Author: Mark Hannam

We were twelve in number – six executives and six non-executives – and we had spent the last five hours in a spacious conference room in Vauxhall, on a hot and humid June afternoon, discussing aspects of the company’s strategy for the next three years.  As the meeting came to an end, and the prospect of dinner together at a nearby Eritrean restaurant came into view, as Chair of the meeting, I brought the formal proceedings to a close.  “Let’s take a few minutes”, I said, “before we leave for our meal, to decompose”.   My words provoked some amusement among my colleagues: “Do you mean decompress?”  “Do you want us to turn to compost?”  On the contrary, I had meant exactly what I had said.  At the start of a Board meeting, each attendee should compose themselves, making ready to come together as a group to do the difficult work of governance; at the end of the meeting, each should feel free to decompose, to return to their constituent self, and allow time for individual relaxation and rest. 

“What do you do at Board meetings,” one of my friends asked me recently, “apart from eating sandwiches?”  In the boardroom, as elsewhere, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Governance is a specialised form of work, and to do it well takes lengthy preparation time, high levels of concentration, the employment of good listening and discursive skills, and the ability and willingness to develop collective recommendations in a constructive and collegiate manner.  This is not easy work and should be undertaken with the serious and responsible mindset that the task demands.  The Board is ultimately responsible – legally and morally – for the oversight of the company, the effective deployment of the resources at its disposal, and for securing the interests of various groups of stakeholders, including investors, staff, customers, suppliers, and the wider community.  Good Board meetings require all participants to come to the table primed and prepared to do this work. 

Continue reading “Decomposed”

As I have grown older, I notice that I am reading more biographies.  I do not wholly understand why this is so.  In some recent cases, for example a biography of Goethe, it is because I am now more familiar with his prodigious literary output and his influence on his contemporaries than when I was younger, and therefore am now better able to understand his importance.  In other cases, for example a biography of Charles V, it is because the years when he was the Habsburg emperor encompassed several historical events about which I already knew a little and with which he was centrally involved – the German Reformation, Henry of England’s divorce, the Spanish invasion of Central America, the growth of Turkish power in the Eastern Mediterranean.  In the case of Goethe, reading about the life helps make sense of the work, in the case of Charles, knowing about the combination of momentous events helps make sense of his life. 

There is perhaps another reason, which has to do with the widespread human predisposition to tell stories as a means of explanation.  I am a little suspicious of arguments based primarily on narrative examples, as if hard facts were not relevant to the process of persuasion.  Contrariwise, I recognise the value of stories in bringing the facts, once established, to life.  The plural of anecdote is not data, but evidence in aggregate does not move us in the same was as narrated particularities do.  To understand the world in the fullest sense we need numbers and words, graphs and pictures, and data and stories.  Biographies are ideal vehicles for story telling because they are framed around the familiar human pattern of birth, life, and death.  As I have become older, the importance of this frame has become more intelligible, hence biographies more interesting.

Continue reading “Three lives”

When I worked in mainstream finance, I came across a lot of people (men, mostly) with big-sounding job titles and hefty salaries to match.  Frequently, they would claim, or at least imply, with great confidence that their success was evidence of the meritocratic nature of the financial services industry: they were smart, they had worked hard, their efforts had been recognised and rewarded.  As things go in milk-making, so they go in business: the cream naturally rises to the top.  Once, I was foolish enough to say to my CEO that the problem with senior managers at our firm was that all the people at the top thought they owed their position to merit but almost no-one who worked for them shared that view.  I added that this was also true in most comparable firms.  I doubt my career trajectory improved after that conversation, but it was probably already too late.  Nonetheless, I still stand by what I said then: if you really want to know how good a manager is, don’t ask them, talk to their junior staff instead. 

Mohandas Gandhi was once asked his opinion about Western civilization, and replied, “I think it would be a very good idea”, which nicely sums up my view about meritocracy.  What we have in the West is a system that encourages people at the top to believe they deserve to be there, without paying much attention to whether there is any evidence to support that belief.  We are born with nothing and we die with nothing (the Book of Job reminds us), so we convince ourselves that what we make of our lives is down to us, and that consequently we should bear responsibility for our failures and take credit for our successes.  Except that we are not born into nothing: we are born into a complex socio-economic world, which supplies advantages to some and disadvantages to others, and what we are able to make of our lives is significantly constrained by the place of our birth, our sex organs and skin colour, and the attitude our parents take towards our education.

Continue reading “Lucky, lucky, lucky”

I like Gary Lineker.  Not only was he a great goal-scorer for the England men’s football team, but he was also played for my team – Tottenham Hotspur – the last time we won the FA Cup, in the summer of 1991.  Since then, he has reinvented himself as the best presenter for football shows and various other sports programmes on British television.  He is as good in front of a camera as he was in front of goal.   Famously, during his football career, he was never “booked” (nowadays, shown a yellow card) for foul play or dissent, which is an impressive record for someone who played at the top levels of club football in England and Spain, as well as at international tournaments, for many years.   Last week, however, he was shown a red card by the head of the BBC and forced to stand-down from his presentation duties.  Chaos ensued – full documentation widely available on all British media outlets – until his red card was rescinded and we are now assured that he will be back in the television studio next weekend.  All’s well that ends well?   Alas, no. 

I will provide a summary of the brouhaha that erupted at the BBC, for sake of context, but my focus in this text is less Lineker’s right to express his opinions about matters of public interest, and more about what this tells us about the sad decline of traditional conservative thought in England.  Those who know me well will be aware that I have little sympathy for traditional conservative thinking and might therefore be surprised that I mourn its passing.  As I will argue, the problem is what has replaced it.  True conservatives are instinctively suspicious of radical change and, at least in their own case, that suspicion seem justifiable. 

Continue reading “Red card (rescinded)”

I recently visited the north German city of Lübeck, which was, a millennium ago, a leading member of the Hansa League that dominated the shipping-trade in the Baltic and North Sea, and, much more recently, the birthplace of Thomas Mann, one of my favourite novelists and to whom I had come to pay homage.  A scholarly friend tells me that Lübeck was also the adopted home of Dieterich Buxtehude, the Danish composer and celebrated organist from the Baroque period and that when Johann Sebastian Bach was a young man, he walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck – a distance of 400km – to hear Buxtehude play.  Unlike Bach, I took the train from Hamburg, a journey of merely seventy-five minutes, and I spent several enjoyable hours walking around the city, stopping briefly to sample some kaffee und kuchen in a café owned by Niederegger, a local company that has been making marzipan flavoured confections for the past two hundred years.  I can confirm that the cake in Lübeck is excellent.

I discovered Thomas Mann’s work as a teenager – Death in Venice plus some short stories – and during my twenties I worked my way through several of his major books, including The Magic Mountain, The Holy Sinner, and Buddenbrooks, his famous early story which was set in Lübeck.  In recent years I have read Dr Faustus and re-read most of the earlier novels, and this year’s challenge is Joseph and His Brothers, the tetralogy set in Biblical times.  First question: why is Thomas Mann’s four volume novel referred to as a tetralogy, whereas Laurence Durrell’s and Elena Ferrante’s four volume novels are always called quartets?  Is there a reason or is this simply convention.  Second question: why do I find Mann’s work so impressive and engaging, always a pleasure to be reacquainted with?  It was this latter question that preoccupied me as I strolled around Lübeck in the winter sunshine.

Continue reading “Lübeck”