Meeting every problem

You have to admire the talent in public and private sector management, that enables its possessors first to identify a matter that needs urgent attention, and then to take immediate, decisive action to address it.

By calling a meeting in ten days time.

One of the important things about a meeting is that you really need everyone there who might have something essential to say on the subject. And because we’re all really good at our job, what any of us has to say on a subject has to be essential. So it makes sense to invite as many people as possible. 

That’s why the meeting can’t possibly take place until the week after next.

Next a decision (it’s all about decisions) has to be taken about the length of a meeting. Two hours is suitable for a routine meeting, the kind you have every week whether there’s anything to discuss or not. Three hours says ‘this is a bit special’. Four hours tells you ‘really important’. But five hours or more means ‘urgent – urgent – urgent – don’t miss this whatever you do.’

You probably know the story about the wine expert who, asked how to identify the best wine on a menu, said ‘look to the bottom right where the prices are highest.’ We truly value what costs the most, and a five-hour meeting of a dozen senior managers isn’t going to leave you much change out of £2000 in staff time alone, and could be a lot more expensive still. So it just has to be really, really good.

Bored meeting

Because a couple of grand is quite a lot of money, it’s probably best to save a bit by not spending too much on preparation. After all, the goal of the meeting will probably emerge from the discussion. And agendas are such a constraint on a good, wide-ranging discussion. They tend to cut out the possibility for those wonderful, philosophical debates which to a pedant may seem irrelevant to the subject in hand, but which provide most of the charm of such sessions.

The other limitation on a genuinely enriching conversation is the keeping of minutes. So tedious and bureaucratic. After all, there won’t be many decisions taken, so everyone who was there will have a memory of what proposals were adopted, and most of the time, the differences between their recollections will be small and easy to reconcile.

Perhaps at a subsequent meeting.

Out of all this a goal generally does emerge. Often it takes the form of a consensus that there’s a need for further information, followed by a firm and unshakeable decision to hold another meeting in a couple of weeks to review the options in the light of new data.

I say ‘unshakeable’ but it is in fact subject to change if another matter becomes urgent, causing the follow-up debate to be pushed back. By which time, the issue it was due to address has probably become significantly less urgent anyway: the patient has died, the deal at risk has been lost, the need for the new equipment has been overtaken by events. So the problem has been resolved anyway. 

In some sense.

A few years ago I had to work with a Finance Director in the NHS and he was immensely boring in his refusal to apply any of the principles outlined above. All meetings I attended with him were planned to last an hour; they were never extended beyond the planned finishing time even if he was delayed getting to the start. There was always an agenda, and he always got through it even if the meeting started late. Several items had supporting documentation which was always distributed before the meeting, and if you hadn’t read it, you were in trouble: no-one was going to take the time to explain it.

Every item led to a decision, usually in the form of an action assigned to a named individual, with discussion limited to the minimum needed to reach that point.

It was so dull, my dear. We knew what we were aiming for, and we always got there. And we left with clearly defined tasks that we just had to undertake before the next meeting, which is just so like turning work into a task. 

To make things worse, decisions were minuted, so there wasn’t even any wiggle-room for creative recollection about which jobs had been assigned to whom.

All the charm, the amusement, the comfort of those lovely rambling five-hour discussions of general philosophy, well, they were just gone.

Now where’s the fun in that?

Guns or butter, trade or war?

International trade often has pretty appalling effects, such as the exploitation of some of the world’s most vulnerable people or damage to the environment, but as a general rule it has some beneficial effects, including boosting prosperity and avoiding war. After all, it’s not particularly good for business if you open fire on your client or your supplier, or they open fire on you. Not good for health either.

That’s why I’m terribly keen on the new Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, catchily referred to as TTIP, being negotiated at the moment between the United States and the European Union. If it’s concluded, it’ll be the biggest trade deal in history.

David Cameron has played a significant role in trying to win support for the agreement in Washington. Which is curious. On the one hand, he goes out there to bat for the agreement, as well he might: experts are suggesting it might be worth 1-2% on GDP on both sides of the Atlantic and, boy, do we need any growth we can get. Nothing else the government’s doing seems to generate any.

Sadly, on the other hand, David Cameron is in awe of the right wing of his own Conservative Party, and of the far right grouping UKIP, currently enjoying a bit of a bubble in the polls. So he keeps tossing them bits of raw meat, apparently unable to understand that each time he does that, they only come back for more. The latest raw meat is the offer of a referendum with a single question: should Britain remain in the EU or not?

The mere fact of having made that commitment has upset the negotiations, as the US has pointed out: the Obama government is already in a fight to get the agreement through Congress and any disruption only makes things worse. But even if it is adopted, the US has made it clear that it would not apply to Britain outside the EU.

So Cameron bats for the agreement on the one hand, for sound economic reasons, and undermines it on the other, for lousy political ones.

Meanwhile, with the support of the French, he has managed to bring an end to the embargo on arms sales to Syrian rebels. Immediately the Russians have announced they will sell powerful and sophisticated anti-aircraft systems to the government there, which is interesting: there’s not much air power on the rebel side, whereas there is, of course, in Israel – which is extremely unhappy about the Russian move and threatening military action.

Preferable to a trade agreement?

So we’ve just seriously ratcheted up the chances of escalating the war in Syria, having it spill out into a regional conflict.

The biggest trade agreement in history in jeopardy. A growing risk of war in the world’s tinderbox.

Am I alone in thinking that Cameron has got everything exactly back to front?

Multiculturalism: a crass Prime Minister refuted by events and a fine pianist

To have an incompetent as Prime Minister may be regarded as a misfortune, but to have a crass incompetent looks more like carelessness.

‘Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream,’ claimed David Cameron back in February 2011, in a speech in Munich.

It may have been merely crass to make such speech in Munich, of all places, which gave the supreme mono-culturalist Hitler his early power base. The Woolwich attack against a British soldier last week has also shown it to be deeply misguided: Hazel Blears pointed out, in reaction to that attack, that it had been shortsighted to emasculate the ‘Prevent’ programme, which she had led in the previous government, and which aimed to channel local money into moderate organisations, to turn young people away from extremism.

And when did Cameron announce the plan to ‘review’ (read ‘cut to the bone’) the Prevent programme? Why, in his Munich speech.

In any case, why is multiculturalism receiving such a bad press? It is often one of the most powerful source of riches in a society. For instance, I have a superb recording of Mozart’s piano sonatas on in the background as I type this, and it’s hard to imagine a more striking illustration of the benefits of multiculturalism.

Back in the 1630s, the new rulers of Japan, just emerged from a terrible century of civil war, decided that peace required rigid controls. As well as severe internal measures, they decided to allow no further contact with the outside world: nobody would go out, nobody would be allowed in. Even Japanese nationals then abroad would be refused the right to return home.

As an exercise in mono-culturalism, this attempt at seclusion could hardly be exceeded.

In reality, small exceptions were made to these draconian measures. After all, political power’s important, but trade provides life’s luxuries, and if you have political power, luxuries are pretty much a necessity. So the Shogunate allowed limited trade with China, Korea and even with Europe.

The Portuguese had built good (commercial) relations with Japan, but missionaries had come in their wake and made some inroads into local communities. Worshippers of the Prince of Peace can sometimes become seriously troublesome, and the Japanese decided they’d had enough of the Portuguese; from 1641 onwards, they only allowed European trade with the Dutch, and only through an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour.

The trading post on Dejima island:
sole point of contact with Western culture in Japan for over two centuries

The Dutch were Protestant, which probably made the Japanese think they’d be less trouble: they hadn’t met some of the more far-out sects of our days, in the United States, say, or Northern Ireland.

The relative seclusion of Japan lasted for nearly two and a half centuries. And what centuries they were in Europe: this was the time of Galileo and Huyghens, of Newton and Lavoisier, of Fermat and Linnaeus and Gauss. A time for the blossoming of enquiry and discovery.

The Japanese have exactly the same hunger for understanding and knowledge as anyone else. So on board the Dutch ships that arrived at Dejima island in Nagasaki Bay, there were books, books, books.

Japanese intellectuals painstakingly translated these works, sometimes word for word, so that they could share in the great awakening taking place in the West.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the West forced Japan to open its doors. Force was used at first, but the Japanese leaped at the opportunities it created. The nation quickly became a world power, a huge trading centre, with political institutions modelled on Western lines, with great centres of learning in which the world’s knowledge was taught, with – and this would end in tears in the middle of the next century – great military power too, capable of inflicting a crushing defeat on the Russian navy in 1905, just 37 years after the end of the Shogunate.

In the middle of all this, Japan took up Western music as well, and learned to excel in it. Have you seen the Japanese film Departures? If not, track it down and watch it now. The central theme is the deeply traditional practice of preparing bodies for the coffin, a preparation carried out with great art and love; but the protagonist of the film is a young cellist and in an early scene we see his orchestra performing Beethoven’s ninth symphony.

Such are the deep roots that Western music has put down in Japanese culture.

I found that surprising when I first learned of it, but I also found it moving. So it was poignant to hear the Japanese pianist, Mitsuko Uchida, talking to the BBC nearly twenty years ago about her joy at being able to record the Mozart sonatas in their entirety. I could feel, even in a radio interview, all the love she felt for this great music, a love reflecting an understanding and sensitivity far beyond my powers, although in theory this was my culture and not hers.

Mitusko Uchida: born in Japan, she's made Western music her own

That’s multi-culturalism, and what a powerful source of good it is. Uchida has, since then, given it still stronger expression, taking out British nationality and becoming, indeed, a Dame Commander of the British Empire. I have my doubts about those titles and honours, but I’m unambivalent in my delight that she received one.

So I sit back and enjoy Uchida’s extraordinary, light but powerful, sensitive but humorous, rendering of some of the greatest music the West has produced. And I wonder at Cameron’s crass words against multi-culturalism.

We need to remind ourselves of those men of secluded Japan who struggled through works from an alien culture, whose contents they knew they somehow had to penetrate. And how the the seeds they sowed blossomed in work like Uchida's.

What is there to reprove, and not to admire, in their multi-cultural efforts?

Inani-mate

Odd how attached I can get to an inanimate object.

It’s my task in the house to look after the bathroom. I know that doesn’t sound like much, so I do the kitchen sink and the stove too. Still doesn’t sound like much? Not like a fair share? Well, it probably isn’t, but I try to make up by putting a lot of love into the work.

That’s surprising because when I first faced the prospect of cleaning a toilet, the very idea disgusted me. But experience changes attitudes. It’s like the first time one of the boys peed into a bath I was about to share with him, and I emptied and refilled it; second time round, I just thought ‘screw it, the dilution must be enormous’ and got on with it. We enjoyed the bath and neither of us was any the worse for it.

These days, having got used to cleaning the toilet, I take enormous pride in a sparkling loo, perhaps because there’s real satisfaction in having turned something that is inherently dirty into something which is spectacularly clean. And it’s all the more good for my soul if I look around the whole bathroom and I see the shelves and the windowsill dustless and sweet-smelling, while the taps gleam. 

Got to get a gleam on them, or you haven’t succeeded

Gleaming taps: yes, that’s the real measure of success, because if you don’t get metalwork that you could use as a shaving mirror, well what have you really achieved in cleaning a bathroom?

This work naturally requires an array of tools and products. But in between all the different plastic bottles, the sponges and scrubbing implements, one object has become a particular friend of mine: an old rag. Not any old rag: we have lots, and there’s only that I particularly like. It’s part of an old sheet, so it isn’t even the only rag that looks like it, but somehow it’s just the right size to dry and shine what I want before needing to be dried out again.

My comfort rag, getting a rest and drying between work spells
And don't think I'm  happy we're still heating the house in May

So whenever I start work on the bathroom the first thing I do is try to find my old friendly rag. If I can’t, if it’s in the wash, I prefer to put off the task until it’s ready. You don’t start a really key task without your old reliable mate, do you?

OK, so may be a bit of a comfort blanket, I admit it. But I’ve reached an age where I no longer have to feel embarrassed by my confessing my relance on a comfort blanket. Especially as it’s actually rather a useful one.

Now I know that the strong affective relationship I’ve formed with this particular rag is a one-way thing. Like the special relationship Britain has with the US, which isn’t reciprocated by the US towards us. But I can live with that.

In fact, the day I start to wonder how the rag feels about me, I have to say we’ll have moved beyond the level of a harmless quirk. It’ll be time for Danielle to lock me up. 

Even if it does mean she’ll have to make other arrangements to get the bathroom cleaned.

Terror and the words we speak

Often the responses to a terror attack is even more notable than the attack itself. As are the words in which they are expressed.

‘I spoke to him for more than five minutes,’ said a woman who approached one of the killers in yesterday’s fatal, meat-cleaver attack on a soldier in Woolwich, South London. ‘I asked him why he had done what he had done.’

Quietly confronting an armed killer

The man she was talking to was still carrying the cleaver and he was bespattered with his victim’s blood. Despite that she showed exemplary courage, as well as calm good sense in asking the one question which really matters and to which we shall never get an adequate answer.

The Prime Minister has also spoken out, repeatedly, and each time has reiterated how ‘shocking’ he finds the event. Well, I think most of us agree. But does it need to be said so often? The aim of terrorists is to terrorise us. Perhaps fewer references to being shocked might give them less of a sense of success.

Much more appealing were the words of a Sikh from the neighbourhood interviewed on the radio this morning. He had been upset by the reaction of the extreme right English Defence League, who within hours were calling demonstrations to demand the return of their streets to them: the attackers were Muslims and therefore from a culture the EDL perceives as alien and to be driven out. The Sikh underlined the fact that though he was Indian, he wasn’t Muslim, and he’d been brought up on those streets – they were his just as much as they were the EDL’s.

What other words did the EDL come up with? Its leader proclaimed ‘They’re chopping our soldiers’ heads off. This is Islam. That’s what we’ve seen today.’

As it happens, no-one had his head chopped off, though apparently the attackers did try to decapitate their victim. But that was one victim. Notice how one soldier has become ‘soldiers’? So a one-off gruesome event is converted, by simple pluralisation, into part of a series of attacks. And then instead of being attributed to two profoundly misled Muslims, it’s attributed to the whole of Islam, even though community leaders up and down the country have denounced the atrocity. That, sadly, did not stop a couple of Mosques being attacked.

The men suspected of killing the soldier have been caught. They seem certain to be convicted of a vile murder and will doubtless spend most or even all of the rest of their lives in gaol. Let’s take that as the right way of dealing with the attack. Let’s not use that crime to fuel an Islamophobic campaign, whose target is one of our most law-abiding communities. Let’s not use it to stoke up the fires of anti-immigrant hatred that are already generating far more than enough heat.

After all, let’s go back to the lady who spoke so calmly to the attackers. Many in Woolwich reacted well to the murder, confronting the men calmly and with courage, and they have been saluted for it. But her case is particularly intriguing.

Her name was Ingrid Loyau-Kennet. The papers took delight in describing her as a ‘British Mum’, but I think the Britishness comes with the ‘Kennet’ part of her name. She explained in a radio interview this morning that she'd been travelling home from France when she made her stop in Woolwich, and both the accent in which she told us the story and the ‘Loyau’ in her name suggest that her roots are French.

That cool courage, in other words, was displayed by one of those immigrants so frequently denounced by the likes of the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Defence League. And the French have automatic right of residence here thanks to that maligned organisation, the European Union. That’s the union UKIP and the EDL, and many in the Conservative Party, would like us to leave.

She, unlike the Prime Minister or the far right, found the behaviour and the words that were right when confronted with yesterday's horror. For my part, I’d be delighted if we could get a few more Loyau-Kennets here, from France, from Germany, from Poland, from Bulgaria. And I’d be more than happy to send a few EDL and UKIP leaders back the other way in exchange.

But that would be terribly unfair to the countries that had to accept them.

Against Corporate greed we need to be in a big battalion

‘Banks are pretty good at getting round rules,’ a senior financier recently told the Guardian, ‘if there are restrictions on us paying bonuses, we will be looking at paying some other kind of allowances.’

Meanwhile, among all the noise about Google, Amazon and Starbuck’s miserly contribution to the national exchequer in Britain, we hear from Senator John McCain that even the saintly Apple corporation is ‘among America's largest tax avoiders.’ 

You want to take these guys on?
You're going to need the clout that only size can give.

There seems to be a mood developing in a number of countries to try to rein in corporate greed. That’s the greed of the corporations themselves, uninterested in paying more than a minimal amount in tax to the jurisdictions in which they operate, and the greed of the people who lead them, passionately interested in maximising the amount they can take out of the companies they lead.

The US has the economic might that would allow it to make a move in this direction, but it’s probably best not to hold our breaths: those same corporations are also the biggest donors to political campaign funds. While they control the ability of politicians to get elected in the first place, there’s not a lot of chance of getting the politicians to control their behaviour. I’ve argued it before, and I’ll argue it again: ban political advertising on TV and suddenly you’ve cut the cost of political campaigns and, at a stroke, massively reduced the power of lobbies to dictate policy to elected officials through their wallets.

The US has the muscle to take on the corporations. Now it needs to find the will. 

Curiously, another body that probably has the muscle, simply because it represents such a huge market, is the European Union. It has recently shown signs of having the will as well, as it starts to look at bankers’ bonuses and at tax regimes. Could be interesting to see what happens in the next three or four years.

Because what’s at stake is fundamental: who shall run our societies, the citizens who inhabit them and make up their electorates, or just that tiny privileged handful who control the big corporations? Right now, the power of the latter leaves very little say to the former.

What’s curious in this context is to see that it’s precisely now that there is such a groundswell in Britain to leave the EU. Bob Crow, General Secretary of National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, was recently arguing the case for departure, from the left, but the most strident voices are coming from the right.

Most people campaigning against the EU, and certainly Bob Crow, would argue that they are forcefully opposed to excessive corporate power. But if Britain were to leave, it would on its own be far too small to exert much authority, it would lose the ability to influence the EU’s decisions, and it would weaken the EU’s own stance by depriving it of one of the main economies currently in its fold.

Big corporations run the world. To take them on, we need the power that a big bloc gives us. Far from giving up our rights by being in the EU, we join 350 million citizens in giving ourselves the clout to stand a chance of defending them.

The Europhobes demand a referendum on the subject of Britain’s membership, proclaiming that simple democratic principle dictates that there should be one. What they ignore is that if a referendum were held and it led to Britain’s exit, it would further erode any democratic control of the forces that shape our lives.

Surely not exactly what they intend, is it?

A modest proposal: solving the problem of corporate greed

Now here’s an idea I think has mileage, but not the slightest chance of being adopted.

There’s a lot of talk, especially in Britain at the moment, of tax evasion, in particular by large corporations. Amazon made £4.3 billion in this country last year and managed to pay just £2.4m in corporation tax, less than the £2.5m it collected in government grants. Meanwhile, Margaret Hodge, Labour chair of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons the other day called Google ‘evil’ for taking £3.2b from UK customers, and paying £6m in tax.

Margaret Hodge
Do you get the impression she wasn't entirely pleased
with what she was hearing?

At the same time, we all get a bit sick of those characters who precipitated the present economic misery continuing to reward themselves handsomely, as often as not for failure, as often as not for failure for which the rest of us, as taxpayers, have to carry the can. Bankers, in particular, continue to take salaries that dwarf those of people who actually do some good (like teachers or nurses), sometimes by multiples of 10, 20 or more. They help themselves to bonuses, though their banks continue to lose value and several of them can only pay out because they’re being kept afloat by the compulsory generosity of the taxpayer. 

It’s not just banks, of course. Board room salaries across industry continue to climb, however bad the economy and however much others suffer. Cuts fall on those same teachers or nurses, and even more severely still on the ill or the unemployed, who are seeing already low living standards slashed still further.

So here’s a solution to the twin problems, of tax evasion and excessive bonuses, simultaneously.

Bonuses to highly-paid staff should be strictly proportional to the corporation tax paid by their companies.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious sight? These are the individuals who take the decisions that keep corporation tax liabilities down. Just imagine how it would be if their bonuses fell with them.

If they wanted to boost their personal pay, they’d have to boost the tax paid by the company by a proportionate amount. That would give a whole new sense to the idea of ‘win-win’.

The big question is, which way would things crack? Would they go on trying to keep tax payments down or would they sacrifice the corporation’s gains for their own?

Having seen how altruistically these characters behave, can anyone have any possible doubt which way they’d go? We might see a long-repeated claim being realised at last: their success would truly be shared by everyone.