Ikea style the Toyota way

It’s so passé to build up stocks of goods long before you need them. These days, ‘Just In Time’ – the Toyota way – is very much the holy Grail of production techniques. So I was delighted to live by Toyota principles this weekend.

At Christmas, we’re being joined by a relatively large number of friends and relatives. Actually, they’re all relatives if we count out-laws as well as in-laws, and I very much do: the company will include one of my charming daughters-out-law and her parents.

The only problem is that there isn’t enough space around the table kindly passed to me by my mother. A beautiful piece of teak from the days before we knew not to use tropical hardwood for furniture. But it really only seats six and we’re likely to be seven or eight.

So we needed a new table. It was therefore opportune that old friends from Edinburgh came to see us this weekend, and were joined by other friends, and sons, and partners.

That focused the mind. The call of Ikea came loud and clear, and we answered it yesterday. This morning we had set to work to put the table together. Not too early, given that we’d had a few drinks yesterday evening: we started at 11:30 and the meal was due to be served at 1:00.

Just in time production became not so much desirable as absolutely essential.

And we knew it could easily turn into just too late.

Those watching us were openly sceptical.

‘It’ll never be done in time.’

‘Should I ring the others and tell them to come later?’

The amazing thing about assembling Ikea furniture is that, like tying a bow tie, the magic only happens at the end. Have you ever tried tying a bow tie? You pass one end round the other, you make a bow, you loop round it and suddenly you’re faced with a final tuck-and-tighten and it’s perfectly obvious that no knot is going to form. Then you do it and – lo and behold – the miracle occurs and a beautifully formed bow knot appears.

So it was with the Ikea table. At 12:50, what we had was a nondescript wooden framework with various protruding bits which didn’t seem designed to fit with anything else. Most suspicious of all, we had four dowelling rods left with nowhere to put them. Had they supplied too many? Had we fitted too few? Would the whole thing fail to form or, worse still, fall apart as soon as the meal was placed on it?

The ambient scepticism level was palpably growing.

But we persevered. My friend Hakim voiced the unfortunate question, ‘why don’t you hold, this time, while I screw?’, but fortunately the Ikea context was obvious to anyone who glanced up, shocked, to see what we were talking about.

A few more washers and bolts, and we were ready to turn the thing over from where it was lying, top down, on the floor. As it came upright it was revealed to be – slightly astonishingly even though it was what we’d been aiming at – a table. We pulled the two ends apart and inserted a leaf and, hey presto, the trick was done: we could sit nine to eat the fabulous Tajine Danielle had prepared (in both a meat and vegetarian version, to accommodate all tastes), followed by the excellent cheesecake brought by Brenda, one of our guests.

And Brenda knocked on the door just as we secured the table leaf in place. OK, so it was 1:03, but since our aim was to complete as she arrived, I regard that as Just In Time and not an instant too late.

The table that provided much pleasure this afternoon.
And it was ready just in time.

So we enjoyed a great meal in congenial company. And provided a striking vindication of the Toyota way.

As for Christmas – we’re ready with positively weeks to spare.

Lively English

The young woman was pleasant and polite. At the counter in Costa’s, she stood back to let me through, laughing off my apology.

‘No, no,’ she said, ‘please. I haven’t made up my mind yet. You go right ahead.’

She was dark-skinned like many of my compatriots, and spoke perfect southern-British English with a slight hint of the lilt that betrays a West Indian background. A long way in the background.

I found a table and slumped at it, exhausted. Despite decades of doing them, I still fall apart after a presentation, brought down by the aftermath of the adrenalin rush. In this instance, it hadn’t helped that I’d only discovered the day before that I was expected to talk for an hour, not twenty minutes; the extra work on my material had left me little over five hours for sleep. I stared at my coffee oblivious to my surroundings and concentrated on getting my breath back.

Until I heard voices from the table next to mine, and realised that the woman from the counter had joined a friend there. They were chatting – and I could have been in Kingston, Jamaica. The West Indian accent is magical, and I was getting it strong and rich from those two women.

And that got me thinking. English is becoming rather too homogenised for my liking. There are no real dialects, except perhaps in West Africa. The lack of variation is underlined by the way people insist on referring to the differences one comes across in Yorkshire or Louisiana as being dialectal, whereas in reality they’re just regional accents.

It’s true of course that American do have their quaint little ways. Calling a lift an elevator, for instance. While you may need to lift something to lower it, how on earth do you get downstairs in something designed to elevate you?

However, those little quirks to one side, there’s little to choose between British and American usage. If I ever have trouble understanding Americans, it’s not usually a linguistic problem but sheer amazement that anyone can make that kind of statement in any language – you know, references to legitimate rape or to 47% of the population living on benefits.

The same thing happens in England, when I hear the language of rights in the mouths of politicians who have done so much to limit them. It’s worse in their case, since they speak standard English. I hasten to add that ‘standard English’ is, naturally, the language spoken by us standard Englishmen, in case anyone in the colonies is still labouring under any confusion on the subject.

What astonished me in the café was to realise that the two young women at the next table had no trouble expressing themselves in standard English, and then switching to something far more Jamaican when talking to each other. And it wasn’t the first time I’d come across the phenomenon: I know at least one other West Indian who speaks very differently with someone from the same part of the world than with a monolingual standard-English speaker.

It’s just like a Frenchman speaking English in London, but switching back to French with a compatriot. Or more to the point, a Dane: I was astonished by the quality of English in Copenhagen.The more I heard it the more I realised that the Danes don’t speak English as a foreign language, they speak it as a second language. Their mastery of it is quite as good as good as many a native speaker’s.

Copenhagen, great English-speaking city

‘Can we get a meal?’ I asked, in English, of a waitress who’d addressed me in Danish.

‘I’ll check if you like,’ she replied in my language, ‘but this is a restaurant.’

I’m not used to having my stupid remarks put down with swift banter by anyone with only a foreigner's grasp of the language. Which is what made me realise I wasn’t dealing with a foreigner. Sure, technically she was, in that she held the citizenship of another country, but she belonged to the same speech community as mine. The Danish accent is a regional accent not a foreign one. The difference is only that Danes speak another language too, and use it among themselves.

Just like the two West Indians in Costa’s. They’ve mastered two linguistic codes and know which one goes in which context. OK, unlike Danish, the code they use to each other is close enough to mine for me to understand them with ease. That wouldn’t have been the case had they been speaking Danish. 

But still what they have is a dual code. And in poor sad dialect-impoverished English I found that fascinating. At last – evidence of that variety that Italian or Portuguese, German or Spanish take for granted. That can only enrich the language.

So my visit to a plain old West London Costa’s turned out to be rather more interesting an interlude than I’d expected.

Which in turn was a good tonic to help me recover from the presentation.

Hopeful halfway point

Since a friend told me that British politics is double-Dutch to people sensible enough to belong to other countries, I should start by explaining the context to this post.

Rousseau once said that Englishmen – by which I suspect he meant the British – are free for one day every five years. There’s some truth in that: every five years, we exercise our right to elect a superlative government, and then spend the next five years seething impotently as we watch the desperate doings of a government superlative only in its incompetence.

This is a contrast to the US system which elects a president from one party and a congress from another, ensuring that nothing gets done at all. I’m not convinced that this is any the less exasperating, but it’s certainly different.

In between votes, and we’re half way through our current parliament with elections due in May 2015, the only time we can administer well-deserved correction to our politicians is at by-elections. These can be triggered by various developments such as a Member of Parliament going off to higher things, or at least more highly-paid ones, or simply dying in office. 

The latter is naturally an event always greeted with widespread and heartfelt grieving, because we always mourn dead politicians. It’s as though the grave converts them from infuriating delinquents whose corruption is only matched by their depravity, into towering figures of statesmanlike virtue. ‘Never shall we see their like again’ we’re regularly told, which always seems odd to me, since I generally find them more or less indistinguishable from the guys who step into their shoes.

Last week we had three by-elections. Two of them were caused by Labour Members of Parliament standing down to go and run for election as Police and Crime Commissioners, positions at the head of local police forces for which no-one wanted elections (they’ve achieved new records for abstention in national polls: well under one person in five bothered to vote at all).

My biggest concern with these new positions is whether they’re about police or about crime. If the latter, then the offence has to be a fraud against electors, designed to convince them that this apparent extension of democracy, compensates for the fact that spending cuts have reduced the number of police actually out there stopping crime.

Both by-elections in the safe Labour seats returned new Labour MPs with comfortable majorities, though on low turnouts.

The third by-election was caused by the resignation of the Conservative Louise Mensch from the bellwether seat of Corby. Really, Corby is like Ohio for US presidential races: no government gets elected without Corby, and none ever has since the seat was created.

Mensch resigned after just two years in parliament, a position most people would find an extraordinary honour to hold. She, however, recently married the manager of Metallica, based in New York and then decided that she had to go and join him and therefore resign the mandate she’d asked for from her electors.

The Conservative Party likes to sing the praises of qualities like perseverance, loyalty and self-sacrifice, but generally demands them of those, like the poor, it’s sacrificing on the altar of wealth preservation. With its own, it tends to be rather more indulgent. So it's not that surprising that it said little in criticism of Mensch; the voters of Corby, on the other hand, showed their disapproval by giving the Labour candidate a large majority to replace her as MP. The bellwether constituency has just been lost by the government.

What’s even more interesting is that the proportions of the vote won by the major parties in all three seats were very much in line with the opinion polls, which show Labour 10 points clear.

Cameron looking concerned. As well he should be.

So – even if British politics remain as much double-Dutch as they were before I started this outline, there’s just one simple message from last week: half-way through the present parliament, the odds have to be against the present government getting a second one.

That isn't a prospect that leaves me particularly upset.

A sock in the eye to OCD

What a great gift my latest sports socks are. They come marked ‘L’ and ‘R’. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s not altogether clear to me how left and right-hand (as it were) socks differ from each other – it’s not as though these ones have toes after all – but I just love it that anyone can go to extent of making the distinction.

Not that this is the main reason I like them so much. Oh, no. What I appreciate about them is that they confirm that I’m making progress in my lifelong struggle against Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

My particular variant of OCD is probably common in Britain and takes the form of excessive respect for the written instruction. For years, I’d wrap the cord around a hairdryer, until I bought one that had a label on it saying ‘do not wrap cord around dryer’, at which point I learned to make a careful little coil to one side before packing it away.

I used to find positively uncomfortable to wear a seatbelt in a car until the day it became obligatory. Since then, I’ve belted myself in on every trip, to the point that I now feel positively under-dressed if I’m not wearing one. Why, I’ve even caught myself looking around on buses or boats for a seat belt. Once, even, in a theatre seat.

Now, I never got quite as bad as the young man I came across the other day whose mother gave him a set of day-of-the-week pants (underpants, for colonial readers). He, it seems, is incapable of wearing Tuesday pants on Monday. Do you think he might regard them as not fair of face enough?

So I was delighted to discover recently that I was completely ignoring the ‘L’ and ‘R’ markings on my socks. I was perfect capable of reversing them completely. And, surprisingly, going to to play and hour and half’s badminton without suffering unbearable agony in either foot.

Could I at last be overcoming my OCD?

Well, today I had the confirmation of it.

When I got home from badminton, I realised that I was wearing two ‘L’ socks. 

A bigger blow for emancipation than might be imagined

Now that’s real emancipation, isn’t it? Freed from the tyranny of the printed word. Or the stitched letter at least. Which has to be a start, doesn’t it?

The words that exalt the private sector

It is a truth not so much universally acknowledged as monotonously repeated, that they order things better in the private sector.

It was a case forcefully put in the recent US elections, where many Romney supporters argued that a tried and tested private sector executive was just what was needed for the most powerful public sector post on earth. 

Not forcefully enough, as it happens, but that wasn’t for want of trying.

Mitt teaching a less which, fortunately, not too many learned

Nothing supports a claim to competence better than evidence of clarity of thought, and nothing proves clarity of thought so much as precision in expression. It is therefore with the sense of fulfilling a public duty that I put before you today some linguistic gems that I’ve been collecting from senior private sector executives in recent months.

Marvel at this small selection of words and sayings:

Antidotal: ‘I only have antidotal evidence for this.’ Some day I hope to hear this said in connection with behaviour described as poisonous.

Harbour: ‘I don’t want to harbour the point.’ Presumably because to do so might lead to our being wrecked at the labour’s mouth.

Plassate: this is a useful word describing the process of calming someone, perhaps a client complaining about poor service. ‘We should do what we can to plassate him.’ Though not, of course, if we have to push the shop out too far.

Amiable: used of someone who has no objection to a course of action. ‘I told him our suggestions and he seemed perfectly amiable to them.’

Catharsis: occurs when an obstacle leads to a momentary halt in progress. ‘They were moving ahead quite quickly, but they seem to have hit a bit of a catharsis.’

It turns out that certain fears tend to justify themselves if you spend too much time worrying about them: they become, in effect, ‘self-proclaiming’.

Sometimes a message can be hopelessly distorted if it passes along a chain of too many people. If trainers train trainers who train users, what they present at the end of the line may bear little relationship to the starting point. This phenomenon, I’ve been assured, is known as ‘Chinese Walls’.

That appeals to me, because it’s a phrase often used by such organisations as the big Consultancies, to explain how they can work with competing companies without a conflict of interest. We might say, in the spirit of this post, hunting with the hare while running with the haddock. Call me a cynic, but I’ve always suspected that things can’t be kept that separate and there are Chinese whispers through the Chinese walls.

And finally, of course, we have the old chestnut: ‘I don’t like the message Peter put out because it inferred that we were doing something wrong.’ Just like this post might be taken to imply that certain managers couldn’t tell a bark from a bite.

Not all of senior businessmen mangle language like this, of course. Many are as limpid in speech as they’re far-sighted in vision. I wouldn’t want to tar them all with the same pencil: that would be like tossing out the baby with the ball court.

Happy birthday BBC. Though it probably won't be.

Happy Anniversary to the BBC! Its first broadcast was 90 years ago today.

Ninety years today.
As lively as ever but short of self-confidence just at the moment

They marked the anniversary with a historic event today: all radio stations broadcast exactly the same three-minute compilation of random BBC sounds at 5:33. Apparently, they’ve never previously all done exactly the same thing at the same time. Shame it was so utterly uninspiring.

Maybe that’s just part of the problem at the BBC at the moment. The strange little exercise at 5:33 came after an hour-long introspective investigation of what’s gone wrong at the corporation, and at the way politicians look likely to make the most of the present scandals to extend their influence over it. 
The two best points made in that discussion were, firstly, that the scandal is about two BBC Newsnight programmes which were, admittedly, dire. But that’s out of 26,000 hours of news broadcast each year. No commercial organisation would fixate that much on the two failures, however major. They’d just work to fix them without donning hairshirts.

And the other key point? There’s been a 25% cut in management costs at the BBC this year. Where before a powerful Deputy Director General looked after editorial problems, and a Communications director made sure the Director General didn’t make himself look stupid in the media, today the posts are vacant or off the board.

Result? No-one made sure Newsnight’s editorial blunder was avoided. And the Director General gave a series of interviews in which he made a complete fool of himself and had to resign.

This is just the latest in a series of mishaps in which understaffed or overstressed public sector institutions, following massive cuts in the name of austerity, have cocked up monumentally.

The Department of Transport made a pig’s ear of trying to let the contract to run rail services in the North West to someone other than Virgin Rail, the present incumbents. The result? They had to call Virgin back in to bail them out. And the Environment people failed to react to Ash Die-back disease on time so we’re likely to lose the bulk of our Ash Trees over the next few years.

Sad developments both. But the BBC is a treasured institution, second only to the NHS as far as I’m concerned. If the present tribulations leave it more than ever exposed to predation by politicians, then a particularly wretched step has just been taken.

I’d love to be able to wish the BBC a happy ninetieth. But I have a terrible feeling it may not be quite the joyous moment we might all have wished for them.

Tale of two Tory women

Whatever its faults, and they are legion, the British Conservative Party does have the knack of producing female politicians who are strikingly colourful. The most notable such figure in the Tory Party, as we like to call it, though not always out of affection, was of course Margaret Thatcher who may have lacked other qualities – one thinks of moderation, compassion and tolerance – was certainly not short of colour.

Right now, we are being well entertained by two others who, though they don’t have Maggie’s stature, nonetheless are as curious specimens as one could possibly wish for. 

One of these is Nadine Dorries, with whom I find it difficult to agree on much. And I really mean ‘difficult’: sometimes I’m probably in more sympathy with her than might be apparent, because she sometimes presents her views in ways that are curious to the point of being incomprehensible.

She describes herself as a committed supporter of a woman’s right to choose, but has put herself at the head of the movement to reduce abortion time limits, a measure mostly supported by those who see it as the first step towards prohibition. She describes herself as supportive of gay marriage, but not as long there is any possibility that churchmen might be forced to perform such ceremonies. It’s never really easy to tell just where she might be on any question at any time.

She’s in the news at the moment because she’s decided to absent herself from Westminster and her constituents for a month, to take part in a weird TV programme called ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’. It takes place in Australia and, as I understand it, contestants are required to feed on ostrich balls and take baths in pools of live worms or some such thing until they get voted out of there.

A lot of people seem terribly upset about her doing this. Neglecting her duties and all that. And they may be right, but I can’t help feeling that they’re saying rather more about their own sense of humour failure than anything else. And they may also be betraying some other and more sinister motives.

Because if there is one statement of hers with which I agree wholeheartedly it’s her comment earlier this year on the nature of the two men who lead her Party and the present government, David Cameron and George Osborne. ‘Two arrogant posh boys,’ she called them, ‘who don't know the price of milk – who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others.’

Nadine Dorries: not posh at all, but intriguing

There are plenty of people around the country who feel the same, though not many who’d say as much inside the Conservative Party let alone the Parliamentary Conservative Party, working in principle under the posh boys’ leadership. No wonder they’ve kicked her out the parliamentary bit, for now. Australia was, I suspect, just a perfect pretext.

Dorries isn’t, however, the only interesting woman Tory just now. Another is Louise Mensch. She made a tidy fortune publishing novels which, those who’ve read them assure me, are only a step from well-deserved oblivion. She decided that it would be nice to become an MP, perhaps the next stage in a pre-ordained glistening career, and in 2010 won the difficult seat of Corby in the East Midlands.

Louise Mensch: much posher. But a little deadlier too?

The following year she married Peter Mensch who manages the band Metallica and is, therefore, based in New York. Now there’s lots to be said for Corby but it probably doesn’t have quite the glamour of Manhattan. Besides, the two places are 3500 miles apart, and that’s a bit of an obstacle when you’re trying to build a marriage. Political service in Corby or a marriage in New York? No contest for Mensch.

So she stood down forcing the Conservative Party to fight a by-election this very Thursday. They're pretty well bound to lose, delivering a welcome scalp to the Labour Party. At a time when it is leading a deeply embattled government, that’s hardly what the Tory Party needs. Can’t help feeling Mensch’s behaviour is little short of betrayal.

And yet there’s been nothing like the same chorus of disapproval about her as there has been about Dorries. Odd really. Except when you think that Dorries comes from a working class family in Liverpool. Mensch wouldn’t dream of saying anything nasty about the posh boys; why, she’s a posh girl herself.

Which rather suggests that for Cameron and cronies it doesn’t matter how bad what you do is, as long as you’re ‘one of us’. Deeds don’t matter half so much as words. Or, putting it differently, who cares how badly someone behaves, if they do it with the right words pronounced in the right accent.

Always offers an edifying spectacle, the Tory Party.