EUROBLOWN + BORISCONI THE BARBARIAN & THE VACUOUS LONDON BUSINESS LOVE-MACHINE

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO BE UNDERWATER
EU or eurozone, the problem is the same: zero problem-solving

By John Ward: One chart that very neatly makes two points of great importance about ezone meltdown:

1. As the red arrows show, the ClubMedders are even more exposed to sovereign toxicity as they were when the solids hit. Supporting what we already know – ie, that the money just keeps moving round in circles from bank to Treasury via Frankfurt – it does clearly separate the wheat from the chaff…with good news for Dubliners because, being wise, as usual the Irish zigged when everyone else zagged. (The Greeks aren’t on here because it is now no longer possible to tell where banks end and sovereign begins there: the country is effectively under Troika occupation. This is not good news).

2. Although making a good fist of not getting any more exposed, the ‘safer’ nations too are nevertheless pretty much as vulnerable to backwash as they were five years ago…thus forever exploding the myth that everything is fine in Northern Europe. Of course, what we can’t see here is whose sovereign debt they own; but worrying about that sort of small detail assumes you think any EU sovereign debt might be a good thing to have in the assets larder at the minute.

Sadly, other myths are still with us – most notably that of the now “firmly established” UK recovery.
I was going to pen yet another piece in the light of today’s “1.9% growth” news, but for once the Daily Telegraph’s Jeremy Warner nailed it before I got there. This extract sums up the bloke’s view:

‘Unbalanced and unsustainable – that’s the correct message on the UK economy to take from today’s fourth quarter GDP figures, not that things are magically turning on a six pence. This is a recovery being driven by a combination of strong growth in London and in consumer spending; it’s plainly better than no growth at all, but it’s not yet the sort of recovery we were hoping for.’

I wouldn’t concur with every word by any means: but the nub of it – that Osborne has spectacularly failed in any way to address the legacy of Thatcher (all paper and no manufacturing in our gdp) – is firmly intact here. At the bottom line, George is a preppy with no idea about how manufacturers start up and then get their knees brown. The son of a draper, he’s OK with accountancy bullsh*t and distribution, but really clueless when it comes to why all his City mates are getting in the way of remodelling the production economy.

We are never going to get any glaznost from the Government, but some perestroika would be good. Just don’t hold your breath. Warning: the value of breath can go up as well as down. Stay long in breath and exhale regularly.

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BORISCONI THE BARBARIAN & THE VACUOUS LONDON BUSINESS LOVE-MACHINE

‘Market-leading cloud, networking and virtualization technologies that are transforming how people, businesses and IT work and collaborate in the cloud era’.

Why is anyone – least of all the London Mayor – taking this nonsense seriously?

By John Ward: Somehow, I seem to have eased myself secretly onto the mailing list of LondonlovesBusiness.com. It’s certainly a secret to me: perhaps the marketing people there lack a sense of irony – I don’t know.

‘Project teams are often made up of employees with various skill sets,” says the blurb, ‘ If managers can succeed in making these different talents complement each other, team goals will be reached quickly and without distractions.”

Well bless me and ping my blog while you’re about it, this is breakthrough insight.

‘In his white paper, qualified psychologist Rainer Niermeyer explains the essence of a”real” team,’ we are told, ‘Managers learn how to defuse the potential for conflict and to coach the team through all the different stages of team development’.

Aaah, right, now I get it: you’re trying to sell me a business jargo-bollocks seminar. And so it is that we are indeed tempted onto a site where all the ‘secrets’ of team management are laid bare at last. Including:

‘How managers can spot the differences between real and “pseudo” teams’

Yes folks, you too can pitch up at Old Trafford, notice that your team is 80% deficient in goalscoring, and then – using our unique yoozyerfeckinbrains© modulised systemic formula – work out how to spend £37m buying a player who can score goals, just a little too late to win anything.

And of that isn’t enough, the secret of effective Time Travel lies barely hidden in this session:

‘How to successfully diffuse conflict within the team’

Er, the verb we’re choosing here is diffuse, right? Not defuse, then? Not the defuse that your blurb used in the intro, perhaps. Well, I have an open mind: let’s diffuse the conflict by giving a little bit to Jayne, a teensy bit to Boris, a little more to Jeremy, and an almost homoaeopathic dose to Theresa. Or better still, let’s learn how to write the English f**king language before we start writing the brochure.

Rainer Niermeyer is a business coaching consultant, and a graduate of the University of Cologne with a Masters in Business Psychology and tartan paint marketing.

This utter drivel was brought to you by citrix…..and this is what they have to say for themselves:

‘Transform your organization with mobile workstyles. When people choose how, where and when work gets done, individuals become empowered and businesses can innovate like never before. As a result, a new empowered workforce emerges where work is transformed and business is reinvented. By enabling organizations to prepare for and manage change in a volatile and unpredictable world, new levels of productivity are achieved. Citrix is helping organizations of all sizes adopt mobile workstyles through a complete portfolio of market leading cloud solutions that accelerate the path to IT-as-a-service.’

Now you might wonder WhyTF any Mayor of a capital city would give this kind of selling-the-obvious crap houseroom. But citrix likes Boris. This is what they feel about him:

‘Johnson never misses an opportunity to talk up his accomplishments. Embrace this attitude when pitching for business or reviewing your goals. Shout about your achievements to avoid blending in with competitors….Johnson’s public persona is one of unashamed and unapologetic difference. His rising popularity indicates that this stance is working and that people believe in him….’

Never mind the awkward fact that Boris Johnson is a boastful, serial-shagging hypocritical populist, it’s working and the daft buggers believe him. Result! And what’s more, this is a two-way street: ‘The Mayor of London welcomes our new publication Securing Britain’s Talent,’ gushed the lovey-dovey website last October, ‘it tackles skills gaps, leadership issues, youth unemployment and workplace diversity’. And sure enough, there was BoJo saying he was “delighted to work with” such completely content-free, barely-literate pinheads:

If ever you wanted proof that Michael Gove and Boris Johnson have common aims for the UK’s State education system, then this farrago of banal codswallop is it.

LondonlovesBusiness.com launched on 5 September 2011. It is the second title from Casis Media, co-founded by Graham Sherren (a 75 year-old retired bloke) and Mike Bokaie (an almost equally old bloke). It hails itself as ‘the first and only digital newspaper exclusively for London’s fast-growing businesses and entrepreneurs’, as if this might be a prediction of the tragic future that lies ahead of it.

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