Prominent People = Poor Quality (in ideas for improving life in Britain)

Prominent People = Poor Quality (in ideas for improving life in Britain)

In October 2011, just before the Tory party conference, the Financial Times Magazine (normally a pretty dull read) had an article where certain prominent Tories were asked for five ideas each for David Cameron.

The people selected were David Davies, Archie Norman, Tracey Emin, Baroness Warsi, Lord Tebbit, Tim Montgomerie (editor of Tory activist website), Claire Perry (MP), John Redwood, Andrew Roberts, Sajid Javid (MP), Tom Greeves (stand-up comic and speechwriter), Lord Archer, Nick Boles (MP), Michael Spencer (wealthy founder of the broking firm ICAP), Lord Wolfson (CEO, Next), Edwina Curry, Jo Johnson (MP) and Mark Pritchard (MP).

Guess which of the above gave, in my opinion at least, the best ideas?

Among the gems(!) suggested were: – “we need completely new relationship with the EU. This may require a referendum” – “ turbo charge our free schools policy” – “make the system as good at deregulation as it is at regulation” – “ a bigger say for Conservative members” – “read the Beveridge Report” – “recruit more northern candidates” – “close women’s prisons” – “create three new UK retail banks”

It is, in a way, disappointing to announce (because the initiator is least well placed to influence policy) that the one who gave the best suggestions was Tracey Emin. She grasped that schooling, apprenticeships and getting graduates into worthwhile work are crucial to changing the mindset of future members of society and would help to make sure that we encourage vocational skills that can generate income for individuals and the country.

As for the others, they gave a pretty dire set of ‘ideas’, revealing muddy thinking and shallowness of pool of thought. Further proof, if it were needed, that politicians and others in positions of influence do not have the answers to our problems, at all.

Neil Thomas

Paying Top Salaries – but that doesn’t mean you get Top People

Paying Top Salaries – but that doesn’t mean you get Top People

There is constant criticism of how excessive salaries and bonuses are in the City and almost continuous comment of how greed in the financial community has driven the economy off course and our society out of balance.

However, it doesn’t end there. The City folk are an easy target in some ways, but it goes further: what of the overpaid senior executives in industry and, for example the generously remunerated senior directors in the BBC. In most such instances, there is no justification for the salaries and bonuses being paid out.

A just issued report from St Paul’s Cathedral (spookily published now and coinciding with the presence of the anti-greed protesters) addresses the problem of City and Business pay. Entitled ‘Value and Values: Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today’, its appearance seems to be by Godly timing, but in fact it was due to be published three weeks ago before the Occupy protest which has delayed its appearance. The conclusion of the Report was that most of the 500 finance workers in the City surveyed believed that bankers, stockbrokers and senior FTSE 100 staff are overpaid.

Interestingly enough, most CEOs (in other regular surveys or interviews) when questioned, say that money is not their main motivation in trying to reach the top of the tree. (The same, although not tested, is probably true of performers and footballers.)

Why then do we pay so much to those who are probably not worth it anyway and who would work for a lot less?

Rates of pay are driven up, in part, to ensure that ‘relativity’ applies: if the top dog gets paid a bounty, then each tier below is dragged up to close the gap and everybody wins a higher place up the pay scale – an organisation becomes full of these ‘paypals’! Thus the position becomes entrenched and difficult to break without the results cascading down the grades.

We can all give examples of executives who are paid more than they are really worth. I know I can, having met and seen at close quarters quite a few CEOs and MDs who, quite frankly, are paid beyond their value to their companies. Many know it themselves (the better ones), but the very bad ones are oblivious of this.

Unfortunately, the culture of the company then becomes one of excessive rewards and that is difficult to reverse. Most public companies pay out far too much to Board members, both executive and non-executive. How is this perpetuated? The argument goes, for the defence, that it is market forces that dictate the rates of pay. Nonsense! If the market worked in a pure form, companies would dictate terms, not the headhunters and individuals concerned who have convinced themselves and others of the spurious worth of the mostly suspect people who fill the top posts. (By the way, the same goes for politicians.)

However, companies are too scared to tackle executive pay and we seem as stuck with excessive earnings in industry as football clubs are with the rewards of their players.

Neil Thomas

Some ‘core’ values from Apple’s Steve Jobs

In the early days (fairly recently, actually, in the late 1970s and 80s), when businesses were computerising their systems and electronic publishing had only got as far as some computerised typesetting, Apple were frowned on by finance departments. Even in the publishing company I worked for, it was a battle to splash out the not inconsiderable sums on Apple Macs to computerise some of our business systems and to use them for what was called back then, desk-top design.

We now know how Steve Jobs and Apple have not only made computing more fun, but radically changed the way technology is used for work and play. Falconbury and Thorogood use them extensively.

In reading the tributes paid to Steve Jobs over the past week, particularly his idiosyncratic way of doing business, I thought I would try and draw out a few ideas/approaches that might help us through these difficult times:

- College: “I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out”; (dropping out of college) “ Looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made”.

It really is time we stopped thinking that university is the best route to developing the nation and its people – we need more vocational emphasis to enable people to achieve their real potential, which would also happen to serve our economic needs far better.

- Focus Groups: “ It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”; and “ it’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want”.

Developers of products and services need to remember (which is particularly difficult these days) that some degree of confidence is needed in innovation.

- Being fired (from Apple, developing Pixar and later making a triumphant return): “It turned out that getting fired was the best thing that could have ever happened to me”.

This is a particularly testing time for any widespread application of this point.

- Facing Adversity: “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith”.

The current economic stresses and strains are certainly testing our faith.

- Wealth: “The goal is not to be the richest man in the cemetery. It’s not my goal”.

Again given the economic challenges facing the world, many of us will match this ambition quite easily.

- Building a business: Philip Delves Broughton (in the FT) said of Steve Jobs that he would say that “building a business was not for the mentally sane, it was for the passionate and maddeningly persistent”;

Mr Broughton also pointed out that he was “relentlessly focused on the present and future”, constantly casting aside the past – the old ties and models being irrelevant.

Yes! Now more than ever for all businesses!!

Neil Thomas

Felixstowe –the berth of a nation!

The news that the Port of Felixstowe is opening new berths to take the next generation of giant container ships and creating 1500 jobs into the bargain is reported as good news. In some ways I suppose it is, but in so many other ways, it isn’t.

The facts are staggering: at present, the large container ships regularly coming in and out of Felixstowe carry15,000 containers, whereas the container ships currently on order for certain shipping lines will take 18,000 containers. Only Felixstowe of all the UK ports will have the ability to take these larger ships.

This certainly keeps Felixstowe competitive with its mainland Europe rival ports and will enable the UK to keep up with shipping demands.

But, and it is a very big BUT, the news of the opening of the new berths was accompanied by the almost footnote fact that most of the containers coming into Felixstowe go out ‘empty’. In other words we have not got much at all to export!!

Felixstowe’s container port is the symbol of our economy: we can still achieve great things, but we can’t make and export much at all any more.

Neil Thomas

PowerPoint on the slide?

News has come through that Switzerland now has a new political party: The Anti-PowerPoint Party (APPP). The founder thinks a lot of money could be saved by sparing people the boring presentations that feature it and that reverting to paper and pens is more effective for presentations. He is campaigning for a ban and says ‘the party is serious and the cause is serious”.

To those who worry about how dull Switzerland is and what there is to do there once you have settled into your tax haven existence, presumably this shows its hard-edged, gritty and finger-on-the-pulse grasp of the economic realities of life.

If it were a humorous attempt to point the finger (laser-pointing being presumably part of the problem) then I would welcome the attack. And I do know that PowerPoint and seminar companies were made for each other and maybe the bond is a bit too close at times.

But for Falconbury, I would like to claim diplomatic immunity under The Geneva Convention on the grounds that it is innocent of using PowerPoint or other electronic slide projection to torture its delegates.

I am, however, preparing a short talk in the light of this development and in it I will address not only this idea that PowerPoint be abolished but also the suggestion in 2009 (said at the time to be mad) from Colonel Gaddafi that Switzerland should be abolished. One of my PowerPoint ‘slides’ will be using the famous Harry Lime quote from the film The Third Man:

• Don’t be so gloomy.
• After all it’s not that awful.
• Like the fella says,
• in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.
• In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?
• The cuckoo clock.

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