SOUTH KENSINGTON — There was a piece in the Independent yesterday about Sir Richard Branson’s “three point plan” to get the UK economy going.

Unfortunately the plan is completely pants.

I wish it weren’t, but it is.

Years ago, when I worked in politics a very worthy husband and wife team approached my cabinet ministers with suggested legislation: A Good Samaritan bill.  The bill was to recognise that restaurants, food stores and food services companies throw out masses of food everyday.  And yet many, many people didn’t have enough food to eat.  The only reason this happened — they said — was because you could be held liable if you gave people food that made them ill.

The Good Samaritan Bill would solve that “by absolving people of all legal responsibility for the food they made available…”

What?!

I was so surprised by how wrong that was that I couldn’t even talk to the proposers.

Today Sir Richard proposes a plan that would:
- make it much easier for businesses to hire and fire young people
- offer small entrepreneurs easier access to small amounts of money and
- reducing time spent at university

And I feel the same kind of confusion.  Why would it be better for businesses to be able to take on more people for shorter periods of time?

Do we believe in the fairness of our laws, or not?  Do we want to protect people from the pure business drivers of companies?  Or are we happy to have them bought and sold, hired and fired, compensated appropriately, or not?

The appeal for business is obvious.  Any business manager could see that.

But for young people?  It’s much harder to rationalise.  I have no doubt one can rationalise it… But should you?

The same unfortunately goes for micro-finance for entrepreneurs.

Yes, small businesses account for much of the job growth in the UK.  Yes, entrepreneurs (like Sir Richard… like me) help bring better competition and innovation to our economy.

But that does not mean that if we could convince more people to to try it we’d get even more jobs and more innovation.

Creating and sustaining a business is the single hardest thing I have ever done in my life.  Without exception.  I am still not sure that God really meant for me to be an entrepreneur.  But we did really do all our due diligence, never borrowed, worked like crazy, fought off dragons, made millions of mistakes and only just scarped through.

Often I think it’s something that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.  Why would we decide that more and more and more people should do it?  How many more open and closed restaurants do we need on our High Streets.

And less time in university.  Really?

There are answers to this economic crisis.  Or certainly things we can do to help fix it.  But I am far from convinced that these are they.

Give me better managers and better trained and supported entrepreneurs… better skills… any day.

But not this.

/df

CHELSEA — The problem with change is that you cannot always foresee what might happen next.  So you create an anticipated direction of travel and risks, issues, dependencies etc. along the way.

That’s how it’s done.  In a nutshell.

The problem with Britain’s big banks though is not that they don’t know what might happen next.  They do, but they’re determined to fight against it.

It is clear when you compare the banking systems of, say, Canada, what the problems of the UK and US systems were.  You can’t really argue it.

As the Chancellor George Osborne has said:

Take the financial sector out of the equation and economic growth in the rest of the economy during recovery has actually been above its average rate of the last two decades.

In fact, the Office of National Statistics says that Britain’s banks are responsible for 1/3 of our national fall in output since 2008.

That’s not really all that funny.

According to many of the banks the recovery is too unclear for action to be taken now.  However, for all the lack of clarity they see around the recovery, the implications of further regulation do seem clear to them.

And they know that that change wouldn’t be good.

Which, of course, is total rubbish.

Change is good.

When it comes to further regulation… and ring-fencing of retail banking, for example… there can really be little argument.

Let’s get on with managing the change.

/df

LONDON — I am still a bit disturbed by an interview I read while on holiday. I have no idea why, while off the grid for a fortnight, I managed to read Lucy Kellaway’s interview with Roland Rudd. But I did.

Have a quick read of it and then come back.

Let me start by saying that I have no agenda with either. Lucy Kellaway will never report on my business.  I have seen her speak once, but never met her.  Rudd is in a parallel business to mine, and although I have met him once, I will never be invited to dinner at his, and for many reasons out companies are guaranteed never to work together.

There is no doubt in my mind that Public Relations (PR) is a dark art.  To many it seems like a job that isn’t really a job.  Even if the PRCA Training manual just landed on my desk and has 55 pages of courses.  Many people feel that PR people sell influence and that influence is hard to measure.

Again, I don’t want to argue that point.  What I am interested in is the way in which Mr Rudd is fairly ruthlessly dispatched.  He’s been “making a handsome living” advising CEOs.  It’s all about people “having their egos tickled”.

It’s not a wholly abusive article.  But it’s not exactly like other profiles in the FT either.  It’s gossipy, dismissive and not particularly fun in the process.  There is something about it that is quite dark.

And I wonder if the uncomfortable relationship between journalists and business has something to do with it?  Why is it for example that these two people in the story, who started their careers together, can have had such different lives as a result?

What I wonder is would a film producer, or a Royal Academician, or a computer company owner have received the same treatment…?

/df

DISTRICT LINE — What ever happened to ‘new’?  Where is our sense of adventure?  Where are the new faces and voices of the future?

Here we are, 11 months into a new decade and we’re still talking about some of the least interesting characters of the 80s, 90s and Noughties.

George Bush has a book out.  Reviewed today it talks about dog poo and tries to re-cast him as an ordinary guy.  But quite apart from being US President, anyone who knows about W’s upbringing knows that he was never an ordinary guy.  Just very much filled with insecurity and doubt like all the rest of us.  And yet he had so much opportunity and so many advantages in life.

He may be one of the few people for whom being a two-term US President arguably wasn’t really living up to his potential.

Then there’s news of Michael Jackson and his amazingly growing immediate family.  Some parents, brother, sisters, nieces and nephews have profited from his 2009 heart failure, and some have not.  So now their is an unseemly dispute (and additional publicity) over the release of a ‘new’ album.  Tracks are out today.

New?  No.  Posthumous even.  (And it doesn’t even sound like him.)

And finally the Scottish superstar Susan Boyle has patched up her feud with former Velvet Underground front-man Lou Reed.  (Yes, you can rub your eyes, drink some coffee and read that again.) And Lou has directed her in the video for his song ‘Perfect Day’.

Really?

Really??

Surely the Teens (is that what we’re calling this decade?) has every right to have it’s own stars.  Where are the great actors, musicians, authors, politicians and business leaders of the Teens?

It feels like we’ve lost our mojo.  We are too stuck in the past to think about the future.

Where’s the excitement and optimist of a new age?

Anyone?

/df

LONDON — A whole lifetime of planning and meticulous work ended with the death of Sir Thomas Tresham on 11 September 1605.  He had been working on a beautiful hill-top house in Northamptonshire and the lavish gardens surrounding it.  A pious Catholic in a Britain that was only settling into Anglicanism, he hid his piety in quiet symbolism around the property.

A little more than a month after inheriting the half-built house and property at Lyveden New Bield, Sir Thomas’ son Francis Tesham was drawn into the Gunpowder plot.  Organisers wanted him to pay for the gunpowder — so a fairly important role — with his new-found riches.

Francis wouldn’t be the first unsophisticated son of a successful man to show poor judgement.

But when the plans to blow up the House of Lords on the state opening of parliament on November 5 1605 were discovered, a poor sop named Guy Fawkes was dragged out and all the conspirators were found.  Francis Tresham was sent to the Tower of London where he was dead by 23 December 1605.

Barely three months after Sir Thomas Tresham’s death the house, the gardens, the family and everything they had ground to a halt.  When my family visited it a few years ago it was almost as it was 400 years ago.

Recent reviews of Luftwaffe aerial surveillance photos of Britain have shown the outline of a decorative Tudor garden than hadn’t been seen before.  The current owners of Lyveden New Bield, the admirable National Trust, are therefore setting about restoring that piece too, to further support the property’s peak back 400 years.

Meanwhile my family here in London have just headed out to the local bonfire night.  Where a life-size effigy of poor Guy Fawkes, the dreaded papist conspirator will be marched across the park with torch bearing children chanting behind him, and promptly tossed on a 35 foot bonfire.

“Remember, remember, the 5th of November…” all young children here are taught at their parent’s knee.

How tossing a Catholic on a fire can be a nationalistic or civic duty is lost on those of us who visit or emigrate to this country.  But there’s a small truth in this that can be relevant to lots of us and lost of what we do.

It is conflict, not peace that creates the greatest need for progress.  Out of competition and the dire need for innovation come most of our most important inventions.  Out of large acts great families and reputations are built and lost.  What the Tresham’s lost stands 400 years later as a great study for people of today.

/df

IN MY KITCHEN — I was just thinking last week that triathlons and marathons have become the new mid-life crisis. And then I read the story in the Sunday Times Style Magazine: “The rise of the IRON MAN”.

Turns out that triathlons are the fastest growing mass-participation sport in the UK. The article cites Vernon Kay, Eddie Izzard, David Walliams and Matthew McConaughey (US readers are going: ‘phew, one I recognise!’)

Some people say that it’s all about the gadgets and the expensive kit. Body mass sensors and £5,000 bikes. But I don’t buy that. I think it has a lot more to do with the new ‘mid-life’.

“This is my last break for freedom,” one punter says.

“It’s the equivalent of being off my head in the Ministry of Sound in 1991,” says another.

What really strikes a chord for me is when another person interviewed in the Sunday Times says “Modern life is emasculating.”

These sporting events offer a host of recognisable words:

• objectives
• stretch goals
• key performance indicators
• strategy
• milestones
• challenges
• achievements
• assessment
• competition
• pressure
• stress

Those sound familiar, don’t they? They’re all business terms that probably have no business being used in business!

We have tried to turn business into a sport. And stolen the terminology of athletes and warriors to talk about it. But, when compared to real physical challenge, endurance and survival, the language sounds silly.

Who are our business heroes?

• Warren Buffett
• Lakshmi Mittal
• Jack Welch
• Sergio Marchionne

And what do they do all day?

They sit around reading stuff and talking to people. That’s not exactly the adventure stories we started life dreaming about.

/df

DISTRICT LINE — I love the way that the mainstream of public discourse can so easily reject different approaches as silly. I didn’t see the show on John Lewis last Wednesday — Inside John Lewis. A friend of mine did though. And he says they were painted as a bunch of numpties. And a bunch of numpties who don’t know how they’ve got so lucky. Which is ridiculous, obviously.

It is, right!?

You’re not so sure?

One of the great charms of Great Britain is the complexity of its history and the variety of narratives that can emerge. In this century, so far, we are all committed to the Dickens narrative:

• We used to work in coal mines, our bosses were mean and nasty, but the world was worse,
• Then the benevolence of man created commercial enterprise — overseen by faceless gods in expensive shoes — who made everything right.

It’s a capitalist fairy tale that insists that the Corporation is what built Britain (and therefore the world).

But the truth is far less clean and consistent. Companies like JLP and Cadbury and The Co-op did it very differently. Their approach to business was closer to socialist than to our capitalist democracy. And they succeeded.

We read in Fast Company and other coffee-table management magazines that ABC Co offers free dog washing to employees who show up on a Sunday, or all you can drink from the booze cart on a Friday afternoon. But when compared to the approach of a John Lewis Partnership or a Co-op that is as parsimonious and fatuous as could be.

Maybe John Lewis are not numpties. Maybe they’ll still be here when the rest of us have folded up our tents. Maybe we can learn something from them.

/df

DISTRICT LINE — The newly appointed Lord made a bit of a storm in Parliament with his maiden speech. Perhaps any minimalism in grace and nuance will inadvertently help our regular politicians, by showing how hard it is to speak without edits, teleprompters and producers.

Describing his views on small business he said:

“I have also seen some poor examples of businesses that simply will not succeed, even in the best of times. The reality is that, however good the help provided by government, some businesses simply do not work. Government and banks cannot just write blank cheques to anyone who thinks that they have a good idea.”

And that’s the basis of the argument. Essentially, if you don’t succeed it’s likely that your idea was rubbish. And that winds me up a bit. Because it sounds like the ‘American dream’ which is often translated as ‘if you work hard enough, you will succeed.’ And my experience, after working in government, in large businesses and in small business is that there are many things that government and large businesses do to keep small business down.

Which is why I like this second quote from Lord Sugar of Clapton:

“In Britain, small businesses have a lot to be proud of. They employ over 50 per cent in the private sector and they generate as much turnover as big business-in fact, 99 per cent of all businesses are SMEs. The credit crisis has pushed our SMEs to the limits. Some companies have struggled, not because of failure in business, but because of the tougher credit conditions.”

And in many ways it contradicts the quote above from the same speech. I have not seen any real effort made to help small businesses in a coordinated or concerted way. There’s lots of nice rhetoric, but the way that Lord Sugar describes small businesses is pretty much the way they feel treated: ‘Do this! No, no sorry, do that! Woops, you screwed up. Must be your fault.”

The fiscal, judicial, regulatory and bureaucratic systems are all stacked against smaller businesses. Rules seem to be written for organisations with means, access to expertise and advisers, and an institutional history in doing this stuff. Small businesses need to negotiate a maze of complexity that no regular business person has all the experience to master.

In analysing his own speech later, Sugar said:

“During the ceremony, I only got a mild ‘hear, hear’ – mostly from the Labour lot, but they’ll like me in the end.”

I will stand in front of the Palace of Westminster itself and give him a mighty round of ‘hear, hear’ myself if he can address the real, structural issues that are holding small business back.

No one wants something for nothing. A proper helping hand to succeed would be good enough.

/df

HOME — I do like to watch shows that I shouldn’t like. Or shows that seem like they’ll be good for you. And Ian Hislop’s Changing of the Bard about the ‘great’ British tradition of Poet Laureate is one of those.

I didn’t know much about the role. Not as much as I thought I did anyway. But now I do. And I think I am uniquely qualified.

I am British. (Just.)

I am definitely a more personable character than Ted Hughes. I have better facial hair than Tennyson – by far. But that may not be enough.

I also love poetry. And in a different time, when one could make a living writing verse, I would have jumped in with both feet. The fact that I can’t spell shouldn’t hold me back. (Try reading Shakespeare in the original.) And nor should the fact that my earliest poetic musing were in French. (One of our first Poet Laureate’s patrons couldn’t even speak English.)

But what a job! I’d love it.

So, without wanting to launch a reality-TV style competition for the next naming… a little less than 10 years from when the role will come up again… here’s my submission for your consideration.

Take your time. We’ve got a few years yet.

On Royal soil

What the hell happened to our life in the noughties?
Politicians have once again lost their senses
And we can’t stop the Tele from talking expenses
Let’s flush them out like pheasant for Royal retirees

Chung, clack, BOOOM!
Chung-a, chung-a, clack… BOOOM!
Squaak, flutter / flutter… plunk.

What does the new world order hold for Britain?
Noble bankers we were, but now it seems we’re not
What do we do with the suits we have bought?
The right to dress up’s in the Constitution we haven’t written

‘Point of order!’ BOOOM!
‘Mister Speaker, sir…?’ BOOOM!
‘Where’d they all go?’ Go… go…

I know. It’s amazing. What am I doing sitting behind this desk?

/df

LONDON — It’s a funny old world we live in. The Chinese state aluminium giant Chinalco just failed in its quite generous attempt to help Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto out of a massive great hole. And where do we go to see the sense of remorse? Not to this ‘management’ section of the website. Although the website has been jazzed up recently… there is no noticeable sign of personality. And business stories these days are increasingly personal interest stories.

It’s been a bad run for China and its various state enterprises.

In 2005 the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) tried to buy the California petrol business Unocal from Chevron. All was agreed with everyone who needed to know. Except the politicians got involved:

“As the world energy landscape shifts, we believe that it is critical to understand the implications for American interests and most especially, the threat posed by China’s governmental pursuit of world energy resources.”

…say some geniuses in the US Congress.

The deal dies. A Congressman again crows that the failure is:

“…good news for the free market”

An analyst says about the Chinese business:

“They had no game plan. I don’t know if they had bad advice or did not listen or if the bureaucracy just couldn’t move fast enough. CNOOC is at a disadvantage in a fast-paced market.”

Whatever it was, it’s not good, is it?

Same goes for the Haier Group’s bid for the Maytag Corporation the same year.

Only the Lenovo purchase of IBM’s computer business stands out as a deal that has gone through. But now that the IBM brand is being rolled back and Lenovo is coming through, what has happened to the brand?

Lenovo reports fourth quarter loss

Ouch.

Not surprising then that news that Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. will buy GM’s Hummer has been met with scepticism… even in China.

What is China missing? I am not close enough to know with any real certainty. I know the Chinese are well served by western bankers (they’ve even invested in a few). They have investor relations teams in the west too. But I have a few suggestions of what they might be missing.

1. A process and plan for change management, stakeholder relations and communications.

2. A single, simple set of messages for their organisational communications.

3. A group of people (Chinese or not) with the skills and tools who are able and ready to talk on their behalf.

4. The ability to get on the front foot with the questions that you just know the western media and politicians are going to ask.

There is no doubt in my mind but that the Chinese will change the global rules of business in the decades to come. It may not even be gradual, and it will definitely be shocking to many people in business. But today there is still some work to do. China must learn how to take better advantage of the rules on the pitch that they’re visiting.

/df