***
I left London on the M4 motorway, past Heathrow and Windsor and took the Slough Central exit, Slough being pronounced 'Sluff' by its detractors of which there are many and with good reason. This exit leads directly to a hotel I use which is located before you reach the town proper. It was early afternoon when I checked in. The hotel belongs to one of those good American chains, pleasant service, rooms always of the expected quality and everything as it should be, you can count on it. Just the way I like it. You can keep those English hotels with their crooked stairs, innumerable fire doors obstructing the passage of both yourself and your luggage along innumerable narrow corridors, creaking floorboards, tiny rooms and ridiculous shower contraptions.
I left the serious luggage in the car, went up to my room, unpacked my overnight case and lay down on the bed, time for some brief relaxation. Except that Mr. Jeremy Parker had made an abrupt and unwelcome intrusion into the gourd of my skull again.
O.K., I told myself, that's it, you are going to get him out of your brain once and for all, you are going to check out a couple of items on your laptop and if any of his facts are significantly wrong, you will have reconfirmed what you have already decided, namely that he belongs on the pile of flotsam (or jetsam if you prefer) which constantly floats past us on the tides of our lives.
Well, I checked. His facts were accurate, only minor differences. Which indicated nothing, so what? I checked my emails, nothing requiring any action on my part, and I decided to do a bit of computer training with me playing White against the King's Indian Defence. I stuck to the classical system in which White plays an early knight to f3.
There is no point in trying to play at a certain level unless you continuously add to your knowledge of the various systems, their possible variations, their possible sub-variations and the concepts hiding behind them all. The concepts are important, you need to know why you are making the moves you are making, you need to know what your positional objectives are and which are the pressure points. Among other things, it saves thinking time if your opponent makes an unusual—and therefore possibly weak—move; after all, you only have 2 hours on your clock for the first forty moves. It also helps to keep you concentrated on the strategic aims and tactical possibilities as you move away from the opening theory and into the middle game.
At some point in time I snoozed off. I woke up just before 8 p.m. and strolled the ten minutes to one of Slough's Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi enclaves—I can’t tell the difference—and into the Taj Mahal. I ordered what I always order there, a Madras curry, hot but Indian style hot, not one of the scalding infernos they prepare for the English and which serve as a feigned justification for the consumption of large quantities of beer. My curry was washed down as usual with some water and a white house wine, cold and dry.
Back at the hotel, I spent a couple of hours checking through my notes for tomorrow's management presentation. It makes for a better performance with everything more or less rehearsed and partially memorized. And then it was into bed, and I fell asleep reading 'Serenade'.
DAY 4
Allow me, if you will, to briefly explain how I came to be a self-employed consultant and how I do my work.
After university, I started working for a multinational which eventually transferred me to its international headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Geneva, sitting placidly on its lake at the spot where the Rhône exits, with its Jet d'Eau, its old town, the French Mont Salève dominating its southern skyline, the Jura mountains to the North, France just five minutes away, the Alps just around the corner, the elegant Swiss-French mother-tongue, and the girls; oh yes, the girls.
Thanks to the multitude of international organizations and multinational corporations based there, it seemed to me as if there were millions of these creatures all over the place. Just looking at them warmed the cockles of my heart, and other cockles as well.
Life's ocean waves continued to be kind to me. They washed me gently ashore and into several available female coves, if you will forgive the choice of phrase. They also threw large chunks of luck my way at work. Over a period of several years, I worked on major projects in our manufacturing operations in France, Italy and Spain and in our marketing subsidiaries in Scandinavia and Greece. I learned about production, purchasing, finance, treasury, sales and marketing and other things, and I learned to listen to employees at all levels—mainly because most of them knew a lot, and I didn't.
And after a few years, I resigned. I resigned because I figured I could enjoy life a lot more and also earn a lot more money, and more quickly, if I were my own boss. And whether or not that would be so, is something you never find the answer to unless you go and do it. A risk. Yes indeed, it is difficult to discover new horizons if you are too afraid to lose sight of the shore in the first place..
And another reason was because Geneva, like everything else on this planet, was being severely devastated and destroyed by the non-stop construction, the streaming masses of human reproduction and the improperly controlled immigration. Ask any elected birdbrain. More, he will proudly tell you, is better.
And the ghastly areas full of African, Asian and Eastern European prostitutes, pimps and drug-pushers, and the corresponding growth of sex clubs and sex shops, a million vibrators and dildos on sale, all housed in buildings growing shabbier and shabbier by the minute, were now visually available to the young genevois children and were assisting them, no doubt, in their early understanding of what this planet is all about—even in the erstwhile pristine, educated, and romantic city of Geneva.
Progress is what our elected birdbrains call it, and all of it engineered or permitted by themselves; except of course that we have to listen to their bleating about how nothing is their fault. Indeed they are paid large salaries, but they have neither the authority nor the responsibility, it must have been somebody else.
So Geneva had disappeared (I’ll go back one day to see if they have managed to reverse any of the city’s self-inflicted diseases), and I became a self-employed consultant. No capital required. I deal with loss-making companies only, usually manufacturing ones, and only those with fewer than 500 employees; more than that and I would need a team.
It takes me between two and three weeks to tell them whether I can get rid of their losses in the short-term, short-term being within 12 months—or whether I can't, I don't see it, maybe somebody else can. I do this by interviewing employees at various levels, and I use the two ears and one mouth ratio, i.e. I listen a lot. And for a very good reason—at any level, these people tend to know more about their business than I do. I also look at the companies’ products, I go through their balance sheets—many a slimy worm creeps out of that swamp, I can tell you—and I do a thousand other things. And if I can see how to get the company churning out some profits again and if they want me to stay and do it, then I cost €1,200 per day plus expenses.
Cheap, I tell them. If you hire a consultancy firm, they will send you a production expert, a sales expert, a marketing expert, a finance expert, a purchasing expert and maybe other experts as well and it will cost you a daily fortune. And you may well end up with a report full of recommendations, many of which are not feasible, or are inappropriate, or require large amounts of capital investment which is simply not available. And, of course, after the report you will be involved in more vast consultancy fees if you want them to stay and help you to actually do something about it.
I, on the other hand, write no reports. I fix things. I believe there is a solution for every problem. There are plenty of people who don't of course. There are plenty of people who believe there is a problem for every solution. Or there are the people who can see a problem but assume there is no solution. Or, worse still, there are the people who cannot even recognize that a problem exists.
And—I tell my potential clients—you will find nobody like me, but nobody, who can be contractually fired overnight if you don't like his performance, and without having to state a reason of any kind or
pay me a single day's extra fee.
So, that's me, I've been doing this for years now. Word gets around, and I have had plenty of customers in plenty of countries. I have the languages, and where I don't, English is the magic elixir. And it doesn't matter what the companies' businesses are, I learn quickly. I am successful and I always have customers. So far, that is.