Saturday 30 June 2018

WHAT versus HOW to think


There's always something that prompts a blog post.  This time it was the World Cup Group G football match between Belgium and England.  It was followed on the UK's ITV channel by the programme Good Evening Britain, co-hosted by Piers Morgan and Suzannah Reid.  The guests included the actor Danny Dyer and the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

The main purpose of the show was to judge the mood of the country following the football match but it inevitably digressed on to other topics.  One digression was the fact that Danny Dyer's daughter, Dani, was a contestant on the programme Love Island.  I have never watched Love Island so I cannot judge it but it is the type of programme that Piers Morgan felt was not the sort of show befitting of Dani Dyer's talents.  Danny Dyer admitted he did have concerns but said as a parent "I've always believed you don't teach them what to think, you teach them how to think."  This profound statement stopped Piers Morgan on his adversarial track and Jeremy Corbyn could be observed to nod sagely.  It got me thinking too and hence this blog post!

Parents do have a tremendous influence on their offsprings' values, which obviously affect their subsequent thought processes and particularly the way they consciously or subconsciously develop mental models as they navigate their way through the challenges that life throws at them.  Mental models are processes that we employ to help us break down complex issues into understandable and organisable chunks.  The problem is, however, that attempting to understand complexity by breaking it down into building blocks of simplicity, often doesn't work!

The picture at the beginning of this post, illustrates an elephant being examined by six blind men.  The illustration comes from the parable of Blind Men and an Elephant, which originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent.  Each man has a different perception of what the object is based on what he is currently feeling and crucially, making comparisons with previous experiences.  So the end of the trunk feels like a snake, the tusk feels like a spear, the ear feels like a fan, the body feels like a wall, the tail feels like a rope and the leg feels like a tree.  The elephant is so big that none of the observers recognises the interconnections between the individual chunks of simplistic understanding and therefore, the realisation of the elephant is not apparent.

Returning to Danny Dyer's statement on HOW to think, if parents teach children the importance of trying to understand the bigger picture (the whole) before making judgements on easy-to-define chunks of knowledge (the parts), then his statement really was profound.  That said, the WHAT and the HOW can be inextricably linked and the parent has to try to decouple his or her WHAT from the HOW that is being taught.  If the blind daughter of the blind man feeling the elephant's trunk, asked him WHY he thought it was a snake, he should tell her that is his opinion based on his experience.  He should suggest she asks the other men and maybe others who are not blind, for their opinions.  That way she might soon conclude it was an elephant!

So the parental teaching of HOW to think must include the fact that parents, like all human beings, only have opinions and anyone seeking the 'truth' must be prepared to explore many opinions and try to understand the reasons behind the others' judgements, by asking WHY.  Even then, their understanding of the 'truth' will only be yet another opinion but at least it should be well informed.  Richard Dawkins, the renowned scientist, wrote a letter to his 10-year-old daughter explaining the problems of living in an irrational world.  He warned her about three bad reasons for believing anything - tradition, authority and revelation.  Without evidence, you should't believe something just because it's always been done that way (tradition), or because the person who told you about it is very important (authority), or because someone who believes it had a 'gut feeling' (revelation).

"I've always believed you don't teach them what to think, you teach them how to think."  (Danny Dyer)

Yes Danny, but it's really not that simple!

Sunday 3 June 2018

Productivity - The Regional Perspective


Throughout my business life and particularly when I transitioned from engineering design and development to business leadership and management, productivity has become a well-used word in my vocabulary.  In my mid-career years, I was obsessed with it, driven by it and tried to excite others with the opportunities to improve it.  It was only when I started to look back on those years, which was a time when I thought I knew it all (!), I now realise what little impact business leaders and government policy makers can have on solving the productivity conundrum.

So what's the conundrum?  From the UK's perspective, the puzzle is to understand why the national productivity is lower than many other global players, including Germany, France, US and Italy.  Also, within the UK, it is equally puzzling to explain why London and the south east of England are the only two regions in the UK where the productivity is higher than the national average.  The danger is that when politicians get there teeth into issues and data like this, which they have done in every government that I can remember, they come up with 'solutions' to the problem, which regrettably subsequently become tomorrow's (bigger!) problems.


The fallacious argument in its simplest form, is that improving regional productivity, outside London and the south east of England, will improve national productivity....conundrum solved!....if only it was that simple!!  High profile projects aimed at boosting regional economic growth, like the Northern Powerhouse, are, in my opinion, a political ruse, which may benefit some individuals and companies (notably financial institutions and property developers) but are unlikely to address the productivity problem....if, indeed, it is a problem.

So is regional productivity really a problem or is it merely an issue to keep governments and civil servants busy whilst formulating and enacting policies aimed at improving the wealth of the nation.  I have lived and worked in the North West, South West, South East and London regions of England in the UK.  Productivity became a part of my parlance in all my business management roles but tended to dominate my thinking after leading a management buy-out of a medium-sized engineering company - part of a category of businesses generically known as SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) - in the South West of England.  It was (and still is!) a great company in North Devon but was not performing as well as it could or should.  Having a financial interest in a company certainly focusses the mind on productivity!

Managing a business in a remote corner of the UK can be a very lonely affair because professional and business networking is more difficult compared with metropolitan environments, particularly those with 'clusters' of synergistic companies, for example the software companies in the Thames Valley and the financial services companies in the City of London.  I made the effort to engage with other businesses in the region through different organisations to help the development of the company.  This proved to be a delicate balancing act between the tangible benefits that the regional network brought to the business and the negative effect of the diversion of my time away from day-to-day management of the company.  One thing that soon became apparent to me was the region did have a distinctive 'culture' that had a strong and direct impact on business strategy.  In the words of Peter Drucker: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."  It's almost impossible to change the culture of a company, let alone an entire region!

During my quest for business support, I sampled many of the offerings to SMEs and the purpose of this blog post is not to provide a comparative assessment but rather to focus on what I learnt from experience.  Regional industrial strategies, whether or not they are supported by government, will not affect the underlying culture of a region.  Many regions, like the South West of England, feel insecure because of their remoteness from London.  Many companies, like the one I ran in North Devon, also have a culture of insecurity because they operate as 'islands of enterprise' without the benefits of like-minded neighbours.  A hi-tec SME in a provincial market town, draws little or no benefit from being part of a local business community dominated by shops, hairdressers, estate agents, agricultural suppliers and hotels.  The downsides are manifested in many ways but particularly in career development.  A young engineer working in the SME will soon run out of in-house career advancement options and will be forced to move from the town, and probably from the region, if he or she wants to progress.  The same feeling of entrapment would not be felt by an employee of a company in closer proximity to the capital.

So I soon learnt that even government investment does not change regional identity.  Regional productivity is just one characteristic of a complex social and business cultural mix, but that doesn't stop governments wading in and creating organisations to administer the investment of public money in regional economic development programmes.  The organisations include the former Training & Enterprise Councils, the former Business Links, the former Learning & Skills Councils, the former Regional Development Agencies and the current Local Enterprise Partnerships....to name but a few!  The proliferation of "former" is because every time there is a change of government, the previous government's organisations are axed and a new brand comes in, often with the same people.

There are some good committed people working hard and trying to make their regions more productive but in my opinion, in many cases it's like shovelling water uphill because culture, like gravity, is something we have to live with and exploit the positives rather than try to change the unchangeable negatives.  The positive side of any social culture is that there are people who genuinely want to make a difference and if they can be helped, rather that hindered, by the support of regional government-funded agencies, they can bring tangible benefits to businesses.  I recall two excellent examples of groups spawned in the early years of the new millennium in the South West of England. 
  
The South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SWMAS) provided specialist support to SMEs particularly through the introduction of lean manufacturing.  Despite being severely threatened by the closure of the regional MAS organisations by the current government, it has carried on regardless and continues to offer an excellent service.

Beacon South West brought together companies from a diverse range of industries, and with a proven track record of success, to promote good practice, share ideas and exchange experience.  Sadly Beacon South West did not survive the wielding of the axe by the current government.

Although regional productivity was implicit in the raison d'ĂȘtra for both SWMAS and Beacon, it was not the driving force per se.  The companies they supported were generally looking for 'best practice', which could improve individual company productivity but not necessarily that of the region.  Two 'lifestyle' businesses might sit happily alongside each other servicing the needs of a small town but if one suddenly becomes more productive, driving costs and prices down, it could force the other one out of business!

So my message on regional productivity is simple....it's not simple!  Regions are not independent, they are interdependent, just like nations are interdependent.  Yes Britain does depend on Europe and Europe depends on the rest of the world....despite what the Brexiteers might tell you!  Let's accept the fact that productivity is not a sensible guide to the economic 'health' of any region and focus instead on helping businesses to achieve their goals, whilst giving them confidence in the longevity of regional support.