Financial Acumen

So I haven’t managed to create an exchange rate mechanism for utility, yet. However a definite highlight of my week last week was a financial acumen training course provided by an external consultant in Paris. Finally I genuinely understand how to relate balance sheets to capital productivity to total revenues to P&L statements to Return on Invested Capital. Not only do I now understand this for both financial and non financial companies (Return on Invested Equity versus Return on Invested Capital), I can also evaluate all of my current business opportunities using this framework. And who said CFOs are boring?!

An Alternative Type of Exchange Rate Mechanism

I was recently reading an article in the Economist about regulation in the US (http://www.economist.com/node/17961890?story_id=17961890). The basic conclusion was that Obama was defending new regulation by saying that although regulation did incur a cost, if the benefits were high enough, then the regulation was worth implementing. A worthy view indeed, although my experience when doing business cases has taught me the difficulty of establishing and agreeing benefits (costs by contrast are very easy to establish and communicate – everyone understands dollars, even, or especially, the Chinese). The fundamental problem I believe is that benefits are subjective, often hard to measure, and that people (especially in a business context) are cautious about admitting to or signing up to them. I believe that the problem of measurement is particularly acute. Not only do we not live in a perfectly competitive world and as such traditional price mechanisms can only be a rough guide at best, we also have no exchange rate of benefits – I know a weekend show jumping will cost me 200 euros but how do I compare the benefits I extract from a clear round with Pich to the benefit Sandie would take from spending the 200 euros on something else (no doubt in a much more considered and sensible way)? Whereas the logic of an exchange rate is simple, the devil is most definitely in the detail as three years of Economics at Oxford taught me (the unholy trinity of the Mundell-Fleming model of Exchange Rates was a particular bête noire of mine); and it seems like changing currency for utility doesn’t make things any easier. Maybe it’s not as easy to be the leader of the free world as you might think....

The Scourge of Email

During her maternity leave Sandie has had a promotion and she has been given a new boss. They have tried to contact each other via email on a number of occasions. Unfortunately every time the communication channel has not been as fruitful as she had originally wanted. However they finally managed to speak on the phone the other day for the first time and had an excellent conversation; the world was put to rights and Sandie was a much happier camper. I couldn’t help but conclude that email is a horrible form of communication – the careless twitter of the business world if you like. Whilst email is very clearly beneficial in many cases, I can’t help but this that it is horribly misused at times, and that in many respects I think it is a shame that no-one these days knows how to, or has the time to write proper letters. It also reinforced my widely accepted belief that nothing is better than going to see the individual concerned in person....it’s just a shame that often the people for me are in Budapest, Basel or Bangalore!

Rings and Watches

Gut feelings this and emotions that, blah blah blah.... More like a leopard can’t change his spots – the fear that consumed my body when I was walking through Paddington station last week when I realised that I had lost my wedding ring and watch was stomach churning. I stopped and turned around to start retracing my steps in the vain hope of finding these two prized possessions (the stomach churning was not just because I was petrified of Sandie’s upcoming reaction). So imagine my relief when I looked down at my arms to see that I had got my Mondays mixed up with my Tuesdays – my watch was on my left hand and my ring was on my right hand for some inexplicable reason. I swapped them both back to their regular positions and normality resumed (although I was slightly frustrated that I had lost 2.3 minutes in my journey from the office to London City Airport).

Wrinkles, Lists and Gut Reactions

After landing in Paris on Tuesday morning I took the Orlyval into Anthony on my way to La Defense. I couldn’t take my gaze off a middle aged man whose face was covered in a very acceptable numbers of clear wrinkles (please let me finish the story before you draw any erroneous conclusions). It reminded me of the fact that to raise a smile it requires your face to use 27 muscles (or some other such large number) – much more than it requires to scowl or to cry or to display any other type of emotion. The conclusion I drew was that this man must have smiled a lot in his life. The next hops that my rather tired mind made at that stage were (1) I’ll be quite happy if I have a similar number of wrinkles when I’m his age and (2) that given how much time we spend at work, then we should be smiling a lot, otherwise we’d have to spend every evening and the whole weekend grinning like a Cheshire cat to ensure that our face will end up with sufficient happy wrinkles. This second thought then naturally reminded me of the lists that I created shortly before I left Accenture and before I joined Wipro. I created a “why I am leaving” list and an “it will have been a success if...” list. I vowed not to look at those documents for a year but I’m already looking forward to opening them again in June. That said, as much as I love my lists (just ask anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in my presence), the older I get the more I realise the importance of gut reactions and feelings in any decision making process – do I really need to wait for 6 months to confirm what I know already?

Jamais Deux Sans Trois

There is a French saying which I believe really captures the quintessential nature of the Frenchman. It’s “jamais deux sans trois”. This phrase basically means if two bad things have happened to you, then a third one is sure to follow. This was indeed the case as no sooner as we had got Gaston out of hospital on the Monday morning following Capucine’s recent troubles, Maxime decided he was suffering from hospital withdrawal symptoms which no doubt provoked his ear infection which meant that we were back at the emergency room in Bayonne at 1AM on Tuesday morning. Absolutely perfect for a papa who had a flight to Paris at 6.50AM, and for a maman who then had to face four nights by herself while papa gallivanted around Europe (more like went to sleep in his hotel bed as soon as possible). And just in case you’re wondering, yes, we are in the middle of negotiating our own personal parking spot at the hospital – no real surprise given that some of the nurses were heard muttering that we turn up at the hospital more frequently that some of the doctors employed there.

Time Pressure

On Monday morning last week Sandie and I even managed to eat together and discuss the week ahead (our final week before going away on holiday together in the mountains). As I was playing the week out in my head, Sandie could see something was troubling me. I was most reluctant to tell her what the issue was; I knew that it wouldn’t be a good idea but on her insistence I spat it out. I told her that I only had 1 hour to have lunch with a client on the Thursday and that I was sure that this wouldn’t be enough time to go through everything we had to talk about. I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to share this worry bead with her....“the last time I had an hour to sit down and eat blah blah blah”..... And once again, just for the record, thankfully we managed to extend the client lunch to 90 minutes so we did get everything done.

PS Because there may be children reading this blog, I’ll not tell you what Sandie said at the end of the week when I told her that on the Tuesday night I had managed to dine at Arbutus in London, an excellent restaurant (thanks Dominic for the tip!), which has recently received its first Michelin star.....

Pink Revolution

Shortly after I got home last week Gaston’s snuffles took a turn for the worse (correlation not causation I hasten to add; it wasn’t me pushing him out into the patio in his underpants when it was snowing). The upshot was that last Saturday he was admitted to hospital. After a brief game of emotional blackmail with Sandie, I came out with the short straw, and so off I went to Gaston’s hospital bedroom, which was painted an intoxicating deep shade of pink, to sleep there on the Saturday and Sunday nights. I now understand even better the idea of authoritarian rulers using the internet and television to placate their downtrodden people because after 48 hours in a colour induced haze, and without any access to the outside world (even mobile phone reception was patchy), I was ready to launch my own Eastern European style “Pink Revolution” and set all of the sick little children free. Thankfully Gaston had returned to near enough full health before I had time to blockade the nurses’ meeting room or piece together some sort of homemade missile, (although those of you who know me and my manual abilities, know that it would probably have taken me a few months to develop any sort of missile that could have even chipped the pink paintwork no less hurt anyone).

Night Shift

On the way back from Finland I arrived in Paris late. I had to a take a taxi in the small hours of the morning to cut across Paris before catching the first flight of the day back to Biarritz. I must have been in the cab for just over an hour. During this time I got talking to the driver who, as it turned out, was also 33 years old. He was of North African descent, 137kgs, and had been driving in Paris for the last 9 years. We calculated that he had driven enough miles to have circled the global 33.5 times already. We also did a similar calculation for his weight – he had put on 4.1kgs in each of the 9 years due to the unhealthy living and diet that often goes with the job. Most interestingly he had a young son and his greatest pleasure was to pick him up from school at 4PM every day. Basically he worked from 5PM through to 6AM seven days a week (last year he only took 10 days holiday), sleeping on his return home after a quick coffee with his wife over her breakfast, before going to play football with his other North African taxi driving pals from about 12 to 3PM before a quick shower, and then off to pick up his son. We worked out our relative salaries and it was interesting to compare notes. We basically earned exactly the same but obviously in very different ways. All that was left was for me to calculate the price of seeing your children every day....

Sign me up Comrade!

It was only on re-reading my recent posting called “Ex-communist rogue backwater?” that I was reminded of an article I read recently about the dark side of internet freedom. The article essentially said that the internet was not always a force for promoting democracy, and that authoritarian regimes could also use the internet for more sinister ends e.g. China in seeking to pacify the masses (much in the same way as the East Germans did with allowing western TV shows to be broadcast in the evenings before the wall came down in 1989), or even Russia’s young internet advisors to the government. A good point indeed that is easily overlooked. I enjoyed the article but I hadn’t expected to have first-hand experience of it so quickly! http://www.economist.com/node/17848401?story_id=17848401

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

I have just landed in Helsinki. It’s so cold that even the plane is trundling slowly to the gate because “it’s a bit slippy out there” (according to the captain). I have a trip up to Oulu in Northern Finland tomorrow. There are rumours of temperatures of -26C. I suspect that my lightweight Hugo Boss rain jacket and my Russell and Bromley leather slip-ons are going to make me the laughing stock of the Arctic Circle. I suspect I may have to buy a couple of tennis rackets and kill and de-skin a seal pup with my bare hands to survive and ensure I get back to Paris in the evening.

Stuff, PowerPoint and People

I just found out today that we weren’t short listed for a big deal we’ve been working on for a few months. I was actually really disappointed because I personally have put a lot of work into the deal – it was an account I really wanted us to develop. On reflection it just goes to show that it’s not what you know (we have a really good capability), nor how pretty your PowerPoint is (it was me who revamped all 90 of the slides), but that it’s all about relationships and that’s where we’ve lost out. Maybe it was a bit to do with price as well – maybe we were just a bit too expensive, although in joining Wipro from Accenture I wasn’t expecting to hear myself write that very often.........(I have a noisy pen, well keyboard).

Bah Bah Business Sheep

Maxime’s favourite nursery rhyme which we have to sing to him when he goes to bed is Bah Bah Black Sheep. Often he won’t settle without at least 3-4 renditions of it, including a solo from both Mum and Dad in some sort of mini sing-off (he’s been watching too much X-Factor me thinks). This little tradition has seemed to have established itself over the Christmas holidays. That was all well and good however since the start of January I have had to start travelling for work again. Maxime seems to consider that the fact I am not actually at home in the evening should not actually prevent him from getting his lullaby. As a result I often find myself sitting next to well clad businessmen in planes singing Bah Bah Black Sheep down my Blackberry to a rather happy little 2 year old. I readily admit that there are often a few raised eyebrows and not just because I often sing out of tune. I suppose it’s a conversation starter with my fellow travellers if nothing else.

Natural Jockey

Last week and the ensuing weekend were pretty good all in all. My meetings in Budapest, Frankfurt, Zurich and Paris all went well. However the highlight of the last 10 days was most definitely Maxime’s first ride on a pony. In an effort to avoid becoming a short sighted and over excited parent, I will resist saying that he was a natural and that the Doris the pony even seemed to enjoy the outing. That said, despite Sandie’s over protective fears that the whole thing would end in disaster when Maxime would no doubt refuse to get in the saddle citing an irrational fear of the fury beast, he did actually seem to both enjoy it and be quite good at it. Competitive Dad (that’s me) even thought it would be a good idea to try a bit of trotting towards the end of the 30 minute ramble in the woods. Maxime thought this was hilarious and subsequently insisted that we had to return to the stables in “second gear” all the way. His smiling chubby little face bouncing up and down was a sight to behold. Seeing Sandie trying to keep up behind and being slightly more red faced than Maxime, was also rather amusing. It was a nice family moment.

Ex-communist corrupt rogue backwater?

You must be joking – free internet in the airport makes it one of my favourite cities. Oh how I am easily pleased.

Shoot ‘em up Viktor

I’ve been thinking a lot about the tragic news that has been coming out of the US recently about the shootings in Arizona and the most recent one in a school in California this week. On a similar note closer to home, I was also rather shocked the other day in Budapest when at 1 o’clock in the afternoon in broad daylight, (well more like some sort of grey drizzle) I was shocked to see a big fat pistol hanging off the hip of a young boy re-filling a bank ATM machine in a busy shopping centre. Whenever I hear of or see such things I am always worried for my little brother who is a policeman in Cambridge. It always makes me think that I am very happy that they don’t carry guns themselves in the UK – I can’t help but think that as soon as the police carry guns in a routine fashion, then criminals will see that as an excuse to fight fire with fire. The longer Christian only ever has a plastic truncheon and a feather duster to defend himself the better. The other thing which is makes me think is maybe the Economist is right about Hungary being something of a far right ex-Communist rogue state http://www.economist.com/node/17851275, or maybe the gun was actually to be used to be used to kill Hungarian chiefs because the food there is definitely not something to write home about…..

Blindsided by the Ginger Cat

You know you're a regular when the hotel cat comes and says hello when you arrive. This pesky little critter scared the life out of me just now by jumping up on the computer from over my shoulder. I suspect she's just trying to tell me I've been hogging the internet and that it's time to stop surfing Facebook. Purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

European Sustenance

Breakfast in Budapest, lunch in Frankfurt, dinner in Zurich. There will not be many people who can say that today (or any day for that matter). Yes, well that is because they have a normal life and use buses and cars to go to work rather than Airbus A320s. Mummy and Daddy did always say that I was "different" from the other children. Oh and for the record, the lasagne in Frankfurt beat the pants off the dried bread in Budapest and the cold sandwich in Switzerland - thanks to Seb in New York for the recommendation!

Pit Stop

Lyon is a lovely place although I was delighted to only spend 11 minutes there last Friday. My flight from Amsterdam was delayed by 40 minutes, and given that I originally only had 50 minutes to catch my connecting flight to Biarritz, things were well a little tense. Thankfully the Gods were smiling on me – I stepped off one plane and walked up the jetty to find my next plane sitting alongside it waiting for me. A helpful Air France stewardess who shepherded me through the “staff only” access to speed up my passage was just the icing on the cake. I was feeling most smug as my little plane took to the skies bang on time.

The weekend that followed was most enjoyable. It consisted of lots of time with the family and a horse that was bettered behaved this week than last, even if he did try some of the same naughty tricks he had discovered a week earlier. Capcuine and Gaston are both now growing up well and Sandie even officially recorded Capucine’s first smile yesterday. All of that plus a good week at work last week, which included a couple of days staying with friends in Amsterdam, basically means that 2011 has started well – hopefully week 1 augurs well for the other 51. Some might even suggest that week 2 has also already started well – I forgot my Blackberry in a cab last night although thankfully the taxi driver was more alert than me and dutifully returned my trusty sidekick to me before driving away definitively.....I’ll make a decision as to whether or not that was a good thing or not depending on the phone calls I receive this week.

This week it is Budapest today, Frankfurt tomorrow, Zurich on Wednesday and Paris on Thursday. I should be home early evening on Thursday so I’ll be able to have a bath, eat some Farley’s baby rusks, play with a bright green tractor and read “My First 100 Words” before an early bed.

See you Jimmy

I am sure someone much more famous than me must have said something to the effect of “happiness is at best fleeting”.... I now understand what whoever said that actually meant. As I waited for a good friend of mine in Schipol airport last night, I went to get some chocolate. Imagine my delight when I found my favourite chocolate shop which brought back many happy memories of my time in Belgium. I ordered one of each of my three favourite chocolates. I was served by the most beautiful blonde (Dutch) girl ever (I had to put Dutch into the sentence otherwise Sandie would get jealous). As she gently stroked my hand as she gave me back my change (I made that bit up), I turned as if on a cloud of air and started to float back to the meeting point I had agreed with Neville..........So imagine how disappointed I felt when I heard some rough, drunken Scottish accent say, “are yoo Eeenglish, cannya gimme som change zo eh can get bak te Scotlan’”. It wasn’t just the rotted teeth (no doubt due to being bottle fed on Irn Bru until the age of 6) and bloodshot eyes that encouraged me to decline this ever so polite request – his aggressive insistence which even extended to him saying that I should go to the bank to withdraw some money to help him out of his little predicament, ensured that he wasn’t going to close this particular deal. And I thought it was the Dutch who were rude.

Over achieving normal person

I’ve had a video camera recorder for almost 2.5 years (bought in anticipation of Maxime’s impending arrival). It is only tonight that I’ve finally managed to take the time to read the manual, install the software and put the 172 clips that have been filmed onto my laptop computer (spending a bit more time with my electronic box in the process). This taking the time to do stuff lark is actually quite enjoyable; I almost feel like I am ready to be accepted into the adult world as a normal person with a smidgen of common sense...

Thankfully however I haven’t completely lost my over achieving, determined, competitive streak....whereas I was planning a very sensible year long diet in which I planned to lose 1 gram a day, when I stepped on the scales this morning I was able to see that I had already achieved 33% of my annual target – only 200 grams to go to get back to my fighting weight! Pretty impressive stuff I have to say, especially given how much of my Dad’s chocolate cake I’ve been eating since the 1st January. I was so impressed I even gave myself the night off from my gruelling new exercise regime.

Here Come The Holidays!

Whilst the majority of the working world is contemplating putting the nose back to the grindstone tomorrow, my attitude is quite different. Maxime returns to creche tomorrow. I just hope that Delphine and Carmen have had a good break because I am more than ready to get back to work and put my feet up. Whenever I stumble across a difficult client in the future, I will just pitch them against the little giant for half a day. Roll on Monday 8AM I say!

Alt + Left Arrow

As Sandie will no doubt testify, I spend a significant amount of time on my little electronic box called a laptop. I dread to think about the amount of time I have spent over the last 10 years using my little mouse or touchpad to move the cursor from wherever it is on the screen to the top left hand corner to click on the “back button” of internet explorer. So imagine my mixture of delight and frustration when I finally took the time to work out the key board short cut to get the same effect (Alt plus the Left Arrow key for those of you who are even more useless than I am). Everyone loves a shortcut.....it’s just a shame it takes so long to find the good ones. Unfortunately I think that applies to life more generally as well (see previous posting about the acquisition of experience over life and not dancing faster than the music).

Middle Age Back-Up

When the main activity of your New Year’s Eve consists of doing a back up of your laptop hard drive before going to bed at 9.15PM, then surely that must constitute middle age? Or maybe it is only middle age when you look forward to going to bed at that time after having been emotionally buoyed by knowledge of the fact that your precious data is safe as houses?

My friends Lizzie and Kofi

“2010 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis”…..”There's no doubt that this has been a particularly difficult year, and I am relieved that this annus horribilis is coming to an end”. Despite not being a Royalist, I have to say that Elizabeth II couldn’t have said it better (although she did say it in 1992), and Kofi Annan with the second quote was also ahead of the game in 2004. The only thing they didn’t add which would have made their quotes even more applicable to me would have been, “thank the lord we had the grandparents close by!”

Admittedly 2010 wasn’t all bad, especially in the first four months of the year when I was still working at LBG in the UK, and I’m sure in a few years time the application of rose tinted spectacles will make everything seem that much more bearable. However at the minute I’m definitely looking more forward than back and I’m very happy to draw a line under 2010! I don’t typically do New Year’s Resolutions because I’ve always been of the mind that if something is worth doing then it’s worth doing straight away, however the top priorities for 2011 include getting on well with Sandie (in the face of an onslaught of young children), taking some sort of enjoyment from work, ensuring that the children are all healthy, riding a clear round at 1m 25 with Pich, and losing 300 grams (77,3kg needs to come down to at least 77 kg over the course of the next 365 days). There, done, it’s now committed in writing for all to see – there’s now nowhere to hide....now someone pass me a lettuce leaf.

Experience, expectations and an alternative view of life

An idea that has always fascinated me is that of experience. In particular I am intrigued by the process of becoming more experienced as you move through life, and the resultant change that this leads to in your opinions and outlook. There is the famous phrase that if you aren’t a socialist when you are young then you are heartless, but if you aren’t a Tory when you are older then you are a failure. From my own personal experience, when I was younger things that I found abhorrent, e.g. adultery, now seem at least more understandable in certain circumstances, even if I still don’t (yet) condone them. However there does seem to be a natural brake on this process which is that it seems that you can’t go quicker (and therefore gain more experience) than your environment allows – you can’t “bruler les etapes” as they say in French; a bright young thing fresh out of university can’t normally be CEO because other people, clients and business around him don’t typically allow it, (Mark Zuckerberg being the obvious exception largely because of the social networking environment in which he finds himself as well as the fact that he is gifted). In consulting I believe that to be successful in the long term you can’t go more quickly than your clients are prepared to go (despite the fact that this can often be contradictory to the quarterly mentality you sometimes find in the industry). I’m not sure what the exact point of this rambling is, although I suspect I’ll come back to it in the years to come....

Another rambling thought I had recently was the importance of expectations to enjoyment; the most obvious one is anticipation of presents at Christmas for children – the run up to Christmas is just as, if not more, enjoyable than the mad rush to open presents on the morning of the 25th. I wondered if this can be extended to life more generally and whether or not life is punctuated by a series of moments in which you set your expectations for the next period. In a nutshell, when you’re a child growing up the world seems to be your oyster and you can do anything – dreams are encouraged. Then the reality of adult life bites and you suffer a series of reality checks all the way through until your mid life crisis before things start picking up again. The reality of life during any given period would be what made you decide whether or not expectations needed to be managed up or down ahead of the next period. Whether or not you perceived life as being good or bad would essentially be whether or not you were resetting your expectations upwards or downwards at each recalibration. Again another rambling without a precise point, but I thought I’d share it anyway.