Experience dictates that someone with the title “Equalities Minister” (sic) is not likely to be a friend of business.

We are therefore delighted to be able to write in praise of Lynne Featherstone, MP, for her excellent suggestion that Joan from Mad Men should be a role model for women.

Her point is that women should be proud of their natural body shape and that the fashion for women to look like stick insects is a marketing con. As we pointed out in a previous post – under some business pretext or other – this is a point on which both men and feminists are agreed.

Yet there is a broader point that Mrs Featherstone missed but which supports her case for Joan as a feminist role model.

Anyone who has seen the television series – highly recommended, by the way – will know that Joan is the best manager in the advertising agency for which she works. While the partners seem to spend most of their time drinking and committing adultery, Joan is the one who actually runs things.

Joan is loyal, intelligent, organised, socially perceptive, efficient, and a born leader. Think of her as a Company Sergeant Major with the curves of a D-Type Jaguar, or perhaps a sexy version of Margaret Thatcher.

The last season saw her sidelined, married to an unappreciative dolt. Things went downhill at the agency without her. The priapic partners had to sober up and set up a new agency in just 48 hours. Chaos ensues until one of them says he knows someone who might be able to help. Cue Joan’s dramatic return – the moment she walks through the door, everyone knows everything is going to be all right.

Yes, Mrs Featherstone is right on this one: we need a lot more Joans. Every businessman fantasises about having one – and not for the reason most people might think.

There has been no shortage of sporting drama recently. Wimbledon saw the longest tennis match in history played over three days. The Open was won by a 200–1 outsider. A Sri Lankan cricketer took his 800^th career test wicket on the last ball of his test career!

It has been a summer of watching the plots of Kevin Costner films intruding into real life – just add music with lots of ascending power chords.

Sport is an excellent metaphor for business. This is just as well because, although business stories may run on similar lines, they rarely make good movie material.

Certainly it is no coincidence that many entrepreneurs are fanatical sports fans, or that many successful sports stars go on to become successful entrepreneurs. Indeed, there may be a stronger correlation between business success and passion for sport than between business success and academic intelligence.

One of the great lessons of sport – and it applies to business – is that success against the odds is possible if you keep trying.

This is important because the other great lesson of sport is that victory usually goes to the better prepared. This is also true of business.

An 11-hour tennis match is possible only because both players were superbly fit and focussed, and because the standard of top professionals is now so high that to have your service broken is considered a major lapse. Golfer Louis Oosthuizen took professional advice on how to improve his concentration in the Open: he is said to have had a red dot on his glove to give him something on which to focus. Cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan must have been motivated, if only at the subconscious level, by the knowledge that the 800 target was within his reach and this would be his last chance.

Mental attitude is the common factor. Yet there is also an external factor. Some call it Luck, others Fortune or Fate or Providence. No one can control it. However, it is not entirely random. There is a lot of truth in “Fortune favours the brave” – so long as you accept that “Fortune” is under no obligation just because you are brave.

Relying on the extraordinary is not a rational basis for a strategy – and certainly no excuse to skip essential preparation. As the legendary golfer Gary Player put it, “The harder I practise, the luckier I get.”

Since this blog has recently had to be less than complimentary about some of President Obama’s economic policies, it is only fair that we balance the books by defending him against some particularly stupid criticism.

Idiots with no sense of priority – and probably no experience of proper work – have been complaining about the President playing golf and taking holidays.

Those of us who understand decision-making processes would be far more worried if he was not taking time to relax and get out in the fresh air.

The ancient Roman poet Juvenal was wise to commend “a healthy mind in a healthy body”. Modern scientists have uncovered a mountain of evidence confirming that a healthy mind, fit for making decisions, is indeed far more likely to be maintained by a healthy body than by one in a permanent state of fatigue.

For any decision-maker, from the self-employed small businessman to the Chief Executive of the most powerful nation in the world, long hours are simply a waste of time unless they are directed by good judgment.

Such judgment is measurably better if you make sure you have frequent breaks, a balanced diet, regular exercise, a sensible working day, and six to eight hours unbroken sleep every night.

There may still be times when you are called on to do 24-, 48-, or even 72-hour shifts, usually without notice in a crisis situation. Yet, to quote our hero Bill Slim again, the best preparation you make for such situations is to make sure that you are fit and well rested when they begin. They are often impossible to predict, and it is obviously very dangerous if they happen to occur when the decision-maker is already suffering from the effects of mental and physical exhaustion.

There is a macho culture that demands people are seen to be working hard – but there is a difference between working hard and working effectively.

Of Mr Obama’s predecessors, none had a stronger work ethic than Jimmy Carter – but the abiding image of Mr Carter’s Presidency was of him collapsing on a run, which seemed symbolic of the failure of his Administration. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, made a point of going to bed early and was often called “lazy” – at least relative to the exacting standards of his office – but he always gave the impression of being remarkably fit for a man of his years, and he is generally accounted a successful Chief Executive, since he achieved all the objectives he set himself.

 

Great news! The British government seem to be serious about reducing their dangerous budget deficit.

More great news! The proof of the their seriousness is that they have realised that they cannot cut their deficit without cutting the number of the bureaucrats who interfere so much in our business and private lives.

Even better news! They have also realised that they cannot do this without amending the employment laws they have forced on us for years, which make it so hard for us to get rid of surplus employees. Now that finally they see the difficulties for themselves – and face paying the bill for themselves – they propose amending the law.

Logically, this should lead on to the best news of all. Logically, they should see that a law that they now realise is wrong was always wrong. Logically, they should see that it is only fair that it should apply the same law to public and private sectors alike. Logically, this means that the change in the law will ease the burden on business as much as it does on the government itself.

Logically... but when did government’s relationship with business ever have anything to do with logic? There are, of course, no proposals to treat the public and private sectors equally.

We get so tired of writing about the ways in which the government makes one law for itself and another law for everyone else that we wonder if there is any point complaining about this latest example. Then, on reflection, this is exactly what the government wants – people so accustomed to double standards that they cease to complain.

It would be all too easy to go to the other extreme and establish a “Hypocrisy of the Week” competition dedicated to the relationship between rulers and ruled.

The problem is that once a week would not be enough. Having read about the employment law double standard, we go straight on to read about the government department that creates fire regulations which is itself in breach of those regulations. The resulting fine for a private sector business would have wiped that business out. The consequence for the public sector? Zilch. (Oh, the wonders of Crown Immunity, ed.)

Then we have the debt double standard. It is relatively easy to get out of your debts to other private citizens, ultimately by declaring bankruptcy, but much harder to get out of debts to the state, such as repayment of student loans. Now whether bankruptcy laws should be more or less lenient than they are is a legitimate subject for another debate, but surely the most basic notion of justice demands that whatever standard is adopted should apply to all equally.

The weakness of our system is that the very people charged with defining and enforcing those basic notions of justice are as often as not the defendants in the moral courts in which they are also the judge and jury.

The Allies had no shortage of flamboyant military leaders in World War Two – MacArthur, Montgomery, Patton, Mountbatten, etc.

Yet when it comes to teaching leadership to professionals, the famous names are not mentioned as often as the relatively obscure Field Marshal Viscount Slim. The Leadership and Management course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, has been described as “Slim Studies”.

This is because the real proof of leadership is not winning but coping with adversity.

The big reputations always go to those who happen to be leading when objectives are achieved. Yet, as often as not, they are the people who are brought in after the moment of crisis has passed, and who benefit from increased resources which were not available to their predecessors. So the new guys are associated with nothing but success and their predecessors with nothing but failure – despite the fact that it is the latter who had the harder job and who may well have performed better. This is unfair, but it happens a lot in life.

Slim is an unusual case because he started by losing to the Japanese in Burma, but was able to turn things around, hence the title of his memoirs, Defeat Into Victory.

This book is itself unusual because, instead of the typical boasting and self-justification of those who like being great men, here is a leader actually admitting mistakes and worrying that he has been given credit which belongs to others. It also contains a number of reflections that entrepreneurs might find relevant.  

1   “It is easy to criticise the decision; it is not so easy to make such a decision”.

2   “Business, too, seemed at all grades in Burma to have been a better training ground than government service for initiative.”

3   “Luckily, there was no public relations department at my headquarters”.

4   “Remember only the lessons to be learnt from defeat – they are more than from victory”.

5   “One need not be an orator to be effective. Two things only are necessary: first to know what you are talking about, and second, and most important, to believe it yourself”.

6   “A new idea should have something to recommend it besides just breaking up normal organisation”.

7   “The fundamental fault of their generalship was a lack of moral, as distinct from physical, courage. They were not prepared to admit they had made a mistake.”

8   “It is not so much numbers and elaborate equipment that count in tough places but training and morale”.

9   “Largely because of this lack of material resources, we learned to use those we had in fresh ways to achieve more than would have been possible had we clung to conventional methods”.

10  “Commanders at all levels had to act more on their own; they were given greater latitude to work out their own plans to achieve what they knew was the Army Commander’s intention.”

 

The contributors to this blog would like to point out the above post was written before the 15 July 2010 broadcast of the BBC Radio 4 show The Bottom Line.

Life in the European Union is increasingly beyond satire.

Laws are being proposed that will force anyone selling eggs to label them by weight or volume – as opposed to simply telling the customer how many eggs there are in the box!

The European Union has well-established reputation for making up daft regulations. In fairness, it also ought to be given credit for a massive liberalisation of trade between member states. The problem is that, with that job done, there are now thousands of people hanging around the European Commission and Parliament with no clearly defined role.

They need to be seen to be doing something to justify their generous salaries and expenses. For all the big talk about European integration, the real power in Europe remains with the governments of member states. So, if Eurocrats want to feel important, it can only be at the expense of those weaker than themselves – individual citizens and small businesses.

Labelling laws sound innocuous, but career politicians and bureaucrats simply cannot grasp that they cost business a lot of money. Labelling and weighing machines cost money. The process of physically labelling and weighing costs money. Fines for non-compliance as part of a cynical revenue raising exercise cost money. The costs can be borne by big industrial businesses but not by tiny farm shops selling directly to the public.

The net effect of almost all regulation is to give big business a competitive advantage over small business.

It is another example of Parkinson’s Law. The work of bureaucrats – and politicians – expands with their number. Yet it is worse than that: the work of the citizens and businesses who have to deal with them expands as well.

It is no great surprise that banking reform has passed through the US Congress. Given the current public mood of “bash the bankers”, the only surprise is how much the final legislation is compromised.

Banking reform is both good news and bad news.

The good news is that some old-fashioned stability has been restored to American banks, making another banking crisis on the scale of 2008 less likely – but still by no means impossible.

The bad news is that this could only ever be done by making the banks more risk averse and less profitable. Since small business is particularly risky, making the banks more risk averse makes them less likely to invest in us.

At the same time, less profitable banks will have less money to loan to small business.

So the great irony of the bank reform that was motivated mainly by anti-banking public feeling is that the banks themselves will actually be stronger as a result of it, but small business will be worse off.

You can put a price on goodwill. If you have goodwill and fifty cents, the total value of your assets is precisely fifty cents.

If that sounds too cynical, take the case of Barack Obama. Despite his domestic difficulties, the President still retains massive goodwill around the world. Yet all that goodwill did not prevent his total isolation at the recent G-20 Summit.

There is a fundamental difference of opinion on the best strategy to come out of recession. At last year’s London Summit of the G-20, the President, then newly elected and with a media image unmatched since JFK, still found himself in the minority in his belief that governments should borrow more in order to fund a massive stimulus.

Since then, his own stimulus package in the United States has had unimpressive results: true, it has prevented – or at least postponed – the loss of some jobs, but it has hardly kick-started the economy. The Obama Administration’s response has been to suggest more of the same.

Meanwhile, international opinion has moved in the other direction. “Austerity” is Order of the Day in most European states. Gordon Brown, the only major leader who shared the President’s approach in London has since lost his own job as Prime Minister of the UK. The new Coalition government in Britain sees cutting the deficit as the priority.

To be fair, in traditional Keynesian economics, a slight reflation coming out of a recession is no bad thing – emphasis on “slight” and “just coming out of recession”. Problems occur when weak politicians become addicted to reflation, “slight” becomes massive, and they do not know when to stop.

In any case, Lord Keynes would have been horrified by the deficits many governments, including the UK and the US, were running up even before the recession. It is one thing to allow a little “cyclical deficit” by reflating a bit at the right moment in recession, but these are “structural deficits”, the products of deeper, longer-term problems. Those problems have to be tackled and reflating simply puts off the day of reckoning.

So what we all face is a long hard slog out of recession. There are no magic short-cuts, and any attempts to wander off looking for them will only delay recovery.

What has happened to the Australians? Their refusal to take themselves seriously used to be one of their most attractive features.

However, some of them have taken to whinging like a bunch of poms at a footy match over airlines using pretty girls in their adverts

Well, what can you expect from a country capable of putting a Welsh Sheila in charge?*

Now we are all in favour of equal rights for women – especially women entrepreneurs, who are increasing in number, wealth, and influence – but there are certain facts about human nature that everyone in business should know if they want to remain in business.

Irrespective of whether you share them or agree with them, when it comes to marketing only a fool will ignore them and the wise will exploit them. Leave your prejudices at the door and profit from the prejudices of others.

1   Men and women are different. The debate about equality does not alter biology. In particular, as every marketing expert knows, men and women buy different things and for different reasons.

2   Customers, male and female, are more likely to buy from businesses where they find the staff attractive. Everyone prefers beautiful people to ugly people – ugly people more than most – and this has a tangible effect on their purchasing decisions.

3   Men find women attractive and – presumably – women find men attractive. To be honest, the contributors to this blog have not found as much evidence for the second of those two propositions as we would like, but, in accordance with our strict principles of sexual equality, we take this opportunity of making it clear that we have no moral objection to women finding us as attractive as we find them.

4   It is therefore nonsense to complain about women being viewed as “sex objects”. Of course men and women view each other, at least on their first assessment, as potential sex objects – the human race would not exist if they did not! Whether an individual can be more than a sex object is down to that individual’s personality. It is those who do not project much in the way of personality who then complain about being “objectified”.

5   Similarly, the words “sexist” and “sexism” are essentially meaningless. This is not to say men and women do not treat each other differently. Obviously, we all do, always have, and always will, because we are different.  

6   Despite years of propaganda and “positive imaging” in media frightened by shrill lobby groups, instincts and inner feelings have not changed. They will not. They cannot.

7   None of this excuses rudeness or discrimination in the workplace. Sexual harassment is wrong not because it is “sexist” but because it in simply unpleasant.

* Before we are accused of being racist as well as chauvinist, we are not only Welsh but have to admit that some Brits can be as bad as the Aussies.

Anyway, we are very fond of the Russians.

The Amish – the subject of a previous post – are not the only religious group whose values have helped them in business.

Monasteries are essentially co-operatives, but the shared religious commitment of their members usually enable them to avoid the disputes over strategy and structure that break up many of even the most well-meaning secular co-operatives.

The irony of the worldly success of organisations set up to help members reject the world has a long history. Most famously, the Cistercian Order made a point of building their monasteries in wild places, fit only for sheep, far from distractions. However, such was their work ethic that it was hard for them to avoid making a profit from the wool of those sheep, and their monasteries became some of the biggest and most profitable businesses in medieval Europe.

Other orders continue that tradition today. Another irony is how many monks have thrived by producing alcoholic products: the Trappists brew strong beer, the Carthusians invented Chartreuse, and the Benedictines of Buckfast Abbey developed a tonic wine.

Buckfast is a peaceful place by the beautiful River Dart in Devon where it is not hard to think of another world – perhaps a better world – a better world, certainly, than the mean streets of Glasgow, probably the hardest city in Britain. Buckfast and Glasgow have nothing in common – except the tonic wine.

For some reason, the tonic wine developed by the innocent monks, who probably thought it would be used as a healthy digestif, has become the tipple of choice for Glaswegian drunks.

The monks themselves are not to blame for this. For one thing, they are no longer directly involved in the production of the tonic wine. More importantly, if the tonic wine did not exist, it is a fair bet that dipsomaniac Scots would find something else to drink.

In any case, the monks set a good example by running their own businesses. In doing so, they demonstrate that their commitment to live a life of prayer is not motivated by a desire to live off the backs of others. One feels that the small businessmen who founded the Church – Jesus the carpenter, Peter the fishing boat owner, and Paul the tent manufacturer – would approve.