The 2084 Precept (11 page)

* * * * *

I left London on the M4 motorway, past
Heathrow and Windsor and took the Slough Central exit, Slough being
pronounced 'Sluff' by its detractors of which there are many and
with good reason. This exit leads directly to a hotel I use which
is located before you reach the town proper. It was early afternoon
when I checked in. The hotel belongs to one of those good American
chains, pleasant service, rooms always of the expected quality and
everything as it should be, you can count on it. Just the way I
like it. You can keep those English hotels with their crooked
stairs, innumerable fire doors obstructing the passage of both
yourself and your luggage along innumerable narrow corridors,
creaking floorboards, tiny rooms and ridiculous shower
contraptions.

I left the serious luggage in the car, went
up to my room, unpacked my overnight case and lay down on the bed,
time for some brief relaxation. Except that Mr. Jeremy Parker had
made an abrupt and unwelcome intrusion into the gourd of my skull
again.

O.K., I told myself, that's it, you are
going to get him out of your brain once and for all, you are going
to check out a couple of items on your laptop and if any of his
facts are significantly wrong, you will have reconfirmed what you
have already decided, namely that he belongs on the pile of flotsam
(or jetsam if you prefer) which constantly floats past us on the
tides of our lives.

Well, I checked. His facts were accurate,
only minor differences. Which indicated nothing, so what? I checked
my emails, nothing requiring any action on my part, and I decided
to do a bit of computer training with me playing White against the
King's Indian Defence. I stuck to the classical system in which
White plays an early knight to f3.

There is no point in trying to play at a
certain level unless you continuously add to your knowledge of the
various systems, their possible variations, their possible
sub-variations and the concepts hiding behind them all. The
concepts are important, you need to know why you are making the
moves you are making, you need to know what your positional
objectives are and which are the pressure points. Among other
things, it saves thinking time if your opponent makes an
unusual—and therefore possibly weak—move; after all, you only have
2 hours on your clock for the first forty moves. It also helps to
keep you concentrated on the strategic aims and tactical
possibilities as you move away from the opening theory and into the
middle game.

At some point in time I snoozed off. I woke
up just before 8 p.m. and strolled the ten minutes to one of
Slough's Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi enclaves—I can’t tell
the difference—and into the Taj Mahal. I ordered what I always
order there, a Madras curry, hot but Indian style hot, not one of
the scalding infernos they prepare for the English and which serve
as a feigned justification for the consumption of large quantities
of beer. My curry was washed down as usual with some water and a
white house wine, cold and dry.

Back at the hotel, I spent a couple of hours
checking through my notes for tomorrow's management presentation.
It makes for a better performance with everything more or less
rehearsed and partially memorized. And then it was into bed, and I
fell asleep reading
'Serenade'
.

Allow me, if you will, to briefly explain
how I came to be a self-employed consultant and how I do my
work.

After university, I started working for a
multinational which eventually transferred me to its international
headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva, sitting placidly on
its lake at the spot where the Rhône exits, with its
Jet
d'Eau
, its old town, the French Mont Salève dominating its
southern skyline, the Jura mountains to the North, France just five
minutes away, the Alps just around the corner, the elegant
Swiss-French mother-tongue, and the girls; oh yes, the girls.

Thanks to the multitude of international
organizations and multinational corporations based there, it seemed
to me as if there were millions of these creatures all over the
place. Just looking at them warmed the cockles of my heart, and
other cockles as well.

Life's ocean waves continued to be kind to
me. They washed me gently ashore and into several available female
coves, if you will forgive the choice of phrase. They also threw
large chunks of luck my way at work. Over a period of several
years, I worked on major projects in our manufacturing operations
in France, Italy and Spain and in our marketing subsidiaries in
Scandinavia and Greece. I learned about production, purchasing,
finance, treasury, sales and marketing and other things, and I
learned to listen to employees at all levels—mainly because most of
them knew a lot, and I didn't.

And after a few years, I resigned. I
resigned because I figured I could enjoy life a lot more and also
earn a lot more money, and more quickly, if I were my own boss. And
whether or not that would be so, is something you never find the
answer to unless you go and do it. A risk. Yes indeed, it is
difficult to discover new horizons if you are too afraid to lose
sight of the shore in the first place..

And another reason was because Geneva, like
everything else on this planet, was being severely devastated and
destroyed by the non-stop construction, the streaming masses of
human reproduction and the improperly controlled immigration. Ask
any elected birdbrain. More, he will proudly tell you, is
better.

And the ghastly areas full of African, Asian
and Eastern European prostitutes, pimps and drug-pushers, and the
corresponding growth of sex clubs and sex shops, a million
vibrators and dildos on sale, all housed in buildings growing
shabbier and shabbier by the minute, were now visually available to
the young genevois children and were assisting them, no doubt, in
their early understanding of what this planet is all about—even in
the erstwhile pristine, educated, and romantic city of Geneva.

Progress is what our elected birdbrains call
it, and all of it engineered or permitted by themselves; except of
course that we have to listen to their bleating about how nothing
is their fault. Indeed they are paid large salaries, but they have
neither the authority nor the responsibility, it must have been
somebody else.

So Geneva had disappeared (I’ll go back one
day to see if they have managed to reverse any of the city’s
self-inflicted diseases), and I became a self-employed consultant.
No capital required. I deal with loss-making companies only,
usually manufacturing ones, and only those of up to a maximum of
around 500 employees; more than that and I would need a team.

It takes me between two and three weeks to
tell them whether I can get rid of their losses in the short-term,
short-term being within 12 months—or whether I can't, I don't see
it, maybe somebody else can. I do this by interviewing employees at
various levels, and I use the two ears and one mouth ratio, i.e. I
listen a lot. And for a very good reason—at any level, these people
tend to know more about their business than I do. I also look at
the companies’ products, I go through their balance sheets—many a
slimy worm creeps out of that swamp, I can tell you—and I do a
thousand other things. And if I can
see
how to get the
company churning out some profits again and if they want me to stay
and do it, then I cost €1,200 per day plus expenses.

Cheap, I tell them. If you hire a
consultancy firm, they will send you a production expert, a sales
expert, a marketing expert, a finance expert, a purchasing expert
and maybe other experts as well and it will cost you a daily
fortune. And you may well end up with a report full of
recommendations, many of which are not feasible, or are
inappropriate, or require large amounts of capital investment which
is simply not available. And, of course, after the report you will
be involved in more vast consultancy fees if you want them to stay
and help you to actually
do something about it.

I, on the other hand, write no reports. I
fix things. I believe there is a solution for every problem. There
are plenty of people who don't of course. There are plenty of
people who believe there is a problem for every solution. Or there
are the people who can see a problem but assume there is no
solution. Or, worse still, there are the people who cannot even
recognize that a problem exists.

And—I tell my potential clients—you will
find nobody like me, but nobody, who can be contractually fired
overnight if you don't like his performance, and without having to
state a reason of any kind or pay me a single day's extra fee.

So, that's me, I've been doing this for
years now. Word gets around, and I have had plenty of customers in
plenty of countries. I have the languages, and where I don't,
English is the magic elixir. And it doesn't matter what the
companies' businesses are, I learn quickly. I am successful and I
always have customers. So far, that is.

* * * * *

It was raining again this morning, hard and
wind-driven. I checked out of the hotel, slung my overnight case
into the back of the car and drove across town to the industrial
estate and into the car park of Clark's Industrial Adhesives &
Fasteners PLC, the name of the subsidiary. It manufactures and
markets industrial adhesives, glue to you and me, lots and lots of
different kinds in lots and lots of different-sized metal
containers and other forms of packaging. It also manufactures a
wide variety of industrial rivets. This is admittedly an illogical
manufacturing mixture, except for the fact that in many cases the
customers are the same for both product types. The glue has high
profit margins, the rivets low ones. If I were to stay involved
long enough to be involved in some of the more strategic issues, I
would have to look closely at what benefits and negatives this kind
of production mixture was propagating.

It was an unkempt, poorly maintained
building, not unusual for a loss-making company with no money, but
the sign with the company name brought a smile to my face, as it
did every time I walked up to the entrance. When I arrived on the
first day, the sign was off the horizontal, a letter had fallen
off, it was grimy, it hadn't been cleaned in years, it was off to
the side of the entrance and it was small, as if the company were
ashamed of identifying itself, or even ashamed of itself, period.
Now, in the scheme of things, while I agree that nothing could be
less important than a sign, small items can often be an indication
of how matters of greater consequence are dealt with. And there is
something called pride, no matter what the situation is. And so I
played my first card, I ranted on about the sign, I offered to
personally lend them the cash to replace it with a brand new larger
one—a no risk offer of course, there was no way they would accept
such a thing—and I shamed them into doing something about it. And
now we had something all the employees, all the customers, all the
suppliers and anybody else arriving at the premises could
appreciate. A huge new sign, yellow lettering on a dark red
background, directly above the entrance and washed down once a
week.

This had nothing to do with improving
operations or profitability of course, but it set the tone, here is
a consultant who makes things happen. I walked past reception,
no-one there. There should be, it's 8.30 a.m. I'll have to talk to
them about that. I got myself a coffee at the machine and entered
the boardroom, first door on the left. I was early, the
presentation was due at nine o'clock, but I like them to see that
I'm always the first one there, something else which sets the
tone.

In the first management meeting several
months ago, two of them came in late, quite happy about it, full of
the joys of life. "Gentlemen," I said, addressing everyone, "I have
always noticed that people who arrive late for meetings are very
happy. They are always smiling and laughing. But those who are
sitting around doing nothing while waiting for them are not so
happy. They are nervous, they are busy people, they have things to
do all day long, sometimes very urgent things. Tell me," I asked
the latecomers, "why are you smiling?" And that of course stopped
any late arrivals in future meetings. Not very courteous, I admit,
nor intended to be. But the intentions were good ones, setting the
tone again.

At five minutes to nine everybody was there
and I switched on the beamer.

There were six of them, CEO, CFO, V.P. Sales
& Marketing, V.P. Production, I.T. Director and, yes you always
have one, H.R. Director, all men. The latter certainly performs a
necessary function but, believe me, any CEOs tend to come from
engineering, sales or finance. Never from H.R. and quite rightly
so, for reasons I prefer not to expound upon. And if I am wrong and
somewhere you know of a CEO who came from Human Resources, then
that would be the illustrious exception which makes up the rule.
Yes.