The End …

… of the nearly year, parliamentary pantomimes and the end.

2007 seems to have been a nearly year. Lewis Hamilton so nearly won the F1 World Championship, England nearly qualified for Euro 2008, Chris Huhne nearly became leader of the Liberal Democrats at the second attempt and the Government lost nearly everything in sight.

Talking of the Lib Dems, Christmas is considered to be the pantomime season, but actually the best show can be seen most Wednesdays throughout the year – yes it’s Prime Minister's Questions, otherwise known as PMQs. There have been a number of highlights. Tony Blair’s farewell performance was a masterpiece, although sadly we were deprived of the final moments by some idiot BBC director deciding to cut to something far less interesting or important.

Blair was a consummate performer, which made the new PM’s performances seem even more inept.Tony B would turn up with a neatly prepared folder of briefing notes, to which he referred only fleetingly. Gordon Brown arrives with a great untidy wad of scrawled notes that he continually shuffles through in desperate search of an answer. And when angered by the questions fired by David Cameron, the whole pack is thrown down onto the despatch box in a show of petulance.

However, often lately Cameron seems to be a blunt instrument battering away without too much success. Certainly nothing like the success of that stingingly cruel but effective jibe from Lib Dems acting leader, Vince Cable when he accused the PM of turning order into chaos and transforming from Stalin to Mr Bean. Sheer pantomime magic!

Well, that’s it for this year. In fact that’s it for Random Ramblings in its current form. From January it will become a monthly newsletter that will feature a business commentary, articles and advice; in fact whatever comes along during the month that I think might be of interest. In the January edition there will be details of our next Towards the Perfect Business Workshop with a big money saving offer for early bookings.

To be added to the circulation for the new monthly Random Ramblings, click here.

Now it just remains for me to wish you a very Happy Christmas and a successful business year in 2008.


David Wike

Archbishop skewers Balls…

… worldsourcing and size matters.

The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr John Sentamu is the 97th Archbishop of York and may well be one of the more colourful holders of that post. Appearing on the Andrew Marr show on BBC TV on Sunday morning, he ranted about the shameful situation in Zimbabwe and the lack of leadership shown by other African nations in the effort to remove Robert Mugabe. After accusing Mugabe of robbing people of their identity Sentamu removed his dog collar, a symbol of his identity, and cut it up in front of an astonished Marr. He said he would not wear one again until Mugabe is driven from power.

Then the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls was interviewed on various education issues including SATs. At the end of the programme, Archbishop Sentamu wagged his finger at Ed Balls and said, "If you want to fatten a pig you should feed it, not keep weighing it." Priceless! The only answer that the Secretary of State could come up with was, "That's very interesting."

The BBC has been a rich source of information this week, in this case from their website business pages. William Amelio, CEO of Lenovo, a global PC company, wrote an article that summed up very eloquently the way business is heading in the 21st century. He talks about ‘worldsourcing’ replacing outsourcing. Outsourcing is about lowering costs by shifting non-essential operations to a contractor in order to cut costs. With worldsourcing, all aspects of business - including materials, human talent, innovation, logistics, infrastructure and products - are sourced wherever the best is available.

Amelio sums up: “Worldsourcing is about increasing value and quality, not just lowering costs. All parts of a global enterprise are worldsourced to where the best resources, talent, ideas and efficiencies exist.”

In this new world, nationality is not important. Amelio continues, “My own company presents an example of worldsourcing: I am an American chief executive based in Singapore. Our European President is Dutch and based in Paris. Our chairman, who is Chinese, works from the USA. Meetings of my company's senior managers looks like the United Nations General Assembly.”

He says, “We have just opened a global marketing hub in India and announced a new manufacturing plant and fulfilment operations centre in Poland. Our European operations hub is in Paris, we have fulfilment centres in North America, and factories in China, India, and Latin America.”

Not all companies are operating on the scale of Lenovo, but even quite small businesses are going global. As an example, a few weeks back we ran a business workshop. One of the participants owns a website design business. He had three employees, two of whom are based in the Philippines. So it’s no good being parochial any more. We can try to stem the tide, but King Canute demonstrated the ineffectiveness of that approach. The alternative is to embrace ‘the new world’ and look for areas where we in Britain can provide the ‘best’ solution to a particular element of business. This requires us to be ever more entrepreneurial, more innovative, more enterprising, more creative and more flexible. It means that we have to free our young people to learn, not just to pass exams.

When we talk global companies, we tend to think big. It used to be thought, and indeed still is in some quarters, that big is beautiful, that economies of scale win the day. In a recent article, management guru Tom Peters comments on research carried out by Professor Pankaj Ghemawat at Harvard University's School of Business Administration. This demonstrates that, more often than not, big does not equal beautiful in the business world, or indeed, in the world in general. Depending on what data you look at, the order varies a little, but nevertheless, Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Ireland, and Denmark are right at the top of the GDP per capita league. None is exactly a large country, so it seems that Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party might be on the right track in seeking to separate Scotland from the rest of the UK!

It is only a short while ago that John Reid famously declared that the Home Office wasn’t fit for purpose and it was split into two to try to make it more manageable. And on reflection, merging the Inland Revenue with Customs and Excise to form HM Revenue and Customs, hasn’t proved to be an inspired move!

For 2008, think small!


David Wike

Take a risk …

… recruit chimps not graduates, letting go and wandering about.

The new boss of the Health and Safety Commission, Judith Hackitt, has said that she wants an end to an over-cautious approach to H&S matters. Apparently she is in the habit of writing to local authorities and others to ‘warn’ them not to take an over-zealous approach to protecting the public or their employees. As she rightly points out, there is a serious job to be done in improving safety in the workplace and avoiding unnecessary or excessive risk. But banning playground games of conkers or requiring Father Christmas to wear a hard hat in case a decoration falls off the Christmas Tree is unnecessary and not helpful to the cause. Well done Judith!

A Japanese study has shown that young chimpanzees have better memories than university students. Probably because they spend less time in the students’ union bar I would think. I wonder if old chimps get to the top of the tree and then can’t remember why they are there?

My excuse for a faltering memory is that there is just so much in there that the ‘hard drive’ is getting a bit full. I read two interesting articles today. The first suggested that having a to do list might not be that helpful. We tend to clutter these lists with things that we would like to do or that we feel we should do rather than just listing the things we must do. As a result we are likely to suffer the ‘can’t see the wood for the trees’ syndrome. It was suggested that we should have a let go list alongside the to do list. On it we should identify what doesn’t really need doing or what could be delegated.

Once we have cleared most of the stuff off our to do list we will then have time to look around and to see what is going on in our business, in the businesses of our competitors and with our customers. Yes, the second article reminded us of the benefits of wandering about, of talking to people, watching people, looking at how processes work in reality as opposed to in theory. By listening and watching we will truly understand what is going on in a way that we never will if we remain in our offices.

Going back a good few years, when I worked in the motor industry, I had to go to a meeting near Dusseldorf. I drove there. My marketing colleagues flew there, as did delegates from Paris, Munich and even Brussels I think. They seemed amazed that I should have driven. OK, so I was out of the office for a little longer, but that drive brought home to me the differences between driving on one of our motorways or the French and Belgian autoroutes and the German autobahns. The speed differentials experienced in Germany just do not exist in other parts of Europe. I then fully understood why our German sales company put such an emphasis on high speed stability and brake performance. Finding a large Mercedes, BMW or a Porsche going 30 or 40 miles an hour faster boring down on you tends to make you dive for cover into a gap in the traffic in the slow lane. The only snag is that the truck that defines the front of the gap is going 40mph slower than you. Given good stability and excellent brakes you might survive. The warning signs along the autobahn suggest that plenty don’t.

You can read about these things, you can be told about them, but there is nothing like experiencing them first hand to appreciate the significance. So whether you get out and about on foot or by other means, do get out and find what life’s like outside of the confines of the office.


David Wike