Grand Finale of a Great Project

Speaker A Let me say one more thing just to close off the story, because it relates to my point about bullshit and where we're at in trying to take thorough forward and get an audience and have an impact. You could look at Brown's career in the end as a magnificent failure for a couple of reasons. One is that he believed that the institutions they had embedded in Glacier would outlive, that they would be resilient enough to outlive the sale of the company to associated engineering. And on the whole, they didn't. They needed Wilfred there whipping them on, really. So to that extent, his belief that they were so obviously right and they would have that resilience, not true. The things over the years fell apart. Although I mentioned the other day that a number of the people I mean, I learned that the Sony Corporation, when they were setting up New South Wales, for example, were looking for an HR boss for their big factory in Bridger. And the chief executive of Sony Corporation instructed them to go looking for somebody from Glacier. And they got one of the one of the HR bosses from Glacier went across to so the Japanese understood this was important as they tend to one other thing. After Wilfred's period at the Board of Trade, he was there from 64 till 70. So he was working in government. He had this wonderfully naive view that once he retired from government, that the offers to sit in various boards would flow in. Now, that's the point. By that time, they'd got the measure of him. They knew how uncompromising, how stupid he wasn't. I mean, the English just hate that. So this is a story he told against himself. The otters never came, so he was beyond the pale. He was a pariah precisely because of the clarity of the authority. No bullshit. It's a kind of a sad but fitting end to the tale. But there you have it. So that underpins our difficulty. And then I made a little list of things I'll close on this. What's the value proposition? And I think that we share the same problem as Wilfred. There's nobody in this conference who is extremely bright, and frankly, I don't think we'd be here unless we've been decently parented. I think there's a combination of intelligence and easiness generosity which goes with this work. It's in the nature of the best. People out there don't share this. So I think that people who are selling this product now, leadership, it's our people will follow us to the ends of the earth. That's a very attractive proposition. People who are selling quality, the market will beat a path to our door. That's an attractive proposition. BPR business process re engineering. Our system will run the smoothly as a machine. Irresistible, seductive systems thinking we can all be really smart. What's the Ro value proposition like? To me, it's something like nobody will have any wriggle room. It'll be like Lol Brown saying it's like this and it's this uncompromising excather. It's not attractive to people. Most the thinking I've been doing in the course of these last two or three days is thinking about what are the ways you can come to market obliquely and get in and build up those partnerships. But I suspect we all need to do it. I'll bet each of you who's doing good work will be in some kind of partnership of a long term character like that. Thank you for pulling all this together. I'm going to read and reread and reread this paper. Thank you. I'm delighted to have an audience. I should mention that's my little Australian book, there's a whole chapter about this.