Are Most Big Corporates Really Psychopaths?

RANT ALERT. Most times I try to be a dispassionate researcher of the new world of work. But sometimes I just can’t take it anymore. Today is one of those days…

Almost every day I pick up a story on the Net of someone being fired by their company for some indiscretion related to social media or digital communications. I suppose people get fired every day for breaching company policies, but when you dig into most of these stories, you really get a feeling that the people in charge just have no freaking clue and are acting like reactionary, idiotic psychopaths.

A psychopath is “a person afflicted with a personality disorder characterized by a tendency to commit antisocial, perverted, criminal, amoral and sometimes violent acts and a failure to feel guilt for such acts.” (dictionary.com)

It may be a bit over the top to call the reflex firing of a person a psychopathic act, but it certainly is not the act of a rational, emotional stable or intelligent entity either. And when it is clear that someone has been fired largely because their employer just does not understand how social media or digital communications work, then I think you can label it antisocial, perverted, criminal and amoral. And normally there is no apology later. That’s a psychopath then!

Is your company a psychopath? You’d be surprised who else is…

… Continue Reading

   Send article as PDF to

How various industries are using Twitter

Mashable, the social media guide website

10 Ways Universities Are Engaging Alumni Using Social Media

Click the title above to access the full story and all the details. The author suggests the following ten uses of social media uses to engage almuni. Some of these may be clever to use with corporate “alumni” too:

• Helping Alumni Find Jobs
• Collaboration and Connecting With Students
• Fundraising: From E-mails to Tweets
• Training Alumni To Use Social Media
• Meeting Alumni Where They’re At
• Providing Tools To Spread Information
• Alumni-Generated Content
• Promoting Alumni Networks
• Mobile Reunions
• Connecting The Dots: Google Maps

How Hospitality Companies are Using Social Media for Real Results

I was excited to find this article title, but disappointed at the content. They suggest the following uses:

• Personalizing Customer Service
• Storytelling
• Making Good with Mom
• Employee Education

I’d suggest that the following could easily be added:

• Geotagged and location-based tips and specials in the venue, and in the surrounding areas
• Event announcements and daily information
• Special deals and giveaways
• Enhancement of entertainment options
• Management of staff, schedules and staff interaction
• Scheduling of activities, including allowing guests to requests services (e.g. wakeup calls, reservations at restuarants and spas, etc)
• Feedback (and responses to feedback)
• Use “objects that tweet” to manage facilities

What would you add?

   Send article as PDF to

Change, Change, Change…Context, Context, Context!

At the Global Leaders Conference I listened to an American professor speak on change. It was his first trip to China. What I heard, which at face value made good sense, was your typical ‘change theory’ proposition. There were two obvious problems with what I heard.

… Continue Reading

   Send article as PDF to

They know where you’re going, and will reward you for where you’ve been

Those of you old enough may recognise my borrowing of a Talking Heads song for the subject line of this post : )

Of course I’m talking about location-based social networking platforms. The likes of FourSquare, Gowala, Loopt, etc. It’s not the first, or the last, time I’ll write about this, because it’s a big and interesting happening. It will change how marketers market, and how we will consume. When you incentives people to ‘log into’ new places, or to ‘check in’ to the same place as many times as you can, that begins to change behaviour. It’s a wonderful trend to watch.

The New York Times recently posted an article, Turning Consumer Loyalty into a Cell Phone Game, focussing on how to use these platforms as an alternative to loyalty cards. At long last! Do we really need the number of loyalty cards that are offered to us? Do retailers really think we want them? I guess some of us do, otherwise they wouldn’t keep churning them out, but it’s a pain to have to carry an extra bag just to move your loyalty cards around with you.

For retailers, these games and apps offer a new form of mobile marketing that goes well beyond a minibanner ad by rewarding consumers, individually, for their loyalty. And unlike paper cards, stores can use the data they collect from people’s cellphones to learn more about who their customers are and how they behave.

In the UK Domino’s Pizza is using FourSquare in a creative way. On Wednesday nights, the mayor of each of their restaurants is offered a free small pizza. Mashable covers the concept if you’re looking for some more detail in ‘Domino’s UK Rewards FourSquare Mayors with a Free Pizza‘.

The promotion could easily help the corporation drum up more sales. On Foursquare, users receive notifications when their friends check in at venues. Pizza checkin notifications from friends could certainly work to convince hungry Foursquare users to order or pick up Domino’s pizza.

In South Africa Global Wraps is a great FourSquare example. You can see how they’re using FourSquare here.

This is only going to get more interesting as more and more companies begin to apply their minds as to how they can tap into our interesting openness with where we’re going and where we’ve been.

   Send article as PDF to

The Janitor: A Reason Why The World Cup Will Succeed

Once again I found myself at O R Tambo airport eagerly waiting to get a flight home after yet another week in Johannesburg.  No surprises there! If they could just move the Johannesburg economy and business buzz to Durban, without the traffic, road works and of course the Lions (the local rugby team)…now that would be the answer I thought to myself.  Such aimless musings are par for the course at the end of a busy week on the Highveld.  Any further thoughts of this ideal blend were interrupted by the need to answer the call of nature and so, without further delay, I made my way to the ‘Gents’.

Upon entering the establishment I was greeted by a loud and cheery, “Welcome to my office, Sir” by the alert and energetic Janitor. It was the way the greeting was delivered that arrested attention. Fully evident was an energy, an appealing sincerity and a spark that meant one couldn’t help but smile by way of response. It was a hard-to-ignore type of greeting and it got me thinking: Where did such enthusiasm and energy come from? Was this something that could be trained, or was it deeper than that? And so curious, I watched and observed.  Now loitering around such establishments is not normally something I would recommend, but I was fascinated by this Gentleman’s approach to his job – one that if I am to honest, would seldom, if ever, warrant such unbridled enthusiasm.

As I loitered and watched, the intensity of the greeting never waned. It was consistent and enhanced by touches of creativity that seemed to touch everyone who encountered it in a different way. It is one thing to walk into a gents smiling but quite another to leave grinning! And yet everyone did…it was that contagious.  I even witnessed the Janitor, after someone had managed to exit ‘his office’ without receiving a farewell greeting, chase after the individual in order to ensure that he got one!

This is the magic of Africa. … Continue Reading

   Send article as PDF to

Technology to connect us: A story before bed (dot com)

For most of our lifetime, technology has been accused of driving us apart – of separating us. And we railed against this as human beings. Computers have brought efficiency, but also sterility. They’ve allowed us to communicate, but not connect.

I believe that the story behind the story of social media is that finally technology has evolved to a point where it has started to connect us. We’ve turned a corner. In the past few years, advances in both hardware and software have dramatically turned this around. We now enough processing power, bandwidth and storage space to be able to use computers effectively to aid us in properly human interaction. As humans, we have deep seated drives to connect, to interact, to contribute and to belong. In the past, technology has restricted our ability to do these. But now it’s enabling these.

That’s why nearly half a billion people are using Facebook to connect. And why social media is the latest hottest thing. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the rest – these may all be fads. But the concept is here to stay.

Here’s one example…
… Continue Reading

   Send article as PDF to

Volcanic ashclouds, conferences and keynote speakers

The disruption to flights in Europe gives us an unprecedented opportunity to innovate at conferences. I speak/facilitate regularly at conferences and away day strategy sessions. Some might think it’s a strange way to make a living, but I love it. Well, all except the travel anyway. And in a week like this one, when Europe’s skies have been emptied by a cloud of volcanic ash from Iceland, it is immensely frustrating. So far, two conferences I was due to speak at have been cancelled. I am sure there will be more fallout as this week unfolds.

But last night, in a Facebook status update conversation with one of the world’s most travelled keynote presenters, the leadership expert, Paul Bridle, I got a different perspective.

Paul was due to speak at two events this week in the USA. Both conference organisers are going ahead with their events, and still want Paul to be involved, so they are hooking up with him via Skype. He’ll speak live via video linkup, and even be able to take questions from the audience. If I was him, I’d pre-record the main keynote and provide the conference organiser with a high quality video file to play – this overcomes any bandwidth and connectivity issues. But then, Paul needs to be available live – possibly to do a live intro and outro to the video, and to take the Q&A session. Paul, like myself and many keynote presenters, has access to good video recording (I have a home studio with green screen, lights and multiple cameras – and also have a video producer brother who lives around the corner).

Anyway, my thought was this: maybe this latest disruption to air traffic around Europe will force some conference organisers to try something innovative – like video-based speakers. And they’ll discover that this works. Maybe then in the future they’ll try it again. This could be a game changer for our industry. It will change how we prepare and deliver our value as speakers and experts. It will change how we package our content. It will change the dynamics of an event. Of course, we will lose out on the informal interaction with delegates after the talk – but there are ways we could do that digitally too (Skype terminals available after the presentation, for example).

It will also allow those of us who speak to reduce our prices. Some people wonder how we can charge what we do “for an hour’s presentation”, but they don’t factor in that an hour keynote can actually be three days out of the office. That’s three unproductive days in airports, on planes and sitting around waiting in hotels. We do need to be compensated for that. But not if we can do a keynote from the comfort of our home studio. Most keynotes are set up as one way communication (it’s the nature of the beast for large audiences), and any interaction tends to be digital anyway. This could happen at a distance quite easily.

We just need a reason to innovate. Maybe the Iceland volcano is just such a reason. I look forward to hearing from conference organisers and presenters who are forced to innovate in this way in the week or two ahead. Did it work? What were your experiences? And maybe most importantly – would you do it again?

   Send article as PDF to

The future of digital-inspired fashion clothing

There is no doubt that clothing designed with new digital accessories in mind will have a definite place in the market in the future. Jeans that are designed with purpose-built pockets for mobile phones (with flaps that close tight), or have pouches for memory sticks/flash drives (see WTF Jeans for example) or sleeves that have pouches in them for Londoner’s “Oyster” cards (with smartchips that need to be touched onto a sensor pad at the station platform to gain access to the train) are already available.

Or, you could go slightly more esoteric with a Bandee – basically a sash with various pockets. Or, as their website puts it: “a multifunctional transport solution for the little things of everyday life.” Phones, music players, wallets, ID, keys, lipstick and a virtually infinite variety of other small items fit nicely in its many pockets, relieving the wearer of the need to carry a heavy bag or load the pockets of one’s clothes.

But, now, let’s take all this one step further and add little battery packs into these clothing items, and allow me to recharge my digital devices while storing them on my person. Then we’ll be talking. I have a feeling that the future of fashion is not going to look like all those Star Trek movies after all.

   Send article as PDF to

Cars that talk to each other – the future of driving and road safety

Since seeing a presentation by Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM on “Tweetjects” – objects that tweet. It’s not just tweeting though. The promise of “augmented reality” is that objects around us will be able to capture, store, transmit and even analyse the data associated with them. Think about it – every object you can see around you has some data that might be useful (is the front door locked? how long has light bulb got to go before it burns out and needs replacing? how warm is that bath water?).

The most obvious next step is to put sensors into everything. Well, everything from which data might be useful. But a few steps beyond that is getting these objects to analyse their own data and do something useful for it – especially interacting directly with other objects.

The best example of the potential for this is when motor cars can communicate directly with each other, and with the world around them. And then make driving decisions based on this information. Volkswagen is one company putting quite a lot of resources into this concept. C3World (Connected Cars in a Connected World) is one of VW’s partners in this, and their website is very interesting. An extract from the front page:

In the future, cars will be ever more intricately networked with the flows of data that surround us. Vehicles will communicate with each other to provide drivers and passengers with information that is relevant to safety and which enhances comfort and convenience. This could be a hazard warning about a broken-down vehicle on the planned route, but it could also be navigation instructions to the nearest vacant car park, the current calendar of events in the city you are driving to, or a list of music tracks copied onto the portable MP3 player the day before. The basis for this is the robust and secure wireless transmission of information within the vehicle and between the vehicle and its environment.

PopSci has also reported on this recently, taking the concept to accident avoidance and navigation aids. That’s a great start, but so much more is possible using these concepts!

   Send article as PDF to

Paragliding across the Himalayas with an iPhone

In our presentation on the different generations called Mind the Gap, we refer to 1968 as a major social tipping point. It was a year in which Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Students rioted in Paris and commentators speculated the start of the second French revolution. There were massive anti war demonstrations in Grovenor Square London outside the US Embassy and in Vietnam the Tet Offensive began. France tested it’s first hydrogen bomb and Apollo 8 became the first human spaceflight mission to see the far side of the moon with their own eyes, as well as the first humans to see planet Earth rise above the moon. 1968 was called the “year that rocked the world”.

But imagine living through 1968, a year of turmoil, and trying to predict what life would be like today. If you were living back then would you have predicted that by 2010, three intrepid explorers would be paragliding across the Himalayas, sharing their experiences and tracking their progress using little more than an iPhone? That is what Brad Sander, Antoine Laurens and Mike Laengle are doing at the moment. Two weeks into an six week long Himalayan Odyssey you can follow their live progress and blogs here We are now not only able to speak to anyone anywhere in the world 24/7 but we can use our phones to track our position using GPS and relay the information realtime back to followers around the globe. 1968 may not have resulted in the second French Revolution but it did result in a massive social and technological revolution that few could’ve imagined.

   Send article as PDF to

Airport security is a sham

My team and I travel a lot. We have literally millions of air miles between us over the past decade. And we all hate airports and airlines. We mainly hate them because they lie to you. It can’t be that difficult to keep passengers up to date with what is happening when things don’t go according to plan. And “the flight is delayed due to operational reasons” means absolutely nothing at all – and they know it! But that’s another thought for another day.

Today I want to moan about the security controls in place at airports around the world. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent, and I get paid to come up with mental frameworks that make sense of the world for other people. But airport security baffles my brain.

If you really wanted to, you can get pretty much anything onto a plane. The controls in place could be easily circumvented by anyone who travels more than once a month. If you don’t believe me, then read the wonderful article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in which he spent a number of months showing how bad airport security actually is. Priceless stuff!

He proves what I have often thought – that airport security is much more about making people feel that “something is being done” rather than actually doing anything useful. Hugo Rifkind in a recent Spectator magazine article goes further and suggests that “airport security is a giant exercise in arse covering – and it doesn’t work, obviously” (and that’s just the title of the article!).

Well, yes. Obviously. The new short hand for this is: #fail

It would be nice if some sanity prevailed somewhere, sometime and we got back to rational and useful security sometime soon. I doubt it, unfortunately. But I do live in hope.

   Send article as PDF to

Cars that talk to each other – the future of road safety and driving

Since seeing a presentation by Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM on “Tweetjects” – objects that tweet. It’s not just tweeting though. The promise of “augmented reality” is that objects around us will be able to capture, store, transmit and even analyse the data associated with them. Think about it – every object you can see around you has some data that might be useful (is the front door locked? how long has light bulb got to go before it burns out and needs replacing? how warm is that bath water?).

The most obvious next step is to put sensors into everything. Well, everything from which data might be useful. But a few steps beyond that is getting these objects to analyse their own data and do something useful for it – especially interacting directly with other objects.

The best example of the potential for this is when motor cars can communicate directly with each other, and with the world around them. And then make driving decisions based on this information. Volkswagen is one company putting quite a lot of resources into this concept. C3World (Connected Cars in a Connected World) is one of VW’s partners in this, and their website is very interesting. An extract from the front page:

In the future, cars will be ever more intricately networked with the flows of data that surround us. Vehicles will communicate with each other to provide drivers and passengers with information that is relevant to safety and which enhances comfort and convenience. This could be a hazard warning about a broken-down vehicle on the planned route, but it could also be navigation instructions to the nearest vacant car park, the current calendar of events in the city you are driving to, or a list of music tracks copied onto the portable MP3 player the day before. The basis for this is the robust and secure wireless transmission of information within the vehicle and between the vehicle and its environment.

PopSci has also reported on this recently, taking the concept to accident avoidance and navigation aids. That’s a great start, but so much more is possible using these concepts!

   Send article as PDF to

British Airways cabin crew on strike – how to strike back!

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I hope you’re expecting a calm analysis of yesterday’s announcement of a 12 day strike of British Airways cabin crew, effectively grounding the airline over the busy Christmas holiday season (remember schools only break up this coming Friday in the UK, so the holidays are for two weeks starting this weekend). Well, you’re going to be disappointed. As frequent travelers, all of us at TomorrowToday tend to lose our rag with airlines and airports. I am normally a calm individual, proud of being unflappable. But put me in an airport, and somehow the red mist descends…

So, here is what I can’t understand.

The cabin crew are going on strike because they’re upset. Their strike is designed is to “hurt management”, which means “to reduce company profits”. They say that they do not want to hurt customers. This is complete nonsense. If they wanted to hurt profits, they would announce a strike for at least three months in advance. There are very few people who have not already booked and paid for their flights over the next month. So, yes, BA will have to give refunds, but actually they will save money, since there will be massively reduced operational costs. The biggest losers here are not management, but the customers. And most of those are families, hard hit by the recession of the past year, who have scraped and saved up for a holiday abroad. They will lose not only their airfare, but may have to forfeit the holiday and the costs of hotels, cars, etc. And BA management will bu unhurt.

So, the cabin crews must not try that line on me. Their goal is disruption and chaos. The outcome will be heartache and pain.

… Continue Reading

   Send article as PDF to

Who owns the moon?

This is not a frivolous question. China is making great strides towards a presence in space – as is India. Russia, the UK, the EU and the USA are already there. And it’s not all about national pride and the “because it’s there” motivation. It is highly likely that there are some very useful and very valuable minerals on the moon. And right now, it could very well be a “first come, first served” scenario for their usage. Oh, and let’s not forget that Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also in the mix and should soon have the ability to launch and relaunch space vehicles at will. So, this will soon be a government and private interest issue.

Can you own property on the moon? This question may have to be answered sooner than you think.

Earlier in 2009, a NASA probe crashed into the moon’s surface and discovered frozen water – they claim lots of it. This makes establishing a base on the moon a lot more feasible. There are lots of reasons someone might want a moon base. There would be military benefits and scientific ones, too. But most important, there would be commercial ones too. There are some amazing mining opportunities on the moon, including huge quantities of helium 3 which could be used to generate clean energy on earth.

… Continue Reading

   Send article as PDF to

Barrie is the Jozi Town Crier

Thanks to our PR company (SimonSays Communications) I’m the Johannesburg Town Crier.

It’s been a fun and interesting role to get into. One day you’re a consultant around future trends and people and the next day you’re getting your head around what it means to be a Town Crier? Feels like a large responsibility. Especially in a ‘town’ as big and diverse as our ‘little Jozi’. What to post, where to find it, how to go about it, what to write, not write. how to be fun and interesting?

I even get rated by those that follow the feed on Twitter, and imagine if I don’t do a good job I get ‘voted’ right outta there. I’m certainly getting a feeling for public office in this new role : )

The people behind it are Happn.in and describe the service as ‘Twitter with a local focus’. In South Africa there’s currently a Town Crier for Jozi and the Mother City. And then there’s a scattering of Town Criers around the world.

Some stats around Happn.in:

Happn.in gives Twitter a local focus. For each Happn.in city, there is:

• A current list of Local Twitter Trends
• A Local Twitter Feed, in which locals can send and receive information to each other.
• A Local Town Crier, a person trusted by the community to tweet interesting, relevant information once a day.

There are approximately 283,492 people following Happn.in in 110 cities around the world.

There is also a general Twitter user, @happn_in, from which updates on the project will be sent.

And some background:

Happn.in began in early 2009 in response to the rapid growth of Twitter. We saw that Twitter was becoming a valuable source of information, but the interesting content was getting buried. We started Happn.in to pull some of this useful information out of the noise, specifically, the answer to the question ‘What’s going on near me?’

Happn.in was built with the long-term idea that localized communities can benefit from Twitter if they can find and talk to each other. We will continue to update the site with features that aid this goal.

Of course anyone can post info about Jozi by simply adding the hashtag (#hi_johan) and you can get the Twitter feed and follow here.

It’s been good for me to work at getting my head around a broader Jozi happn.in community in order to put as diverse a spread of stuff I possibly can. I’m only a few days in, and hopefully improving all the time? Time will tell and so will the votes : )

   Send article as PDF to

Vacation 2023 – I don’t want to go

I just read a fairly depressing forecast (from FastCompany) for the future of vacations. Specifically the year 2023. It’s based on the fuller article from ‘Forum for the Future‘ where they’ve developed four scenarios for 2023 in the tourism world (specifically the UK). A brief summary of the four from the FastCompany article:

In the “Boom and Burst” scenario, economies prosper, advances in air travel make vacations cheap and easy, and fuel efficiency has allowed the industry to stay on target with carbon emissions regulations. But there’s a catch–the massive increase in tourism leads to overcrowding in many destinations and the degradation of wilderness areas.

The more dire “Divided Disquiet” scenario imagines that a “toxic combination of devastating climate change impacts, violent wars over scarce resources and social unrest has created an unstable and fearful world. This has made traveling overseas an unattractive proposition,” so most people just stay home. In the “Price and Privilege” scenario, high oil prices make travel the exclusive domain of the rich, while the “Carbon Clampdown” scenario imagines that the government has regulated climate change and educated the public so thoroughly on the carbon price of travel that most people only want to take “ethical vacations” to volunteer or learn about other cultures.

The reality of vacationing in 2023 will probably be a combination of these scenarios, with high oil prices, disappearing wilderness, carbon quotas, and advances in air travel (i.e. biofuel-powered planes).

It does help give some perspective as to why wealthy people around the world are currently buying up coastal properties and game reserves. Simply because, in the future these investments will be worth massive amounts of money.

To download the full 2023 tourism report go here.

   Send article as PDF to

Space Tourism is 18 months away

Last Thursday, Sir Richard Branson updated shareholders in Virgin Group on “Virgin Galactic”, the company that has taken $200,000 deposits from over 200 people for seats on the first commercial near-orbit flight. However, his announcement indicated that the first flight would be reserved for his family (an a few friends and some journalists, too, no doubt), and that it is expected to happend within about 18 months.

In addition to these tourist flights, Virgin Galactic will also put satellites into space, train NASA crews and is investigating orbital hotels and tours of the moon. Anyone who says this won’t happen clearly has never heard of Richard Branson (or the Wright Brothers for that matter)! A few people alive today are old enough to remember when cars were considered a luxury for the truly rich and famous. How long will it be before the middle class can afford space tourism? Probably in my lifetime, I would have thought.

The “mother ship” that will launch the actual space flights: VMS Eve (see photo), named after Sir Richard’s mum, got its debut in Oshkosh, Wisc., this past July. And SpaceShipTwo, the suborbital plane for space tourism, will be unveiled on December 7, Branson says. He added: “What started off as a dream to send people just for the excitement of a voyage to look back and marvel at Earth has turned into a business.”

   Send article as PDF to

Don’t mess with your customers

My good mate, Steve Simpson, creator of UGRs (unwritten ground rules – still one of the cleverest management tools I’ve ever seen!), just posted this story on his blog. The new world of work is going to filled with this type of story – especially, I fear to say, in the airline industry where everyone blames everyone else for everything…

Remarkable development in the voice of the unhappy customer

Technology has just enabled a remarkable shift in the voice of the unhappy customer.

In March 2008, the musical group ‘Sons of Maxwell’ were travelling on United Airlines to Nebraska for a one week tour. Just prior to departure, one of the band members heard a woman seated behind them say ‘My God, they’re throwing guitars around’. Sure enough, as they looked out the window, they could see the baggage handlers literally throwing the band’s equipment.

On arrival, the band discovered that a $3500 Taylor guitar had indeed been broken.

That was the beginning of a long saga of buck passing and avoidance. After nine months, an employee from United provided one too many ‘no’s’ in response to accepting responsibility for the damage. On hearing this, band member Dave Carroll promised to make three songs about the experience and post them on the internet.

As I write this, the song ‘United Breaks Guitars’ has been viewed by over 3 million people. Yes, you read correctly, over 3 million views!!

You can view the video on YouTube by clicking here
There’s even a blog that explains the whole saga which is here.

This is a remarkable example of how unhappy customers can now be heard!

Source

   Send article as PDF to

Visit Johannesburg – go on, you’ll love it!!

I may live in the cold and clammy climes of London, England (one of the world’s greatest cities). But I was born and brought up in Johannesburg, the city of trees (more than any other urban area in the world), afternoon thunderstorms (the most number of air to ground lightning strikes of any urban area in the world), and Africa’s economic heartbeat. I love cities. I love Johannesburg most of all.

It’s a dangerous place, to be sure. You can’t be stupid, and you have to stay awake. But if you do, it’s one of the greatest places in the world. Check out a previous post about this. But, don’t believe me. Jeremy Clarkson, BBC journalist and famous host of the greatest car show on earth (Top Gear), has had his say on the city of my birth.

From The Sunday Times
March 1, 2009
I dare you to visit Johannesburg, the city for softies
It’s the least frightening place on earth, yet everyone speaks of how many times they’ve been killed that day

Every city needs a snappy one-word handle to pull in the tourists and the investors. So, when you think of Paris, you think of love; when you think of New York, you think of shopping; and when you think of London – despite the best efforts of new Labour to steer you in the direction of Darcus Howe – you think of beefeaters and Mrs Queen.
… Continue Reading

   Send article as PDF to

A Lesson in managing (potentially) irate customers

Last Tuesday was my busiest so far this year. Departing home by taxi just after 4am, I took the 5.27am train from Paddington to Taunton, arriving by 9am to set up for an opening keynote. After lunch, I was back at the station, heading back to London to lecture at the London Business School. I was due into Paddington at about 4pm.

The train was late into Taunton, due to a fault. We were assured it was fixed and sped off on the fast service, due to stop only in Reading. But an hour into the journey, the train came to a stop in the middle of nowhere. And there we sat. A long story short is that a freight train had broken down, blocking the tracks and reducing the national rail system to South West England to a parking lot. We sat and sat. Then moved a bit. Then sat some more.

Then, we made a stop at a tiny station, Bedwyn, I think it was. After half n hour, we were asked to disembark. Our train was pulled out of service and we were boarded onto the next train that came along a few minutes later. I can only guess they were trying to reduce the number of trains on the system.

But, now for the point of my story…

Sharing our train and equally distressed by the situation was the Chairman of the train company. He was brilliant. He kept us informed, apologised and later he literally opened the bar. He told us that he wanted the buffet car cleared out before we arrived in Paddington and that the cash register had been put away. He then personally walked up and down the train dispensing wine, chatting to passengers and creating great goodwill for First Great Western trains.

Good on him! A bad situation well handled.

The only question I have is whether we would have received the same treatment had the Chairman not been on board. Was he just following company policy? Was he MAKING policy? Or was he just doing something only he could do as Chairman?

   Send article as PDF to