Business travel: the glamour rediscovered

I’d forgotten how glamorous international business travel was, not having done any for a few years.

Fortunately, as I sit at a departure gate in Vienna airport with the prospect of another five hours travel to get home in the small hours, I can console myself for the renewed glamour by remembering the pleasure I’ve had from spending time with a bunch of colleagues: Germans, Austrians, a New Zealander and even an Italian who looked after me brilliantly: he it was who met me at the airport and insisted at the dining table in our hotel last night that there was no point not taking the whole bottle of wine and only having a glass each – we’d certainly finish it. As, indeed, we did.

But that was about the peak of glamour. Otherwise I took a taxi from the airport to an airless meeting room avoiding, in a city full of splendour, any sight worthy of note apart from the Danube (which you really can’t miss and, in my experience, is never blue at Vienna).

From the stifling meeting we got a taxi to the hotel, which we had failed to choose strategically: it took us nearly an hour to do get to it, 20 kilometres away. At one point, we even passed a sign telling us we were entering Vienna. I had no trouble believing we’d left the city, since we’d spent an unconscionable time struggling through traffic jams on motorways to get to that point, and we could have been just about anywhere.

That bottle of wine in the hotel wasn’t an indulgence, but a relief.

This morning we have another forty-minute taxi ride, this time for seven kilometres through the morning rush hour. That took us to another airless room where we spent the next six hours, bar a break for a canteen lunch, in another meeting.

As it happens, the meeting went well. I’d been sent out there because I’d had the misfortune of winning an unenviable, and undeserved, reputation for being a fluent German speaker. It’s one thing to be able to trade a couple of sentences and sound plausible with a colleague met in a corridor; it’s another to stand up in front of a meeting and sound as though you were competent. As my wife likes to ask me, “how can you have spent so long learning German, and even living out there, to still speak it so badly?”

Still, I got through the ordeal, by dint of judicious calls on my Austrian and German colleagues to field any question I felt too hard to handle. That was pretty well any question more complicated than “did you have a good trip in?” I’d learned the word for traffic jam, “Stau”, so I was fine with that.

Fielding the questions in that way had a double benefit: I could dodge the bullet, and even look like a real team player.

We still hadn’t seen any sights, apart from the Danube, which was visible from the conference room window. Though still not blue, it looked increasingly attractive as the meeting rolled on and the atmosphere became stuffier.

The Danube from the terrace of the bar
Majestic and fine – but who ever decided it was blue?

In the end, a small group of us did go for a drink down by the side of the river to celebrate a day that had avoided disasters. That was fun. And, as well as the pleasure of some congenial colleagues, I did also manage to have an Apfelstrüdel yesterday and a Wienerschnitzel at the airport just now, so, hey, I do at least have the sense of having been in Austria.

But glamorous? Decidedly not.

Cleaner or MP? Lift operator or Judge?

Did you see the story about MP Dawn Butler?

She was the Labour MP for Brent South from 2005 to 2010, when the seat was abolished. But she stood in Brent Central in 2015 and has been an MP again since then. She told the BBC that she was recently told, while travelling in a members’ only lift in the House of Commons, that it “really isn’t for cleaners.”

Back in 2008, she told the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality, that she had been accosted by a former Minister in the members’ area of the House of Commons terrace. He challenged her right to be there, and when she assured him that she was a member, he replied “they’re letting anybody in these days.”

Does this all seem odd? It isn’t. Dawn Butler is, naturally, black.

Now it all makes sense, right?

Dawn Butler? MP or House of Commons cleaner?

This all puts me in mind of the first ever black justice on the US Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall. He was a man with a fine sense of humour – even his name has a colourful history: he was originally named Thoroughgood but decided, as a child, that it was too tiring to spell, so changed it to Thurgood.

One of his favourite stories of his tenure at the Supreme Court was being in a lift – sorry, elevator – when a couple of tourists climbed in. A black man in an elevator? Had to be the elevator operator.

“First floor, please” one of the tourists said.

“Yowsa, yowsa,” Marshall answered. And pressed the button.

It’s hard to avoid the feeling that organisations such as the Fawcett Society have a bit of way to go yet before we can claim that equality has been fully achieved.

I was irritated with the Oscars being so white this year, yet again. But maybe that doesn’t matter quite as much as I felt. It seems to me that it’s even more important to sort the problem of black MPs not being taken for cleaners in the British House of Commons, or black Associate Justices taken for elevator operators in the US Supreme Court building.

Thurgood Marshall. Not an elevator operator

Although there’s no reason not to make sure that black actors get the recognition they deserve at the same time...

England-Ireland was a good match. But it didn't look good for the nations of the North

It was odd to find myself overtaking the Irish Rugby Football Union team bus on the M40 this morning. I was heading towards Oxford and my mother’s; it presumably for points West, into Wales and a boat for Ireland. In the meantime, I was just another Englishman pulling ahead of the Irish Rugby Team, just as happened on the turf of Twickenham yesterday.

Another Englishman posied to leave Irish Rugby behind

We fans of England tend to be rather a lonely band: no non-Englishman is every likely to join us, since England is the team everyone loves to hate. “Anyone but England” is a pretty standard position to take.

That tends to put chips on our shoulders, and with the way the England team has been playing of late – and “of late” in this context means the last twelve years or so since it won the World Cup in 2003 – those chips get knocked off our shoulders with monotonous regularity. Rugby fans, however, unlike their counterparts in that villainous game with the round ball, are supposed to resist provocation, so we try to smile through the gloating and show that we’re bigger than that.

A win over Ireland, winners of the last two Six Nations Championship titles, is therefore satisfying. Still more satisfying, though, would be to see England playing well. Sadly, we’re not there yet: England’s victory against an injury-bedevilled Irish side was hardly the sparkling triumph we might have liked.

It’s a sad truth on the rugby world stage that the teams from the Northern hemisphere tend to be weaker than those from the South. That’s been historically the case, but in my experience it’s never been truer than now. Last year’s World Cup took place in England, giving the North home advantage, but not only did the hosts, England themselves, fail to make it to the quarter-finals, not a single Northern team was among the four in the semi-finals.

Admittedly, one was denied in the most galling circumstances: Australia overcame Scotland in the dying moments of their quarter-final, but only due to a penalty awarded in a terrible refereeing error. However, had Scotland progressed, it would have been a fluke, as the Scots have proved themselves yet again this season to be one of the weakest teams even in the weak Northern Hemisphere.

Funnily enough, that weakness however makes the great competition of the North, the Six Nations championship, more interesting. At least the teams are all much of a muchness. There don’t tend to be easy, run-away wins. Several times this season matches have been won by teams which were behind at one point – notably in yesterday’s England-Ireland game, where Ireland was 10-6 up before ultimately losing 21-10.

So the weakness of all the teams involved has made for more gripping games and better entertainment. But they remain weak. Often, in the most trivial way. Again and again, promising England moves were frittered away in penalties conceded for avoidable and silly infringements. These are professional players and they should know better than to make life so much easier for their opponents.

Why, two England players committed infringements so serious that they had to spend ten minutes off the field, in the sin bin. Terrible self-inflicted injuries...

So the match was fun to watch. And I enjoyed overtaking the Irish team bus. But overtaking a Southern team would be far more satisfying, if unlikely to happen any time soon.

Conservatives avoid ideology

The problem with the Left, I’m frequently told, is that it’s too driven by dogmatic ideology. This means that instead of taking decisions in the light of real circumstances, it attempts to apply a sort of rule book of what it thinks of as principles: no NHS worker should ever be made redundant, no benefits claimant should ever lose entitlement, no nuclear weapon should ever be used.

On the other hand, parties of the Centre-Right, like the British Conservative Party, or the saner (i.e. non-Trump, non-Tea Party) reaches of the US Republican Party, are pragmatic in their outlook. They study how things really are before they reach a decision, and then adopt a policy that takes fully into account the reality of circumstances, That, after all, is the only way to ensure the success of a policy.

Crazy ideologues
Unlike the fine pragmatists behind tough new conditions for junior doctors

For instance, back in 2010 the British Conservatives, seeing the parlous state of the world and in particular British economy (which had been mismanaged by Labour doing crazy things like spending on healthcare), decided pragmatically to sort out the deficit in public spending with a view, ultimately, to reducing public debt.

What made the task more difficult was that they took another pragmatic decision: never, under any circumstances, to increase taxes. Let’s be absolutely clear that there’s nothing ideological about such a stance. It’s purely pragmatic. The Conservatives have observed reality and reached the inspired insight that no one likes taxes. This is especially true of their supporters. So they opposed tax increases.

As a result, bringing the public deficit under control hasn’t gone as well as they might like. Conservative austerity policies have hugely reduced public expenditure. It’s true that they’ve created crisis conditions in our hospitals and our classrooms, but it needed to be done. Or so I’m told. Needed to be done, even though, far from falling, the UK national debt has grown to the highest levels ever seen.

Still, they haven’t increased taxation. Why, they’ve even reduced it for top incomes. A pragmatic decision, presumably based on the pragmatic observation that most of their major contributors benefit from that reduction, and by increasing their disposable income, there’s a reasonable chance that more of it will be disposed of towards them. Pragmatically.

The government has also decided to address a terrible public health problem, growing rapidly throughout the prosperous world: obesity and, in particular, childhood obesity. They have promised us a strategy for tacking it. According to today’s Guardian, they promised it for December 2015. Then for January, then February, then perhaps March. Now, it seems, the date has gone out to June.

As the Guardian made clear, this may in part be due to the fact that increasing numbers of people are calling for a tax on sugar in drinks and foods. There is a widespread view that this might reduce obesity, particularly among children. Obese children are much more likely to encounter health problems as adults, including type II diabetes which, apparently, now absorbs 10% of NHS expenditure.

The popularity of this call for a tax is a problem for the government. They don’t want to publish a strategy that doesn’t call for one. Nor, however, do they want to introduce such a tax. Remember? Conservatives don’t increase taxes. Ever. Whatever the circumstances.

Shame, really. There’s a major health problem to address. And a significant saving for the NHS to generate. But, hey, we don’t increase taxes.

It’s just as well they don’t suffer from the besetting sin of the Left: ideology. Otherwise they might be so rigidly and uncompromisingly wedded to a view that they wrongly treat as a principle that it would prevent them taking necessary action.

And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

Miss a machine, miss a train, but at all costs, get a seat

Not everything’s good about working in London, but quite a few things are.

It’s a great benefit that Luton, where I live, is on a direct railway line to the station at Farringdon, a pleasant stroll from my office. Pleasant in the sense that most of it is on elevated walkways that wind around the Barbican complex, containing the London theatre that is home to the Royal Shakespeare company. The walkways and the buildings they link are modern, with flat spaces at many levels leading down to fine extent of open water; in amongst the modernity, we also have the remnants of the old city walls and, standing proud if slightly isolated, the fine old church of St Giles, Cripplegate (yes, that’s a real name).

The commute has given me a bit of a fixation on train seats. I go to considerable length to ensure that I have a seat both on the way in to work and the way home. For instance, I catch a train in the morning nearly an hour later than I need to – which means getting up at an entirely dotty hour – to be sure to be able to sit down. On the way back, I try to leave soon after 4:30 or not until at least 6:15, again to be sure of a seat.

Although I have found another way of securing a seat on the way home. Instead of walking to Farringdon in well under a quarter of an hour, I walk nearly half an hour to Blackfriars station. Trains travelling northwards, my homeward direction, reach Blackfriars two stops before Farringdon. That makes it the stop where, in rush hour, the train fills up. Get there and I’ll get a seat.

There’s another benefit in walking so much further. Blackfriars station is built on a bridge. It's glorious, especially when approached from the south, so I even walk a little further across the Millennium Bridge, the footbridge built to mark the year 2000, which provides a breathtaking view of the Thames in both directions, of the Tate Modern gallery straight ahead, with St Paul’s cathedral soaring behind. That means I reach Blackfriars from the right end to get another great sight of the Thames further upriver, as well as the same view downstream.

The sun dying on the Thames, viewed from
the Millennium Bridge looking towards Blackfriars

Today, I left ahead of time. I’d been in early every day this week, and stayed late, so I thought it was time to indulge myself a little. It meant that, with the days lengthening, I caught the last of the light, and was able to enjoy the sunset on the cathedral and the river. I made it to Blackfriars station, continuing as always to enjoy the view through the station’s glass sides. The 16:52 drew into the station and I climbed on, immediately securing a seat.

I sat down and went to pull out my work laptop, ready to send a document to a colleague who’d asked for a copy. Only to discover that it wasn’t in my bag. A picture sprang into my mind: the laptop, on my desk, still clipped to its docking station. I hadn’t picked it up before I left.

It wouldn’t have mattered, except that I plan to work from home tomorrow. I needed the machine. I enjoyed my hard-won seat for two stops and then, my heart sinking, left the train at Farringdon, retracing the steps I’d taken in the morning.

Back in the office, I picked up the machine, to the kind but teasing merriment of my colleagues. By then it was getting on for 5:30. I knew Farringdon meant standing room only on the train. So I headed off to Blackfriars again.

The same sights, splendid as ever, in the later, fading light, presented themselves to my eyes. St Paul’s. The footbridge. The river with Tower Bridge downstream, its lights coming on. The Shard, lit at its monumental top. The river itself, again.

And yet, somehow, the experience had begun to pall a little. The extra walk once seemed a price worth paying for the view. But twice? It felt like too much of a good thing. My feet were paying too high a price for the pleasure of my eyes.

Still. At least I got a seat again. Though on the 17:52 instead of the 16:52. My inattention had cost me a full hour.

I just hope the lesson will sink in.

Oh, dear. Looks like I have to back rank ineptitude.

On balance, I’m inclined to believe David Cameron when he says that he favours Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.

I say “on balance” because I find it difficult to discern anything in Cameron that could be called a principle or a conviction. Apart from one sincerely held belief: he is entirely committed to the notion that he should win and hold office. He’s actually rather good at that. Not much good at anything else, including doing much that’s useful with the office once he’s won it, but the winning he’s proved good at. 

It’s a classic tactic of good sales work to be careful where you set your customer’s expectations. Clearly, if you promise to provide the best flavor anyone ever tasted, you’re in serious danger of disappointing. “Probably the best beer in the world” is an intelligent slogan: it sets admirably high aspirations, without actually presenting Carlsberg as having fulfilled them and therefore putting the bar too high.

Bar in either sense.

Probably the best beer? Certainly good marketing

Cameron, inept at managing the power he’s so good at winning, has set the bar far too high on the EU. He’s faced with a right wing of his own party that is intent on damning the EU and all its works, and getting Britain out at the earliest opportunity, which is far too powerful for a man of his limited political skills to manage. It might have beyond any politician without the ability of, say, an Abraham Lincoln, but it was beyond his.

So he has carefully calculated a stance that said that he fully understood dissatisfaction with the EU, indeed sympathised with it. He would, therefore, hold a referendum in which the British people would be able to have their say over continuing membership of the EU. In the meantime, sharing their concern about the defects of the Union, he would negotiate such a wonderful package of reforms, that even those who were persuaded that it was not for them, unreformed, would come round to his view and back staying in.

Sadly, the other 27 governments of the EU were only prepared to go so far and no further to accommodate British demands. Cameron has only been able to negotiate minor changes in the way the EU operates, and is now desperately trying to present them as radical and fundamental.

In other words, he set the bar high, and now can’t hit it.

That gives huge encouragement to the anti-EU movement. Boris Johnson, current Mayor of London who aspires to be leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, has seen his chance. He has aligned himself with the campaign to leave. The long-term future of the country matters less than the short-term future of Boris Johnson, and he believes the votes are with Britain leaving, with Brexit.

Will it be enough to win the argument? Well, on his own Boris won’t change the way views are flowing. It’s more a matter of his wanting to ride on a wave that’s already flowing towards the Brexit. If he’s proved right, Cameron will emerge from a referendum defeat gravely wounded, possibly so badly that he’ll be forced to step down. That might give Boris his chance. Unless it ends up opening the door for someone more ghastly still (yes, the Conservative Party has worse even than Boris to offer us).

Conversely, if Britain defies the present trends in the polls and votes to stay in the EU, Cameron will live to fight another day. Sad for those of us who would like to see a man that poorly qualified booted out of his job. On the other hand, the price of leaving the EU is far too high for seeing Cameron sacked.

So I face the doleful dilemma of having to campaign for an outcome which would leave Cameron in Downing Street. I shall be seeking a referendum victory that would once more veil his utter incompetence, at least from those who don’t want to see it. But staying in is worth even the price of living with Cameron a little longer.

After all, however little we can rely on him for, it’s absolutely certain he’ll find other opportunities to prove how inadequate he is to be Prime Minister.

Which works better, delegation or control?

How about this as a vivid description of one way of doing work? From Garrett Mattingly’s Defeat of the Spanish Armada, it conjures up powerfully the stultifying atmosphere in which lived the King, Philip II, who sent that Armada against England:

When a diplomatic pouch reached the Escurial, its contents, however urgent, were receipted by the appropriate clerk, and placed along with the originals on the appropriate corner of the long table in the cheerless little room in which the King now spent most of his waking hours. All sorts of official papers lay piled on that long table. It held the correspondence of ambassadors, the reports of viceroys and governors, of customs and treasury and municipal officials… Nobody since the beginning of history had ever ruled so much of the earth’s surface as Philip II of Spain… nobody, surely, had ever had so many papers to read. Sooner or later Philip read, if not all, at least a very great many of them, leaving in his spidery scrawl in their margins shrewd statesmanlike comments and trivial corrections of spelling and grammar, each annotation a witness to posterity of his appalling, his stupefying industry. Naturally, he sometimes got a little behind…

Yes. It’s hardly surprising he wasn’t always entirely up to date. A state of affairs probably not helped by what Mattingly calls “his habit of second thought.” Sometimes Philip delayed responding to a dispatch, which might already have waited some time to be read at all, because he wanted to take longer making up his mind.

As Admiral Nelson took his fleet into what would become known as the Battle of Trafalgar, against a combined French and Spanish force, he told his captains:

…in case signals can neither be seen or perfectly understood, no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.

In other words, Nelson believed his ships’ captains knew what was needed of them in battle: to sail alongside their enemies’ vessels and fire on them until they went down or surrendered. He didn’t feel that they needed constant direct orders from him, to sail towards one ship or the next, to turn one way or another, to open fire or cease firing. Those were matters they could decide for themselves, on the basis of their knowledge and experience, and their clear understanding of the overall goal of the fleet action.

Spanish Aramda (lfet): a crushing defeat
Battle of Trafalgar (right): a stunning victory
And guess which approach is more widely applied

Trafalgar remains one of the most famous victories at sea of all time.

The Armada’s attempted invasion of England has become an exemplar of how not to attempt a naval campaign. It failed lamentably to achieve its aims – not a single soldier was landed on English soil – and the fleet itself was forced to flee for home. What’s worse, because the direct route through the Channel was blocked, less by the Engish than by the weather, the Spaniards were obliged to sail up the East coast of Britain and over the North of Scotland, with tragically high losses on the way: over a third failed to return to Spain.

Doesn’t that sound like a striking vindication of the management style known as delegation, where power of decision is moved downwards to the lowest possible level? That’s in to its opposite – authoritarianism, or perhaps simply control freakery – where nothing can happen without the explicit say so, to a numbing degree of detail, of the person in charge.

So here’s the million-dollar question: why is it that so many executives in organisations, public or private, seem so intent on emulating Philip II rather than Admiral Nelson?