Saturday, 25 April 2015

Are 'political leaders' an oxymoron?!

Lambasting our politicians is a democratic sport - if they're stupid enough to stick their necks out we'll knock 'em down, since by definition they must all be lying, conniving, power-grabbing harlots, surely?!

Maybe we're the problem, not them?  Possibly we get the politicians we deserve if we don't take politics seriously? 

Are you willing and able to relinquish insecurities, tribal instincts and media brainwashing, and listen objectively to a provocative take on politics, using insights into the well-researched behaviour of Top 1% leaders and organisations?  

This blog gives my thoughts on the brutal realities of the political backdrop to the 2015 UK General Election.  Hopefully the observations are relevant elsewhere too.

The second part, Is voting a waste of time?, tackles a fundamental question and uses learning from the Top 1% to try to answer it: 

In the messy, complex, frustrating reality of 21st Century politics how should you vote?!

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Most political debate is infantile, tiresome hot air – it’s a wholly predictable Punch and Judy show.  It’s either this, OR it’s that, say the two main UK parties, as they bash each other over the head, simplistically distort and devalue each other’s contributions, mischievously fuel voters’ cynicism and mistrust of their opponents, and reduce everything to the lowest common denominator. It drives me nuts!
Politics is further discredited and undermined by political leaders’ unwillingness to admit mistakes or acknowledge uncomfortable truths.  The reason is that it’s a glorified popularity contest, and they are under extreme pressure to play to the crowd - the relatively narrow interest group(s) who support or bankroll them, and vast numbers of others who don’t understand the complex realities and want it expressed in baby talk, conveniently filtered for them through the prejudices of the journalists in their chosen tribal media.  This further devalues the debate and only serves to alienate intelligent voters – it’s a vicious circle.
The electorate as a whole are like sheep.  They basically do as they are told by the people they trust most to tell them what to do.  In their search for easy answers and a brave new (fairy tale) world where life is simple, straightforward and childlike, an increasingly large minority will vote this time for beguiling con men (and women) in distracting extremist or one issue parties who may well be conning themselves the most!  This is really scary.
The centrist portions of the Conservative and Labour Parties and the majority of the Liberal Democrat Party are far closer together than they are to the right wing of the Conservative Party or the left wing of the Labour Party.  British politics is crying out for a re-alignment in which the left wing of the Conservative Party breaks away and combines with the majority of the Liberal Democrat Party and elements of the right wing of the Labour Party to form a powerful centre grouping that could govern for years as a One Nation party if it played its cards intelligently (following Top 1% principles), which would include being visionary and inspiring, by the way, not purely pragmatic.  
Boy, do we need it right now!!
OK, but that’s not apparently going to happen anytime soon. Therefore we’re stuck with a Conservative Party constantly distracted and dragged towards the right, particularly over Europe and immigration, and a Labour Party continuing to dally with laudable but entirely impractical socialist ideals.  We have a Conservative Prime Minister who’s fairly competent and likeable in a well-meaning, doesn’t set the world on fire, smug, privileged, out-of-touch, public school sort of way, but who has consistently shown he lacks the bottle to talk to real voters (not halls filled with Conservative stooges), debate publicly with his opponents, or stand up to the conniving ideologues in his own party and LEAD from the centre. And we have a Leader of the Labour Party until recently ridiculed by his opponents and thought by many (including me) to woefully lack the qualities and experience to lead the country, who is now suddenly looking much more statesmanlike, but who, together with his party of too many inexperienced, naive idealists, represents an unwelcome hostage to fortune for the country, for multiple reasons.
History shows that nation states too often lurch from one political extreme to another in the cycle of elections, so they don’t get where they need to go as fast as they need to get there.  Exhausted and disillusioned electorates are taken in by politicians who promise change for change’s sake, i.e. change from the other lot who’ve gone before who are, by definition, a bunch of treacherous incompetents.  We keep starting from scratch and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, instead of building intelligently on what’s already there and ensuring there’s a steady hand on the tiller.  Whatever anyone tells you, politics is (too much) about emotion, not reason.  Our primitive brains are in charge - see How the brain works and why you should know.
The outcome of this UK General Election on 7th May is less predictable and more fraught with danger than for many years.  Neither of the two most likely outomes looks attractive to many, me included, though there are pros and cons.
  •  If Labour are the largest party in Parliament after May 7th we get an inexperienced, idealistic bunch of policy wonks who will in my view, however well intentioned, naively commit a lot of the sins of their forefathers all over again (see the blog Human weakness - a competitive advantage?).  We may, or may not, get the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) to boot – if Labour truly is foolish enough to parley with them then the informed view is that it will render itself unelectable for decades after a single term in Government.  With or without the SNP the country will lurch in a different direction with Labour at the helm when we badly need relative stability.  Business confidence will suffer.  The respected independent economic analysis group the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has said this week that the funding of Labour’s policies is not transparent.  However, the upside of a Labour-led Government is that we avoid a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU, which would be the largest known, predictable upheaval to our economy and a huge distraction and own goal when we need to be focused on growing sustainably in very challenging times and addressing pressing geo-political and environmental difficulties. 
  • If it’s the Conservatives we get a recklessly one-dimensional approach to cutting the deficit (austerity) in which the wealthiest don’t make a sufficient contribution, and ironically creativity and entrepreneurism is not sufficiently encouraged to generate greater wealth for the country and thus increase the tax take, i.e. the sort of balanced approach to turnaround that an intelligent business leader would adopt.  We also get a widening disparity between a shrinking set of haves, who have more and more, and the majority, the have-nots, who have less and less. This is not a recipe for sustainable growth and deficit cutting.  The IFS said this week that like Labour the funding of Conservative policies is not transparent.  Most disturbingly of all we get the colossal, unnecessary hostage to fortune of a distracting, destabilising, divisive 2 year build-up to a 2017 referendum on Europe, ironically foisted on us by the self-styled party of economic responsibility!!!  David Cameron is gambling recklessly that the referendum can be won by a pro-European campaign – look how close he came to screwing up the Scottish independence referendum, with incalculable consequences!  If we get a Conservative-led government, even with the Lib Dems in it (I can’t see them stopping David Cameron’s prospective death wish, hard as they may try) I predict that some companies will start relocating from the UK to other countries to avoid the uncertainty, and others not already here will choose to invest in other countries instead.  (I wrote this section on Friday morning, before I heard HSBC’s announcement!)  Let’s be clear, the EU needs a complete overhaul, especially the extravagant budget and the complacent, meddling fat cats in the EU Commission in Brussels.  But David Cameron has done untold damage to the UK’s credibility and influence, especially with our many allies in Europe who also want reform, through his risible, naïve, gun boat grandstanding in Europe to pander to the right wing of his party and folk who might be tempted to vote UKIP.  And he has made no compelling argument to mobilise the centre ground, or to constructively champion reform in Europe and work with allies across Europe to make progress on that agenda.

So where do we go from here?  Watch this space next weekend for a suggested solution based on Top 1% organisational and leadership principles.

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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:
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.
The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..
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

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Friday, 17 April 2015

Do customers matter, or is 'customer lip service' just fine?



I'm tired of dealing with companies who trumpet their so-called customer focus and do the opposite. Over the years I've had plenty of negative experiences.

Last October I wrote three blogs about Tesco - 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?  You may recall that Tesco started to implode last September following the sacking of CEO Philip Clarke and the subsequent revelations that the global supermarket giant had been cooking its books, the subject of an on-going UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) investigation.

Clarke's demise reminded me of that of David Moyes as Manager of Manchester United FC. Clarke and Moyes both made fatal errors during their relatively short tenures, but the true seeds of their downfall, and their organisations', were sown by their illustrious predecessors - Sir Terry Leahy and Sir Alex Ferguson respectively.

The fundamental problem at Tesco was the contradiction between Leahy's professed passion for putting the customer first (captured in Tesco's strapline 'Every little helps') and the company's traditional passion for profit, at the expense of its customers and suppliers.  This thinly veiled, cynical hypocrisy made Tesco one of the most loathed retailers in Britain.



However, this blog isn't about Tesco.  It's about EE, another household name corporate whose behaviour over the last few weeks is the amongst the very worst I have personally experienced from any company in my 52 years on the planet to date.


Funnily enough, the other most appalling customer treatment I can recall suffering is from BT.  What is it about telecoms companies??!!  Oh, and by the way, it's strongly rumoured that BT have been negotiating for months to buy EE - now that's a match conceived by Lucifer, if ever there was one!!

Anyway, it seems I'm not alone when it comes to EE.  I recently Googled statistics from OFCOM, the UK Government watchdog that monitors the ICT industry, and found that EE had TWICE the rate of complaints of its next worst two rivals and THREE TIMES the rate of its other rivals.



Here's a selection of some of the damning evidence for the prosecution:

http://eecomplaints.co.uk/
https://www.facebook.com/EEComplaint
https://twitter.com/eecomplaints
http://bit.ly/1CijsfC,

There's plenty more, I can assure you!!

So what did EE do to upset this particular punter so much that he's decided he's quitting and not coming back, after 10 years with Orange, one of the brands that EE bought out?

10 months ago we moved my 18 year old son's mobile phone account over to EE from a competing provider and put it onto my contract, to get a better deal.  8 weeks ago, bless him, my son decided he wanted a better mobile phone.  So unbeknowns to me he went into our local EE shop in Skipton, North Yorkshire.

Now you'd think, wouldn't you, that if a customer walks in to a mobile phone shop and says they want to upgrade their mobile phone then the shop would assume they had an existing contract.  That would be logical, wouldn't it?  You'd also think that they'd assume the contract must be with them?  I mean why would someone walk into a different mobile phone shop than the one through which they had their existing contract, for crying out loud??!!

Now bear with me on this - I know it's difficult.  A customer comes into your mobile phone shop. Wait for it, they have a mobile phone, of all things.  Now there's a surprise.  They want to upgrade it. First of all you would ask them for their phone number, right?  You wouldn't ask them for their contract details - most of us don't carry those round in our heads.  You would key in their mobile phone number to EE's computer system to see what sort of contract they were on.  And you would probably tell them that it would cost them to upgrade the phone, since it almost certainly would.  Of course as soon as you keyed in this particular customer's mobile phone number you would see that the contract was not in his name, so you would ask him who Mr Mark Ashton was, and he would tell you it was his father.

Are you still with me?  Yes?  Good.  Except that's not what happened.

All we know is that the EE shop proceeded to sell my son not only a new mobile phone, but a new two year contract to go with it, in his own name.  He did not need a new contract - he already had one in my name, which still had 16 months to run.  But somewhat naively, yet quite understandbly, particularly for a youngster, he was preoccupied with getting this sexy new mobile phone and perhaps assumed that EE would automatically cancel the existing contract?

I wonder if the more streetwise can work out where this is heading?!

I was aware that my son had been given a new mobile phone number - he gave it to me - but I did not realise he had taken out a new contract.  This did not become apparent until I got my next bill from EE a few weeks later and noticed that I was still paying for his now redundant, previous mobile phone number.

I called EE.  Guess what?  "We're sorry, Mr Ashton, there's nothing we can do.  You took out a 2 year, legally binding contract last June and we cannot cancel it.  You can pay an early termination fee - it's £250.  Your son was legally old enough to take out a contract in his own name.  HE SHOULD HAVE TOLD US (my emphasis) that he had an existing contract with EE and that it was in your name.  Without that information we could not find his mobile phone number on our system."

I went into the EE shop, I rang EE to complain and in each case I got exactly the same response.  It was as if this sort of thing happens regularly and they are all programmed to deal with it.  Every person I've spoken to from EE has pointed out to me that I have a legal contract with them for two years, my son now has a different legal contract with them for two years, and THERE'S NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT.

I have a phrase for it, an ironic paradox - I call it 'legalised theft'.

My son was sold something he didn't need - a new mobile phone contract, which will cost him approximately £650 over the two years.  The only sensible option now in fact is to pay £250 to terminate early the unwanted contract in my name.  The helpful customer complaints guy from EE did point out to me that there was another solution - guess what folks, I could FIND ANOTHER USE FOR THE SPARE MOBILE PHONE NUMBER!  Wow!  Let me see now - what could I use a mobile phone number for when I have no need for it?  Tough question!  No, but wait, he did point out another option.  Wait for it - I could find someone else who needed it!  Wow again!  So having created a problem for me that was none of my own making, EE now suggest I should figure out a way to solve that problem myself.  Great, spectacular in fact!  What genius!  Where DO they find these people?!

That's why I'm leaving EE after spending 10 years with Orange, and will never return.  They will lose my business mobile contract next week (as luck has it, that's when it expires), and once the contracts have expired they will lose my son's contract, my wife's contract, and my mobile WiFi dongle contract.  Oh, and as I pointed out to them, I might mention it to a few people, including at least several hundred who typically read my blog each week!

EE's behaviour is a classic example of corporate taking - see Adam Grant's 'Give and Take' (2013). Takers ultimately lose out because people abandon them so they constantly have to replace churned relationships that have gone toxic on them.  Then there is the bad press - people spread the word about their negative experiences with takers, like I'm doing now.  But most people do it privately, so takers are never aware that their dire reputation is spreading.

By contrast it's well known and well researched that companies who genuinely put customers and customer relationships first, and who handle complaints sensitively and intelligently, are rewarded with far greater, enduring loyalty and a much better reputation.

The choice is yours!

__________________________________________________________________
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:
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.
The business I lead, Resolve Gets Results (RGR), provides hands-on leadership, management, problem solving, customer/market development, sales and fundraising capabilities to companies with long-term growth potential.  I'm also actively involved in Linked2Success (L2S), a business which helps clients to use social media intelligently to build professional relationships and grow.  RGR and L2S work together as a single team to leverage the benefits of our respective skill sets, giving tremendous business value to far-sighted clients..
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


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