WHILE no one would wish to diminish the plight of the Rover workers, it’s not all doom and gloom in the Midlands. Less than 50 miles up the road from Longbridge, another car company has quietly completed a pounds 50 million investment programme and recruited 1,000 extra workers to boost production from 220,000 to 285,000 cars a year, 85 per cent for export.

That brings the total invested on the site to pounds 1.2 billion. In its 13 years of existence the plant has steadily upped its purchases of parts from local suppliers. These now total pounds 450m, or 49 per cent of the total by value.

Admittedly Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK (TMUK), based at Burnaston in Derbyshire (it has another plant making its engines at Deeside in north Wales) benefits from a very different context from Rover. Its parent, on some measures, is currently the second-largest motor firm in the world after GM, and few doubt that it will take top spot in the next few years. It is also in robust financial health – in marked contrast to the big three US automakers, two of which are struggling to avoid junk bond status.

Yet those differences in circumstances are not coincidental. They are the consequence of profound differences in the way Toyota operates. ‘Toyota is a an oddball company,’ admits Sir Alan Jones, chairman of TMUK and ‘managing officer’ of the parent firm in Japan. ‘We look at things in a holistic way.’

This is an unassuming way of putting it, but then Toyoto prefers actions to words, both in and outside the plant. Although it is happy to show what it does if people ask, it doesn’t boast or preach about its unique approach.

T here is more to Toyota’s holism than meets the eye. To understand it, it is necessary to back up half a century.

When the company was starting to make cars again after the war, it rapidly twigged that the mass-production methods of the Americans would have to be substantially altered to meet the very different conditions of Japan, where space, raw materials and skilled labour were in short supply and the customer base was smaller, poorer and more diverse.

The genius of Taiichi Ohno, who developed the Toyota Production System (or TPS) in the 1950s, was to take the standardised way of working pioneered by Henry Ford, and insert it in a process that reversed Ford’s logic.

Instead of seeing production as a series of separate processes (press, weld, paint, assembly, sales) each delivering batches of products scheduled and optimised for economies of scale, Ohno saw it as a single pulse: a car ‘pulled’ through the different factory processes, from one end to the other, by a customer order. In this view, each process was both customer and supplier to the processes next to it.

As Ohno surmised, by optimising the pulse rather than the batch he could do away with the need to store work-in-progress while it waited between processes, thus saving space. By putting the processes close to each other, he no longer required expensive transfer lines.

But coupling work tightly together meant that you couldn’t afford anything to go wrong. There was nowhere to house rejects, and no buffer of stock from which to draw new ones. Quality had to be right every time. So to ‘just-in-time’ delivery of parts was added a second principle of the TPS: automation with a human touch, or ‘ jidoka ‘, meaning the ability of those on the line to stop production instantly to correct mistakes on the spot if anything went wrong.

And finally, in a pull system, it was the customer that drove constant improvement , not obsolescence planned on high.

The implications of this way of working are far-reaching. The workforce is in control of the production process – so you had better educate, trust and respect it. The quality of goods received from suppliers is equally critical, so the same goes for them. This is why Toyota calls employees ‘members’. It is also the reality behind Jones’s remark: ‘Company prosperity depends on member [employee] prosperity and supplier prosperity.’

Trust and respect are far from costless. For example, although Toyota is highly sensitive to demand, carrying inventory in the factory for hours rather than days, it freezes orders to suppliers for 20-day periods to give them continuity. It works with them long-term, too, for reciprocal benefit.

Likewise for members: when in 1996-7 currency movements and unsuitable models left TMUK badly exposed, it did not build for stock or have recourse to layoffs, instead keeping people working on process improvements that paid off later. ‘That was an important decision point,’ says Jones.

In the same way, ‘Toyota didn’t walk away from us then – although it could have done.’ It has taken 11 years for TMUK to become profitable.

Holism explains many things that look paradoxical to outsiders. For instance, while some areas of manufacture are heavily automated, others are not.

‘To understand what we’re doing, we first do a process manually, then mechanise it, then automate – if we need to,’ says Jones. So you may see a trolley of parts pushed a short distance by hand, or someone on a bike collecting up internal orders for new parts.

Or take work standardisation. Jones denies that this is a straitjacket or a dis incentive to initiative – it’s the reverse. ‘You have to have standard methods to know how to improve. Standard methods force discussion,’ he says.

Although principles are common across all Toyota plants, detailed work methods vary. Comparisons show how and where further improvements might be possible. In that sense, standardisation is part of the open, visual management that is at the heart of the TPS.

The greatest difference between Toyota and Rover and other ailing car firms is financial. By treating production as a single end-to-end system, and focusing on shortening the period from order to delivery, Toyota forces into the open the costs of traditional methods – quality, missed forecasts, vast management overhead – that are usually hidden.

Unobsessed with internal and external league tables, Toyota has only one unchanging target: to improve against itself in cost and customer approval.

‘It’s sometimes hard,’ notes Jones, ‘to maintain the holism through thick and thin’ – but not as hard as being Rover.

The Observer, 22 April 2005

LIKE MANY businessmen, Sir Clive Woodward, the enterprising head coach of England’s 2003 World Cup winning rugby team, is fond of presentations containing charts, bullet points and abbreviations.

As the engaging Woodward concedes, these performances caused rolled eyes among the players when he took over the England job in 1997. The description in his book, Winning! (Hodder & Stoughton) of the team running around in practice games shouting ‘CTC!’ (Crossbar, Touchline, Communicate, for spatial awareness), or even better ‘T-Cup!’ (Think Correctly Under Pressure) is deeply cherishable.

But wacky is not the same as flaky. In the Telstra Stadium, on the rainy Sydney night of 22 November 2003, in the last minute of extra time in the World Cup final, CTC and T-Cup paid off in hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades.

As England threw in the ball for the crucial play, the players knew, from systematic analysis of hundreds of games, that 70 seconds was more than enough time to win – as long as they kept their heads. It takes just 20 seconds to score a try, and a team retaining the ball through five successive phases of play has an 85 per cent chance of scoring.

In the event it took three phases, accurately executed under desperate Australian pressure, for the team to position Jonny Wilkinson for the famous drop-kick in front of the posts. Wilkinson’s right boot did the rest, giving England their best sporting moment since the football World Cup of 1966.

The preparation for that last minute sums up Woodward to a T. Unlike many sportspeople, who sell motivation to the business sector, he insists sport needs to learn from the professionalism, attention to detail and entrepreneurialism of business.

‘You don’t get lucky,’ he says flatly. ‘There’s risk in saying this, but you want to work in an environment where there are absolutely no excuses. My job was simple: to give Martin Johnson the best chance of winning the World Cup. We had to be favourites, the best planned, the best prepared team.

‘You have to make [the players] feel very special, very elite, the best qualified in the world. That way you can demand the best. If you give them every chance to be successful, it’s then up to them to grab it, just as we did in the World Cup.’

Nine months after that win, the manner of Woodward’s explosive departure was also revealing and consistent. He believed that, although the players had been specially made available for his brand of intensive preparation, England had in the end won despite, rather than because of, the system.

It could only win again, he reckoned, if the level of preparation could be moved up another few notches, towards perfection – keeping ahead in the business of rugby demanded nothing less. When it became clear this would not happen, he departed in a thunderous display nearly as dramatic as the victory in the rain.

With something near a grin, Woodward concedes that now he can see the other point of view. ‘Water under the bridge,’ he says briskly, acknowledging that, until that final clash, ’99 per cent of the time the RFU [Rugby Football Union] was fantastic. They supported what we did, they allowed us to put in place something quite special – and we delivered.’

Fashioning one of the most professional sporting teams in the world in a deeply traditional game such as rugby entailed a cultural change for which only a small-business background could have prepared him, he says. While Woodward also had a rewarding career at Xerox, ‘of all the experiences, including playing rugby for England, setting up my own firm was the best grounding for the England job, quite categorically.’

From establishing his own business he learnt the primordial importance of making the right appointments, both for playing and management teams. ‘Leadership,’ he says simply ‘is picking the right people. You win more matches by right selection than in any other way. If you have the right people in your team, you don’t need to worry about motivation. But one wrong person can cut the legs off everyone. If you make a bad decision you have to change it, however hard that is.’

Small business also taught him the imperative need to get things done, never mind the niceties. When Woodward first arrived at Twickenham he found he did not even have an office, since it was assumed he would work from home. He scrimped and saved, borrowed or got around funding shortfalls by invention and lateral thinking.

His approach to sponsorship was typical. The England players were bemused (again) to find themselves equipped with full mobile IT kit, including laptops from Elonex and phones from O2. Some of them had never used a computer before. But these were not perks, rather a bonding device for a team that spent far more time apart than it did together.

Despite the lasting reverberation of slammed doors at Twickenham, Woodward will almost certainly be back as a full-time rugby coach (see page 1, Sport). But in the meantime his ideas will be tested to destruction on the forthcoming British Lions tour of New Zealand. There is no history of winning against New Zealand, the most intense rugby-playing nation in the world – of 10 test series, the Lions have won just one.

Woodward says: ‘When Brian O’Driscoll leads the players out in the first test in Dunedin on 25 June, my job is to ensure they’re the best prepared team ever in a Lions shirt. That gives them half a chance. We have to work back from there and fast-track everything we’ve learned in six years in a matter of weeks.’

That will require a wholly new approach to training – which is why the players are currently marvelling at some methods that seem a lot stranger than flip charts. History may be against them – but then who would have bet that England would win 14 games against the southern hemisphere teams in a row? ‘I just have a sneaking feeling,’ Woodward says, ‘that we could cause an upset if we get it right.’

The Observer, 15 May 2005

THE MOST surreal episode in the election campaign was the panicked prime ministerial time-out from matters of trust, immigration and war in Iraq to instruct doctors how to make patients’ appointments.

In itself, the incident might seem laughable. But there could hardly be a more telling symbol of Labour’s greatest domestic failure: its inability to fathom how its relationship with the public services should be managed.

Think about it: after decades of privatisation, and the erection of a tentacular regulatory regime (now costing the public sector at least pounds 13 billion a year) with the express aim of distancing government from the day-to-day management of services, ministers are more dedicated interferers than at any time in the past 50 years – perhaps ever.

This is micromanagement on a gigantic scale (if you see what I mean). But it is more than that. Like the almost daily promises to get rid of MRSA, deliver cleaner hospitals, cut the number of asylum seekers, improve exam results, and shorten hospital waiting lists, the ministerial dictation of doctors’ appointment systems is straight out of the Gosplan handbook for central planners, circa 1950.

Command from the centre didn’t work in the Soviet economy, and it doesn’t work in the NHS either. The first reason is that the government doesn’t know what patients ringing up for an appointment actually want. Since it doesn’t know the nature of the demand (how many calls are real emergencies, how many can be handled by a nurse, how many are follow-ups) it follows that it can’t know the real capacity of the system to meet it.

In turn, this means that the famous target of all appointments within 48 hours is entirely arbitrary. Some surgeries may be able to meet it, others not. If enough pressure is brought to bear, those that can’t will feel obliged to manipulate the numbers, as the only things under their control, to get the desired result. That’s what happened in the appointments case, just as it hap pens in all other services subject to blanket specifications too.

It follows also, because it’s a government representation of what patients want rather than the thing itself, that the system is not likely to be a good one. It’s not patient-friendly. A follow-up appointment a week later may be much more important than a first-time one which has to take place within 48 hours. But as a mass-production system it can’t handle this legitimate variety.

Moreover, ministerial prescription subverts any possibility of improvement. As the scientist-philosopher Gregory Bateson put it: ‘Learning proceeds from difference.’ Difference has the political disadvantage of inequality, since some solutions will be better than others. But it has the advantage of movement: given a degree of choice, a better solution for patients or customers will attract more adherents, to the exclusion of poorer ones.

The other thing Whitehall still doesn’t seem to get is the costs of its interference. These are hidden but enormous. And although where they emerge is unpredictable, their incidence isn’t. Tinkering with one part of a system always has costly ramifications somewhere else.

In the surgeries case, the cost of meeting the 48-hour appointments deadline is that some patients find it harder to see their doctors for a follow-up. The cost of insisting that hospitals treat all accident and emergency patients within four hours is that some infected wards can’t be taken out of commission to get rid of MRSA.

So interference begets more interference, as ministers decree changes and regulators diligently amend and tighten the rules. But if the capacity isn’t there – if there simply aren’t enough doctors and nurses to attend to all the first-time and follow-up patients that need to be seen – surgeries will either not meet the targets or, if enough jobs depend on it, find new ways round them.

And so the dance goes on, with more and more invention and effort going into satisfying ministers’ demands for the right numbers and less and less into finding better ways of treating the patient.

There are other casualties, too. Perhaps the most insidious is the degradation of official numbers. Paradoxically, the more the government prods, measures and intervenes, the less the figures it produces to show that the desired ends are being met, are believed.

There are good reasons for the scepticism. We should know by now that you can’t use the same figures for measurement and control: the control function corrupts the measurement.

Because of the interventions, the figures are constantly being revised, so it’s hard to compare like with like. But they’re dubious anyway, partly because of the representation problem noted earlier, but also because in every public ser vice they are subject to systematic manipulation. The figures may purport to show that no one has to wait more than two days to see their doctor, but any straw poll says the contrary – a next-day appointment is rare. The figures don’t correspond to the reality as people experience it.

The diagnosis from the doctor’s surgery is that, the election over, New Labour needs a new start. Foreign adventures apart, its only hope of a fourth term is to win unambiguous recognition that public services are getting better. But to clean up the figures, it needs to acknowledge an unpalatable truth. The famous efficiency review, now being worked on in every department across Whitehall, has the wrong focus: the major engine of bureaucratic cost inflation is ministers themselves.

Accordingly, to win back control over the numbers, No 10’s Delivery Unit should decree a self-denying ordinance: reform starts with conquering the atavistic urge to command and control.

That’s not as paradoxical as it sounds. Curiously, there’s a precedent under its nose. Practically New Labour’s first significant act when it took office was to grant the Bank of England independence. Although the move was controversial then, it has come to be ranked as an almost unqualified success. No party wants to turn the clock back. The medicine is the same for any other public service. Set people a clear purpose, give them the keys to the system, hold them accountable – and stand well back.

The Observer, 8 Observer 2005

MARGARET THATCHER once said that anyone taking a bus after the age of 26 was clearly a failure. In that case, failure is catching and London is in the grip of an epidemic: over the past four years bus usage in the capital has risen by 40 per cent and some nouveaux deadbeats have actually abandoned their previous status symbols, their cars, to slum it.

Perhaps uniquely in the world, says London’s high-profile traffic commissioner, Bob Kiley, London is experiencing ‘an intermodal shift’ in favour of public transport.

The burgeoning of the buses, accompanied by efficient implementation of the congestion charge, may be one reason why Kiley looks so relaxed after four years in what has been called the toughest transport job in the world. Indeed, last December he told mayor Ken Livingstone that he was renewing his contract at Transport for London (TfL), the umbrella organisation that shelters the Underground, buses and strategic roads, ‘for an indefinite period’.

Not everyone thought he would. After all, Kiley has long passed the age when he qualified for a free bus pass (he is 69). After a successful career that included rejuvenation of the Boston and New York transportation systems as well as stints in the CIA and private industry, the affable, thoughtful American had little left to prove.

And in London, even with (because of?) the support of the feisty Livingstone, Kiley has not had it all his own way. The pair lost a very public, bloody battle with the Treasury over how the desperately needed renewal of London’s crumbling Underground system would be funded. Kiley still thinks the conditions of the infamous public private partnership (PPP), which locks maintenance and renewal of the tube infrastructure into fixed 30-year contracts with the private sector, are ‘heinous’. So why should he continue to put himself through it?

Shirt-sleeved and at ease in his airy TfL office above Victoria Street, Kiley laughs: ‘Almost from day one I said it would take six to eight years to have enough of the pieces in place to be able to walk away thinking that this work would continue for a long period, say 20 or 30 years, and [that] the whole system would be rejuvenated – all of it.’

That point hasn’t been reached – but it’s getting closer. One important element was the bringing together of the buses, Tube and other organisations into TfL, an organisational feat in itself given the fate of so many large mergers and reorganisations in the private sector. The Traffic Management Act, which gives TfL powers to control who digs holes in the road and when, is a further piece in the strategic jigsaw.

More importantly, TfL has secured adequate funding. This is not just through the PPP it is now allowed to borrow £3bn or more on its own account depending on its performance.

‘There’s no question that the government has committed itself to funding PPP indefinitely – whether for the whole 30 years remains to be seen, but renewable every seven-and-a-half years,’ says Kiley. That means a spend of £1bn a year under the PPP alone, divided equally between maintenance and renewals.

In short, the job is doable? ‘With our resources resolved for the next five years or so, very definitely.’ There are still big issues with the contracts, but also a general feeling among the parties that having fought themselves to a standstill, they have to try to make the arrange ment work. The Treasury, whose brainchild the PPP was, is desperate for it to succeed – Gordon Brown, after all, wants to be Prime Minister – and has, Kiley concedes, been ‘extremely helpful’.

This, of course, gives Kiley and Livingstone political leverage to compensate for lack of control over the contracts, and they too would rather be remembered for an Underground that works long after the details of the PPP have been forgotten. ‘I’ve always reluctantly conceded that, if you give it long enough, any contract can be made to work better,’ Kiley says. Some people think that after the election and a few changes of personnel, a quiet renegotiation of the contracts in the light of experience would be in everyone’s interests – including those of the contractors’ shareholders, some of whom are becoming restive.

TfL’s end of the bargain is now to deliver on the projects it is funding and building itself, notably the East London line extension which should be under construction by the end of the year. ‘We take that very seriously,’ says Kiley. ‘We want to make the budget, we want to do it in time, with the minimum of fuss, in a way that makes people appreciate it’s a great project.’

A lot is riding on these projects, which also include the Thames Gateway bridge and extending the Docklands Light Railway. If TfL brings them in on time and under budget, as it did with the congestion charge, it will not only reinforce its claim for further powers – for instance over the overland commuter rail network – but prove that old-fashioned public procurement was the right way to rebuild the infrastructure all along.

London School of Economics transport expert Tony Travers, a fierce opponent of the PPP, believes this is likely: ‘It will almost certainly be financed, built and opened while the PPP is still wallowing in treacle.’ He is more nuanced about TfL’s achievements as a whole. He concedes that the congestion charge and buses have been an extraordinary piece of public policy and that uniting the transport modes under TfL is a gain in transparency. But the buses are now seriously in the red and some charge that TfL on its own has inflated the going rate for public-agency salaries. But even allowing for the baleful influence of the PPP, the real doubts centre on the Tube: ‘Has quality improved perceptibly since takeover in 2003? The answer has to be no.’

Kiley’s indirect answer is to point to New York and Boston. On the whole, London and the two US cities are very similar. But there is one big difference: New York and Boston have been working on physically improving their systems for 20 and 30 years, respectively. London, on the other hand, has just the Jubilee and Victoria Lines to its credit over the past 60 years.

Kiley is well aware that for TfL over the next few years building human capital will be as important as the infrastructure. It’s the last big piece of the jigsaw – ‘the mode we have to get into for the next 30 years’.

He won’t be around that long, of course, but he has another good reason for sticking around to make TfL work. He likes London. He enjoys his relationship with the mayor, and vice-versa, despite their political differences (Livingstone reportedly began the job interview by saying he never thought he’d be recruiting an ex-CIA agent Kiley retorted that he didn’t expect to be sitting in the office of an unreconstructed Trot). ‘It’s been a delight. I really like London – it’s getting a bit easier to move around in, too.’

Profile

Name Robert R Kiley

Born 16 September 1935

Career Although ‘never a spook’, joined the CIA after Harvard Graduate School, ending up executive assistant to director Richard Helms. Deputy mayor of Boston and chairman of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in the 1970s. Chairman of New York’s MTA in the 1980s. In 1990s principal of private equity investment house CEO of New York City Partnership. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, American Repertory Theater, Princeton Review

Family Married to Rona, two sons

Leisure Jogging, reading, galleries, museums

What they say

‘He definitely plays like a political animal. We’re not used to that. It’s curious, a top guy telling everyone that a partnership isn’t going to work. It hardly provokes the spirit the PPP is supposed to have’

One-time contractor

‘He sets very high standards. But don’t bullshit him – it’s lethal’ Colleague

‘When I was elected mayor, I decided to appoint the best transport expert in the world. All my experience working with Bob Kiley has confirmed that judgment. Personally, we hit it off from the start – it has been a real pleasure working with him’ Ken Livingstone

The Observer, 8 May 2005

W HY DIDN’T the Rover workers revolt? They certainly have a right to be angry. They have lost pretty much everything: jobs and prospects, and their pension fund has a pounds 67 million hole in it. To add insult to injury, the residual value of the cars they were persuaded to buy as a show of support is now in many cases less than what they owe. Meanwhile, their bosses and shareholders – the Phoenix Four – have walked away with pockets and pension pots brimming. They are unlikely to need to work again.

The legacies left by Rover on its deathbed to its shareholder and worker inheritors could hardly be more different. Yet, despite belated protest and token wringing of hands, the only remarkable thing about the indignation is the speed with which it has died down.

The truth is that the Rover workers (and we) are resigned to the despoliation. We have so internalised the idea that this is the way the world is that while, as in this case, we can be indignant about individual abuses, that is precisely what we assume they are – aberrations rather than something inherent to the system that produced them.

But Rover demonstrates just how rotten the foundations of that system are. Consider how any company really works. Its unique potential resides in the ability to combine the resources of different constituencies to create value that neither could on their own. Without the human capital contributed by employees, the financial capital of investors is sterile. Employees need financial capital to amplify their efforts. Each is necessary to the other.

Neither is the company actually ‘owned’ by the shareholders in any normal sense – the whole point of the ‘limited-liability’ trade-off is that shareholders shed final responsibility for the assets and liabilities on to the ‘legal person’ of the company itself, embracing all its constituents.

So how come that the Phoenix Four can make off with all the swag without being arrested?

The answer is that we have bought the orthodoxy that the company exists to maximise returns to financial capital alone. From this principle a whole set of consequences flow and all the participants have acted out their roles in textbook manner. Behind it all lurks the argument that financial capital is entitled to the greatest returns (or, in some cases, all of them) because it shoulders the major risks. True to form, this has indeed been argued in the case of Rover.

But, as management guru Sumantra Ghoshal pointed out, for this to have any justification, it is necessary to make a big assumption – that labour markets are perfectly efficient. In other words, if employees do not feel that their wages exactly represent the contribution they bring to the company (the default position) they will instantly and costlessly switch jobs to one where they do.

‘With this assumption, the shareholders can be assumed as carrying the greater risk, thus making their contribution of capital more important than the contribution of human capital provided by managers and other employees and, therefore, it is their returns that must be maximised,’ he said.

However, as Ghoshal also observed, this is the opposite of the reality. Shareholders can and do dispose of their holdings in a tiny fraction of the time and effort it takes an employee to find a new job. The rush to close or downgrade company pension schemes – even though the ratio of profits to wages has increased from 33 to 50 per cent since the 1970s – simply underlines the fact that in every substantive sense, it is employees who bear the greater risks, not the shareholders.

What’s more, in today’s economy where knowledge is the most critical and most fragile element of corporate success, there is a good case for arguing that the skills, entrepreneurship and know-how of human capital are more important to enterprise than financial capital, a commodity in oversupply.

Why then do we accept a model that so comprehensively fails the tests of justice and common sense, stacking up neither in theory nor practice? The underlying reason is that corporate purpose is a classic casualty of the well-documented and overdeveloped propensity of managers (and politicians) to reduce as many as possible of the variables with which they have to deal to numbers.

Numbers are important – the choice of what and how to measure is one of the most crucial and least well understood tasks of management. Unfortunately, they are also treacherous. All too often the measure subverts the purpose.

As Igor Ansoff, the father of strategic management, put it: ‘Managers start off trying to manage what they want, and finish up wanting what they can measure.’

That is precisely the case with shareholder value. Common sense says that companies and societies prosper when interests are balanced – when companies look after customers, suppliers and employees in such a way that they can nurture the human capital to innovate and improve alongside the financial capital to invest in the future. But that’s messy and difficult unlike returns to shareholders, it is hard to express in numbers and impossible to reduce to a single figure.

As a model, shareholder value is a travesty, as is what happened to Rover in the past five years. It may well be true, as a new report from the Cambridge-MIT Institute claims (see above), that by 2000 Rover was already doomed and we have just been witnessing the longest corporate death scene in history. But that should not be allowed to disguise the fact that the episode truly represents in every respect ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. Tellingly, it took a German company, previous owner BMW, with its different traditions of labour-capital relations, to point it out.

The Observer, 1 May 2005

WHILE no one would wish to diminish the plight of the Rover workers, it’s not all doom and gloom in the Midlands. Less than 50 miles up the road from Longbridge, another car company has quietly completed a pounds 50 million investment programme and recruited 1,000 extra workers to boost production from 220,000 to 285,000 cars a year, 85 per cent for export.

That brings the total invested on the site to pounds 1.2 billion. In its 13 years of existence the plant has steadily upped its purchases of parts from local suppliers. These now total pounds 450m, or 49 per cent of the total by value.

Admittedly Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK (TMUK), based at Burnaston in Derbyshire (it has another plant making its engines at Deeside in north Wales) benefits from a very different context from Rover. Its parent, on some measures, is currently the second-largest motor firm in the world after GM, and few doubt that it will take top spot in the next few years. It is also in robust financial health – in marked contrast to the big three US automakers, two of which are struggling to avoid junk bond status.

Yet those differences in circumstances are not coincidental. They are the consequence of profound differences in the way Toyota operates. ‘Toyota is a an oddball company,’ admits Sir Alan Jones, chairman of TMUK and ‘managing officer’ of the parent firm in Japan. ‘We look at things in a holistic way.’

This is an unassuming way of putting it, but then Toyoto prefers actions to words, both in and outside the plant. Although it is happy to show what it does if people ask, it doesn’t boast or preach about its unique approach.

T here is more to Toyota’s holism than meets the eye. To understand it, it is necessary to back up half a century.

When the company was starting to make cars again after the war, it rapidly twigged that the mass-production methods of the Americans would have to be substantially altered to meet the very different conditions of Japan, where space, raw materials and skilled labour were in short supply and the customer base was smaller, poorer and more diverse.

The genius of Taiichi Ohno, who developed the Toyota Production System (or TPS) in the 1950s, was to take the standardised way of working pioneered by Henry Ford, and insert it in a process that reversed Ford’s logic.

Instead of seeing production as a series of separate processes (press, weld, paint, assembly, sales) each delivering batches of products scheduled and optimised for economies of scale, Ohno saw it as a single pulse: a car ‘pulled’ through the different factory processes, from one end to the other, by a customer order. In this view, each process was both customer and supplier to the processes next to it.

As Ohno surmised, by optimising the pulse rather than the batch he could do away with the need to store work-in-progress while it waited between processes, thus saving space. By putting the processes close to each other, he no longer required expensive transfer lines.

But coupling work tightly together meant that you couldn’t afford anything to go wrong. There was nowhere to house rejects, and no buffer of stock from which to draw new ones. Quality had to be right every time. So to ‘just-in-time’ delivery of parts was added a second principle of the TPS: automation with a human touch, or ‘ jidoka ‘, meaning the ability of those on the line to stop production instantly to correct mistakes on the spot if anything went wrong.

And finally, in a pull system, it was the customer that drove constant improvement , not obsolescence planned on high.

The implications of this way of working are far-reaching. The workforce is in control of the production process – so you had better educate, trust and respect it. The quality of goods received from suppliers is equally critical, so the same goes for them. This is why Toyota calls employees ‘members’. It is also the reality behind Jones’s remark: ‘Company prosperity depends on member [employee] prosperity and supplier prosperity.’

Trust and respect are far from costless. For example, although Toyota is highly sensitive to demand, carrying inventory in the factory for hours rather than days, it freezes orders to suppliers for 20-day periods to give them continuity. It works with them long-term, too, for reciprocal benefit.

Likewise for members: when in 1996-7 currency movements and unsuitable models left TMUK badly exposed, it did not build for stock or have recourse to layoffs, instead keeping people working on process improvements that paid off later. ‘That was an important decision point,’ says Jones.

In the same way, ‘Toyota didn’t walk away from us then – although it could have done.’ It has taken 11 years for TMUK to become profitable.

Holism explains many things that look paradoxical to outsiders. For instance, while some areas of manufacture are heavily automated, others are not.

‘To understand what we’re doing, we first do a process manually, then mechanise it, then automate – if we need to,’ says Jones. So you may see a trolley of parts pushed a short distance by hand, or someone on a bike collecting up internal orders for new parts.

Or take work standardisation. Jones denies that this is a straitjacket or a dis incentive to initiative – it’s the reverse. ‘You have to have standard methods to know how to improve. Standard methods force discussion,’ he says.

Although principles are common across all Toyota plants, detailed work methods vary. Comparisons show how and where further improvements might be possible. In that sense, standardisation is part of the open, visual management that is at the heart of the TPS.

The greatest difference between Toyota and Rover and other ailing car firms is financial. By treating production as a single end-to-end system, and focusing on shortening the period from order to delivery, Toyota forces into the open the costs of traditional methods – quality, missed forecasts, vast management overhead – that are usually hidden.

Unobsessed with internal and external league tables, Toyota has only one unchanging target: to improve against itself in cost and customer approval.

‘It’s sometimes hard,’ notes Jones, ‘to maintain the holism through thick and thin’ – but not as hard as being Rover.

The Observer, 24 April 2005

IF PUBLIC services are to decide the election, how Tony Blair would like every town to be like Liverpool. Rewind to 1999, and the Mersey seaport was a travesty- as council leader Mike Storey put it – a seaport without ships a world-renowned music centre with no big-time venue. Once the second-most important centre of an empire, Liverpool was a wasteland that businesses and inhabitants were deserting in droves.

Council services were third-poorest in the country, council tax the highest. Education was about to be privatised. The city’s fabled Victorian fabric looked more candidate for demolition than heritage, and a night out in Liverpool was like being in a Harry Enfield sketch: within half an hour of arriving at Lime Street station around that time, I had been tapped by a beggar, asked what my problem was by a passer-by and harassed in a pub by a drunk of world-class obnoxiousness. Why would anyone go back?

Six years on, no one would claim the makeover is complete – but neither would they deny that the city is undergoing a real renaissance. A pounds 700 million retail development – the largest in Europe – is helping to regenerate the centre, the Mersey waterfront has become a World Heritage site, the exodus from the city has been reversed and Japanese tourists asking directions for the Cavern Club are outnumbered by visitors inquiring about the secrets of the 2008 European City of Culture’s success.

At least part of the answer lies in what can only be described as a transformation of council services. ‘The council doesn’t create jobs’, Storey says. ‘But we can set an encouraging climate and we can’t preach to business unless we deliver services efficiently and well.’

Since 1999, when an all-new executive team arrived, Liverpool has proved that the politicians’ Holy Grail is possible: you can cut costs (and council tax, now not even in the country’s 100 highest) and improve services. From ‘failing’ it has hauled itself up to ‘good’ in the Audit Commission’s rankings, becoming the fastest-improving council in the country while removing pounds 120m from its cost base.

Managers insist that cost and service trajectories are related. Falling costs are not the starting point, but the natural result of focusing on the customer. ‘Much of local government is a monument to problems of the past,’ says chief executive Sir David Henshaw. Liverpool’s approach has been to demolish the relics and start again from scratch. Henshaw calls it an ‘intelligence-led model of local government’, re-engineering services to improve delivery to the customer, often using partnerships, while stripping out accumulated administration and support costs.

Nine human resources systems and 200 people have been streamlined to one system and 78 employees 30 ways of claiming car expenses have become one. Swollen managerial overheads were dramatically reduced as departments were slimmed from 11 to five. ‘We’re continuing to collapse things down,’ says David McElhinney, executive director responsible for customer service. ‘Consolidate, analyse, rationalise. The more you do that, the easier and cheaper it is and the less you have to manage.’

Liverpool could not have consolidated the much-maligned back office so radically without also re-engineering the point of contact where the citizen meets the council. Instead of the myriad agencies and departmental channels of the past there are now basically two: a call centre, which accounts for 70 per cent of contacts, and a network of one-stop shops giving face-to-face access to all the city’s 770 services. People can also communicate with the council electronically through e-enabled street kiosks, or ‘pavement pods’.

Perhaps surprisinglythe jewel in the Merseyside crown is the call centre, Liverpool Direct. A 10-year, pounds 304m joint venture with BT (now replicated in Suffolk and Rotherham), Liverpool Direct boasts of being the highest-paying call centre in the land, as well as the largest run by local government and possibly the one with the lowest labour turnover, at 2 per cent a year. Its present 300 seats will rise to 450 as it takes on additional council, and perhaps even private-sector, ser vices. And don’t call it outsourcing. It’s the reverse, says McElhinney, who runs it. BT provides the technology, but all the people are on secondment to the joint venture, which is an integrated part of the council organisation.

Crucially, says McElhinney, this lets staff work on resolving calls first time by having expertise available (hence the high salaries) and slashing the number of repeat, or ‘failure’, calls – a good, if unusual, measure of success. ‘Our job is to drive out system failure,’ McElhinney says.

What’s more, the Liverpool Direct contract is constructed in such a way that when it ends in 2010, all the assets and accumulated know-how from the venture are retained by the council.

‘So we have the assets to do what we want with at the end,’ says McElhinney. ‘It’s a good means of managing risk, and quite a clever way of rebuilding the family silver.’

Liverpool still has a way to go to meet its goal of an ‘excellent’ service rating in 2006, and more broadly being recognised as a ‘premier European city’. It also has to live up to its designation as European Capital of Culture in 2008 – a monumental step up in ambition and confidence. ‘This is our big contribution to the vision of Liverpool’s future – great services and low council tax,’ says McElhinney. His sentiment is echoed by Sarah Parr, head of learning: ‘It’s about making 2008 real. How is the Capital of Culture going to benefit people in the housing estates outside the centre?’

Even before then, however, Liverpool’s experience already delivers a number of important lessons for others. First, improving service and cutting costs are not incompatible – provided the focus is on the customer. This is easy to say, harder to do.

Second, the answer is not technology. Technology is useful, but everyone agrees that leadership and civic vision are much more so. Third, the distinction between front and back office is a false one: both are part of the same flow, and the full engagement of each in finding better ways to do things is essential.

Finally, although local government often rightly grumbles about one-size-fits-all diktats handed down by central departments, essentially their fate is in their own hands. ‘What we’ve shown is that you can start the transformation wherever you are,’ Henshaw says.

For Blair, of course, the only thing not to like about Liverpool is that the transformation also included politics. In 1998, the city went Lib Dem.

The Observer, 17 April 2005

RICHARD Layard is an economist and Labour peer who made his considerable name in employment economics. Now he has written a remarkable book about happiness ( Happiness: Lessons from a New Science published by Allen Lane at pounds 17.99) which effectively trashes the claim of economics to guide policy for a good society.

Happiness, not GDP, still less competitiveness, should be the overriding principle of economic policy, Layard maintains, backing up his proposition with some fascinating statistics from the ‘new science’.

Thus, money really can’t buy it: while Western countries are at least twice as well off as they were 50 years ago, they are no more content. Although richer countries are on average happier than poorer ones, in all nations, diminishing returns to happiness set in steeply once incomes reach around $20,000 a year.

One important reason for this is that people judge wealth relatively rather than absolutely: even if you were happy getting a rise, finding that a colleague has a bigger one more than wipes out your happiness increment. Competition for money and status is thus a zero-sum game and the more opportunities for comparison – rankings, league tables, advertising – there are, the greater the dissatisfaction will be.

Traditional economics fails to take account of these psychological niceties, just as it does of almost all the remarkably commonsensical things that happiness really depends on – loving relationships, fulfilling work, reasonable health, ties of community and friendship, personal freedom and values – which have more impact on it than income.

Layard is in no doubt: the economic policies of ‘rampant individualism’ – pursued for at least the past three decades by the Anglo-Saxon countries in particular – have damaged trust, fairness and social bonds and wiped out the gains in happiness that might have been expected from rising material living standards.

What does all this have to do with management? Plenty. Although largely ignored by Layard, management is economics’ essential henchman, the principal vehicle by which economic attitudes are spread. Most activity in today’s advanced economies does not take place through the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s atomistic market, but through the very visible hand of co-ordination in formal organisations.

Organisations dominate the economic and social landscape and in this world management’s writ runs. Management, of course, shares with economics the same reductive and narrowly economic view of human nature that Layard complains of. This is reflected in companies’ hierarchical controls and even more clearly in their reward systems: sharp individual incentives and targets, competitive rankings and comprehensive performance management systems.

In terms of happiness and effectiveness, this is counterproductive enough. For instance, Layard notes the ‘serious errors’ in prosecuting public sector reform through incentives and targets rather than professional norms, and roundly criticises flexibility as a mantra ‘if we want full employment and a decent quality of working life’. Yet this is made much worse by another key psychological element that is left out of economists’ accounts: the self-fulfilling nature of many assumptions about human behaviour.

As Layard notes, good behaviour elicits good behaviour trust begets more trust. But the reverse is also true. If (obeying underlying theory) managers treat employees as opportunistic chancers who are only motivated by large incentives, that’s what they will come to resemble. Likewise with shareholders and directors.

Hence the phenomenon of the ‘supervisor’s dilemma’, a vicious circle in which tight supervision generates behaviour that seems to justify still tighter control. This is a close portrait of much of today’s management, at least in the US and Britain, where people’s levels of trust in one another have halved since 40 years ago – although not in Europe, where levels have stayed much the same.

What does this mean? The implication is that companies and managers driven by the economic model of human nature are not only engines of individual unhappiness (as is largely borne out by people’s worsening experience of work) but through these self-fulfilling assump tions they are reshaping people in their own impoverished image in a way that makes happiness impossible to achieve in the future. This is a frightening prospect, and clearly illustrates why the attitude-shaping role of management is so pivotal.

But there is , appropriately, a happier aspect to all this. If Layard’s analysis casts interesting reflected light on the dark side of management, identifying exactly why so much of today’s practice is counterproductive, it also offers hope to those of us who would like to be more optimistic.

Thus for Layard a happy society is based on old-fashioned virtues such as trust, fairness and (yes) equality. Although political leaders and managers are wedded to ‘change’ and ‘flexibility’, ‘there are huge advantages to inflexibility and predictability, as continental Europeans appreciate.’

In his vision, there is no overwhelming need to work harder to keep up materially security and family-friendly policies are more important than absolute income. Targets, incentives and performance-related pay aren’t the best way of running companies or revolutionising public services. A fulfilling job allowing pride in the work, challenge and autonomy, is its own reward and the best motivator. Since people care more about losses than gains, repeated reorganisations may produce more harm than good.

Phew. But although this list runs counter to many of the assumptions now made about management, it’s certainly not incompatible with economic success. In fact, it fits extremely well with what a minority have argued about management all along: that a model based on a more rounded idea of human nature is more realistic and hence more effective than the present, stunted version. A company run on these lines is likely to be ‘better’ in both senses of the word.

Word has it that Layard has presented his Benthamite ‘felicific calculus’ in Downing Street. We’re not told whether the reaction to his book was frowns or the reverse. But for those of us who believe that companies should be a force for happiness rather than exploitation and despair: read it, and take heart.

The Observer, 10 April 2005

PEOPLE used to cluck about police officers apparently getting younger by the day. They don’t any more, because how would they know? They rarely see any.

The issue of where all the coppers went is (rightly) a sensitive one, particularly around election time. Nottinghamshire police chief Steve Green practically had to go into hiding himself after unwisely confessing that he couldn’t keep up with murders on his patch because too many of his officers were sitting at their desks filling in forms.

Green was showered with brickbats, but he was only voicing, in extreme form, the frustration that many police officers experience every day: they know they could be so much better at preventing crime, collaring villains and reassuring the public (their three main tasks) if they weren’t spending so much time fighting the system rather than the criminals.

The nagging problem is that although police numbers and spending are at record highs and crime levels are down, the public hasn’t noticed any difference. Whatever the reason, there is a large disproportion between the effort going in and the perceived result.

Does this sound familiar? It should. Public cynicism about claimed service improvements bedevils the NHS and local government too, and for exactly the same reasons. The official yardsticks and specifications that the government imposes and judges by – waiting lists, proportion of e-enabled local services, even national crime levels – are out of register with public concerns. As far as voters are concerned, much of the extra billions spent on public services is missing the point. Policing is a brilliant example of this mismatch. Today’s policing is designed as a response system – you call the police and an officer arrives (or is supposed to) pronto. That sounds a good idea – until you dis cover that, predictably, just 1-2 per cent of calls (in business terms, demand) represent real emergency.

The remaining 98 per cent don’t require a bobby on the doorstep, or at least not immediately. But where the default is response there is no systematic way of responding to the overwhelming majority of non-urgent requests. They get shunted around between the specialist units (community, neighbourhood, schools liaison, witness protection) that are constantly being set up to deal with political hot potatoes.

The result of this compartmentalisation is that intelligence gets lost, the public gets cross – and costs go up, because people are ringing a second or third time to find out what happened to their previous call. About 40 per cent of 999 calls – and an even higher proportion of non-emergency calls – are preventable in that sense.

Meanwhile, the police are tied up sorting out what to do with the non-urgent calls, frustratingly compromising response to urgent ones. According to Richard Davis of Vanguard Consulting, in a police command unit of 350 people, at any one time just five or six officers may be available to respond to calls. Hence the obsessive calls for more resources to answer the phones, deal with paperwork and ‘put coppers back on the front line’ on the one hand and public ingratitude on the other.

It helps to understand how we got into this situation. In the 1970s and 1980s, faced with rising demands, expectations and costs, governments decided to go for economies of scale. They took calls out of police stations, transferring them to dedicated call centres, and consolidated response atlarger stations. Astonishingly, police stations are still being closed at a rate of three a month.

The result was a two-part (them and us) system much resembling that of the banks or IT help desks – a front office to field calls which it sorts and passes to back-office specialists for response. Unfortunately, just as with the banks and IT help desks, the arrangement made matters worse rather than better, raising costs and worsening service. This was the inevitable outcome of feeding varying demand (‘Help!’, ‘I have something to tell you’, ‘Can you tell me…’, ‘Please do something about these noisy schoolkids’) through a standard mass production line (‘You can have any colour so long as it’s navy blue’).

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the present mass-production system is the loss of intelligence – fairly critical for policing, you might think. ‘Intelligence is disintegrated from the call in the hand-off from the call centre to the specialist unit, and the officers then have to reintegrate it afterwards,’ says Davis.

But (again as with banks or IT help), there is a smarter way. In the West Midlands force, two of its 21 operational command units are trialling ways of putting the intelligence back by reunit ing the two halves of the broken system and treating response as an end-to-end process. The approach involves setting up a ‘clean room’ on the real frontline where telephone agents and officers can figure what each call is really about and what would be needed to take it to a conclusion.

The characteristics of each geographical area for policing purposes vary, of course, but predictably so. ‘What you learn is that the demand for policing is hugely predictable, in terms of time, place and even people involved,’ says Davis. Once the predictables have been established, the appropriate resources can be put to handle them on the front line, with specialists on hand as needed. Technology, in the form of superior communications and analytical tools, backs them up.

‘We don’t use technology for its own sake,’ says WMP Superintendent Jo Byrne, ‘but to maximise the intelligence coming in so that we can do the right thing at the right time for each call.’

It is relatively early days, but results are already visible, especially in call-handling – ‘one of the most critical parts of policing’, according to Byrne. ‘Every contact leaves a lasting impression. If we get it right here, we reassure the public, we prevent repeat calls and rework, and we create extra capacity in the system.’

That should benefit both detection and prevention, turning the circle from vicious to virtuous. The aim may be ambitious, but it’s also simple.

Byrne says: ‘It’s a whole system, everyone is engaged in understanding the work, and the role of managers is to remove the barriers to making it better. It really is an intelligence-led system.’

Better performance, less pressure for increased resources and greater reassurance leading, at last, to public acceptance that things really are improving – elementary, my dear Watson.

The Observer, 3 April 2005

WHO SAYS television doesn’t do business? Anyone watching Jamie’s School Dinners or Sir Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice these past few weeks has been taking part in a masterclass in contrasting business attitudes and management styles. Rarely have two rival versions of business been so clearly juxtaposed, their incompatibility neatly symbolised by their clash on the schedules: since they aired at the same time, it was one or the other. Take your pick.

The Apprentice undoubtedly corresponds the more closely to the business stereotypes of the day. The website instantly reveals the tone. ‘I seek success as a result of my own achievements,’ is the credo announced by the lead-in.

‘Fourteen bloodthirsty entrepreneurs compete in the ultimate boardroom drama to become Sir Alan Sugar’s Apprentice ,’ it continues. ‘Throughout the series, the candidates will live together in a luxury eight-bedroom mansion on the banks of the Thames and experience a taste of the high life they aspire to. The tasks continue until the last man or woman standing becomes Sir Alan’s Apprentice ‘.

Perhaps surprisingly, the description is cruder than that used by the US programme it was modelled on. The American version of the show, now in its third series, has the ineffable Donald Trump, exhibitionist extraordinaire, in the role of manager and executioner-in-chief, and its website assumes viewers have a higher level of business nous.

Common to both versions, however, is the cast of power-dressed young women and aggressive, sharp-suited men with spiky haircuts and of course the cutthroat nature of the exercise. This is summed up by the catchphrase shared by both programmes: ‘You’re fired!’ In America this has become a national cultural reference, on a par with ‘You’re the weakest link!’ But for the UK version, rumour has it that Sugar only reluctantly agreed to adopt it.

In truth, however, the catchphrase would be difficult to take it out. The show assumes that business is a simple, zero-sum game. Winner takes all, and every winner requires there to be many more losers. Consequently, whatever words are found to say it, ‘You’re fired!’ is central to the show’s functioning and audience appeal.

But the casualties of those two small words are important: co-operation and trust. As each episode ends, the losing project leader (especially if it’s a woman) makes a half-hearted attempt to defend the team, but eventually has to offer up two members as candidates for the chop. When the axe falls, recriminations and reciprocal accusations fly the team is destroyed. In this apprenticeship, the subjects in the curriculum are how to avoid risk, hoard the credit and not leave yourself vulnerable. Management is about covering your arse and sacrificing the team to get to the top.

But it’s only a game, surely? If only. A better defence, ironically, would be that this is a good preparation for how business really is. Under former chief executive Jack Welch, for instance, GE was famous for its yearly forced ranking of managerial grades, under which the ‘worst-performing’ 10 per cent received Apprentice -style marching orders. Many other companies have copied its lead.

Whether on TV or in real life, this is management by fear, not reason. Fear ‘works’, in the sense that the wielder gets his way, or an apprenticeship with Sugar or Trump but in the wider context, the unseen losses are always more than the gains – in teamwork, initiative and intelligence itself. Stress, as Daniel Goleman noted in his book Emotional Intelligence , ‘makes people stupid’.

Pace The Apprentice , the truth is that all business isn’t ‘kill or be killed’, or driven by personal greed. For the evidence, turn now to Jamie’s Dinners. You may or may not be susceptible to the lad’s mockney charm, but leaving personalities out of it, what does the school meals saga say about business? First, that it’s about real issues. ‘Feed me better’ is the website tagline. In this version, the drive is supplied not by a craving for ‘the high life’ but something more fundamental: the desire to make a difference.

Yet, the fact that this entrepreneurship is socially rather than monetarily motivated doesn’t make the challenge ‘softer’ or less rigorous. In fact, the reverse. It is fair to say that making fresh food for schools across a borough using a de-skilled workforce on a budget of 40p a portion represents business ambition on a Himalayan scale compared with any of the apprentices’ tasks.

In this circumstance, far from being the result of individual achievement, success can only be the result of co-operation and teamwork. The conversion over the course of the series of the formidable Nora Sands from chief barracker to Jamie’s indispensable henchperson is a wonder to behold. So is the enrolment of the rest of the Greenwich dinner ladies.

This can’t be done by order or fear. ‘You’re fired!’ is not on the menu. Instead, the under-equipped, de-skilled teams are cajoled and supported until they have the confidence to deploy the new skills involved in serving fresh food. Leadership is critical: Oliver puts himself on the line, faces up to the people issues, adapts quickly and – crucially – shields the team. When during one episode, his restaurant Fifteen, where he taught disadvantaged teenagers to be chefs, is singled out for criticism by the press, he responds angrily: ‘They’re attacking my kids!’

The other lesson is the light the programme throws on the limitations of conventional business measures. W Edwards Deming, the American quality guru, once said that the most important costs and benefits of business were unknown and unknowable. That sounds baffling, especially coming from a statistician. But consider the revelatory moment in the series when an assistant almost casually remarks that pupils no longer need asthma pumps after meals now that they are eating properly, or that behaviour and attention have improved in the classroom. The cumulative benefits of children eating healthier meals are, strictly speaking, incalculable – just as the costs of the blind, blithering, idiotic decisions of the 1970s and 1980s to cost school meals on narrow accounting measures alone are only now emerging.

It’s tempting to compare the two approaches to business to junk and real food. One is a managerial takeaway, pre-processed, high on fat, salt, sugar and instant gratification, but lacking nourishment and ultimately creating greater problems than those it solves. The alternative, requiring fresh ingredients cooked from scratch, initially takes longer, but in the long term builds both the demand and skills to become self-sustaining. Tempting, and true. If Sugar didn’t have qualms about the diet The Apprentice was offering, he should have.

The Observer, 27 March 2005