Often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte and I think I remember it from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, a very good book to have a read of especially in the highly politicized office environments I worked in.
You can try and help people out but often they choose a course that looks very dodgy and will lead to failure or disaster. Many people don't want to know and find it hard to take advice or perhaps enter into a conversation about it. You learn your lessons when you are young and you learn to deal with these things. Cover your arse in writing used to be the other thing and confirm all instructions in a memo. Now of course, email is more prevalent and probably easier to cover your actions when you can see the disaster unfolding.
I found out the hard way that you have no friends (or very few) in business and so after a very quick baptism of fire, I used the tactic on never interrupting anyone when I could see that they neither solicited or wanted my help. There is a malicious side to me that takes a sort of "told you so" glee at the downfall of a peer or better still a more senior manager or director. It's really a lot better when they realise that you did warn them but they carried on regardless.
Those who knew me well, employed me because I was a planner and thinker, a specialist in programme management and risk mitigation / management as well as being someone who was technically switched on. So my job would throw up commercial and technical risks as well as things around planning too. I had a rule that said if I had tried three times and no one listened, then they'd be cast adrift if you like. By that I mean that if I need to tell you more than three times you weren't listening to me in the first place, you were head strong and didn't need my advice or were just plainly ignoring me and not engaging. So that sort of meant they didn't need my advice and I would then go into a different mode of distancing myself from what would be happening 6 months to a year down the line. I would just go about my part of the work covering the warnings in a "told you so" series of reports and memos that no one took any notice of until the postmortem.
It was at those reviews I would take my file of memos or list of emails or whatever and present my side of the story to the horror of some, the bemusement of others and the anger of those made to appear stupid (dear reader they didn't need to appear for they were). I could appear all innocent and present the advice I have provided, the risks, the mitigation plans etc that had all been ignored. ON many occasions I could show with uncanny accuracy what the future of the project held if my advice wasn't heeded.
It sounds a bit "big headed" but it was just me trying to do my job and if I was ignored, it was me covering my position. Of course, I took great inside joy in the accuracy of my predictions but anyone who had any common sense would have seen these disasters coming.
Silly things like overusing overtime to complete a part of the project - you pay one and a half times to double times more for the same level of production. If you'd managed it properly and got the right resources in then that wouldn't have happened and the huge losses were caused by paying up to double for the same amount of work. Other things included not making everyone productive, not covering the costs of all the changes and so on. It's basic, basic stuff and so obvious. Lots of other things but a few common ones there.
So, it's actually a problem (in myself) in that there's a duty to point these things out but it isn't worth making enemies doing so and it is actually quite fun to watch these people have their car crash moments in full view and in some way you subtly letting them know that you warned them enough times but you let them have the car crash anyway. Today's car crashes are going to happen with our current government and the inept politicians we have now and for the past 20 years really.
There's all sorts of rubbish coming our way and you can see with every policy decision and twist and turn that the crash is about to happen. The MSM are bigging up the economy today saying that the interest rates will come down and the stock market is up and blah blah blah. I really don't see it at all, not from what I've seen and heard and certainly not from industry if half the rumours are to become reality. The tinkering and adjusting are all ideologically driven but have no real slowing down of the speed of the car crash we are going to be in, in fact, it looks as if they've stepped on the gas pedal. There's no room for growth in terms of energy costs, taxes and if inflation is really running at two and a half percent then I'm a Dutch Man's Uncle. It's probably around double that, more if you look at energy prices and the price of groceries at the local shops.
With close to three trillion pounds of debt, our feckless politicians are p1ssing around with minutiae of a million here and a million there when they truly need to be taking a holistic view of this. All of our services don't work, the bloat of public services is ridiculous and there is just a part of the problem. Then by making it difficult for the real wealth generators to operate without being hit for more taxes and overheads the problem collapses in on itself.
Anyway, join me with a bag of popcorn and watch the car crash happen. It won't be the first time they've painted us into a corner but woe-betides us if the IMF get involved again. Maybe they were looking to write their book "How to destroy an economy in six months" I think we just let them have the crash and watch how stupid they'll look. Incompetence at its finest on full display.
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