A sour taste in my mouth

This essay is a review of Cubic Construction and its principal proprietor, Qulzam (Cooly) Mahmood.

I am surprised by the absence of other reviews on the internet, either positive or negative, since my experience was so extreme. My goal, therefore, is to provide a thorough and accurate assessment of how this company performed when I hired them to build a house extension in 2010.

At the time, my wife and I lived in a small mews terrace in Rodley overlooking a road junction, a couple of well-known pubs, and the Leeds to Liverpool canal. Needing to expand the space around us, we chose a three-bedroom semi-detached in Tranmere Park, Guiseley as the place to build our future. It had an extensive south-facing garden, off-road parking and, crucially, scope for development. If we removed an old flat-roofed garage there was ample space between the house and the boundary for a two-story extension. We wanted a kitchen-diner on the ground floor and a master bedroom with en-suite upstairs thus creating a modern four-bed semi. Being near good schools and transport links, the home would provide all our needs for the duration of our working lives and prove popular, when the time came, on the market.

Planning permission given, we were immediately swamped by flyers advertising builders’ interest. The first through the letterbox was from Cubic Construction, at the time a trading name for the sole trader Qulzam ‘Cooly’ Mahmood. I was impressed by this proactivity. It showed the spark and enterprise I was looking for in a builder and because the company was located in Stanningley, only a stone’s throw from Rodley, I kept edging Cubic through my selection process.

Builder selection is the key decision in any renovation. I had budgeted for the refurbishment and extension to cost in the region of £100,000. To some degree this was a finger-in-the-air figure, but it was not without grounding. I had read the excellent Haines Manual on home extensions and spent an age researching trade secrets on the internet. I dreamed this would be my Grand Design, but I was not going to be the one gently teased by Kevin Macdonald into admitting that I was forty per cent over budget and three months behind schedule.

Of the eight builders I contacted, three replied. One quoted £250,000 having never visited the house. The second (who came recommended and wanted the job because he was local) quoted £140,000. Cubic was the only company under budget, at £70,000.

Perhaps at this stage I should have been more wary. Why was there such divergence in the pricing? Would the second quote provide any better service than the third? Was the budget reasonable? But in simple terms I could not afford to make any other choice than Cubic and imagined the spare £30,000 would be sufficient to cover any shortfall. I didn’t know that Cubic’s strategy was to under-price in order to win the work and I had no cognisance of what was to follow as they clawed back profit. But to say the decision was merely financial is incorrect. Cubic came with trade membership of the Federation of Master Builders, something I understood to be an assurance of quality. I asked all tenders to produce a project plan and Cubic were the only ones to provide a week by week breakdown. They wanted to be paid partly in cash, which was fine by me. And there was something I thought I recognised in Cooly Mahmood; the same striving for professionalism at the heart of my own life. It was the start of Ramadan, and he was fasting.

I was elated. Through a diligent selection process I had discovered a building company that was capable, affordable, and managed by men of integrity. How wrong this assessment proved to be.

Building commenced in August and the ground works crew proved to be just as tenacious as I expected. In a matter of weeks the old garage had been removed, the footings put in place, the drainage laid out, and the walls erected and insulated. One day of slippage here and another there did not seem to matter and I paid according to a schedule agreed at the outset.

The cost profile of building projects is front weighted to cover the supply of bricks, blocks, cement, concrete, scaffolding and so on. Labour costs remain pretty much consistent as one trade hands over to another; ground works to roofers, first fix (plumbers and electricians) to second (plasterers and painters). I had agreed how much would be paid at what stage but as the project plan slipped, I was slow to realise that I was paying for work that was yet to be completed.

By the end of the first month, the project was a week in arrears. By the end of the second month, it was not much further on. As autumn chilled to winter I was keen to get the building water tight before the rains started, but the barriers to this were, firstly, that Cubic underestimated how long it would take to source matching concrete tiles and secondly, that they had to find and price roofers who would fit them.

Small building companies are, I realised, not cohesive units but fluid federations of independent traders. This suits the building industry as demand expands and contracts in line with economic prosperity. It was quickly apparent that no roofer would do the work required for what Cubic were prepared to pay and as a result my project became further and further delayed. The rains started. Water poured in where the rafters of the old house had been exposed. It pooled on the concrete foundations. The stacked plasterboard disintegrated and the damp rooms began to smell of mould.

My guess – and this is supposition as I was not party to the discussion - is that Cubic made a decision to accept the cost of the roofing but would seek other ways to recover their profit. With the roof completed the building was at last watertight and it looked for a brief moment that we might enjoy Christmas with our family in our new home. This was something we dreamed of, but I did not take into account the quality of Cubic’s first and second fix tradesmen, nor Cooly’s ability to manage them.

While the water and drainage was disconnected, Cubic failed to supply a portaloo until I told them it was not up to me to manually empty the toilet into the sewer. A crate of beer I had been keeping went missing. New fittings were broken by careless handling. I found the remains of an electrician’s sandwich stuffed under the floor boards in what would become the spare room; an obvious enticement to rats.By now in was mid November. The temperature fell by the day and icy mud got stamped everywhere through the house. The skip became so full that the collection lorry could barely lift it. Litter blew through the cage of security barriers and caught in my neighbours' gardens, sparking one or two angry exchanges. Though they did not express it directly, it was obvious that they were tiring of the traffic, parking, dirt, swearing, music, and hammering. My immediate neighbour the other side of the semi had to ask an electrician to stop hammering in the attic at five o’clock in the morning. The noise was keeping his six year old son awake. I repeatedly had to apologise for the work vans gouging deep tracks out of his pristine front lawn.

Now in financial difficulty, Cubic started inventing additional charges and cost savings for work that I considered part of the original specification. Having explicitly ordered a closed-system boiler at the tender stage, they proposed fitting a combi-boiler because it would be cheaper to do so. Fitting a closed-system boiler, they said, would cost equivalent to a total refit of the central heating system, about £5,000. Rendering a twenty-metre retaining wall would cost an additional £1,800, a figure so exorbitant as to be laughable. Very quickly, the spare £30,000 evaporated and I had to break out my pension pot and long term savings to get the job completed.

I agreed to pay the additional charges because I realised that Cooly had under-priced the job. I lay awake at night fretting about the spiralling expenses and what I should do about them. It dawned on me to stop paying and hold the remaining budget until everything was done. I was in an invidious position. About £30,000 worth of work still remained and yet I had only £10,000 still to pay. I couldn’t sack Cubic because no one else would do the work for what I could afford and I was stuck with a company no longer incentivised to do a good job. All that mattered to Cubic was cost reduction, something they set about with unparalleled skill. A carpenter who had been sacked was suddenly reinstated. Jobs did not get done unless I was there to observe. My ignorance was brutally exploited.

But nothing was ever simple. Working on a building site with teams of various disciplines, one becomes swept along in the shifting tides of human relationships. I had, from the start, made a point of treating the men with excessive generosity, providing fish and chips for everyone on Friday lunchtime. As a result they would whisper to me if others, Cooly included, were cutting corners. One man was incredibly multi-skilled and hard-working, able to turn his hand from roofing to bricklaying to carpentry as need dictated. Others were difficult to pin down, unwilling to assume any managerial responsibility. When the beer went missing I had to interview them all like school children to get to the truth.It was awkward. I thought I understood what motivated people. I had, I told myself, been leading teams since the age of nine. But this dynamic was one I never mastered. The loyalties were too thin, too shallow to truly grasp. Someone would steal from me one minute and then down tools to help with heavy lifting the next. Another would apologise for being late one morning, explain that his grandmother was dying and thank me for an expression of concern, but brazenly walk out when others were depending on him to complete a job by the afternoon.

If I was expecting Cooly to provide any form of governance, I was wrong. In the end I stopped giving instructions to him and gave them directly to the builders.

But it would be wrong to say that Cubic were completely incompetent. In one particular instance their technical advice was quite brilliant. The architect’s original plan was predicated in the upper floor extension having a ceiling clearance of seven feet, very low for someone as tall as me. Cubic’s solution was to raise the ceiling using a rolled steel joist, saving me having to duck every time I entered my bedroom. There were times when the subcontractors’ behaviour became so wayward that Cooly had to step in noisily to maintain any semblance of order; something I had neither the skill, nor the knowledge, nor the inclination to do.

Yet by the start of December we had tired of each other and tired of the project. The temperature rarely got above freezing and even simple jobs became painful. The constant worry and competing demands had made me irritable towards my wife, whose expectations were never being met. We were obliged to vacate the house in Rodley as the buyers had a baby on the way and wanted to be in for Christmas. There was a time when I thought we would have to move into a hotel and put our furniture in storage. I wanted them out, no matter what remained. I would borrow more money and get someone else. I made the decision: we would cut our losses and Cubic had to go.

Two weeks prior to Christmas I told Cooly that I was sacking him and de-scoping what remained of the build. Despite this, I would pay everything still owed, including his additional charges, as soon as I was handed a certificate of completion from the planning authority. This was duly provided, and I handed over the cash. On the last afternoon the electrician gave me a certificate of electrical safety but was too drunk to drive home. I told his crew to leave his van, which was eventually collected three days later.

I now had two weeks to finish all the remaining internal work and move house so that we could have my family for Christmas day. The house was dry and warm with the heating on full, but much was still to do: mounting the doors and kicker boards on the kitchen cupboards after the fitter disappeared; carpeting; painting; replacing the recessed lights in the bathrooms where the electrician had drilled holes too large for the ones I had supplied; replacing the lights in the kitchen the electrician broke; filling round the window boards that had been lazily cut nearly half an inch too short at either end; blocking the drafts round the doors; fitting handles; laying insulation in the roof spaces.

The more I looked, the more I saw. In the kitchen the units had been erected without removing the blue protective film. Where they butted up against each other, and the gap was too small to slip any implement, I was left with a ragged corner of film taunting me. The floor boards in the bedroom had been insufficiently nailed down. Anyone walking upstairs sounded like Captain Ahab pegging across the poop deck of the Peaquod. I found guttering that sloped the wrong way; and more in which a hole had never been cut for the downpipe. The rendering so expensively applied to the retaining wall fell off in chunks because it had never set in the cold. The freezing orange mud got tramped everywhere into the house, staining the new carpets, because the patio was never finished.

One of the best bits of advice in the Haines manual was to keep back a retention, around 5% of the total sum, for six months to ensure a builder is motivated to return if any snagging is required. My problem was that the work completed was so shoddy, and the remaining works so extensive, that the paltry retention would never cover it. I told Cooly that I would be using the money to finish work, such as the patio, that I had de-scoped from him. If there was anything left, I would pay it in six months.

Laying the patio cost more than double the retention, but at least I got a reputable landscape gardener who did a brilliant job very quickly. The impact of the patio was immediate; the kitchen ceased to be streaked with drying mud and there was less to tread through the corridors and up the stairs. Drilling away the crumbling render and replacing it cost another £3000. This, of course, required repainting.

In the year following the build I spent around £20,000 either finishing off the programme or repairing work that Cubic had done badly. To my chagrin, this put me well over budget and way behind schedule. A window shattered in its frame because it was under torsional pressure from when it was mounted. Another window, the largest one in the living room, warped from being inadequately fixed into the gap. I had to plug the centimetre wide space to stop the rain and spiders creeping in. The insulation Cooly swore he had fitted had to be laid. The expensive bamboo flooring in the kitchen had to be replaced after the planks warped and buckled. The manufacturer told me I should take Cubic to court; the instructions said clearly that the flooring required a totally flat screed base (the absence of which was one of Cooly’s cost savings) and an impermeable water barrier.

Indeed any number of suppliers and contractors started chuckling when I described the utter hell I had experienced with Cubic. The owner of the window company provided the replacement for the shattered panel at cost. He sent his own men to fit it because I explained that I was never allowing Cubic on my land again.

“You’d be surprised how many times I hear that,” he said.

The cruelty of the project crept into every aspect of my life. Every day repairing and replacing made me coil with anger. An insidious seething permeated the house like a cold mist. Every creek of the floor, or draft of cold air, brought back the helplessness of being trapped in a contract that never seemed to progress and never seemed to end.

And it wasn’t just me infected by the disease. In the summer after the build, the plumber rang me to ask my advice on how to get money out of Cubic.

“He’s took his own profit and not paid me,” he said. “He’s saying you kept money back and I have to take the hit.”

This appalled me. Not only had I effectively paid twice for the central heating system, but I had never held any payment back. In a spirit of goodwill I had even paid Cooly a representative figure when the retention was due. It came as something of a shock to hear he was blaming me for his inability to pay his tradesmen. It came as more of a shock that the plumber was asking for help.

While my family were staying with us for the Christmas immediately after the build, a dark stain appeared on the walls where the stairs doubled round. At first I thought it was water, or steam from the boiler escaping in between the brick skins of the building. I pulled up the newly laid linoleum in the bathroom to investigate, feeling along the water pipes for a leak, but found nothing. Finally, after three days, a creeping stench told me to search underneath the toilet and there I found the cause. The outflow from the loo was inconclusively locked into the soil pipe. Solid effluent was leaking into the walls and every flush of the toilet made the stain richer. It was Boxing Day. My family were downstairs putting on a brave face for my sake. There was nothing else I could do except roll up my sleeves.

***

It is now five years since the build programme. The floor of the bedroom still creaks like the deck of a dhow, and mortar still falls from the roof ridges in high winds, but the majority of the repair work has been completed. I no longer shiver when confronted with a building project and in fact am keen to undertake another. The experience of employing Cubic has been educational. I know for certain that building contractors expect to be treated in an extremely transactional manner. Kindness leaves them uncertain of the boundaries between supplier and client. Some builders, like Cubic, are probably very effective on small budget projects like patios and loft extensions, but they rarely have the capability or experience to manage protracted, inter-disciplinary extensions. Always, always, always employ on recommendation. If a builder charges a premium, you are paying not for additional skill but for integrity. I lacked the hardness required to drive Cubic to meet my expectations and, of course, had created much of the mess by paying too much, too early. The quality assurance I expected from the Federation of Master Builders logo on the Cubic website was utterly vapid. Their level of membership is not a statement of capability but a paid subscription issued to anyone who signs up to a code of practice. I didn’t even bother writing to express my concerns. Furthermore, I had selected Cubic on the strength of something I thought I saw in Cooly. Perhaps, if I am honest, my liberal sensibilities had led me to select a muslim against the prevailing trend of racism I saw around me. I wanted to prove he would be reliable. His failure to be so reflects not on him, but on me. It is five years since I sacked him and I noticed recently that he is using photographs of my house build on his website to advertise his business, which suggests that he had not learned anything from the experience.

In early January 2011, a few weeks after the build, Cooly asked to meet me to discuss why I sacked him. We met on neutral terrain, Costa coffee in Guiseley. He was nervous and uncommonly obsequious, insisting on paying for the drinks. He asked if I wanted anything to eat, then nearly begged me to let him finish the patio in exchange for what was left of the retention, to be paid on completion.

“This project has left a sour taste in my mouth,” he said. “I want to prove I can do a good job.”

I declined. I had spent the morning replacing a leaking outflow in the shower. If he had a sour taste in his mouth, perhaps he could imagine what was in mine. 

26 February 2023

As an afterword, though I have made myself accept my own culpability in the events I describe above – my failure to properly control Mahmood’s activity – people keep responding to this essay. I have had a number of people contact me over the years wishing they had read this piece before hiring him.

In 2020 I wrote a footnote describing one such story. Someone had been diddled by Mahmood in the form of work being paid for but left unfinished. He took the matter to court. In 2023, Mahmood himself contacted me to complain about the footnote, saying the matter had been thrown out of court and the claimant was required to pay costs. I removed footnote because I could not vouch for the story’s veracity to the same level of confidence with which I can evidence the above. Then, in July 2024, the correspondent wrote again to say that the matter was not thrown out of court but had been delayed by Covid. The judge had ruled that Mahmood committed fraud as a company director but, since he had been able to close Cubic construction down, the claimant was not able to recover all that was owed to him.

Mahmood had asked me to remove the full text of the article. It had been found by his teenage daughter and he wanted to ‘get on with his life’.

I was in two minds about removing it. On one, I accept that people can change. Mahmood may finally have learned to place quality of service and client satisfaction over personal, short-term profit. On the other, if I can warn people about his shoddy service and non-existent moral code, the same function as what people do on Tripadvisor, then I will do so. Were I to publish photos of a roof Cooly built, when I could afford to replace it, you would see why.

My instinct is this: if no one contacts me to complain about Mahmood between now and the end of 2024, I will delete this article. If they do, it will remain in place. This means, Cooly, that the onus is on you.  

7 July 2024

Shortly after I published the addendum above last year, I was contacted by someone who knew Cooly on a personal level through playing cricket and, having checked him out on Instagram, had employed him to do some renovations. Despite their personal relationship Cooly left him with the work uncompleted and out of pocket to the tune of £40k, meaning he was unable to afford another builder and had to reduce the plans he had for his wedding. This was in Horsforth, Leeds. The man said: “I share the sentiment of spending sleepless nights stressing over what is going on, and the biggest frustration is that I know him personally. It makes you feel like a fool and a let down when you use someone you know to build a home for your future family, and they act in this manner.”

So I have come to the following conclusion: Cooly Mahmood as a man is not to be trusted, even by his friends. As a builder he is to be avoided. And this essay will remain up on the internet for as long as I decide it adds value to the people of Leeds.

Bibliography

Rock, Ian, Home Extension Manual: Step-by-Step Guide to Planning, Building and Managing a Project (London: J H Haynes & Co Ltd, 2010)

Cubic Construction http://www.cubicconstruction.com/ [accessed 20 June 2015]

B&Q: when the operating model fails

An Operating Model is a way of conceptualising how an organisation delivers a service to customers. It unites the seven basic elements of an organisation into a single cohesive whole.

The most important part of the operating model is the customer. Knowing who they are, what they need, and how to reach them is pivotal for everything else. The second element is the business strategy. This describes how a business will position itself in the market in the service of their customers.

Then we must look at the internal machinations of the organisation. The major business processes are codified sequences of activity that add value to raw materials. They ensure that everyone on the pitch has a number on the back of their shirt and that everyone with a number has an appropriate role to play. Then we have the shaping of staff capabilities into roles and hierarchies. As I have mentioned here, the structure of an organisation should be built around the major business processes so that structure and process are almost synonymous.

All businesses are managed by the processing of reports. The flow of this information is enabled by the technology systems architecture. The operational management of the value chain (the supply chain) determines how processed information is turned into action: orders, payments, contracts and so on. The whole model is held together by the leadership culture of the organisation, the way things are done.

We could therefore represent an operating model graphically, as follows:

Where there is an effective operating model there is a happy customer. Where there is an unhappy customer, one or more elements of the operating model have, to some degree, failed. The purpose of this essay is to examine a moment of operating model failure and identify the possible causes.

My case study is drawn from personal experience. In 2014 I was redecorating a bathroom to replace a leaking bath and associated plumbing. Having researched prices and styles I eventually chose a mixer tap from the B&Q store in Leeds, and ordered the large items - bath, bath panel, and waste piping - from B&Q’s online home delivery service. The bath and panel had credible reviews online and dispatch was promised “within one week”.

One day later, on 9 May, I received a text asking me to book a delivery date. I selected the first available, Saturday 17 May, and on the strength of this understanding, booked a plumber for the subsequent Monday. In the course of this correspondence it became apparent that B&Q did not have, as the website implied, a stock of baths and panels. Instead they were operating as a sales platform for other providers to flog their merchandise in much the same way as Amazon. In this instance the bath and panel were to be provided by PJH Group, a company specialising in bathroom wares. This did not bother me – I did not care who manufactured or delivered the items – only that they would arrive on time.

On Friday 16 May, the day before delivery was due, I was phoned by the B&Q call centre to be told that the bath panel would not be delivered the next day and, indeed, would not be available for some two months. In a frustrated exchange of calls, both B&Q and PJH blamed each other for the confusion. My problem was that fitting the bath could not be done independently of the bath panel. I was annoyed, and expressed this, but there was little that could be done. I gathered from talking to the call centre operator that the bath panels were still awaiting manufacture in India.

The following morning, a bright, cold Saturday in May, the waste piping was delivered along with the bathtub. The driver, from a courier company frequently used by B&Q, insisted that I sign a hand held device indicating everything had been delivered. I refused. Although the bath had indeed arrived, the legs were missing and there were no installation instructions. After another exchange of phone calls I was sent them as a pdf by email from PJH Group and was told by B&Q that the legs would be couriered to me within 5 days. Angry that my project plan was unraveling, I cancelled the plumber at two days' notice, to much griping on his part.

Having mulled on the issue overnight, I wrote a stiff letter of complaint to both B&Q and PJH Group. Surely they ought to have known when I ordered and paid for the bath panel that it was not possible to deliver it within one week. Replies duly arrived and I was again told the legs would be with me “within five days”, meaning the following Friday before a bank holiday weekend. That evening I made the decision not to wait until July for the panel and wrote an email on Tuesday 20 May to B&Q, copied to PJH Group, cancelling it. I would get one somewhere else, I said, and re-booked the plumber for Saturday 24 May.

Two days later, on the Thursday, and still believing that the bath legs were imminent, (fortunately, I was working from home) I became concerned that I had not received any acknowledgement to the email I sent cancelling the order. The money I was owed had not appeared in my account. I rang B&Q again and spoke to yet another operator who told me that the person who had managed my email failed to raise a repayment order. I expressed some element of surprise, after which he did so while I was on the line. When I then asked where my bath legs were, he rang PJH and assured me that they were "in transit and would be with me within five days". He was adamant that even due to the bank holiday, the legs would be with me by Tuesday 27 May. I therefore had to cancel the plumber I had booked for 24 May, to considerable further embarrassment.

I remained at home throughout the bank holiday weekend. I noticed that I was finally repaid for the cancelled bath panel on 25 May, but the bath legs were never delivered. On 28 May I made the decision, in conjunction with my plumber, that we could fit the bath using the legs from another bath and a panel from a more reliable supplier.

The totality of the experience was that having ordered three items from B&Q for home delivery, one was delivered one time, one was never delivered, and the last was missing a critical part of the construction. In order to complete my bathroom I had to pilfer the legs from the old bath, making it unsellable. The plumber did not bill me for the two occasions I cancelled but he would have been within his rights to do so. Dealing with the issue caused me considerable embarrassment and irritation at the wasted effort.

Irate, I wrote to B&Q telling them that I held them responsible. It was fundamentally weak to blame PJH and they should feel obliged to honour the warranty on the bath and repay me at least 50% of the cost for the trouble they had caused. In the end they refunded nearly 80% to placate me, although this was in coupons that could only be redeemed at a B&Q store and would not be delivered for a further four weeks.

So B&Q had a customer (me) ready to buy a product in a channel that we both enjoyed for its simplicity and cost (online shopping). But what went wrong with the operating model for the story to end in such acrimony and financial loss?

Looking at governance webpages of B&Q’s parent company, Kingfisher (kingfisher.com) it is clear that the organisational strategy concentrates not on customer experience, but shareholder value. Whereas funding is, in my understanding, an element of operations management aiming to serve the paying customer, the B&Q model is the opposite. The buyer is a source of cash to ultimately enrich the shareholder.

The website is strewn with verbiage about growth, value, and expansion and mentions almost nothing about customers. The one place they feature is a page titled ‘Our strategy – Creating the Leader’. Underneath this heading is a four-step growth plan, the first of which is called ‘Easier’. Reading on, one finds that this concerns making it simpler to separate paying customers from their money through ‘omnichannel’ retailing. In an energetic use of measurable KPIs, performance is gauged through sales figures rather than any analysis of satisfaction.

I would argue that customer satisfaction in DIY retailing is a function not of access but quality and price. A quick glance round the B&Q trading website (diy.com) reveals a tellingly poor set of customer reviews on every own brand product. Crown non drip paint, for example, scores five stars, as does Unibond tile adhesive. But anything from one of B&Q’s own ranges, whether paint or flooring, lawnmower blades or loft ladders, the customer feedback is at best neutral and at worst, shocking. “Do yourself a favour,” one reads, “pay a few pounds more for something decent.”

Looking at the corporate structure it’s interesting to note that the highest level of governance is channelled through Kingfisher’s subsidiary brands (B&Q, Koctas, Srewfix, Castorama, Brico) supported by a finance function, a productivity function, supply chain management (called ‘sourcing and offer’), and group level internal communications (the first time I have ever seen this appointment at Board level). In other words the business concentrates on financial performance, internal reporting, and brand promotion. If one is to hope that the CEOs of the subsidiary brands are the champions of their customers, I would advise caution. Kevin O’Byrne, the newly appointed B&Q CEO, rose to this position by having been Finance Director in every one of his last three appointments. It doesn't look like he has spoken to a customer in the last ten years and he certainly never responded to the email I sent him last year.

Operationally, B&Q online operates as a trading platform for other partners to sell through. This is not explained on the website and it is only after one has paid that the confirmatory notes explain who is actually providing the goods. In other words, B&Q carries no stock and outsources all of its online supply, charging a premium for doing so.

I can see why. They employ over 20,000 staff and have vast real estates and stock levels all around the world. Many of these estates were bought, according to former CEO Sir Ian Cheshire, on long leases at the height of the property boom. But the woes of the store based business should not affect its online arm. We must be able to tell, with modern inventory management software, whether items are in stock or not. I can only imagine that because B&Q has chosen to partner with companies like PJH Group, that their respective IT systems are not linked. That is the only thing that would explain the utterly chaotic management of my order.

In summary therefore, B&Q have built a strategy around shareholder return. They have structured their online business as a sales platform for companies like PJH Group, but their management systems are incompatible and there are no business processes to manage the inventory. The structure of the organisation is a function of legacy conglomeration and the leadership culture internally and financially focused.

It is reported in the media that Sir Ian Cheshire turned round the fortunes of Kingfisher Group, driving an increase in net worth of 20% and a doubling of pre-tax profit. As he handed over to the new CEO, Véronique Laury, 2014 was proving a difficult year for B&Q and Kingfisher by extension. I am interested to follow how she performs. My belief is that the organisation’s operating model is fundamentally broken and that B&Q will undergo considerable market challenges if it fails to recognise the importance of the customer in how it operates. There are, after all, two more case studies of former Kingfisher brands that failed to do so. One was called Woolworths and the other, Comet.

In the meantime, if you need a plug or a plank of wood, go to a builders’ yard or a plumbers’ merchant. You’ll get a better product for a cheaper price and a smile into the bargain.

Bibliography:

The Daily Telegraph viewed 12 February 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11277279/Interview-No-easy-answers-for-the-grocers-says-Sir-Ian-Cheshire.html

Kingfisher viewed 12 February 2014, http://www.kingfisher.com/index.asp?pageid=193&board=executive&person=veroniquelaury#person

B&Q viewed 12 February 2014, http://www.diy.com/departments/colours-non-drip-interior-exterior-white-gloss-paint-25l/578199_BQ.prd?tab=reviews

The Power of the Union

The first single I ever bought was Geno by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. 

It sat in a red, drop-front box for nearly five years before I found something worthy of joining it, Billy Bragg’s Between the Wars EP. Only two records, but five awesome songs; a well of virile socialism. On the sleeve of Geno, the Runners stood like a picket line in donkey jackets and woollen caps. On Between the Wars, two children in naval outfits ate toast and jam above the simple instruction never to pay more than One pound and twenty-five pence. This being the eighties, these records provided the soundtrack to my emerging political consciousness and the decade’s iconic imagery: a Royal Marine with the Union Jack on his radio antenna; the miners’ strike; the punk movement surrendering to the New Romantics.

My recollection is of violent social division.  It was like living in a crowded family home where all parties had to yell in order to be heard.  Punches were thrown, glass got smashed, and shins became bruised from the kicking - and yet once the noise died away we seemed to settle down to enjoy the relative prosperity of the subsequent decade.

Twenty years later I am in Leeds Town Hall sitting beneath the idioms written by the city fathers.  High up on the wall to my left is the phrase ‘In Union is Strength.’ This feels apt: I am waiting for Billy Bragg to come on stage. The audience are seated, murmuring to their neighbours, coats folded across their knees.  Bragg comes on to expectant applause and the cosy intimacy of the venue brings out the best in him.  He’s chatty and personable, drinking tea because of a sore throat. The drummer is fluid and expressive.  The lead guitarist alternates between a pedestal and the array of instruments provided by a hard working technician. Bragg introduces each song by relating it to the news. I delight in him singing Between the Wars though am disappointed no one joins in.  When he starts Sexuality, a couple that look like they’re from the real ale community dance unabashed around the speakers.  Bragg tells us with justifiable pride that of all the folk rock musicians around the world, it was him chosen by Woody Guthrie’s daughter to put her father’s remaining poetry to music.  He sings some, and others from ‘Tooth and Nail’, his new album.  I particularly like Handyman Blues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YmHtISRcz0) and There Will be a Reckoning, which show the breadth of his musical oeuvre.  He intersperses these with the brazier songs I love of old.  I doubt any musician coming out of the talent show sausage machine could ever write such wonderfully polysyllabic poetry, or would dare sing with such flat vowels.  My all-time favourite verse is from the idiotically catchy Waiting for the Great Leap Forward: 

In the Soviet Union a scientist is blinded

By the resumption of nuclear testing and he is reminded

That Doctor Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism failed

At the first hurdle 

The band takes a break but Bragg stays on.  People call out the names of songs and he quips: “Thanks mate, you remembered the title!  I’ve got to do the words and chords as well.”  Then he talks openly about how amazed he is to be still doing this after thirty years; that he is still writing and we are still listening.  “Art,” he says, “is the lukewarm squeegee that cleans the glass of perception,” a phrase so tongue-in-cheek that I had to write it down.  Only just starting out as an author, I find his humility and determination inspiring.  Be true to yourself, he’s saying.  Have courage.  He sings Levi Stubb’s Tears and then, after lambasting how the press behaved in the phone hacking scandal, Never Buy the Sun.  The band comes back on to kick into the classic call to arms There is Power in a Union.  During the final chorus Bragg folds his guitar round his back to sing deeply into the microphone, one fist raised in the salute of solidarity.  In the second row, a single fist answers the call.

After the show I run to the Town Hall Tavern for last orders.  It’s a Monday night but hey, I’ve just seen Billy Bragg.  I’m with a handful of friends who were all once pink-cheeked, placard-waving students who identified with the miners, the dockers, the railwaymen.  Now we are management consultants, supply chain directors, marketing executives; a little heavier, wealthier, and dare we say it, conservative.  But that’s not the point.  I don’t think Bragg would blame us for the paths our lives have taken.  He is a singer ‘mixing pop and politics’, sure, but primarily he is a musician.  It would, I hope, please him that I was listening to his first EP while a pupil at a boarding school and that it cost me 50p, second hand, so the seller could buy some fags.  The message I take away from the evening is simple: be active in the pursuit of social unity.

On Youtube there’s a film of Bragg tackling an English Defence League pundit who was trying to destabilise the community where he lives.  The same is happening to me this year and I am determined to resist, but it’s not the EDL that I must oppose, it’s the Scottish National Party.  On the 18th September, Scotland decides if it wants to be independent.

The SNP have produced a document called ‘Scotland’s Future: your guide to an independent Scotland.’  It presents the referendum as an option between the No vote (stagnation) and the Yes vote (progress).  It states baldly that Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, a net contributor to the Treasury.  Tax revenues from oil and gas could be invested for future generations in the same way that Norway, Sweden and Finland have vast national savings rather than substantial debts.  It states that an independent Scotland would be fairer, more democratic, and more prosperous than a Scotland under the yoke of Westminster.  If the SNP were elected there would be a raft of business-friendly policies to attract inwards investment: free tertiary education, lower corporation tax, cheaper air travel.  They promise help for small businesses and to set up a commission to determine the future pensionable age.  They promise more choices for infrastructure development and travel.  Social services would be developed on the key values of supporting those in work, protecting those out of it, and ‘a climate of social solidarity’.  On the big international issues Scotland would inherit membership of the European Union and the Common Travel Area (CTA). It would remain part of NATO and the UN.  It would establish a network of embassies and a security agency. A national broadcaster would inherit some of the BBC assets in Scotland but retain rights to Eastenders, Doctor Who and Strictly Come Dancing.  The fishing industry would be revived by renegotiating the Common Fisheries Policy and all of this would be administered by the thirty thousand civil servants currently resident north of the border.

The document is an inspired piece of political rhetoric.  Such figures as exist are carefully placed to attract the lower income vote.  Policies such as the single tier pension stand shoulder to shoulder with nuclear disarmament.  There is much suggested and little promised.  I am suspicious of the facts, where they exist.  Could one really create a potent military force (with air capability and an army of 20,000) for a mere £2.5Bn?  Or would that turn out to be a retired oil-rig helicopter and a pipe band?  Are the thirty thousand civil servants who are going to run the country the same who built the Scottish Parliament and ran ten times over budget?

I am left full of questions.  The document angers me.  I fear for a Scotland that blindly believes this rhetoric and yet it seems that many people do.  The website wingsoverscotland.com is typical of message boards that claim to be impartially ‘soaring above Scottish politics’ and yet the posts are puerile: mash-up photos, comments full of exclamation marks, and puns on people’s names.  It wouldn’t matter what one said, no one would change their mind.

The sad thing is how poorly the No lobby are campaigning.  Better Together, led by Alistair Darling, seem ponderous and uncharismatic in comparison and a Yes vote is always easier to sell (remember Iraq?). At least someone had the wisdom not to let David Cameron enter a televised debate with Salmond.

To find sensible discussion one has to look to the David Hume Institute, which is running a research programme about independence (http://www.davidhumeinstitute.com/).  The papers assess the viability of separation from the legal, commercial, fiscal and political perspectives and there is also a fascinating benchmark of how the Basque country managed separation from Spain.

Strong messages emerge.  An independent Scotland would probably be financially viable in the short term.  Oil revenues could fund the balance between public spending and tax receipts although it is unlikely that they would create the budget underspend that Norway has managed to accrue over fifty years.  The SNP are possibly being disingenuous with the facts, public and welfare spending being much higher than they may wish to admit (Quinn, 2012).  The European Union would not allow an independent Scotland to simply inherit membership – it would have to apply in the same way as Romania has done – and the use of the Euro is out of the question.  Other EU states would doubtless challenge any reduction in corporation tax.  If Scotland retains the pound then much of its monetary policy would be driven by the decisions of the Bank of England whose principle interest, rightly, would be the rest of the UK.  If Scotland developed its own currency and pegged it to the pound, as Hong Kong has successfully done with the US dollar, it would require an expensive financial regulator.  The markets may take some years to build trust in the new state’s fiscal policies, causing the credit rating (currently AAA) to drop and the cost of national borrowing to increase.  Scotland would doubtless gain some measure of UK assets – not just oil revenues but also embassies and a share of the BBC licence fee - but it would also inherit a fair share of the national debt, equivalent to two thirds of the national income (Johnson and Phillips, 2012).  Oil revenues, oft listed by the Yes campaign as the source of not just wealth, but excess, are fantastically volatile and reducing (McCrone, 2012).  For Scotland to attract on-going inwards investment it would require an airport to rival Schiphol or Heathrow, but where would that be built and how would it be funded?  In short, failing to think through the details would be ‘costly and risky’ (Quinn, 2012).  It is of interest that the Basque experience (termed Devolution Max in the Scottish context) increases the amount of resources per capita to the devolved entity but does so at the expence of poorer regions within the remaining union.  This increases stresses across the community as a whole and does nothing to reduce further secessionist demands (Colino, 2012).

Put simply, I believe what Winston Churchill wrote in 1936: “The Union has grown strong the longer it has lasted.”  Independence would be completely against the run of history.  I was brought up partly in Dumfries, partly in Leeds, and partly in Edinburgh.  I went to university in Belfast and having married an Englishwoman, settled in Yorkshire.  Only then, in my thirties, did I move my voting rights south.  I served in a British regiment in the British army in which the battalion colours (red, blue, and green) referred to their historic recruiting areas.  The idea of independence is abhorrent.  Tearing apart the United Kingdom is to rip my mother from my father.

Taking the three pillars of the SNP argument in turn, I do not believe that a vote for an independent Scotland would make the country more democratic.  The referendum franchise is extended to 17 year olds but does not include the diaspora.  It has been decided that being non-resident we do not care, and this is simply wrong.  I care deeply: all my blood relatives live in Scotland and if I were to retire there I would have just as much interest in its future stability as the current teenage population.  McCrone (2012) states that 610,000 Scots emigrated between in the 1950s and 1960s, the equivalent of 130% of the population of Edinburgh.  A rough survey of my classmates identifies that roughly half now work in England or abroad, meaning that there could be over a million and a half interested but disenfranchised parties.  This is not a democracy I recognise.

An independent Scotland would not be more prosperous.  Measured by Gross Value Added (an assessment of productivity) Scotland is, currently, a net contributor to the UK, as is London and the South East.  The other regions of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland are net users of this wealth.  But it is a fallacy to say that independence would mean everyone in an independent Scotland would become richer.  There will always be regions that produce and others that consume and in a smaller state the resource available to support the needy would be reduced.  Independence could be devastating to those who depend on the state for their wellbeing.

The SNP appear to think that Scotland is one nation and that independence is equally attractive throughout.  I challenge this.  I think the appeal of it is mainly held in the cities of the central belt and that the reverse view exists in the liberal north and the conservative borders.  The SNP did very well in the 2011 election but this was fought within the context of a devolved parliament operating within the UK whole.  They would be unlikely to sustain such a broad majority in an independent country, especially once a credible opposition took shape.  A vote that narrowly scraped through in favour of independence would be catastrophically divisive and could spark further secessionist demands, as was the Basque experience (Colino, 2012).  There would be those who gain, sure.  But this would be localised and in the short term.  An independent Scotland could never provide long term benefit to all.

Sitting back from the hubbub and blether it strikes me that the independence vote is essentially an emotional one.  If you want to believe that an independent Scotland will be rich, no statistics will persuade you otherwise.  Conversely, the unionist argument is always presented in rather dull, rational terms: how Scotland benefits from UK fiscal regulation and market trust.  Alistair Darling lacks popular appeal but he has managed to push the hard questions into the public agenda, and Salmond has failed to answer them (Campbell, 2013).

The Unionist vote needs to define its emotional pull, the reason why people like me – the British Scots – feel as strongly for the Union as anyone does for independence.  In Leeds Town Hall, Billy Bragg talked movingly about a diagram he once saw that showed the correlation between declining membership of a (trade) union and increasing wage inequality.  Paraphrasing the lyrics of one of his songs, a union protects the rights of the weakest in society.  Independence for Scotland would build a wall that removes the mutuality and power of the Union while placing the most vulnerable at risk.  

Bibliography 

Bragg, Billy, Tooth and Nail tour live at Leeds Town Hall, 25th November 2013

Campbell, Alastair, Blog: If only Smart Alec Salmond could have brought himself to say ‘don’t know’ to some of the questions on website: http://www.alastaircampbell.org viewed December 2013

Churchill, Winston, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Volume 3 – The Age of Revolution, Cassel: London, 1970

Colino, Cesar, Devolution-Max a la Basque: A Model for a Scotland within the UK? The David Hume Institute: Edinburgh, 2012

Johnson, Paul and Phillips, David, Scottish Independence: the fiscal context, The David Hume Institute: Edinburgh, 2012

Kelly, Owen, Scottish Independence and Financial Services – an Industry Observer’s Perspective, The David Hume Institute: Edinburgh, 2012

McCrone, Gavin, The Scope for Economic Policy After Independence, The David Hume Institute: Edinburgh, 2012

Quinn, Brian, Scottish Independence: Issues and Questions, The David Hume Institute: Edinburgh, 2013

The Scottish Government, Scotland’s Future: Your Guide to an Independent Scotland, Edinburgh, 2013 Websites:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13305522http://wingsoverscotland.com/http://bettertogether.net/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_rating   

Please do not sit here - a cultural study of Ryanair

April. I am going to be working abroad for a couple of months. My client is a manufacturing company with a loss-making plant located half way across Europe. There are two options for getting there: the Jet2 flight from Leeds or the Ryanair flight from Manchester. I chose the latter because it departs earlier on Monday morning and tell myself that the horror-stories are exaggerated. In truth, I actually admire the CEO for daring to be different. He managed to turn a profit in a highly geared industry throughout the global recession. Though one might question his public persona, he could never be described as duplicitous.

I get up at three in the morning, drive to Manchester, park in the multi-storey, and then weave past the stuttering queue of passengers pushing hold baggage to the check in desk. I have squeezed my laptop, diary, notebook and five day’s clothing into a small case that fits within two of the three dimensions Ryanair imposes. Over the weekend I was sent an automated email yelling at me to ensure I comply with the restrictions, but due to the wheels and the documents I have crammed into the front pocket, the depth of the bag is about five centimetres too large. I stride across the concourse thinking up things to say to anyone who challenges me: my bag is perfectly acceptable on any other airline; I used this very bag on a flight to Dublin last year and you didn’t challenge me then; it fits perfectly into the overhead locker – why does it need to be any smaller?

The worry makes me hot and sticky, something I want to avoid as I am in these clothes for the next eighteen hours. I tell myself to be calm. If I am challenged I will just have to accept what happens.

I snatch a Massimo Breakfast at the Italian trattoria, then dash for the boarding queue which is already clogging the corridor. The occupants avoid each other’s eyes. I take my place at the back and check my pockets: phone, passport, boarding pass, glasses.

Down at the gate, a woman in the lurid Ryanair uniform has started checking the dimensions of all cabin baggage. This must be the famous baggage inspector, something I have heard about but never believed to be real. She carries a cardboard box that slips over passengers’ bags. Having approved the tidily professional business travellers at the front of the queue she sets about the gaggle of middle aged tourists behind them. She tells a beige-clad lady to place her handbag inside her cabin bag. The woman colours, then clumbers down nervously onto one knee. Her actions are rushed. The zip sticks. She forces it and then places her handbag as flat as she can across her underwear before pleading with the zip to close. The lid bulges. It doesn’t look like it will shut but then it does. The woman stands up, relieved, pressing up on one knee. She lifts the bag upright onto its end. The baggage inspector tilts her head like a sparrow, then primly moves on to the next person in the line. She looks like she is revelling in the discomfort she is causing. I exchange glances with my neighbour. His lips are tight. It has taken nearly five minutes for this public repacking to take place. My bag is not the largest of those around me but it’s not the smallest either. My neighbour’s is a nylon black rucksack that bulges out in all directions. I remove a novel and a newspaper from the front pocket of my bag and squeeze the sides together as best I can. Then I realise I have booked a seat. This enables me to nip forward into the priority boarding queue, which has already been through the baggage screening process. Walking down the line past the inspector I feel that I am dishonouring the sanctity of the queue and somehow evading a just punishment that we all should endure. I tell myself not to worry. In a second my boarding pass is torn apart and I am skipping through the gate and down the steps. I have survived the cull.

May. I am impressed with the workload of the staff on the flight but cannot help wondering if they make life hard for themselves. As soon as I have taken my allocated seat they chivvy others to sit in any free position, separating families and partners. The crew leader mumbles something about needing to pushback within the next five minutes and this creates a mild panic as passengers ram their bags into the nearest overhead locker then dive for a seat. Throughout the flight the staff patrol the plane no fewer than twelve times: to check seatbelts, to sell drinks, to take food orders, to serve the food, to peddle scratch cards, bus tickets, electronic cigarettes, more drinks, more food, landing cards, charity raffle cards and then to remove litter before making the final safety check prior to landing. The near constant blizzard of inaudible announcements followed by the staff hawking down the aisle has started to annoy me. I don’t make eye contact and sit in sullen isolation, pretending to read.

This time I am in row 2DEF, behind the bulkhead. I like this position: it has dedicated overhead lockers and more leg room than on the other side. In front of me is a custard-yellow wall with the airline’s harp logo emblazoned across it. I am struck by the androgynous nature of the harp’s figurine. It leaps engagingly into space, the legs and wings gracefully poised. The body is athletic, pert, and powerful. The outline of the breast is tight and round. But then I notice the head; how square it is, how certain and proud is the lift of the chin. It looks, to me, like the head of an eager young man on the body of a woman.

The staff have been changed from the ones I was starting to recognise. The crew leader is Irish but the remainder of the crew are Eastern European. They take it in turns to announce what will be sold next, each as inaudible and inarticulate as the last. I don’t hold it against them but I don’t buy anything either. The constant hard sell has become wearing. I try to sleep, anticipating the three-hour drive I have when we land.

We touch down. The plane taxis off the runway to a trumpeting broadcast over the tannoy: “Welcome to another on time flight from Ryanair… Ryanair, for the best on time record and the lowest prices.” Someone unclicks their seatbelt and the crew leader has to hiss at everyone to sit back down until the aircraft has come to a complete stop and the captain has switched off the seatbelt sign. I look at my watch. We are landing fifteen minutes later than last week and yet we are still on time. How did we manage that, I wonder?

June. I am certain of it now. It happens every journey, even if there is no turbulence. The crew leader unhooks the telephone handset from above his seat, turns away from me, then mutters to someone in the cockpit. He laughs then places the handset back in its cradle. There is a resonant bong as the seat belt sign comes on. He lifts the handset again to announce to us all that the captain has switched on the seatbelt sign and would everyone please return to their seats. The aisle is to be cleared of hand baggage and the toilets are not to be used at this time. He then locks the toilet door (there’s a bolt under the toilet sign) and the staff congregate by the food trolleys, unfazed by having to work though the impending turbulence.

But there is no turbulence. The flight is so stable that the wings don’t even flex. I realise we are being pinned down in our chairs for the trolley to move freely. I am angered by this, astounded at the cheek of it. Is it legal? Thankfully, I don’t need the toilet while the trolley is going down the plane, but others do. Ignoring the seatbelt sign, a mother and child fumble their way forward. The child is red faced and unhappy. With one hand he grasps the groin of his trousers. His mother holds his other wrist and tries to open the toilet door, but it is locked. The child hops from one foot to the other. The crew leader tells the pair to sit back down as the seatbelt sign is still illuminated. The mother argues but the crew leader has no option but to enforce the law. The boy wails pitifully. His mother urges him to hold it in a little while longer then drags him back to their seats. The crew leader turns away from me, picks up the handset and speaks in hushed tones. Miraculously the seatbelt sign goes off almost immediately. The toilet is then unlocked and the mother barges forward: “Excuse me please, coming through…” The crew leader smiles at her. The mother is wonderfully expressive in her gratitude to the crew leader but I am filled with uncontrollable rage at what I think I have just seen. It strikes me that having the authority to say when you can and when you can’t pass water is one of the most awesome powers available to man. It enfeebles. It reduces all of us to the role of incontinent child.

July. I am told that my contract has extended and therefore I can book flights for the next few weeks. This is good: if I book early the flights are cheaper and there is one more thing crossed off my ‘to do’ list. But I still keep the job till last, dreading the moment when I have to battle through Ryanair’s website. Every text field has to be entered from scratch. There are pages and pages of offers one has to positively decline rather than voluntarily accept. No, I don’t want Ryanair Talk. Or parking in Manchester. Or a city tour. Or a bus ticket. Or car hire. And no I don’t need insurance, I’ve already told you that. And if I did want a cabin bag that fits your demands, how do I know you won’t change them in the future? How would you get it to me?

It takes half an hour to book three flights. The overall cost is about the same as if I had got two flights from Jet2, so I am confident I can prove that I am doing everything possible to keep overheads down. But why don’t they just have a loyalty scheme that remembers my passport numbers and expiry date?

Then I get an email from a market research company asking for my impressions of a recent flight. Would I fill in the survey? You bet I would.

To be fair, I am usually impressed with the staff. I’ve seen them maintaining discipline when the entire aircraft was laden with stag and hen parties. I’ve watched a crew leader gently calm a party down who, having started on the gin at six in the morning, were cackling raucously by ten. Once, when I had paid for a seat on the fifth row, a crew member saw how cramped I was and suggested I move to the empty front row so that I could stretch my legs. My gratitude was unbounded: at over six foot I dread the cramping, dehydrating effects of air travel; how it plays havoc with my digestion, disrupts my sleep patterns, and leaves me stiff and headachy for days. On another occasion I watched a bubbly scouse crew leader trying to explain the word ‘tara’ to one of her Eastern European colleagues. The comedy of this discussion was hugely enjoyable for everyone in earshot. On the feedback survey I complain about the use of the seatbelt light as an instrument of enabling sales. I complain about the baggage inspector. But I forget to ask why they don’t ever pay for an airbridge and make us walk down the steps, across the tarmac and up the stairs. Or why they leave us standing forlornly to board the plane. Or why I was refused tap water and forced to pay exorbitantly for a miniscule bottle. Or why the cramped seating cannot be alleviated by employing the always vacant rows 3 and 4. The nub of the issue is, I insist, about their attitude to their customers. On my most recent flight the reserved seats were adorned with a poorly photocopied A4 sheet on which was written ‘please don’t sit here' above a logo indicating a crossed-out seated man.

August. The survey must have been read by someone. For two weeks I notice that the crew don’t ask the cockpit to put on the seatbelt sign before they have to wheel the trolley down the aisle. I am pleased with myself, but the practice resumes when the next crew take over the route.

I am once again in row 2DEF, sat in the middle. The man next to me is as tall as I am. He’s asleep, his novel about to fall from his lap onto the floor. His legs are crossed and due to their length, one foot extends out beyond the bulwark into the aisle. The trolley comes up from behind us. The woman is struggling with the weight of it. She rams it forward to get the wheels over the plastic strip that joins the carpet to the rubber matting in front of Row 1 and in the process traps my neighbour’s foot between the corner of the trolley and the bulwark. He wakes with a sharp yell. “Excuse me, could I get through please,” the crew member snaps as she continues past. My neighbour curses to himself, rubbing his ankle. The crew member neither apologises nor acknowledges him. He looks for a brief moment like he is going to remonstrate with her but then changes his mind. I imagine him being afraid of further humiliation in front of the cold and distant travellers just waiting for this all to be over.

September. There is a documentary on television that describes Ryanair as taking shortcuts. Almost immediately I see that the airline is planning to take the programme makers to court. I then read in the paper that they have had to issue a profit warning. The article gloats about the shouting that would, no doubt, have issued from the Ryanair boardroom. Standing on the stairs before getting on the plane the following Monday morning, the man next to me says that he heard the boss of the company was recorded as saying, “Well, we’d better start being nice to people.” I snort, doubtful that a culture so institutionally dismissive could ever change. If there was an alternative I would take it, I say. People around me turn and nod in silent agreement.

But the truth is we want Ryanair to survive. We need its cheap flights and efficient service. We just want to be treated better. The stories I mention are all true and I have mapped them against Johnson and Schole’s cultural web model to describe the company’s behavioural norms: the routines we have to endure; the symbols we are blasted with; the cold control mechanisms; the utter domination of even out most basic human needs. Does the profit warning mean the power structure will change? We will have to see. I hear they are planning to allocate seats, change the website, and implement other initiatives that will ‘improve the customer experience’. On my last flight I got offered the chance to buy a calendar showing Ryanair hostesses posing in bikinis, almost provocatively, on a beach. I am told that there were several applicants for every place on the photoshoot. I shake my head. The cultural web model looks like a flower, the petals representing the constituent parts of an organisation’s culture. They are organised around a central element, the paradigm, which captures the essence of the whole and forms the lens through which the petals should be viewed. I try to imagine how I would describe the paradigm of Ryanair: something gaudy and androgynous; something surprisingly uncertain about its identity; something that responds to our basic cravings but that can also be cruel, transactional, and mercenary.

Now what does that remind me of?

Notes: Johnson, G. and Scholes, K. Exploring Corporate Strategy: Text and Cases 3rd Edition, Prentice Hall, 1993.