Apologies for the lack of updates

I guess this is as good a time as any (i.e. the optimum time to deploy it as an excuse) to announce the birth of Heidi Angela Beryl Young on March 13th at 15:41. Although fatherhood is taxing, it's a very natural experience (so far) and I've been surprised at how much work I've been able to do. A big reason for that is my supremely capable wife, of course. More blogging this year, I promise. Despite the sleep deprivation.

All forecasts come right eventually

Well, although I had some doubts about my predictive abilities, it turns out I am some kind of sage after all. The FTSE 1000 has hit 3,500 (near as dammit) and I'd say it's starting to look like "fill your boots" time. Almost.

The problem? Well, it's not downside risk - the headline index is unlikely to slide below that low of 3,300 plumbed six years ago. And it's not opportunity cost - where else are you going to invest right now?

It's liquidity and upside risk. First, only the very rich (and I don't know any of them) don't need access to a chunk of cash in case of emergencies right now. If household income degrades (a euphamism for redundancy) the mortgage still has to be paid and Sir Terry Leahy will want his cut. Second, things might not stabilise and move decisively to an up trend until the autumn. (Remember the old Market saying "sell in May and go away"?) By September, the market will have got its head around the recession and calmed down a bit. Low returns elsewhere will be making equities look much better again. And you'll have six months less of the recession to worry about when you're looking at your cash savings.

(Blast. That's another prediction - and another opportunity to be wrong!)

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Want to see how we've all changed?

Gmail is down. Wow. Looking at Twitterfall, it's a global phenomenon. And because Gmail is a) so widely used; and b) so fundamental an application, the outpouring of feeling is palpable.

Several emotions are evident. Surprise is common. Denial - which is usually associated with the early stages of grief, of course. There's some amazement. A fair smattering of disappointment. Anger isn't too strong a word for some users. Quite a bit of fear. And annoyance, of course.

Interestingly, many of the "annoyed" posts are directed at in-house IT departments (for supposedly limiting access to non-work email), ISPs (coz the problem couldn't be Gmail's) and at themselves - for relying on cloud computing.

The "fear" posts also tap into that nervousness about the cloud (what will do for SaaS sentiment, I wonder... guess it depends how long the outage lasts). But there are also lots of wry people - they seem amused that such an incredible thing could happen.

You know what I imagine this would be like? If aliens invaded Earth. I'd imagine the same set of emotions (for IT depts and ISPs, substitute governments, for example) afflicting us all - equally global, equally stunning.

UPDATE (10.54GMT): Interestingly, it appears I can still access Gmail via my iPhone's Mail application. Good news: both the Gmail back-end and my iPhone are robust and reliable. Bad news: I'd still love to have the Gmail front-end back! Also, IMAP synch from my desktop Mail.app is only partially working. Very odd...

UPDATE (10.59GMT): Mail.app now merrily synching with IMAP, although iPhone now also occasionally can't find the server. I wonder whether Gmail users all over the world are firing up and synching local mail applications, placing a heavy burden on the servers and bandwidth?

UPDATE (middayish): All good. And to all the Gmail haters out there, how fast did your tech support/ISP guys take to fix the last organisation-wide email failure at your domain? Longer than 90 mins, I'll wager...

Pop quiz: when did I write this editorial?

A week before we went to press, National Express fired its finance director. As I’ve said before, it seems that a lot of FDs have left their jobs recently in “unfortunate” circumstances, seldom of their own doing.

In this case, FD William Rollason had been filling in as chief exec while CEO Phil White was on protracted sick leave. When White came back, Rollason left. “We need a more operational, hands-on, finance director rather than somebody who has a particular strength in the corporate finance area,” said the CEO.

Am I missing something? An FD who’s been with the company three years steps up to the top job. He sheds the old “bean-counter” image. And he does very well, thank-you very much, as chief executive for months. Then he’s dropped because he’s too versatile?!

I’ve really had it with defensive executives who can’t handle the modern financial manager. Don’t they get it? Once more, with feeling: the FD is one of the few people who can tell you hard facts about what is happening across every facet of the business. A good one, with strategic vision as well as the ability to report on the business and control costs, is worth their weight in gold. And they’re worth a lot more than White’s throwaway quip about his long-term illness: “The doctor said it was an aversion to finance directors.” Ha. Ha.

I’ll concede one point to White. We mustn’t forget to be prudent this year. That’s something the British population at large seems to have forgotten in [LAST YEAR]. Despite all the warnings, last year we borrowed £40bn against our homes and spent it on widescreen TVs and other luxury goods.

I’ve nothing against borrowing against your assets per se. Most FDs, even in this downturn, will be able to find projects that deliver returns above the cost of capital, especially with interest rates so low.

But how many of you would borrow to the extent that you were increasing profits to the tune of six per cent per year, then blow the dough on non-earning assets? That’s how much the national income increased last year thanks to home equity withdrawal, and much of it has gone to fuel the consumer boom.

While you and your fellow directors have been exhorted to apply the highest standards of corporate governance and look at the social and environmental aspects of your financial decisions, the masses are out their doing an Enron (well, almost). Even if house prices stabilise, the consumer boom is definitely over in [THIS YEAR]. There’s precious little equity left to borrow against; the credit cards are maxed out. It’s going to be a challenging year. So companies will need FDs with the *full* range of skills if they’re to exploit to the expected upturn in the last quarter.

"Twitter ye not"

Just a maintenance post, and a chance to get something off my chest about twitter.

People seem to be using it all wrong.

OK, I know that's hardly fair: there's no "right" way to use something like a messaging service. And I'm following some very inventive feeds using it in clever, non-obvious ways. But it's medium that leads people to become egomaniacal and arrogant (especially as their follower numbers mount - which I think causes a form of Messiah Complex). Let me give an example.

A well-known specialist journalist of my acquaintance is a heavy twitter user. He likes it so much, he's said in the past that it might replace, for him, email and RSS feeds as a means of staying in touch with his interest groups. But subscribing to his twitter feed has been a painful experience. (He's not the only culprit - I've unfollowed lots of people for the same reasons I've ditched his twitter feed.)

There are three huge problems. First, as a twitter fan, he uses an awful lot of twitter shorthand. For those of us not au fait with the jargon, that makes them impenetrable. (New tweet conventions seem to spring up every day - some obvious, others positively runic.) I think that's unforgivable for a journalist. As professional communicators, what we write should be clear, direct and concise. The 140 character limit on twitter rewards directness and conciseness - but it torpedoes clarity in many tweets.

SOLUTION: tweet a lot less. Blog more - where you can write to the right length, then perhaps use clear, plain english tweets to flag up new posts. (Note: this journalist blogs plenty and does tweet new blogs... in between screeds of unintelligible tweets that make my head hurt.)

Second, twitter is a broadcast medium. But it encourages person-to-person communication. The number and proportion of this journalist's tweets directed with the "@" sign to specific individuals is huge - and most of them are utterly uninteresting to me as a result. Because I'm only seeing part of the conversation - and have no interest in following everyone my colleague follows - the signal-to-noise ratio gets even worse.

SOLUTION: tweet a lot less. If the conversation is one-to-one, for god's sake email. If it's a relatively narrow interest group, why not go to a group or chat-room - try using this for hot topics: http://www.tinychat.com/. If you tweet, you tweet to all your followers, and it seems rude not to address them all in that case.

Third, twitter is an over-public medium. Think of the internet cloud as a giant pub. If I want to talk to someone I know quietly in the corner over a beer, I use email or IM. If a small group want to chat about football or politics, hugger-mugger in a booth, it's a chat-room or perhaps a comment thread. If I have something I want people to read, I might leave a flyer on the tables or in the loo - put up blog post or a web page. Twitter, however, is the equivalent of the bloke in the pub who won't leave you alone. He has to tell everyone he's ever met there exactly what he's been up to - IN A RATHER LOUD VOICE. And he'll often bore you with stories about conversations he's had with other people (often people he barely knows). He's slightly shouty and a bit of a boor and he thinks everyone really likes him. (Let's just be clear: I'm not saying my journalist friend is like that - just that heavy twitterers can come across that way.)

SOLUTION: tweet a lot less. Why not do it only when you have a very open question that anyone in the pub might be able to answer? Perhaps use it as an online equivalent of shouting "there's a fight in the street!" - a public service to those in the pub: clear, unambiguous, concise and useful. Then if someone rushes out with you to take a look, you can discuss the brawl one-to-one without annoying anyone else.

In short... tweet a lot less. I'd like to follow more people - I like people, lots of people have interesting things to share - but there's a limit to how many tweets I can plough through in a day. If that limit is, say 200, and everyone puts up 5 tweets, that's 40 people I can keep track of. If two people stink up Tweetdeck with 50 a day each, then my twitter population halves.

I still follow my journalist's blog entries via RSS. He's interesting, well-connected and informed. Articulate, even. But his twitter feed is dead to me. My favourite US political journo, now a White House correspondent, is next... unless she calms the frick down. (Sadly, her blog is less frequently updated.) An expert in global accounting also need to re-learn the value of email, IM and texting (especially when she's being flirtatious) or she's on the block. (Her RSS feed is good, thankfully).

As the late great Frankie Howerd might have said: "Twitter ye not!"

Dead cat bounces

While I'm far from being an expert, all this investment banking panic seems to present an market opportunity. I still think the FTSE100 will bottom out at 4,500 (give or take 10% - see, I told you I'm no expert...), but this Lehman nonsense will cause an overselling today and maybe tomorrow. That generally provokes a bounce. If I wasn't neck deep in National Savings, I'd be buying the FTSE at 5,000 and looking for 5,500 as a sell-out point before the bear run continues...

And so, a return

Been a long time, but even now it's not business, management and finance I'm keen to commit to posterity. It's politics, and in particular the art of winning elections. This more than anything seems to be at the heart of the malaise that afflicts us - leaving us with lacklustre politicians and an intellectually crippled electorate.

Once politicians - actually, the political ecosystem - embraces "electoral strategy", it loses any need to deliver innovation or leadership. Skilled politicking becomes the chief decider of any election. It's easy to blame the media, and in particular press barons who fancy they wield true power by deciding who to back. In reality, I suspect politicians are only too ready to resort to crude electioneering as a substitute for winning over an electorate. The media are simply their means of expressing this baseness.

Was it ever so? I'm too poorly read in political history to judge. I'm sure Churchill was something of an expert in electioneering. But he had the fortune to practice politics at a time of polarisation - not least, of course, during the war. Radical polar opposites require politicians to take a line and stand by it, even if they sell their expertise with spin and polish.

Now, however, the famed "end of history" has left us with nothing but the spin. We're all agreed on liberal democracy, regulated capitalism and social equality. And politicians have seemingly stopped making judgments about genuine right and wrong; and/or they have decided that conventional wisdom is much more important than enquiry. Why bother investigating the drugs problem from the bottom up, say, when the top-down conventional wisdom is so well entrenched that nothing is likely to shift a majority from their ill-informed positions? After all, even if you accepted that a reformed drugs policy might deliver social, financial and personal improvements, such a policy would (at best) require a huge effort of leadership - and at worst, render the proposer electorally unviable for some time.

So we end up at the logical end-game: politics for its own sake. Professional campaigners defining not just the election itinerary or the billboards or the PPB - or even the manifesto (gahhhd - last time politics defined a mainstream manifesto, it sunk the party, Labour 1983). They define... everything. At all times.

We get David Cameron and George Osborne. (We should salute Tony at this point, a true pioneer being the first pure "electoral strategy" PM.) We get Sarah Palin. We get no idea of what we're voting for, because the electoral strategists know that standing for anything really definitive gives the opposition something to target. When politics is all about mud-slinging, why give the other side something to aim at?

Some people - Danny over at Times Comment Central sadly falls into this category - worship electoral strategy. They see it as the high art of politics, the definition of "clever". Purpose, vision, direction - they seem lost, or at least painfully naive in the face of clever politicking. And the solution? There is none. Oh, the Lib Dems can shout into the wilderness, but they exhibit plenty of the wrong attributes, too. And why wouldn't they? There's only so long you can fight the good fight before low blows and steroid abuse wear you down and you think the only way you can beat them is to join them.

I loathe it. And perhaps that's the only hope. If enough of us loathe it enough... perhaps things can change. But I fear catastrophic failure of our system and exposure of the pathetic games-players in the high offices of political parties will get us even close.

Blimey

Has it really been six months? Well, if you're hungry for some Richard action, I'm back blogging at EquityFC.com (see link, right) and I'm also blogging for the ICAEW at their new online network ION - visit http://www.ion.icaew.com/itcounts/blog/ for more details.

You'll be able to tell that I'm on my uppers when I have the time to update this blog more frequently!

BPO - it's OK really

I've been sceptical about finance function outsourcing (actually, BPO in general) since a FTSE 100 FD told me he'd love to bring his dull, process-driven teams back in house and re-locate that "feeling" about the business, its suppliers and customers he got from having on-floor feedback from the "drones". But I had breakfast this morning with a BPO expert who assured me that many of the biggest issues - contracts, service level agreements and pricing plans - are being addressed by great minds in the BPO and consulting arenas.

Hmm. Still sceptical. But one thing she said did ring true: the biggest BPO problem is clients. I agree 100% - if the client doesn't know what they want, how they want it to happen and where the trip-wires are, who can blame the BPO provider for locking them into an expensive screw-up? Which is why I always think that unless you've done two BPO deals before - and seen how they go wrong - you shouldn't try it (at least not for a company you love). Catch 22? Well, pick a couple of companies you don't like and do it there first...

Doomed, we're all doomed!

I'm a bit of a doom monger. I've called the top of the property market at least three times (wrongly) since the mid-nineties, I'm sceptical about the stock market and really a bit of a neo-malthusian at heart. Worse, the current state of the economy - asset bubbles, financial market uncertainty, rampant consumerism, high levels of personal, corporate and government debt - means that this post about the parallels between the twenties and today is pushing at an open door marked "Richard's paranoia".

In short? Lack of regulation has encouraged the growth of an asset bubble and risky practices in financial markets that threaten to repeat the calamity of 1929. Add in social psychosis, environmental degradation, moral collapse and tribal conflict and... well, it ain't pretty. Run!

Not business, finance or management

But pure genius, nonetheless:

Um

What he said.

Well, up to a point. There are lots of private equity firms that invest in growing companies in need of capital, experience and contacts; and others that turnaround businesses that would otherwise fail - and they have my full respect. I know lots of guys in that line of business, and they work hard and get a buzz out of transforming businesses.

But these days "private equity" has become shorthand for the LBO merchants - who fall into three categories: merchant bankers (ugh), asset strippers (ugh) and megalomaniacs (ugh). Them, you can keep - read John Caddell at the above link for a fairly reasoned attack on them and their actions.

Facebook vs Linkedin

I've just seen this blog posting about Facebook. Here's my reply about the relative merits of two social networking sites:

About a month after I joined Facebook - and found it great for both social and professional purposes - I got an invitation to Linkedin. I'd had them before, but I was now intrigued by my FB experience, so I joined and used the site to tell me who from my address book was also "Linkedin". I added them as connections, asking them to tell me whether they thought, as existing users, it was worth it. Everyone, out of about 40 users, said they'd joined but then found it passable at best. Most hadn't visited the site in the last year and couldn't see the purpose of it. They understood the idea - but in practical terms, it sucked.

Facebook scores because it fits my own personal maxim: "never do anything for only one reason". I'm not checking Facebook for professional connections, but my social network takes me back every day. Then when I need to find a contact for a feature (I'm a journalist) I can search groups, professions and companies and come up with people to get in touch with. and other people see more about me and my approach by understanding me socially.

My tiny poll also suggests that Linkedin (and the frankly scarily bad eCademy) fail because being on there just looks "pushy" and smacks of personal salesmanship. That's not as true on FB. Maybe the reticence to seem "proactive" is peculiarly British. But on FB, all my "friends" are Brits and they have no problem with "projecting"...

Not business, but...

Colbert genius on Blair and Brown:



http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=86802