Job Security in the 21st Century

Because I’m a bit of a political junkie, it always puzzles me when a respected presenter of factual, ‘serious’ programming chooses to move to what seems to me a less worthy form of broadcasting, such as playing records on the radio. It always seems like a demotion.

Jeremy Vine was demoted from Newsnight to Radio 2 more than six years ago now, and in the long gap between my last blog post and this (of which more later), I finally came across his show on Radio 2. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I must have been either driving or baking cakes (I don’t normally put the radio on otherwise), and there must surely have been some dire stuff on Radios 4, 5 and LBC.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find that he still talks to the occasional politician, and still makes the odd political comment. On the day in question, the political topic of the day was the threatened closure of Tata Steel’s Redcar plant. One of this country’s last big steelworks was about to close, and Vine’s response was to play XTC’s 1979 song Making Plans for Nigel.

XTC were the first band I ever went to see live. The Damned were the second. This dates me somewhat. But anyway, why did Jeremy Vine play that particular sound of my teenage years? Because it contains a line that goes:

We’re only making plans for Nigel
He has his future in British Steel.

In other words, back in 1979, having a job in British Steel was a metaphor for steady, boring, dependable employment. Those who joined, like Nigel, in the late 70s or early 80s, would no doubt have been made redundant years ago, or fairly recently if they’d had the good fortune to have been posted to Redcar.

Well, Jeremy, I still don’t approve of your own career decision (the one which involved swapping Newsnight for a spot of disc-spinning), but you made your point well.

Meanwhile at Ascot Business Training…

Recent publicity for our Mini-MBA programme has led to a great deal of new work. No complaints here, but it means we’ve had to (temporarily) close our books to new students. For details of this suspension and of the publicity in question, feel free to browse the website. You can even join our mailing list, which will ensure you’re the first to know when we’re in a position to re-open the course to new applicants.

A Deep Frozen Tipping Point?

When Americans watch a televised game of football in the UK, they’re always mystified when the commentator refers to a “Mexican Wave”.  To Americans, it’s not a Mexican Wave, it’s just a wave, and it’s been the favoured pastime of bored sports crowds for several decades.  But in Britain and most of the soccer-loving world, people were only vaguely aware of the phenomenon until the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, where most of the games were particularly boring, forcing audiences to make their own entertainment.  Hence the Mexican Wave.  Pretty soon after that, you could hardly attend a major game in this country without at some point being obliged to stand up and stick your arms in the air – and that’s still true today.

The Mexican Wave may seem an inconsequential thing, but the story illustrates something much more important which I think may be about to happen.  The 1986 World Cup is a good example of a tipping point.  It brought about a quick change in behaviour, and something which probably would have caught on slowly and late, happened quickly and immediately.  Lovers of synchronised standing up and sitting down again have been happy ever since. 

As I look out of my office window today, this is what I see.

We’re currently in the middle of the most prolonged cold snap since 1982.  The date is significant because it means that this is the first long series of “snow days” since it became easy for most office workers to work from home.  In 1982 there was no WWW, no VPN and darn few other TLAs.  If you couldn’t make it into work, the company lost your services and you lost pay. 

Although the technology has existed for several years, the take-up of remote access for work purposes has been lamentably slow in this country, and indeed in most countries.  Although the idea has been around long enough for the term “telecommuting” to have been coined back in the 1970s, most people still regard working from home as something of a novelty – despite both the ever-improving technology, and the environmental arguments for saving fuel use and reducing congestion.

Perhaps this cold snap will be the moment when employers rethink the need for their office workers to drive into the office every day.  I hope in hindsight the snows of 2009-2010 will be a very positive tipping point which will benefit the planet.  Am I being naïve, or just hopelessly optimistic?

The White Heat of Change

This week the Centre for Economics and Business Research predicted that by 2015 the UK will drop from 7^th to 11^th in the list of the world’s biggest economies.  Many people will be surprised to learn that China, India and Russia don’t already outrank the British economy, but no, apparently this will happen sometime in the next six years.

As we come to the end of the decade (and don’t let the Queen tell you it’s still the noughties for one more year!), it’s tempting to look back and ponder ten years of constant change.  Ten years ago the internet was already a part of many of our lives; now it’s insinuated itself into our very culture.  Ten years ago we’d all heard of terrorism but most of us had never heard of Al Qaeda.  And ten years ago we all knew that eventually the Chinese would start to throw their economic weight around; this is the decade in which it’s actually started to happen.

But it would be fatuous to spend too much time looking back, because the forces which brought about these and other dramatic changes will move even more quickly in the 2010s and 2020s than they have in the 2000s.       

Of all the modules on the Mini-MBA, ironically it’s Module 9, Management of Change, which has had to be revised and rewritten more than any other.  In one way or another, everyone from prime ministers to humble business trainers is busy coping with the white heat of change.

The Commonwealth, Copenhagen, and the Need to Belong

The biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has just taken place in Port of Spain.  There are 54 members in the Commonwealth club.  Unlike the British Empire from which it evolved, each member is free to leave the club – as Zimbabwe did in 2003 – and each has decided voluntarily to join.


Traditionally the members have in common a shared history of British rule.  However Mozambique – a former Portuguese colony – joined in 1995, and Rwanda – once German, later Belgian, never once British – has just been accepted as a member.  Less widely known, at least seven other countries without a historical link to the British Empire (Cambodia, East Timor, Algeria, Madagascar, DR Congo, Angola and Eritrea) have either applied to join the Commonwealth or have  expressed an interest in joining.

The obvious question is why?  Why would any self-respecting nation want to be a member of a club organised by its former colonisers, and, still more puzzling, why would anyone for whom the British weren’t their colonial power be the slightest bit interested? 

In Rwanda’s case, the initial impetus was a falling-out with France.  Although it had never been colonised by France, Rwanda’s period under Belgian control had left it with a francophone education system.  The relationship with France having soured in the aftermath of the Rwandan Civil War, Rwanda has turned to the Commonwealth.  Rwanda does at least share a border with two Commonwealth countries: Uganda is to the north, and Tanzania to the east.

Mozambique shares borders with six other countries, all of them members of the Commonwealth at the time of its accession.  Again, perhaps it was natural to want to join the same club as all the neighbours.  But what, exactly, do Rwanda and Mozambique actually gain from being members of the Commonwealth, and what do the other prospective members hope to gain?

The usual argument is that the Commonwealth stands for democracy, stability, human rights and the rule of law.  That’s what it says in its constitution.  And, from time to time, a member will be suspended for going against these principles.  But that hasn’t prevented military coups in Pakistan, Fiji and Nigeria, and (to say the least) corrupt regimes in Zimbabwe, South Africa and elsewhere.

There are, of course, fringe benefits.  Commonwealth leaders get to meet the Queen every two years, and every four years their athletes can compete at a major Games which doesn’t involve the USA, China and Continental Europe.  (Unfortunately still not much help for Britain’s 10,000-metre runners!)

Of course, the benefits of Commonwealth membership are complex and may differ from case to case.  But the real point of Commonwealth membership is that it satisfies the basic human instinct for belonging.  Not for us citizens, but for our national leaders.  At every level and in every situation, whether at home, at school, at work or anywhere else where we gather and spend time, human beings benefit from the company of their peers.  That’s primarily why national leaders spend so much of their time visiting other national leaders, when in reality the business could just as easily be done by phone, or by mere mortals.

Just as the rest of us enjoy the feeling of togetherness that we get from a chat at the water-cooler or in the canteen, our national leaders benefit from the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the G20 Summit, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and any other chance they can get to affirm their sense of belonging.  I can’t help wondering if this need could be pandered to in a less expensive way.

At a less lofty level, the psychology and the consequences of this human need for belonging are discussed in Module 4 (Motivation) of the Mini-MBA.

The Trouble with Market Forces...

It’s now more than thirty years since Margaret Thatcher’s landslide election victory of 1979.  Unusually for the UK, power has only changed hands once more in that entire period – in 1997 when Tony Blair won a landslide for Labour.  In fact though, in many ways nothing changed at all in 1997.  One of the main themes of British politics since 1979 continued under Labour:  the enthusiastic divesting of publicly-owned industries and companies, and the attempt to introduce the rule of market forces in industries which it isn’t possible (either politically or practically) to divest.

First in the early 1980s we had the privatisation of government-owned utilities, car manufacturers, coal mines, steel mills and everything else that could be got rid of.  The whole process came as a shock to many.  I was practically a babe in arms in 1980 but I remember asking my father why the new government was taking so much trouble and spending so much money on separating-out the telephone section of the Post Office.  The answer shocked me:  “so that they can sell off the phones.”  At the time this was such an outlandish idea that I simply didn’t believe it.  But thirty years later, what was once the phone section of the UK Post Office now operates in 170 countries, and it’s impossible to conceive of British Telecom doing almost all of what it now does, had Thatcher not come along and shocked us all.

On the other hand, it never even occurred to Margaret Thatcher to privatise the Royal Mail, the other half of the Post Office.  And yet this is exactly what the current Labour government wanted to do, until they ran out of parliamentary time and political capital.  What would have been too Thatcherite even for Thatcher had become Labour policy.

Meanwhile under both parties a year never goes by without some new scheme to increase the influence of market forces (either real or ersatz) into education, health and every other sector where the state still has some kind of control. 

Recently it emerged that London Metropolitan University has been fraudulently maximising its income by neglecting to notice when students left its courses.  Since all universities are now paid per student from public funds, this amalgamation of former polytechnics actually benefited from its own lax procedures, to the tune of at least £36million.  In other words, in this case the attempt to introduce market forces in education – which even today most would agree should essentially be a public service – has had the opposite effect to that intended.  The reward of a flat fee for every student attracted to its courses was meant to encourage London Metropolitan, and every other university, to improve its standards of education, accommodation, and everything else that could attract students.  Instead, the incentive actively encouraged universities to become lax in their monitoring of which students continue to turn up.  Usually where genuine market forces apply, an organisation is eventually punished for its inefficiencies.  In this case, the opposite has taken place.

Until very recently there was a clear consensus in British politics that it’s necessarily a good thing for governments to minimise their own involvement and oversight wherever it's possible for a sector to be run by blind market forces.  This assumption is lazy economics and lazy politics.  Thankfully, it's now being challenged – it was, after all, one of the causes of the banking crisis.  Perhaps it should now be challenged elsewhere.  

We study the problems of trying to impose market forces in Module 1 (Introduction) and Module 11 (Economics) of the Mini-MBA.

Good Strategy + Time = Bad Strategy?

In recent months Rupert Murdoch has been trying to find a way to make money from the online versions of his newspapers.  The reason, of course, is that News Corp are no longer making any real money from the print versions.

You and I are both part of Murdoch’s problem.  The more we read our news online, and the more we seek the opinions of bloggers instead of leader writers, the less money Murdoch makes out of us.  Murdoch has fingers in many pies, and he no longer needs newspapers to make his money.  But newspaper ownership is in his blood – he inherited the Adelaide News from his father – so it’s hardly surprising that he wants that side of his business to survive and thrive even in difficult times.

In the developed world, the newspaper industry has been in decline for many decades.  Technology actually saved the industry once – in the 1980s the typesetting and printing process was computerised, helping to bring many titles back into profit.  But now, of course, the rise of the internet is a real threat to the future of the printed newspaper.  People no longer have to pay for news and opinions, and the print barons are casting around for a remedy.

In Britain this desperation has become more and more obvious.  Back in August, James Murdoch (Rupert’s son and probable successor) used the high-profile MacTaggart Lecture to launch a sustained attack on the BBC, and in particular the extensive, free-of-charge, provision of news content on www.bbc.co.uk.  To him, the BBC is an “unaccountable institution” which “threatens significant damage to the provision of independent news, investment in professional journalism, and the innovation and growth of the creative industries.” 

Wee Jimmy certainly has a point.  The BBC is a public sector organisation competing in the private sector.  It has a guaranteed income funded by British tax payers, and the ways in which it spends this income can distort the free market.  Without the BBC, perhaps other providers would by now be able to charge for online news provision – which is what News Corp want to do.

But on the other hand, the Murdochs are surely barking up the wrong tree if they think the BBC is the root of all their problems.  If the BBC wasn’t providing free news content, someone else would.  Now that the internet exists, it can’t be uninvented, and it’s likely that there will always be someone willing to publish the news online for free, if only for advertising revenue.

Perhaps it’s time the press barons recognised reality and stopped trying to make money from their papers.  There are industries where company owners don’t expect to make money but still get involved.  There are other rewards available in these industries – perhaps a higher public profile or the hope of increasing their power and influence, perhaps simply fun.   Football team ownership is an obvious example.  Perhaps in future Murdoch should view The Times and his other titles in the same way as Roman Abramovich treats Chelsea FC – as a vanity project with benefits.

We study the issue of Strategy over time in Module 9 (Management of Change) of the Mini-MBA.

Virgin on the Ridiculous?

Back in May, Richard Branson announced that the first of his Virgin Galactic spaceships would be built by December, ready to start test flights in 2010.  He’s been back in the media recently to confirm that all is going to plan.  Branson says he’s confident that commercial space travel will soon be much more than just a millionaire’s dream. 

This is heady stuff, and I couldn’t stop myself from buying this month’s Focus Magazine, which Branson has “guest-edited”.  (In other words, much of this month’s magazine is one big advert for Virgin Galactic.)

Branson’s an example and an inspiration to all business-owners.  In forty years he’s gone from a market stall with a mail-order sideline, to a group of 400 companies worth a total of £5billion.  Impressive by any standards.  And of course he’s helped his empire grow by staying in the public eye.  He’s an excellent self-publicist, always willing to trade dignity for attention.  Whether it’s long-distance balloon flights or beardy cross-dressing, our Dick’s there, giving it all he’s got.  Who could doubt his enthusiasm and his self-belief when he talks about “the dream of the world’s first commercial human space launch system becoming a reality…. I can see the end of the beginning of the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved in.  I’m looking forward to the spaceship being unveiled and flown for the first time next year.” (Focus Magazine, December 2009)

And yet… and yet…

It happened over ten years ago, but I find it hard to forget an interview Branson gave to Sky TV back in 1998.  He’d just bought London Broncos rugby league club, and Sky sought him out at half time during his first game as owner.

He was his usual enthusiastic, committed self, and he said how excited he was to have been able to buy such a wonderful team, which he’d been following for some time.  He finished by saying something like “I’ve really enjoyed the first 45 minutes, and I’m looking forward to the next 45.” 

Oooh dear, Richard old chap.  Every last TV viewer, and certainly everyone in the ground – except him – knew that rugby matches (of either code) take 80 minutes to complete, not 90.  90’s that other code, old fruit.  I couldn’t have been the only viewer who felt embarrassed for him.

We discuss Branson’s hugely successful sequence of strategic about-turns in both Module 2 (Strategic Management) and Module 9 (Management of Change) of the Mini-MBA.  Since 1969 he’s made a lot more right decisions than wrong ones, but let’s not forget the times when he’s let his enthusiasm get the better of him.  You can join the waiting list for his commercial space flights here.  I for one will be keeping my money in my pocket.