Ha-ha, do you see what I did there? Meanwhile I just find it depressing that City’s current owners – who hitherto had seemed to be doing just about everything right at the club – decided to take a leaf out of the Big Book of Football Stereotypes and act in the impatient and short-termist way that foreign billionaire owners are expected to. It doesn’t take much to squander the vast reserves of goodwill I had for them, as I was grateful that they took over from Thaksin Shinawatra then behaved impeccably and honourably from thereon in; but that’s what they’ve done, and it will be a long hard slog for them to earn my respect again (although, being a fickle fan, winning some trophies will go some way towards doing that, no doubt).

But I’ll give them their due; they’re feeling their way into this football club ownership lark and I know where they’re coming from, as I’m feeling my way back into blogging since my recent hiatus. That’s perhaps why, on reflection, I wish I hadn’t bothered with that last post on the bankers’ bonuses, a clumsy collection of loose semi-thought bundled together in a post, the existence of which is partly thanks to the fact that I had a free afternoon. So as I’m approaching my usual Christmas sabbatical I’ll try to tidy this place up a bit and not make such a mistake again. Some hope. But in that vein I’ve ditched those weekly twitter digests that were just cluttering the place up in the absence of any other posts. If you want to read my twitterings then you can always follow them here, and they are also duplicated on my tumblelog over here; there really is no need to triplicate them, so now, if I can’t think of anything worthy of a full post then this site will simply go quiet, but I will always be back.

While in the mood to tidy up I think I’ll finish off this story from last year, because I hate leaving loose ends lying around, I really do. You’ll recall, perhaps, that British Gas had doubled our direct debit payment, despite our being in credit? Well they had. And last Winter came and went, we shovelled money to the gas board hand over fist, and in the Spring we found that those payments had just about covered our seasonal usage, and so we were still over a hundred pounds in credit. Time, perhaps, to rethink the level of our monthly payment? Well British Telecom and E-On thought so; our telecoms provider gave us two free months as we were in credit with them, while our electricity supplier refunded our credit and lowered our monthly payment. But from British Gas we heard nothing.

Summer arrived, then Autumn, during which, of course, our gas usage plummeted while our payments remained sky high, and by the time of our October statement we were now some £315 in credit. Time, now, surely, to readjust our payment amount? I’d have thought so, but perusing our gas bill I found a notice warning against this, as British Gas said that they strongly suggest we all wait until the Spring before any payment amount is altered. If only they’d stuck to this policy the previous year, when they’d hiked our monthly direct debit in Summer and Autumn; then, perhaps, our account wouldn’t have gone in credit to the value of China’s trade surplus? Well anyway, I couldn’t be bothered waiting until Spring, and I couldn’t be bothered negotiating with British Gas, so we skipped over to E-On for a dual-fuel account, a process that took around six weeks, buy which time our account had become £415 in credit. Only then, once we had left, did British Gas finally repay us.

So a happy story in the end in which everyone is a winner. E-On has a new customer; British Gas earned a paltry sum of interest on our money; and I have a tidy lump-sum to spend as I wish. I know I could moan about British Gas earning interest that should have been mine, but unless yields on pissing money against the wall have risen sharply in the past year I wouldn’t have done anything of note with that spare cash. As it is, their crazy direct debit policy has turned out to be an unlikely savings plan. So ultimately, and ironically, I end this tale with a sincere and honest “Thank you, British Gas”; because this year, after a fashion, Christmas is on you.

There was a sharp knock at the door which then opened. A fresh-faced member of staff stuck his head into the room and blurted breathlessly,

“Stop selling endowment policies. This minute. We’ve just found out…they’re crap.”

The unindependent advisor’s face changed from the beam of financial wizard who had just earned a bundle of commission to the scowl of a cheap conjurer who had realised she had been rumbled.

“Get out…GET OUT!” she screamed, as I was ushered from the room.

And so it was that I became the last person in Britain to take possession of an endowment mortgage.

But you know, things didn’t turn out too badly for me. A few years later I sold that house and moved in with my then girlfriend. The equity on the house paid for all of our wedding and half of the purple Rover 200 that still adorns our drive. And even though I’d flogged that house and rid myself of that mortgage, I still kept on paying into the endowment policy as an investment, anticipating a tidy lump sum in the eventual future. If I had taken out a repayment mortgage rather than an endowment then on selling the house I wouldn’t have had much to show for it, having done little more than to have paid off a few years worth of interest on a mortgage for a house that was no longer mine.

Over the years the name of the company that runs my endowment policy has changed as often as that of a firm of dodgy builders you may see on an edition of Rogue Traders; from Black Horse, to Lloyds TSB, to Scottish Widows. The name has changed, but what has stayed the same has been the nature of the regular letters I’ve received from them, reporting on their progress in investing my cash is a way that should – in theory – earn me a sum of money capable of covering the cost of the mortgage they still believe I possess. Despite the many fluctuations in the economic outlook over the past decade, my provider has consistently warned me that they are failing to earn a sufficient return on their investments to meet the price of my old house (minus deposit). Since there would have been no such concerns if I had taken out a repayment mortgage, then another way of putting it could be that I have been paying money to some so-called financial experts in the hope that they would invest it wisely, but the return on that investment currently seems to have failed to match – or has in fact been outperformed by – the returns on a simple repayment loan set at an extremely low level of interest.

So what to do? Well, nothing, basically. After all, as I said, even if my endowment policy doesn’t cover the cost of my mortgage when it matures, that mortgage and house are long gone as far as I am concerned, and so any shortfall is irrelevant in that regard. But recently there has been a change of tone in Black Horse Lloyds TSB Scottish Widows’ correspondence. Sure, they are still admitting that they’re not going to get anywhere near hitting their nominal target, but now it seems the time for prevaricating is over: action is needed, and needed NOW! I concur of course; if they are failing in their job then they really should take action to sort things out. Yet strangely, rather than detail the actions they are taking to put things right, instead the letter informs me of the sort of actions I should be taking; rather than it being a case of them getting their act together, instead it seems that I am the one who needs to pull up my socks and make arrangements to cover this shortfall that they have created (although apologies and an acknowledgement that it is their failures that have led to this shortfall, there are none).

They are nothing if not helpful, though, my endowment policy provider, whatever it is they’re called today. They haven’t just abandoned me to try to find my own way out of this crisis. Oh no; their letter runs through a number of options I can take so to aid me in my plight. They suggest I could change part of my mortgage to a repayment loan (not feasible in my case, since I don’t have that mortgage any more), I could set up an additional savings scheme (to pay for a house I no longer own) or I could vary my endowment plan by increasing my payments into it (or, in other words, they are saying “look, I know we’re not on track to get anywhere near to earning you the lump sum we said we would do, but you could always bung us a load more money to see if we can get it right this time, eh?”) None of these options seem to me to be worthwhile, tempting, or in some cases physically possible.

But Scottish Widows hasn’t finished yet. They’ve clearly read up on Nudge, and want to help me to make the right choice. For them. So they say that all they require is a simple signature on a piece of paper and in a trice they are willing to authorise an increase in my payments into the policy by some 25%, and that should solve all my shortfall problems. Perhaps. Well, at least until the next set of circumstances conspire against them and their smart investing ways. Oh yes, and smuggled away in the small print it mentions in passing that if I refuse to give them any more money they will in turn refuse to “lifestyle” my endowment policy; in other words, in the closing years of my policy they will no longer transfer some of my units into lower risk investments, so to protect against sudden drops in the stock market in my policy’s final days. Which is nice of them.

Now, giving these folk another wedge of my cash is the last thing I want to do, frankly, but I would quite like to keep that lifestyling bit if you don’t mind. A conundrum then. Which options should I choose? I need a second opinion. Fortunately Scottish Widows are also forced to include a leaflet from the FSA with their correspondence, and that leaflet also handily goes through all the options I can take to deal with my theoretical shortfall, indicating the pros and cons for each choice by a selection of ticks, crosses and question marks. Repaying my mortgage early by paying a lump sum or overpaying each month, for example, earns two ticks ( “this will reduce the amount you owe…” and “it may be better value that saving up separately…”) and two question marks ( “you should check whether your lender will make an early repayment charge…” and “you should check when your lender will give you the benefit from extra payments…”). So, converting part of the mortgage to a repayment loan earns 3 ticks; converting the whole mortgage to a repayment, 2 ticks, 1 cross and a question mark. Starting an additional cash savings plan gets another 3 ticks, while doing the same with a stocks and shares ISA gets 1 tick, 2 crosses and a question mark. As for altering the endowment policy: extending the term gets just 1 tick, 3 crosses and 2 question marks, while bringing up the rear with 3 crosses, 2 question marks and not a single tick is the option to pay more into my existing endowment policy. Even though I could suggest a fourth cross I feel the FSA has omitted there – that “it’s probably not a great idea to shovel yet more money to the people whose investments have created your shortfall in the first place” – this is still the option the FSA feels is the worst possible available, and it is also the option that Scottish Widows wants to bully me into taking. And indeed will punish me if I don’t take it.

As I say, this isn’t a major problem for me as my endowment policy is designed to pay for a house that is now owned by other people (although as my wife’s endowment policy is also currently going south we may need mine to swing into action to pay for the house we do live in.) Still, it will be pretty annoying if my continued investment suffers due to a lack of lifestyling should my endowment policy happen to mature the day after a Lehman Brothers-type bankruptcy and accompanying stock market collapse. More annoying is the principle; that Scottish Widows feels it can just request I pay more money into an endowment policy that by the very nature of the request they admit is to some degree failing, and unilaterally alter the terms and conditions on that policy should I refuse to comply.

All of which is a rather roundabout way of saying that I really must get around to digging out the helpline number and giving the FSA a ring. What do you reckon? It’s not as if they have any more pressing matters to deal with at the moment.

Dear Atlantic Gas

Quick question about a letter you just sent me last week, dated October 2008. I don’t understand how you can write to me in October telling me that gas prices “will” (future tense) increase from 25 August 2008 (2 months ago). This is gas I’ve already used at an agreed price. You surely aren’t allowed to raise prices retrospectively for goods I’ve already bought? After all, PC World can’t come and call on me for an extra tenner for that Epson printer they sold me at 49.99 last month. Why are you allowed to do the equivalent?

I know the feeling, or rather I know a similar feeling. We recently received our statement from British Gas wherein they announced that it was their sad duty to inform us that our direct debit payment would be increasing from £63 to £87 a month. Curious, I thought, since the statement showed that we are over £120 in credit with them as it is, having paid them £189 this quarter while using £50 worth of gas; but winter’s a-coming, and as they explained, over the last 6 months wholesale gas prices has risen by over 60%, and British Gas’s new prices came into effect on the 30th of July, so this explains the dramatic rise.

Or does it? Because it was only three months ago in our previous statement that British Gas said they were increasing our monthly payment from £42 to £63, when we were just £15 in debit at the time and heading into those lean summer months. So how can a 60% increase in the price of gas in the last 6 months translate into a doubling of our monthly payment in the course of 3 months? Well, it evidently can, but it shouldn’t. Perhaps they just want my money to be earning interest in their bank account rather than in mine.

British Gas helpfully included a little brochure with our statement explaining how they work out the monthly direct debit charge, taking into account gas usage as averaged over the year, long term weather forecasts, current payment levels and so on. It’s pretty easy to work out, I can only think it a shame that the cack-handed all-fingers-and-thumbs numpty with the calculator who came up with our new monthly figure must have done it last thing on a Friday when his mind was already in the pub and without him referring to any of our previous statements.

Now I know that I could phone up British Gas and point all this out to them, perhaps ask if they can come up with a more sensible payment figure which has some basis in reality, but I’ve been there before and I have bad memories of the last time I tried such a tack. The friendly call handler agreed that the new payment at the time of £45 was indeed way too high and she said she would lower it to more a common sense figure of £28. Job done. In fact all that happened was that we continued to be charged £45 but our payment date moved from the 1st of the month to the 28th, meaning we actually paid them £45 twice in the month they made the change. Once bitten, and all that, so I’m leaving it be for now.

Instead I can guarantee that history will repeat itself in another way; come April, British Gas will realise, not for the first time, that we’ve massively overpaid for the gas we’ve used, they’ll again send us a cheque to repay what they owe us, and then they’ll once more concoct a brand new but lower monthly direct debit payment, but this time one so low that it won’t even come close to covering our consumption of gas.

Then, and only then, will I be tempted to call them up and tell them not to bother, that they can spare themselves the effort; I’ll reach for that handy guide to how they figure out the monthly direct debit and I’ll do their work for them, simply presenting them with my new, higher, reality-based monthly charge and telling them that they can like it or lump it. Either that or I’ll just pluck a new figure out of mid air, for all the difference it would make.

It was actually the IFC, the International Finance Corporation at the World Bank. They were struggling with what to do with these underdeveloped countries, the poor. They were referred to as underdeveloped, poor, the South, so forth and so on, and … one gentleman from the IFC was in his shower in Washington one morning and he came up with the idea of emerging market which was a more optimistic name.

The shower? I have to wonder what IFC man was up to in the shower when the word “emerging” popped into his head, but I really don’t think I want to know.

Property investment training firm Inside Track, which claims to have created hundreds of property millionaires in the UK, filed for administration on Tuesday, the latest victim of Britain’s housing downturn.

The company, which says it has trained more than 100,000 individuals, said demand for buy-to-let landlord training had shrivelled as mortgages became more expensive and less accessible and as housing prices sagged.

So it looks as if my dreams of travelling in time will remain just that; looks. On a more positive note, however, perhaps I have now received the last of their smuggy and disdainful (but eminently compostable) correspondence that boasted of how you just can’t lose in the property market – especially if you stump up some £3000 in hard cash to pay to Inside Track in the first instance – and which gloatingly mocked and cackled at all those other sad, foolish saps and loser-types; too weak, too timid or just too alert to leap aboard the good boat Inside Track as amazingly it rose with the high tide but then strangely failed to defy the laws of gravity once that swell had subsided.

Which only goes to prove the age-old adage that a Devil in hand can butter no goose on time.

I’m still sure that decision was correct, but recently I have read a good number of posts and comments around the place that, when legitimately criticising the BBC’s business coverage, have spoken wistfully of the Jeff Randall era. Such instances are rare but still they haunt me (I’m easily spooked) and they are a disturbing development. For example take Guido (via Gracchii) who, in one of those posts that suggests he really should just stick to the gossip, criticises Newsnight and Stephanie Flanders because of what appears to be a simple transposing error when reporting the markets; he then finishes his post by pointedly noting that “Jeff Randall is on Sky…“, as is his style.

Well I read that as an invitation, so this week I decided to check out Jeff at his new televisual home, Jeff Randall Live on Sky News. Much water has gone under the bridge since I last clapped eyes on the fellow, and I wondered if perhaps I had been a bit harsh in my appraisal of his talents, that maybe Guido’s implication is right and that he and others have seen something I have not, and that Jeff is a far better journalist that I have hitherto given him credit for.

But oh dear no, it is all still there; Jeff still has the air of someone slightly puzzled, who is trying really hard but is not at all sure quite where he is. When he talks it seems less like he is speaking his brains than he is conducting someone else’s thoughts. Okay, but that’s just presentation, and while it doesn’t breed confidence or suggest Jeff has a mastery of his subject he may still know his stuff, even if he gives every impression that he doesn’t.

But there is more to it than that. In his BBC days Jeff’s role was to answer questions put to him by the presenter, whereupon he would typically appear clueless and flounder around for a bit, unquestioningly trotting out some received wisdom lacking in any supporting evidence, or drawing lazy and false conclusions; I particularly remember him trying to illustrate Leeds United’s financial problems by comparing its turnover against Manchester United’s, which is idiotic. Fortunately Jeff is now spared all that indignity, being both the presenter and interviewer for his own programme, and presumably fed his lines by autocue and earpiece; but still all is not well. He is a very poor interrogator for one thing, his technique apparantly being to lob the obvious and most contentious question first – the one the interviewee will be well rehearsed for – and to then fail to follow it up, plodding on to the next question regardless and making little attempt to react to and engage with whatever the other party has actually said. The result is that he allows the interviewee to speechify, to in effect be allowed to get away with delivering a PR monologue without any fear of being picked up on any of the specifics. In all it doesn’t feel like he is conducting an interview, he may as well be running through a questionnaire.

So yesterday we had David Greene of the law firm representing around 6000 of Northern Rock’s shareholders who reasoned that the government could recompense each shareholder to the value of £4 per share of their worthless stock, a statement that went entirely unchallenged by Jeff. His “interview” with Mike Turner of BAe Systems was even worse, allowing Turner to respond to the obligatory question about the company’s contentious links with Saudi Arabia by sighing, shrugging his shoulders and wondering aloud about what a cruel and unfair world we live in where people can’t just leave his great British company alone, as if concern about the Serious Fraud Office investigation into the Al Yamamah deal and the political interference that brought it to a halt was just an example of the tall poppy syndrome, sour grapes and a sadly regretable lack of patriotism. It was all pretty pathetic.

Now I have nothing against Jeff personally, he is only doing his best bless him, but had I read some of these recent criticisms of the BBC’s business coverage during his tenure I may have entirely agreed, but cited Jeff as a perfect example; so how can you explain his fine reputation among the same folk? Clearly I’ve not watched every report or read every article Jeff has ever produced, and it is possible, though barely plausible, that I have been uniquely unfortunate in my exposure to the bloke; this could merely be a difference of opinion between Jeff’s cheerleaders and myself and there’s no accounting for taste. Maybe it is all down to his supporters taking a dim view of Jeff’s replacement, Robert Peston, who is himself no great shakes; it may be a straightforward case of absence making the heart grow fonder. But just perhaps, could it be the very fact that Jeff has spent much of his post-BBC career regularly criticising the corporation he used to work for that has so endeared him to some? Not for me to say, but whatever the reason the solution is simple; should anyone praise Jeff’s journalistic abilities I will just point them in the direction of his Sky News show and leave it at that. Nothing more will be required, and I never need write about him again.

Well some old things don’t change with the New Year; for one thing Inside Track are still mithering me. Once again I have received a mailing from them inviting me to attend one of their workshops where I can learn all about investing in property so that they I can profit to the tune of a tidy sum. Since having a chuckle while reading their first letter to me a few years back, I’ve always thrown their post straight in the recycling; for an organisation that proclaims that spaces on their seminars are limited and rapidly snapped up I can’t understand why they insist on sending unsolicited invitations to someone who has ended up on their mailing list for no good reason at all. But still the letters come.

However, they seem to have changed tack with their most recent mailshot; just take a look at their latest envelope.

Yes, Inside Track was responsible for making 200 people millionaires last year; now they want me – yes, me – to swell their number and become the 201st. Clearly for Inside Track the arrival of 2008 is no reason to rest on their laurels for 2007; oh no, not only do they want to make me rich, but they want me to join their rich list for last year, so boosting their already impressive statistic of 200 success stories. I can only assume that they don’t simply want to make me a millionaire, they also want to help me to travel back in time, to have become rich some months back; or at the very least they are going to backdate my windfall.

Perhaps I should be flattered by Inside Track’s continued interest in me, but why do I get the nagging feeling that their target audience is not the financially astute, but rather the gullible? Certainly they have hitherto been wasting their time with me, unwilling as I am to get roped into something that exhibits all the signs of financial charlatanry; but time travel? Well, that changes everything. Rather than wasting my time as I had assumed, will an Inside Track seminar instead afford me all the time in the world? Even the mere possibility of it excites me; perhaps I have been far too dismissive of the dubious clots.

Last week’s BBC1 programme Shopping The Supermarkets, and Monday’s Dispatches programme The Supermarket That’s Eating Britain on Channel 4, are recent examples covering familiar territory. Local councils, like mine in Stockport, are bullied in the planning stage and Tesco builds stores that breach planning permission; they hold “land banks” that reduce competition by blocking other retailers from developing sites; they squeeze suppliers into bankruptcy from their powerful oligopsonistic position; they exploit numerous tax loopholes whilst cosying up to government; and they have really, really irritating adverts (sorry, that last one wasn’t on Dispatches list, it’s just one of my bugbears).

Dispatches also highlighted the Clubcard scheme whereby customers’ purchases are monitored and scrutinised, providing a wealth of information ascribed to each individual so that discount vouchers can be posted out tailored to our disparate needs, so that our every whim can be twisted, teased and coerced into profit. Such data mining raises some privacy concerns, and it is this matter that forms the subject of this post, and which has determined why I feel Tesco and its cohorts must be engaged in battle and defeated.

For instance; take a look at this section from my Clubcard statement that arrived this morning. Ignoring the general voucher for the princely sum of £2 which I can spend as I like, we see below the unique, targeted vouchers for my use as prescribed by that infamous, omnipotent database. So, drawing on my many years as a Tesco customer, following the trends as I turned from callow youth into a callow father-of-two, let’s see what they make of me.

You may not be able to empathise, but reading the coupons I feel a distinctly eerie feeling, like someone has just walked over my grave. How do they do it? What witchcraft is this? How could they possibly know that I drink milk? And eat bread, fruit and vegetables? That my wife uses cleaning products? Or that I take all my goods home in a bag? Truly the power of Tesco is mighty, other worldly. I feel invaded, violated, as if someone has been dipping around in my brain, has delved into the depths of my very soul.

Join me. Help me to fight this menace, before Tesco discover other secrets about me – that I wear clothes, shoes – and send me unsolicited vouchers for them too. They must be allowed to go no further. This must end here. Now.

I’m talking about Belbin’s Team Roles, and for the second time in my life I have filled out one of their self-perception questionnaires that in theory indicates where I should ideally fit into a company or organisation. In short the questionnaire is divided into seven sections (eg.“What I believe I can contribute to a team”) and for each section you are given several different options that could apply to you (eg. “Producing ideas is one of my natural assets”, “I can work well with a very wide range of people” etc.). You must allocate 10 points to the possible answers in each section; say 7 points to the option that you feel strongly applies to you, 3 point to an option that you feel is only partially appropriate, and no points to those options that you don’t feel are relevant at all. By following the matrix at the back of the questionnaire you can then discover your ideal role in a team, be it a Shaper, a Co-ordinator, a Resource Investigator, and so on.

So I am a Plant, which apparently meant that I am “creative, imaginative, unorthodox”. Plants “solve difficult problems”. On the other hand I “ignore incidentals” and I am “too pre-occupied to communicate effectively”. A few years ago, however, on the previous occasion that I completed the questionnaire, I was a Monitor Evaluator, which means I was “sober, strategic and discerning”, I would “see all options” and “judge accurately”, but I would also “lack the drive and ability to inspire others”. So which is the real me?

Perhaps I have changed over the intervening years; more likely I suspect that if I were to take the test several times I would each time provide some slightly different responses and so produce a slightly different result. I am not saying the test is total bollocks – I reckon I will never get the results that elevate me to the level of a Resource Investigator (extrovert, enthusiastic, communicative, explores opportunities, develops contacts) or a Shaper (challenging, dynamic, thrives on pressure, the drive and courage to overcome obstacles), they don’t sound like me at all – but I reckon it is mainly bollocks, that’s all.

Because I just don’t know what the purpose of such a survey is, other than to make lots of money for Dr. Belbin. I know what it is meant to do; ideally the test should work out each individual’s attributes and where each employee fits into the team to assist management in arranging the right mix of talents, but does it? Shouldn’t managers be able to ascertain peoples’ abilities without relying on a test such as this? My boss gushed evangelically when she passed the test out, saying to each of us that when we discovered what our team role was we would be amazed at how closely it matched how we see ourselves; but this is hardly surprising when you consider it is a self-perception survey, and so you will be answering the questions as you think you are, which may or may not tally with reality. You may have zero leadership qualities, but if you think you are a great leader then you will answer the questions as if you are Alexander The Great; you will land yourself with a leadership team role according to Belbin, so confirming your own opinion of yourself. When you bear in mind that it is a self-perception survey it would be pretty weird if your Belbin role didn’t fit with your own self-image.

I am not casting aspersions upon Dr. Belbin’s credentials, I am sure he is eminently qualified, but what is to stop someone like myself without any training in the field coming up with my own test if I wanted to? I could create a management quiz where the answers people give would mean they are divided into, oh I don’t know, sheep, goats, wolves and aspidistras; but would it necessarily mean anything? In my case it would be about as scientific as one of those “Are you a chocoholic?” quizzes in Take A Break; but that needn’t prevent it being picked up by a certain type of manager and passed on to their undeserving staff.

And I am not saying that there is no role for management theory, there are probably nuggets of good advice in all management books, and from what I have read of Dr. Belbin he makes some pertinent points, but I think a lot of management is more about common sense than the burgeoning and lucrative management theory industry would like us to believe. Things are often much simpler than people would have us imagine; for example, when I worked in a call handing centre we underwent countless changes to our “opening salutation”, to the order and style in which we answered the calls according to the latest management fad. Ultimately, though, you can theorise to your heart’s content; the best way to provide a good service on the phone is to employ competent and polite people.

Everyone seems to want to build their part. When I was doing my economics degree I reckoned that here was a social science that fancied itself as being a natural science; then when I did a post-graduate diploma in marketing I was conscious that I was studying a management discipline that aspired to being a social science, like economics. The fact is that management is far more art than science; but I guess the arts don’t pay as well. You can’t really blame the likes of Dr. Belbin for trying; but you can question the people who lap up this sort of thing.

I don’t know, but here it is anyway.

I have never listened to Jeff Randall’s Weekend Business on Radio FiveLive before; in part because I have always been doing something else, but also I have never held Mr Randall in very high esteem. When he regularly popped up on the news as the BBC’s business editor he always struck me as a bit of a bumbling and incompetent buffoon; I even remember Andrew Neil ticking him off on The Daily Politics for not having any statistics with him to support his take on some business story or other. However, I recently read this article in The Observer where I learned that he is now the Daily Telegraph’s editor-in chief, and indeed that he has had a pretty successful career. The Observer summarises

Jeff Randall, 51, studied economics at Nottingham University and lectured briefly before switching to journalism. He worked on trade titles before joining the Sunday Telegraph as a business reporter in 1986. From 1989 to 1995 he was City editor of the Sunday Times, then briefly joined PR firm Financial Dynamics as chairman. He returned to the Sunday Times as assistant editor and sports editor in 1996 and was launch editor of the Barclay brothers’ Sunday Business in 1997.

So it seems that being a bumbling and incompetent buffoon needn’t be a barrier to success in the media. Perhaps I should make the switch.

Anyway, last Sunday I listened to his radio programme and it was actually quite interesting, and unintentionally amusing. A cast of business leaders were interviewed on the programme, all perfectly nice people I thought, but what was notable, if perhaps not exactly surprising, was how many of them spoke managerial English in rounded pseudo accents. Much of their talk was liberally peppered with the usual clichés about visions, journeys, environments and experiences, throughout which you could hear the faint echo of the public speaking course. I can only imagine that these people only ever move in circles where such speech is the norm, and that no one ever points out how we talk in the real world.

The most interesting part of the programme, however, was when they discussed this news story about an accountant who sued a management training company when she injured herself on a team building exercise where she had to walk over hot coals. Jeff questioned John Holden of Resource Development International, another training company, about the worth or otherwise of these courses. Jeff did alright I guess, questioning what fire-walking actually has to do with team building, how relevant it all is to the office or shop floor, and about the cost of these exercises, while John Holden trotted out the managerial speak; these courses are about personal developmental processes and journeys, they are about challenging self limiting beliefs and breaking down the barriers in your mind, that wise companies pay a lot of money for these courses because people are a scarce resource.

It is nice that the staff are valued so highly that firms are expected to waste money on this nonsense. The nearest I have been to this sort of thing was on one course where juggling was used at the start as an “ice breaker”. This was a particularly weird set up, as I went on this course with about fifteen people I knew from my office; we were then split up and put on different tables with staff from other offices and had to engage in this farce in order to get to know each other. If my office colleagues and I hadn’t been split up in the first case we could have dispensed with this ice breaker bollocks altogether and just cut to the chase; but then a two hour presentation wouldn’t get stretched out into a whole days training, and that would never do.

Anyway, some plastic balls were placed in the middle of each table and some trainers instructed us all on the basics of juggling; then it was our turn. The “point” of this charade was that we would learn that what had seemed impossible at the start of the lesson was actually far easier than we thought once we applied ourselves. Now in my case all I actually learnt was that I can’t juggle (or perhaps that I don’t apply myself) but even if I had succeeded in this pointless task just how was this seriously meant to affect me? When struggling at work, trying once more to match the quart of workload to the pint pot of resources, is it expected that I will think, “But hey, I can juggle! I can do this”? Probably, but I am never going to; that is never going to happen.

And that’s the real point; through all the talk of valuing teamwork and fostering self awareness there was no attempt on the part of John Holden to explain just how walking on hot coals, or juggling, has ever been of any actual practical assistance to people in their working lives, or if there is evidence of any tangible success for these courses. More interestingly, perhaps, Jeff Randall, a journalist with an impressive CV and an apparent extensive knowledge of business practices, didn’t think to ask.