Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent (15 page)

There are times when I despair of this planet, and this is one of them. Look, I’m a Brit, and we have been at war with the French (on and off) for centuries – the only difference being we now send soccer fans over in buses to flatten their cities. But we still visit, and that’s where we differ from the American nation, which has (essentially) pulled up the drawbridge. I love the place, so I’m going to outline a game plan whereby Americans can learn to do the same. It will stop all this ‘enemy’ nonsense. Right, here goes …

• Visit the place – but not in the way you normally ‘visit’ Europe. Limit your party to two or four people, and do not stay at a Best Western hotel or a Comfort Inn. These are fine brands, but they are not going to get this job done. Dig into the internet or Fodor’s and find a place with a maximum of twenty bedrooms and
  phone them up
  to fix the deal. Get to know the owners. They will speak English, and you can chat about rooms, facilities and price. You will be friends before you get there.
  
• Target your location. France is Old Europe. Go to one of its Old Cities – I recommend Nice – and stay in the old part of the Old City (
  Vieux Nice
  ).
  
• Change your daily biorhythm. Sleep in later, eat later, have a snooze after lunch, and then go to bed later.
  
• Breakfast is mandatory – but
  not
  in the hotel. Walk to one of the squares and sit outside – in chairs and tables all facing out into the square. A large
  café au lait
  accompanied by a
  pain au chocolat
  will get the job done, and you will find your resting pulse rate dropping into single digits.
  
• After breakfast you are faced with choices. It’s the best time to wander around the flea market, sternly resisting the temptation to spend 145 euros on Napoleon’s personal barometer, but soon enough comes the time when you have to choose your meal plan for the day. After breakfast you will need two more meals – an A
  meal
  and a B
  meal
  , defined as such by the size, length and alcoholic consumption involved. Many French take their A meal at lunch, but I prefer the lighter one then. In Nice, of course, they invented
  salade niçoise
  , so that will do nicely – along with a glass (or two) of local rosé diluted with some mineral water.
  
• After a quick afternoon zizz (beach or hotel), it’s time to
  promenade
  – which can be translated as:
  walking up and down trying to look thin
  . When you are tired, repeat the breakfast formula, only this time with a
  pastis
  , and sit discussing how fat and ugly the other
  touristes
  are. This is also where you decide on dinner, which is your A meal.
  
• Now then, do not choose the dinner venue from your tour guide or any list of restaurant names. Read about the food that’s available locally and choose something you can handle that’s a bit different than your normal microwaved pap. When you have decided on an item, walk around the squares and look at the menus and the specials until you find it in a restaurant that is: a) busy; b) does not have a ‘tourist menu’ outside; c) is not overpopulated with Germans; and, most important, d) does not have photographs of the dishes posted outside. I’m not being racist about the Germans. To slightly misquote Jerry Seinfield, there is, of course, nothing wrong with Germans. But a restaurant that’s full of them will not get this job done for you.
  
• We are coming up to the big finish now. If you have followed all the above, with plenty of local
  vin rouge
  , you will now feel French and be enthusiastically defending ridiculous agricultural subsidies and the rights of all male cabinet ministers to have mistresses without interference. The last big decision of the day awaits you – what to have as a
  digestif
  with your coffee. As to the latter, it’s mandatory – so don’t whinge on about decaf. You’ll sleep after this lot, trust me. Now, back to the
  digestif
  – and I suggest you trumpet your newly discovered Frenchness by upsetting your niçoise hosts by choosing a
  Calvados
  from Normandy. They’ll love you for that.
  
• When dinner is all over, pay your
  addition
  , leaving only a 10% tip. Any more and they will think you are mad. Do not smash the plates (that’s Greece). Shake hands with your hosts and the occupants of a few nearby tables, and with a cheerful
  ‘A demain, mes amis’
  drift off into the warm Mediterranean night, with your woolly sweater tossed casually over your shoulder. Avoid soccer fans.
  

When
demain
arrives, repeat. And repeat and repeat until you must go home.

As you journey back, you can be satisfied that you will have accomplished two things. First, you will have only put on a bit of weight. This is because the French measure it in kilos, and you can’t put many of them on in a week. Second, you will have improved world understanding and helped the cause of world peace. And all for the price of a couple of hangovers.

Santé.

37. Road of least exposure

A
fter a lifetime of success in the PGA and then on the seniors tour, somebody asked golfer Lee Trevino – as his results started to tail off – if he was considering retiring. As he reflected on a professional life of golf and travel, his reply was: ‘Retire from what?’

I feel a bit like that. It’s nearly a decade since I made a decision never to be directly involved in big business again … well, to be exact, never to work for anybody ever again. After a quarter of a century of impersonating Road Runner, I set myself some different goals with a different biorhythm – which I’m still pursuing.

One of those goals was to educate myself. This might come as a surprise to some, considering I’d been to school, university and a blue-ribbon business school, and then had countless training and development courses in business. When I had time to pause and reflect, however, I found that all that that had given me was a one-eyed view of real history and a paper-thin, superficial analysis of the world around me. I decided to start again and deliberately built time in my life for the necessary reading, travelling, looking, and listening.

I found out some odd things. In the space of a generation, our approach to the management and acceptance of risk has changed fundamentally. This is true in almost every aspect of life, and particularly so in business. If you had charged a classroom of young executives to come up with two words that captured the spirit of business in 1970, they would have said ‘Taking risks’. Now they would come up with ‘Avoiding risks’. Today, the business leader’s job is to corral half a dozen optional strategies and then pass them to an attorney to make the decision based on what I call the ROLE, or road of least exposure.

This is understandable in a world of ludicrous potential compensation litigation, intense competition, and stock market booms and busts. I guess it’s a comforting approach. But, you know what – if you really want to win in your crowded, competitive market, it still won’t get the job done. It matters not whether you see your fight as one location against another on the street or at macro-brand level, the ROLE might see you safely in the pack, but it will not see you ahead of it.

Am I advocating rushing out with untried food products or massive investment spends without diligent research? Not in the quick-serve industry, I’m not. But I
am
advocating a step change in a lot of our mindsets. During one of the better historic wars between England and France – the Hundred Years’ War – we, the Brits, had the nuclear weapon of the age. It was called the ‘longbow’ (and you need to read about it to understand how devastating it was). But we lost the war despite this advantage. The reason was odd but has profound relevance to this day. The longbow was a fantastic weapon,
but only to defend
. If you were attacked, it was brilliant, but it was next to useless to attack with – and the derived message is still relevant today. If your mind and resources are geared up just to defending, eventually – eventually – you will lose.

It is all about your state of mind. Winners are not rash or stupid, but their minds are wired more towards the edge of the mental-risk spectrum. That mindset can manifest itself in product range, sales and marketing activity, the look of the place and – perhaps most of all – in the people chosen to work there. These minds obey only two rules: they are prepared to be different and they are prepared to upset a few people to attract a lot.

This last aspect is critical. Today, almost anything you do in business that gets you noticed is likely to upset one faction of the population or another. A lot of business activity is, therefore, neutered of any possible offensive content. The result is that nobody really notices or remembers anything. You personally were probably exposed to thousands of brand sightings or messages yesterday. Can you remember even one? Precisely.

The modern risk-taker understands and accepts that you cannot avoid the risk of upsetting some people if you are to do something out of the ordinary (a.k.a.
distinct
or
memorable
). In fact, if you are not deliberately taking such a risk, your efforts are likely to be stillborn. The risk-taker understands that such a risk can be manageable, and the upside of it is the opportunity to glue in a lot more customers to your concept. Today, frequency and loyalty are far more likely to be achieved by how you do business rather than by what you do.

My re-education exercise has shown me that this isn’t new thinking. It has worked in every historic age and in all aspects of society. Rather more surprising, however, is my finding that it is still relevant today and that the advent of a billion lawyers has not made it less so but more so. In addition, my own experience tells me that the modern quick-service business, at all levels, needs it more than most.

For those who are interested, we, the Brits, are still, of course, technically at war with France. The longbow, however, has obviously been superseded by new weapons and tactics. Today, we send soccer fans over. They travel in buses, sing their songs, wipe out a couple of provincial French cities, and are back home for tea.

Now that’s effective and efficient.

38. Everything changes

I
t is rumoured that Nevada has actually sunk by thirteen inches over the past five years on account of the increased per capita weight of visiting tourists.

Now then, it is wise to treat all rumours, printed in books such as this, with a healthy cynicism – and that is particularly so in this case because I have just made that one up on the spot. But a recent visit to Las Vegas, the understatement capital of the planet, highlighted the fact that the
All-American Butt
is expanding fast.

There is an added dimension that also needs considering – that the appropriateness of the Las Vegas tourists’ clothing is in inverse proportion to its size. We caught a show by the wonderfully loopy Rita Rudner who explained that Vegas residents (such as her) get anaesthetised to these sights – until one comes into view that simply can’t be ignored. At that stage she rushes up to the subject and – in a loud voice –
demands
an explanation.

Yes, today we are going to explore the minefield of obesity and its relation to our quick-serve world – perhaps
the
big gathering storm on our twenty-first century radar screen.

Like all objective contributors to the debate, I should start by declaring my position and biases. My position is that I had a 34” (86 cm) waist when I got married nearly forty years ago, and I have one today – and it has never changed. My pants have sometimes been tight, sometimes loose, usually OK, but always that size. My weight today is what it was when I played soccer seriously (although its distribution has altered a bit!). My biases reflect my belief that this has been down to a million choices I made over that period – choices to do some things associated with diet, exercise and lifestyle, and not to do others. In short, I drift towards the debate position that if you are fat, it’s a result of your decisions. It’s not an illness, and you should not point the finger of blame at quick-serves.

I said I ‘drift’ towards that position. I qualify it by recognising that some obesity – some – is contributed to by external factors. Wealth, for example, clearly helps the cause of the thin. It is difficult to imagine Prince Charles, for example, as he goes about his role of adding zero value to the planet, getting tubby when he is served by personal chefs and footmen. Conversely, if you happen to be one of the few unfortunates who does not have a personal chef, and who adds to this tragedy by not having a home, a job and/or any money, it is likely that you will use any money that might come your way to get something
big
to eat. I can also understand that, living on Planet Stress, as we all do, some folk will seek solace in food as others do in other substances – whether they be in liquid, tablet or powder form, or made from leaves.