Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets

by Barry Gibbons

  Here’s the spill-over for quick-service. I have contended for some time that the art of getting distinction in cluttered, competitive markets (a.k.a. branding) has ceased to be just about what you do. For decades (centuries, perhaps) the specification of your product and/or service was enough to get you market distinction. But now there is another dimension in play. The values you espouse as a company are becoming critical differentiators – and customer loyalty is recognising your corporate personality as well as its product portfolio. Companies who understand this, and get their game-plan right, seem to punch well above their marketing-spend weight.

  Virgin does this brilliantly. The company constantly pushes its corporate personality attributes (value, fun, innovation) out into space whenever it gets the chance, either through formal marketing or PR and photo opportunities. Trust me, this is a science, not an art form, and it seems that people who are comfortable with these values are then more inclined to try the products/services with the brand name written on them. Think about Apple, Benetton, Tesco, RyanAir and Haagen Dazs – they all stand for different values, but are all quite clear in what they are.

  Let’s bring this closer to home. I don’t care whether you are CEO of a quick-serve giant, or the operator of a single location. Mentally, walk outside your store or your brand, and look back. You see the brand sign. Now, forget about your product for a minute. What signal does the brand sign give off about how you do business? What does it say about what you stand for? Try a Virgin analysis: limit yourself to two or three words. Then, and here’s where the fun comes in, check your results with some of the folk who buy your products – but I suggest you have a strong gin and tonic first.

  It’s cool to take this one step further. Forget your business and concentrate on yourself as a leader. If you have anybody reporting to you directly, try the same exercise. If you were in a group of your first-line reports, and you walked in the room, what would be the consensus view of the values you exude? What do you think your people think you stand for? Hey, if your people are your greatest asset, it’s kinda important, yes? You might want to check your results out again, with them this time. But be really careful with this one – it can go wrong.

  Writing this stuff is exhausting, and I’ve moved from espresso to grappa. At least, I think it’s grappa. It is only when I look at the label on the latter that I realise I have made another translation mistake from the Italian. I should not have drunk it. I should have dabbed it behind my ears.

  Ciao.

  43. The long run

  Anytime now a number of the global quick-serve brands celebrate a half century of existence. That’s cool, and a matter for some pride, but in the gene pool of longevity, they are splashing about in the shallow end.

  Back in 1548 (the same year my beloved Manchester City Football Club won their last silverware), Nostradamus foretold of a future historic business combination:

  From Albion’s shore shall come a marvellous conveyance, a carriage silincieux bearing the arms of Rolles de Roi.

  Is that spooky, or what?

  You can choose to believe it as a prophecy or not, but some three and a half centuries after he penned those words, and exactly a hundred years ago, Frederick Rolls and Henry Royce met in England and gave birth to a company whose name has become familiar in every country – and synonymous with excellence. At Burger King, we called the Whopper the Rolls Royce of sandwiches. I don’t own a Rolls Royce car, but I find something comforting about seeing the R-R logo on the engine of any jumbo I’m on. A century from now, who knows how we will be travelling, but I suspect R-R will be written on the quality end of it.

  This longevity thing is not just about big brand names. The fourth-century BC Chinese belief that the world is made up of opposing forces has been reflected in their cooking ever since then. The notion of balancing such forces is central to the famous Sichuan cuisine – in this case six of them (ma, la, tian, suan, xian and ku – spicy huajiao, hot peppers, sweet, sour, salty and bitter respectively). That’s a way of life – and a way of eating – that has survived for more than two millennia. Again, you get the feeling that, two more thousand years from now, assuming our assorted gods spare us, the same principles will still be in place.

  A while back, I meandered around the ruins of Pompeii. Beforehand, my knowledge of the place (and the events) was limited to distant school history lessons, a few TV shows and Hollywood sound bites. Walking the streets of the place brought home to me – just as so many things do today – just how little I know and appreciate about our planet and its history. Pompeii was a town of some 60,000 inhabitants, nestling under Mount Vesuvius. Nobody even suspected the latter was a volcano until 24 August AD 79 when it erupted, covering the town in mud and ashes. The fantastically preserved domestic, commercial and community buildings (still not all excavated) reflect a metropolis of advanced culture and bustling business activity. Social developments were illustrated by a 20,000-seater sports amphitheatre, extensive graffiti and about seventy quick-serve restaurants.

  The latter fascinated me. They are quite different from the many tavernas that are also evident in the preserved ruins in that they are counter-service, with the counters housing several fire-holes for preparing hot food. I spent an hour or two finding out what I could (and imagining the rest) of a typical lunch menu from the first century AD. The area is well south of Europe’s Olive Line, and olives (and olive oil) would join the grape (i.e. wine) as a mainstay. The hills of Campania would provide good grazing for livestock and rich wines. They had salt (via solar evaporation), and so could keep hams and cheese. They had vinegar. They made sausages from pork and other meats, preserved in salt, seasoned, and stuffed into natural casings from intestines. They had greens, including fennel, asparagus and cabbage. Indeed, the origin of the word salad comes from the Latin for salted greens. The Mediterranean was full of fish, ranging in size from anchovy to tuna, and commercial boats would trade all of the above for salt cod from the north Atlantic and spices from the Middle East – and even further afield. Bread would be a source of carbohydrate.

  All this research made me really hungry, so I ambled into an osteria in the square in Sorrento. I ordered a plate of local olives and a carafe of local wine. I then had a plate of mixed, fried (small) local fish and finished off with some local ham and cheese. The sun combined with all these ingredients, and I headed off back to the cool of my hotel room for a well-deserved nap. As I closed my eyes, my thoughts were that I had replicated – exactly – a meal that somebody could have been eating 1,930 years ago when their peace was interrupted by a noise. And I mean a noise.

  Some things are timeless, and a lot of people quite like that. If I’m in Miami, I head for the Versailles restaurant, or the Captain’s Tavern down south. In Chicago, it’s Melman’s Scuzzi; in New York, it’s Madhur Jaffrey’s Dhavut; in London, it’s Joe Allen’s or Langan’s. They’ve all been around a long, long time. They are built on strong foundations, and a lot of people like that, including me.

  There’s so much uncertainty, so much tension and so much technological change going on in our world that it’s almost nonsensical to try to forecast the future. But here’s a test for any quick-service. Spend five minutes with a piece of paper and write down five big things you think are going to happen in the next twenty-five years. Then try to picture what the place you are thinking about might look like against that background. It might, just might, help some short-term decisions you were planning to take anyway.

  Then follow the rest of my advice: finish your wine and go for a nap.

  44. I’ll take the high road

  Normally, about this time of year, I seek some peace and quiet for a period of private reflection. I take this very seriously, and I am often to be found in a cave in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, eating only locusts for a couple of weeks while I think about eternity. And if you believe that, you really do have to get out more.

  This year, by way of a change, I decide to fly into Cap
e Town to see how many line-fish I can eat at one sitting in a neat little café in the V&A Waterfront.

  The trip is full of surprises from the outset, starting on the long plane journey to South Africa. Like many guys, modesty is not my strong point. In fact, if they ever put self-delusion in the Olympics, I would be a shoo-in for gold. Suddenly, however, I decide that I am rather pretty, of all things. The prime reason for this revelation is that I share the overnight flight with the Irish rugby team, who are flying in for a series of internationals. I know from experience that nobody looks their best as they get off a plane after an overnighter, but these guys are something else when it comes to being ugly. I also realise why American men wear crash helmets for (gridiron) football – it helps to keep your nose somewhere near the middle of your face. There was not one nose in the Irish team where it should be, and not one ear that reflected the shape that God intended. It takes a lot to make me look pretty, but there you go.

  The trip from the airport into Cape Town reminds everybody of the contrasts of this staggeringly beautiful but still troubled country. As the glorious backdrop of Table Mountain slowly reveals the high-rise wealth of the city and the showy waterfront developments, your car takes ten minutes to pass the first township and its horrendous quality of life. The history of the country is built on such contrasts – extreme poverty and wealth, danger and refuge – and the questionable best and profound worst of imperialism. South Africa is, of course, home of some of the earliest human settlements, where groups of twenty to eighty hunter-gatherers lived together for security. A bit like Miami’s gated communities, really.

  It is now more than a decade since democracy finally won out, and that anniversary triggered Nelson Mandela’s final, final retirement. This guy fascinates me. To be brutally honest, I knew very little about him during his long incarceration on Robben Island. In our world, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and much of how we judge these things depends on the media we are exposed to – in other words, it depends on Rupert Murdoch’s chosen position on the subject. But as I got to know enough to form my own judgement, it became clear that the latter part of the last century had produced one of history’s special people.

  Mandela is not a saint. His eye for the ladies and his refusal to mince words or tolerate fools would make him an uneasy fit in most American corporations. But his challenge was not to support the market capitalisation of some shadowy global enterprise, it was to lead and steer his country through a profound transition at a speed that was simply unprecedented. Almost every commentator forecast civil war and bloodshed. It never happened – and, more than a decade later, there is a lot of stability and optimism, and a realistic understanding of the residual problems.

  Mandela has much to teach us in business. (There you are, see? You knew I’d get round to it eventually.) Over a career, many of us will face business crises. All the options for the next steps will seem ugly. The sheer size of the task will appear insuperable. Pause for a minute, and imagine your worst-case business scenario, then multiply it by a million to get some idea of what this guy faced. And then pause a bit more and register this: he made it through, and he got there without abandoning the high road. At every point, where it must have appeared easier to resort to violence and extremism, and for him to morph into (yet another) dictatorial warlord, he chose to have faith in the core human spirit and to try and get minds to meet other minds rather than bullets to meet skin. There is an old saying: It is crucial to talk to your enemies. Otherwise, you only talk to people who agree with you. Did he ever. The world would be a different place if a new Mandela could suddenly appear on the cast list for the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula.

  Quick-service is always in transition – whether it be a single owner-operated location or a global giant – and in transition there are always potential winners and losers. Transitions can be managed for the better, but in the West we believe that has to be about winning and losing. The idea that a better – more sustainable – transition might emerge if you leave something on the table, and other parties also gain something, is alien to us. You might want to give it a thought. Take the high road.

  Meanwhile, as ever, here are some practical tips on South African cuisine. Eat anything out of the cold ocean or the big powerful rivers: snook, line-fish, kingklip or shrimp. While you are doing this, make a note of my view that fried fish does not belong in a hamburger bun.

  While in South Africa, do not – and I offer this from personal experience, the details of which would provide you with just too much information – attempt to eat anything with ostrich in it.

  45. Oh, won’t you stay?

  My initial position was to stay quiet when asked about the continuing revolving door on my old CEO’s office at Burger King. There were two reasons for my silence. First, I left that stage long ago and have neither the wish nor the information necessary to comment specifically or wisely. The second reason is also simple: There are some things better left unsaid. Oh, how I wish everybody had such sense.

  As ever, however, my initial position weakened and has now broken. As it normally does, this happened at a party when I was trapped in a corner by a hard-bodied supermodel, who would not release her trapping leg until I had outlined my thoughts on CEO tenure. Yes, I know I am making this up, but it’s my book.

  Where was I? Oh, yes: CEOs and how long they should stay in position. Let me first put my record straight. I stayed in Burger King as CEO for five years, in the early 1990s, after initially agreeing to a three-year contract. In the decade before my arrival, there had been 1,378 CEOs, some of them lasting as long as four days. Since I left, there have been, by my calculation, another 2,722, with the range of tenure stretching from seven minutes to well over a week.

  So, is this CEO-churn a bad thing? The world can make its own mind up about BK; I’m going to widen the debate to business generally. I have here, before me, an official statement from the revered IBO (the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious): Of course it is dumb business to change your CEO every time Wogan appears on the TV. The blindingly obvious prime reason is that it gives off clear signals to all stakeholders that the business is in trouble. On receiving these signals, it is unlikely that these stakeholders will seek to increase their stake in the business (whether that stake is an investment, a supply position or an employment contract). At best they are likely to assume a holding pattern for their stake; at the worst, they may seek to exit.

  CEO-churn also inhibits the implementation of deep-set strategic change. Of course, there will be changes with each new CEO: he or she immediately wants a new advertising agency and a gaggle of new key executives; product development priorities will alter; the company will exit a few markets, and enter others; R&D spend will go up, or down; there will be a new raft of policies, ranging from corporate travel allowances to diversity training; everything that was blue will become green; and so on and so on. In short: a load of tinkering goes on, which then all changes again when the next CEO arrives.

  For most companies, however, this sort of change is not enough. These programmes are about doing things differently – but there also needs to be a programme to contemplate doing different things. These are changes to the fundamentals of the business – and they can take years to design, test, implement and tweak. Quick-service needs long-term change programmes on portion size, menu range, health positioning, internationalism, price-pointing and wealth creation. These are what I call deep-water policies, and you can’t get out there at them if you are constantly splashing about in the shallow end. They need time – but more than that, they need continuity of thought. They need the benefits that come from the same folk designing them, implementing them, and then being held accountable for them.

  Is there no case for changing a CEO after a year? Of course there is. If it’s clear that the CEO isn’t a fit – and you never really know until they are behind the desk – a great way of turning a non-fatal mistake into a mortal failure is to do nothing. But that
’s quite different to knee-jerking just because some twenty-year-old Wall Street analyst fires a broadside about short-term profits or a group of investors or franchisees has a communal whinge.

  Now then, let’s come at this from the other end. Can a CEO stay in position for too long? Oh, yes. Indeedy-doody. History will look back on Margaret Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan quite differently. Reagan rode off into the sunset after his two terms in office to the sound of applause – loud from his political think-alikes but also quite warm from his political foes. In the cycle of political life, his heritage was that he was conservative against the backdrop of a conservative zeitgeist, and he did what he felt he had to do. He was doctrinal but a good communicator. All that, and more, could be said of early Thatcher. It is my belief that if she had left power after eight years, her heritage would be as favourable as Reagan’s, if not more so. In reality, she stayed on. And on and on. It all went pear-shaped, and she ended up being thrown out by her own party, and her heritage is a cross between Lady Macbeth and mad cow disease.

  You can stay too long. I felt it after five years in BK. People start to anticipate your thinking and tell you what you want to hear. Try as you might, you get detached from the short-sword fighting. You repeat yourself and run out of ideas. You get comfortable. You lose the plot.

  The Founding Fathers had it right – a maximum of two terms of four years. What they didn’t know was that they had invented a formula for CEOs as well as Presidents.

  As I finish talking, I notice the eyes of my (trapping) supermodel have glazed over. She makes no attempt to stop me as I squeeze by. I decide I will get us another drink, and come back and tell her my views on corporate re-engineering.