Writing on the Wall The Campaign for Commonsense Business

Geoff Burch on... Marketing "people who offer marketing, often have names like Jervaise or Tarquin, and they gambol and caper around their west London offices with sheer excitement at the prospect of 'marketing' your (product)...I used to have mobs of pitchfork and blazing brand-wielding marketing people beating a path to my castle gates by suggesting that the whole marketing thing basically sucks, but that may not be true. After all, you can even get a degree in it, by jiminee." Consultants "Hiring consultants is just like hiring mercenaries...amuse yourself by drawing the analogy between the two...When you choose your mercenary/consultant, you don't want the hair trigger 24 year old MBA. You want the Yul Brynner, man in black, with a few scars, a piece of ear missing, well used guns, a black hat, and eyes like steel bearings. Be warned, you only control him while you pay him." Human Resources "If you recall the early black and white Frankenstein movies, Professor Frankenstein was always portrayed as tall, aquiline, darkly handsome, and of course barking mad, but he was always accompanied by this poor, twisted hobbling mad thing...Now every chief executive has one of these, and he's called the Human Resources Director. It is his job, amongst other things, to judge people's (sorry, 'the resources') performance against goals, targets, and objectives...He then has to report to El Supremo on this performance. The trick is that this performance must be expressed as a number and not one that relates to anything from the real world."Burch, Geoffrey is the author of 'Writing on the Wall The Campaign for Commonsense Business', published 2002 under ISBN 9781841120430 and ISBN 184112043X.