Hill+Knowlton Strategies

The British American Business’s http://www.babinc.org/ recent event, ‘Fixing Britain-the Business of Reshaping our Nation in 2012’, featured keynote speaker Lord Digby Jones, who over the course of the morning took some time to share the key points from his new book Fixing Britain  http://www.digbylordjones.com/fixing-britain.html

 After listening to months of news focusing on nothing but the doom and gloom of our struggling economy, it was refreshing to hear someone confidently speak about and celebrate the good qualities of UK businesses. In Digby Jones’s view London is one of the most attractive international financial centres, especially considering its political, financial and legal stability. We are also the 6th biggest manufacturing economy and home to one of the world’s most productive car plants – in Sunderland, managed by Nissan. The second biggest pharmaceutical company in the world, GSK, is also proudly British. For every Airbus which circumnavigates the globe, half of its parts including the Rolls Royce engine are made in….you guessed it, Britain!

Confidence tricks never go out of fashion and Digby Jones showed how displaying confidence can be a truly valuable commodity, which certainly helps to sell a new book or bargain for Britain at the trading table. He also answered a few questions on the state of the European economy relative to Asia’s and highlighted that Britain needs to better foster Asian trading relationships in order to remain competitive and harness our strengths. Warren Buffett once claimed, “when the tide goes out it shows the wrecks at the bottom of the sea” and in Britain’s case we are still fixing the social, political and corporate ‘wrecks’ which the recession has left us with.

Digby’s new book gives us some good reasons to celebrate what we are good at in Britain. In order to reshape our nation we can start by supporting British businesses, develop stronger trading relationships and use events like the Olympics and the Queen’s Jubilee to inject some much needs confidence into the economy.