Welcome to Planet of the Apes!

I've often regarded the long-running film and TV franchise 'Planet of the Apes' as the metaphor it was intended to be for the perils of atrophying human intelligence and wisdom.

It's based on the 1963 satirical novel 'La Planete des Singes' by French author Pierre Boulle, which highlighted the failings of human nature and mankind's over-reliance on technology.  It depicted a faraway world in which animal like, speechless humans had, through complacency, allowed themselves to become subjugated, hunted and enslaved by intelligent apes.  Amongst other things one can see in it an obvious metaphor for Edmund Burke's famous saying which I've quoted in previous blogs: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

There are many topical examples in the news, and I've experienced some in my business and personal life recently.  Complacency is indeed a huge peril, perhaps the greatest one of all to long-term human survival and happiness.

• A 28-year old (scarily young) deluded narcissist with a known, troublesome medical history which prevented him from achieving his heart's desire to captain long-haul flights apparently decides to fly a commercial airliner into a mountain at 500 km/h, taking 149 poor souls with him, stunning the world, and permanently destroying hundreds of lives, including his own family's.  Yes, realistically it could not have been foreseen, but there were ample reasons why he should not have been flying an airliner nonetheless.  No doubt we'll hear in due course that as well as seeking everlasting global notoriety (already widely reported) he also intended to punish his employers, and/or his former girlfriend, and/or his parents for dealing him such a rotten hand of life cards, i.e.being born into one of the safest, richest, most civilised countries in the world, without obvious disability or suffering, and with a strong intellect and superb life chances.

• A talented, intelligent, maverick but arrogant and utterly selfish, anti-social journalist (I've heard 2nd hand stories from people who've dealt with him personally) who deliberately courts fame and controversy by being a boorish, obnoxious, insulting thug in front of a global TV audience, thus making the BBC £100s of millions annually, finally oversteps a 'line' after years of incidents by assaulting one of his colleagues and subjecting him to unwarranted, prolonged, extreme abuse in a hotel they were filming at 20 miles up the road from where I live because the chef had gone home and there was no hot food at 10pm in the evening.  He is suspended from work pending the outcome of an investigation by his employer. His friend the UK Prime Minister inadvisedly professes support for him, and the Prime Minister's 10 year old daughter reputedly (and one hopes jokingly) supports a petition of 1 million to have him reinstated by saying she'll "go on hunger strike" (a severe case of anorexia clarksona?)  The BBC's internal investigation proves assault (the police are now examining the case) and the Director General, who confesses he is a fan of the journalist himself, is apparently subjected to a death threat when he makes the only decision available, to fire him - see http://bbc.in/1xK7iw8.  Puerile BBC interviewers leave their brains (what brains?) at the door and suggest that he and the BBC are over-reacting and have lost the plot.

• A police investigation gathers pace into increasing reports of child abuse and subsequent cover-up by politicians, celebrities, senior police officers and clergymen in Central London in the 1970s and 1980s.  Already several celebrities are behind bars and others, now dead, are disgraced as a result of the unfolding UK child abuse scandal.  Informed sources tell the media we are looking at a Pandora's Box of depraved behaviour by people who considered themselves above the law and thus covered up for each other.  I cannot conceive of anything more insidiously, cynically evil than this - it makes my blood boil.

• The police officer in charge of the stadium at the appalling 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield in which 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death finally admits to the latest official inquiry 26 years later that he panicked, lost his head, did not consider the impact of his decisions, that they caused the loss of 96 lives, and that subsequently he and his superiors in South Yorkshire Police systematically covered up their mistakes by submitting false statements, requiring fellow officers who witnessed the terrible events to do the same, and leaking to the media a false story that drunken Liverpool fans had caused the tragedy.  He apologises publicly to the families of the dead, many of whom are in tears in court listening to his unexpected confession.  His life since 1989 appears to have been decimated by the trauma of what he is responsible for - he was retired early from the police on grounds of ill-health and has suffered regular, serious bouts of depression.

• I visited a close friend this week in another part of the country.  She and her husband, whom I introduced to each other over 20 years ago, set up a vibrant new community church last year in a school in their local town after a small coterie of nominal Christians used a procedural ruse to expel them from the mainstream church her husband led, which had been growing successfully with young families under his (and her) dynamic, inspired (though by no means perfect) leadership for 10 years.  The national leadership of the denomination in question were unhappy about it but were apparently powerless to intervene because the organisation's rules embed authority at local level.  The main reason the established church is on its knees in the UK is not because the country has become substantially more atheist.  It is because it is largely discredited due to the out-of-touch, complacent (that word again), self-serving people who control it locally and in blissful stupidity think it is there to serve them and their cliques, not to make a positive difference by giving practical aid to anyone in the community who needs it, regardless of their faith or lack of it, and without proselytising them. These people have truly lost the plot, and whether or not it exists there is no place for them in Heaven! 

In two blogs last November - How the brain works and why you should know and Why selflessness is good business - I described the 4 level hierarchical structure of the human brain captured in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics (NMT) and derived from studying how the human brain has evolved over millions of years since we were.....guess what.....apes!!  The juxtaposition and inextricable interconnectivity of our primitive brains (brain stems, at the rear top of our necks) and neocortexes (upper brains) led me to use the analogy of a 6 year old child who has found the keys to Dad's Ferrari and is intent on taking it for a spin, with inevitable, catastrophic consequences.  The challenges we face, individually and collectively, are beautifully captured in Dr Steve Peters' 'The Chimp Paradox'.  Dr Peters has become well-known in the UK in recent years for his work as a sports psychologist with the likes of the world-beating British Cycling Team, snooker world champion Ronnie O'Sullivan and more recently Liverpool FC and now the England soccer team.  He describes the battle we each have to fight with our 'inner chimp', aka the irrational, oft-threatened primitive brain, and he trains people to deal with it successfully.  The likes of Andreas Lubitz and Jeremy Clarkson could have done with his input.

Irrespective of your personal beliefs, and to be blunt no-one can prove the existence of a higher intelligence (God, Allah, Yahweh, whatever) or its benevolence (which seems to me on the basis of available evidence to be seriously delusional, wishful thinking), many of the biggest problems humanity is currently facing arise because we complacently believe we don't need to follow what I might characterise as 'the maker's instructions', in other words the essential, pretty much universally shared principles of goodness and self-sacrificial love.  THEY WORK, and they tend to keep us out of trouble. As it stands though, watch out - the intelligent apes are coming, in the guise of narcissistic humans!

My business life is now informed by a detailed understanding of how the Top 1%, most enduringly successful businesses all swim against the tide by following humanity's 'maker's instructions'.  And do you know what, it's the best fun I've ever had - I heartily commend it!!

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this article. If you find it helpful please click on 'Like' and also share it using the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ button. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton

How to get people to do what you want

"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character.  But if you must be without one, be without the strategy."  General Norman Schwarzkopf

As a student of leadership whose passion for it has intensified over many years I'm increasingly struck by its parallels with parenting.  And as father ('Pop') for over 14 years to an adopted son who turned 19 this week I find them even more striking.

Good leadership, like good parenting, requires self-sacrifice, love, wisdom, patience, resolve, humility, and the ability to learn from frequent errors.  It is a lifelong quest, not a destination, and it is the most basic role of any human being.  As I blogged last September great leadership is fine art, not painting by numbers.

Poor leadership, like poor parenting, is characterised by selfishness, neglect, bullying, intimidation, manipulation, sniping criticism, the portrayal of self (inadvertently perhaps) as controlling and all-knowing, an inability to learn from mistakes leading to their constant, needless repetition, and often a compulsive need to belittle others to puff up one's own fragile self-esteem.  Poor leaders are often unhappy people - fearful and insecure, though they may conceal it well.

As I used to say years ago of an admittedly talented narcissist, one of several I had the misfortune to work for!: "He's like a tennis coach.  The first thing he does is take your game apart................er, that's it!!"

Great leaders are, at least when it matters, at ease in their own skin.  Above all they are self-aware. That breeds humility, but they also have keen insight into their ability to make a positive difference and they aren't afraid to do so.

Like great parents, great leaders are inspirational and utterly transform other people's lives for the better.  They are die-in-a-ditch, princpled people who infuse others with confidence.  They can be in sharp conflict with one another - witness Churchill and Ghandi, Montgomery and Rommel, or Lincoln and Robert E Lee for example.  There are many examples in sport of competing coaches, or competing captains, who are both great leaders.

Sadly in 'real life' great leaders often suffer, and sometimes pay the ultimate price - Friday night's brutal execution of Boris Nemtsov within spitting distance of the Kremlin in Moscow is a painful reminder of that horrible truth.

However, like great parents the majority work anonymously in the background and don't seek the limelight or take the credit.  They are more than content to enjoy the unfolding results of their long-term labours, in the form of the happiness, performance and fulfilment of their charges. Or put another way:

"By their fruits ye shall know them".

In stark contrast are the managers.

For over 20 years the BBC has produced the peak time TV show Room 101 in which celebrities talk about their pet hates and send them to outer darkness - Room 101 - a prison cell for which they throw away the key.  I'd love to consign the words management and manager to Room 101.

In the spirit of the 'Stop Doing Lists' of the Top 1% companies in Jim Collins' Good to Great, and with tongue only partially in cheek, this would be a major contribution to organisational excellence! And in the spirit of Jardin's Principle (see Focus - it's easy, right?!) it would simplify organisations wonderfully, focus minds, and prevent humungous time-, energy- and life-wasting for millions.  After all, as Peter Drucker put it:

"There's nothing quite as soul-destroying as doing with great efficiency that which one should not be doing in the first place!" 

I would therefore replace the word management with the word bureaucracy, and manager with bureaucrat. My wife says this sounds perjorative (contemptuous/disapproving) - I say "Exactly - it's meant to!" So instead of Sales Manager, Operations Manager and Technical Manager I would have Sales Bureaucrat, Operations Bureaucrat and Technical Bureaucrat, etc. Finance Manager would of course be Finance Bureaucrat, and Accountant would be Accounting Bureaucrat!  Only teasing guys, and I'm privileged to have associated over the years with a good selection who defy this particular stereotype!

I'm not alone.  There are many great books and research programmes that support the basic premise behind this unashamedly irreverant take on the world of management.  See 'How Google Works' (Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg - 2014) for example - if this sort of thinking is good enough for Google to create over $50 billion in revenues in 15 years from a standing start it's good enough for me.

"So what?", I hear you say.  Where is this going?

In last week's blog Don't get ill in the UK!!! I described the Dickensian standard of medical care my father-in-law has experienced in recent weeks as he waits for a hip replacement.  It has long been de rigeur in the UK to decry the at times breathtaking dysfunctionality and self-defeating stupidity of the National Health Service (NHS).  Yet there's an almost hysterical resistance to creative, common sense thinking about changes to the NHS that would benefit everyone, most of all patients, for goodness sake!  Oh yes, sorry, did anyone tell you they're real human beings, not inanimate widgets to be processed through the system??

My father-in-law and I talked today about a perfect example of NHS idiocy.  As a diabetic he has suffered two hypoglycemic episodes (abnormally low blood sugar) in the last 2 days, whilst in hospital.  He told me the food is very poor, unappetising, often not properly cooked, and made from poor quality ingredients because of course the over-riding focus is cost.  Choosing external contractors on cost is somehow not deemed as "creeping privatisation", whereas more effective solutions are. The hyporcrisy and closed-mindedness is infuriating.

My father-in-law knows his own body and manages his diabetes very successfully when he's at home. In hospital he is finding it difficult to do this since the diet isn't geared to his diabetes. Sorry.....did I hear that correctly?   He's in.......hospital, did you say.......and the diet is not geared to his diabetes?!

He and I swapped ideas for improving hospital food.  He suggested providers of airline food could do a better job.  Ever the entrepreneur I suggested patients could pay for their own food.  I can hear the sharp intakes of breath from NHS true believers - what a sacrilegeous suggestion!  Surely I must be some rabid, facist, free marketeer?!

OK, now you've vented, think about it logically (and no, I'm not, by the way).  Patients would be paying for their own food if they were at home, within their own budget, so why should it be free in hospital and thus inevitably farmed out to the lowest cost bidder??  Why not offer a range of foods that could be brought in from outside, ranging from budget to gourmet level, and give patients the choice? Indeed why not offer a whole raft of other services to patients that help them to feel they are still in control of their lives, not some helpless piece of meat left in the lap of the gods, at the mercy of an incompetent system?!

This brings me to the crux of the argument.  In study after study after study you find that the highest performing organisations in all walks of life do exactly the same 5 things:

1. They devote themselves to the end-user of their products or services, in this case the patient.  Google's astonishing success is built on this principle - read 'How Google works'.
2. They pursue an inspiring non-financial purpose and they do not compromise on it in order to achieve financial targets, whether on sales, profits or costs. 
3. They focus on effectiveness in striving for the non-financial core purpose and meeting the needs of the end-users, not on efficiency. (They learn from Peter Drucker's maxim quoted earlier.)
4. They measure the performance of the whole system in delivering value to the end-user, in this case again the patient. By focusing performance measurement on the end-user they highlight all of the really big inefficiencies, which occur at the boundaries between different parts of the organisation along the so-called value chain, or value stream.  And so they dramatically outperform the pedants who steadfastly refuse to see this logic, and who tend to be.......bureaucrats rather than leaders.
5. They engineer the entire organisational model to gradually deliver more and more value for end-users and to systematically eliminate waste, classified as anything not adding value for end-users. This strategy was originally called the Toyota Production System and it turned Toyota into the No 1 car company in the world.  It is now called Lean Thinking, but is commonly totally misunderstood and incompetently applied, including by the NHS, to improve efficiency for 'internal' stakeholders rather than effectiveness for end-users.

Should this all seem rather theoretical I conclude by offering a compelling personal case study that it really does work, which you'll find in full on my LinkedIn profile.

In late-1999 I was asked on behalf of the Chief Financial Officer of £4 billion turnover British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL), to undertake a rather unusual and challenging assignment at their infamous Sellafield site on the North West coast of England.  BNFL bore many of the hallmarks of the NHS - a large, complex, essentially public sector organisation run by bureaucrats and unchallengeable black art technocrats, in this case nuclear engineers rather than consultant doctors. Like the NHS the costs to the UK taxpayer of the nuclear industry were slowly, inexorably spiralling out of control.

Sellafield

My 'Mission Impossible' was to come up with a way of quantifying the financial value of decommissioning and waste management at Sellafield.  It is the largest industrial site in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe. It contains dozens of streams of nuclear waste, some coming from the decommissioning of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s nuclear weapons programmes and spin-off civilian nuclear power programmes, and some from plants which reprocess fuel for British nuclear power stations and for overseas customers, principally the Japanese.

Reprocessimg was viewed as highly profitable by BNFL managers (bureaucrats and technocrats), whereas decommissioning and waste processing were deemed necessary evils, to some extent distractons, paid for by the UK taxpayer, who would of course go on picking up the tab ad infinitum.

By applying the five principles above I created a financial performance measurement system that met the brief extraordinarily well. far better than any of us could have imagined.  The CFO, a very experienced senior accountant who had worked in a tightly financially controlled large corporate (plc) environment previously, described it as the best measurement system of its type he'd ever seen. By making the true financial picture starkly visible in a way that non-finance people could immediately understand it completely transformed both the operational and the strategic realities.  It broke down barriers along the value chain, leading to far greater effectiveness and efficicency, and it contributed to a complete restructuring of the nuclear industry. The UK Government broke up BNFL and formed a new public body - the Nuclear Decommissioning Agency - to oversee a strategic shift away from reprocessing to decommissioning.

A similar earth-shaking change is needed in the NHS.  It starts with the correct application of the 5 principles.  It's essentially the same change that CEO Dave Lewis is applying to turn around Tesco's fortunes (see How to make your company more resilient, Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you and Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?).

So how do you get people to do what you want?

• By acting like a selfless, nurturing parent, not a selfish, petty bureaucrat
• By focusing unequivocally not on internal targets, especially financial ones, but on the needs of others, first and foremost the end-users of your products or services.

As Norman Schwarzkopf so memorably put it, at the end of the day it's about CHARACTER, stupid, and it ALWAYS will be, whether individually or collectively, and on whatever scale you care to name. 

The evidence is out there in spades if you're willing to listen and learn.  Go for it!

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I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton