Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets

by Barry Gibbons

  What’s different, of course, is that – other than during something called ‘executive training’ – I have never actually run my own restaurant, day in, day out. By that, I mean actually feeding large numbers of people. Occasionally I forget that, and – half-blinded by delusions of competence and grandeur – I decide to do that at home.

  Here’s how such a day goes, and how and why I get back to my position of safety. Rapidly.

  I started the day early, wandering downstairs in my shorts. On the last occasion, my wife and I had stupidly agreed to provide lunch and drinks to a loosely defined group of friends and were not sure whether our invitation included our collective ‘children’ – all of whom are now between twenty-five and thirty-five years old and still live within striking distance. That causes planning problems, particularly for the bar. Nevertheless, our menu was planned, and – pretty much like Top Cat – I greeted the new day unafraid.

  The house looked pretty clean. To me, that is. My wife informed me that it didn’t look that way to her, and we would give it a run over before we started setting up. Still in my shorts, I found that the required specification for said ‘run over’ was that of a SARS ward in Toronto during the recent scare. As a result, I was a sadder and wiser man, smelling of lemon furniture polish, some two hours later. Only ninety minutes remained before the scheduled start.

  Here’s my next mistake. I lived in Miami for twelve years. If you invited somebody to show up for lunch at 12.30 p.m. in Miami, the well-known northern suburb of Havana, nobody – nobody – would appear before 4.00 p.m. This was England, however, and they would all arrive on time. So, I had one hour and a bit to move and sort fifteen chairs, two tables, 150 knives, forks and spoons of various sizes, five sets of thirty plates and dishes and about sixty glasses, and to set up the bar and music. The latter is a crucial responsibility – it’s my party and I want my music. My son can go blow all his ‘garage-indie’ stuff out of his ear. Whatever it is.

  I left myself three minutes to shower and change. I decided, in my wisdom, to wear all black – basically because I need my head examining. This was quickly confirmed. The bell rang spot on 12.30 p.m. and I opened the door to the first guest. It was one of the twenty-five-year-olds – a delightful one at that; the sort you would think might be impressed by my all-black image. ‘If it’s not Johnny Cash’ is the reward I got as she air-kissed her way past me, all smiles, to the bar – a trestle table upon which there were about two dozen uncorked bottles of France’s finest export. Depending on whether her friends arrive, this will last all day or ten minutes.

  For the record, we served ‘nibbles’ or ‘munchies’ first. Halfway through this, a relative arrived, accompanied by three children between three and five. Not part of our plan. Our golden retriever thought this was great fun, and commenced a game of hide and seek. Our SARS-standard home began to look like downtown Baghdad.

  I hid in the kitchen, getting the main course(s) ready. I was to carve the ham. With this is mind, my wife had bought me an electric carving knife. Ha! I spit on such convenience. An electric carving knife is right up there with an electric pool cue – it is not a man’s way of doing things. About thirty minutes later I surveyed the completed ham plate, which looked as though it was an out-take from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  We got through to the dessert stage, with dusk setting in. The kids had hijacked the music centre, and something sounded as though a child was in pain. It was a child in pain. So much for letting them play with the electric carving knife.

  I was partly responsible for desserts. One of the dishes – mine – consisted of tangerines poached in red wine. They had been chilling overnight, but something strange had happened under the foil. They hade morphed from appetising-looking fruit into what I imagine a malignant external growth on the Elephant Man might look like. Everybody studiously ignored them and headed for my wife’s ice cream creation.

  Well into the night, the surviving bodies decided to play a game of Trivial Pursuit. We decided that the men would play the women, but complicate this already dangerous approach by having a sub-plot whereby the young played the old – rather like Spock and his multidimensional chess. Absolute chaos ensued, and bits of the cheese course started flying.

  About 10.30 p.m., the ‘youngsters’ decided to walk up to the pub for the last round, and steadfastly refused our company. An hour later, they arrived back – and with what? Oh, goody, a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey. That’s whiskey with an ‘e’ in it. Not that it made a big difference.

  At 12.30 a.m., just twelve hours after the opening bell rang, the last guest left. Three hundred and twenty-nine tables, 3,762 chairs, 43,765 pieces of cutlery, 65,983 glasses, and 72,876 empty bottles were jammed in the dishwasher. I discarded my Johnny Cash outfit. Armed, once again, only with my shorts, I retired.

  No, gentle reader, I haven’t ‘run’ restaurants, and it shows. Gentlemen and ladies of quick-service, who do it every day, I salute you.

  40. Next time you post a letter …

  A while back, McDonald’s dropped Kobe Bryant from its sponsorship activities, and the news broke like a thunderclap in England. Everywhere I went, people crowded me, pushed microphones into my face and generally harassed me – always wanting to know the answer to the same question: ‘What is a Kobe Bryant?’

  I had to explain to them, of course, that it is not a ‘what’ but a ‘he’ – and he is someone who is seventeen feet tall and who plays NBA basketball in America. I then have to explain the NBA, which I do as follows: five very tall men run up a wooden court and (usually) score points by throwing a ball through a high hooped net. Five different very, very tall men then run up the other end and (usually) do the same. This progresses until about fifty seconds before the end of the game when, by some strange freak of the space-time continuum of the kind written about by Stephen Hawking, those fifty seconds last just over an hour, and then one side wins.

  Back to sponsorship – and the question that bugs me yet again as I look at a paper in front of me telling the world that Vodafone has just canned its sponsorship deal with Manchester United (the world’s biggest soccer ‘brand’). Why do sane businessmen and women continue to flush huge sums of money down the pan by pursuing this odd mix of science and art? Marketing gurus are often in favour, arguing that – if you take the five-point marketing cycle as: 1) generating awareness of your product or service; 2) securing a trial purchase; 3) getting a repeat purchase; 4) encouraging increased frequency; and, finally, 5) landing that Holy Grail called customer loyalty – then effective sponsorship budgets can help any or all of those stages. What pish.

  Here’s my position. If you are running any quick-serve business, and you receive a sponsorship proposal, you should consider it carefully. You should sleep on it, walk the dog and think about it, talk to your partner about it, phone a friend about it and then sleep on it again. And then politely turn it down.

  It is not the best way to spend your hard-earned marketing support money. Markets are so cluttered and competitive today that you need to get customers to change behaviour when you get a message through to them – not just change an attitude or perception. Billions of dollars go into sponsorships annually, and I do not understand how the big spenders figure it actually works, let alone how it justifies itself. Take one high-profile programme, for example. The US Postal Service sponsored Lance Armstrong and his team – who have triumphed an unbelievable seven times in the Tour de France. Now here’s the problem: only about fifteen Americans know that the Tour de France is about bicycles and is the world’s greatest bike race. Of those fifteen, only three still write to other people, and they don’t have a lot of options when they post a letter in the US.

  If it doesn’t fly in the US, does it work over there? Over in France, Le Tour is an annual sporting highlight for millions of Europeans. Armstrong’s victories have, as a result, given him megastar status. So, is this where the sponsorship pays off? When these millions visit the US next time, is the plan t
hat they are suddenly resolute in their determination to seek out only the US Postal Service when they want to post a letter home? Er, as against what other option?

  I am confident I know the determining drive behind most sponsorships. It is the chairman (it doesn’t happen with chairwomen) who trousers a huge chunk of the advertising budget and decides that the brand will lend its name to (let’s say) a PGA golf tournament. Is this driven by target marketing? No, it is not. It is driven by enabling him to: a) play one of the world’s best courses in the lead-off pro-am with Tiger Woods; b) watch the happenings on the eighteenth hole from twenty feet away with a martini in hand while playing King-of-the-Tent; and c) go on TV in his Ralph Lauren blazer and polo shirt and offer his golf wisdom in a thirty second slot at the end. Is that cool, or what? And it’s bound to make the target audience feel warm and attracted, isn’t it? Isn’t it? I said isn’t it? Yeah, right. Who cares?

  Look, I’m not saying sponsorships can’t add value. Nike morphed from being a US sneaker-marketer to being a global sports equipment and apparel supplier on the back of extensive and risky marketing programmes that included clever sponsorships in golf (Tiger) and soccer (Brazil, Manchester United, et al.). All I am saying is that, apart from the obvious risks of associating your brand with somebody who might end up facing a judge, the huge relative amounts of money required to sponsor anything or anybody of note are not likely to be the best way to spend your quick-serve brand support money – whether that be at national brand level or that of a single owner-operator. If you are insistent, I would limit it to the very big (e.g. Nike-type) or the very small (e.g. local junior baseball-type). In the middle, it just gets lost. Remember: you need to change consumer behaviour when you spend – ‘feel-good’ stuff doesn’t cut it anymore.

  If, however, after all that, you remain determined to spend your money in this way, I have an opportunity for you. I am hoping to represent my country in the 2008 Olympics in the KFC Bucket Leap competition – but a shortage of funds is limiting my altitude training. You know where to find me, and all cheques will be welcome.

  41. The rising sun

  Japan came to the top of my mind recently. Having breakfasted on news of the appointment of an ex-Apple executive to help McDonald’s’ Japanese operations to get out of the fairway bunker they’ve landed in, I found myself hosting our eldest son (aged thirty) to a sushi lunch. The meal came by in tiny individual portions, on small plates, via a sort of model railway, and was memorable for two things. First, I confirmed my love of the food – which is strange considering that a decade or so ago I used to put similar looking delicacies on the end of my fishing hook. Second, the bill was totalled by the simple method of adding up the number of empty plates on your table. You couldn’t see my son behind his pile, and the bill came to roughly the equivalent of the GDP of a mid-sized Scandinavian country.

  I have spent a lot of my life exposed to varying Japanese images and influences. The first should have been strongly negative, but oddly became the opposite. My father was a Japanese prisoner of war and suffered horribly – and that should have been enough to instil a lifelong hatred of all things Nippon. That it didn’t was a mark of my father’s spiritual strength. He rarely spoke about his experience, but when he did it was to make the point that the Japanese simply had no idea how to handle POWs. In their culture, if you lost at war, you died – and they simply had no concept of what to do with thousands of prisoners. It reined in my horror enough for me to keep some sort of open mind.

  At university in England, one of my buddies came from Tokyo. Everything appeared to be normal until the first vacation, when he told me he was staying in the country to work on his English. He then told me that his grandfather, who ran the family, had decreed that it was too cold to send his wife over to join him, so the family was sending his mistress instead. As you do. When I visited him some years later in Tokyo, this ‘sharing’ situation was still in place, and I suggested to my wife it might be something we could think about back in England. The scar still exists where she hit me with her Chelsea Flower Show programme.

  I landed in Japan for the first time in 1978 – leading a team buying an automated warehouse system for a big brewery. My questioning fascination began to turn to genuine affection. Their whole national logic is different to ours on many planes. When I pointed out that our system would need more safety protection in case somebody broke into it and got injured, they looked at me as though I was mad. Their thinking was simple – if a burglar broke into a place, he deserved to be chewed up.

  My ’70s trip was also responsible for one of the funniest scenes of my life. One of our mechanics got terribly (no polite way of putting this) constipated. It was an all-male party, and the rest of us were, to put it mildly, not very helpful. But we did convince him to go to the pharmacy in the basement of our hotel. Three of us then watched the scene hidden behind a big stack of shampoos, and I have to tell you that if you have never seen a male, English mechanic try to explain to a female, non-English-speaking Japanese pharmacy assistant the problems of constipation – in sign language – you have not lived.

  I have been back to the islands several times and continued to digest the complexities of this beguiling nation. My wife became involved in Ikebana – floral art – and I became aware that simplicity, minimalism and clarity could also bring power and beauty. My business education had tended to indicate the opposite.

  I’m not sure I could advise anybody about Japan. If your quick-serve brand is not in the country, should you enter the market? If you are in it, what are your prospects? After all my exposure, if you ask me those two questions, all I can do is echo Mayor Giuliani’s words after 9/11. This is what I know and this is what I don’t know:

  In Japan, whatever corporate architecture is involved, they will do it their way. They will work to their charter, their rules and their code. Their position will be thought through and will be based on a mix of indefatigable logic and unanswerable heritage. If it doesn’t match yours, they will be polite but not move an inch.

  Their economy is not out of the woods yet. Mr. Koizumi’s government was strong on promise, but has not delivered. He remains too cavalier with public spending, but there are two pieces of good news worth banking. First, over the past decade, the Japanese economy has gone through as near a revolution as it has ever experienced, and their institutions, attitudes and executives are now in better shape to face changing global challenges. Second, many forecasts are now predicting a period of steady growth for their economy – unexciting, but highly welcome after the woes of the past ten years.

  They will remain uninterested in short-termism. It will still be the nature of the beast to identify a game-plan and then stay with it for the long term.

  Despite all the changes, their business fundamentals will still be built from a different DNA than ours in the West. If you want to do business there, the rule is still to find a local partner.

  Just as the Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, the Japanese are rumoured to have fifty different words for a Walkman. Owing to the average height of their men, however, their language has no word for slam dunk. Can you believe that?

  Neither can I.

  42. O sole mio

  The sun rises over the Bay of Naples, and the water winks its reflection at me. Despite four espressos, I struggle to translate the local morning paper, Il Mattino, into English. In the distance, the ghostly peak of Vesuvius seems to echo the whole environment’s laughter at my pathetic efforts.

  Suddenly, one paragraph seems to make sense, but I can’t believe my translation. For the first time since I arrived, I break into a brisk walk and get myself an English language paper. My fears are confirmed: Shell, the imperious global oil giant, has joined Enron, Parmalat, WorldCom (et al.) on the list of corporate evil-doers. It appears the company has not only over-stated its oil reserves by an astonishing 25–30%, but also knowingly done so. There’s a blame-storming session going on, they’ve already zipped shut a few
body-bags (including one on the chairman), and the lawyers on both sides of the case are looking forward to years of gainful employment. This one stuns me particularly, and there’s a personal reason.

  Around the end of my second decade as a human, I was in a mess. I was a rebel without a clue, heading for a lifetime of serial trouble and underachievement. Suddenly, I got a number of breaks that changed everything for me. One of those was a junior job with Shell in England. My dad thought I had won life’s lottery, and it is difficult to describe credibly today what it was like to land a job with Shell in the UK nearly forty years ago. It was almost like joining the Church. Once you’d got in, you didn’t leave – and the average week was spotted with visits to the canteen to present somebody with a twenty-five, thirty or even forty-year service award. The company watched me through university and then paid (full salary plus fees) for me to go to one of England’s premier business schools.

  I then signalled that I was part of the generational paradigm shift in the relationships between corporations and their employees by saying ‘thank you for all that’, by being headhunted and joining another company. Shell survived this potentially mortal blow and carried on as before: a bit top-heavy, a bit bureaucratic, somewhat paternalistic, genuinely global, astoundingly capital-intensive, a tad conservative – and stinking of integrity. If in doubt, three things always ruled: integrity, integrity and integrity.

  There is no doubt I owe Shell much. When I hear present-day CEOs mouthing off the shallow lie that their ‘people are their greatest asset’ I feel like upchucking – quite simply because I have always believed that was for real, and I was taught it in a company that was all about technology. What has happened to Shell is beyond belief to me. I wonder just what will I feel when I pull up under that brand sign next time? Will I link the guy behind the register, or the product quality, with the deceit and malice aforethought that seems to have been de rigueur in the boardroom? I tell you: it will be hard not to.