So it's our fault is it?

I often walk down to the Post Officer rather than slap a stamp on a package and post it, because I can never be quite sure that I've got the right postage amount. So I spend a long time standing queues - there's always a queue these days. And that gives me plenty of time to take in the message on the Post Officer poster that says: "4 out of 10 people use the wrong postal service from our range."

Can you believe it? A business has got it so wrong that 40% of its customers are buying the wrong product. Now whose fault is that? Not the customers for a start.

I have tried very hard to keep up with the ever changing services - first and second, large and small, different widths and different sizes, different weights. I'm sure I get it wrong - I'm sure I'm part of that 40%.

Now if 40% of my customers were buying the wrong product for their purposes, would I broadcast the fact to them? Would I slap them in the face with the knowledge that I'm so incompetent I've made my offering so complex that they can't understand it?

Of course not. The idea is ludicrous. I would quietly, with as little fuss as possible, revise my offering to make it perfectly simple and easy the use. I wouldn't just carry on and blame my customers instead.

So come on Royal Mail - I know you're reading this, or you certainly should be if your online monitoring is adequate. Don't blame nearly half your customers for your own inadequacies. Look to your business model, sort it out and then perhaps the queues will be a great deal shorter.

Bonus bluffs

A couple of years ago it would have been too far fetched for a movie or a novel.

Executives in a Very Large Organisation bring it to its insolvent knees. It’s baled out by A Third Party and then the executives say to that Third Party: “Pay us obscene bonuses or we’ll leave”.

Leave, say I! Do we really need to keep in post bank employees who have done such a bad job that without public money baling them out they wouldn’t even have a job? I think not.

Health of the nation

If the UK’s finances were a person, you would have diagnosed a potentially fatal illness a year ago. The patient was mortally wounded, bleeding heavily, and it was only after extraordinary and emergency resuscitation at the last minute that the danger of death was averted.

The causes of the organ failure were it seems due to the patient bingeing in an unprecendented way, consuming large amounts of unsuitable sustenance, a poison in fact.

Any medical practitioner having regard to such an illness and the excesses of the patient, would administer to the recovered - and hopefully contrite patient - a stern lecture on the evils of over-imbibing. A doctor would explain in words of one syllable the consequence of similar excesses and would spell out in very certain terms the very likely danger of death if such behaviour happened again.

A sensible patient, having had a near-death experience, would then mend their ways, choosing instead of their usual excesses a more frugal existence and avoid, like the proverbial plague, the very behaviour which had brought them so low.

I don’t see any of that in the alleged resurgence of financial health. We seem to have side-stepped the issues and the patient, if anything, is being encouraged to carry on as before. Consumption, growth – these are the terms we hear commentators crowing about, as if they are anything to be proud of.

It looks to me as if the patient still has not received the message. I fear that it will limp along, becoming increasingly over-weight, talking the talk but not desisting temptation nor doing the walks and the runs it should. And as Greenspan says, yes, it will all happen again, the patient will never really learn.

There's no Plan B

It's only 9.05 am and already I'm rather hot under the collar. I keep reading about green shoots everywhere and how we're on track to getting back to where we were.

Why don't the politicians get it? We cannot go back to where we were - it's broke. It didn't work. It ain't worth saving. The endless growth of spending and consumption has to end if life is to continue on this planet. Up to this morning I couldn't quite understand why politicians don't seem to realise that.

Now I think I know the answer. The reason politicians, economists, business leaders and all the vast heaps of quangos keep banging on about green shoots and growth is that they know nothing else. They can't imagine anything else. It is beyond their comprehension that life could be other than an unmitigated drive to growth and consumerism. So if the economy is not growing and consumerism is not flourishing, well they hope it will soon. They are not looking for any other model or solution.

Even the 'Thought for the Day' speaker on Radio 4 spoke about the use of that word "consumer" today and what a sad reflection it is on our modern lives that we categorise ourselves as consumers, people who eat up resources.

To illustrate how I think those that rule don't understand the plot consider this. I've just read the introduction of a leaflet from Her Majesty's Government entitled "Real Help Now For Women" - a Central Office of Information publication it appears. There's a whole page - the second one in the introduction - which is just singing the praises of the government, it's nothing to do with helping women. And we are paying for that page with all its white space around the words. We are paying for that political propoganda at a time when we're in a recession and everyone's tightening their belts. Obviously the COI is not.

This leaflet is a symptom of the problem. It illustrates the unwillingness or inability to change ways for working, for this juggernaut that is our government to do things differently. Why not cut the design element, cut all the white space and stick the information in that leaflet onto a couple of sides of A4 and save thousands? I don't suppose it ever occurred to anyone.

The COI is doing what it's always done, government is doing what it's always done, the politicians are crossing their toes and fingers and hoping that the economy will eventually do what it's always done. So that means setting up initiatives, web sites with lots of links, beautifully designed leaflets, lots of spending that can be flagged up in the intro to yet more leaflets. It's all so predictable and I suspect completely useless.

Somewhere along the way those who seek to lead have lost that ability to think outside the norm. They just cannot grasp that all previous models have failed and we are in unknown territory so we need to do something different.

There is no Plan B and at the moment there's no comprehension that we even need one. I think that's the biggest problem we face, there is no Plan B.

Royal Mail's "pricing made easy"

You could be forgiven for letting out a large and long guffaw if you picked up a leaflet from the Post Office today entitled "pricing made easy". In the last few years Post Office management has done its level best to ensure that the pricing is anything but easy.

I run a small business and up to now I've always been aware when there was a price increase because the Royal Mail made a point of telling me and sending me the new tarrif. Not this time. I'm obviously not paying attention for today I only discovered the rise in postage prices when I went to the Post Office.

I'm visiting Post Office counters more and more these days because I'm finding it more and more difficult to know which category my post comes under. Let's face it, you now have to know not just the weight but also all the dimensions of your letters and check if they go through the little slot.

I was lucky because I received a little slot in the days when Royal Mail communicated regularly with me. I wonder how ordinary mortals, without little slots, cope? Well, actually I don't really wonder at all, because I see them in their droves queuing at the Post Office in order to send their one package.

The queue is longer of course, because wherever it can (under the dictates of Europe) Royal Mail has closed post offices, so people have to travel to find one that's still open.

For me, who stores stationery for years, there's an added trip in the system. I cannot assume that my larger envelopes will pass the tests and many of them have to be cut down and taped in order to make them the correct sizes.

So Adam Crozier, if you're reading this, just think about things from a user's point of view for a change.

Pricing made easy? - you've got to be joking!

World Economic Forum 2009

I think it was my second ever blog - 16 November 2007 - do check back - when I wrote:

"I don't know about you but I get very worried about economists who keep telling us that markets must grow in order to have success. Have they not worked out that we live on a sphere with limited resources?

There must come a time, it's just common sense, when we have to stop acquiring, we have to stop growing our aspirations, our belongings, our greed. Because it we don't do it voluntarily eventually it will catch up with us in a most unpleasant way.

I crave the day when a Chancellor of the Exchequer says we must maintain our current levels, we must make do and mend, we must grow the principle of re-use, re-manufacture, and build a truly sustainable and green economy. At the moment government ministers - especially those in favour of plastering the south east with high-density flats - use the word 'sustainability' all over the place with little regard to its true meaning. "

And so it has come to pass that the economic leaders of the world meet like headless chickens to discuss something that they no longer understand and over which they have no longer any control.

Was it just me that knew it all had to stop somewhere? No, of course not. I'd discussed my misgivings about the greed culture many times with friends. We often contemplated how a couple that we knew, without a full-time job between the two of them, had managed to acquire three houses. It turned out they just walked down to the mortgage shop, signed on the dotted line, and became property owners. Simple as that. Only of course we knew it wasn't that simple because common sense told us it couldn't last.

Even though it's all now happened, the baby has gawn darn the plug'ole with the bath water, still we hear nothing about sustainability. Still government ministers talk about economic growth and debt as it if were something that can be sustained infinitely. With the truth staring them in the face they still don't seem to 'get it'. Meanwhile thousands of ordinary people, many of whom never made a greedy decision about property or possessions have been plunged into spiralling financial disaster.

We must start talking about a financial system which is infinitely sustainable and that will support a life-style that is sustainable. That means less greed for all of us. There is absolutely no point in aspiring to go back to the position that we were in originally. 16 November seems a long time ago but my wishes have not changed.