Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent (17 page)

41. The rising sun

J
apan came to the top of my mind recently. Having breakfasted on news of the appointment of an ex-Apple executive to help McDonald’s’ Japanese operations to get out of the fairway bunker they’ve landed in, I found myself hosting our eldest son (aged thirty) to a sushi lunch. The meal came by in tiny individual portions, on small plates, via a sort of model railway, and was memorable for two things. First, I confirmed my love of the food – which is strange considering that a decade or so ago I used to put similar looking delicacies on the end of my fishing hook. Second, the bill was totalled by the simple method of adding up the number of empty plates on your table. You couldn’t see my son behind his pile, and the bill came to roughly the equivalent of the GDP of a mid-sized Scandinavian country.

I have spent a lot of my life exposed to varying Japanese images and influences. The first should have been strongly negative, but oddly became the opposite. My father was a Japanese prisoner of war and suffered horribly – and that should have been enough to instil a lifelong hatred of all things Nippon. That it didn’t was a mark of my father’s spiritual strength. He rarely spoke about his experience, but when he did it was to make the point that the Japanese simply had no idea how to handle POWs. In their culture, if you lost at war, you died – and they simply had no concept of what to do with thousands of prisoners. It reined in my horror enough for me to keep some sort of open mind.

At university in England, one of my buddies came from Tokyo. Everything appeared to be normal until the first vacation, when he told me he was staying in the country to work on his English. He then told me that his grandfather, who ran the family, had decreed that it was too cold to send his wife over to join him, so the family was sending
his mistress instead
. As you do. When I visited him some years later in Tokyo, this ‘sharing’ situation was still in place, and I suggested to my wife it might be something we could think about back in England. The scar still exists where she hit me with her Chelsea Flower Show programme.

I landed in Japan for the first time in 1978 – leading a team buying an automated warehouse system for a big brewery. My questioning fascination began to turn to genuine affection. Their whole national logic is different to ours on many planes. When I pointed out that our system would need more safety protection in case somebody broke into it and got injured, they looked at me as though I was mad. Their thinking was simple – if a burglar broke into a place, he deserved to be chewed up.

My ’70s trip was also responsible for one of the funniest scenes of my life. One of our mechanics got terribly (no polite way of putting this) constipated. It was an all-male party, and the rest of us were, to put it mildly, not very helpful. But we did convince him to go to the pharmacy in the basement of our hotel. Three of us then watched the scene hidden behind a big stack of shampoos, and I have to tell you that if you have never seen a male, English mechanic try to explain to a female, non-English-speaking Japanese pharmacy assistant the problems of constipation –
in sign language
– you have not lived.

I have been back to the islands several times and continued to digest the complexities of this beguiling nation. My wife became involved in Ikebana – floral art – and I became aware that simplicity, minimalism and clarity could also bring power and beauty. My business education had tended to indicate the opposite.

I’m not sure I could advise anybody about Japan. If your quick-serve brand is not in the country, should you enter the market? If you are in it, what are your prospects? After all my exposure, if you ask me those two questions, all I can do is echo Mayor Giuliani’s words after 9/11. This is what I know and this is what I don’t know:

• In Japan, whatever corporate architecture is involved, they will do it their way. They will work to their charter, their rules and their code. Their position will be thought through and will be based on a mix of indefatigable logic and unanswerable heritage. If it doesn’t match yours, they will be polite but not move an inch.
  
• Their economy is not out of the woods yet. Mr. Koizumi’s government was strong on promise, but has not delivered. He remains too cavalier with public spending, but there are two pieces of good news worth banking. First, over the past decade, the Japanese economy has gone through as near a revolution as it has ever experienced, and their institutions, attitudes and executives are now in better shape to face changing global challenges. Second, many forecasts are now predicting a period of steady growth for their economy – unexciting, but highly welcome after the woes of the past ten years.
  
• They will remain uninterested in short-termism. It will still be the nature of the beast to identify a game-plan and then stay with it for the long term.
  
• Despite all the changes, their business fundamentals will still be built from a different DNA than ours in the West. If you want to do business there, the rule is still to find a local partner.
  

Just as the Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, the Japanese are rumoured to have fifty different words for a Walkman. Owing to the average height of their men, however, their language has no word for slam dunk. Can you believe that?

Neither can I.

42. O sole mio

T
he sun rises over the Bay of Naples, and the water winks its reflection at me. Despite four espressos, I struggle to translate the local morning paper, Il Mattino, into English. In the distance, the ghostly peak of Vesuvius seems to echo the whole environment’s laughter at my pathetic efforts.

Suddenly, one paragraph seems to make sense, but I can’t believe my translation. For the first time since I arrived, I break into a brisk walk and get myself an English language paper. My fears are confirmed: Shell, the imperious global oil giant, has joined Enron, Parmalat, WorldCom (et al.) on the list of corporate evil-doers. It appears the company has not only over-stated its oil reserves by an astonishing 25–30%, but also knowingly done so. There’s a blame-storming session going on, they’ve already zipped shut a few body-bags (including one on the chairman), and the lawyers on both sides of the case are looking forward to years of gainful employment. This one stuns me particularly, and there’s a personal reason.

Around the end of my second decade as a human, I was in a mess. I was a rebel without a clue, heading for a lifetime of serial trouble and underachievement. Suddenly, I got a number of breaks that changed everything for me. One of those was a junior job with Shell in England. My dad thought I had won life’s lottery, and it is difficult to describe credibly today what it was like to land a job with Shell in the UK nearly forty years ago. It was almost like joining the Church. Once you’d got in, you didn’t leave – and the average week was spotted with visits to the canteen to present somebody with a twenty-five, thirty or even forty-year service award. The company watched me through university and then paid (full salary plus fees) for me to go to one of England’s premier business schools.

I then signalled that I was part of the generational paradigm shift in the relationships between corporations and their employees by saying ‘thank you for all that’, by being headhunted and joining another company. Shell survived this potentially mortal blow and carried on as before: a bit top-heavy, a bit bureaucratic, somewhat paternalistic, genuinely global, astoundingly capital-intensive, a tad conservative – and stinking of integrity. If in doubt, three things always ruled: integrity,
integrity
and
integrity
.

There is no doubt I owe Shell much. When I hear present-day CEOs mouthing off the shallow lie that their ‘people are their greatest asset’ I feel like upchucking – quite simply because I have always believed that was for real, and I was taught it in a company that was all about technology. What has happened to Shell is beyond belief to me. I wonder just what will I feel when I pull up under that brand sign next time? Will I link the guy behind the register, or the product quality, with the deceit and malice aforethought that seems to have been
de rigueur
in the boardroom? I tell you: it will be hard not to.

Here’s the spill-over for quick-service. I have contended for some time that the art of getting distinction in cluttered, competitive markets (a.k.a. branding) has ceased to be just about what you do. For decades (centuries, perhaps) the specification of your product and/or service was enough to get you market distinction. But now there is another dimension in play. The values you espouse as a company are becoming critical differentiators – and customer loyalty is recognising your corporate personality as well as its product portfolio. Companies who understand this, and get their game-plan right, seem to punch well above their marketing-spend weight.

Virgin does this brilliantly. The company constantly pushes its corporate personality attributes (value, fun, innovation) out into space whenever it gets the chance, either through formal marketing or PR and photo opportunities. Trust me, this is a science, not an art form, and it seems that people who are comfortable with these values are then more inclined to try the products/services with the brand name written on them. Think about Apple, Benetton, Tesco, RyanAir and Haagen Dazs – they all stand for different values, but are all quite clear in what they are.

Let’s bring this closer to home. I don’t care whether you are CEO of a quick-serve giant, or the operator of a single location. Mentally, walk outside your store or your brand, and look back. You see the brand sign. Now, forget about your product for a minute. What signal does the brand sign give off about
how
you do business? What does it say about what you stand for? Try a Virgin analysis: limit yourself to two or three words. Then, and here’s where the fun comes in, check your results with some of the folk who buy your products – but I suggest you have a strong gin and tonic first.

It’s cool to take this one step further. Forget your business and concentrate on yourself as a leader. If you have anybody reporting to you directly, try the same exercise. If you were in a group of your first-line reports, and you walked in the room, what would be the consensus view of the values you exude? What do you think your people think you stand for? Hey, if your people are your greatest asset, it’s kinda important, yes? You might want to check your results out again, with them this time. But be
really
careful with this one – it can go wrong.

Writing this stuff is exhausting, and I’ve moved from espresso to grappa. At least, I think it’s grappa. It is only when I look at the label on the latter that I realise I have made another translation mistake from the Italian. I should not have drunk it. I should have dabbed it behind my ears.

Ciao.

43. The long run

A
nytime now a number of the global quick-serve brands celebrate a half century of existence. That’s cool, and a matter for some pride, but in the gene pool of longevity, they are splashing about in the shallow end.

Back in 1548 (the same year my beloved Manchester City Football Club won their last silverware), Nostradamus foretold of a future historic business combination:

From Albion’s shore shall come a marvellous conveyance, a carriage silincieux bearing the arms of Rolles de Roi.

Is that spooky, or what?

You can choose to believe it as a prophecy or not, but some three and a half centuries after he penned those words, and exactly a hundred years ago, Frederick Rolls and Henry Royce met in England and gave birth to a company whose name has become familiar in every country – and synonymous with excellence. At Burger King, we called the Whopper the Rolls Royce of sandwiches. I don’t own a Rolls Royce car, but I find something comforting about seeing the R-R logo on the engine of any jumbo I’m on. A century from now, who knows how we will be travelling, but I suspect R-R will be written on the quality end of it.

This longevity thing is not just about big brand names. The fourth-century BC Chinese belief that the world is made up of opposing forces has been reflected in their cooking ever since then. The notion of balancing such forces is central to the famous Sichuan cuisine – in this case six of them (
ma, la, tian, suan, xian
and
ku
– spicy huajiao, hot peppers, sweet, sour, salty and bitter respectively). That’s a way of life – and a way of eating – that has survived for more than two millennia. Again, you get the feeling that, two more thousand years from now, assuming our assorted gods spare us, the same principles will still be in place.

A while back, I meandered around the ruins of Pompeii. Beforehand, my knowledge of the place (and the events) was limited to distant school history lessons, a few TV shows and Hollywood sound bites. Walking the streets of the place brought home to me – just as so many things do today – just how little I know and appreciate about our planet and its history. Pompeii was a town of some 60,000 inhabitants, nestling under Mount Vesuvius. Nobody even suspected the latter was a volcano until 24 August AD 79 when it erupted, covering the town in mud and ashes. The fantastically preserved domestic, commercial and community buildings (still not all excavated) reflect a metropolis of advanced culture and bustling business activity. Social developments were illustrated by a 20,000-seater sports amphitheatre, extensive graffiti and about seventy quick-serve restaurants.