Tag: business challange

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Elon Musk probably wants to rid himself of dead wood and make room for the go-getters

Elon, Elon. What’s going on? You’ve done some crazy-but-it-might-just stuff over the years and proved the haters wrong: PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, the 10 children, the Twitter takeover. But I fear you have finally lost it.

When you start channelling Jerry Maguire and yelling “Go hardcore or quit! Who’s with me?” Nobody is. Not even Renée Zellweger’s goldfish.

That’s not our way here in the Old Country. The secret to the American Dream is in the name, Elon. You can punch your fist in the air as high as you like. But exhorting anyone in these shores to do anything just leads to awkward silence.

In fact, we are considerably more famous the world over for our awkward silences than our dreams. That’s at the best of times. You don’t have to be Dickens to recognise these look suspiciously like the worst of times.

Bank of England, UK city,
Photo by Expect Best on Pexels.com

We are in the midst of a “unique labour shock”. The Governor of the Bank of England said that. And it didn’t have anything to do with Starmer’s post-Truss 39 per cent lead in the polls.

The labour market is in free-fall, due to a surge in early retirement and long-term sickness that has left Britain isolated among industrialised economies, according to Andrew Bailey.

NHS waiting lists have left a record 2.5 million people languishing at home due to long-term illness, up from 2 million in 2019. And it’s getting worse; an extra 133,000 people disappeared from the workforce for that very reason in the three months to September alone.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has just announced an extra £6.6 billion for the NHS over the next two years which theoretically could help the long-term sick back to work.

In practice, it would arguably be better spent on a fundamental reform of our sclerotic health system, however that doesn’t have the same crowd-pleasing splash as throwing ever more cash into the money pit.

At the risk of sounding like a Cassandra, Jeremy Hunt’s bitter autumn budget medicine looks unlikely to kickstart economic growth.

Vacancies are also unfilled in almost every sector, because those who aren’t sick are tired – and insisting they need to work from home and walk their lockdown dogs – instead of schmoozing their way to promotion.

The number of job vacancies in the economy remains around the highest on record, meaning competition is driving up wage costs.

“Skills and labour shortages have reached crisis points…it’s a ticking time bomb for firms up and down the country.” That comes courtesy of the British Chamber of Commerce. Not much Build Back Better dynamism to be had there.

During her leadership campaign, Liz Truss launched an astonishing broadside against British workers, saying they needed “more graft” and suggested they lacked the “skill and application” of foreign rivals.

Mind you, she still got the gig, so presumably the facts spoke for themselves and nobody thought that it was particularly controversial. But workshyness isn’t just a British malaise.

A survey this week revealed that “mass French lethargy” risks cutting productivity at a time when the French are already “unhappy with their purchasing power and the state of public services”.

The study by the French Institute of Public Opinion showed that while in 1990 around 60 per cent of French people said work was “very important” to them, that figure has sunk to 21 per cent.

But back to Twitter and Elon’s eccentric belief that “hardcore or quit” will achieve anything other than a swathe of voluntary redundancies here in lazybones Britain.

Could it be that was his intention? It’s certainly less time-consuming than sacking his team one by one, which seems to have been his modus operandi thus far.

But he probably wants to rid himself of dead wood and make room for the go-getters. Oh dear. The only thing the average member of the British labour force wants to go and get is another latte. I’m not sure what the answer is, but Elon is at least a workaholic, so I expect he’ll come up with something. Or run the entire shebang himself – the algorithms could do with improvement judging from the ongoing chaos over suspensions, blue ticks and the random culling of followers.

“A company is a group organised to create a product or service, and it is only as good as its people and how excited they are about creating.”

Guess who said that? Why yes, Elon himself. He has pledged to develop new social media solutions. But first he must tackle a very pressing people problem.

Judith Woods
17 November 2022 • 6:48pm
Judith Woods

Telegraph

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Thank goodness, we are now able to move on from Covid.

The fact is the government and media are way behind most of the population and certainly those of us who need to run businesses. the disgrace is that vested interests, of many who work in the Public sector servants of society have trumped private business.,

Sage scenarios vs actual: an update

16 January 2022, 7:00am

Modelling from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine showing Covid beds occupied (19 December)Text settingsCommentsShare

‘Deaths could hit 6,000 a day,’ reported the newspapers on 17 December. A day later documents for the 99th meeting of Sage were released which said that, without restrictions over and above ‘Plan B’, deaths would range from 600 to 6,000 a day. A summary of Sage advice, prepared for the Cabinet, gave three models of what could happen next:

  • Do nothing (ie, stick with ‘Plan B’) and face “a minimum peak” of 3,000 hospitalisations a day and 600 to 6,000 deaths a day
  • Implement ‘Stage 2’ restrictions (household bubbles, etc) and cut daily deaths to a lower range: 500 to 3,000.
  • Implement ‘Stage 1’ restrictions (stay-at-home mandates) and cut deaths even further: to a range of 200 to 2,000 a day

After a long and fractious cabinet debate, the decision was to do nothing and wait for more data. ‘Government ignores scientists’ advice,’ fumed the BMJ. But the decision not to act meant that the quality of Sage advice can now be tested, its ‘scenarios’ compared to actual. 

Sage/Warwick hospitalisations

Let’s start with the Warwick model. It published various Covid scenarios depending on Omicron’s possible ‘severity’: 100 per cent as severe as Delta, 50 per cent, 20 per cent and 10 per cent. A UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) document released on New Year’s Eve said: ‘the risk of presentation to emergency care or hospital admission with Omicron was approximately half of that for Delta’. 

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Restrictions should be dropped “completely” once the top nine priority groups have been vaccinated, a senior Conservative MP has said as he warns ministers against “changing the goal posts”. 

Mark Harper, former chief whip and chairman of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), said he feared the goal posts for reopening society were being shifted beyond the original focus of NHS pressure and daily fatalities. 

“I think what people are worried about is you then keep hearing other things creeping into the argument about the rate of infection and other things keep being thrown into the debate which sounds like it’s changing the goal posts,” he told the BBC’s World at One. 

“I think we should keep focused on protecting the vulnerable, reducing deaths and hospitalisations and the pressure on the health service – and those are the two things I think that need to drive opening up.”

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Of all the charges made against Brexiteers, the notion that we ‘don’t understand the modern world’ is the one that some Remainers have most often returned to; their equivalent of the boxer’s stinging jab that relentlessly wears down an opponent. In a global system increasingly dominated by a handful of big players with huge populations and land mass – the US, China, India, Russia – being a medium-sized nation in Europe without the umbrella of the EU was supposed to be a mug’s game.

In the European Parliament, that arch-federalist Guy Verhofstadt would often refer to the countries of Europe as ‘dwarfs’ who needed to band together to compete in such a world. We all remember Barack Obama trotting out a similar thesis during our referendum campaign, delighting David Cameron’s Downing Street team by saying that Britain would be at the ‘back of the queue’ in trade talks because he would look to deal with ‘a big bloc, the European Union’ first.

When Boris Johnson decided last spring to stay out of the European Union’s Covid vaccine programme out came the jab again from the usual suspects. The Prime Minister was accused of being ready to sacrifice British lives on the altar of a hopelessly outdated Little England ideology – ‘silly Brexit games,’ said Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey. The EU’s massive combined purchasing-power was going to leave us scrabbling about for crumbs.

The Brexiteer answer to such charges has always been that, in fact, there are many advantages to acting as an independent nation state – quicker decision-making processes, the ability to pursue national priorities, more accountability to the public. These arguments have often been summed up by deployment of the word ‘nimble’.

Well, ‘nimble’ has just beaten ‘big bloc’ hands down on the most important post-Brexit issue Britain has yet faced and is likely to face for many months – the provision of life-saving and economy-saving vaccines.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has compounded its hideously embarrassing, ultra-bureaucratic failure to secure its own supplies by resorting to bullying, tantrums and ultimately full-on meltdown in the form of its triggering (and subsequent u-turn) of Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol to implement a hard border.

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