Advent 15

This one is as much about a time as a place. The time was 2006 and I felt myself, immodestly, at my professional peak. We holidayed in Denmark, spending a week by the coast and a few days in Copenhagen. Loved Copenhagen but it was the coastal resort of Smidstrup that I most marked.

We rented a house in the pine forests that lie behind the beach. I would wake early, leaving the Groupie to sleep (this was before my now permanent state of semi-sedation) and would run on the forest tracks before swimming in the sea and then returning to brew myself coffee. As I drank my coffee I would read management texts and plan mentally for my role as Managing Partner. As I say, the peak of my powers. Sadly I did not foresee my legal career crashing about my ears. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

As for Denmark, a decidedly civilised place

There's A Lot Of Spleen Venting Going On

And quite right too. Mind you much of the venting is uninformed and, surprise, surprise, a lot of those making the wrong noises are our spectacularly daft politicians. Ignorance crosses all political divides it would seem.

First up - the horrid case of John Worboys, taxi driver cum sex pest - Worboys . This low-life has been released on parole amidst all sorts of administrative bungling. And after a surfeit of outraged concern the government have confirmed that they will not be seeking a judicial review. It seems someone finally had the bright of getting some legal advice before sounding-off on the subject. Worboys, it seems to me, was under-prosecuted back when he faced charges, net result being that he got a sentence ill-fitted to his actual criminality. And here's the rub, his parole board could only consider his case in the context of the proven record. For a judicial review to succeed it would need to be established that no reasonable board (acting upon the information properly available to it) could have reached the decision that was reached. It is the prospects of such a review upon which the government lawyers have now said their piece. How about re-opening the many other cases in which he was thought to be involved and using that as the method of banging the scumbag up for a proper interval? Just saying.

If you want to hear a slurry of old bollocks then a corporate collapse is often a good starting point. Take the shit and fan scenario at Carillion - Carillion Insolvency . Now this is an absolutely shameful situation and, enthusiast for open markets that I may be, I really do hope that the right people end up in the slammer for this one. Are you telling me that successive corporate fat-arse directors did not see this coming? That no one within KPMG (the auditors) had spotted that something smelt putrid? This sort of shit could turn a man socialist. But before politicians are let loose on the subject can someone give them remedial lessons in the difference between cash and profits and on the meaning of a profit warning. Due diligence anyone?

Cheery bye.

53 Days And Now It's Not Raining

I set foot outside to run and as if by divine ordinance the rain stopped. This of course was a blasphemous thought and so a subsequent ordinance made it rain again as I was running. The final ordinance now means that it is sunny and my air is suffused with the odour of damp kit hanging to dry. If I venture to hang the kit outside it will inevitably rain. Still I plodded four and a half miles around the mean streets of Benllech. The BFP Show is still just about on the road.

A news story hit me this morning as being particularly poignant and emblematic of the evil that is abroad - see Palmyra Slaying. It is hardly novel but it bears repetition - these people need to be stopped. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. I think I'd better stop before I go on to sound any more Blairite. I've got a business plan to write. Watch out world OG is on the move. 

Advent 3

Today the most balanced, charming , honest and deserving entrepreneur I ever knew. Alan Robert Murrall was a Black Country boy and autodidact. He loved things mechanical and even at the height of his business flight (and trust me he really soared) he remained a simple mechanic at heart. But actually no, he was so much more than that. Alan got business, simply got it. He proved Marx wrong.

He brought his humane commercial genius to bear in many fields and he took this callow young lawyer on the journey with him. He was a champion in haulage, mining, waste disposal, property and so much more. He was modest in his accomplishments and generous with his advisers. He always said thank you. I never met a good man who begrudged him. He was taken from us far too young and in my direst moments in commerce I try to think of Alan and the sheer bloody privilege it was to be on board for a small portion of his voyage.

Sadly I don't have a photograph of Alan but here is one of his beloved Bowmur trucks.

Pyramid Selling: A Song Of Modern Management

up-sell

callage

partnership

pretty unique

critical mass

process mapping

bow tie approach

a brave new world

supply chain route

key influencer

multiple touch points

to much more focus on

far less failed deliveries

a whole nother suite of rooms

it's all about the customers

no second chance to create a first impression

 

selected for economy

a room too small

and smug with faux conviviality

fearful and loathing all

leaderene spitting vitality

oozing corporate offal

 

audience interaction

(non) participation

inanity

inaudible

how do you know?

trust me

 

money money money

must be funny.

 

Bloody hilarious.



 



 

 

Wage Slavery

Last week I received my first payslip since April 1988. Qu'est ce que c'est le PAYE? Is this part of the global social democratic conspiracy? I've been rather more used to paying my tithe in lumpy sums in January and July.

Those twenty years of self-employment (succeeded by the Dave the Student Part II years of self-unemployment) had worn away memories of the good and the bad sides of working for the Man. The good side: you are contracted for set hours and the buck stops - over there; you get a fixed reliable income; membership of the masses; anonymity. The bad side: lack of ownership (all the guff about 'stakeholders' is so much Blairite bollocks); lack of excitement; anonymity; PAYE. Mind you I'm quite glad to be out of the enterprise community (or whatever it might fashionably be termed) in the current conditions: countries that can't/won't pay their debts; America dumbly failing to grasp that for the first time in its history it has a socialist president; banks that won't lend to anyone; America agreeing that it's in order to borrow $17trillion (wtf is a trillion anyway) on the never-never; Vince Cable bearer of the greatest misnomer in politics, 'Business Secretary'. Suddenly wage slavery doesn't seem so unappealing. Oh and for the past couple of days we have had capital markets in free-fall because the chinless wonders of the trading floors have suddenly twigged what the rest of us knew aeons ago, that there is no puissant political will to sort the mess out. But there is always good news if you look hard enough. Danny Baker was the deserving castaway on Desert Island Discs this morning, an accolade richly earned and a nice change from the self-serving bums more usually featured.

Triathlon: Iron Dave's day of destiny looms and ID is not ready. He has not done enough swimming. Or cycling. Or running. He has had two punctures in eight days. A spoke broke on the rear wheel of the dream machine. ID has a week to put all of this right, which cannot, of course, be done. Discretion is the better part of valour but stupidity is the better part of Dave. No more Doctor Faggot.

Rodney Meere

A friend has died. W.J. Rodney Meere was the brother of my business partner Richard. Rodney was first a client and soon a friend. We played golf together, we drank together and we talked, how we talked. One night on a golfing jolly to Norfolk our discussion got so heated that the anxious waiter came over to check that all was in order. We laughed. We just liked to argue. Rod was a contrarian. So am I. I found it charming. I hope he did likewise.

Rodney was a man of substance, material and intellectual. He could wear an expensive suit less tidily than any man I have known and he introduced me to places I might never have ventured without his generosity. Best of all he treated me (indeed everyone so far as I could tell) as an equal, which I wasn't.

I will remember him thus: we were playing golf at Bamburgh, indubitably one of the world's most stunning spots; it was competitive (it always was) and we had reached, I think, the 16th, perched on a cliff-top and with a cavernous void in front of the green - one left one's trolley at the edge of the void and crossed to the green; Rod and golf trolleys were ever incompatible; as Rod putted I looked back down the fairway and was just in time to see his trolley, parked too close to the edge, topple comically and slowly forward and deposit his clubs into the valley below; he thought my laughter impertinent until I explained that I was not laughing at his putting; out of deference to his greater age I scrambled down to collect the clubs; we played on and the match was halved. There is a nice symbolism to that outcome.

A friend has died, but bloody hell it was fun while it lasted.

The Death Of An Englishman

John Leonard King FCA JP was 69 when he died last month. I attended his funeral this morning. A great affair in its own charming way. As a catholic I have to concede that Anglicans have the best English churches - stolen from Rome one might say but we should let that pass. All Saints Alrewas was pretty, patrolled by two insouciant cats and reachable most easily by canal boat.

Above my head in what I like to call my study (I believe in the earliest incarnation of this much altered and stoically plain house it would have been the garage) hang three racing pictures - two are prints of the Champion Chase, my favourite race, presents for my 40th from a great friend and gambling accomplice; the third is a watercolour of a point-to-point meeting given to me by John King when I did some legal work for him. Most often I worked with Kingy rather than for him. I met him early in my days in Walsall and there must have been something he liked about my uncultured style because he became a major and generous source of introduced work. We had fun and as the Americans probably don't say, John definitely gave good lunch. He was my favourite kind of Englishman - self-made but not chippy, bloody-minded and fiercely loyal. He did the right thing by his clients and by his mates. He called a spade a spade but only after he had inspected it first. He was also the only accountant I worked with who could add long lists of figures in his head, a legacy of the family fruit and veg business. I saw him use this gift to intimidate a bumptious young type from Brum - teach him to play with the grown-ups I thought.

So the great and the good of Walsall said goodbye to Kingy this morning and did it just right. As well as the best churches you protestants also get the best hymns - I Vow To Thee My Country; Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer; Jerusalem. Who wouldn't want to go out to that lot? John's old business partner, Geoff Griffin, gave a wise and witty eulogy.

I was lamenting yesterday the awfulness of our political class and I'm afraid much the same goes for the professions - the hard-nosed competent decency is being replaced by self-serving and back-watching. This is, I know, a jaundiced view and echoes exactly what my forebears must have said about my generation. But there is an important difference - I am right.

One last thing about Kingy - he was a rugby man as player, referee, administrator and bar-room expert. If you have the stamina to stand at a rugby club bar long enough you will eventually hear some resounding good sense. All you have to do is master the art of distinguishing it from the good-natured but utter bollocks you will also endure. Talking to John was a shortcut to the good stuff.