Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets

by Barry Gibbons

  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

  For 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 py
gmy 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.

  The new generation was epitomised by Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander, the six- and eight-and-a-half-year-old Scandinavian ‘leaders’ of the infamous BOO.com – the deceased and unmourned internet company. Not only did these two signal the death of the old ways, they rubbed salt in the wounds by getting herds of previously sanguine WMAFPWWSHs to invest millions and millions in their doomed company. It seemed the Age of Aquarius was over at last.

  Not so. The oldies fought back. Most of those dotcom enterprises imploded, and the WMAFPs are back in position. Scan any Western corridor of power, and non-whites and women are still noticeable by their absence, and the keys to the top-floor toilets are back in the hands of those with ‘experience’. Quite so.

  Is there anything in this cycle for quick-service to learn? Is it better to have a white-haired business leader, who has seen it all before and who trades off some fire and creativity for safety and calmness under fire? Or is it a young person’s game, with success dependent on the ability to work eighty-hour weeks and be ‘in touch’ with the market?

  My observation is aimed at being oh-so-helpful. It is neither and both. Sure, it is helpful to be physically fit – but there are many people who are in their sixties who are fitter than the sedentary teenagers of today. Sure, intelligence (as against intellect) helps – but I’ve seen that present in many twenty-year-olds and missing in industry veterans.

  The quick-service business is unique in both its range of offerings and its range of people who can succeed at all levels. It does require one particular consistency, and that has nothing to do with age. It requires a mind that has a unique – almost telepathic – insight into the mind of the customer. Because of its very nature, quick-service lives on compromise – and the winning leader knows what is wanted, what is acceptable, and what is off-limits. The trite, conventional rulebook is baloney. The customer, for example, is not always right. To take one case, it is inexcusable for families with young children to leave the restaurant table and floor looking like a hurricane has passed through. The brats (and by that I mean the adults) should be taken out and soundly beaten by a sous chef.

  The customer, however, always wants one thing – to be treated as you, the owner/manager/leader, would want to be treated if you were in their shoes. If you understand that, and deliver on that, you will succeed – irrespective of age, gender, race, or hair colour.

  I have one more piece of advice for WMAFPs, if you are to hold on to power. It is an inviolate law. The arrival of nose hair should signal the disappearance of all visible jewellery. It is mission-critical if you are to remain credible.

  23. Trattorias, osterias and big quick-serves

  Over the years I have refused offers to eat sea slug and to drink the (still warm) blood of a krait (a staggeringly poisonous snake). These were not offered to me on the same night or, indeed, in the same country, but in both cases they were accompanied by a hint that the off-putting appearance of the delicacies was compensated for by their unquestioned aphrodisiac benefits. My wife gave me full marks for both decisions.

  As I reflected on such events, however, it occurred to me that I should make this chapter more international. There is a tendency to think of the quick-serve business as essentially American and where it does appear in the rest of the world, it is where McDonald’s or one of the USA’s usual-suspect brands makes an appearance. Indeed, if you ask Londoners what a QSR is, they will probably reply that they don’t know – but that they think they lost 2–1 on Saturday. The confusion here, of course, is that there is an English soccer team called QPR, which coincidentally means nothing outside England (and actually very little in it). If you are all clear on that, I’ll proceed.

  My logic in deciding to put an occasional international dimension to this magnum opus is that, wherever I have been in the world, cheap and quickly available local food has been readily in evidence – and, indeed, is usually part of the way of life. In many cases, of course, it now co-exists alongside the big US brands, but it is alive and well and there are many lessons that both groups could learn from the other.

  Let me start in Tuscany, and more specifically in Florence. It was here the world came out of the Dark Ages via the Renaissance, and some elements of Tuscan culture have gone on to affect the world at large. If you are paid a salary, the genesis of that was when Tuscans were paid in salt (sale). This commodity was so precious that taxes were paid on its use, which is why Tuscans dry their tomatoes in the sun and dry their braesola beef in the air. It is also why, to this day, they (uniquely, in my experience) use no salt in baking their bread – which is why it tastes like your underpants.

  From the top of the hill to the southwest of the city, you can look back down and savour the magnificent panorama. If you do that, the chances are that you will notice something that should be pinned up in every quick-serve boardroom in the world: there are no visible brand signs. With tourists topping up a hefty city population, there is a lot of quick-serve food being eaten. With the local pasta and pizza shops, tiny trattorias and osterias, and the big QSR brand guys all operating inside the city limits, there are a lot of quick-serves. But if you half-close your eyes and look at this glorious city, it seems to have paid no visual price. There are no ugly brand signs. Somehow, it all seems to work without having been turned into a cultural Chernobyl. Now, here’s an exam question: compare and contrast that picture with an average American Strip Center or a UK shopping mall. Quite.

  Tuscan food raises a couple of other questions that the conventional quick-serve industry could ponder. If quick-serve is what it says – a quick-service concept (as against quick-preparation or quick-eating) – then arguably this part of the world has spawned a worldwide quick-serve industry with thousands and thousands of unbranded pizza/pasta parlours and trattorias all over the planet. What they have managed to do in many of these, however, is something that most quick-serve brands gave up decades ago – which is to defend culture, heritage, and integrity.

  There is an east–west line drawn across Europe, south of which whole life patterns are determined by the harvest cycles of the olive tree and the grape vine. Obviously, what used to be rural ways of life have extensively changed in industrialised and modernised societies, and the farming techniques themselves bear no relation to those of the past. But a culture remains, and there is a reverence and respect for food and drink, the quality of the ingredients and the process involved in eating and drinking. That has been lost elsewhere. I defend the conventional quick-serve industry as vigorously as anyone for the good jo
b it does. But it is about eating to live. Somehow, south of Europe’s Olive Line, however cheap and quick the offering, people still live to eat.

  You will have gathered that I love Tuscany. It is a delightful and continual paradox. An eternal Italian talent is to make the impossible seem easy, and the easy seem impossible. The stunning buildings – many upwards of a thousand years old – leave you with your jaw firmly dropped. Then you go back to the hotel, and the water in the shower refuses to acknowledge gravity.

  Prego.

  24. What I know; what I don’t know

  The quick-service business is, at times, murderously frustrating to write about. It is full of paradox. It is a bit like the Italy I talked about in the previous chapter – making a few complex things look easy but a lot of easy things far too complex. After a quarter of a century in and around the industry, I have decided that the more I know about it, the less I understand. To bring some order to my intellectual chaos, I decided to run an inventory check on my observations.

  I was led to do so by the memory of Mayor Giuliani’s speech on 9/11. Frankly, I hadn’t been inspired by the guy before and (even more frankly) have not been over-inspired by him (or his truly awful book) since, but cometh the hour, cometh the man. For a while there, he was great leadership personified. In particular, his ‘This is what I know, this is what I don’t know’ speech rang out like a bell amidst the chaos of that dreadful day.

  So, after twenty-five years, this is what I know, and what I don’t know, about quick-service:

  I do know that if you want to be mass-market in the quick-service business, and that if you seek your market distinction on the back of being healthy and/or fresh, you will fail.