Well, what an honour! I am in the running for the Sudsy Studs of Cyberspace Calendar according to Jonathon Delacour. It seems I’ll be Mr. April…?
(For the background to this story click here.)
Ocado OK?
Today I received a promotional email from Ocado, the new on-line grocery business that I wrote about a few weeks ago (see Shop Till They Drop), and since I abandoned my initial attempt to use their service, I wondered how they are doing.
Before they came up with the brand name Ocado they were called Last Mile Solutions, which is a much more meaningful name given the major logistical problem facing a grocery delivery business. However, L.M.S. is clearly not so good if you want to be remembered for providing food, and this new business, which appears to have been founded by a gang of guys from Goldman Sachs and Marks & Spencer, has lofty ambitions indeed! The following text comes from its website:
Our Mission
- Our mission is to make grocery shopping the highlight of the week for our customers.
- Our vision is to create an exciting new grocery experience in which our actions speak louder than our words. Our people are encouraged and trusted to exceed their own and customers’ expectations. Together we will deliver an unrivalled personal service that surprises and delights our customers every time.
The highlight of the week? Good luck, mate!
Different Perspectives
It’s always amazing how different experiences result in widely different opinions. During a recent trip to the UK Nick Denton wrote (Olde England):
Back in Olde England, and realizing with a jolt how modern it is. And did you read about Estonia, where the government has streetsigns indicating the presence of wireless networks? The more antiquated the infrastructure, the easier it is to scrap, and start afresh. Yes, so London buildings still look scrawny, and the trains rattle, but a visitor might be surprised by…
- the cathedral spaces of the Jubilee line subway
- the Heathrow Express, whisking arrivals from the airport to the center of town in 15 minutes
- mobile phones sold like candy
- 3p per minute calls to Australia
- free electronic bank transfers
- online grocery shopping
- local government offices that call you back
- discount airlines offering flights to the Med for the price of a taxi
Meanwhile, in response to an article on the benefits of broadband, BBC News | Technology | Riding the internet’s fast lane, John Corbally wrote:
I have had broadband for four years now in California at just $40 per month. My whole family back home in the UK – mostly salaried professionals – are not even on dialup and if they do have access at work, can’t see the movies I send them or even get in trouble for using the e-mail. I bank, shop, plan social events, communicate with all friends, read news, watch sports and movies, study and work online and have done for years. It frustrates me that England is so far behind on what will soon be like the phone or TV for being in touch with the world.
Two very different perspectives resulting in quite opposite impressions. I have written previously about the improvements in daily life here in the UK during the last decade, so you won’t be surprised to learn that I agree with Nick Denton. Just the other day I was amazed to discover that my sister, who currently lives in Philadelphia, still cannot order groceries on-line. She used to, but the dot.com business (Webvan.com, I suspect) went under. In some respects at least, the US really does need to catch up.
Worth his weight in… grasshoppers?
Here’s a quirky story from Saskatchewan dated August 28, 2002, via the CBC: Top grasshopper catcher wins Elton John tickets. Unfortunately, I can’t link to it because the CBC Arts Canada section uses Flash exclusively, so here it is in full…
Regina – A woman who collected 39,000 grasshoppers last weekend has won a pair of tickets to Elton John’s sold-out Saskatoon concert this Friday. Brandy Elliot, 26, beat her closest competitor in the radio-station contest by 6,000 bugs. “I had started on Friday by hand initially, and just put them in a bucket, but then I thought this is ridiculous I can’t get this many grasshoppers,” Elliot said. “So what we did is made three huge nets with the netting from screen doors and basically took our quarter ton truck and drove through the ditches. As soon you touch the grass they fly up. It was unbelievable.”
Elliot said she estimated the number of grasshoppers by counting the number that fit in one pail, and then counting the number of pails used to fill each of the bags she took to the radio station. After the official count, the grasshoppers were put in a dumpster behind the radio station. Elton John’s first-ever concert appearance in Saskatchewan sold out within minutes when tickets went on sale last month.
Saskatchewan is completely flat, so there’s not much else to do in summer except count the grasshoppers. Still, I bet it will make Elton John’s prairie debut pretty memorable.
Goodbye Lineone (aka Tiscali)
Here’s a story that’s rather relevant to this weblog: BBC NEWS | Business | Tiscali back in the red. As the BBC story says:
Tiscali cut its sales forecast for this year to 800m euros, down from 1bn euros, after losing almost half a million subscribers in April, May and June.
Earlier this month Tiscali blocked the transferring of files on all carriers except their own dial-up and broadband connections. This is why my weblog stagnated in August. Tiscali barred Blogger.com from transferring any files, so nothing I wrote appeared on my site.
Tiscali has initiated this policy in the hope of forcing its customers to use its carriers and thereby generate revenue via the telephone. Well, not me. I refuse to pay for Internet telephone calls, and so have purchased web space elsewhere. In fact, if you’re reading this post I have already moved my website from Lineone (a part of Tiscali) to my own domain, and so contributed my part to Tiscali’s decline. Not only will this policy fail to increase revenue, it will drive viewers away, which will simply worsen the decline in advertising revenue. Goodbye and good riddance!
Provence
The south of France is an amazing part of the world. My wife, Ann, and I have just spent another two weeks here and many things still remain to be discovered. For example, I have just discovered that one of the most highly rated vinyards in the region is located only 10km from the village in which my parents live. The wine is called Chateau Routas, while the vinyard appears to be known as Rouviere Plane. The whole place sleeps 12 and can be rented by the week in the summer, with or without the executive chef who used to work at Lalime’s in San Francisco. Click on the image above if you want to know more.
Sydney Surprise
Here’s an hilarious story of some confused British tourists who travelled to Sydney, Nova Scotia, instead of Sydney, Australia (Britons fly to ‘wrong’ Sydney)! In what must be the British understatement of the month (and today’s only the 5th) one of them was quoted as saying “Obviously, it was a big disappointment.”
Careless Harm
Norman Jensen (onegoodmove) has found a great quote that he attributes to T. S. Eliot:
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them.”
In my experience, this aphorism is particularly prevalent in business.
On the Ropes
I think I’ve become a fan of Alan Leighton, currently Chairman of Consignia (aka the Post Office), after hearing him interviewed by John Humphrys on BBC Radio 4 (On the Ropes). On the Ropes usually features people who have gone from riches to rags, or experienced some other personal failure in their life. In this case, it was argued that the Post Office is on the ropes and Leighton is the man responsible for turning the organisation around. Humphrys stressed Leighton’s reputation as a ruthless businessman, but most of what Leighton said seemed like common sense to me. Here are a few highlights:
“I believe fundamentally you shouldn’t pay people for failure.”
“All organisations I know, particularly those that are performing badly, have what I call layers of treacle or permafrost in them which basically stops stuff happening. You know, there are business prevention squads in most businesses. They go out of their way to stop things happening, and one of the things you’ve got to do is get around that.”
“In businesses, generally, the Chairman and Chief Executive create the context. They can’t do anything else. They don’t actually go and do very much. In retailing all the money is taken in the shops. It’s not taken in the head offices. So you have to get that piece of thinking around your head. Where does the money get taken? Who takes the money? Who does the execution? Well the front line, so this whole thing about people are business’ most important assets. It’s a sort of trite saying that everyone trundles out now and then, but actually it’s true. And if you actually understand it’s true and you get after it, it’s the only the way you turn businesses around.”
“…the execution has to take place at the front end and you’ve got to have the management who believe that too. You know lots of managers don’t believe that. Lots of managers think they’ve got a job by right. Their job is to bark out commands. Their job is to get people to do as they’re told. Their job is not to listen to what people say. Their job is they know best. Well in my experience the operators know best, and if you can get them to be involved in things then you get a better result.”
“The most bizarre thing about [the Post Office] is, this business is a monopoly. It’s got £8 billion of sales, it’s a monopoly and it loses £300 to £400 million pounds at the operating level. It’s happened over a period of time….[the Post Office] is so inwardly focussed it doesn’t think about the two things that count. If you don’t look after your customers and you don’t look after your people, you can be a monopoly and have £8 billion of sales and still lose a lot of money!”
“The most important thing is, do the right thing. If we do things wrong, we’re not going to sit on them forever, which is what’s happened in the past. We do things wrong, we get up, we say we did things wrong. We take the hit. We take the embarrassment, but we’re not going to continue to do something that is wrong.”
“In business turnarounds particularly, and in good businesses, most of the turnaround isn’t in huge, big programmes. It’s all about doing things better that you do everyday, and I’m sure there’s a lot we can do on the back of that.”
Although his comments make a lot of sense, these goals are very difficult to achieve in a large organisation, and I imagine the UK Post Office will be a challenge, even for an experienced businessman like Alan Leighton.
Fast Fatty Food
Here’s a legal case straight out of Ally McBeal, Fat Americans sue fast food firms. It seems a group of obese Americans are suing several fast food chains, accusing them of knowingly serving meals that cause obesity and disease.
“The fast-food industry has wrecked my life,” Caesar Barbar, one of plaintiffs, told the New York Post. “I always thought it was good for you. I never thought there was anything wrong with it,” he said.
Perhaps the fast food restaurants will use the same excuse.