GROW'S THE ONLY WAY TO GO

 Grow’s the only way to go

Yes, I admit it. I’ve been too obsessed with the pronouncements of our new Prime Monster. And that’s why I’m having so many peculiar dreams. 

Recounting ones’ dreams is unforgivably boring but here goes anyway.

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I’m at home, feeling a bit odd but itching to tell my wife about my new plans.

“Growth” I say importantly.

“Where?” She says looking concerned.

“No, not a growth. I’m talking about growth of our life, our income and our self-perception.”

“Have you been drinking?” she asks.

“We need a proper meeting now “ I say “to sort out our strategy, our direction of travel and our key beliefs.”

Silence. Or was that a snort?

I plough on with my prepared speech.

“We have been leading a life of restraint and sluggardly growth…I want explosive growth and I want it now. I want to invest in impressing my network. I’m going to have daily lunches with the brightest and best I know but first I’m going to start with an image renovation. I’m buying a red Porsche, wearing red braces, red socks and getting red framed spectacles. Red is the new hot colour for my world of growth. Red Hot is my new life.”

I pause, slightly moist eyed at the power of my words. A quiet voice interrupts my thoughts.

“And where’s the money coming from for this …new life?”

“We must borrow for tomorrow. The more we spend the more they lend.”

I didn’t see the book flung at me until too late. As I slumped to the floor I heard my wife say:

“Red also means something else. It means stop.”

And then I woke up.

Zzzzz!!

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It’s been a strange week. 

I’ve been wondering if we can trust a Truss and I’m really not sure at all. I’ve lived under 15 prime ministers. Liz is the most unusual and Kwasi Kwarteng reminds me of Antony Barber, Heath’s “dash for growth”  Chancellor in 1972.

Truss seems fearless, carefree and a bit careless. In business I’ve lived with go-for- growth CEOS and it always ends in tears. That’s usually because events outside their control scupper their well laid plans. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, he replied: ‘Events, dear boy, events’.

Big events seemed all that interested Boris Johnson. But all he did was so dishevelled I often wondered if he changed his pants. He relied on instinct but not strategy. He was an accident-prone shambles. 

The Truss is different. She and her new team aren’t boring. I expect planned chaos but she’s seized the mantle and is vigorously shaking it. She’s clearly read Joseph Schumpeter (ex-Professor at Harvard University) who created the concept of “creative destruction.”

Here’s a definition :

“Creative destruction is based on the principle that old assumptions need to be broken so that new innovations can benefit from existing resources and energy.”

That has a good radical, courageous sound to it but like heroic surgery in applying it you can sometimes destroy more than you intended. It lives in the world of “oops!”

So we are sitting and waiting. The rich are getting richer. The poor are staying poor. Does trickle down of wealth work? We shall see but the pundits are sceptical.

One of Truss’ more interesting new appointments is Therese Coffey, Secretary of State for Health. In response to a very long question in the Commons recently she stood up said ”Yes” and sat down.

No. Life won’t be boring. But we’re on red alert from now on. Pay attention.

DON'T GO IN TO THE DRESSING ROOM

Between the ages of 16 and 50, I spent a lot of my weekends playing cricket. Over the past week I’ve been thinking about racism in cricket. I experienced hardly any racism although I was once described as a “honky” by a West Indian fielder. 

Back in the 1980s the power of the West Indian teams was such that any racist remark by someone stupid enough to make it would have resulted in some lightning fast short-pitched bowling aimed at their helmetless heads. One player in county cricket stood out. Wayne Daniels. He was called “Sir”.

The most enjoyable cricket I played was when white players were in the minority, when talent was what counted, where sheer unbridled joy in the game was what stood out.

But there was a remark in the Azim Rafeeq hearing that stopped me. It came from one of the Yorkshire Cricket Club Board. It said that “Asim lacked White Rose qualities and attitudes”. This made me shiver.

I recalled a particular cricket dressing room. The smell of BO and Brut, old unwashed kit spread around and a laddism that would have been at all levels unacceptable today. It was ghastly then, but it represented the cultural language of our team. It was misanthropic, misogynistic, homophobic, satirical, cruel, and crude. Almost certainly it was racist too. Everyone had a nickname – none of them pleasant. There was team-bonding and a slightly hysterically fueled hatred of our opponents. This was the same credo as the Allan Border-led Australian team of the late 1980s. He was known as “Captain Grumpy.”

Dressing Rooms like Board Rooms can be dangerously self-deluding places. Last week has at least corrected that impression.

What bewilders me is anyone thinking racism is acceptable in 2021 yet the people who ran, and presumably some who still run cricket in Yorkshire, think it is acceptable, or maybe worse, they don’t even realise that they are being racist.

In the 1980s advertising had a slight smell of -ism about it. A black art director who liked his photography to be dark and moody who was called the Prince of Darkness. He seemed amused – but was he? A team at Saatchi & Saatchi who dressed as ‘The Blues Brothers’ – trilbies, dark glasses, black suits, white shirts, narrow black ties. They grimly told their clients they were “on a mission from God”. 

This was a world of alcohol, drugs, and beautiful women. It made ‘Mad Men’ look rather underpowered. It was not so much an -ism as a world in which to be politically correct (I’m not even sure we even knew what that meant back then) was to be out of step.

Now, not to be politically correct is to be unemployable. It isn’t good enough to say the right things, you must not even think the wrong things. The result of last week’s hearing will be an upheaval in sporting governance, not just that of cricket. In Friday’s Times, Sports Columnist Matt Dickinson said:

“There’s no other word for it: the way we run sport is nuts”   

 He’s right. The comments of many of the leaders in cricket fill me with dread. Sport is no longer an amateur business. For better or worse (mostly if run well, for better) the money floods in to allow world class talent to be properly rewarded.

This is what happens if you don’t understand this simple truth. 

Money matters but our self-respect matters more. Our world has changed. We need to change with it or become just a footnote in history.

Cricket RIP.

Hopefully not.

MONET, MONEY AND MARKS

I know…from art to retailing requires a leap of faith.

I’ve just been to the Monet exhibition at the National Gallery. The 70 paintings there would sell for over $1 billion yet he found it hard even selling his work until his mid-40s when sales took off with vivid Mediterranean coastline paintings which Americans loved.

Claude’s story matches that of most artists that we now rate as great with only a few becoming truly rich from their endeavours whilst young enough to enjoy it. Most relied on finding a sugar daddy or patron but the market itself was harsh. Yet they carried on tirelessly and in the case of Monet painting the same scene at different times of the day when the lighting was different.  In painting Rouen Cathedral he sat in a ladies changing room of a department store opposite the cathedral, ladies curtained off of course, and painted dawn to dusk.

Artists in general are not especially commercial, entrepreneurial or productive…they just carry on doing what they do regardless always trying to get better. For them quality beats cash any time. Money merely seems to be inconvenient (mostly by its absence.) And a century after they die their work (like ‘Nymphéas en fleur’) can sell for $85 million.

But it isn’t money you think about when you think of Monet, it’s the light, the colours the sheer joie de vivre.

And that’s what’s missing from M&S - retail bellwether, housewives’ favourite, the Monet of underwear. Unlike Monet its value is declining.  Unlike Monet it is no longer notable for its light, colour or joie de vivre. It’s about to depart the FTSE 100, close a dozen or more stores and ‘unify brand and culture’ (I really wish that I knew what that meant). The iron hand of Archie Norman, the man who saved Asda 27 years ago is Chairman. He is a McKinsey trained heavy who seemed short on small talk when I met him.

For years M&S has been a bit like the Brexiteers chasing new business in young markets unknown to them but “representing huge, yes huge and incalculable opportunities”, rather  than focusing on their core old market of loyalists– around 20 million of them. Instead it keeps on going hopefully after the deaf, dumb and blind kids like millennials who would rather be seen dead than in M&S. Because M&S is like grandad doing the twist.

M&S matters because when it does things well, like much of its food, like cashmere, socks, underwear or cords it does them rather well. When it flirts with the unknown it’s sorrowfully irrelevant. I shall watch its strategy of downsizing and trying to find an authentic voice intriguing but without much hope. M&S has stopped learning it seems.

Monet kept on learning. He has colour and energy. His pictures are timeless. M&S is not. Tom Peters said “you can’t shrink your way to greatness”. On that Monet and I (but not M&S) agree.

FOLLOW YOUR PASSION

This is what Oprah Winfrey said:

“Follow your passion. Do what you love, and the money will follow. Most people don’t believe it but it’s true”

Which sounds great until you look at your debt, your food and fuel bill and your rent or mortgage repayments…..But I don’t think Oprah was suggesting you followed your passion into bankruptcy, merely that you decided what you really wanted and that you went for it.

It’s like love. You don’t marry the first person who comes along. You don’t get hitched to a call-centre of a person – “I don’t enjoy them but they get the cooking done”. You marry for better, for richer, in health and in fun.

So here are three questions:

i)    Do you really know what your passion is?
ii)    What do you really need in life?
iii)    Do you actually want to follow your passion?

Most people say loosely I want to be …”fulfilled” and rather weakly flap their hands. What you need to identify is what exactly it is that fills your mind and about which you want to know everything, a focus for all your learning urges.

I met Nicholas Showam MD of Jaly Ltd. at an RSA conference on Saturday. His passion is machines and making things. He could talk forever about the latest bit of kit. He believes we can out manufacture the worlds if we choose to.

He’s followed his passion.

We don’t have to be passionate 100% of the time. We can earn what we need and be pragmatic about budgeting but we must follow that passion like the wonderfully talented Richard Crane, playwright, dramatist and  actor who observed jovially “I’m on the stage…I know all about austerity…and how to deal with it.”

He’s followed his passion.

On Friday I went to Birmingham to the great Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition in their Art Gallery. Birmingham is rocking. Great customer service; taxi drivers who tell you how wonderful the place is and the new Bullring…a revelation of 21st century quality retailing. I love positivism, art and great business. I want more of this and we all need more of it to break out of the austerity trap.

So on Friday I too followed my passion and I believe the money will follow.