Hairdressers

Some years ago I reached the happy state where I regard a visit to the hairdresser as therepeutic, one of the few occasions where you can hand over control to someone else relatively free of risk. This was not always the case.

From as early as I can remember my hair was cut in a salon owned and run by Mr Bussey, not fair from where I lived in Knowle Park, Bristol. When I was deemed in need of a haircut my mother would give me ninepence (men paid one shilling and sixpence), and despatch me to Mr Bussey's, where I would stand or sit in a queue with several other unfortunates. My recollection is that this normally happened on rainy days, so I had to stand and wait in my wet raincoat. Eventually my turn would come. If I was lucky, my hair would be cut by Mr Phil, a young, friendly man who regarded his junior customers as members of the human race. If I was unlucky, I got Mr Bussey himself. He would cut my hair with the clippers iin 45 seconds without looking at my head once whilst he talked, either to Mr Phil or to one of the adult customers. Most of the cut hair dropped between my neck and my shirt, promising a very uncomfortable time until bedtime.

I put up with this until I left Bristol to go to university in Leicester, where my hair was cut by a Greek Cypriot chap who gave 10% discount to students.

After two years in Leicester (that's a story for another day) I got a job with Leo Computers in Hartree House in Bayswater, and then subsequently in Portland House in Victoria. Hartree House was in fact the top two floors of Whiteley's department store in Queensway, and Whiteley's had a gent's salon in the basement, so that was easy, particularly as I lived in Talbot Road, a couple of streets away.

Then I returned to Bristol. I discovered that many of my male colleagues used a rather more upmarket salon at the top of Park Street; they did a good job but I remember little about them. Then I moved to Suffolk and, again, found a men's hairdresser in the basement of a department store. It was the first time I felt that I was a client rather than a customer - relationships were important. 

My next move was to Chorleywood and my job was London-based. Having enjoyed a significant increase in income over the preceding few years I decided that I would raise my game, and started using the Vidal Sassoon salon in Brook Street, which I continued to patronise for a number of years. At first my hair was cut by a big West Indian guy called Thurston; we got to know each other well and often talked about our experiences and ambitions. I encouraged him to apply for a vacancy in the Vidal Sassoon salon in New York and, to his delight, he was successful. His successor was a tall, auburn-haired Swedish girl called Sabina Johanssen, who cut my hair for almost ten years until, bizarrely, she married a guy who, I think, sold day-old chicks to chicken farmers. Then Emma cut my hair for a few occcasions.

During the time I patronised Vidal Sassoon I moved job, and house, several times, and by now was living in Oxfordshire. I decided that paying for a trip to London for a haircut was an extravagance I could do without. I asked a guy I knew, who always looked well turned out, for the name of his hairdresser. He told my it was Segais, in Wantage. This was in 2003. I'm still a client.

My autobiography - not really

As most of my friends and many of my acquaintances will know, I am an inveterate story teller. Sometimes those stories have a point - most of the preceding entries do - and sometimes they do not. Occasionally someone says "You ought to write your autobiography". I admit, I have occasionally thought about it, and concluded that my life is not biography material.

I enjoy reading the biographies or autobiographies of others; I particularly enjoy those of actors - Peter O'Toole and Sir Alec Guinness are favourites - and chefs - Rick Stein and Keith Floyd. Published biographies have one thing in common that is missing from my life - there is a plot line. My life consists of a series of anecdotes which can be read in more or less any order without losing meaning.

I have concluded that a blog is probably the best way of publishing my stories, and avoids me having to confront the possibility that nobody would want to read my autobiography anyway.

Some of my stories are about my experiences when carrying out management consulting projects. In deference to my clients, I will not mention them by name.

Robin Seward and The ICL pod

After one of ICL's periodic reorganisations I discovered I had been posted to the newly established Management Support Business Centre. I had recently embarked on a management consultancy career so I was interested to find out what was expected of me. My colleagues were a mixed bunch from all around the Company and, since they were all pretty smart, there was no risk of "being in the wrong room".

Despite having chosen the "professional" (i.e. non-management) career path, I found that I had someone to manage or, as it transpired, mentor. People in the know said to me, "Oh, bad luck, they've given you Robin - he's a right screwball." Robin Seward had had a relatively undistinguished ICL career but, as I had, he'd taken the opportunity to do a variety of different jobs, including a spell working for ICL in the West Indies.

We hit it off right away. Robin had a great sense of humour and I soon discovered he was one of the most creative people I have ever met. The reason people thought he was a screwball was that they didn't understand him. We shared an extensive vocabulary, not just of words but of concepts; in a ten minute conversation with Robin I could cover as much ground as half an hour with most other people. In consequence, conversations with Robin were often exhausting.

We had a highly productive relationship, the major fruit of which was the ICL pod. This was an octagonal meeting room equipped with the latest in (1985) information technology so that particpants in meetings could have the information they needed to debate the issues projected onto screens on the walls. Robin was also well connected in academia but in areas that didn't overlap with mine, so the pod reflected both streams of thought. In one corner was a workstation in which a support engineer could access and manipulate information and displays to aid the discussion (colloquially referred to as "playing the organ").

When Robin and I first came up with the idea we had no expectation that it would ever be built and we were astonished when our funding application was nodded through. We collaborated with an upmarket office furniture and decor supplier and we managed to put the prototype in place in three or four months. Its first ever use was for an ICL Board Meeting and Robb Wilmot, our CEO at the time, was impressed. He encouraged us to approach major accounts with a view to installing further prototypes and again, so my surprise, we were successful - no doubt his personal backing carried a lot of weight. Several pods were installed, including one at the LSE. I visited this a number of years later and it was being using for, I think, MBA teaching about behaviour in meetings.

This is not the place to go into a lot of detail but, if you would like to read more, I published a paper in the ICL Technical Journal which provides it. You can find it at https://www.fujitsu.com/ie/imagesgig5/ICL-Technical-Journal-v05i02.pdf

PS This link now appears not to work. If you would like a copy of the paper message me and I'll email it to you.

The NHS - in the front line

In my early 20s I was diagnosed with what, at the time, was a life threatening illness. Fortunately I made a full recovery, thanks to the skill and care of everyone involved. This post isn't about that but about a couple of events I experienced much later, in my consulting career.

The first was when a colleague and I were running a management development programme in a Birmingham hospital. The General Manager at the time, who was our sponsor, thought it would be a good idea if we spent a little time on the front line, seeing the challenges faced by the staff, and how they deal with them. So it was agreed that we would spend a day as observers in A&E (the Accident and Emergency Department or, as my American readers would prefer, the Emergency Room). We arrived, donned some sterile clothing and presented ourselves. Two cases in particular stick in my mind.

• A man who'd been involved in an RTA (Road Traffic Accident). I'm no expert but he was badly knocked about with broken limbs and a lot of blood. The team swung into action without any sign of distress and the whole thing was like a military operation - it was deeply impressive.
• Another man who had collapsed in the street with a heart attack. The doctor who took charge was a house officer (junior doctor) who was learning the ropes, and it was her job to use the defibrillator to restart the man's heart. After a number of attempts, it was decided to stop. It was clear that the doctor in question felt she had failed him, and her grief was inconsolable. A colleague took her away to look after her.

The second occasion was several years later when I was carrying out an OPUS project (I'll write about the OPUS Method in another post). The subject of our resarch was the use in practice of surgical drapes - the (usually green) sheets that are placed under the patient and protect those parts of the patient which are not to be operated on. It was agreed that I would witness an operation so I could see how the drapes were used. An orthopaedic surgeon had agreed that I could attend one of his knee replacement operations so, after being prepared for my presence in the theatre, I went to meet him. "How much do you know about knee replacement surgery?" he asked. "Nothing," I admitted. "Would you like to know about it?" "Yes, please". "Right, if you agree to stand where I tell you, I will treat you like an medical student, and explain what I'm doing, and why." I agreed.

This is not the place to explain the process - I'm sure Google will tell you more than I possibly could - but I felt deeply privileged to have this access. It will surprise some people to know that I enjoyed it - but I did.

Decision Theory - What's the point?

Early in my management consulting career in ICL I developed an interest in decision theory. This was partly as a result of meeting several academics from different business schools who had different angles on the traditional decision tree approach. There was Prof Larry Phillips at the LSE with multi-attribute utility decomposition (MAUD), Dr Colin Eden at the University of Bath with his cognitive processing engine (COPE), Dr John Friend from the Tavistock Institute with his strategic choice method, and several others. As is the case with academics (in my experience, at least) each was deeply sceptical of the others and attempts at reconciliation were doomed to failure.

However, I took the view that the best way of finding out the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches was to try them out in practice. Because of who I am, the softer, more judgmental approaches had a greater appeal and I was able to secure several small projects learning about them and putting them to the test. These experiments came to the attention of my management "grandfather" and he came to me one day to tell me that he had secured the agreement of a major ICL customer to use my skills to help them make a complex decision. To say I was scared was an understatement - I certainly didn't feel that my knowledge had reached that level - but, as tends to happen to me, he said "Don't worry. I'm sure you can be of significant help to them - I explained that it would be experimental, so I'm only charging them £x" - he quoted a number in five figures.

So I set off for London to see the client. I spent several weeks interviewing people, seeking to understand what the decision was all about and, over time, developed a large and complex model embodying both objective and subjective variables. We ran the model a number of times and began to understand its behaviour. Eventually we felt we had something we could rely on. We ran it for real and came up with a result which seemed intuitively in the right ball park. We presented it to the decision maker. "Very interesting," he said, and asked a couple of good questions about how the model was constructed. He then suggested a couple of changes in weighting, and we ran the model again. "Still not quite right," he said, and suggested a couple more changes. We implemented them. "Yes, that feels right," he said, and we went with the result. What I realised, in retrospect, was that my job had been to create a convincing justification of a decision that had already been made.

I wonder how often that happens.

My influences: Noel Buckland - updated

Soon after I moved to work in East Anglia for ICL, and it became clear that my primary focus was to be on stock control and production control systems, I was introduced to a man called Noel Buckland, an internal production control consultant. When he left school, Noel had gone to a London medical school but, living in Letchworth, had secured a summer vacation job at the local factory of what must have been the British Tabulating Machinery Company. He found the manufacturing environment more to his taste than medicine and never returned to medical school.

By the time I met him Noel had been an ICL factory manager and then, after a heart attack, had stepped back into an advisory role. He and I formed an association, shortly followed by a friendship; he was a kind, generous, funny man. People began to refer to us as “The Two Noels”.

The first time I took Noel to meet a client, I discovered that he already knew many of the Production Directors with whom I was to work, which was the case the first time we carried out a customer visit together. We were shown into the Production Director’s office, seated and given coffee. Noel’s opening remark startled me. “Well, Ron,” he said, “how are the boy’s budgies?” I thought we were on a business call and this descent into trivia worried me. It turned out that Ron’s son bred, showed and sold budgerigars and Ron was very proud of him. After a short while we got down to business and I recovered my composure.

After the meeting I asked Noel why he’d started talking about budgies and he explained the concept of rapport building, which I hadn’t come across before.

The next two meetings with other customers proceeded in like fashion and, after the second, as we walked back to Noel’s car, I said, “I can see how it works, Noel, but how do you remember all this stuff?” “I don’t”, he said and from the glove box of his car retrieved a small black covered notebook. Each page was covered with notes on the various people he met in his travels. Lesson learned!

Noel had a fund of stories about his experiences and one of them was about a well known washing machine manufacturer.

They had launched a new model with a perforated stainless steel drum and demand considerably outstripped supply. The limiting factor was the availability of the perforated stainless steel from which they made the drums. They were so keen to find further supplies of this steel that they took salesmen away from their roles and directed them to search for another supplier of the steel.

Eventually a salesman came back with a sample from a small steel stockyard. Apparently, the owner of the stockyard said that he would get small quantities of the steel from an intermediary; supplies were intermittent but he would be delighted to let the washing machine company have them.

The metallurgists examined it and said that it was identical to the steel they were already using, and clearly came from the same source. Enquiries were made and a story emerged.

The washing machine company was in the habit of issuing batches of 105 sheets into the factory in the expectation that wastage would not exceed 5 sheets - a common manufacturing practice at the time. But in fact there was no wastage; the steel shop foreman was keeping a few out of each batch for himself and selling them to the intermediary at a nice profit.

Until they found out.

Noel and I visited many different manufacturing sites during the three or four years we worked together. He had a Sherlock Holmes-like ability to notice little signs which told him what was going on.

We used to walk round the factory - well, Noel used to saunter - he was really laid back. He would often stop as we walked around to engage someone in conversation - a machine operator, a man driving a fork-lift, a guy sweeping the factory floor - and knew just what to say. The conversations always ended with a smile and a handshake but they were never without purpose.

On one occasion we were given a guided tour of the works and then went back into the office to talk to our host, who said, "Well, Noel, what do you think?" Noel said, "Two things to start with. You need to sort out your tool stores - there's lots of redundant stuff in there. And your piece work rates need looking at."

Our host looked at him, open-mouthed. "How do you know that?" he said. "Well", said Noel "the boxes of tools on the top two shelves in the tool store had a quarter of an inch of dust on them. They haven't been touched for years. And many machines in the machine shop had boxes of parts kicked under them. What this tells you is that the machine operators work on them only when there are no better paying jobs to do."

I learned a lot from playing Watson to his Sherlock Holmes.

My influences: Peter Honey

When I was a few years into my career in ICL it was decided I should attend a course entitled "Profile Training". This was regarded as a privilege as it was run by an external academic, and the academic in question was Peter Honey, at the time relatively unknown but later to become internationally known as the author, with Alan Mumford, of the "Honey & Mumford Learning Styles Inventory".

As I recall it, the goal of the course was to help you understand yourself and use this knowledge to help you understand other people. I was excited to be attending but was somewhat taken aback when we were all asked to complete a series of (I think) five psychometric questionnaires. The science of psychometrics was unknown to me at the time and, working my way through the first questionnaire, I decided it had about as much credibility as those questionnaires in women's magazines of the time claiming to show you whether you were a good lover.

Peter Honey's feedback on the first questionnaire took me by surprise - it did seem to describe someone I recognised. At the end of the fifth questionnaire (the end of day two, I think) Peter took the results away with him and, early on day three, gave each participant overall individual feedback. I was shocked by mine - I had been sussed! From then on I paid close attention to everything he said.

The only thing I remember from the rest of the course is that we spent some time on Transactional Analysis, which explains how the language people use in conversations modifies the behaviours of the other participants. Tom "Big Al" Schreiter demonstrates a clear understanding of this in his books on network marketing.

But ever since I met Peter Honey I've had a fascination with anything that helps me know myself better and I still do. Thanks Peter!

https://www.peterhoney.org/

Learning how to invest

Since my pension fund is likely to get called into action as a safety net in the foreseeable future, I keep a close eye on the performance of my investments, and try to make some kind of sense of the stuff I read in the financial columns. It's been clear to me for some years that most people in the industry don't understand they companies they invest in nor, indeed, do they take any interest in them. It's all about trends and statistics. Necessarily, the indicators they use are historical and they just use statistical trend analysis and extrapolation to "understand" what's going on. Perhaps it's unfair to describe it as gambling but the distinction is a fine one.

I started work in the computer industry (English Electric Leo Computers Ltd) when it was in its infancy, and was fortunate to work in an office in London with a load of very clever and well informed people. Some of their conversation was about their stock market investments and it stimulated my interest in the topic, though my income didn't allow me to do anything about it.

The following year I moved to Bristol, my home town, and a couple of years later took on a sales role. The increase in income re-awoke my interest in the stock market. Coincidentally a local firm of stockbrokers occupied the floor below us in our office building and I was wondering aloud how to approach them as a naive investor when one of my colleagues said, "Oh, my Uncle Fred works for them. I'll introduce you if you like." A meeting with Uncle Fred was arranged, and I walked down to his office to meet him.

Uncle Fred was a genial old chap, and we got on well. He explained that he couldn't give me specific advice but that he would give me some general pointers. I agreed. The advice he gave me will be familiar to anyone who invested in the stock market at the time. He said, "Buy when prices are low and sell when they are high; most people will be doing the opposite but have confidence in your own judgement. And only ever invest in companies you know about and understand".

My sales role brought me into contact with directors and senior managers of local companies. One such company was Reed & Mallik, who were working on the new M32, the motorway spur from the M4 into the centre of Bristol. I had a meeting with the site manager and was able to persuade him that our payroll service would meet his needs. However, I would need to go to meet the Finance Director at their head office in Salisbury to get a signature.

I got to Salisbury to meet the FD, and spent an interesting hour with him and a couple of senior managers having the business explained to me. My researches had shown that Reed & Mallik's share price was in the doldrums and I concluded that the stock market's valuation was in error. The following day I bought a parcel of shares for 10½d each and, six weeks later, sold them for 1s 4½d each, a profit of around 50% after dealing expenses.

I had many other successful investments, and a few failures, of course but I've always invested by focusing on the fundamentals - what the company does, how good it is at doing it, and what's happening to the markets on which it depends. I still do. It works.

Mr JE Barton

My father, Ken Austin, was born in 1908 and grew up in Sandford, near Winscombe, North Somerset, where his father was the village postman and ran an apple orchard. Dad attended Redcliffe Endowed School and was then apprenticed to Wake & Dean, cabinet makers in Yatton.

When I was awarded a scholarship place at BGS in 1955 my father recalled an experience from his early working life. Wake & Dean were awarded the contract to equip the new library at Bristol Grammar School and, as an apprentice, my father became part of the on-site team. Most Wake & Dean clients dealt only with the foreman, and then as little as possible. However, at BGS the then Headmaster, Mr JE Barton, was in the habit of visiting the library to inspect progress. When he did, he spoke to every member of the on-site team, including the lowly apprentice. My father remembered being deeply impressed.

Postscript

After writing this piece I Googled Barton and was astonished to come up with this:

https://stradlingcollection.wordpress.com/the-bauhaus-in-bristol/the-bristol-legacy-je-barton-ken-stradling-and-the-bristol-guild/

No wonder my father was impressed by meeting him.