BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Andreas Moelzer, until recently leader of the right wing Austrian Freedom party, said the EU was in danger of becoming a “conglomerate of negroes”. His party did pretty well in the MEP elections as did the French equivalent of the NLP, Marie Le Pen’s Front National Party. In a world that we’d hoped was becoming a little more liberal in attitude and caring, all this is a little sad. But the very PCness of the EU had much of this coming to them. Nigel Farage isn’t my idea of a thinking politician but José Manuel Barosso doesn’t inspire me either. The EU is a mess but electing a squad of lunatics to clear it up is insane.

In case you missed it I enclose an insight from the Huffington Post.

And the point it makes is the values attached to Ukip are brutishly out of date. They belong to a world of smoking, halitosis, turn ups and Butlins; a world of unblinking certainty and a lingering sense that slavery was not all bad. They are egged on by nonsense like this though, the recent decision for the BBC to edit out the word “girl” from a programme called the “Queen’s Baton Relay”. In it a TV presenter thrown to the floor by a teenage judo star says “I’m not sure I can live that down - being beaten by a 19-year-old girl” in case “using the word “girl” caused offence”.

That’s not liberal that’s lunatic.

Beauty was lost somewhere else last week. Anyone who worked in adverising will know that David Abbott, the co-founder of Britain’s largest advertising agency, Abbott Mead Vickers died a week ago.

His work as a writer on campaigns like Volvo, Sainsbury’s and the Economist were examples of clear thinking and intelligence. When David wrote, advertising really mattered as opposed to being sensationalist for its own attention seeking ends. It was that attitude that made him dislike the vulgarity of FCUK so much.

David ‘s writing had a calm and contented but never a complacent tone. He represented the best of the writer’s craft. Here are just three examples of his work which lift advertising to the plane of a serious business and one I was prould to have once been part of not least as a one-time colleague of David’s.

The Economist idea, which was David’s, ran and ran. It had witty headlines and was incredibly noticeable.

After David’s advertising finished, Sainsbury’s never seemed the same. He positioned the brand where consumers want to be, not quite where they are right now.  But my favourite piece of writing was in this ad for Chivas Regal. You’ll need a glass after reading this. It can serve as David’s epitaph too.

(if you can't easily read this, here's a bigger version)

I don’t think he and Nigel would be best friends somehow. And he’d be disappointed by, and even angry at, how bad and clumsy all political writing has recently become.

Finally then, to intelligent thinking, beautiful writing and to David Abbott.

SIZE BEATS PUNY - FIGURE IT!

I’ve been listening to the arguments all week. It’s become increasingly clear that size matters. That’s why China is now tipped by the Economist to overtake the USA as the world’s biggest economy by the end of this year.

It’s why the Astra Zeneca takeover by Pfizer makes so much sense….. but I’ve got a bit confused by this. Apparently the most significant recent breakthroughs by pharmaceutical companies have actually been achieved by midsized companies.  The fact is too many big mergers have been disasters for us to assume this one will work.

The Huffington Post notes that 70 to 90 percent  of mergers fail . Here are a series that we can all recall - AOL and Time Warner - disaster; EBay and Skype - disaster; Quaker buying Snapple for $3.6 billion and then selling just 27 months later for $300million and worse, Daimler Benz buying Chrysler for $36 billion and then paying Cerberus Capital $650 million to sever the ties a few years later.

My biggest concern is this Pfizer/Astra Zeneca story is about innovation and learning. No wonder that tiny little academic institutions like Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard with student populations of just 22,000, 18,000 and 21,000 respectively are struggling when there are mighty organisations like the Indira Ghandi University (3.5 million and number one in the world); The Payane Noor University, Tehran (800,000 and number 8) and even the lowly Modern University for the Humanities in Moscow at 48th in the league table has 100,000 students.

So innovation and excellence go with size.

I’ll say that again so you can fully appreciate how absurd the equation of scale with excellence is.
Innovation and excellence go with size. Unless you mean “go” in the “disappear, are absent from and destroyed by” sense of the word because the reality is, as we should by now have learned, scale fails. Creativity is killed by size.

John Lewis Christmas 2013 created by a little agency - Adam and Eve

Any of you who are thinking of setting up Goliath Advertising Inc. forget it.  The hot agencies in the UK right now are I’m told Adam and Eve, Weiden Kennedy, Droga5 and Corner. None are big and although Adam and Eve was bought by Omnicom it is still aggressively independent. More start-ups like the Counter are happening whereas Abbott Mead,with as many as 400 staff as the London number one agency, is described by some as a “behemoth”.

This mad merger will probably happen but I doubt, no,  I do more than doubt, I’ll be confounded and astounded if there’s any addition of value, innovation or human  advancement as a result of such folly. Ian Read the Pfizer CEO will get rich plus a few others but breakthroughs, achievements and success - forget it. Big isn’t beautiful it’s just barmy and the mid-sized and small businesses are where the big brains will go. Oh and to Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard too.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

THE OUTSOURCING MYTH

For years MBAs have been preaching the virtues of outsourcing. But the Asian temptress has started getting a bit expensive with wages going up currently in China by well over 20% a year.

Alix Partners, the global consulting firm, said in the Economist in March that if China's currency and shipping costs were to rise by 5% annually and wages were to go up by 30% a year, by 2015 it would be just as cheap to make things in North America as to make them in China and ship them there.

Trouble is the jobs and skills have been largely turned off in the States as not needed.

They will be soon.

But this week I saw some good news from Stoke-on-Trent. Burleigh Pottery is alive and well at last and across Staffordshire, pottery businesses are beginning to revive. Businesses like Emma Bridgewater whose owner laments the outsourcing trend which led to losing touch with buyers, customers and quality control.

A few years ago I was talking to a Chinese apparatchik from Sichuan who confessed that Chinese quality was a problem. He said workers set off focused but then got bored and standards slipped. In fact in China the trick has been increasingly to invest in state of the art machinery not skilled labour and this by definition levels the cost playing field. But the potential plus that manufacturing here has is the existence still of some skilled workers.

Look at the automotive business in the UK. Look especially at the triumph at Jaguar given proper levels of investment in plant.

The flight from manufacture came in part from a generation of graduates and MBAs who preferred spread sheets to factories and who, quite simply didn’t want to get their hands dirty. The ideology went rather further than that. Provenance of manufacturer was judged unimportant or an issue for marketing to solve. Why should champagne come from Epernay (or even from France) or whisky from Scotland or our organic food from Britain or anything from here apart from apps and computer games?

It may very seductive to hear our future lies in the knowledge economy and that farming, manufacture and added-value-stuff are redundant to our needs but it isn’t true.

The moment of truth is approaching.

Making stuff matters and where it’s made matters too.

Alfred Brown makers of worsted cloth from Leeds are more and more visible in M&S and Charles Tyrwhitt.

From Brown to Bridgewater Britain is changing.