Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent Read Online Free PDF

man, with a bunch of secret service guys hanging about, their eyes never still. The walkie-talkies suddenly crackled and up pulled a huge limo. The door opened, and out stepped my tiny wife. The hotel had sent this doozie to pick her up at the airport. She, not knowing any different, had got in. As everybody stared silently at her getting out, some of them wondering if they should shoot her, Norman pulled up behind – in an old red pick-up truck.
    There and then I formed SEAL (Senior Executives Against Limos) and I have remained president, treasurer, and the only paid-up member ever since. It begs the question, of course, as to what is the correct degree of ostentation you should enjoy as a ‘big cheese’. There are negatives to a fully egalitarian approach – I remember one of my corporate managers pleading with me to be a bit more flash when I visited franchisees. His message was that they expect ostentation from a corporate leader, that they want their employees and their competitive peers to see that they belong to a system of substance, and that they are led by a Big Time Charlie. The point is also made, of course, that if you are in the junior ranks of a company, labouring away for 24/7 in an office the size of Fatty Arbuckle’s coffin, if you don’t believe there is a big office and a load of perks at the end of your rainbow, there is not much to keep you turning up and motivated. Each to his (or her) own.
    There is, however, a clear trend towards reducing the excesses of corporate style invoked by business leaders, if for no other reason than it can tick off the Stock Exchange and/or investors and/or pressurised employees by giving off the wrong kind of signals. I have stopped judging all this by car length or office square-footage. There is an appropriate level of cost necessary to support the effectiveness and efficiency of each job in a corporation. Corporate cost is like the fresh water barrel on a fifteenth-century galleon crossing the Atlantic. The water has to get everybody there alive. It’s finite, and there’s not much of it. If one person uses more, another must use less. If it runs out, everybody dies. It calls for judgement.
    This approach can justify the private jet – but only if it is used like Sam Walton used it. His life was visiting Wal-Marts, day in day out, all over America. He was frugal in the extreme with normal overhead costs, but everybody agreed he added real value visiting stores. A private plane probably doubled or trebled his annual store visit tally and was money well spent.
    On the other hand, this approach can’t justify a limo if it’s only about image and pampering. One of my old bosses was driven, in a stretch limo, on his own, from home to work and back every day. It was such an important part of his image that he had a structural wall knocked out in the under-office car park to cater for his big sardine tin.
    Both stories tell you all you need to know about right and wrong in this game. Spend what you need to spend to support your job description. No less, no more. That’s a ruling that should apply to every job. If you are sending a junior manager to Japan, give them a first-class air ticket. If they are important enough to represent you, the cost of getting them there fresh is justified. Conversely, if you are a big cheese and you are hopping a short distance, shock everybody and drive yourself or fly economy. Your lifestyle is determined by your salary and how you spend it, not corporate perks.
    I fear the only way I will stop this unwanted limo invasion in England is to start a scare. So, if you read of an outbreak of mad-limo disease in the UK sometime soon, and read of the government slaughtering them all, you can smile quietly to yourself. And you can still apply to join SEAL.

9. The giants’ changing faces
    I am in Turin, at a convention of European shopping-mall developers. They have just realised that the provision of food and drink at such facilities is er