Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent (9 page)

Schlosser had 288 pages. I’ve got loads more ammo, but I’ll stop after a couple. Fast food ain’t the real problem. Schlosser’s the real problem – inasmuch as he exists on the planet with six billion peers. Their aspirations and needs create demand forces that are supplied by people. As such they are occasionally subject to greed and abuse, and are occasionally out of control.

If we could cure those diseases, it would be an historic first. Meanwhile, it’s a wonderful world with a lot of faults. We could and should try to do better.

I haven’t had one for a year, but I suddenly feel like a Whopper.

20. And now for something completely different

W
ith a start I realise it is over a decade since I left my position as the Anna Kournikova of Big Business. From the minimal research I have done on the subject, it seems nobody missed me. Few people, apart from my bank manager, evidenced any distress at the time. Had he actually been dead, he assured me, he would have accorded me the honour of turning in his grave.

I have never missed that world for a minute. Others who have left it have felt the need to justify the move – ‘wanting to spend more time with the family’ being a favoured reason. I simply decided that after a quarter of a century of bosses, I would never work for anybody again.

I have survived, without the covering fire of a big corporation and a pay cheque, thanks to the rigid application of a three-part formula I designed at the time. The three elements are deceptively simple: 1) make a lot of lists; 2) forget one person every day; and 3) track nothing but cash flow. It was only with the wisdom afforded me by ten years of hindsight that I realised that if I had applied these rules while I was a big cheese, I would have been a far better CEO. Let me expand.

It was Tom Peters, I think, who said,
‘If you’ve got more than one priority, you got none.’
Forgetting the massacre of the English language, this always struck me as sound advice. I followed it, as I know thousands of other managers did – and still do. Today, however, I start every day with a new Post-It note, listing at least twenty tiddly things with which I must occupy my time. Some days I have two lists. Some days I have lists of lists. I suddenly realised this is actually a magnificent way to run a business – because having the Single Great Big Priority From Hell is now far too inflexible for modern needs.

Business is so multidimensional and fast-changing, my new way is the only way to map your journey. Besides, if you have no real idea about your priorities,
your competitors won’t have a clue
. This is now the only way to stay ahead of the market. Also, if you can change priorities on a dime, and actually forget or lose some, you can avoid the SMEF (spontaneous massive existence failure) that is so popular among many of today’s global giants.

The next element is a lot more subtle – forget one person every day. I invented this because of worries about my memory. I have an outstanding ability to remember the names of all the Kinks, but an outstanding inability to remember somebody I met yesterday. Clearly, I am heading for short-term memory troubles in my later years, so this tactic was devised to get there first. In this way, I will be in control. So I work hard and deliberately sit down and forget somebody every day.

Eureka!
I found I had stumbled on another winning management strategy. We all know far too many people and constantly try to remember more. We (particularly males) need to stop trying to impress. We need to figure out who is important to us and to whom we mean something special. The reality in modern business is that there are about fifteen people who are personally mission-critical to most of us. These are the relationships that need working on and nurturing. One by one, you should forget the rest. You will see things much more clearly, and you will be sure-footed and pleasant to be with.

Thirdly, ignore everything else – just track the cash. I was given advice once by a veteran in the brewing industry when I was head-hunted for a job he thought he should have landed. Effectively, I ended his career by being brought in over his head, but he still had the class to try and help me. He told me that if anybody wanted to learn about a business quickly they should sign every cheque and read every paying-in slip for a couple of weeks.

I ignored it then but recognise it now as a jewel of advice. I run my life on a cash-accounting basis – and if I ever re-joined big business, I would monitor little else. One of the fundamental cancers in business is now the ability to lie, through and over (and, in some cases, abetted by) auditors and present GAAP accounts that actually show what the profits would have been if the company hadn’t paid its bills, created a ‘restructuring charge’ or invested in e-commerce. The only solution is for the world to move to cash accounting for its primary presentation of results, with all the other
crappola
attached as appendices. Forget paper valuations and non-cash items. Forget the difference between balance sheets and operating statements. If you’ve spent it, it’s gone. If you’ve received it, you can use it. Nothing else matters.

There is a possibility that I have completely revolutionised the combined science and art of business management with these discoveries. There may be a book – and possibly a film – in it for me. All I can say is that these ideas work for me, and I wish I’d thought of them twenty-five years ago. You might want to give ’em a go.

Now then, I can see there are the sceptics among you who believe I am pulling everybody’s leg – that this exciting new approach is just a joke to fill a chapter. The only way I will dignify such comments with a response is to echo Peter Cook’s wonderful words to Dudley Moore in the film
Bedazzled
: ‘Everything I have told you so far is a complete lie.
Including that.
’

21. Mediocre, sad and cheating: the ascent of man

F
or many years now my wife has been immersed in the wondrous world of genealogy. For almost as many years I left her and it well alone, thinking, mistakenly, that it was all about the mysteries of female reproductive organs. Apparently, that is a science that sounds similar, and this one is actually about family trees. Phew.

Once I knew that, there was no stopping me. Within days I had traced the living descendants of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), Frederick the Great (1712–1786) and Alfred the Great (871–900). Out of respect for their privacy, I won’t tell you their addresses or phone numbers – but let me tell you who they are and what they are doing.

The 71st generational descendant of Alexander the Great has the same given name, but his full name is now Alexander the Mediocre. He works in my bank’s call centre.

I have been with the bank for about thirty-five years, and I have reached the stage in life where I qualify for the esteemed title of
high net worth individual
. If I want to telephone my bank, however, I have to ring in to a call centre – which I suspect is somewhere in northern India. Before any conversation happens, I then have to tell this latter-day Alex my mother’s maiden name, which is a security code I’ve apparently agreed to. The trouble is I have had a mother and a stepmother and can’t remember which one’s name I gave. The minute I hesitate, I am treated as though they have heard a leper’s bells over the phone.

Here’s what I should do to Alex – I should tell him to stuff his bank. However, I can’t be bothered. It will be a pain to relocate my accounts – and all the other banks will be the same anyway. I suspect that this pathetic attitude (of mine) is the glue that keeps 90% of modern customer relationships alive.

The seventh linear descendant of Frederick the Great is also called Fred. In his case it is Fred the Saddo, and he has many siblings and cousins. You realise what this is about when you ask him about his job.

For thousands of years, people have used a summary narrative of the products and/or services of their labours to describe their jobs (farmer, carpenter, train driver, pizza salesman, etc., etc.). On the surface, Fred the S and his siblings all do such work, but in reality their 24/7 job is to do nothing but manipulate their company’s share price. It doesn’t matter a fig to them what products and services they market – all that matters is the share price of their company. Their life is a constant flow of spin-doctorship, press releases, PR and misinformation. Now, there’s nothing new in propping up a share price, of course, but the past twenty years have seen stock become a key weapon in mega-acquisitions and executive pay. That has changed everything. The result is that thousands – millions – of employees focus on nothing other than stuff that will directly or indirectly keep the company stock in some anti-gravitational hover-mode. What a miserable, sad way to earn a living.

Now, Alfred the Great’s modern direct descendant is of an entirely different kidney. You can spot it in his name, which is Alfred the Cheat. I will tell you exactly where he works – in the finance department of my mobile phone service supplier. These phones are a bit like wire coat-hangers in that if you leave two of them in a cupboard overnight, they breed. So we now have several of the things, all with this company.

Like many lazy guys, I pay my mobile phone bill by standing order and just track the total cost as it passes across my breakfast table each month. On one ‘slow news’ day, however, I read it out of curiosity and discovered that I was paying about £2.50 per month, per machine, for something called ‘handset insurance’. There are two points to note here: First, the handsets cost nothing and would cost nothing to replace in a market where suppliers are getting desperate. Second, when I checked, it was quite clear, in all three contracts, that the provision of handset insurance (or any other optional extras) was excluded from the signed contract.

What we have here is sinister. Big Al is sitting in his office, unilaterally adding out-of-contract extras to customer bills – in the hope they won’t be noticed. Now, if I contracted to sell someone some timber, and then unilaterally added the price of insurance for it when the contract specifically omitted doing so, and then I took the money anyway, wouldn’t I be a cheat? What say you, Al?

When they are caught out, as in my case (and you might want to check yours, right here, right now), they agree to stop it immediately. If you are the one consumer in a thousand who could be bothered to force the issue, I suspect they might reimburse you a few pounds. And why wouldn’t they? I suspect this game-plan is netting them millions – and a few payoffs to keep it quiet would be money well spent.

So, there they are – the direct descendants of three of history’s great men. One is mediocre, one is sad, and one is a cheat.

It was Jacob Bronowski who summarised the last few thousand years as the Ascent of Man. Not in the case of these three it wasn’t.

22. When I’m sixty-four

I
am now, of course, of a particular vintage and thus able to see things differently. When I say ‘vintage’ I do not have in mind the word ‘old’. I have in mind a shining Aston Martin of indeterminate years, kept in spectacular condition, or a bottle of 1963 Taylor’s Port.

Having been born in the first month of the first full year of peace after the Second World War, I am finding that, with the passage of time, my views are changing on many things. I am, for example, now set firm in my hatred of all things to do with Christmas. I am deeply critical of almost all elected leaders in business, politics and religion – strongly adhering to Steinbeck’s view that all nations are to be admired while all governments are to be despised. I detest all this emotional incontinence that now sweeps vast tracts of the developed world when faced with the ugly reality of the latest manifestation of man’s inhumanity to man. I frequently accuse modern populist media of insanity. I deplore the basic inequalities of opportunity still institutionalised in everyday life. And I am revolted by the mere thought of French beans.

All these views of mine are secure, objective and well-received at dinner parties, but one area still leaves me confused. This aging process – which has clearly left me an intellectual pygmy and an emotional bigot – must have implications for business leadership. I can’t, however, for the life of me figure them out.

When I started in business, the role model for leadership was easy to define. It was a white male aged fifty-plus – or a WMAFP. In America it was all the above, but with the addition of white sprayed hair (i.e. a WMAFPWWSH). This applied if you ran a small business (e.g. a single restaurant) or a massive one (e.g., an international chain of them).

This seemed to run against the conventional wisdom evident in many other occupations – even those that did not depend on young athleticism or beauty as their core competence. Niels Bohr argued that no physicist had ever produced any significant original thinking after the age of 25, and there are many scientists who share a similar view where it concerns their chosen field. Quite obviously, with the possible exception of Bruce Springsteen, nobody has written a modern song of any substance after they were 30. In Mozart’s case he did little of merit after becoming a teenager. Despite all this evidence pointing to another option, however, the WMAFPs and the WMAFPWWSHs continued to rule unchallenged in the world of business.

Challenges – or, rather, challengers – appeared at last in the 1990s. The male factor was challenged by the emergence of a new breed of female leaders and entrepreneurs, and the white factor by a similar group of non-whites. The fifty-plus thing then came under heavy fire from a new group of business movers and shakers, who seemed barely out of high school.