Richard Merrick

Freshmen

Seth Godin makes an interesting observation in his blog today - Seth's Blog: Eternal September.

In all our businesses, we have to deal with this. This year alone, in one of my businesses, I've had to deal with external audits on social responsibility, in order to confirm that we do not use slave labour, that our dormitories are clean and similar. However, we only manufacture in the UK, and these audits are all predicated on outsourced production to low wage economies. So as in many other areas, we spend huge amounts of time doing things that generate very little value, but result in lots of boxes being ticked.

I often wonder what the impact would be if we qualified those we deal with. We don't go to college, and go straight into final year. Almost every area of endeavour we undertake productively is based on trust, not compliance. As Jonathan Aitken noted earlier this week in relation to MP's expenses, compliance kills conscience. If we comply with the rules, we do not have to think about what we are doing. I don't think so. Depends who sets the rules, and why.

Increasingly, I feel inclined to deal with those who are in the same year as us, and who help us move forward together. We can make separate rules and conditions of engagement with Freshers that reflect the effort we have to put in.

Priorities

As I drove into work this morning, I wondered what might happen if we started to look at important things, rather than sensational things.

·         Hans Rosling has posted a thought provoking short video that highlights our view of Swine Flu(which gets over 8000 press mentions per death) , versus TB (which gets 0.1 mentions)

·         The press is saturated with MP’s expenses, whilst unemployment at 2.2m is forecast to over 3m, with the young most severely affected.

·         Post (or at the current stage) in the Banking crisis, credit is at best flowing like treacle.

·         Risk aversion is so endemic, that any potential risk gets magnified and leveraged. In the supply chain I deal with, every stage in the chain (from raw material to retail) sets its own requirements and strategy for things as diverse as product safety to ethical standards, with each party’s lawyers trying to lay off liability elsewhere. The end result is a torrent of administration and cost that adds no value whatsoever.

The list could go on. And on. We are being seduced into a strange sense of priorities.

I wondered what might happen if we chose to leverage things with potential – ideas, people, ventures and used the money we are spending on propping up obsolescent brands and businesses to grow the new areas our children can take advantage of.

You are who you associate with

I’ve been arguing for some time that traditional organisations are obsolescent. Founded on a 200 year old principle of command and control, they have partially evolved but now seem to be mired in processes and systems which make them highly resistant to, rather than tolerant of, change.

We have seen it with the banks, the insurers, the car industry and now here in UK, in spectacular fashion, with the Mother of Parliaments. The common factor seems to be that the apparent security of an organisational wall, the “status” of the senior managers / members, and the insularity from reality have been punctured by whistle blowers, viral networks, and the disinfectant of transparency.

And that’s before the generational gap. My daughter got married last week, and it was a wonderful opportunity to see 4 generations alongside each other – from the wartime generation, through boomers, X and Y to Millennials. It is clear that Gen Y, and certainly the Millennials will not put up with the traditional structures and authority that I was brought up on. Quite right as well – any organisation that relies on power rather than permission seems likely to fail (this side of a dictatorship).

It is a good time to revisit Seth Godin’s Lecture on TED. The ability of people to connect, link and work together has never been greater, such that conventional organisations will be outmanoeuvred as the brightest, best, (and importantly, most principled) go the way they choose, with those they choose.

You are who you associate with. Think about it.