Hit the road Positive leadership for troubled times - ICAEW

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MAKING THINGS
Sixty years ago, royal souvenirs were almost all
made in Britain. Those on offer for this year’s
jubilee are almost all Chinese. This book is the
story about what happened and why, as former
Labour business secretary Peter Mandelson put it;
“We have forgotten how to make things.”
Coming from a former Daily Telegraph reporter,
this is no left-wing diatribe but there is plenty of
blame to go around. The list ranges from the
arrogance of both management and labour that
the British public “should be grateful for what
they were producing regardless of its quality or
relevance” through to “treating Europe as a
handicap rather than an opportunity”.
One scapegoat is “sheer bad luck”. The Comet
jet airliner is an example, where terrible new
lessons about metal fatigue, which twice caused
catastrophic failure to the fuselage in mid-flight,
were learned by aero-engineers the world over
– not least those working on the Boeing-707. The
other is “good old fashioned incompetence”: the
runway at the Gloster aircraft works was too short
to allow completed aircraft to take off.
Britain accounted for almost 40% of the world’s
shipbuilding industry in 1950, but used methods
Surrender:
How British
Industry Gave
Up the Ghost
1952-2012
By Nicholas
Comfort
Biteback Publishing, £20
F&M RATING
from before the first world war. The production
methods developed by the American shipyards in
the 1940s were the ones adopted by countries that
soon became our rivals. Just 13 years after the war,
both Germany and Japan were launching more
tonnage every year than Britain.
In the index former minister for technology, then
industry, then energy Tony Benn has 15 separate
page references. Two lines down, world wide web
inventor Tim Berners-Lee gets just one. This not
only tells you something about the book, but a lot
about what’s happened to British industry.
There are success stories, too. Martin-Baker, the
family-run manufacturer of aircraft ejection seats,
has saved 7,630 lives. (Never mind shareholder
value creation: how many lives has your company
saved?) The tone of the book is one of head-shaking
astonishment. In short, a very British book about
a very British decline. There was something quite
motivating about it, however. I wanted to dig out
my old Meccano set and make something.
READER OFFER: Save 10% with free p&p by emailing
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Finance & Management in your email.
WORDS: ANDREW SAWER
PARTY INVITATION
Ever since the 1997 launch of CFO: Architect of
the Corporation’s Future, the finance community
has been well served with a succession of titles
aimed at hauling CFOs out from behind their
spreadsheets. Not many of those books
manage to reach the high-water mark set 15
years ago, but The New CFOs comes close.
This is not a technical manual. It’s more
readable, satisfying and more likely to drive you
forward. Yes, it is about leadership, but it is also
well grounded in the finance function. It talks
about controls and communication; building a
great “finance factory” and risk management.
There’s a smattering of guru-isms (“Your
respect equity”) but this is an accessible book.
It has the right number of Venn diagrams,
flow charts, quadrant diagrams, the compulsory
finance function pyramid and other graphical
paraphernalia – which is to say, not very many
at all. For the most part, it lets the words do the
talking, not arrows and spirals ripped off from a
PowerPoint presentation. In fact, a lot of the
The New CFOs
By Liz Mellon,
David C Nagel,
Robert Lippert
and Nigel Slack
Kogan Page, £34.99
F&M RATING
words come from CFOs and other experts.
Moreover, the authors – three of whom are
US-based – deserve praise for looking beyond
their own shores for quotes, from the likes of
Douglas Flint, former FD and now chair of HSBC,
London Business School Dean Sir Andrew
Likierman, and Allister Wilson at Ernst & Young.
Their quotes are enlightening and valuable. The
authors clearly enjoyed meeting these people.
One of the best bits wasn’t written by the
authors but by Zarin Patel, CFO at the BBC, who
wrote in the foreword that excellent finance skills
will get you the invitation to the party: “But if you
are to play a leader’s role in making the party
swing, then you need to be able to deploy a wide
range of non-financial skills too. Otherwise you’ll
be the wallflower with the calculator at the party.”
If this book impresses Zarin Patel as much as it
evidently does, then that should be
recommendation enough for many people.
READER OFFER: Save 20% with free p&p (UK only):
simply visit koganpage.com and enter the
promotional code CFO20 on the checkout page.
Offer expires 30 June 2012.
FINANCE & MANAGEMENT MAY 2012 9