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Dark times ahead?

21 December 201622 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Brexshit

Since the result of the Brexit referendum, nearly six months ago, I have found it hard to write. I spend too much time reading about developments and not enough time ordering my thoughts. As a consequence, this blog post covers a lot of ground and will be split into three parts.

But there’s a more subtle reason for my writer’s block: my mood swings. This month, watching the Supreme Court display Britain’s constitution working properly, I’ve been able to think that we might find a way through the challenges ahead with good sense and collegiality. But having seen – amid the broader global context of political upheaval – the intolerant and hysterical reaction to the earlier High Court ruling on Article 50, I experience a foreboding about what the Brexit vote might unleash.

I don’t think I’m alone. The foreboding extends beyond the cosmopolitan bubble I inhabit in London. I see it the eyes of visitors from northern cities. I heard it amid the chat of scores of More United supporters who turned up from far afield to campaign in the Richmond Park by-election for openness and tolerance.

Morbid symptoms that precipitated Brexit

27 June 201622 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

gramsci — Antonio Gramsci

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union is easily the most cataclysmic political development of my lifetime. I have spent the last days stunned and despondent; absorbing the news more than making sense of it.

Although I count myself thoroughly European, it was not a foregone conclusion that I would vote Remain. It is self-evident that the EU, as an institution, is ossified and dysfunctional, incapable of addressing the seismic challenges it faces with the Euro or of mustering an effective humanitarian response to the refugees arriving at its borders. Conceived to heal division, the EU has become a wrecker of social democracy that has engendered extreme right-wing politics across the continent.

Such concerns did not persuade me, though, of the prospectus for leaving. That Britain’s economic interests lie in being part of the EU is a no-brainer. A bigger consideration for me was the case for staying engaged in Europe’s conversation, trying to keep it’s project for co-operation on the road. As the referendum campaign unfolded, the xenophobia and hatred stirred up by the Brexiteers dispelled any notion that there might be a decent argument for leaving.

Camus and the wisdom of not knowing

17 June 201622 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

camus

“Democracy, said Camus, is the system that relies on the wisdom of people who know that they don’t know everything.” This observation, by Philip Collins in The Times (£) this morning sent me scuttling to consult Camus’ reflections in more depth.

Collins was giving a very measured response to the day of infamy which saw the murder of the Labour MP, Jo Cox. I hadn’t heard of Jo Cox before yesterday. But in our age of political disenchantment, it seems especially poignant that she appears to have been – as my friend, Simon, who broke the news to me, put it – a fabulous advert for everything we all want: an engaged, democratic, local, committed politician.

Different kinds of truth in health care

29 April 201422 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff

The unharmonious sound of an establishment closing ranks could be heard last week when an NHS hospital attempted to discredit the account by the MP, Anne Clwyd, of the death of her husband while in its care. While conceding that Ms Clwyd’s husband, Owen Roberts, died of hospital-acquired pneumonia, the University Hospital of Wales said it had no evidence to support Ms Clwyd’s assertion that Mr Roberts had died “like a battery hen.”

Cardiff and Vale University Health Board released a summary of an independent inquiry into Ms Clwyd’s allegations but declined to release the full report. So it’s impossible to assess what evidence it evaluated before reaching a view that Mr Roberts didn’t die like a battery hen.

The Co-op, revolution and public leadership

14 March 201422 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

99 per cent The tragic mistake that the Co-op keeps making is to try to accommodate itself to the era of unrestrained, crony capitalism just as we need it to prove that its 19th Century mutual values are a plausible alternative to corporate excess.

Euan Sutherland – who resigned this week after the leak of his £3.5m pay package – demonstrated not only a poor fit with the Co-op’s mutual ethos, but a complete lack of the leadership values that will turn round public disaffection with business.

It may have been lame of Sutherland to declare the Co-op “ungovernable” before he’d even attempted to reform it, but this was consistent with an executive whose leadership style had demonstrated – as Will Hutton put it – no understanding of his organisation’s core challenge:

“That challenge is to marry Co-op values with a new and better functioning business model. What is astounding is that it occurred to nobody, not the executives themselves, that by being offered and accepting sums this large the management were trashing the very values they were on a mission to rebuild.”

Co-operative values: missing in action

4 December 201322 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Spinning in their graves? The Rochdale Pioneers, founders of the Co-operative Movement

Last week, I ended a 30-year customer relationship with the Co-operative Bank. The move was precipitated initially by financial caution as a gaping hole was revealed in the bank’s balance sheet but cemented by dismay at the catalogue of mismanagement revealed in recent weeks.

While I feel a litte sad as a customer, I’m also discomforted professionally as the collapse of the Co-op Bank raises questions about my advocacy of values-driven leadership. I believe the problems of the self-styled “ethical bank” stem not from an excessively values-driven approach but from a disconnection from its values. But – and here’s the sting – the complacency generated by its intent as an ethical business may have played a role in the bank’s undoing.

Purpose and values in the NHS

6 February 201322 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

It was only last month that we were asked whether a hospital, of all things, would ever need to consider its purpose and values. To those outside the NHS, it is self-evident that a hospital exists to treat people’s health problems and to save lives. Yet today both Robert Francis QC and the Prime Minister have dispelled any notion that the NHS can currently be trusted to deliver such a purpose.

Introducing the final report of his inquiry into the Mid-Staffs hospital scandal, Robert Francis spoke of an NHS trust that “put corporate self-interest and cost control ahead of patients and their safety.” Responding to the report, David Cameron condemned “a focus on finance and figures at the expense of patient care” in the culture of the NHS.

The facts of the Mid Staffordshire scandal were already established, in part by Robert Francis’s earlier inquiry but also thanks to the campaigning efforts of relatives of some of the hundreds of patients who needlessly died because of negligent and inhumane “care”.

Antony Jenkins and the FIFO test at Barclays

18 January 201322 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

fifo — An inspiring model of leadership

Many a year ago, when I was working at BBC News, leadership by acronym was very much in vogue. One department head who favoured a flamboyantly macho style enjoyed satirising the culture by describing his approach as the FIFO model.

The Vogel Wakefield blog is too polite a space in which to spell out the meaning of FIFO. Suffice to say the manager’s broad intent was along the lines of, “Kindly toe the line or consider finding employment elsewhere.”

I was reminded of this on reading the email to Barclays’ staff sent by the bank’s chief executive, Antony Jenkins, redefining Barclays’ purpose and values.

Sustaining public service broadcasting worthy of the name

16 November 201222 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

reith Following my post earlier this week on the difficulties at the BBC, I have been chastised by a good friend and former colleague for being too harsh on the Corporation. The specific criticism was that my piece offered no evidence that I valued anything in the BBC.

On reflection, the complaint seems justified. As both a consumer and a former employee, I’m happy to record that I find much to cherish in the BBC’s output and modus operandi. Given how besieged staff inside the organisation feel, perhaps I erred in assuming that this was taken as read. It is because I respect the nobility to which BBC journalism aspires that I am perplexed by its falling from grace.

However, all organisations need critical friends who are prepared to speak difficult truths. What people value in the BBC – or, more precisely, in its purpose of public service broadcasting – will be at risk if it remains sanguine about the existential threat it faces. The purpose of public service broadcasting is not served by trying to equate it with everything the BBC does. Nor by insisting that the activities we value in the BBC need to be undertaken by a single monolithic broadcaster.

The BBC: judgment suspended

14 November 201222 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

New Broadcasting House, London

As a former BBC hand, I wonder whether people inside the BBC appreciate just how out of control it looks to the outside world? The failures at Newsnight over its mistaken (semi-) identification of Lord McAlpine as a paedophile have revealed what should have been unimaginable lapses in basic journalistic protocol. The director-general’s subsequent resignation with a £450,000 pay-off looked like the BBC Trust had lost the plot. And BBC News is running out of seasoned hands as executives keep falling in the line of fire. But the message from the BBC is “steady as she goes.”

Jimmy Savile and tacit knowledge: what the past can teach us about the present

25 October 201222 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

savile

The Jimmy Savile scandal is a textbook example of wilful blindness. It viscerally underlines the necessity for leaders to free up tacit knowledge in their organisations.

The BBC is not alone in facing questions about how it allowed a predatory paedophile to conduct a career of child sexual abuse stretching over decades – apparently to the knowledge of colleagues around him. The NHS, the police, sundry care homes and approved schools among others also have to account for apparent failures in their duty of care. But the BBC holds a special responsibility, having provided the platform upon which Savile built his celebrity as a family entertainer and sustained his powerful influence over vulnerable people. Such is (or was) the trust in the BBC that the halo effect it conferred over Savile possibly encouraged others to drop their guard.

Murdoch talks values

24 August 201222 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Elisabeth Murdoch

Elisabeth Murdoch’s MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival could have been cribbed from the Vogel Wakefield rule book.Discussing the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News Corporation last year, she demonstrated that at least one Murdoch sees the fundamental importance of alignment between values and behaviour in the family business. She said that News Corporation was “asking itself some very significant and difficult questions about how some behaviours fell so far short of its values.” And she took issue with the assertion by her brother James, at a previous MacTaggart lecture, that “the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit”. Not that she denied the importance of profit; rather, “profit without purpose is a recipe for disaster.”

A master of the universe resigns

15 March 201222 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Goldman Tower — Goldman Tower, Jersey City

Greg Smith had been working for Goldman Sachs for twelve years before he published the resignation letter yesterday which has caused a furore.

It presents a devastating portrait of a corporate culture that is entirely self-serving and betraying the interests of its clients:

“I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

“It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.”

The season of social value

29 November 201122 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Occupy London protestors at St Paul's Cathedral. — Occupy London protestors at St Paul’s Cathedral.

The idea that business should create social value, not just shareholder value, is fast becoming the common sense of our time. One could interpret this as a delayed corrective to the crisis in capitalism brought about by the credit crunch. But there was no inevitability about it. Even at the start of the year, when Michael Porter published his Harvard Business Review article on creating shared value, his argument was greeted with scepticism as much as agreement.

Since then, we’ve had the Arab Spring, public disgust with the press brought about by the phone hacking scandal and now the Leveson hearings, riots in England over the summer, the Occupy protests, and the looming threat of financial and social collapse in the euro zone. These events have given voice to public unease with corporate elites who seem out of control and political elites who have no answers to our current predicament.

When spin is not enough

16 July 201122 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Sorry — The hardest word?

I beg your forebearance in returning so soon to the leadership failings at News International. But no sooner did I publish my last post than it was overtaken by events. Rebekah Brooks saw the error of her ways and Rupert Murdoch issued this apology. Perhaps a retweet of my post reached their Twitter feeds.

Andrew Hill summarises the reasons why the timing and nature of this apology is unlikely to help Murdoch:

Mr Murdoch’s audience is understandably confused. If you set any store by the fad for corporate bosses to demonstrate their “authenticity” then the “authentic” Mr Murdoch was the ruthless mogul of July 3, the day before the outrage over the hacking of murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone broke, or the smiling patriarch, toughing it out with his arm round Ms Brooks earlier this week…

Phone hacking and social value

14 July 201122 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Thank you — The final edition of the News of the World

For some months I’ve had occasional thoughts of writing a blog post about the phone hacking scandal at News International. The reason I never got round to doing so until now is instructive. At some level, I doubted the point of deconstructing News International’s venality as this has appeared so self-evident to me since I was a schoolboy delivering newspapers that it seemed unremarkable.

In recent days, the pace of events has been so fast and the volume of commentary so large, that I doubted that I had anything distinctive to contribute. However, the affair prompts me to pull together some thoughts on the social purpose of business and why I’m convinced this is an increasingly important focus of leadership.

The risks of the spiv economy

11 May 201122 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

John Kay writes apropos the banks’ PPI mis-selling scandal:

Market economies are always vulnerable to chancers and spivs who sell overpriced goods to ill-informed customers and seem to promise things they do not intend to deliver. If such behaviour becomes a dominant business style, you end up with the economies of Nigeria and Haiti, where rampant opportunism makes it almost prohibitively difficult for honest people to do business. Our prosperity depends on a self-enforcing culture of ethical business values, in which traders value their reputation and seek to develop long-term commercial relationships. That is the culture in which banks used to operate: it is time they did so again.

China’s disrespect for the law undermines its businesses

8 April 201122 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

ai weiwei — Ai Weiwei on a video link shortly before his detention

The FT reports on Huawei’s difficulties breaking into the US market. Over the past decade, the Chinese firm has risen to become the world’s number two supplier of network equipment with growth in most major markets outside America. But America’s growing distrust of China is proving a huge obstacle and it has failed to win any major contract with a leading US telecoms network:
Read More »

Reputation deconstructed

7 April 201122 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

googleplex — Googleplex, Mountain View, California

Amazon tops the Reputation Institute’s 2011 survey of the most reputable American companies. Google leads the global survey.

In relation to the US study, the RI found that the excellent companies were:

2.5 times more likely to have the CEO set the strategy for their enterprise positioning
1.5 times more likely to include reputation metrics as part of their senior management “dashboard”
15 times more likely to manage corporate reputation across company functions
1.7 times more likely to use an outside partner to assist with corporate reputation management

There’s some interesting detail on how reputation affects consumers’ buying decisions. The RI found that people take into account their whole impression of a company, not just their view of its products or services, when deciding whether to buy: