A New Start

FT: Steaming Ahead

Rosen’s recurring motif is Stephenson’s Rocket. Rather than the traditional view that the Rocket symbolises the beginnings of steam locomotion, Rosen sees it as the culmination of experiments that began nearly 2,000 years before, when Heron of Alexandria demonstrated a crude steam turbine. He writes: “The puzzle of the Rocket is why it was built to run from Manchester to Liverpool, and not from Paris to Toulouse, or Mumbai to Benares, or Beijing to Hangzhou.”

The explanations cover a lot of the familiar ground: waterlogged mines needing more efficient drainage, the questioning nature of Protestantism, and British patent laws that added, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius”.

Rosen, an American, argues that the anglophone world was the first to succeed industrially because it “democratised the nature of invention” by breaking down scientific elites and letting craftsmen in on their secrets. A new breed of man arose – the artisan-engineer-entrepreneurs such as James Watt and George Stephenson. The Victorian hagiographies of Samuel Smiles turned them into heroes, a status that later became academically unfashionable. Here Rosen restores their work to a place of honour.

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The Most Powerful Idea in the World

Review by Ian Jack

Published: June 5 2010 01:18 | Last updated: June 5 2010 01:18

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry and Invention, by William Rosen, Jonathan Cape RRP£20, 400 pages

It was a collection of essays by the economic historian Arnold Toynbee, published posthumously in 1884, that first popularised “industrial revolution” as the name for the transformation that swept across Britain in the previous century.

There may be some problems with the term: the country hardly adopted the steam engine – which William Rosen rightly calls the period’s “signature gadget” – like a crowd storming into an Ikea sale. Thomas Newcomen may have put the first practical steam engine to work in 1712 to pump water from coal mines – but 90 years later water mills still produced more than three times as much power in Britain as steam.

Nonetheless, nobody can doubt the consequences of that most pivotal century. As Rosen writes, human productivity had changed very little in the 7,000 years since the earlier, agrarian revolution. Food consumption, life expectancy and distances travelled were all much the same for the average Englishman in Shakespeare’s time as they had been for the average Babylonian shepherd; his was a world of homespun clothes and local food, with a horizon defined by how far he could walk in a day. The compass, the printing press and gunpowder had changed history more than any empire or religion. But the surplus brought by these developments had been quickly gobbled up by a growing population.

During the 18th century, a wave of inventiveness released mankind from this tail-chasing economy. Between 1500 and 1820, the British population quintupled but its per capita GDP also rose two and a half times. Britain had pioneered powerful new ways of getting and spending that were soon copied by other countries with enough financial and mechanical resources.

The historical question is: why Britain? What was peculiar to a smallish island in north-west Europe that turned it into the first industrial nation? Rosen isn’t the first writer to attempt an answer, but I can think of no other book that combines so many aspects of the story so clearly and elegantly.

Rosen’s recurring motif is Stephenson’s Rocket. Rather than the traditional view that the Rocket symbolises the beginnings of steam locomotion, Rosen sees it as the culmination of experiments that began nearly 2,000 years before, when Heron of Alexandria demonstrated a crude steam turbine. He writes: “The puzzle of the Rocket is why it was built to run from Manchester to Liverpool, and not from Paris to Toulouse, or Mumbai to Benares, or Beijing to Hangzhou.”

The explanations cover a lot of the familiar ground: waterlogged mines needing more efficient drainage, the questioning nature of Protestantism, and British patent laws that added, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius”.

Rosen, an American, argues that the anglophone world was the first to succeed industrially because it “democratised the nature of invention” by breaking down scientific elites and letting craftsmen in on their secrets. A new breed of man arose – the artisan-engineer-entrepreneurs such as James Watt and George Stephenson. The Victorian hagiographies of Samuel Smiles turned them into heroes, a status that later became academically unfashionable. Here Rosen restores their work to a place of honour.

Like the Rocket, this book isn’t perfect. No matter how lucid the writing, even simple inventions such as Watt’s separate condenser are difficult to grasp without diagrams; and sometimes, abashed at his own seriousness, the writer introduces an aw-shucks note to his text. But its scope and lively intelligence make it the best kind of popular account. Anyone who has ever wondered over Britain’s exceptional contribution to the modern world should read it.

Ian Jack is author of ‘The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain’ (Jonathan Cape)

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

FT: USA - Mapped Out

US and the world: Mapped out

By Daniel Dombey and Gideon Rachman

Published: June 2 2010 20:33 | Last updated: June 2 2010 20:33

Friend seeker: in the Oval Office Barack Obama inspects a cartographic gift. He is aiming to deepen US co-operation with new ‘centres of influence’

Against a military backdrop, Barack Obama sounded a distinctly unmartial theme. Previewing his administration’s new national security strategy – its overarching doctrine on how best to protect America – the president told a May audience of graduating cadets at West Point military academy that the US needed to intensify its diplomatic efforts as “more countries and capitals” gain influence over the modern world.

His emphasis was no accident. One of the main themes of the doctrine, released last week, is the US push to deepen co-operation with what it calls “emerging centres of influence”.

But, as a Turkish-Brazilian deal with Iran showed last month, rising powers are using their increased influence in ways that often pit them against Washington. Also, as the fall-out continues from Israel’s attack this week on aid-bearing ships off the Gaza Strip, Washington is confronted with an apparent choice between bolstering relations with states on the ascendant – such as Turkey – and siding with its closest allies, particularly Israel.

“Emerging powers in every region of the world are increasingly asserting themselves,” the national security strategy observes in language very different from the rhetoric of George W. Bush’s presidency. “Individual nations are increasingly taking on powerful regional and global roles and changing the landscape of international co-operation.”

The Obama administration has been thinking about this for some time. In an address to the US-based Council on Foreign Relations last year, Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, specified the main countries concerned. “We will ...put special emphasis on encouraging major and emerging global powers – China, India, Russia and Brazil, as well as Turkey, Indonesia, and South Africa,” she said.

While the administration’s desire for better relations with Moscow, Beijing and Delhi has been widely documented, the drive to work with other rising powers is also a central part of its attempt to cope with an increasingly unmanageable world.

This is a reaction both to such nations’ growing economic strength and to the Bush administration’s problematic reliance on “coalitions of the willing”. Such groupings often focused on small, loyal nations, while failing to enlist the support of re­gional leaders such as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, South Africa and Indonesia.

Highlighting their increasing importance, those countries are today all members of the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations, which has largely supplanted the western-dominated G8 in the wake of the economic crisis. They also occupy an ambiguous place on the world stage. All are democracies. But that does not necessarily ensure they will side with the US on the big international issues, even against authoritarian China.

Indeed, Beijing has skilfully played on its status as a developing nation and a former victim of western imperialism to create emotional bonds with other rising powers. China now also has a weight in the international economy that can rival America’s. It has already displaced the US as the largest trading partner of both Indonesia and South Africa, and is vying to do the same in trade with Brazil.

On a range of issues, from climate change to nuclear proliferation, the US has become painfully aware that it cannot take emerging powers’ support for granted. The deal that in spite of Washington’s misgivings Turkey and Brazil reached with Iran – for Tehran to ship enriched uranium abroad – was only the most recent setback to US hopes. It followed the chastening experience of the Copenhagen climate summit, at which the US found itself faced last December with an informal axis of developing nations, centred on China and including India, Brazil and South Africa.

In an April interview with the Financial Times, Mrs Clinton said she understood why rising countries might push back at the US because of their “global aspirations” and desires to play a leadership role. “I totally get that ... I don’t know why anybody would be surprised by that,” she said.

But she argued that there was no alternative to the US stepping up its engagement with such countries: “If you really listen and you respond, you may not agree on everything but you find areas of agreement.”

BRAZIL BEYOND ITS HEMISPHERES

Lula’s ‘friends with all’ approach strains relations with the US

Last month, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran raised their clasped hands together in Tehran and proclaimed a “victory of diplomacy”.

Brazil’s “friends with everyone” foreign policy, privately derided by US diplomats as unrealistic, even naive, appeared to have paid off in spectacular fashion.

“Our language is that of persuasion, friendship and co-operation,” said Celso Amorim, Brazil’s foreign minister, after Tehran agreed to send uranium abroad for further enrichment, which the US and its allies had tried to talk it into for months.

Washington points out that under the deal in principle, Iran would be dispatching less than half its stockpile of almost 2.5 tonnes of low enriched uranium. That total is enough, if further processed, to yield fissile material for at least two bombs, although Tehran insists its programme is purely peaceful.

Turkey and Brazil reply that the deal is based on a proposal the US backed last year.

Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, adds that the deal abides by benchmarks US President Barack Obama set out in recent letters to Mr Lula da Silva and Mr Erdogan: for the shipment to be no less than 1,200kg; for time to be allowed for other countries to provide Tehran with nuclear fuel in exchange; and for Iran to give formal notice of its plans for “constructive” engagement.

Now neither side is happy. Largely because of US objections, the deal’s future is deeply uncertain. Meanwhile, Turkey and Brazil’s continuing opposition to sanctions on Iran has dented the image of global unity against Tehran that Washington wished to foster.

“The raw, naked truth is that Iran, which was sold to the world as some kind of devil that wouldn’t sit down and talk, decided to sit down at the negotiating table,” Mr Lula da Silva said on his return from Tehran.

Brazil’s choice of friends has not been universally hailed, however. Mr Lula da Silva was criticised for receiving Mr Ahmadi-Nejad in Brasília last year.

Furthermore, while the administration of George W. Bush often depicted Brazil as a moderating force in Latin America and seemed to view its connections to figures such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez as a means of containing extremism, the two biggest economies in the Americas have found themselves increasingly at loggerheads since Mr Obama took office.

After last year’s coup in Honduras, which both governments condemned, the US led those countries in favour of recognising subsequent elections while Brazil led those refusing to do so. Jonathan Wheatley and Daniel Dombey

One of the central assumptions of the Obama administration is that the biggest foreign policy issues, such as financial reform and nuclear arms control, can now be tackled effectively only on a global basis. “We are not going to be able to solve any of these problems alone – we have to work with other nations,” says Anne-Marie Slaughter, the State department policy chief. She says such co-operation cannot wait for the reform of international institutions.

So the battle is on for the favour of the emerging powers. Mr Obama made his first set-piece speech abroad in the Turkish parliament in April last year. In just one day last month, he treated President Felipe Calderón of Mexico to only the second State dinner of his time in the White House – significantly, the first was for Manmohan Singh, Indian prime minister – and set aside time for a long phone call with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s leader. This month, he heads to Indonesia on a long scheduled (and twice delayed) trip to the country where he spent part of his childhood.

Still, by all appearances, such efforts are not paying an immediate dividend. The deal on Iran heralded by Turkey and Brazil – both of which have temporary seats on the United Nations Security Council – shattered any image of international unity on Tehran’s nuclear programme. Washington was quick to criticise it, in a move some commentators say showed that, rather than genuinely engaging with emerging countries, the US merely wants them to follow its lead.

Such ill feeling between the US and Turkey, two countries allied for more than half a century, has taken aback even the most seasoned of observers. “I’m not surprised that Brazil has taken the position it did on the Iranian issue,” says Henry Kissinger, one of Mrs Clinton’s best-known pre­decessors. “I didn’t expect Turkey.”

All the same, the strains between the two are probably greater than with any of the other midsized rising powers – a result not just of very different perspectives on sanctions against Iran but also of increasing anti-Americanism in Turkey after the Iraq war and Washington’s fears about signs of possible authoritarianism within Mr Erdogan’s government.

Ankara’s furious reaction to the Israeli attack on the ships heading to Gaza – three of which flew the Turkish flag – has further highlighted tension. With Washington balking at joining the criticism much of the world has directed at Israel, Turkey’s government has called on the US to take a tougher line.

Yet the Obama administration still sees Turkey as a country with enormous potential influence in the Middle East and beyond – and therefore one it cannot afford to neglect.

Also indispensable is Brazil, identified more than ever as Latin America’s heavyweight, with which the US has co-operated closely over issues such as the Haitian earthquake in January. But as with Turkey, Washington is at loggerheads with Brasília on Iran, perhaps the Obama administration’s top diplomatic priority.

Mr Kissinger argues that a long period in which Latin American countries were absorbed by their own domestic politics has ended for Brazil and, to some extent, for Mexico. “I think part of the challenge for American policy now would be to involve Latin America in a dialogue as countries that really play a role internationally and not just in the western hemisphere,” he says. “I would hope that we could get Brazil or countries of that group not to feel they need to oppose us.”

Washington is meanwhile trying to intensify co-operation with South Africa – where Vice-President Joe Biden will attend the soccer World Cup this month – on issues ranging from health to energy and nuclear non-proliferation. But the country has proved a difficult partner for the US in the recent past. Before President Jacob Zuma took office last year, the South Africans opposed western efforts to censure Burma’s and Zimbabwe’s human-rights abuses at the UN.

The US is also keen to continue cultivating Indonesia, as the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, the third-largest democracy and a strategically located nation in the Asia-Pacific region, in which many Obama officials believe the main events of the 21st century will be played out. Washington and Jakarta have co-operated closely to combat Jemaah Islamiyah, the regional affiliate of al-Qaeda.

But the limits of US influence are clear: officials have pronounced themselves frustrated with the low level of two-way trade – just $18.8bn (€15.4bn, £12.8bn) last year, based on International Monetary Fund figures – and what they characterise as protectionism, even as Indonesia’s trade with China ($23.5bn in 2009) lifts off after a south-east Asian free-trade agreement took effect this January.

The US effort to win over emerging powers is complicated by the fact that traditional allies such as Britain, Japan and Poland have let it be known that they feel neglected by the new focus. On Wednesday Yukio Hatoyama, Japan’s prime minister, resigned after backing down in a dispute with the US over a marine base. The president has recently sought to reaffirm links with old friends, praising the US-UK special relationship, while the national strategy emphasises traditional alliances as the “foundation” of American security.

Mrs Clinton bridles at a suggestion that the US is now a mere “convener-in-chief” focused on persuading other, often smaller, countries to address global issues. But she does acknowledge that such coaxing is now a central part of Washington’s role.

“We are the only global power in the world today and we accept that responsibility, but we also recognise that convincing people to go along with us requires different skills and a different way to exercise our power than it did 50 years ago or 100 years ago,” she says. “So we have soldiers fighting in two wars, which is hardly a convening, but it is [also] necessary to be constantly bringing people together.”

The problem is that bringing countries together – particularly states on the rise eager to leave their mark on the world – is no easy task. Strengthening ties is proving far harder than the Obama administration had bargained for, but it is difficult to see that it has any other choice.

FT: Cute, Cuddly, and Commercial

Cute, cuddly and commercial

By Tim Bradshaw

Published: June 21 2010 22:10 | Last updated: June 21 2010 22:10

Aleksandr Orlov, a heavily accented Russian aristocrat with a penchant for velvet dressing gowns, has become one of Britain’s most recognisable faces over the past 18 months.

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His social networking scores speak for themselves: about 730,000 Facebook fans and some 40,000 Twitter followers. Tens of thousands have downloaded an iPhone application that plays his catchphrase “Simples” and other such quips. His autobiography – A Simples Life – is due to be published by Random House later this year, while Harrods has been stocking his limited-edition incarnation as a children’s toy.

Not bad for a computer-animated meerkat.

What is even more remarkable is that Aleksandr and his long-suffering sidekick, Sergei, do not come courtesy of Disney, DreamWorks, Pixar or any other silver screen stable of cute, animated characters. Instead, they were developed by advertising agency VCCP to promote Comparethemarket.com, an insurance price comparison website.

Aleksandr is one of the more prominent examples of the trend for animated characters or puppets to act as brand ambassadors. US consumers have long been charmed by the frogs that feature in Budweiser’s advertising or the cockney gecko that stars in Geico’s campaigns. Meanwhile, Domo, the saw-toothed mascot for Japanese broadcaster NHK, has gone on to appear in video games and comics, and spread virally online.

But the proliferation and popularity of these creations and the merchandising they have spawned raises questions for both brand owners and advertising agencies hoping to capitalise on the value of the intellectual property.

For brand owners, the appeal of creating characters is that they are cheaper and more reliable than the celebrities often enlisted to star in campaigns.

“Quite often celebrities do things outside of your advertising campaign which can reflect badly back on your brand,” says Charlie Herbert, director of e-commerce and marketing at Travelodge, the budget UK hotel chain that has just launched a campaign featuring Mr Sleep and the Zzz Squad, a group of gangster teddy bears with a vendetta against night-time noise. “With puppets, you can control your iconography.”

The Zzz Squad was developed by London-based agency Mother, which insists on sharing profits from future merchandising with the client. “In these last few years, the consideration of how we retain IP on our characters has been at the forefront when we create them,” says Stuart Outhwaite, a creative director at the agency.

The parent brand is paramount

Comparethemarket.com’s meerkat adverts first aired in January 2009. In each instalment, computer-generated Aleksandr Orlov berates viewers for confusing the insurance price comparison website with his own Comparethemeerkat.com website.

He has proved so popular that, for some months, traffic to the fictional meerkat site exceeded that to Comparethemarket.com itself. But, in spite of all the spin-off merchandising, Kal Atwal, managing director of Comparethemarket.com, denies that the meerkat franchise is becoming overextended. “If we wanted to, we could do a lot more on merchandising,” she says. “But we have this asset that we need to protect and we don’t want to have overexposure.”

Ms Atwal also insists that any tie-ins are meant to promote the car insurance site, not generate revenue themselves. “We have been strict at focusing on elements that are important to the campaign,” she says. “It would be too short term from our perspective to do it as a revenue driver.”

Mother’s stance follows its experience with Monkey, a cuddly character it created in 2001 for the UK broadcaster ITV Digital. When ITV Digital went into administration, a row erupted over who controlled the intellectual property rights to Monkey. After a legal battle, the rights to the character were donated to the charity Comic Relief. In 2007, Monkey was revived for Unilever’s PG Tips brand of tea under licence from the charity, working with Mother as part of the deal.

In spite of not holding the rights, Mr Outhwaite says the agency remains Monkey’s legal “carers” and “creative guardians”.

“Monkey and Mother are intrinsically linked,” he says. “As a creative property, he has been fantastic. Beyond any significant financial gain, he has won us two or three awards and brought in enough business. He’s earned his fair share over the years.”

Nonetheless, proceeds from Monkey merchandise – from toys to babywear – go to Comic Relief.

By contrast, VCCP, the agency behind Aleksandr and Sergei, does not receive any direct proceeds from meerkat merchandise. Kal Atwal, managing director of Comparethe­market.com, argues that the absence of revenue-sharing arrangements is fair because, as the client, her company has taken the bigger risk by investing in it. “There were a number of pitches and the brief was quite specific,” she says. “You work in partnership.”

Chris Satterthwaite, chief executive of Chime Communications, VCCP’s parent company, points out that a successful campaign creates more work for that client and attracts new ones. “Lots of agencies have talked about creating their own IP and I really haven’t seen any who have succeeded in doing it,” he says. “They are in the services business. You produce it to a brief and [the IP] belongs to the client.”

But, with the advertising industry’s traditional business model under pressure from moves towards time-based remuneration, sharing in the upside of creative work through IP ownership could unlock a new form of revenue for agencies.

Moreover, the guarantee of a 10-year royalty stream would be very welcome for agencies as long-term retainers become scarcer.

Some agencies have set up dedicated brand licensing units in response to the new challenges. M&C Saatchi established one such division earlier this year.

“Traditional advertising is becoming less important, new ways of communicating are growing, yet no one was really doing licensing,” says Matthew Conrad, a former IP lawyer who leads the unit. “The way we look at licensing, it’s a response to a specific marketing challenge. By doing that you’ll mitigate the huge risk of brand [dilution].”

He also hopes to incorporate licensing into more agency contracts for traditional marketing work to avoid missing out on meerkat-like opportunities.

Another unit has been set up by BBH, the agency behind Flat Eric, the orange puppet who shot to fame 10 years ago in adverts for Levi’s Sta-Prest jeans. As well as T-shirts, toys and other merchandising, Flat Eric even topped the charts with the techno anthem Flat Beat . But BBH shared in little of the upside, prompting it to create Zag, its own brand invention business.

“It’s a challenging model that requires a long-term commitment but if you get it right it will be game-changing for you as a business,” says Neil Munn, who runs the unit.

But for all the valuable merchandising opportunities they generate, the main purpose of all these cute and cuddly characters remains to promote the brand.

“I almost don’t see it as brand extension,” says Comparethemarket.com’s Ms Atwal. “It’s more about how we’ve broadened the communications platform that we have.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

FT: Fabio Capello

Man in the News: Fabio Capello

By Simon Kuper

Published: June 4 2010 22:27 | Last updated: June 4 2010 22:27

In 1987, the former footballer Fabio Capello sat some psychological aptitude tests normally given to recent MBAs. Mr Capello was working as an executive in the sporting wing of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire, and everyone could see he was bright. However, nobody expected him to score as highly as he did. An impressed Mr Berlusconi sent him for a year’s executive training. In 1991 Mr Capello became coach of the empire’s football team, AC Milan, and performed brilliantly.

He leads England into this month’s World Cup as, match for match, the country’s most successful manager ever. He is unlikely to win the tournament, but has set a new template for the job. He has sealed the transformation of what was once a chiefly ambassadorial role into a meritocratic one, best filled by a top-class coach from continental Europe who descends on backward England as a sort of development consultant.

Mr Capello was born in 1946 in the cold northern Italian town of Pieris, 20km from the then Yugoslav border. His father, a schoolteacher and the local football coach, had recently returned from a German prisoner of war camp weighing just 48kg. Mr Capello’s upbringing was tough. Swimming, for example, consisted of his father taking him to the nearby cliffs and throwing him from the rocks into the sea.

Mr Capello became a top-notch footballer, who played 32 times for Italy and scored at Wembley in the country’s first ever victory in England in 1973. However, he was never a monomaniac about football. According to his biographer Gabriele Marcotti, he became fascinated in the 1970s by the new “arte povera” movement, which made art out of rubbish and other discarded materials. He preferred the company of art dealers to footballers. He became a notable collector of modern art.

Yet there was nothing artistic about his coaching. A pragmatist, he tailored his style to the players he had. All he cared about was winning. He was as tough with his players as his father had been with him, taking on even the biggest stars. “Aren’t you ashamed of being so fat?” he roared when the Brazilian striker Ronaldo emerged from the shower. “He’s a shouter,” confirms his former player Clarence Seedorf.

Yet Mr Capello holds no grudges, writes Mr Marcotti. He judges people only on whether they can help him win. In a rage at Real Madrid, he once said that David Beckham would never play for him again. But Mr Beckham did, helped Real win the league, and later served Mr Capello’s England team.

The craggy Italian won nine league titles in 16 seasons as a club coach. Stefan Szymanski, sports economist at Cass Business School in London, has calculated that only about 10 per cent of managers consistently perform better than their clubs’ wage bill would predict. Most managers simply do not have much effect on results. Mr Capello heads the small elite.

Oddly, until 2000 England had never recruited from that pool. In a country that happily recruits chief executives and even sometimes monarchs from abroad, England manager was one of the last jobs reserved by convention for an Englishman. Unfortunately, few Englishmen were elite managers. The country, long isolated from the European mainstream, had developed its own dysfunctional “kick and rush” style of football. This favoured warrior virtues over thought. Accordingly, England produced few great football thinkers.

Worse, convention required that the England manager must have diplomatic gifts. That ruled out the best English manager of recent decades, the provocateur Brian Clough. Every Englishman who got the post ended up disappointing a demanding public. Before Mr Capello, managing England was often called “the impossible job”. Rather, it was a difficult job made impossible by a misguided recruitment policy.

Mr Capello had long wanted his last coaching job to be with England. He saw the nation’s unrealised potential. When he got the job with its salary of about £6m – his appointment a symptom of the Europeanisation of Britain since the 1990s – he scarcely even pretended to respect English traditions.

Previous England managers had done the bidding of British tabloid newspapers. The best-known players were celebrities, and so had to play at whatever cost. Mr Capello, who does not care what the media say about him, broke this Hollywood-style star system. He banished Michael Owen from the squad, banished Steven Gerrard from central midfield and used Mr Beckham only as a humble substitute until the player disappeared from contention through injury. Mr Capello also banished the players’ free-spending wives and girlfriends, or “Wags”, from the team’s camp: Rustenburg at this World Cup will not be the media circus that Baden-Baden was at the last one.

Above all, he has largely banished the old frenzied, blind English game – what the football historian Jonathan Wilson calls England’s “headless-chickenness” – even if it sometimes reappears like a genetic defect. Mr Capello’s England play intelligent continental football. They value possession of the ball over speed. The results are telling: Mr Capello’s team has won 75 per cent of its 24 matches. No previous England manager won more than 60 per cent.

Crucially, too, Mr Capello has given the tabloids nothing to work with off the field. He is a conservative, traditional Catholic, who in 2006 praised the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. What he liked about Spain, he said, was “the order Franco left behind”.

In the UK he has wisely kept quiet about politics. He also lacks the free-range libido of another predecessor, Sven-Goran Eriksson, whose various relationships kept the tabloids busy. Mr Capello lives a quiet, golfing life in London. He has made “the impossible job” seem almost a soothing leisure pursuit, like doing the sudoku.

His England will probably fly home in tears: they have generally lost against first-rank teams in friendly matches. However, Mr Capello has redefined the job. His next few successors will surely be drawn from the elite of winning, monogamous, continental European coaches.

The writer’s latest book is Why England Lose: And Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained

FT; How not to salvage a reputation, at BP and beyond

How not to salvage a reputation, at BP and beyond

By John Gapper

Published: June 24 2010 00:02 | Last updated: June 24 2010 00:02

Towards the end of his seven-hour testimony in Washington last week about BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Tony Hayward’s face, full of resentment at the politicians who were goring him, evoked Charlie Rich’s “Feel Like Going Home”.

“Lord, I feel like going home/I tried and I failed and I’m tired and weary/Everything I done was wrong/And I feel like going home.”

Unfortunately, having gone home, BP’s chief executive then went out again to sail his yacht, prompting a fresh fusillade from across the Atlantic. “I think we can all conclude that Tony Hayward is not going to have a second career in PR,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

Not everything Mr Hayward did was wrong, and nor was poor public relations the only cause of his downfall. His fate was sealed when BP’s early plans to cap its well failed, leaving oil still spewing. As one of BP’s advisers argues: “This is not a PR disaster; it’s a disaster.”

But Mr Hayward’s wayward PR performance worsened BP’s troubles; his yachting trip came after he had suggested early on that the environmental impact of the spill would be “very, very modest” and then, as part of an apology, said: “I would like my life back.”

The irony of this is that, early on at least, BP appeared to be adopting a textbook approach to corporate crises – dispatching its chief executive to lead from the front, taking responsibility for cleaning the spill and compensating victims.

Mr Hayward was, laughable as it now sounds, eager to be a model corporate citizen and show that BP would be more responsive than Exxon Mobil after the Valdez disaster. Andrew Gowers, a former Financial Times editor, is his head of PR, and they launched a very visible public campaign, to little avail.

So should chief executives, many of whom are shocked by the sudden shredding of Mr Hayward’s reputation, avoid taking charge of blow-ups and dispatch some smooth-talking (and disposable) underling instead? Does the corporate crisis textbook need to be rewritten?

Not completely, I think. The chief executive still has to be the battlefield general because there is no alternative – the media and politicians will demand it whatever he or she does. But the BP debacle shows the need to plan carefully.

First, be prepared. That does not just mean undergoing media training when trouble strikes, but being used to dealing with the vagaries of the media and politicians beforehand. Mr Hayward was not prepared because he had kept such a low profile since taking over from John Browne as BP chief executive in 2007.

Mr Hayward positioned himself as the antithesis of “the Sun King”, who had seemed to revel in the spotlight, being constantly pictured on magazine covers. But by keeping such a low profile, he did not go through the media mill until a crisis blew up, and it showed.

Second, marshal support. One of the enigmas of the BP affair is how little public backing Mr Hayward got from Carl-Henric Svanberg, its chairman (who has his own PR adviser). Mr Svanberg only appeared in public right at the end, when he was summoned to Washington.

BP thought few Americans would know what a non-executive chairman was, which is a counsel of despair. If a company goes to the trouble of having a chairman whose job is to mediate with investors and the outside world, he must visibly and vocally support the chief executive.

Last, pick your battles. This is the most important lesson of the Deepwater crisis because it was a rolling (and still ongoing) disaster. By making himself a target from the start, rather than timing his entry until later, Mr Hayward exhausted himself and his usefulness.

BP had a suitable surrogate in Robert Dudley, a southerner who is director in charge of US operations and had duelled with the Russian government and media, which is fine training for anything. Mr Dudley has now come to the fore, too late.

It is near-impossible for a company to win the battle for hearts and minds when trouble strikes; the best it can do is not lose too disastrously. Mr Hayward fought solo and ended, as Charlie Rich once sang, with “not a friend around to help me”.

john.gapper@ft.com

Evil (excerpts from FT)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/f70d8fde-6f64-11df-9f43-00144feabdc0.html

It is Svendsen, however, who offers the most comprehensive analysis – one that resists the twin errors of too narrow or too loose a definition. His clear, logical but essentially humane analysis of evil does not boil all evil down to one thing, but places its variants in four general categories.

Demonic evil is “the activity of doing evil precisely because it’s evil”. This is how the diabolical villains of Hollywood films are presented, but Svendsen argues that it is a cartoon caricature rather than a paradigm of evil.

The evil of the death camps therefore needs to be understood in terms of Svendsen’s other three categories. The first of these is instrumental evil, which arises when we “do something evil, well aware that it’s evil, in order to accomplish some other goal”. As fundamentalists show, there is nothing more dangerous than a person convinced of the righteousness of his cause, for then any means might justify the end. Even love, when excessive, can motivate abject wickedness.

Instrumental evil is a close cousin of the idealistic variety, which is doing evil in the belief that it is in fact good. Witch trials and crusades are two obvious examples, but genocides also often fall into this camp. Rwanda’s Hutus were urged to massacre the Tutsi “cockroaches” because when the enemy is vermin, it is positively good to cut them down. Likewise, Jews were not just killed by the Nazis as an unfortunate means to the end of more lebensraum – they were also seen by the Nazis as a sub-human stain on the world.

The kind of remembrance Todorov advocates is the variety exemplified in truth and reconciliation councils, most famously in post-apartheid South Africa. This is the only way, he says, to avoid the two extremes of a vengeful perpetuation of evil by cancelling it out with yet another, and a permissive determinism that excuses everyone, on the basis that “individuals are not responsible for their acts, that they obey economic or psychological forces over which they have no control”.

This is not the only practical piece of advice to come out of these predominantly theoretical books. One lesson is that we should not be seduced by the illusion that we can eliminate evil. As is so often the case, Svendsen and Todorov are in wise agreement, cautioning that catastrophic results follow when people try to take on this purifying role.

But the lesson common to all four writers is the same one we’ve been hearing for decades now from the psychologists who perhaps know best. “The worst evils are committed not by monsters, but people no different from ourselves,” as Svendsen puts it. That’s why, in his defence, Eagleton’s refusal to call terrorism evil makes sense, because the danger of labelling it as such is that it can make the comprehensible look incomprehensible.

We should all know this by now. We can argue all we like about the best way to define evil and the point at which it becomes mere wickedness, but the facts are all in. Evil is not a mystery. That’s why Svendsen’s central point rings true: “The fact that evil exists is not so much a metaphysical challenge as it is a moral and political one.”

Svendsen’s fourth category is stupid evil, by which he does not mean evil resulting from a lack of intelligence but rather “a form of thoughtlessness”. It is an idea most closely associated with political theorist Hannah Arendt who, although more famous for the phrase “the banality of evil” only used it three times in her classic study of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazis’ “final solution”.

Stupid evil is perhaps the most common variety, but how can anyone be so blind to the obvious horror of flagrant wrongdoing? Psychologists have the best answers to this – and, as answers go, they’re remarkably mundane: habituation by increments, socialisation, distancing and divided responsibility can all lead previously decent people to do terrible things. Svendsen explains a lot of this, but more comprehensive accounts drawing more on empirical psychology can be found in recent books such as Kathleen Taylor’s Cruelty and Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect. Historically, of course, evil has been the subject matter not of psychology or philosophy but theology. Its so-called problem of evil is perhaps best summed up by Primo Levi: “There was Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist.”

Food trends?

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6d6b0688-7a60-11df-9cd7-00144feabdc0.html

 

"

What does he think is behind the brand’s popularity? Just like the John Lewis chain of department stores, middle England can’t seem to get enough of Waitrose. Wherever a new store opens, the shoppers come. It is a case of supply nowhere near meeting demand (Waitrose’s footprint in the UK is a flea on an elephant’s back when compared with its bigger rivals) but it also reflects, thinks Price, the shift towards a more ethical kind of consumption.

Waitrose has made a big thing about paying fair prices to farmers – recent figures from industry bible The Grocer show that it pays farmers more for milk than its rivals do – while the Waitrose Foundation, founded in South Africa in 2005, ensures that a cut of profits made on foods such as mangoes and avocados is paid directly to farm workers to spend on anything from HIV projects to football coaching. The foundation is now being rolled out in Ghana and Kenya.

“The politicisation of food is one of the major issues going forward,” Price says, finishing off his asparagus spears and taking a sip of perfectly chilled Albariño. “Waitrose has been historically well-positioned to reassure customers that these things are really important to us – we own a farm and the foundation in Africa – and we are not doing it for short-term benefits but because it is the right thing to do. I think our customers are aware ... that Waitrose cares for those things.”

 

FT: The public image: Adidas's 'Star Wars' cantina World Cup ad

The public image: Adidas's 'Star Wars' cantina World Cup ad

By Jonathan Birchall

Published: June 22 2010 03:00 | Last updated: June 22 2010 03:00

Client: Adidas Agency: Sid Lee Territory: Global Verdict: ****

Adidas is the leading sponsor of teams at the World Cup. But the German sports brand has put its biggest advertising dollars into a campaign that aims to expand its appeal beyond the limits of the pitch.

The brand's Star Wars cantina 2010 ad is the latest effort in its collaboration with the makers of the films. In this edition, it reworks the famous bar scene from the original film. Han Solo, Obi Wan Kenobi and a bar full of aliens watching the football are joined by David Beckham, former England captain, Noel Gallagher of Oasis, rapper Snoop Dogg and other celebrities with walk-on parts. The film is funny, clever and has the requisite cool in-jokes to encourage repeat viewing.

Since it was launched at the start of June, the video has been viewed more than 3.4m times on YouTube. Nike's rival big-budget "Write the Future" soccer-focused video is up to 15m views. But Adidas wanted to highlight its co-branded Star Wars casual clothing line rather than its soccer wear. The ad is, therefore, aimed at a more segmented audience that can recognise a two-second shot of someone such as DJ Neil Armstrong. As such, it cleverly takes Adidas's sponsorship of the World Cup to audiences that a more conventional soccer-themed campaign could not hope to reach.

Jonathan Birchall

ST: A Love Story

 

Jun 20, 2010

A love story

Love at first sight is romantic but may not hold a candle to love that lasts a lifetime & is for better or for worse

By Lee Wei Ling

 

 
 

-- PHOTO COURTESY OF KWA KIM LI

An advertisement for the 'Sassy Miss 2010 Workshop Series' in The Straits Times caught my eye recently. The headline was: 'The Power of First Impressions.'

The text claimed: 'It takes just 30 seconds for your first date or prospective employer to form an everlasting impression of you. So flash your X-factor, from the way you look to the style in which you carry yourself. Come uncover all the trade secrets of image-making at this power workshop!'

I was amused. If I want to make an impression, it would be to show my competence, sincerity, pragmatism and willingness to fight for what is right. My appearance and how I carry myself are highly unlikely to make an impression in a 30-minute encounter, let alone a 30-second 'flash'.

As for assessing someone on the first encounter, it would take me at least five to 10 minutes to appraise a person. I do not base my judgment on whether the person is good-looking or how he carries himself. Instead I would focus on his facial expression and body language.

If these contradict what he says, I would be wary of him. Body language and facial expressions are rarely under voluntary control and hence are better indicators of the true intent of a person than speech.

I am fairly good at sizing up people. There have been quite a few instances when I have accurately assessed someone at the first brief encounter. But even then, I seldom depend solely on first impressions. I will reassess the person on subsequent occasions. Only if I observe certain traits repeatedly would I be confident in my assessment.

Some people do indeed judge others on the basis of first impressions. Their judgment may well be strongly influenced by the person's appearance, how well he carries himself and how eloquently he speaks. I think such people are shallow. In life, we have to interact with people; and the more accurately we judge people, the fewer mistakes we are likely to make about them.

Research on interpersonal relationships between strangers shows that physical appearance does influence first impressions. But this does not explain why people stick together in long-term relationships. Commitment is a key variable in sustaining such relationships.

The one remarkable relationship I have personally observed is the one between my father and mother. Theirs was certainly not love at first sight. Nor were looks the main factor in their mutual attraction. Rather, it was personality and intellectual compatibility.

They are not only lovers, they are also best friends. There has never been any calculation about how much each had invested in the relationship. Theirs is an unconditional love.

Before my mother suffered her first stroke in 2003, she lived her life around my father, taking care of his every need. The stroke and the resultant disability made my mother quite frail.

From that point on, my father lived his life around her. He was still in the Cabinet, first as Senior Minister and then as Minister Mentor, but he tried his best to arrange his working schedule around my mother's needs.

He also took care of her health, strongly urging her to swim daily for exercise, and supervised her complicated regime of medication. He would also measure her blood pressure several times a day, till I got in touch with Dr Ting Choon Ming who had invented a blood pressure measuring equipment that is worn like a watch. Next day, when Dr Ting came to take the watch back to analyse the recorded blood pressure, my mother said to him: 'I prefer to have my husband measure my blood pressure.'

After my mother's second stroke in 2008, she became bed-bound and could no longer accompany my father on his travels overseas or to social functions here. Every night after returning home from work, my father now spends about two hours telling my mother about his day and reading aloud her favourite poems to her.

The poetry books are rather thick and heavy, so he uses a heavy-duty music stand to place the books. One night, he was so sleepy, he fell asleep while reading to my mother, slumped forward and hit his face against the music stand. Since the music stand was made of metal, he suffered abrasions on his face. He cursed himself for his carelessness but still carries on reading aloud to my mother every night.

I have always known my father was fearless, willing to fight to the bitter end for Singapore. When Vietnam fell in 1975, it looked for a while as though the domino hypothesis - which held that other South-east Asian states would also fall to the communists like dominoes - might turn out to be true. My father knew how ruthless the communists were, but he was determined to stay on in Singapore, and my mother was just as determined to stay on by his side.

I began this article because I was reading an article in a psychological journal on 'love at first sight versus love for a lifetime, for better or for worse'.

Love at first sight is rare and often does not endure. The affection my parents have for each other is also rare. They are each other's soul mates; their happy marriage has lasted beyond their diamond anniversary.

But they have never made a show of being a loving couple in public. Even in private, they have rarely demonstrated their love for each other with hugs or kisses. It was only after my mother's second stroke that I saw my father kiss my mother on her forehead to comfort her. They don't seem to feel the need for a dramatic physical show of love.

I have great admiration for what my father has done for Singapore - and at age 87, he is still promoting Singapore's interests. But he being the first-born son in a Peranakan family, I would not have suspected him to have been capable of such devotion as he has shown for my mother, taking care of her so painstakingly. My admiration for him has increased manifold because I have watched him look after my mother so devotedly over the last two painful years.

The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute. Send your comments to suntimes@sph.com.sg

lee kuan yew

FT: John Wooden

 see also

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MM-psvqiG8 

 

==

Farm boy who put college basketball on map

By Jurek Martin, Financial Times

Published: June 19 2010 02:26 | Last updated: June 19 2010 02:26

John Wooden, 99 when he died in Los Angeles, was, indisputably, the greatest college basketball coach ever. Indeed his record is fit to be compared with any coach in any sport worldwide; if soccer had been his game, his team would be the one to beat in the current World Cup.

As much as anyone, he helped transform collegiate basketball into the US national obsession of early spring, known as March Madness. Office pools bet on it; presidents must make their preferences known. If Japan stops for high school baseball, so does America when the men in baggy shorts get at it.

John Wooden

Wooden was christened the Wizard of Westwood, where the University of California at Los Angeles plays, but his magic had its roots in small-town Indiana. Indeed, for all the glamour associated with Hollywood, and for all the national social turbulence of his glory years, 1964-75, he remained, in essence, a modest, religious Midwestern farm boy.

He would sit at courtside, besuited, short hair parted almost in the middle, tapping a rolled up programme on his chin. He never cursed his own players for underperforming. His worst public profanity was “goodness gracious sakes alive”, though he could be rougher on referees who made bad calls. Jim Murray, the great Los Angeles Times sports journalist, once wrote of him, “John Wooden’s so square he is divisible by four”.

Wooden knew more about the game than anyone else, and had an extraordinary gift for imparting his knowledge. He won with small teams – his first championship side had nobody taller than 6ft 5in. He won with big ones, exemplified by his towering centres, 7ft 2in Lew Alcindor, who became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the most prolific scorer in the professional game, and 6ft 11in Bill Walton, the hippie red-head. All of them, black, white, radical or not, hung on his every homily: many, including his two great stars, trooped to his hospital bed to say a final farewell.

His records at UCLA are unapproachable – 10 national championships in 12 years (no other coach can boast more than four in a lifetime), four undefeated seasons (the next best is one) and 88 consecutive games won (the previous record was 60, the highest since is 45).

John Robert Wooden was born in 1910, on a farm near Martinsville, Indiana, the state where basketball is a religion. He was a star on his high-school team and married a classmate, Nell Riley, a cornet player in the band, and his wife for 53 years. He was also an excellent student, with a particular love for poetry instilled by his father.

He combined both at Purdue University, also in Indiana. At 5ft 10in, he was the playmaking guard on its national championship team in 1932, named player of the year. He then taught English and coached sports around Midwestern high schools and colleges, interrupted by military service during 1943-46.

In 1948, the University of Minnesota wanted him as basketball coach but a storm knocked out his phone line for a critical few hours and it was UCLA that made him the first firm offer – $6,000 a year to coach in a dilapidated gym shared with the gymnastic and wrestling teams. He plied his trade diligently, but west coast glamour in the 1950s rested with the University of San Francisco. With its dominating centre, Bill Russell, it brought off the 60-game winning streak and lifted two national titles.

That all changed with his first national triumph in 1964, an upset win achieved with a defensive scheme, the zone press, that befuddled Duke University, the heavy favourite. As Bill Nack wrote in an elegy for the ESPN sports cable network, Wooden sent out on court “a swarming monster with five heads and 10 squeaky feet”. His subsequent successes helped put college basketball on the American map just as televised sports were truly coming of age. UCLA became like the New York Yankees of baseball, the exemplar of excellence, loved and hated in equal measure. Whenever they were on the small screen, millions watched.

The game was not played in a social vacuum, certainly not in the 1960s and 1970s. It became, increasingly, a black inner-city sport, more flamboyant and spectacular, less structured and tactical. Wooden recruited high-school talent from all over but his coaching approach never changed; he taught discipline, fitness, speed and teamwork and discouraged individual highlights. When Walton, truculent and very spectacular, turned up for practice wearing his red hair long, he was ordered to get it cut or play elsewhere (he got on his bike to a barber’s forthwith). He would not allow his players to take part in anti-Vietnam War protests if it meant missing practice. If it didn’t, yet they thought the cause just, that was fine.

He bonded with them in subtle ways. He introduced Lew Alcindor to the works of the black poet Langston Hughes and encouraged his subsequent conversion to Islam. In his autobiography, Abdul-Jabbar, almost as square as his coach, remembers first meeting the man who recruited him from far away New York in Wooden’s closet-sized office. “He surely did look like he belonged in a one-room schoolhouse. He was calm, in no hurry to impress me with his knowledge or his power. He called me Lewis and that decision endeared him to me even more.” Yet Walton always suspected that behind the surface calm lurked “a caged tiger”.

He was known for his aphorisms, often banal but never challenged because they brought success. The most quintessential reads, “Talent is God-given: be humble. Fame is man-given: be grateful. Conceit is self-given: be careful.” John Wooden, who had left monthly love letters to his wife on her pillow since her death in 1985, is survived by a son and daughter.

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