THE WD40 EFFECT

We’ve had major domestic renovations here culminating in the installation of a new kitchen, the loss of cooking facilities and, thus, extensive experimentation with the improved 2016 food concept called Cup-a-Soup. I’ve lost weight but my wife is coughing badly from the dust clouds that come with building work. And something else has happened…all the doors in the house started creaking.

So I’ve been going round with my WD40 and the creaks just go with one spay. This is a magic product; invented in the mid 1950’s by the Rocket Development Company, California its formula is a trade secret. The name stands for Water Displacement, 40th formula. Mystery surrounds the magic.

On the can it says it, amongst other things:-
-          Stops squeaks
-          Frees sticky mechanisms
-          Shines stainless steel

This is a miracle multitasker we’d trust to do anything from curing constipation, headaches, pimples, debt, mathematical problems and so on. Would we trust a company called WD 40 Marketing Services, WD 40 Home Repairs or the WD 40 Bank? It’s quietly goes about its business and it never lets you down. It’s earned our trust by delivering….quietly.

Like hairdressers.

They’ve unobtrusively swept up the Ipsos Mori Veracity League Table 2015 to sit alongside vicars and judges. Business leaders languish down with Estate Agents and Bankers. The least trusted are politicians… (how would the WD 40 Party do?) As Jack Welch said: “Forget about technology – worry about who trusts you.”

Trust is at its most vulnerable when we encounter major change. In writing my book on marketing I’m coming to realise the changes we saw a few years are accelerating. We are in marketing literally witnessing a revolution.

When we ordered bathroom items from John Lewis online at 10pm and they arrived at 9.30am the next day we could see that Amazon is no longer the only game in town.

When Guinness launched their new commercial (they call this their “champion creative”) on Instagram rather than mainstream TV some of us blinked before thinking – “how wonderfully novel”.

Those who worry most about all this change tend to be concerned that we now live in a world where figuratively speaking Chateau Petrus is available to everyone at affordable prices.

On Saturday I compered a Celebrity Cricketers’ Question Time Session in Brighton with ex County Cricketers reflecting on current developments, most notably the World Cup being played in India. They and the audience all expressed anguished concern about the threat to Five Day cricket by this “Fast Food” version of the game.

Sadly for this mostly retired audience the concept of five day Test Cricket seems to belong to a different world to the fast moving one we live in where people are too busy to take lots of days off in the sun. Technology changes everything…more powerful bats, day-night cricket under cover, computerised umpiring and it only takes a long as a film.

We are in a new world where nothing squeaks.

WD 40. It’s the future.

WHY I LIKE SPRING AND EASTER SO MUCH

I have spent the past week feeling refreshed.

Originally the word “Easter” comes from the Saxon ‘Eostre’, the pagan Goddess of Spring which in turn came from the Germanic ‘Austro’ - the Goddess of Dawn. From its outset Easter was always magical. The Christian story of the risen Christ made it much more so.

Something magical still happens every year. Welcome to spring flowers; to plucky battalions of daffodils; to some experimental bursts of sunshine and lambs gambolling.  In April we put on walking shoes to go on pilgrimage like Chaucer.

Change is in the air and, of course, more sunlight makes life easier. This and a degree of gastronomic restraint as opposed to the mandatory, bloated excess of Christmas means this season of celebration leaves us feeling ready to get going.

So, yes, I feel terrific and my good humour even extends to the bunch of jokers who’d been making me rather grumpy recently.

What do this lot have in common? Trump; Putin; Farage; Johnson.

And of course you’re right.

Extravagant egos; wrong people to run anything; irresolute yet dictatorial; will do/say anything to get their own way. They make Kevin Spacey acting the part of Frank Underwood in “House of Cards” look very electable.  They have all pandered or are currently pandering to a vision of the present and future forged entirely out of a nostalgic image of former glory. But to be fair they have the capacity to entertain us as well as baffle.

Hence my good humour. I suddenly realised I was taking what they said much too seriously. The best way to debunk is to deflate with laughter. And anyway the premise of an argument solely based on rationality will inevitably fail. As that supple brained Ad Man Rory Sutherland recently noted, on issues like the EU or the America Presidency or which house to buy or whom to marry, emotion rightly plays a large part.

When I turn on the news or I read the paper I often find I’m reduced to frothing rage.
But then when I see a front cover of Private Eye like this one….

….or I see the cartoon of Paul Daniels’ funeral at which someone is sawing his coffin in half saying “it was how he’d have wanted it” , I feel much better.

So a diet of roast lamb, minted potatoes and Cote de Beaune plus walking in bluebell woods (soon) plus a lot of good old fashioned, squirm provoking and sharp satire plus a resolution to be much nicer to people will do me well enough.

We live in uncertain times said billionaire Warren Buffett. Well yes, but what fun that uncertainty creates. Every day is a cliff-hanger. And the great thing about spring is it signifies the end of a winter of discontent

So I’ve resolved to start listening more and laughing a lot more.

Join me - a very happy spring and Easter to everyone.

NOSTALGIA ISN'T QUITE WHAT IT WAS

On Friday we went to Guildford for lunch with a friend with whom I shared my three years at Balliol College, Oxford. We sat looking over the Surrey countryside. It was all very pastoral. And it would have been perfectly in order for me to have been humming Parry’s “Jesusalem” especially as my friend’s a vicar.

But we spoke only briefly of the past. He asked if I regretted anything about my University days. I declared like Piaf “Je ne regretted rien…” But I did regret one thing.

I regretted not having worked harder. Not to have got a better degree but because today I have so much more energy than I did when I was 20 - ½ century ago - and I regret not having read more, thought more and squeezed more juice from the fruit I’d been given. I had a great time, made some great friends, learnt a lot but the Nutribullet that I called my brain was in idle.

Those were pleasant times…we had the Beatles, That Was the Week That Was, films like Zulu, the first Habitat … but they were sleepier times . Donald Campbell reached 276mph to break the land speed record.

Today it’s 763mph.

Instead of pleasant reminiscing my friend and I talked about now, the future and about what’s going to happen next. He’s unwell and being made worse by tooth-sucking doctors - I call them “pessimedics”. If only they’d say “Well done, you’re making great progress” the effect would be more beneficial. Advice to doctors: don’t give people pills. Inspire them to feel a bit better. Look forwards. As we both did.

The world we talked about is certainly more dynamic than the past. And more fun. How extraordinary to hear my grandsons talk about their favourite football teams (we can take Brighton & Hove Albion who are second in the Championship as a given):

“Arsenal, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Barcelona”

At 7 and 9 years old they are people who think beyond these shores. Wonderful.

I am currently writing a book on Marketing and whilst my grumpy nostalgic side threatens to surface when I encounter the debate on social media and “the need for an authentic interactive platform” it’s suppressed. Because give or take a bit of linguistic embroidery what’s new? Just an abundance of bright, shiny toys for lucky marketers to play with.

I wish, I really wish I were back in marketing; it seems to be so tricky now, yet so full of change and such fun.  A cornucopia is what we have. Great shops. Great food. Great wine. Great entertainment. Great memories - yes of course but keep these in perspective.

I feel the urge to use that quotation from 1957 from Prime Minister Harold MacMillan who predicted:
“a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime - nor indeed in the history of this country”

Yes. We’ve never had it so good.

SUCH GREAT EXPECTATIONS

The Stones sang “We can’t always get what we want” and that gap between what we want and get in life is widening. Tell people anything is possible and they reply “OK then - where is it?”

One student launched into a rant when Christakis Yale was rocked last November by a row between some undergraduates and the Master of Silliman College over their demands that frightening Halloween costumes be banned. The Master said he wanted to allow free speech but Jerelyn Luther (above) the most vociferous of the protesters told him “to shut the f*** up” and added: “Be quiet! In your position as master it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman.”

I checked Yale’s website but “comfort and home” don’t get a mention. This appears instead:  “Yale College provides a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual curiosity, independent thinking, and leadership skills.”

All the kerfuffle about free speech and “safe places” represents an expectation on the part of students that the Universities meet at their peril.

Driverless cars were in the news recently when a Google car had an accident with a bus. But the Wall Street Journal remains a fan of driverless because they tell us: “Taken together, the costs of automotive death and delay equal 2.6% of American GDP.”

My concern is going by this we’ll get bored. What’s next? A winter holiday skiing on autopilot, a book-free library - summaries of everything provided instead. I once saw the hilarious “Reduced Shakespeare Company,” three men preforming the whole Shakespeare canon in less than two hours. Is this the future?
Our expectations that technology will deliver a rich and leisure filled world are disappointed with more people working very hard.

Our expectations of the Arab Spring were, at its outset, generally high, as Palestinian businessman Munib Masri said in 2013: "I think the Arab Spring is the best thing that has happened in this part of the world and we need to give it time…”

Yet now over 180,000 deaths and 6 million refugees later I don’t think these expectations have been met.  We are instead seeing, as Al Jazeera put it :- “the fallen leaves of the Arab Spring”. (Syrian Tammam Azzam is the artist.)

And finally those wanting to exit the EU also have great expectations. Here’s a typical view: -

 “We don’t need the EU draining away our self-confidence, stoic resilience and resources when we could do so much better as our forebears did, standing on our own two feet”

I’ve tried to understand their argument but I can’t. I just don’t get it. When have we ever had so much collective wealth and created such amazing ideas?

Yet they have great expectations of the unknown. Perhaps they just hate foreigners? Perhaps they believe we could do better although history says not.

Paul Cook, the drummer of the Sex Pistols, got it about right when he said:-
“Coming out would be like going back to little England.”

LET'S ALL CHEER UP

I was thinking that we’ve all become a bit querulous. I blame the referendum. Rage is in the air. Chris Patten and I, as well as being Europhile, are at one on this. Here’s what he said:

"I think referendums are awful... Julian Critchley used to say that—not very surprisingly—they were the favourite form of plebiscitary democracy of Mussolini and Hitler.”

I trudged (uncharacteristically for me) to the station on Friday - have you noticed by the way trudging and lumbering have become the default mode for walking in 2016 - whatever happened to sauntering? I got on the grubby train. I read the gloomy paper. I thought I’d have a grumpy snooze. And then (oh no not a busker!) an African with a guitar walked into the carriage and started singing an African song (think African Cat Stevens) and it was fabulous. He did another. We all applauded and everyone, yes everyone in the carriage gave him some money.

The sun had come out.

And it came out again when 71 year old Phyllida Barlow was appointed to represent Britain at the 2017 Venice Biennale. I loved her enthusiastic response to the news:

"I am astonished, thrilled and hugely excited …I cannot imagine a more invigorating and wonderful challenge… a unique and stimulating creative opportunity beyond my wildest dreams."

Adele singing “Hello” and scooping the Brits was another recent OK moment especially as she has a house in Brighton. Smart girl that Adele.

Am I just a cockeyed optimist? Am I mindlessly cheerful and unfair about the tight-lipped discontent I see?
I’ve reading Raymond Tallis’ “Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur” which as you might guess from its title is slightly heavy going. “Flaneur” means a man who saunters around looking at society. It originated as a term in 19th century Paris and defined the man of leisure who observed and thought about the city and how it and its people related to each other. “Flaneur” and “Dilettante” are lunch companions. At an alumni dinner I was once asked what I did. I was surrounded by eminent judges, senior civil servants, investment bankers, bishops and CEOs. I told them I was a “dilettante” and to a person they replied “wow! I should love to be a dilettante”. Yes. It is great.

As a blogger I am certainly a flaneur. And I do saunter; I do not lumber or trudge. I also passionately believe in the power of conversation and of “entente”. The more we talk and the more we listen the less likely we are to become bellicose and prickly.  Vladimir, can you hear me?

Here’s part of a poem by William Blake that Penny Hunt, a friend of mine, recalled -  “A Poison Tree”
“I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow”.
   
Tweet this to those Brexit chaps. It’s really why the EU works.

MONET. MONET. MONET.

This week I went to the incredibly popular Royal Academy show “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse”. It had been described by the Guardian as

“a ravishing joy from start to finish”.

Yet - oh dear. Am I a philistine? I was a bit bored. Monet is in the money as an artist - one of his many lilies “The Water Lily Pond” sold for $54 million at New York in May last year but there was a dreary sameness of colourful blobs throughout the exhibition. I found myself growling that flowers are precise and mathematical in design not random slobs. My mind was annoyed and my heart unmoved.

Until I came to the less well known Alfred Parsons (no me neither). Born in 1847 he died in 1920. He lived in Broadway where artists of the late 19th century congregated.   He was an artist, illustrator and a garden designer. As it happens I know one of the gardens he designed. It’s wonderful.

Here is the picture that really caught my wife’s eye and mine. It has movement and invites you in. It is one of the pictures in the RA that actually smelt of flowers. These rude orange lilies reek of summer and there’s a back story behind that gate…a couple embracing or a cat sunning itself. The painting is alive. It’s also valuable but more like $20,000 than $20 million.

I’ve decided to listen to my heart more and less to what I’m told to think. And let that terrible expression of the second rate businessman “the devil lies in the detail” be forever sent into exile. That’ll be good news for Boris Johnson whom, as far as I know is not keen on gardening, painting or detail.  If he had a song here’s how it would go:-

“You put your right arm in
your right arm out
In, out, in, out,
You shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around
That's what it's all about...”

But I digress….

After recent weeks of working on presentations and reading business books I’d had enough. They maybe full of quotable stuff from chaps like Peter Drucker positioning culture as the key to success:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” he said; right on Peter.

Because yes, it’s good (but like Monet is it worth the money?) So I decided to refresh my mind with some John Le Carré.

My wife had bought me “The Night Manager” which is also currently on TV - it’s BBC drama at its swaggering best. The book’s astonishing, dense and beautifully written; it speaks to my mind and to my heart.

He’s such a fine craftsman and his definition of what a story is, is  unsurpassable:
“‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not a story.
‘The cat sat on another cat’s mat’ is a story.”

He also wrote a book called “The Constant Gardener” which brings me back to Monet……
Painting the Mo Garden: Monet to Matisse

WHAT IF WE JUST DID NOTHING?

When “Management by Objectives” was in vogue, a colleague suggested that “Management by Lethargy” might serve us better. He argued that while we rushed around like busy fools, in the long run nothing changed.

Phil Angelides, who was Chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in America, has argued strongly that guilty bankers be charged. But ironically, he notes, we seem to have witnessed “Immaculate corruption” whereby no human being can be held accountable. The Banking Crisis was an act of God.
What is the point of doing anything if events turn out as they must do by some force of destiny? “Que sera sera”, sang Doris Day in the film “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Increasingly, however, most men know far too little.

Economists, forecasters, politicians and journalists all seem stumped and, despite occasional displays of great certainty, experts keep on dropping the ball. Bobby Rao, one time Strategy Director at Vodafone and now a founding partner at Hermes Growth Partners, said presciently a few years back “no one knows where the ball is now.”

This is not a time for useless energy except insofar as being alert so when that ball pops into sight we can thwack it. So has life been reduced to Whac-A-Mole?

Maybe for some it has. Stephen Leacock the Canadian writer and economist wrote this in 1911 in “Gertrude the Governess” one of his nonsense novels: “Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”

He could have been writing about the Brexit crowd. On Friday at Westminster Hall they announced to tumultuous applause that they had a new, important recruit….  George Galloway.  Ah yes, that Churchillian figure….

Yet what makes democracy so special is it reflects the will (or the idiosyncrasy) of the people - hence the Trump, Sanders, Bloomberg (if he stands) story; hence the Corbyn story: hence Le Pen and all the rest.
But what I find strange about the burning desire to “do something …anything about Europe” is what the alternative might be including, maybe, destroying the EU? Most in the democratic west disliked Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi yet what’s succeeded them is almost certainly worse.

After a month or so trekking around meetings in Europe with intelligent businessmen I found none to whom the dead hand of the EU was seen as a reality let alone a problem. As part of Europe we are “torchbearers of the age of reason” in an unstable world - thank you Matthew Parris that was nicely put.

So not management by lethargy but how about management by reason, thought and a feeling for what we should be leaving our grandchildren?  The good things Europe offers not the Euro-myth of straight bananas.

Things like European Football; cheap, easy travel; being an important part of the world’s largest market and of a congress of civilisation.

I remember pre-EU. Our world is a better one now.