Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets

by Barry Gibbons

  I never did find a full copy, but I spent the rest of the time waiting for my plane reflecting on my version of the article, on what seminal advice I had received over the years. Here’s the list, straight from the Air France napkin:

  My dad was hugely influential in shaping my approach to life – but in ways he wouldn’t recognise. He had a horrendous decade in the 1940s – being whisked away to war just weeks after he married, and then being captured by the Japanese (with all that entailed). He survived that, returned and I was born, but then my mum died. As he rebuilt his life, I learned from him not to look backwards. Indeed, I had my rear-view mirrors surgically removed when I was eighteen. History fascinates me, but I have found that any substantive and/or objective analysis of the ‘good ol’ days’ usually reveals them to be anything but.

  Number two came from the same source. My dad had every reason to feel sorry for himself – but never did. I have heard it said that they whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make angry, but that is not so in my book. A good temper is a healthy thing. But I have witnessed self-pity destroy good people. It can be cancerous.

  When James Taylor was awarded an honorary degree at some university, his acceptance speech was beautiful: ‘Rehearse every day, and don’t do drugs.’ With that, he walked off. It was obviously pertinent and personal to him, but it reminded me of Tom Peters: ‘If you got more than one priority, you got none.’ The most complex challenges sometimes can – and should – be boiled right down to a few mission-critical priorities.

  Charles Handy’s thinking on modern life structure had a big influence on me. His idea that the three-part life structure (dependence, occupation, dependence) had changed into a four-part script (dependence, occupation, something else, dependence) shook me up. His premise is that many people either choose, or are forced (e.g. by losing their life job) to find something else to do well before the accepted age of retirement. At forty-eight years old, when I read this, I had known nothing but big business, so I chose to do something completely different. After twelve years of doing it, my wife’s still trying to figure out what it is.

  Many years ago, working for Shell, I was having a performance review. My boss was a wizened old Scotsman. He rambled on, and I was becoming seriously bored, when he stopped and said, ‘I’m only appraising 75% of you. There’s a quarter of you that is dark, and I don’t want to go in there. It’s where your best stuff and your worst stuff comes from, and it’s best left alone.’ Wow. Ever since that day, I have had faith in my dark quarter, although it has landed me into the soup on occasion. I have also never appraised anybody or been appraised without remembering this guy doing his Braveheart impression.

  Hiring people. There are millions of books on this subject, and if there’s one thing you must get right to lead a business, it’s this. Allen Sheppard, my old boss at GrandMet, the company that acquired Burger King, gave me the best, shortest and clearest advice possible on this subject. Never employ anybody who is not capable of hitting you. I have nothing to add. You can’t improve on the best.

  When I first joined GrandMet, I came in over the head of a veteran. Consequently, he had every reason to want me to fail. He acted in quite the opposite manner and gave me a piece of advice I wish I’d had years earlier. When you are going into a new business, if you really want to understand it, sign every cheque and initial every bank deposit for a month. Understand the flows of cash. Whatever the size of business, I could pass on no finer advice. In fact, if I had my way, we would abandon GAAP and all these dubious restructuring charges, extra-ordinary items, and Enron-style, off-balance sheet drivel and concentrate on cash-accounting.

  One last one, and it’s to do with writing. We all need to do it, and a lot of us do it badly. If you want to improve your style, let me pass on the advice of Ernest Hemingway, who echoed Winston Churchill. Write short sentences in short paragraphs. Then, when you’ve finished, go back through it and rake out all the adverbs. I’ve written six books, and it is advice that has proved gloriously helpful (but I’m weak on the adverbs – see ‘gloriously’).

  These have been my guiding lights. Reading through, however, I realise that there is nothing there for our younger readers, so here’s a piece of advice just for you. If you are less than ten years old, and you have a favourite uncle who is always joking, if he points his index finger at you, never, never, never pull on it.

  For the rest of you, feel free to tear this out and steal it. If that’s good enough for Warren Buffett, it’s good enough for me.

  54. India on 10,000 calories a day

  Way back in the 1930s, my father served in the British army in India – in the last full decade of the Raj. After a lifetime of hearing and reading about the sub-continent, I’d promised myself a visit, but only when I would have the time and resources to do it properly. That time arrived recently.

  They say that when you visit India, you will be changed. You will, trust me. A team of specialist doctors has advised me that I will (hopefully) regain control of my lower bowel within a few months. Yes, if you are there for any length of time, you will probably get a tummy bug, but it’s worth it.

  First, I will attempt a potted history of the place. Originally mostly Hindu, it has been invaded by two religions. Muslims came nearly 1,000 years ago, and Christianity arrived on the back of British imperialism about 300 years ago. Interestingly, in my view, the British then invented modern franchising by dishing out large globs of the country to friendly princes.

  In an attempt to avoid a religious civil war straight after independence, the British partitioned the country, shoving most of the Muslim population into Pakistan and Bangladesh. This action neatly created the bloodbath it was trying to avoid. India’s independence finally came in 1947. The planet’s biggest democracy was then stifled for more than forty years by the dynastic Nehru–Gandhi governments, which were attracted more to the centralist-socialism of Stalin rather than the enterprise-capitalism that served the other Asian Tigers’ economies so well. The country is waking up now, on the back of a prospering IT and service sector, although the march of corporate globalism is causing something of a fundamentalist Hindu backlash.

  The country has so much to teach us – in terms of both ‘what to do’ and ‘what not to do’. But it is complicated and demands an open mind. Here’s an example: I abhor the idea of arranged marriages. One day, while in India, I heard the subject being discussed by an articulate, intelligent Indian woman. She had no time for the Western model of marriage, where – in her view – the choice of partner is mostly left to inexperienced, naive young people. (Note: this almost exactly defines my wife and I when we met forty years ago.) The whole marriage process and ceremony then places the relationship under ridiculous pressure, based on a foundation of unreal expectations of each other and life’s realities. (Note: ditto.) A marriage carefully arranged by wise parents, however, does the opposite – the young couple know they have to work at the relationship from the start and that love is earned over time in a real world and is not a start position in a make-believe one. Has this altered my views on the subject? No, I still abhor it – and my wife and I are still together after forty years of the Western model. But I now have an open mind about there being other models that might work for other people in other circumstances.

  Seeing and then trying to understand such differences hammers home the fact that I do not have a monopoly on wisdom. When I reflect on my time in business, I realise that too often my mind was open only to the options that were familiar and comfortable. The quick-service business is now mature, with a long history and heritage. It needs to change with a mixture of evolution and revolution – and choices will have to be made. Open your mind. There may be more options than you think.

  It should also make you wonder about conquering alien cultures. There are times when a business contemplates acquiring another business, which may make all the financial sense in the world but may involve a post-acquisition clash of cultures. Sometimes, a business may
contemplate entering a new market where the financial logic seems sound but where the existing and new market cultures are like oil and water. A visit to India brings home the fact that the intangible cultural barriers are often more of a threat to success than the tangible financial ones. It was, I think, Norman Mailer who said that you can never conquer a country if you don’t understand the music. I think that’s a wonderful maxim to apply when taking your business into a different cultural arena. Either take the time to understand the music, or stay out. There are a billion people in India, and it is a huge potential market with its rapidly expanding middle class. But there are times when it’s like being on another planet. Don’t go there unless you are prepared to spend the time to ‘understand the music’ or you can hold hands with someone who does. By the way, the same applies if you are contemplating moving from Seattle into New Orleans.

  The sub-continent has many more things to teach us, particularly those of us involved in selling food. For example, the variety of breads is astonishing, and in many instances it is used as a utensil – in combination with the right hand only! I am also convinced that vegetables will – must! – play a much bigger part in the future of quick-service, and the Indian diet is full of ways to make them more attractive and tasty. It was, in fact, my love-at-first-sight relationship with black lentil dal that led to my downfall. But there seemed to be a million ways to cook and present all their vegetables. The idea of just boiling and/or steaming them, and then sticking them on the side of your plate to bore you to death, just doesn’t seem to occur to anybody in India.

  My dad was in the Royal Signals Regiment, which today would be called ‘Telecoms’ or something. I think I found a couple of his wiring jobs in Jaipur. It had his special trademark, with the blue wire attached to the brown wire and the whole lot covered in black tape. I just smiled and downed another Kingfisher beer in his memory. That’s another wonderful local product, and I did a lot of them – just to keep cool, you understand. Hence the 10,000 calories a day.

  55. I’m thinking …

  At long last, I have found a job that will suit my talents. The only drawback is that I have reached the stage in my life where I do not want a job. If this opportunity had been around thirty years ago, I would have been a shoo-in.

  I spotted, buried in the dark world of academia and tenures, an advert, placed by a big department of a prominent international university (based in the US), for a ‘Leader’ for its ‘Thinking Center’. If ever a job was designed for me, this is it. I could think for England.

  Of course, you can’t just splash about in the shallow end of such a job. You have to take it seriously. The set-up has to be right, and mine is perfect. My home in England has an old stable block, and over the top of the stables (now garages) runs an old hayloft. This is my office, which will now be known as my Thinking Centre. You will notice that, in my version, ‘centre’ is spelled correctly. My TC has two essentials for such cerebral tasking: broadband internet access and a dartboard. In addition, it has two mission-critical accessories: an armchair and an iPod/iTunes combination containing four and a half days of my CD collection.

  Right – eyes almost closed. I’m thinking …

  Bruce Springsteen is mumbling through my speaker system. I have loved the Boss for – what – thirty years! He combines style and substance like no other. He’s like Elton John and Bob Dylan rolled into one. I first saw him with the E Street Band a quarter of a century ago, and his concerts are spectacular. But his content has been equally impressive. Now, I’m thinking whether any quick-service brand has combined style and substance to such powerful effect for so long? Answer? I think not. Sadly, I’m thinking Burger King never had it, even when I headed the ship (it was all substance then). Similarly, I’m thinking McDonald’s is all style. However, Starbucks had both for a while.

  I am not in the camp of those who either totally hate or love George W. Bush and Tony Blair. But if you scored all the developed world’s big leaders out of ten for impressiveness, the total score of those two, plus the French, Italian, German and Russian guy, and the guy with the big hair from Japan, would be the lowest aggregate in history.

  The greatest single idea in the history of the planet was the revelation that all organisms compete for resources, and those that have some innate advantage will prosper and pass on that advantage to their offspring. Charles Darwin thought that up, reputedly in an armchair similar to mine. He came under fire for this thought then, and he is still doing so, but I’m thinking you can file all alternatives under ‘Fiction’. A further thought of mine is that ‘intelligent design’ is an idea that can be applied to a club sandwich, but not to the origin of species.

  So, what’s the equivalent greatest idea in the history of quick-service? I’m thinking we might have to go back to pre-Neolithic times to find the answer, when the first grain paste (flour and water) flatbreads were produced more than 5,000 years ago. Today’s chapattis, tortillas, pizzas, flatbreads and all versions of modern raised breads stem from that very idea. I’m thinking that whoever invented that first flatbread actually cooked two of them and whacked a bit of dinosaur meat in between and invented the first Whopper.

  Quick-service needs a punk rock-type brand. The business needs an enfant terrible, something that challenges every received wisdom and that upsets everybody in quick-service who is older than twenty and breaks all the rules.

  The idea of a lifelong career with one organisation is history. Whether you are eighteen or forty-five, get used to it.

  Any job title that includes the words liaison, deputy or coordinate is a non-job and should be phased out at the next reorganisation. If a job exists that contains any two of those words, I’m thinking you should can it tomorrow.

  The tsunami-type force that is attacking quick-service on the back of health, lifestyle and globalism is being met by a counter-tsunami force of people who are fed up with being told how to live their lives. I have enormous faith in ordinary people to force the kind of changes the quick-service industry needs to make over the next decade without massive amounts of blood being spilled.

  I’m thinking that I cannot go through DFW airport security without my shoes and belt on, and then assume the crucifixion position for the metal-detection sweep, without my pants falling down.

  • I have figured out why Holland has a low crime rate. I’m thinking that it’s because it’s flat, and you can see muggers coming from half a mile away. You’ve time for a cappuccino before you run.

  Now, I’m thinking that this is in danger of getting out of control. That’s the problem with thinking: You start off determined to follow a path (serious quick-service-related thoughts), but before you know it, you are in Holland. Now I’m thinking that the Spanish idea of a siesta is a good thing, partly because some sleepy music has come on my iPod (which I didn’t know I had), and partly because I’ve got a lot more thinking to do tomorrow. I don’t want to use it all up now.

  56. You never can tell

  You are now in for a treat, as I am going to share with you the Chuck Berry Rules for Quick-Service. They are not well known, which is partly due to the fact that I only invented them about half an hour ago.

  I can hear some of you commenting, unhelpfully, that you have never heard of Chuck Berry and, indeed, some of you (including some CEOs) were not born when the guy was strutting his stuff. Well, for those folks, Berry is a vintage rock ’n’ roller, still performing at the age of (by my calculation) 146. It is generally admitted that he was a seminal influence on most early rock stars.

  My Chuck Berry Rules for Quick-Service started crystallising when I heard a radio show vote one of his songs as ‘Best Rock Song Ever’. The particular song was called You Never Can Tell, but it was why it earned the most votes that fascinated me. Apparently, great songs of any genre grab you with the first line – and then keep you hooked. In this case, Berry’s intro, ‘It was a teenage wedding and the old folks wished them well’, had everything: wham – the picture and the story r
ight there!

  I wasn’t sure about the theory, so I tested it with some of my all-time favourites and found out it held up well. Listen to the first line of Sarah McLachlan’s Angel – ‘You spend all your time waiting for that second chance, for the break that will make it OK’ – and you are glued in to find out what happens next. Bruce Springsteen’s Blinded by the Light has an opening riff followed by the Boss yelling ‘Madman drummers, bummers, and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat’. Ignore that if you can. And how about Tom Waits’ A Little Rain? It starts out, ‘Well, the Ice Man’s mule is parked outside the bar’. Every picture tells a story – you can’t wait to find out more. (The Ice Man’s mule?!)

  You don’t like my favourites? Neither does my wife, but, hey, try it with your own. I think you’ll find the First Line Rule holds up just fine. And what’s this got to do with quick-service? It’s the same principle: just as winning songs grab you with the first line, winning restaurants grab you well before the food reaches you. First impressions are crucial, with research indicating that many customers make their mind up about a place within two seconds of entering it.

  Just stop and think about that. What are the first impressions on show when people come into your place(s)? Sure, you’ve invested in a nice looking interior, and your food and drink offering is well priced and thought through, but how often do you drive into a Burger King and see a sign saying ‘ OW H R NG’ on the outside? It should, of course, say ‘NOW HIRING’, but three letters have fallen off. You go into a Starbucks and find the tables haven’t been cleared. You go into a Macs and a Great American Family has left the floor underneath one of the tables looking like a tsunami has just passed through, and no one has gotten around to clearing it. These are not criticisms of these fine brands, but they are real, recent experiences of mine.