Taking a long term view

I was at two very different talks last week. The first, Priorities for medical research in the United Kingdom, given at the University of Exeter by Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, the last in their Shaping the Future series. Much of it well over my head, but a fascinating hour and 20 minutes looking at key issues in medical research, now and in the future. One interesting point: Borysiewicz stressed the need for researchers and research institutes to build their relationships with the wealth creation sector.

I came away feeling that this was an area which had been well and truly gripped- and that in the long term, which is what medical research is inevitably about, we are going to be well served.

The second had a rather more immediate subject. This was a valedictory presentation by Peter Gripiaos to the Devon & Cornwall Business Council on The South West – The credit crunch and the real economy. It was a sobering 20 minutes: not very much good news, for any part of the Region, and an interesting counterpoint to the South West RDA’s What Now, its updated plans for 2009 – 2011.

Gripiaos asked ‘So are we out of the woods?’. His view is no (“the signs of recovery are conflicting”) and his answer to ‘So what can be done?’ is just as stark:

We are in the realm of psychology now and the recession needs to run its course.
SWERDA and local authorities have little money and not much leverage.
Many businesses need to fail.
Businesses and consumers need to learn a harsh lesson.
So do politicians.
We should focus on long term strategic interventions rather than short term fire-fighting.

As for the last of those bullet points, that too was the thrust of Borysiewicz’s talk.

It makes for interesting scenario planning.

A most peculiar animal

We do not live in traditional hare country. There is a (relatively) local pack of beagles, and they meet, or have in the past, at Headless Cross on Mardon Down, but I have not seen a hare down here; well, not that is until the other morning.

Driving the windy road to Exeter (see Down narrow lanes) suddenly, at the top of the hill before the road drops down to Steps Bridge, a large brown hare; still, in the middle of the road. She must have come out of the fields on the right hand side. I stopped, and she lolloped off, across the road and into the woods that soften the the side of the Teign valley.

I have become used to seeing roe deer along this stretch of road, although the best view is from the passenger seat in the Land Rover; and occasionally badgers, although more usually their sad, muddy corpses. There are foxes in the woods, and early morning is a good time to see cubs. And through the trees buzzards and owls, and at night large brown bats. but a hare? It made my morning.

Apus apus

I always enjoy Harry Eyre’s Slow Lane column in the Weekend FT. Last weekend’s The planet’s still working was no different: a delightful mixture of the practical and the philosophical, and at its heart the swift, or more correctly the European swift (Apus apus), as there are almost 70 different species of swift across the world.

We are like Eyre’s uncle, whom he notes,

Every May . . notes down the first arrival of the swifts on his particular beat in north London. The birds are not quite as regular as the St George’s mushrooms which appear on precisely the same day – April 23 – every English spring, but the birds come some time between the 9th and 13th of the month. I haven’t asked him about this but I assume he finds it comforting, a sign in uncertain times that, as Ted Hughes put it, not entirely reassuringly, “the planet’s still working”.

We see them later in this part of the country, and often the ones we see first are on their way north. In the last 10 years, the earliest we have noted them was 30 April in 2004; and the latest, in 2002, 14 May. For the most part they are with us sometime in the second week in May. The swallow may be the usual harbinger of summer, but for us it is always the swift.

Eyre also quotes the recent RSPB report on the diminishing number of swifts: since the 1990s a 40% drop. Again, we have seen it here. This year there seem only to be four or five resident in Moretonhampstead, whereas in the past we have had far more. Changing building practice is partly (possibly largely) responsible, but this is nothing new. In his 1980 book, Devil Birds, Derek Bromhall wrote,

As old buildings in which swifts have nested for years are demolished, new sites become progressively harder to find. Modern buildings do not allow birds access into roof spaces, and in our present energy-conscious society we seal and insulate the roofs of those older buildings which are being preserved.

Eyre wrote almost the same last week, “Mostly unconsciously, we have been shutting the swifts out of our lives. Now the imperative to insulate our houses and make them airtight, to save on heating and therefore CO2 emissions, has made matters still worse.” He suggests swift bricks are one answer. Bromhall was there first, advocating nest boxes.

And an afterthought; Harry Eyre makes the mistake many people do, referring to swifts as hirundines, and thus lumping them into the same bird family as swallows and martins. They aren’t. Swifts belong to the Apodidae; swallows and martins are Hirundinidae.

And as for poetry, Ted Hughes’ poem, also ‘Swifts’ is every bit as good, “On their switchback wheel of death/They swat past, hard fletched,/Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,/and are gone again. . .”

Are you fed up with the S word?

In the introduction to my last post I touched on the orgy of apology that we have had to endure from MPs, the Speaker, the leaders of the main political parties etc. etc. Yet whether the apology is profound or passing, the overwhelming response of the man and woman in the street (or Harriet Harman’s “court of public opinion”) seems to be anger and resignation. “Sorry” (however expressed) just doesn’t seem to work any more – and the endless repetition has devalued the word to such an extent that before using it in an email to a client this morning (Shock horror! Lawyer says sorry) I wondered if he thought I would be taking the piss.

I went back to a couple of posts by Matthew Taylor in February, where he anatomised apologies: Sorry bankers – a scorecard and Bankers apology – the verdict. Taylor was writing after the appearance of Sir Fred Goodwin and others before the Treasury Select Committee. Read the posts in full: they apply as much to the expenses fiasco as to the contrite (?) bankers.

Perhaps it’s time to take a more systematic approach to apologies. After all, not all ‘sorries’ are worth much. When I worked in Number Ten, Tony Blair used occasionally to admit he’d made a mistake but only when he wished he had listened to himself earlier!

A distinction to start with when grading apologies is between apologising for the act and apologising for the consequences. Insincere apologies will tend to be weak on one or other side; either ‘I’m sorry for what happened but there was nothing I could have done about it’, or ‘I made a mistake but I’m not responsible for what happened as a result’.

I haven’t yet scored the recent apologies (and no doubt someone else will) but the visual representation of the apologies scorecard which Matt Cain produced for Matthew Taylor is very good.

Leadership is all

In a week when everything is overshadowed by the fate of Speaker Martin (at the time of posting we are still waiting to hear when it is he intends to go) and after what seems an eternity of disclosures about MPs’ expenses (accompanied by an orgy of hand-wringing insincerity), yet another excellent article by Stefan Stern in today’s FT – and for leaders in law firms another pointer,

Does “real leadership” simply mean telling people what to do? Or does leadership mean building consensus, so that when you attempt to make changes your organisation advances more or less as one.

Leadership is situational. In other words, context is everything. Few business leaders find themselves facing a weekly inquisition like PMQs. But in a time of economic difficulty, businesses and organisations do look to their leaders for clarity of thought and decisive action. So which organisations will come through this period in better shape: those where there is less talk and more action, or those where agreement is sought before action is taken?

Stern writes about the recent launch of the Centre for Professional Service Firms at the Cass Business School in London, and reports the comments of Laura Empson, director of the centre : “Professionals, by and large, do not want to be led, and professionals, by and large, do not want to be leaders.”

And this is the real problem.