Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets Read online

  We witnessed the simultaneous fall of two business leaders. What made it doubly interesting was that they represented two entirely different styles of leadership.

  You don’t want to get me started on Lay and his henchmen, but let’s just say they represent the Adam Smith–Gordon Gekko-Darwinistic–free market–everybody wins if everybody pursues their own vested self-interest–exploitative–greedy–share-price driven version of capitalist leadership.

  Anita rowed a different boat. Profit, personal greed and (unfortunately) investor returns were all low priorities. She saw ‘her’ business as a vehicle that would drive the world to a better place. The cynics would have it that The Body Shop was simply an exercise in extremis of cause-related marketing – but her consistent track record shows she sought to use ‘her’ business to lighten Third-World oppression and ease the battering the environment is taking from our presence. In addition, she used her own high business profile to support worthy non-business causes. She epitomised the model that recognises that a business needs to reflect the interests of many stakeholders.

  Both of these figures fell from grace in the same week, which raises the question: just where do we point our children when they ask for business leadership role models?

  The definition of the point when you’ve become old, for a male, is when you first save a piece of wood to stir paint with in the future. I have been doing that a lot recently. Now, has age brought me wisdom, particularly in this contentious area? It certainly has.

  My views on this subject are now geometrically in line with those of Mort Meyerson. Mort was, you will remember, a kind-of joint commander of the business giant EDS, together with that strange little ET-like creature who nearly became president of the US. Together they espoused a sternly Protestant style of leadership, but that is not what has inspired this reference. I am much more impressed with Mort’s magazine article from a couple of years back. Its contents are summarised in its title: Everything I Thought I Knew About Leadership Is Wrong. Bingo.

  In truth, that’s where most of us are. The whole leadership thing has got so complex, and brings so much pressure, that about 95% of all our preconceived ideas are capable of being proved wrong. Leaders we admire as lions crash and burn in just the same way as those we think of as donkeys. All bets are off.

  You will note I said ‘95%’. Floating about in the 5%, where we can retain some confidence, are a couple of leadership must-haves that not only still survive but seem to me to be increasing in importance. They are not new and they are not fancy, but my advice is not to leave your leadership home without them.

  The first is personal integrity. I cannot see any leadership model today, if built on deceit, surviving over anything but the short term. Whether it is an exercise in ‘supporting’ your share price, or simply dealing with your employees, customers or affected outside parties, you will get found out today if you try to deceive. You will not necessarily be tumbled by regulation, auditors, or GAAP. These bodies are all capable of missing this stuff. But there is simply too much information available that cannot be hidden all the time from all the people who sing from a different hymn sheet. With the World Wide Web in place, there is nowhere to hide.

  The second is to learn from the Orient. In the East, a good deal is where both parties leave the table smiling. A four or five on the dice is okay; it doesn’t have to be six every time. So, deal something back. Re-invest in a partnership. Surprise a customer by giving something away proactively and/or without pressure. Don’t rape suppliers just because you can. Treat your employees as assets, not expenses. When you look outside your tent, show the world you give a damn.

  None of this means you turn into Mother Teresa. To be an effective modern leader, you cannot build just on the cornerstones of popularity and being a nice guy. And Anita Roddick’s fade-out reminds us that the prime purpose of being in business remains the capture and retention of a customer, not a supplier. But you can succeed without deceit and without having to take the whole pot at every visit to the table.

  I know, I know – such wisdom from one so young. But the world is full of new ‘wisdoms’. Another one that spoils breakfast for some folk is the maxim that you are not actually a millionaire until you have sold the stock and paid the taxes.

  18. Go on, surprise me: make my day

  Despite the fact that the last twenty-five years have seen an alarming increase in the number of things about which I know nothing, I try and steer a course in life that avoids surprises. I follow Leibowitz’s law, for example, which states that when hammering a nail you will never hit a finger if you hold the hammer with both hands.

  Life does, of course, insist in throwing occasional spanners in the works. Only yesterday, to give you another working example, I opened a tin that clearly said ‘evaporated milk’ on the label only to find it was still there. In general, however, I avoid the stresses caused by events not following a predetermined script.

  It was only recently that I realised that this approach might be the cause of me missing out – and that a life-plan that drifted towards the other end of the spectrum might also provide an effective and efficient business tool.

  The setting for this epiphany was a restaurant in Florida. Two of us were eating and were some way through a meal that was – as planned – unsurprising. The place was thinly populated, but there was nothing in the food, ambience, decor or service that had so far generated any sort of comment – either of praise or criticism. All that was about to change. We were positioned near the kitchen door, which slowly opened. A guy in a dark suit walked through into the restaurant area. Without any drama, he approached our table and asked us how the meal had been. In fairness, we both had to think, as the whole experience had been singularly unmemorable, but when it all came back to us it seemed to be OK, so we passed on the good news. His brow furrowed. Barely controlling his emotions, he startled us with a short, but memorable, speech: ‘It may have seemed OK, but let me assure you, I am not happy with anything in this place tonight. It does not come up to my standards. The meal is on the house.’ With that he turned on his heels and headed off towards the next occupied table – leaving us open-mouthed, and not a little worried about what we had just eaten.

  After a lot of post-match analysis, and having survived the night with no negative side-effects, we decided that we were a lot more impressed than concerned. It seems we had dined at a restaurant run by the last person on earth who was both honest and uncompromising – and who was prepared to lose unnecessary money in the pursuit of both values. What a surprise – a pleasant one.

  It’s this ‘pleasant surprise’ thing that got me thinking. Most of us would confess to a natural dislike of being surprised, but what we mean, of course, is that we dislike being unpleasantly surprised. That attitude arises because that’s all we ever get. The world is now geared to bland uniformity via the spread of global brands. Add to that the fact that the whole business universe is involved in a master plan to lower our expectations so that we are not unpleasantly surprised every two minutes. If you book a flight, for example, you might see a take-off scheduled at 10.15 a.m. and an arrival at 12.15 p.m. – that’s a flight time of two hours. When you eventually take off, however, the pilot tells you that the flight time will be one hour and fifteen minutes. So, what’s with the ‘missing’ forty-five minutes? It’s easily found: their whole act is so crappola that they need this to cover for routine inefficiencies. In this way, if you plan around their published times, you get no unpleasant surprises. If they do have a tail wind and arrive at the gate at 11.40 p.m. – i.e. ‘early’ – you think you’ve won a minor prize in the Lottery.

  It’s not just airlines: they are all doing it, trust me. Try ringing up the phone company and navigating your way through the hold-menu. Try calling a plumber. Have you ever tried to correspond with a big private or public sector organisation? The whole process is shaped to lower your expectations to a level where you get no unpleasant surprises. Occasionally, if they do some
thing half-right, you are anaesthetised to such a degree that you believe you have beaten the system and are pleasantly surprised.

  Let’s go back to our troubled restaurateur, and see if he’s unknowingly come up with a business weapon we could all use – one that is also efficient, effective and cheap. I think he has. The key is that what he did was not just a pleasant surprise, but that it was also proactive. No only did he surprise us pleasantly – part of the effectiveness was that it came before we were expecting anything – but it also came from right out of the blue and was mighty powerful. So, let’s call it the PPS – the pleasant proactive surprise.

  It doesn’t have to be expensive, and it doesn’t have to be related to something going wrong. One of the most successful franchisees we had in my time with Burger King was Manny Garcia in south Florida. Sure, he had good locations and a reasonably wealthy market – but so did many others. I’m not daft enough to put his overall success just down to a couple of tiny PPSs, but his staff used to go round the restaurants with free coffee fill-ups and mints, and there was enough positive feedback from that alone that convinced me it contributed. Here’s the power of what I am talking about – the PPS is so rare in modern business life, it’s actually exhilarating when you get one. What’s important is that you do tend to go back to a business that gives you such an experience.

  It’s a powerful weapon because nothing surprises us any more. If I told you there are twice as many plastic flamingos in south Florida as real ones, you wouldn’t be at all surprised would you? Amazingly, you would be right not to be.

  19. The defence speaks

  I belong to an elite club. Membership consists of ex-Burger King CEOs. At the last count there were only 175,397 of us still alive.

  As Club VP for External Relations, I have a responsibility. The fast-food industry has come under heavy mortar fire from a journalist by the name of Eric Schlosser in his book Fast Food Nation. We need a response.

  In no particular order of priority, the industry stands accused of fuelling mass obesity, losing a better way of life, exploiting labour and consumers (particularly children in both camps), abusing power, being pathetically regulated, advancing new diseases, unfairly distributing wealth, and over-globalising the planet. After reading it I felt like Pol Pot.

  What an absolute crock.

  I cannot attempt a detailed debate in a few paragraphs. That’s even if I wanted to – and I don’t. The truth is that there is much about the industry that should give everybody in it cause for concern, and objective challenge should be welcomed. But a full debate needs two added dimensions that the book doesn’t provide.

  First, it needs balance. In and of itself, the book is a powerful piece of scholarship – but in my observation a piece of work is better if the conclusions come after the research. In this case there is the strong feeling that the author’s mind was set and the extensive research was an exercise in finding and selecting stuff to support that position. Any industry that provides work and affordable food for many millions of people every day; that creates wealth; that is consistent and relatively safe and that is regulated in the main by elected governments cannot be all bad. That’s all missing, and what the book also fails to do is to define the alternatives. Presumably they are omitted because they only exist someplace over the rainbow.

  The second issue I have with Schlosser’s thesis is that it addresses the symptoms, not the disease. The problem with this planet is that its population has forward momentum. People keep inventing things. People want more for themselves. The strong exploit the weak because they can. These forces drive societal and economic changes, which bring a lot of benefits – and a lot of costs. Sure, it would be nice to pick and choose – but you can’t. The momentum is always forward. The benefits always come, but then we are all faced with managing the costs whether we like it or not.

  Schlosser is right. There are some aspects of the fast-food industry that are hideous and that cannot be defended. But they are not specifically about fast food. They are about the cost of the planet’s development momentum and the imperfections of its population. Here are some examples:

  Abuse of juveniles as employees – There are regulations with which society feels comfortable, and there will be more. The real abuse comes from those little Hitlers who use their local power to run their operations like something out of a Dickens novel. They abuse regulations and people because they can get away with it, and they exist in every industry.

  Abuse of children as consumers – When I was a kid, you could have marketed to me until the cows came home. If my parents didn’t think it was right for me, it was off limits. The crass abdication of parental responsibility is a society-wide disease. Burger King Kids Club is not the real problem here, trust me.

  Obesity – In Europe and the USA alone, more than 500 million people need two to three meals a day. The fast-food industry makes millions of meals available at affordable prices. If they didn’t, I don’t know who else would. Now then, it is no big secret that some foods you eat during a week have different dietary properties. Some folk eat too much, have too many meals, and have the wrong mix in their diet. Is this really a supply-side problem? No. So, eat less and/or eat better. It is an entirely discretionary consumer decision.

  Low wages – Whether the minimum wage is where it is now, or twenty times higher, or doesn’t exist at all, there will always be a bunch of jobs in society that are (by definition) at the bottom of the pay league. They are defined by where consumer supply and demand, and labour market supply and demand, all come together at one point on society’s welfare graph. And, yes, fast food is there with a group of others. But guess what – it is not entirely a bad thing. It provides a wealth of opportunities for the low-skilled and itinerant. It provides an entry point for those who can and want to develop. It has helped millions of students make ends meet on a journey that otherwise might have been impossible. And for those (like me) who are lucky enough to progress in life, it provides a workplace experience that should make you a more empathetic and sensitive manager of those less fortunate.

  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

  With 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.