From Empire …

… to the new world of skills, enterprise and can do.

In a speech to the CBI, Gordon Brown said that decisions on key national infrastructure projects will be handed to a new independent body and streamlined. If that means that desperately needed improvements to the road, rail and airport network will be speeded up and free from the Government meddling in the details, hurray!

As more and more top ex-public servants ‘come out of the woodwork’, an article in The Telegraph at the weekend reveals just how much the Labour Government has tried to micro-manage the UK. It makes the fascinating contrast between today and the days of empire. At the height of the British Empire when we ruled a quarter of the world, there were just 99 staff in the Colonial Office which administered everywhere except for India, which had its own administration. How on earth did this work? Quite simply because there were local administrators in each territory who were trusted to get on with things. Without the benefit of modern communications there was little choice but to give them this responsibility.

Compare that 99 at the Colonial Office with 92,000 at HM Revenue and Customs today! At the CBI conference when the Prime Minister said Britain needed "the most far-reaching change in our occupational industrial and employment structures for more than a century", I don’t think he was referring to government, but perhaps he should have been.

Gordon Brown went on to say "If the best welfare is no longer the benefits you have today but the skills you gain for tomorrow then the inactive should, wherever possible, be preparing and training to get back into work." Not exactly plain English but I think we get his drift. He pointed out that we have six million unskilled workers in Britain today but it is likely that within a few years we will need only half a million. So what will the other 5½ million do? Well, it is predicted that we will need five million additional skilled employees within the next ten years, so those currently unskilled will need to be ‘upskilled’, to use a horrible piece of jargon.

So what do we mean by skilled? “We are not looking for students with a degree or even A levels, we are looking for young people who are reliable, hard working, trustworthy and can work as a team player; we would welcome anyone who is able to contribute and who would not be frightened to put forward ideas. We have a training policy to teach the skills needed and have a number of staff that have taken NVQs and other training opportunities. We are really looking for staff who are interested in developing to reach their full potential.” So said Westons Cider Human Resources manager at The Enterprise Imperative day earlier this year run by Midwest Rural Enterprise for teacher development.

This backs up comments from the Federation of Small Businesses that I reported two weeks ago in Random Ramblings, “that those managing a small company are not generally 'hung up' on education and are more interested in hiring people who have the basic necessary skills and who will fit in.” So it seems that the challenge for teachers is to instil in their students a need to develop a ‘can do attitude’ and a willingness to learn ... and keep on learning.


David Wike


Midwest Rural Enterprise is a community interest company supporting the Business Link Volunteer Mentor programme in the West Midlands. David Wike is a member of the mentor programme.

Speaking, Spam, Spam ...

… Spam, clay on our boots and is the customer always right?

On Monday evening I was at a speaking competition. For those of us who have been used to getting up on our hind legs to give business presentations, speaking publicly doesn’t hold any great fear apart from a few butterflies before standing up. But the learning from watching and listening to other speakers is invaluable to developing one’s own performance. Perhaps like many other things, we can pick it up as we go along and think we can do it quite well without ever having had proper training. However, there is nothing like some structured coaching to initially disabuse one of that idea and then to build on any innate strengths we may have to develop us into a competent performer.

You will note that I have used the words ‘performance’ and ‘performer’. Whenever we stand up to speak there should be an element of a performance to make the whole thing come alive. And most importantly, we should pitch our delivery to suit the audience and the occasion. We should be sensitive to them and react accordingly.

I am sure that none of us likes junk mail, cold calling and spam emails. This presents a dilemma for those in business because we want the potential customer to know about our products and services, but we should want to avoid alienating them by bombarding them with unwanted advertising. How do we know that it is unwanted? Well, possibly we don’t, but we should be sensitive to any feedback that indicates that may be the case. I have had two phone calls recently where I was politely trying to indicate that I wasn’t interested. In each case the caller didn’t take the hint so I had to be a bit more blunt, but hopefully still polite. In both cases I was treated to what amounted to abuse.

I have also had a call from someone offering a business service. I asked for the details to be emailed to me so I could study them at my leisure. Nothing arrived but the same guy called me again a week or so later. I reminded him that he had promised to send information and he said that he would do so. A couple of weeks on and I have heard nothing. Hopeless!

On Saturday evening I was at a dinner and was talking to a very senior executive of a major motor manufacturer. He said that one aspect of the job that he enjoyed was visiting the styling studio to look at progress on new models. We both agreed that talking with the designers, the smell of the clay, and indeed, coming out of the studio with clay stuck to your shoes was a highlight of the new product development process. Developing a new product that is sufficiently forward thinking to be exciting and to have longevity is a challenge because you also need to design something that isn’t so unfamiliar that the customer feels uncomfortable with it when it first appears.

This led me on to thinking about whether the oft repeated statement that the customer is always right is, in fact, always right. My view is that customers are not always right but they do pay your wages. However, I do think that we do the customer a disservice if we do not try to gently lead them towards our way of thinking if we are sure that we are right. As a simple example, if we try on an item of clothing and the sales assistant always says, “That suits you sir.” or something similar, we soon start to discount their ‘advice’. If on the other hand they suggest that we try something else as, “I don’t think that’s quite right for you sir.”, their advice is genuine, it has value and we are likely to go back to shop there again.


David Wike

Attitude, paperwork ...

... and leadership.

In my 29th August Ramble I discussed business associate Trevor Gay’s view that employers would be well served by recruiting for attitude and training for skills. In other words, put more emphasis on a ‘can do attitude’ and a willingness to learn, rather than on academic qualifications. Therefore, it is interesting to note comments from the Federation of Small Businesses “that those managing a small company are not generally 'hung up' on education and are more interested in hiring people who have the basic necessary skills and who will fit in.”

A spokesman for the FSB said, "For an employer, once you get past the key stages of a potential employee being well presented, on time and having good communication skills and a good basic knowledge of reading and writing, adding up, that kind of thing, what they are looking for is people that will fit into their business.” Interestingly he goes on to point out that many small business owners are not well qualified in an academic sense and therefore take a more open attitude to job application candidates.

I wonder how many large organisations miss the opportunity to recruit really capable people because of an insistence on degree level qualifications or the ability to pass a set of ‘aptitude’ tests. By applying these standards they would have denied themselves such talents as Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Duncan Bannatyne and John Major. Quite simply, qualifications prove an ability to pass exams. They give little indication as to suitability and capability to do a particular job.

I am sure that we all agree that we need to keep on improving, to keep driving standards upwards. But extra pieces of paper do not achieve that. If we take education and health, the government has ploughed in record amounts of investment over the last ten years. They have raised target and put in new targets where none existed. There is no doubt that there have been improvements. But ten years on we have hospitals that are positively dangerous places to visit and students leaving school who, by the government’s own admission, are not adequately prepared to meet the challenges of the modern economy.

So being a simple soul, without spending years researching it, I conclude that paperwork, be it in the form of certificates for this that and the other, or new targets and policies, or even lots of crispy twenty pound notes, do not make a positive difference. The only thing that makes a difference is People. Leadership is about encouraging, motivating, inspiring; it is about trusting people to use common sense and use their own judgement. It is about making them responsible for themselves, making a real contribution and not being ‘passengers’.


David Wike

In from the sun …

…. long distance commuting, grumpy old man, perfection and cheese.


Good grief! It is forecast that 1½ million of us Brits will be commuting to the UK from sunnier climes within the next ten years. I know several people who travel for a couple of hours each way to get to work at the moment and I think they are barking! But commuting from abroad? Well, perhaps it’s not that daft. Come to think about it I do know someone who lives in Spain but works in the UK for four days a week. And that is the key, increasingly it isn’t necessary to work 9 ‘til 5, Monday to Friday. The Internet and mobile communications have meant that going to the office is more of a habit than a necessity for many people.

In fact, to balance out the effect of all this long distance commuting, most of the rest of us will have to work from home to offset their carbon consumption. I am sure that most employers still suspect that those working from home don’t pull their weight. I’m not at all sure that is true, but even if it is, just think of the savings that could be made by not needing anywhere near so much office space. Investment tip – don’t buy offices to rent out!

As a self-confessed nit-picking perfectionist and grumpy old man, I am constantly frustrated by the inefficiencies and incompetence of many organisations. Of course, there are many excellent businesses around, but I’m sure that even they could find opportunities to do just that bit better. After Manchester United won the treble in 1999, a reporter asked manager Sir Alex Ferguson what he thought of the team. The reply was, “We need to improve”.

Today, along with Trevor Gay (Simplicity is the Key), I will be running a business development workshop entitled ‘Towards the Perfect Business’. I know that none of us is ever going to achieve perfection, but unless we have that single minded determination exhibited by Sir Alex, we will become less competitive over time.

I have just re-read ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ by Spencer Johnson. It tells the story of two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two mice size ‘little people’ Hem and Haw. The live in a cheese maze and live well of the cheese in their ‘cheese station’. One day the cheese runs out so Sniff sniffs out the whereabouts of a possible new supply and Scurry leads the chase of the two mice to find the new cheese. Hem and Haw don’t want to believe that the cheese has gone for good so stay put. Time goes by but they still cling to the belief that ‘somebody will do something’ to return things to the comfortable way they were.

Eventually it dawns on Haw that the cheese will not be returning so he sets off into the maze to find new cheese. There are many blind alleys and dead ends and haw is frightened to go on. He is tempted to turn back to the familiar but cheeseless place he has left behind. But he continues forward, encouraging himself with a vision of a bountiful supply of new cheese. Eventually he finds it along with the mice, Sniff and Scurry.

Of course, cheese is a metaphor for a good income, food on the table, a better way of life, greater personal fulfilment and so on. Have you noticed that so many say that ‘they’ should do something where ‘they’ is the government, the council, in fact anyone but themselves. The many migrant workers who have arrived and still arrive in this country were brave enough to travel to an unknown and probably frightening new place in search of new cheese. Some of us would do well to follow their example rather than hope that someone restores our old supply of cheese.


David Wike