Hill+Knowlton Strategies

I believe it was contemporary urban philosopher Ferris Bueller who once said ‘Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it’ (NB – on reflection, I don’t know why I wrote that; I hate people who ascribe deep significance to the throwaway utterances of fictional characters. IT WAS WRITTEN BY A SCREENWRITER, YOU CHUMP). This edition of Web Curios is brought to you by the whooosh-ing sound that time makes as it flies past your ears; it seems like only yesterday that I was writing the last one of these, talking about holidays and the end of summer and stuff. All of a sudden it’s December, I’ve not written a Curios for a month (not that any of you CARE, you unappreciative whelps), and you can’t turn on the television without a famous trying to sell you stinkwater. On an unrelated note, I am yet to eat a mince pie in 2011. If anyone would like to courier some over to H&K towers, I will be very grateful and possibly do a small happy dance in gratitude; thanks (in the unlikely event that HRH Prince Charles is reading this, I am a massive fan of Duchy Originals).

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The pretence that this blog is a weekly thing really has to stop. One month since the last one, fact fans. I’ve had THINGS TO DO. Not least going to Brussels and Croatia, where I went on holiday and did NOTHING other than read and swim and be horizontal. It was awesome, and as a result I now look less like this and more like this. No really, I do.

BUT that was then and this is now; I have returned to a world in which the internet spends all its time railing against the evil of corporations and then…er…goes incontinent with grief over the passing of the head of one of the world’s largest corporations; in which Silvio manages to somehow become even more ridiculous and offensive;  and a world in which somehow one of the members of 1980s pop combo Hue & Cry has become a consultant on games, play and ludic theory. We live in interesting times. Here are some totally insignificant bits of online ephemera to help distract you from what appears to be the total meltdown of civilisation which is going on all around us. Christ, I sound like an old man.

Socially responsible graffiti on a Croatian beach hut

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This is actually Daisy Sheppard under the guise of Jonathan, many thanks this week for our contributor’s Me, Dave Chambers, Ross Gillam, Ed Jones & Nick Woods…

This week there was the unsurprising announcement that top Uni’s intend to charge top fees, interest rates are STILL at 0.5%, Osborne’s Project Merlin, the return of RBS Six Nations & H&K were trending with their digital insights at #SMWLDN. 

The stakes were raised… It came as no surprise this week that Cambridge University will be charging students the maximum tuition fees of £9k a year. Viewing higher fees as a measure of academic excellence is already the norm in the US and in the UK public school system and it was this position that Cambridge took in defence of its plans arguing anything less than the maximum would be ‘fiscally irresponsible.’

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This is to be the worst of times in the hope of a return to the best of times. The long awaited Comprehensive Spending Review was as brutal as the Coalition Government had prepared us for: £83 billion worth of cuts.

 Let the John Redwoods of this life point out that in cash terms public spending is still rising. Over the next four years it won’t feel like that with an estimated half a million public sector jobs to go.

The Chancellor – with business backing – claims that this is the medicine Britain needs. Labour have bet their economic credibility on the cuts being too fast and too deep and halting the recovery. Outwith that domestic political split, there is another context in which this should all be seen and another voice heard.

This week, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, warned that a failure to agree a common path globally on how economies are re-balanced could lead to a decline in world output and a 1930s style global depression.

George Osborne’s plans must be seen in this context. The UK economy does not function on its own and whether this plan works or not will as much be influenced by global pressures as domestic concerns.

The USA, which is still pursuing the path of stimulus, is in direct opposition to China on currency policy and that disagreement is replicated all over the globe.

This is a roller coaster ride on a sharp downward incline with no one really certain when the car will start to lift again.

If global conditions do not improve, the UK will not be able to expect the level of growth which will make up for the cuts in government spending to re-build the economy, or bring in the necessary revenues to cut borrowing.

What can be said for definite then?

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Today I’m loving a post on the Harvard Business Review blog titled Having Ideas Versus Having a Vision, by Roberto Verganti. Coming from a small, mature business market like Australia, I’d been well-indoctrinated to the idea that the British economy was bigger, faster, stronger. But like the old expression says: “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”, and boy, has this economy fallen (I’d like to point out that the correlation between my getting here and the world falling apart is entirely coincidental).

From an outsider’s perspective, I really believe part of the challenge facing the British recovery post-recession is a lack of demonstrable passion in the business community. There’s plenty of passion about things like bankers’ bonuses, quantitative easing and football players. But expert commentator after expert commentator has agreed for months now that after the initial shock, the global financial crisis became a crisis of confidence. Who’s job is it to inspire confidence? The Leader’s.

A crisis of confidence is, to a natural leader, an opportunity like no other. If you have a vision, and the courage to point to it and say “that’s where I’m going”, you’ll be one of very few. And while all of your competitors are sitting around waiting for the results of the next general election, their customers and staff will take a peek over your side of the fence. And a lot will jump over. Maybe they’ll jump to a new brand. Maybe they’ll jump to a new market. Maybe they’ll all bugger-off to Asia; so long Europe, it’s been a…time.

So someone needs to get angry. Someone needs to get up off the mat and say “enough”, and grab the cliche by the horns and give British businesses a damn good seeing-to. Someone needs to throw an elbow. Because that’s the kind of someone that others follow.