Those That Live By The Shredder Die By The Shredder
It is often said that everything comes to him who waits. The partial lifting of the so-called banker’s, Fred Goodwin‘s super-injunction, shows that no matter how tight you jam the lid on a can of beans, eventually the pressure builds and it blows up in your face.
There are some choice headlines.
- Daily Mail – Sir Fred, adultery and the public interest.
- Independent – Goodwin’s affair at bank exposed after peer breaks gagging order
- Daily Mirror – No good in these gags
- The Sun – Fred the Bed
There’s a lot more.
The tone is set by this from the Daily Mail.
While RBS was undergoing the biggest collapse in British corporate history, he was busy carrying out an extra-marital affair with a senior colleague involved in the strategic direction of the bank.
Truly, there can be no doubting the public interest in disclosing Sir Fred’s conduct. The collapse of RBS, under his control, led to a £45billion bailout by taxpayers.
Thousands upon thousands lost their jobs and businesses in the financial devastation which followed.
If Fred had had an affair with a Page 3 bimbo, that wouldn’t have mattered so much to the bank and in the end UK taxpayers. The tabloids might have made us laugh as they did years ago with Ron Halpern, a long forgotten businessman in the 1960s or 1970s, but because he had an affair with a senior executive, it meant that his crazy policies were able to get through board and other meetings. I had problems years ago with a company, where I served on a technical committee that had a husband and wife on it. We all had to convince two people who slept together of the correct course of action. It was not easy and the company suffered.
Two people having a relationship in an organisation is rarely a good idea!
Fred Goodwin was knighted in the 2004 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for his services to banking. So at least we can’t blame that one totally on Prudence, as he wasn’t Prime Minister until four years later. It will be interesting to see in twenty or so years time, when the details of Sir Fred’s knighthood are released, what dicussions took place on his suitability for such an award.
If ever there was a case for a knighthood to be taken away, then Sir Fred is at the top of the list.
Responsible Lending
If I walk up the Kingsland Road in Dalston, the road is crawling with money shops, pay day loan companies.pawnbrokers and all of the other dodgy lenders that proliferate these days.
So when someone who works in finance, said there was a thing called The Lending Code, I thought I’d take a look.
It is the sort of worthy document produced by regulators and the like that is manna from heaven to all those dodgy lenders down the Kingsland Road and others who shark loans with large amounts of advertising, sponsorships of Premiership football teams and sometimes with door-to-door salesmen with big boots.
I always remember a story told by a respectable finance guy, who said that when the government restricted the length of time you could take out a loan for and if it was for something like a car, then you could only lend a percentage, it was a licence for finance companies to literally print money. If everybody sticks to the Lending Code, then the costs to borrowers will go up, banks will make higher profits and many will be effectively removed from the list of borrowers. A lot will remove themselves because they won’t be bothered to read the paperwork.
When I was in Greece, I thought I might stay a bit longer and in that case, I would have needed more cash, as Greece is very much a cash society. So I used the Internet to login to my Nationwide account and increase the overdraft. In the end, I came home and haven’t used the limit. But would the Lending Code with all its provisions on overdrafts make such a simple transaction more difficult?
What is really needed is a plain English Lending Code. When I was at ICI, we used to write and distribute flyers about the jobs we did with our computer. They were successful in getting new business and this was because they were read. And why were they read? Because they were a single sheet of A4 paper.
So The Lending Code as implimented by a bank say, should be a series of web or A4 pages related to each area of lending. If it can’t fit on one sheet, then The Lending Code is wrong.
Only in that way could we have a code that could be understood by the man or woman on the Dalston Omnibus! These are the people we need to protect from the lenders. Not those like me that sit in the middle of the lending market and only use it, when they have a well-thought out need.
I like Zopa and I’ve met a few of their borrowers, who seem very happy with the way Zopa does business. In a way, you can almost class Zopa as a group of people coming together to lend money to others. Isn’t that supposed to be what building societies and credit unions were and are about?
In a way though, Zopa, although it is unregulated by the FSA, acts like a mainstream lender, in that it does proper identity and credit checks and gets tough with those that default on their payments. I think, that it might be unique in that it allows borrowers to chsnge their payment day or repay the loan early without penalties, when perhaps their cicumstances change. Both these features, should be in The Lending Code. I can’t even find the word early in The Lending Code.
So yet again the bureaucrats are creating work for themselves in trying to protect the unprotectable.
Industrial Swearing
With all this talk about swearing, brought out by Wayne Rooney, I must repeat this story, which I heard when I worked at ICI in the early 1970s.
ICI had employed their first female instrument engineer. She didn’t suffer any sexism, but she did feel that when she was working with an electrician or fitter on a chemical plant, there was a certain coolness between them.
One day, whilst she was working with an electrician installing an instrument, she dropped something heavy on her foot and did what most of us would do. She swore loudly and very industrially.
The electrician then put his arm round her and said, “Does that mean we can all swear now, madam?”
Interns
There has been a lot of talk lately in how those with power and money have got their children work experience, which is of the highest class and out of the reach of those without privelege and wealth.
It has always been thus.
Take my example.
My father was a successful letterpress printer in Wood Green. He employed half a dozen people and we lived comfortably in the days before letterpress was replaced by offset litho. Much of his work was for a company called Enfield Rolling Mills, that as the name suggests rolled metals into something useful. In their case it was non-ferrous metals, like copper, bronze and aluminium, which were turned into bars, sheets and cables.
So when I got my place at Liverpool University to read electronics, and I needed some work experience, he decided to do something about it. His business wasn’t that healthy too, and he had told me that, he wouldn’t be able to find me work for the summer.
In his usual manner, he started at the top and phoned John Grimston, the Earl of Verulam, who was the boss of his largest customer.
They found me a place in their electronics laboratory, where I had my first lesson in controlling processes. I also learned a lot about industry, health and safety, the various trades and their unions and of course life, which gave me a lot of rich anecdotes I use to this day. Only today, I related to my physio, a story about lady cricketers gleaned from one of my colleagues.
To say that internship, as we’d call it today, changed my life, would be an understatement.
But I got it because my fsther knew someone with influence. And also because he never felt anybody too grand to ask for a favour.
Punk Finance
This term caught my eye on the business pages of The Times.
Apparently it’s all about getting people and communities to take over businesses. The best example is FC United.
Apparently, the man begind this successful venture, Kevin Jaquiss, has been asked to help with solving the problem of the Royal Mail.
Up The Organisation
Sometimes we forget those in the past, who did things well and whose words should be read by anybody, in government, management or business.
Such a person was Robert Townsend, who wrote the classic book on management, Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits (J-B Warren Bennis Series)
The book has now been republished and is probably more relevant today, than when he wrote it over thirty years ago.
Why SMEs Don’t Get a Look In
David Cameron is reported as saying that he will open up more contracts to small and medium sized companies.
But it won’t happen, as these sort of contracts don’t fit bureaucrats thought processes.
As an example, a government agency found that my software Daisy would be ideal for an application. The cost would be a couple of thousand pounds for a special system. But as they were dealing with contracts in millions, they couldn’t find a way to buy the software or pay me for the consultancy. In the end I walked away from it. I suspect that in the end they did nothing or spent several millions with one of the major consultancy firms to do a job that was worth five grand at most.
As a contrary example, a division of a major British company found that Daisy was useful to their researchers. So they put it on their approved software list and allowed those who wanted it to buy it with credit cards and then bill it on expenses. I sold many copies that way, just because the accounts department at this company wanted their people to get the work done.
And then there is the question of bribes. Not actual suitcases of the folding stuff, but big companies can afford to have things like days at sporting events and ask the purchasers along. Small and medium sized companies can’t afford that and anyway they have more important things to do, like keeping their business solvent.
Gossip About Polythene
I’m putting in this post, as it was just office gossip with a guy I shared an office with at ICI Mond Division in Runcorn, but feel it ought to be recorded before I forget it again.
Bert Cross was ICI Mond’s infra-red analysis expert and he was a man who’d worked for the company from well before the Second World War. I remember one classic tale about the visit of the then Lord Melchett to the laboratories, where Bert then worked in Northwich and the Lord’s meeting with a researcher, who let’s say didn’t like the idea of capitalism. Whenever, I hear the current Lord Melchett mentioned, I chuckle at Bert’s tale.
Bert also told how when polythene was discovered at ICI’s laboratories by accident, when they were applying high pressures to ethylene gas. They found this waxy substance in the experiments. but they had no idea what to do with it. One idea that was current, was that it might be added to candles to stop them bending. In the end it was polythene’s excellent electrical insulation properties combined with the need to develop better radar systems in the Second World War, that were to prove polythene’s earliest substantial use.
In the early days, it was thought that polythene was a perfect polymer, with no cross linking or imperfections. Bert disproved this using infra-red analysis and always claimed he was nearly fired for his work.
Later when I worked at ICI Plastics Division, I didn’t actually work on polythene, but I worked with others who did.
At the time, ICI made low-density polythene and this was an amazing process with high-pressures, whirling shafts to mix it all and bearings that were lubricated by molten polythene. It was engineering at its most difficult and best. The section I worked for, had actually applied computer control to two plants, using IBM 1800 computers.
At the time, one of ICI’s products was a high-grade cable-grade polythene used where a high-degree of electrical insulation was required. A lot of this product went to Tupperware, as it made the containers look perfect.
The Anonymous Widower 