This was a talk that I gave to a bunch of emerging leaders this morning at a Common Purpose event.

It's rough and ready, but I had a lot of fun.

I was invited to speak about 'Adapting To A New Environment'........

“Never pretend it’s all real.”

Anyone know how old Gary Barlow was when he wrote Never Forget?

Just 24.

And yet this is some of the best leadership, life advice that I’ve ever heard. And it displays an incredible level of maturity and wisdom.

Because he’s right.

None of it is real.

None of it.

We kid ourselves that it is – that what we see around is fixed, stable, solid.

But it’s not. As Take That found out, when Robbie left after they recorded that song.

I mention all this because I think the starting point for this topic is wrong.

I don’t blame Emily or anyone else at Common Purpose for this; I blame the zeitgeist

And here’s my problem with the zeitgeist: adapting to a new environment, necessarily presupposes that an old one exists - and that therefore the challenge is to move from one fixed environment to another.

In reality, of course, it’s all changing.

All the time.

Change.

Now there’s a word for our times.

How many of you have been on a change management course?

I work with clients who have ‘Directors of Change’, ‘Change Tsars’ even. They send their senior people on Leading Change courses, and their junior people on Understanding Change courses.

Change, change, change.

It’s all bullshit, if you’ll excuse my language this time in the morning.

And, by the way, just because it comes out of Harvard Business School or somewhere equally esteemed doesn’t mean that it isn’t bullshit – au contraire some might say.

But it’s bullshit because the very word change suggests that there is an end point - that once we’ve made the change, or ‘adapted to a new environment’, we’ve done our work, and we can take a break, a breather, before the next ‘change’ or ‘adaptation’ is required.

But life, work, the whole shebang just isn’t like this.

There’s no such thing as a new environment, in the same way that there’s no such think as an old environment.

There is just ‘an environment'.

And this environment is forever shifting, forever dynamic, forever morphing.

And either you recognise that and you morph with it, or – you get stuck, you become irrelevant and out of touch.

And that – ironically – is when people start talking about ‘change’ . That’s when you know you’re really in trouble, when they bring in the ‘change managers’.

Because whilst you’re busy ‘managing the change’, ‘adapting to the new environment’, carefully superimposing your Harvard models, the change has already happened.

You’ve fallen into THE BIG TRAP.

You got comfortable. You looked around you and you thought it was fixed and stable: instead of noticing what the dynamic was; however subtle.

In short, you got hubristic.

I went to a comprehensive school, and didn’t know what the word ‘hubris’ meant until I was 25.

But as soon as I found out what it was, I realised I’d seen plenty of it in my time.

And, as any Ancient Greek will tell you, hubris is always, always, always followed by his good pal nemesis.

Look at the banks in the last few years if you want possibly the best example there’s ever been.

I got so hubristic that I set up an office in Australia.

There I was, 6 weeks in Sydney, meeting people, having lunches and coffees, swaggering around Circular Quay feeling pretty pleased with myself and pretty important.

When – I know now – there were very loud alarm bells ringing.

But I couldn’t hear them.

All I could hear was people telling me how brilliant I was for setting up a business in London, and now one in Sydney.

But back in London, that business, my business, was failing.

Very quietly, almost imperceptibly, it was failing. We turned it around in the end of course (and what a ‘learning experience’ that was) but the point is I had allowed it to fail.

Because the market was changing – as it always does, all the time.

Because the clients and their requirements were changing – as they always do, all the time.

Because the people we employed were changing – as they always do, all the time.

Everything was changing – as it always does, all the time.

I’d just stopped noticing it.

I’d started to believe my own hype: that it was fixed, stable, and sorted.

But it’s not. It never is. Ever.

This is a fundamental truth about the world: businesses, organisations, friendships, love affairs even…..

Just because my wife thought I was amazing yesterday, didn’t mean she didn’t think I was a tosser this morning.

Just because this particular approach worked with a colleague yesterday, doesn’t mean it will work today. And tomorrow, she might find it so demeaning and offensive, that she resigns!

Just because we spent X many years making money out of people using landlines, doesn’t mean a whole new market that we don’t really understand - mobiles - won’t emerge.

Has anyone else heard those frankly tragic, rearguard adverts by BT? Desperately trying to persuade us, almost blackmail us emotionally, that it’s somehow ‘better’ to call our loved ones using landlines?

It’s laughable. Or if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

Telephones are interesting:

Just because you are the predominant provider of mobile handsets – Nokia – doesn’t mean that Apple won’t come along and smash into your market share by building the iPhone.

But of course Apple didn’t ‘smash’ into Nokia’s market share – had Nokia been looking, paying attention, they’d have seen ‘em coming, seen the signals.

But suddenly they were the rabbit in the headlights, mesmerised, surprised and unable to move.

There are thousands of examples, particularly at the moment.

The printed press. Didn’t really see the internet coming didn’t they?

HMV. What is HMV for in a world of iTunes?

And actually, what is iTunes for in a world of Spotfiy and Last FM?

All of these players have all been totally caught out.

Totally needlessly.

Because they all got comfortable and thought that their environment was fixed.

It’s not: it’s ever changing, no matter what field you’re in, no matter what your job, no matter what your situation.

To stay on top, in my opinion, the job is as simple as – and as impossible as – recognising this.

OK, so how?

How do you avoid being that bunny in the headlights?

Well, if you’re the rabbit, you notice that it’s not earth any more, that it’s tarmac, that there are white lines that smell different and new, you recognise it’s new territory and so you look a bit more carefully.

You force yourself to look again at the environment around you.

You develop, to extend my animal metaphor (different animal this time) very sensitive antennae.

Antennae so sensitive that they detect the slightest shift.

So that you can make the slightest tweak now – and don’t have to lurch, and scramble later, in a desperate attempt to catch up to get back to where you already thought you were.

My experience is that it’s all about constantly just tweaking, reacting to the environment.

Look at some successful leaders. Caesar (who had never been on a change management course, by the way) had amazing antennae, could keep adapting and changing his approach to suit developing situations the whole time – except interestingly towards the end when he got comfortable, which is when they murdered him.

Churchill – perhaps the greatest opportunist of the last century. He could read the signals and environment around him like no-one else, and through very careful positioning over many years, became the only real choice for Prime Minister following Chamberlain’s fall from grace. Hitler, interestingly, certainly from the mid-point of the war, lost his previously stellar ability to smell out the times. It was probably this, more than the fact that he was an evil nutter, that was his downfall: he didn’t look at the environment around him.

So how do you develop these antennae?

I’m going to leave you today with what I think are the 8 key steps to getting there.

1.Step Back.

Watch your own business, career, life as a movie. And comment on it, critique it. Go somewhere different to do this.

2. Trend.

What I mean by this is look at the world, listen to the news, and think what it the news might be tomorrow.

Where do you think things are going? Trust yourself, because you’re a much better judge of this than you think.

Think about where you’d put your money if you were forced to literally bet the ranch on a few things happening in, say, five years' time.

What would those things be?

And don’t worry about how crazy your predictions sound. Crazy is the new normal. Who’d have thought 3 years ago that Peter Mandelson would be Gordon Brown’s deputy PM?

Or in the 1950s, that Ronald Reagan, the washed up actor, would be President?

Or in the 1980s that George W Bush, the drunk playboy, would be President in fewer than twenty years?

Now relate those predictions back to what you do.

How can you tweak what you do to be ready for that world?

How can you leverage it, take advantage of it?

3. Travel.

Don’t think parochially. And by the way, London looks pretty parochial if you’re sitting in Shanghai, Mumbai, LA or Abu Dhabi……

4. Seek Challenge.

Force yourself to see people you don’t agree with.

Maybe even some people you don’t like.

Ask those people for advice, for ideas – and then ask them why they’ve suggested what they’ve suggested.

You don’t have to do any of what they say, but the insights that they give you will be invaluable, and make you a richer, wiser person.

My experience with clients is that in both the public and the private sector, unthinking consensualism and the absence of constructive challenge are huge barriers to excellence and continued success.

So get people to argue the toss with you, and don’t take it personally.

5. Understand Popular Culture.

Whether you like it or not, popular culture is coming your way and will – at least in parts, whether you’re conscious of it or not – impact heavily on what you do.

The X Factor is sooooo establishment now.

Anyone know that story about Deloitte, on the verge of banning Facebook, until they found that the Deloitte user goup on Facebook was bigger and more comprehensive than their own internal employee databases?

6. Be Prepared To Fail.

We all fail, it’s a fact of life.

And those people who treat it as a necessary – if unwelcome – corollary of success, rather than its antithesis and something to be feared, deal with it: they learn from it, get over it and get on with things.

Dispense with the taboo of failure – something our American pals are much better at doing. In doing so, you’ll become supremely self-confident, which is also vital.

7. Keep rolling.

Keep hustling, keep moving – never lose momentum.

And finally…..

8. As Gary and his mates would have, never, ever, ever, pretend that it’s all real.

Thank you.

This piece was also published by The Huffington Post: www.huffingtonpost.com

“This is about a culture of management that seems to think in a democracy that the workforce have to do just what they're told.”

This happens to have been said by Billy Hayes, the General Secretary of the UK’s Communication Workers Union, currently at loggerheads with the management of Royal Mail about the very future of the mail delivery industry, in a dispute which could easily become a key barometer of the state of global industrial relations in the 21st century.

But Mr. Hayes is by no means unique in this view.

More to the point, this view is by no means unique even to union officials or aggrieved workers: I have heard senior managers within organisations all over the world say pretty much the same thing.

Which is, of course, surprising, to say the least.

Why would anyone take such a line?

Because if one takes this argument to its logical extreme, disaster necessarily awaits.

Manifestly, not everyone in an organisation will agree. This is particularly likely to be the case where the short term interests of staff are endangered by a course of action that is right for the long term interests of the organisation, as is the case at Royal Mail.

If, as the Hayes line requires, we make majority agreement – or democracy - a condition precedent of key management decisions, deadlock, stagnation and ultimately terminal decline ensue.

This is no idle conjecture, and it certainly isn’t a political point. It is a simple reflection of reality, and something that I have seen with my own eyes, over and again, across the globe.

When organisations start to place such a high premium on consensus in decision-making, they start to fail.

Given that neither workers nor management want to see organisational failure, why is the Hayes line so earnestly pursued?

Unions and their leaders have short term political considerations, of course. So too, arguably, do managers. But the real issue here is a deeply entrenched, and terribly well-intentioned, confusion.

Throughout the 20th century, people in organisations quite properly started to say “hang on a minute, this top-down, autocratic ‘you will do this when I tell you’ culture is no longer appropriate; as managers we should be more consultative and involve our people more, not least because they might have some useful things to say”.

Spot on. You tend to get more productive organisations if everyone is allowed to contribute fully.

The difficulty is that that people have confused “consultation” – let’s hear what our people have to say and then make a decision which may or may not accord with their thinking – with “consensus” – let's ask our people what they think and then all make this decision together.

In my experience, the tendency for managers to want to see the latter can be overwhelming. This is doubly so, perhaps understandably, in those organisations which have a history of punitive, thoughtless management and are desperate to show that they “have changed”.

The problem is, they have changed too much. The pendulum has swung too far the other way, and the cult of uber-consensualism has emerged as an insidious force inside too many organisations.

Because – somewhat counter-intuitively – democracy, in the sense that we know and cherish it politically, does not in fact make for better organisations.

It kills them.

If, as an HR professional, you cannot show the genuine, tangible, pounds, shillings and pence value in whatever you are proposing, you have failed.

It really is as simple as that.

The best HR people I know unashamedly measure themselves - in the way, let us be honest, that everyone else in an organisation is supposed to - against the bottom line.

Want to spend £50k on an employee engagement exercise? Fine. Show me how it will translate into a better bottom line.

Want to spend £100k on diversity training? Great. And how will it improve productivity or profitability?

For as long as HR professionals cannot answer that simple question then they will always, without exception, be seen as cost centres. Because, in the absence of being able to prove their value, that is precisely what they are.

It is not enough simply to assert that the latest scheme or idea you have picked up on the HR grapevine will necessarily, by definition be a 'good thing' for your business.

You need to show me.

I know of one HR director who takes management accounts to each board meeting he attends, and demonstrates the impact that his schemes have (or have not - they are not all successful) had on the P&L and balance sheet.

And guess what? He can pretty much name his own salary as a result.

Talking about commercial HR, value-add HR or whatever else you want to call it is meaningless if that is not what you are delivering.

As Stevie V. said, money talks.

This piece was also published by The Huffington Post: www.huffingtonpost.com

For a moment, let’s put party politics and arguments about what government is, and is not, for to one side.

Because it seems to me that anyone who is interested in effective management should be exceptionally wary of public bail-outs for much more prosaic reasons.

Whether or not any of us thinks that bail-outs can be justified in principle, in practice they tend at best to reinforce poor management, and at worst they even reward it.

I cannot think of a single example of an industry or sector that has been bailed out over the last18 months that is not also well-known for its poor management practices. Newspapers, the latest in the long line outside the Oval Office, are a prime example.

So what kind of message does a taxpayer-funded bail-out provide?

Keep up the good work guys. Carry on regardless.

Now those familiar with the fine detail of the bail-out packages will retort that, because of the large sums of money involved, these deals are conditionalised on improved management practices, in order to return maximum value to those ‘investing’.

That may be the intention. But history suggests that, over and again, the required changes just simply don't materialise.

And why should they? When a slovenly management culture is not forced, by a disastrous bottom line, to rethink totally its approach, any attempts at change are more than likely to be half-hearted at best.

When did you last walk into a bailed-out bank, automobile manufacturer, coal producer, aircraft maker, telecoms business or postal service and think, with the smug sense of satisfaction that only a wise investor can enjoy, “yes, that’s a really well-run business”?

This piece was also published by The Huffington Post: www.huffingtonpost.com

Much has been written over the years about the Kennedy family and leadership.

But the focus has tended to be on JFK and RFK, rather than their younger brother.

So in the wake of Senator Edward Kennedy’s death, let us revisit this.

I have never been so naïve as to set out what I believe to be the inalienable, definitive characteristics of effective leadership: because I do not believe that is possible.

But I do know, however, that leadership is - in part - about vision and that it is - in part - about single-mindedness. In which case, one is hard-pressed to find better examples than Jack and Bobby respectively.

President Kennedy was nothing if not a great orator, capable of creating and communicating a vision of America’s future. I have blogged before (http://bit.ly/YZ9J2) about the sheer power of his 1961 “man on the moon” speech (quite possibly the best ever example of a well-deployed SMART objective) but that is merely one part of a vast anthology of epochal speeches which includes such gems as “Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You”, as well as the iconic “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”. Vision by the bucket-load from Jack, then.

His brother Robert’s relentless, often unfashionable, championing of minority interests, particularly those of black America, was doubtless instrumental in the development and furtherance of equality in the United States. As Attorney-General, Bobby was asked in May 1962, "What do you see as the big problem ahead for you, is it crime or internal security?" The reply? "Civil rights”. Single-mindedness was never a problem for this Kennedy.

Inspirational stuff, all right, as countless leadership books and courses will tell you.

But are these (admittedly fascinating) examinations of Jack’s stirring rhetoric and Bobby’s unremitting pursuit of justice genuinely helpful to today’s leaders? Or do they – in fact – miss the mark by appearing remote from the leadership challenges experienced by most leaders today?

Because unlike the former President and Attorney-General, most of us do not occupy a world where great speeches and noble thoughts suffice. And most of us do not, moreoever, die so young and so rich that our legacies are forever preserved and polished.

Instead, as leaders we find ourselves locked into lives which are necessarily stacked with painful obstacles, hard nitty-gritty and a huge amount of compromise. This doesn’t, of course, mean that we shouldn’t aspire to the lofty heights to which Jack and Bobby so effortlessly ascended, just that – very often – our immediate leadership concerns are a good deal more prosaic.

So step forward Ted. Because - having been denied the Presidency - the Kennedy family’s baby brother had no chance but to carve out a different type of leadership: and a much more realistic one.

Like us, Ted Kennedy didn’t have the “benefit” of dying young and being frozen in time, as his brothers have been. Rather, this leader was unmistakably human. And a flawed human at that. But that is what makes his brand of leadership so much more accessible than those of his brothers. Over forty years of public life, this Kennedy, like us, encountered those painful obstacles, that hard nitty-gritty and the concomitant, necessary compromise. And he achieved so much in spite of that. Perhaps even because of it.

Forced by history into becoming the deal-doer’s deal-doer, with his sleeves rolled up and an understanding that political enemies could also become legislative friends, Senator Edward Kennedy was arguably significantly more influential during his lifetime than either of his brothers were during theirs.

A man who eschewed the glamour bestowed upon, and perhaps even sought by, both Bobby and Jack. A man who chose to envelop himself in the dry, hard, bureaucratic process that is law-making. A man who was prepared to let others take the credit for work that was largely his own, even if the ‘other’ in question happened to be a certain Republican President that had ‘history’ with the Kennedy family.

Too many leaders, in government and outside it, believe that leadership is about ideas and speeches. These are, of course, important. Necessary, in fact. But ideas and speeches do not bring about change.

Only action brings about change. And Ted Kennedy knew that.

The rhetoric and mythology that had served his brothers so well was never – post Chappaquidick – going to be sufficient to sustain for him a serious, long-term career in the Senate.

And so was formed perhaps the greatest of all the Kennedy leaders: the ultra-liberal who co-authored laws with Orrin Hatch, the anti-Iraq war voter who partnered with President Bush on No Child Left Behind, the scion of an establishment dynasty who refused to create another and endorsed a risky candidate called Barack Obama instead. Above all else, the Kennedy who learned, perhaps the hard way, of the overwhelming importance of doing.

Richard Lacayo put it eloquently in Newsweek recently: “He took the mythology and shaped it into something real and enduring.”

Indeed. A life defined not by one singular choice but instead by a clear, deliberate direction. Whether TMK chose that direction or whether it chose him, his life’s journey now stands as one of the finest examples of American leadership that we have yet encountered. At his wake, Senator Dodd said, “John Fitzgerald Kennedy inspired America. Robert F. Kennedy challenged America.

Our Teddy changed America”

He sure did. That’s real leadership.

with special thanks to both

Tom Fletcher of 10 Downing Street, London

and

Marc Adelman of Adelmania Consulting, Washington, D.C.

Sitting here in my office, realising I have never shared this before.

It sits, framed, on my desk and is a guiding force in my life. I think it is relevant to me, of course, but also many - if not most - of my clients:

"The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

Your time is limited, so waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish"

Steve Jobs, June 2005, Commencement Address, Stanford

Matrix management. Mmm.

It sounds like bullshit, doesn’t it?

That’s because – with very limited exceptions – it is.

For the uninitiated, “matrix management” means having more than one boss. Or, if you’re the boss, sharing your team members with other managers.

In principle, you can see how this structure is at times both necessary and desirable: Bill needs to report into Ben on this project, and into Hilary on another.

That makes sense, and we know that in a world which increasingly values specialist expertise we are likely to get more from our people if we can have diverse managers working with individual employees to assist in nurturing their talent.

The problem, as ever, comes with the execution.

It’s one thing to have a team member help colleagues with different pieces of work and projects whilst you maintain overall responsibility for that person’s performance and pastoral care. It’s quite another to allow staff to be buffeted between different managers, departments and projects with no sense of overall direction or control.

But the latter is most people’s experience of “matrix management”. You don’t need to be a genius to see that this serves no-one well. The employee is too often left flailing around, bewildered and stressed by the requirements of not just one but – by definition – a whole suite of de facto managers, whose inability to back up what they need with any sort of serious leverage is obvious: and deeply frustrating.

This does not make for happy, productive workplaces.

So why has the government seemingly institutionalised this problem in Whitehall?

In an attempt to achieve Tony Blair’s much vaunted “joined-up” government, Sir Gus O’Donnell, the British Cabinet Secretary, and his immediate predecessor have talked a lot about “interchange”. If you want to get on, runs the mantra in the corridors of power, get out. This is a well-intentioned effort to ensure that civil servants, as part of the Professional Skills for Government agenda, get exposed to more than the inevitable silos of their own departments. By taking a year or two in a different department, goes the thinking, we can improve the experience and skill-set of many senior civil servants and so the quality of government as a result.

Nice idea, and again – in principle – it makes sense. But instead of “joined-up” government what we actually get is disjointed, incoherent government par excellence. This is because whilst civil servants move from one department to another, they continue to be appraised according to their home department’s performance management system. This presents huge issues for both individual members of staff and their managers.

As an individual having “got out” to “get on”, you might well find your performance being measured by someone whose grip of the competencies and behavioural indicators upon which your bonus, next job and possibly the rest of your career depend is at best half-baked. This is before you factor in the wildly differing performance management cultures that exist within the many different departments of the central British government.

As a manager, you might well find yourself having to manage a whole host of individuals according to a whole host of different departmental systems and cultural expectations, as well as exposing yourself to the “but you don’t know what it will mean for my career if I don’t get a top box-marking” type complaints and grievances.

The problem is particularly acute overseas where increasingly HM Foreign & Commonwealth Office acts as a ‘platform’ from which other UK government departments can ply their trade: individuals from all over Whitehall arrive at a mission with their own appraisal systems, expectations and the like and then proceed to “sort of” half report into their home department in London, and half into the local Ambassador.

Confused?

You should be. They are. And it is.

This wouldn’t matter so much if we weren’t all paying for it. But we are.

And until Sir Gus, or his successor, is prepared to develop some kind of universally-understood performance management system and - crucially - culture across Whitehall, it is only going to become more expensive.

I happen to live in London but I work all over the world.

London is a fairly cosmopolitan place, and that’s one reason I choose to live here.

And many of us here in London talk about, and work on, employer brands. We do this because we make a clear connection between engaged employees and organisational effectiveness. And we didn’t need Macleod’s specious statement of the bleedin’ obvious to tell us. We already knew about the vital importance of recruiting the best people into organisations to begin with, and then – crucially – holding on to them, keeping them motivated and enthused.

But are those of us in this field actually having this conversation in the right place? Or could our efforts be better spent elsewhere?

Because whilst London is indeed cosmopolitan, most businesses here still have a distinctly ‘English’ or ‘British’ feel to them. This has its pros and cons (see posts below) but my point is that in countries where there is some kind of overarching national identity – even if we Brits aren’t sure of what that is – employers don’t have to work so hard on their 'brand'.

In a place where most people will have plenty of common denominators or reference points (UK - football, Marmite, bacon sandwiches, conker fights and the like; US – baseball, Oreos, trips to the mall etc) whilst employer brand is of course desirable and doubtless gives a competitive edge, one might question whether it is strictly necessary.

Contrast this with the responsibility of employers in those markets which rely even more heavily on expatriate labour. They are truly, genuinely cosmopolitan in a way that London still is not: the Dubais, the Singapores and the like.

The absence of a greater sense of employer indentity in such places leads not to a default to water-cooler conversations about the topics set out above, or even their local equivalents - there simply isn’t sufficient commonality of interest.

Instead, in these organisations the more natural default is into damaging, fragmentary sub-groups centred on class, nationality, ethnic or tribal origins and so on. Unlike Macleod, I do not need to spell out the grave danger this represents to business.

It is equally clear, however, where organisations recognise this issue but deal with it clumsily - by taking a nannyish, cookie-cutter approach to every person, doing any job, in any location - then the same fragmentation and disenchantment arises, albeit for different reasons.

Effective employer branding is an art, not a science and it’s not dissimilar to nation-building.

So I look at the businesses that have done this well and see that they understand how to glue people into their organisations in an individuated sense. A sense of common purpose set around some very basic but heartfelt ‘big picture’ themes, yet allowing for sufficient space for each individual to express themselves fully and meaningfully.

If my nation-building hypothesis is correct, then I guess you could call this the American model…….

Would you accept an IOU from Arnie?

Well, as a public sector employee in the Golden State, this month you've got no choice.

I owe you, says the Governator, last month's salary.

But is he good for the cash? The answer to that question depends on a judgment requiring a sophisticated understanding of some complex fiscal and political factors which are simply outside the ken of most individuals.

Now this looks and feels outrageous (because it is) but in asking state employees to enter into Hobson's Choice - accept an IOU with the risk the money won't follow, or quit and be certain that it won't - is California simply doing what it does best: trailblazing?

I remember as a young boy growing up in England, someone sagely telling me that what happens in California tends to become mainstream on the East Coast of the US about five or ten years later, and hits these shores about a further five or ten thereafter. It was good advice. And if anything, in our globalised, 24/7 media-engorged world, the timelines involved have probably reduced.

With Britain set - by 2013 - to be spending as much annually on repaying debt interest as it does on its prized National Health Service (that's before we even begin to think about the capital, by the way), it is by no means impossible that we'll see "Dear Valued Employee....It is with regret that....." style notes emanating from HR departments across the public sector.

To an extent, it is already happening in the private sector in the form of the crazed 'special offers' being touted to employees of the bloated, poorly managed, former public corporations British Airways and BT.

British Airways wondered if staff might like to work for free for a while.  How sweet. And BT is offering a 75% pay cut not to turn up for a year. Particularly in the case of BT, which - incredibly - employs a whopping 106,000 employees, but also to a large extent BA too, having to take such drastic action now is the price to be paid for years of complacent navel-gazing, unchecked growth of fixed costs and, most importantly, sluggish, timid management cultures.

But in many respects the story of these monopolistic private sector giants, both of which have yet to engage in genuine cultural and structural reform, is the story of the UK's public sector writ small.

Schwarzenegger's desperate action is as unfair as it insulting, breaching as it does so many of the basic tenets of the psychological contract that exists between employer and employee. The 'suggestions' from BA and BT are not much better.

But unless senior leaders in the UK, in both the public and the private sectors, are prepared to look scrupulously, honestly and relentlessly at the performance of their most expensive resource - people - we might as well sit back and wait for the IOUs to hit the doormat.