SINGAPORE, JULY 2005: London was sentenced to host the 2012 Olympic Games. A public relations team including HRH the Princess Royal, Sebastian Coe and Tony Blair delivered a pitch of such unctuous piety that only a gang of Nazi child-butchers could have rejected it.
(Back at home we had no interest in it at all until we realised that we were head to head with France, at which point it rightly became a matter of life and death.)
It's just as well we got our gloating in early since within 24 hours of the decision we had the London suicide bombings, and our attention snapped back to the real world.
Our Olympic "team" were now forced to confront the implications of their sanctimonious rhetoric, and with the rose-tinted spectacles off, the vision began to morph. Their Field of the Cloth of Gold, with its countless sports pavilions, flags fluttering to the horizon, seemed more like acres of toxic wasteland, slum clearance and swamp.
From the warm glow of the Star Trek transport system emerged a yard of old railway sidings, a dead bus and a bloke from the local planning authority.
We know that our leaders are incapable of costing out anything more complex than lunch, so it goes without saying that the original budget began to look on the low side (and has now tripled). The only people in the country who would have forgotten to account for VAT were of course in charge of the bid. They have now very sensibly added this in plus an extra £0.4 billion to hire a firm to ensure the costs are kept down (yes). Obviously I've already bid for the job of keeping that firm on track, and created an infinite set of untraceable subsidiaries, each of which ... (you get the picture).
Most worrying of all, however, the alleged nation of bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked nymphs and shepherds eagerly skipping in a summer's breeze now looks more like the most obese country in Europe, slobbing its SUVs around a desolate urban landscape searching for pies.
So today UK Sport has launched an initiative to find tall people, who will be invited to join (or perhaps to be) our rowing, handball and volleyball teams in 2012.
This is a start but it's simply not bold enough: we should return the Olympics to a genuine contest between amateurs on a truly level playing field. Every nation has to enter every event, and it must select its team entirely at random, by picking names from a hat. So, there you are contentedly pursuing your career as neurosurgeon, armed robber, wholesale fruiterer etc when you hear the good news that you've been selected to represent the nation.
The bad news is you drew the pole vault.
Sport for all indeed.
Tuesday 27 February 2007
Wednesday 21 February 2007
Down and dirty: an introduction to British management technique
We tend to disdain modern management jargon here in the UK, where Just In Time refers to the moment you arrived at the pub.
However, as the world's first industrialised nation, our management style goes back a long way and many of today's internationally-recognised methods evolved from our original procedures.
For instance, the basic unit of management - the Threat - has scarcely changed, while its associated technique - ordering people around - survives to this day as the Cascade Briefing.
Being first in the field, we were making this stuff up as we went along, so it took us a while to hit our stride - we didn't abolish the slave trade until 1807 and our initial response to the trade union movement was to arrest the leaders and transport them to Australia.
But we've mellowed since then, introducing more subtle approaches based on greed, for instance, and peer pressure. That these do not always work is demonstrated by the experience of a young man from one of our superstar corporate law firms.
While the £1 million salary was clearly attractive, he realised that to nail that down he had to put in eight years of working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and his response, sadly, was to kill himself. The firm held a minute's silence in his memory, which at their hourly rates must have cost a small fortune.
Of course I'm simplifying it all a bit here, but I know you have limited patience and many important tasks to accomplish. The thing to remember is that more or less wherever you look in corporations around the world you will see management styles which are based on axioms laid down by us, the people who produced the Luddites, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Jarrow March.
Thus, while value migration might seem like a 1990s American concept, we came up with it back when the Cook Islands were a British Protectorate and the top managers on the ground realised that the International Date Line ran through their territory.
As god-fearing people determined to keep Sunday a day of rest for their hapless employees, they would take the obvious step of driving the workforce west across the Line at midnight on Saturday for another hard day's work in the banana plantations, and then of course back east again 24 hours later (guess what?) just in time for Monday.
Have a great, er, weekend.
However, as the world's first industrialised nation, our management style goes back a long way and many of today's internationally-recognised methods evolved from our original procedures.
For instance, the basic unit of management - the Threat - has scarcely changed, while its associated technique - ordering people around - survives to this day as the Cascade Briefing.
Being first in the field, we were making this stuff up as we went along, so it took us a while to hit our stride - we didn't abolish the slave trade until 1807 and our initial response to the trade union movement was to arrest the leaders and transport them to Australia.
But we've mellowed since then, introducing more subtle approaches based on greed, for instance, and peer pressure. That these do not always work is demonstrated by the experience of a young man from one of our superstar corporate law firms.
While the £1 million salary was clearly attractive, he realised that to nail that down he had to put in eight years of working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and his response, sadly, was to kill himself. The firm held a minute's silence in his memory, which at their hourly rates must have cost a small fortune.
Of course I'm simplifying it all a bit here, but I know you have limited patience and many important tasks to accomplish. The thing to remember is that more or less wherever you look in corporations around the world you will see management styles which are based on axioms laid down by us, the people who produced the Luddites, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Jarrow March.
Thus, while value migration might seem like a 1990s American concept, we came up with it back when the Cook Islands were a British Protectorate and the top managers on the ground realised that the International Date Line ran through their territory.
As god-fearing people determined to keep Sunday a day of rest for their hapless employees, they would take the obvious step of driving the workforce west across the Line at midnight on Saturday for another hard day's work in the banana plantations, and then of course back east again 24 hours later (guess what?) just in time for Monday.
Have a great, er, weekend.
Wednesday 14 February 2007
Growth for the grosser grocers
Supermarkets are always in the news, and in the UK they're everywhere else too.
It's more than 10 years since Sainsbury's lost the"UK's biggest" title to Tesco which is currently three times its size and counting. Now in third place, they're making headlines again as a clutch of private equity firms consider a bid of around £9.0 billion.
Of course I'm not engaged to advise any of the parties, so I can offer a completely unbiased (and indeed thoroughly ignorant) opinion. The question is "How will they make money out of this?" and the answers focus on the property portfolio and operating margins.
Well, all supermarket groups like to keep great chunks of real estate on their books to prevent the competition building stores there if nothing else - but they'll need to retain that - while the advantages of sale and lease-back would probably be over-diluted by the new debt.
Margins? To get near Tesco they'd need to quadruple their performance without reducing the shopping experience to North Korean levels, but they must know that the Pyongyang strategy is already working brilliantly for Aldi and Lidl. And anyway, if they try to be just like Tesco and succeed, they'll become, well, just like Tesco, thereby removing any serious differentiation and destroying the brand.
But there is a way: with price, range and presence as given, they should concentrate on service. Currently, customer service consists largely of packing your bags at the checkout, but why stop there?
Why don't they go the whole hog and drive you home, stack your fridge, pour you a beer, make dinner and give you a full body massage? Why not send people round to mow the lawn, redecorate the dining room, clean the pool, wash the dishes and walk the dog? I'd shop there, wouldn't you?
Of course this is only the beginning: retail groups should stop offering loyalty points and start awarding their best customers free servants instead. The more you spend, the more (and better) servants you get. They live in your attic, call you Sir and Madam, wear uniforms, get up before dawn, clean things, make tea and spread malicious gossip about you - all the traditional stuff. All you have to do is buy everything from their store group.
Start saving the coupons.
It's more than 10 years since Sainsbury's lost the"UK's biggest" title to Tesco which is currently three times its size and counting. Now in third place, they're making headlines again as a clutch of private equity firms consider a bid of around £9.0 billion.
Of course I'm not engaged to advise any of the parties, so I can offer a completely unbiased (and indeed thoroughly ignorant) opinion. The question is "How will they make money out of this?" and the answers focus on the property portfolio and operating margins.
Well, all supermarket groups like to keep great chunks of real estate on their books to prevent the competition building stores there if nothing else - but they'll need to retain that - while the advantages of sale and lease-back would probably be over-diluted by the new debt.
Margins? To get near Tesco they'd need to quadruple their performance without reducing the shopping experience to North Korean levels, but they must know that the Pyongyang strategy is already working brilliantly for Aldi and Lidl. And anyway, if they try to be just like Tesco and succeed, they'll become, well, just like Tesco, thereby removing any serious differentiation and destroying the brand.
But there is a way: with price, range and presence as given, they should concentrate on service. Currently, customer service consists largely of packing your bags at the checkout, but why stop there?
Why don't they go the whole hog and drive you home, stack your fridge, pour you a beer, make dinner and give you a full body massage? Why not send people round to mow the lawn, redecorate the dining room, clean the pool, wash the dishes and walk the dog? I'd shop there, wouldn't you?
Of course this is only the beginning: retail groups should stop offering loyalty points and start awarding their best customers free servants instead. The more you spend, the more (and better) servants you get. They live in your attic, call you Sir and Madam, wear uniforms, get up before dawn, clean things, make tea and spread malicious gossip about you - all the traditional stuff. All you have to do is buy everything from their store group.
Start saving the coupons.
Thursday 8 February 2007
In the nick of time - a new vision for British jails
Our jails are full and this has taken our government by surprise, which is odd. Having created over 3,000 new criminal offences since 1997 you might have thought they'd have seen it coming.
Of course we're ambivalent about prisons in the UK. We know the system doesn't work but we don't mind crooks being subjected to it - after all, if people want to commit crimes then it's just tough if they then find themselves four to a cell with axe-murderers and cannibals 23 hours a day for five years.
It's obvious to me however that prisons are a colossal waste of resources. Locked up in there among the psychopaths are people who have become seriously rich and powerful, and they've got that way by being smart, devious and dangerous.
They have, for example, built up billion-dollar organisations smuggling drugs, trafficking migrants and running vice rings. Increasing numbers are there for their creative interpretation of company law while FDs of blue-chip companies.
There's obviously no point in having these folk sew mailbags, walk round prison yards, take sociology degrees, molest each other and seize hostages. We need to leverage their skills, so here's the offer:
Your accomplices have legged it with the gold bars, your wife's shacked up with your lawyer and you'll be in here for ten years even with good behaviour. You might as well join Wormwood Scrubs plc, keep your brain in shape, and earn some serious money.
Adopting the poacher-turned-landowner model we should be able to develop some world-class consultancies and outsourcing contractors. Prisons would start to compete with each other for talent, and we'd soon have Dartmoor and Holloway bidding for rail franchises, heritage sites and defence contracts. Their tender for a privatised Prison Service would be essential reading.
As management consultants they would have, for legitimate businesspeople, the same attraction that Niccolo Machiavelli would have for politicians had he not been dead for nearly 500 years.
Serious career-minded graduates would be committing crimes geared precisely to the length of sentence they felt they needed before joining Booz Allen or McKinsey on the outside. Some would stay inside deliberately, tactically clouting a warden or setting fire to a cell-block now and again to see an over-running assignment through, while the more practically-minded would be digging tunnels under the walls to get in.
This is clearly a brilliant idea. Why do I get the feeling that it is already happening?
Of course we're ambivalent about prisons in the UK. We know the system doesn't work but we don't mind crooks being subjected to it - after all, if people want to commit crimes then it's just tough if they then find themselves four to a cell with axe-murderers and cannibals 23 hours a day for five years.
It's obvious to me however that prisons are a colossal waste of resources. Locked up in there among the psychopaths are people who have become seriously rich and powerful, and they've got that way by being smart, devious and dangerous.
They have, for example, built up billion-dollar organisations smuggling drugs, trafficking migrants and running vice rings. Increasing numbers are there for their creative interpretation of company law while FDs of blue-chip companies.
There's obviously no point in having these folk sew mailbags, walk round prison yards, take sociology degrees, molest each other and seize hostages. We need to leverage their skills, so here's the offer:
Your accomplices have legged it with the gold bars, your wife's shacked up with your lawyer and you'll be in here for ten years even with good behaviour. You might as well join Wormwood Scrubs plc, keep your brain in shape, and earn some serious money.
Adopting the poacher-turned-landowner model we should be able to develop some world-class consultancies and outsourcing contractors. Prisons would start to compete with each other for talent, and we'd soon have Dartmoor and Holloway bidding for rail franchises, heritage sites and defence contracts. Their tender for a privatised Prison Service would be essential reading.
As management consultants they would have, for legitimate businesspeople, the same attraction that Niccolo Machiavelli would have for politicians had he not been dead for nearly 500 years.
Serious career-minded graduates would be committing crimes geared precisely to the length of sentence they felt they needed before joining Booz Allen or McKinsey on the outside. Some would stay inside deliberately, tactically clouting a warden or setting fire to a cell-block now and again to see an over-running assignment through, while the more practically-minded would be digging tunnels under the walls to get in.
This is clearly a brilliant idea. Why do I get the feeling that it is already happening?
Tuesday 6 February 2007
First things second (ie after the cricket)
Surely I have better things to do than write to myself? Well, yes of course, but I've already done them.
Much as I love my work, I don't do it 24 hours a day, and with many weeks to go before the start of the trout season, count this as displacement activity. Since I got up at 5.45am to listen to the England v New Zealand cricket I feel as if I've done a day's work anyway, so now I owe myself lunch while I decide on the crack's new editorial policy.
Much as I love my work, I don't do it 24 hours a day, and with many weeks to go before the start of the trout season, count this as displacement activity. Since I got up at 5.45am to listen to the England v New Zealand cricket I feel as if I've done a day's work anyway, so now I owe myself lunch while I decide on the crack's new editorial policy.
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