On the Beat

The BBC is reporting that Sir Peter Burt and Sir George Mathewson are trying to put together an alternative to the Lloyds TSB takeover of HBOS.

This is interesting. Burt oversaw that merger of Bank of Scotland with Halifax, which could be seen to have lead BoS into its current situation. Mathewson oversaw the (up until last year) successful acquisative strategy that built RBS from a small regional bank operating in the UK to the fifth largest bank in the world (by market cap c. 2004).

They were both highly successful, but both were behinds their organisations' expansion that brought them to where they are today: essentially bankrupt and reliant on Government money to survive.

I am not certain I would trust them with HBOS, myself.

Interestingly, Mathewson is one of the SNP Scottish Government's team business advisers. The collapse of RBS and HBOS, and their survival using UK Government support, puts the lie to the SNP's claim to be able to succeed as an independent, small economy.

BBC radio news has just announced that Fred Goodwin will resign from RBS tomorrow.

I have no idea whether this is good news or not.

I am on the train heading down to York, to meet someone to tak about business.

It is a glorious day. I love this journey: I am sitting by the window on the east coast side, and the scenery is just stunning: cliffs until Berwick, castles and islands until Newcastle.

It is just glorious.

Even though I have made this trip many many times, it never fails to excite me.

We have just passed Alnmouth, where we spent a lovely week a year ago: this makes me very happy, and very sad.

(I must post my photos of that week sometime: spectacular dawns over the beach; and castles lit up by the setting sun. It was glorious.)

Edit: And I forgot to mention the music! I am listening to Bruckner 8 loudly on my iPod, and it is stirring and emotional and in tune with the landscape. It all just fits so well. And now you know!

A couple weeks ago, I went to an event at the management school where budding entrepreneurs were pitching their ideas. It was a bit like “Dragons’ Den”, but they weren’t (overtly) after money. And it wasn’t multi-millionaires who were listening to them: it was people like me.

In retrospect, one of the things I find most interesting is how this event has stuck in my mind – I have spoken to many people about it.

I found it a really interesting evening. I didn’t hang around to find out more about any of the pitches, but a couple of them – just a couple – I thought were really worthwhile.

There were seven people pitching, and it was really interesting to hear what their ideas were. That was why I went along – I don’t have any pretensions to entrepreneurship myself, but I do like new ideas, and I am interested in small businesses – and they don’t really get much smaller than this.

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Last week, on a corporate website, I read this:

" in short, can we use the board to drive policy learning to help us to stimulate the system change that will lead to a step change in achievement around the smarter outcomes?"

I have absolutely no idea what they were talking about. None at all. (Although frankie_ecap thought she understood it perfectly. I found this worrying...)

Along similar lines, today I read this:

" This strategy is set within the improvement agenda to provide momentum and structure for change".

Once more, baffled.

What’s worrying, though, is the thought I might actually write stuff similarly vacuous.

Lastly, I recently read a bottle of washing up liquid (the sad life I lead!) which promised:

"Hygenic Cleaning"

which just got me to wondering how many products were offering me unhygienic cleaning? Or am I missing something?

For the past few weeks, I have been working in quite a large office building; it houses maybe two or three thousand people. And each part of it looks the same.

A couple of times – usually first thing in the morning, as I walked in to work thinking about something else - I have given myself a shock by forgetting to walk up a flight of stairs. Instead, I walked to where my desk would be if it were on the ground floor (or, for that matter, an alternative universe) and thought, Father Bear-like, who’s sitting at my desk? At which point I realised, once more, that I was on the wrong floor.

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I spent a couple of days working in York this week.

I stayed overnight, and explored the city a little in the evening. I went to what said it was a wine bar. I had looked up places to eat on the web, and this place - Wilde's Wine Bar - got a rave review.

The city, and the bar, were very quiet. I don't know where everyone was, but they weren't out on a drizzly Monday night, and I can't really blame them.

I was out, however. In the wine bar. It was in the old part of the city, down a rambling lane. It was almost empty when I got there. It looked like a pub. There were three house wines, and a further choice of four other wines, too. The house wines came out of a pump. It tasted fine, though. There were, however, lots of beers. And the bar looked like a pub. And the food was pub food. In fact, it was a pub that called itself a wine bar.

I had a huge steak. I was hungry, though not that hungry. I viewed the steak as a challenge, and finished it, of course. I have been living off vegetables ever since, in the vain attempt to eat a balanced diet.

On my way back to Edinburgh, I spent several minutes on York station - waiting for my train. My train was also waiting, because a couple of Virgin trains occupied the platform. One of the Virgin trains was going to Bristol Temple Meads, the other to Bournemouth. But I think something was wrong, because they pulled the two trains gently together, and got one to push the other away. They had to push start the train! I can't believe they were going to travel like that all the way to Birmingham (or wherever it is that one left to go down to Bournemouth and the other to Bristol).

It was funny watching them gently - very gently - bring one train up to the other, almost as if they were gently kissing; and then they set off, the one pushing the other before it. Pendolino 125s (or whatever they might be) are hardly built for shunting each other about.

After the two Virgin trains left, I looked at the curve of the platform. I like curves, so I took this picture, too.

I have just spent a couple of days working in Manchester. Over the years, I have spent a fair bit of time in Manchester and thereabouts, but I haven’t spent much time there at all in the last five years.

( More - and photos - after the cut... )

There was a bit on the radio news this evening about how many managers in organisations are actually clinically psychotic.

Unfortunately, I can't find a link for it.

How annoying.

(Googling "psychotic managers" produced all sorts of interesting things. But not the right thing.) It was from a conference on psychology. Maybe I should ask secretly_evil.

Anyhow. When I find it, I'll post it.

Until then, take my word for it. Managers can be psychotic...