Roger Collis

This is a collection of more than 100 mostly satirical columns reflecting the evolution of management life and style and organisation in international companies: from the telex and typewriter age of the 1960’s and 1970’s to cyberspace and the IT revolution – and the author’s view that satire should be almost indistinguishable from reality. Satirists these days are always being second-guessed by real events. Now you see it, now you don’t.  Does satire reflect a truer reality?

Are managers more fulfilled, more secure, more effective, than they were 50 years ago? Have relationships within organisations improved or become more stressful?

Much has changed, of course: technology not only enables, but requires, managers to be totally wired at all times, so that business travellers now have two jobs, one on the road and one fighting their corner back in the office at the corporate Kremlin.   Thanks to the ‘War on Terror’ and the age of mass tourism, business travel has become more onerous.

Instant communications has brought its own challenges.

The Internet brings new challenges and opportunities. It enables even a small company to market its products worldwide. ‘Viral marketing’ through ‘social media’ have become the new buzzwords.  Remember the old buzzwords and the quick fix ‘how to’ books, such as the ‘Three-minute manager;’ ‘In search of excellence’…?

Organisations may seem to have changed. ‘Globalisation’ has seen the transformation of companies from export led by ‘international’ departments in the Mid West and elsewhere to being fully ‘domesticated’ in many countries, with a ‘matrix’ management with shared responsibility between local, or regional, general managers and international product line managers.    ‘Kinetic equilibrium’ is how an erstwhile chairman of the author described it with subsequent fear and loathing in the organisation. One of the realities of management today is that managers have more responsibility than authority.

But management is always re-inventing the wheel.   The IT revolution helped to strip out layers of middle-management to create ‘flatter’ hierarchies, with ‘business units’ as semi-autonomous ‘profit centres’ and a stripped down ‘headquarters unit.’    Entrepreneurship, or rather ‘intrapreneurship,’ was the name of the game.  As management gurus came and went, corporations centralised and decentralised every so often in seismic ‘restructuring.’

In the foreword go this book, the author describes this management evolution from first-hand experience from his roller-coaster international marketing career – from running a ‘creative boutique’ in Lausanne for the largest British international advertising  agency of the 1960s, Colman Prentis & Varley; head of European marketing for Miles Laboratories, an emerging U.S. multinational; to VP responsible for business development for a family-held Swedish health care company based in Geneva; to marketing and sales director for the British subsidiary of the international pharmaceuticals giant Merck Inc. of Rahway, New Jersey.

The earliest of these pieces first appeared in Werbung/Publicite (bilingual monthly organ of the Swiss Advertising Association, in a German translation – subsequently as a regular page in English under the inspiring auspices of the editor Walter Greminger in Zurich, of affectionate memory); and The Guardian.  Many were published in my end-page column in Chief Executive; five notoriously appeared on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal in 1984; a few first appeared in my weekly column The Frequent Traveler, which ran for 23 years in the International Herald Tribune (1985-2008); others I broadcast in Business Matters on the BBC World Service. Thirty-nine stories were collected in my first book, ‘If My Boss Calls, Make Sure You Get his Name,’ published in 1984.

Several are taken from my column Roger & Out in British Airways’ Business World, and many first appeared in The Professional Expatriate column in Resident Abroad magazine, published by the Financial Times.

These and others have appeared in various guises in many publications around the world.

The stories encompass two main phases of my life: so-called ‘management years’ (1961-1980) in Switzerland; and what you might call the ‘expatriate years’ (1981-2000) as a journalist and occasional consultant rubbing along in the south of France.

I have arranged the pieces in more less arbitrary order, early pieces cheek by jowl with later ones; but all are dated (though not too dated, I hope) along with the publications in  which they first appeared (some have been republished many times over the years) which puts them in some sort of context. I have tried to avoid specific business travel pieces, but some have inevitably asked to ‘cross-over’ from my daunting archive of travel columns. After all, travel is an integral part of management life.

Foreword: The way it was…

1.   The anxiety game

2.   The consultant explosion

3.   Selling the sizzle

4.   Vocation vacations

5.   Mammon and the muse

6.   Decisions, decisions

7.   Meetingmanship

8.   The medium is the merchandise

9.   In parenthesis

10. Making your presents felt

11. Meanwhile, back at the conference

12. Fear and loathing at Doberman & Pinscher

13. Harry Toombs’ apocalypse

14. Management by rumour

15. Say ‘Shalom’ to Mr Yitz

16. Management by surprise

17. The swagman cometh

18. Standing up to the media      

19. The selling of the business lunch

20. Escaping the grind

21. How to choose an advertising agency

22. But what have you done for us lately?

23. Introducing our very own cybernetic superstar

24. Madame Bellwether’s establishment

25. Physician, sell thyself       

26. Focus Group Victorious

27. Management by accident

28. Management by absence

29. A crash-course in re-entry      

30. When the headhunter calls

31. High flying aboard Management One

32. Fighting inflation at the word factory

33. Flower power in the executive suite

34. Cold sweat in St Tropez

35. Discussion Partners

36. Close encounters of the management kind

37. Are managers born under a lucky star?

38. Executive Santa

39. Small is beautiful

40. Executive star wars

41. Eavesdropping on the Sunday Club

42. Moonlighters anonymous

43. Contingency planning is never saying you’re sorry   

44. A camel is a horse designed by a committee

45. The psychographic streamlined tangerine-flake computer baby

46. The great consumer war

47. The loneliness of the long distance manager.

48. Management lib

49. Exploring the semantic universe

50. Jaime Sevilla’s secret empire

51. Do you sincerely want to lose money?

52. In search of a management style

53. Bailing out the banks with frequent flier miles

54. A brief history of the future: Flying villages and space spas  

55. Too many discounts confuse travelers

56. Reinventing the generalist

57. The middle-management menopause

58. A friendly voice on the road

59. Japanese management style

60. Paws for thought

61. Yours Revealingly

62. Bizspeakmanship

63. It’s not what you say… It’s how you say it

64. Some survive, others thrive

65. All stressed up and nowhere to go

66. Finding time for time management

67. ‘I miss you too!’

68. Have expenses, will travel

69. Are you sure you know who I am?

70. The art of keeping out of touch

71. Can absence make the heart grow fonder/

72. Much appreciated

73. Golfing holidays may handicap your career

74. Honey, did you pack the divorce papers?

75. Sleepwalking raises alarms

76. Thinking outside the box

77. Space tourism: Ready for liftoff?

78. Jet lag: the time to stay on your own time

79.  How flying can make you ill

80. Remembering the days of the Concorde

81. Farewell to the Concorde

82. Video conference: a global view

83. Does the meeting deliver the message?

84. Executives at leisure

85. Mind the gap

86. Upbeat in the downturn

87. Cracking down on expenses

88.  ‘Mobile homes on the high seas

89. Safeguarding your digital footprint

90. Aren’t you rather young to be thinking of early retirement?

91. Land of milk and money

92. Your jetlag may be just the ion gap

93.  Return to the future for airline passengers? 

94. Will ‘virtual’ travel become the new reality?

95. Games managements play

96. Power Play

97. The hotel room of the future

98. Topless rules ok

99. Going up in smoke

100. It’s an ill wind

101. Soros strikes again

102. Banking woes

103. Paradise redeemed       

104. Conference chic

105. How I never met Graham Greene

106. Loose connections

107. Le Coeur de filet

108. Don’t confuse me with the fax

109. All the help I can get

110. Writing well is the best revenge

111. Cold comfort calls 

112. Let me sleep on it

113. I’m sorry, I’m not in today

114. Lightening the load with ‘live luggage’

115. Frequent flier programs: 30 years old

116. Some of my best friends are strangers

117. Velvet idiom; iron fist

Afterword:

118. Even masters of the universe can have enemies…