Mr Bojangles

What are the odds of that?

2012-01-20T23:21:00.000-08:00

At the recently concluded African Gifted Foundation Academy that took place in Kampala, Uganda a brilliant maths teacher from South Africa, Thomas Hagspihl, delivered a talk entitled "Beauty and Elegance in Mathematics".

I have to say it was probably one of the best maths lectures I have ever attended. It made me feel that perhaps I could have been a mathematician after all even though I was pretty average at maths (despite having the nickname "ADDIKO" at school for having scored 104% in an Additional Maths exam once. But that's another story).

What he seemed to be able to do was take quite challenging mathematical concepts and present them in a way that made you feel you grasped what was going on and that left you wanting to know more.

For example, for the first time I got a proper sense of the futility of playing the lottery. Apparently the chance of winning the (UK) lottery jackpot is 14 million to 1. I hear those words but they didn't mean much to me. I couldn't get my mind around them.

In just a few minutes, Thomas put it in to language that I really understood. He made me realise just how big a million actually is.

Take a matchstick (he said). Let's say that it has a width of a millimeter. So, if we stood a million matchsticks next to each other in a long line, how far would they stretch?

Well as each match is a millimeter wide, a thousand matchsticks equals one meter (because there are a thousand millimeters in one meter. Got it? So far so good).

And a million equals a thousand thousand, right? (1,000 x 1,000 = 1,000,000). So a line of a million matchsticks standing next to each other would stretch out a thousand meters. Or to put it another way, a football pitch is (say) 100 meters, so a thousand meters equals ten football pitches in length.

Right, a million tiny matchsticks standing up, side by side would stretch for ten football pitches. Gosh a "million" really is huge!

But to win the lottery jackpot, the odds are 14 million to 1. So here is what you have to do to win the lottery jackpot. Line up 14 times 10 football pitches worth of matches i.e. 140 football pitches worth of matchsticks. Then put on a blindfold, walk up and down the 140 football pitches of matches and pick ONE. If the ONE that you have picked is the same ONE that the lottery comes up with then hey presto, you have WON THE JACKPOT!!!!

I love it.

All in all a decent year

2011-12-26T11:20:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of 2011 I set myself three big challenges. All were in train as I went in to 2011 but I knew I had to stretch myself a bit to achieve all three. In fact I was a bit nervous that I had overreached and I wondered if I would be able to pull it off.

Fortunately, with a lot of help from a lot of people I managed to tick off all three, and in the last few days of the year pick up a bonus point too. So, all in all it was a decent year.

First on my list was the African Gifted Foundation. This is the charity that I set up to seek out and educate exceptionally gifted African children, particularly in the arena of mathematics and computer science. It is a big ambition and one that I will be devoting a lot of time and money to over the next decade and more. After much planning and preparation we finally ran our first ever African Gifted Academy in January 2011. We took 25 incredible young people from across Africa to a two week session held at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda. We flew in tutors from Cass Business School, from Bletchley Park and from the Space Academy to teach the young people about financial markets, codes and ciphers and space science. We invited Harold Wanyama, the East African Chess Champion, to run a chess masterclass and play all 25 students in a simultaneous match (all of which he won - just!).

Second was the opening of Hammersmith Academy, the new secondary school that opened its doors in September 2011. I came up with the idea for Hammersmith Academy in 2005 and led its creation over six years and I am incredibly proud to be its chairman. Hammersmith Academy is the UK's first secondary school with creative and digital media and IT specialisms. It is an amazing school and houses TV and radio studios and technology to die for! We paraded in the Lord Mayors Show in 2011 and a couple of weeks ago I spoke to the 240 students at our end of term assembly after our first ever term. Magical.

Third was the launch of my new venture, Nodddle. After taking a break in 2010 I got back in to the start up game towards the end of the year as part of Callcredit, the private equity backed credit reference agency. Starting from a blank sheet of paper, we decided to shake up the consumer credit report industry by announcing free-for-life access to your credit report. We researched consumer needs, looked at what the competition were up to, came up with a knock out proposition, created a new consumer brand, build the technology, gained support for the investment, ran a 6 month trial and finally in the week before Xmas launched Noddle in the market in partnership with the UK's largest price comparison site, Moneysupermarket.

Oh, and days before Xmas, Garlik the company that I founded back in 2005 was acquired by Experian. Sitting alone in a small, serviced office with two desks, a flipchart and some coloured pens I created a brand new type of company, with a brand new brand, using brand new technology, attracted and recruited an excellent team, raised the venture investment, rode the venture through its ups and downs over five year, taking it to the point where we were recognised as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. To have it sold to a great home is an excellent result and I hope the guys there will build it in to the international consumer business that it deserves to be.

So, in 2011 I launched an African charity, launched a secondary school, launched a new business and exited my last one. I am not always good at patting myself on the back, but I think on this occasion I am going to give myself a "Good effort, lad".

Now bring on 2012 !

Lord Mayor's Show

2011-11-16T12:47:00.001-08:00

On Saturday 12th November I had an excellent time marching proudly along at the front of the Hammersmith Academy float at the Lord Mayor's Show, with our sponsors the Mercers' Company and the Information Technologists' Company.

I say "float" because it was a float, in that it floated. An inspired idea by Master Mercer led to the creation of an inflatable balloon version of our school, held down by a number of sturdy Liverymen, selected for their natural ability to hold down inflatable floating schools. Along with thirty two students armed with rattles, plus teachers in gowns and Liverymen in robes, we made a very lively party.

We assembled early in Mercers' Hall and were treated to a sumptuous breakfast of sausages, bacon and egg washed down with lashings and lashings of tea, coffee and orange juice. Suitably fortified, we set off for our assembly point in to the snow blizzards and wild storms...okay I admit it, in to the rather pleasant, sunny November morning and prepare to wait around for an hour or so.

The Lord Mayor's Show has a history stretching back hundreds of years. For 785 years Lord Mayors have paraded from the City of London to Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown, supported by the City's Livery companies. Today a wide range of floats join in, representing all aspects of City of London life. Tens of thousands of people line the route waving and cheering, politely of course as this is the Lord Mayor's Show after all. Someone described it to me as "[Notting Hill] Carnival for the middle class" although to be fair there were cheering onlookers from all walks of life.

Once we started parading, I realised that we were supposed to wave like royalty. I hadn't considered my waving strategy but quickly worked one out. Wave and smile, wave and smile. I discovered that you can make someone's day by selecting a random onlooker, looking in to their eyes and directing a wave and a huge smile STRAIGHT AT HER!

As we passed Mansion House, where the Lord Mayor himself raised his hat to greet us, I was accosted by Clare Balding of the BBC for a short interview about Hammersmith Academy. With me was an exceptional young lad, Frank. Before the interview, fearing that he might be a bit nervous I jokingly asked him "have you every been on TV before?". "Oh yes" he replied in a relaxed, almost off-hand manner, as if to say "of course I have, you funny old man, do you think you are the only person who appears on telly?"

In our 30 seconds of interview time, (at 50 mins 27 secs) I tried to get across how much I am fascinated by the combination of literally hundreds of years of City tradition with the most modern, exciting, high tech school in the country. Liverymen have been founding schools for over 500 years. We have founded this new one and it just blows my mind to know that in 500 years time our school, Hammersmith Academy will be back at the Lord Mayors Show celebrating its anniversary. Liverymen, selected for their natural ability, will probably be supporting a hovering hologram of the school using thought-projecting helmets, but the students will still have rattles and make lots of noise.

That's what I love about the City. When we say "a hundred years time" we mean a hundred years time. When we create schools, we build them to last. For us its not just a fad or the latest wheeze. It's our purpose. It's what we do.

It took about half an hour to get to our lunch stop. We parked our float and ran off, leaving the Liverymen tied to the balloon before there could be any suggestions of the rest of us taking our turn! Besides, I'm too light and would have blown away if there was a slight gust of wind. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Next to us was a military float. Their float didn't float. Because they had things that looked like tanks. They were probably armoured personel carriers but they looks like tanks to me.

Small boys eyed the tanks. Soldiers eyed the small boys. There was some uneasy shuffling on both sides. Then all of a sudden, excitable boys were being lifted on to tanks by proud soldiers whilst us adults looked on as if to say "errr, did someone allow for this in the health and safety manual and, errr, how do I get to climb on the tank too without looking like an idiot?"

We marched back, proud, tired, still waving, still looking people in the eye and finally came to the end of a marvellous day out. One young lad said to me "Are we nearly back?" Yes, I said, don't worry we've nearly finished. "Ohhh", he said "I don't want it to end."

Well, let me tell you. Economic crises will come and go. Government's will rise and fall. Wars will be fought. Men will land on Mars. History will sweep by. But the City of London will stand firm. The Lord Mayor's Show will parade. Hammersmith Academy will endure. Don't worry, lad. This is the City of London. It doesn't end.

The cleaning lady at Number 10

2011-10-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

This morning I attended a round table discussion at No 10 Downing Street with a bunch of other mostly middle-aged-men-in-suits (us men-in-suits are like a tribe all of our own. Gang culture for the middle class, over 40’s).

I won’t bore you with our conversation but for those who haven’t visited No 10, the pantomime is always interesting.

Even if you have been to No 10 before, and I’ve been a couple of times on social occasions, it is quite fun to be invited. Over breakfast I did a lot of “Oh, is that the time? I must dash. Got to get to No 10 for a meeting”. “What are you doing this morning? School? Work? Me? Oh, nothing really. Just popping in to No 10 for a meeting.” My teenage son remained resolutely unimpressed. My wife almost hissed.

Getting in the front door involves navigating security. They seem to allocate very large policemen to the gates of No 10. I’m 6 foot (okay, okay, 5 foot, 11 and a half) but this chap towered over me. I wore my best City chalk stripe suit and proper tie “that looks a bit like an old school tie but isn’t actually an old school tie” tie so that he wouldn’t mistake me for a rioter and spray me with a water cannon. They are very polite, even when your name is spelt incorrectly on the list and they can’t find you. But eventually, after navigating the tough looking security lads in the hut, who try to appear all chatty and informal but you get the feel would relish the opportunity to see a bit of action, you get to walk towards the famous Big Black Door.

The Big Black Door always opens just as you get there. I had rather wanted to knock but I guess the doorman is peaking through the keyhole as you walk towards it (or perhaps a thousand hidden cameras, a drone or two and a satellite are peering down at you, watching every footstep). The uniformed doorman asks your name. I assumed he was being friendly as he didn’t take a note of it or check any lists, but it has just occurred to me that perhaps there are a bunch of faceless young men in suits listening to your answer ready to “take you down” if your name is not expected.

All phones are left in reception, so no live tweeting from the meeting itself. Except for the PM’s special advisor who laid an array of smartphones on the table in front of him, presumably to taunt those of us who were having blackberry withdrawal symptoms ten minutes in to the discussion.

There is a complex science to seating people at these meetings. Charming young chaps shimmy around with place cards, getting the positioning just right. Minister in the centre (but where is the centre?). A note taker here, an advisor there. A gaggle of Government types at one end, quietly wielding immense power. And us invited guests carefully placed around the table. I don’t know what the seating criteria are but I ended up being placed directly opposite the Minister. I tried to stretch my legs out under the table to play footsie but couldn’t quite reach.

There is a particular way of speaking at this type of meting. It was quite similar to when I was doing something for the Secretary General of one of the UN Agencies in Geneva. We are being Very Senior People. If you are being Very Senior People it is important to speeeaaakkkk veeeerrry slooooowly and in a rather deep voice. Speak slightly more quietly than you would normally so that people need to strain a bit to hear. You must look slightly bore. You can’t be excited to be there. You must endorse something. It doesn’t matter hugely what is it, but emphasise that you “ECHO WHAT THE MINISTER SAID AND FULLY ENDORSE ....the choice of biscuits”. Then as you are Very Senior People, you must calm things down by issuing a fatherly word of caution. Whist you encourage youthful enthusiasm you (smiling, but slightly tired eyes) just want us to think about the implications of spilling hot water whilst making tea. Remember also that Very Senior People never commit to anything. That is a skill honed over many years and many tricky meetings.

Lifestyle Partner: would you like your dinner now?

Very Senior People: I FULLY ENDORSE the concept of dinner and I applaud your decision to push down that path. Over the years I have been served with many dinners and I would just caution the risk of dropping food on your own lap. But I am certainly optimistic about the dinner situation moving forwards and its positive impact on the global economy.

Lifestyle Partner: oh for goodness sake, why don’t you go and boil your head

Possibly the highlight of the meeting involved the No10 cleaner. I suspect there is more than one No10 cleaner but it is nice to think that there may be just one lady who pops in “of a Wednesday morning” to dust and vacuum.
As the meeting progressed we heard a vacumming noise in the next room. We tried to ignore it and it would rise and fall as she moved around the room. Then the Minister spoke and was in full flow as the huge door was flung open and Mrs Moppet the cleaner burst in to the room waving a very noisy vacuum cleaner. Very Senior People are not used to this sort of thing. We wouldn’t accept it in our own home/office let alone at No10. The whole room went quiet for a fraction of a second. She looked horrified. We looked horrified. We looked at the Minister. He laughed. We all laughed as if it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to us in our whole life. Phew. Panic over.

The meeting ends. You shuffle around waiting to be led out (don’t go wandering off – faceless young men waiting round corners will probably “take you down”). Don’t forget your phone at the front door. Stride out of the gate, hoping that tourist take photos of you thinking that you are Somebody.

Then, pop, you are outside the No 10 bubble and back in the real world. From Very Senior People to civilian in the blink of an eye. You fish out your oyster card and jump on the tube, watching people watching you and wondering whether they are thinking “he looks like he’s just been to a meeting at No 10”. Sorry to burst your bubble. They aren’t!

On Being Mixed Race and Quantum Physics

2011-10-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

The BBC is currently showing a major series on Mixed Race Britain, fronted by George Alagiah.

I have a particular interested in this give that I am "mixed race". I am also a physicist (or at least I read physics at University) (by which I mean I occasionally turned up to lectures that had the word "physics" in the title - much to the surprise of the lecturers). As a mixed race physicist, I naturally find myself asking what being mixed race has in common with quantum physics.

The conclusion that I come to is that the aspect of quantum physics that best helps to explain the experience of being mixed race is wave/particle duality. It's obvious when you think about it.

To provide a one line explanation of wave/particle duality (that will be immediately debunked by anyone reading this who has any knowledge of quantum physics, and such clever people I am sure will provide a much clearly and correct explanation rather than just saying "that's not right")...the principle states that matter (stuff) and light-waves behave like both waves and particles, depending on whether they are being watched. Or to put it another way, look at the behaviour of something like an electron. Does it behave like a particle? YES. Does it behave like a wave? YES. What? Did you just answer yes to both questions? YES. That's confusing. YES. Does it depend on how it is being observed? YES. Do you answer all questions in capital letters? YES.

As I mentioned, I am mixed race. White mother, black father. Mixed Tom.

Growing up in the UK (mostly) in the 60's and 70's was interesting. In those days, we knew how to "do" racism properly. Who doesn't remember having 20 kids standing around you in a circle chanting that inspiring song

"Hey Tom
Wogs the matter?
Feeling a bit Browned off?
Didn't have your Coon-flakes?
Nigger mind
Go Black to bed
You'll feel all White in the morning"

So, as I entered my teens, I was very clear that being "mixed race" in London meant being black. I began to shape my confused teenage identity in this context.

Then, when I was in my mid-teens, my Dad took me to live in Nigeria, West Africa and I discovered something rather confusing to a sensitive teenager wrestling with issues of identity. I changed colour. Who doesn't remember being followed up the road by groups of small, smiling children chanting

"Oyibo pepe
If-e-eat-e-pepe
You go yellow more more"

(rough transation: White man, pepper. If you eat pepper, you will turn that funny yellow colour that white people become in the sun)

Followed by shrieks of laughter as the whiteman in question (me in this case, in case you have got confused) turned around and chased them away. I lived as an Oyibo for about eight years before returning to the UK and switching back to being black again.

Even today, when I travel to Uganda, in East Africa, for my African Gifted Foundation, I am generally referred to as a Muzungu i.e. white man in Swahili. My Ugandan sister is known in her village as the woman with the muzungu brother.

Tom, are you black? YES. Okay, are you white? YES. What? Did you just answer yes to both questions? YES. That's confusing. YES. Does it depend on how you are being observed? YES. Do you answer all questions in capital letters? YES.

Wave/particle duality explains being mixed race perfectly. It's really very clear. I don't know why George Alagiah needs a whole BBC series to explain it. Understand quantum physics and wave/particle duality and you will understand me completely. It's that simple.

First day of school

2011-09-10T01:13:00.000-07:00

Six years ago I decided to create a new school, designed for the 21st Century.

A school that delivers an outstanding education for everyone, that specialises in creative and digital media and information technology and delights in using the best technology in the world to inspire young people to create their own futures and to succeed.

An early and very special conversation with Michael Marchant in a coffee shop in North London turned the idea from a dream to reality.

I teamed up with some great people and sponsors, the Mercers and the Information Technologists Company. I travelled around the world learning from some of the most innovative schools out there, from High Tech High in California, to Kunskapsskolan in Sweden and Thomas Telford School in the UK.

We found an amazingly supportive local authority, Hammersmith and Fulham, that welcomed us with open arms and found a site for us to build the school. We teamed up with Barnsley Hewett and Mallinson, one of the best educational architects in the UK, Wates Construction, an outstanding building firm and a world class group of educational and building advisers. We formed a close relationship with the incredible St Paul's Girls School, one of the best schools in the UK.

We worked closely with the Department of Education, enjoying several Ministers and officials but with a couple of individuals who shared our vision and showed exceptional commitment to helping us create something very special.

We assembled a hand-picked team of teachers with a level of enthusiasm and energy that I have rarely seen, led by a headteacher who emerged from a gruelling selection process that started with nearly 100 candidates.

When we went out to the local community inviting parents to send their young children to a school that didn't exist yet the response was overwhelming. Over 650 applications for our 120 places.

And on 8th September, 2011, six years later, I stood and watched the first ever group of students, resplendent in their Hammersmith Academy uniforms file in to our school, their school, shaking hands one by one with the Headteacher, as a group of waving mothers and one very proud founder and Chairman shed a few tears.

Plan B

2011-08-20T00:22:00.000-07:00

Do you have a Plan B? I'm not talking Plan B. I mean Plan B.

There is a view that if you have a plan B, it implies that you are not really committed to Plan A. I don't subscribe to this view. I always have a Plan B and usually Plan C, D and E too.

I think this is particularly important if you are a start up guy. If you are running a large corporate merrily executing your plan A then you can pretty much see the warning signs well in advance. You have months to gradually adjust your course, lobby your colleagues, change your messages so by the time you get to the crunch point your plan B merges seamlessly with your plan A. In fact it looks like plan B was plan A all along.

But if you are a start up guy, major shifts happen literally overnight. A key supplier that accounts for 60% of your business pulls the plug. Your VC backer tells you they are fully committed one day and sells their stake in you the next. Your critical tech guy is poached by someone who will pay her in actual real money.

If you don't have a plan B in your pocket and you are caught flat footed it can be Game Over. So, you execute plan A flat out. But the very second something goes wrong and you have to shift your strategy, you do it. You don't go in to a lengthy strategic review. You reach in to your pocket, pull out plan B and start executing that instead.

I am quite comfortable with doing this. I think it comes from my "tai chi" mindset that I apply intuitively to most things I do. Yin and Yang. Always looking for balance. Always ready to shift weight from one leg to the other to make sure I am properly balanced before I strike.

How good was your start in life?

2011-07-31T17:16:00.000-07:00

Many years ago when I was a lazy good-for-nothing teenager whose top priority was seeking out the next bottle of beer and the odd cheeky cigarette, my father, in a fit of annoyance or possibly just stating an indisputable fact, said "if I had your start in life the sky would have been the limit".

It is a comment that has stuck with me over the years and may have made me feel guilty about wasting the start in life that I had been given (hah - his cunning plan worked!). It was a fair comment to be honest, and when I consider the start in life he had I have to admit that I don't think I would have achieved a tenth of what he did. On the other hand, I think I've done okay so far given the cards I was dealt and where I decided to play them.

Thirty years later, I find myself considering the start in life that my own children have had and how it compares to other young people today from more and less priviliged backgrounds and to my generation. Naturally, being a scientist by training I immediately had the desire to capture my thoughts in a formula, so that I could assign everyone a meaningless score and rank us all on a rather silly index.

Thus was born the Start In Life Index, whereby everyone has their own SILI Score that shows clearly where you are starting out from and how far ahead or behind the pace you are verses your peers.

The function underpinning my SILI Score is straightforward enough. It goes like this

SILI Score = f{IG, IC, NP1, NP2, EU, ES, CC1, CC2, PA}

The SILI score ranges from zero to 100. It is UK specific, geared towards young people just embarking on their careers post-education and it has all the validity of any other index that you might find in the average lifestyle magazine measuring your "snoggability" or your suitability as a cat owner.

If you score upwards of 90 then you have no possible excuse for not becoming a multi-millionaire banker, top City lawyer, head of the United Nations or a senior Government Minister. Achieve anything less and you have frittered away your amazing start in life. If you score 30 or less, then you are doing an incredible job just fighting your way past the closed, massed middle-class ranks who will, as a matter of course, be occupying all the middle ranking jobs.

So, let's get down to businesss.

The SILI Score is divided in to five categories

Inherent Features - things about you that you can't change. So deal with it.

Network - they say who you know matters. Well guess what, they are right!

Education - or as someone once said "education, education, education"

Cultural Capital - read a good book recently? Good. But don't forget to turn on the radio

Personal Attributes - Got that glint in your eye and fire in your belly? Hmmm...have you considered seeing a specialist?

Simply go through each category below, answering the question and allotting the appropriate number of points and hey presto, your SILI Score will emerge. For what it's worth mine was a modest 38 out of a possible 100.

Inherent Features

Gender - male 10 points

Gender - female 6 points

Colour - white 10 points

Colour - brown/other 6 points

Colour - black 2 points

Network/Who you know

Parents - have lots of millionaire/well connected mates 10 points

Parents - have a few millionaire/well connected mates 4 points

Personal - 20+ of your friends are in/starting professional jobs 6 points

Personal - 5+ of your close friends have millionaire/well connected parents 4 points

Education

University - Oxbridge 10 points

University - Other Russell Group 4 points

University - any UK 2 points

Secondary - Eton 10 points

Secondary - Other top public school 6 points

Secondary - Independent/good grammar 4 points

Cultural Capital

Sports - skiing 4 points

Sports - rugby 2 points

Sports - cricket 2 points

Sports - golf 2 points

Social - galleries & museums 4 points

Social - classical music 2 points

Social - regular foreign holidays 2 points

Social - familiarity with Radio 4 2 points

Personal Attributes

Strong communication in Queens English 4 points

Persistence 4 points

Ambition 4 points

Speaks one of French, German, Spanish, Mandarin 4 points

Can walk in, look anyone in the eye and shake hands confidently 4 points

As you will see by skimming through the choice of proxies and scores, this whole index says more about how I think British society works than anything else. It says interesting (I think) and probably controversial things about my beliefs such as

in the UK, your gender and colour are still strong factors in the early stages of your career and its not as simple as being white or black. I'm afraid it is a bit easier being mixed in Briton today than being black (I wonder if this is controversial or obvious? I guess I am about to find out!)
your parents network of contacts carries as much weight as your own
Oxbridge still stands out and grades are pretty irrelevant. A second class degree from Oxbridge in any subject easily trumps a first from any other University, except in very specific disciplines
At secondary school level Eton is way above the rest, whether they like it or not, but once you get beyond a handful of other schools (Westminster, both St Pauls', Harrow perhaps) no-one else really counts
your kid can play all the football they like. It doesn't count. Rugby, skiing, cricket is where you build lifelong friendships that will matter ten years later. If you play golf, it's because Father does and you're playing at his club, so you're sorted, mate.
you can go and visit museums and so on, but if you don't have Radio 4, The Archers and The Shipping Forecast wafting around your house in the background, the cultural capital that matters isn't going to sink in to your bones
it's not enough to be a confident talker. You are going to have to work on your accent. The more you sound "Home Counties middle class" the better set you will be

So, there you have it. The SILI Score is a foolproof way of measuring how good your or anyone else's start in life is. It's not silly at all. Oh no, not at all. Not at all. And if only I'd started out with a score in the high 80's I might have made something of myself.

Are jeans smart casual?

2011-07-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a question for you. Do black denim trousers count as smart casual?

I think they do. Some of my colleagues think they don't.

Today I am wearing proper black shoes, black socks, black underwear, a light blue button up shirt with cufflinks, no tie, a beige jacket and black DENIM trousers. I think I look smart and casual. I feel smart and casual. Therefore I AM smart and casual.

But apparently I am wearing jeans. Therefore I am not dressed for real work. Never mind that I am negotiating multimillion pound deals, structuring complex projects, trying to hire brilliant people. I can't be serious because I'm wearing jeans.

I heard a phrase recently "casual dress, casual attitude". It was delivered as if it was fact, and was received with approving nods. I listened with disbelief. Some of the laziest, most political, work-shy, hang-your-suit-jacket-on-the-back-of-your-chair-so-it-looks-like-you-are-still-at-work people I know have been hard core suit and tie merchants. No smart casual for them. Strictly proper business attire. Some of the most creative, driven, passionate, innovative, won't go home, work through the night people I know have been the scruffiest people you'll meet.

I fall somewhere in between. I am a smart casual guy. I will force myself in to a suit and tie if I have to, for a Board meeting for example or for a client meeting if I know that its a strictly suit wearing culture. But that's about it. Around any office I work in I'm smart casual at best.

But what is smart casual? Well, here's a pretty good definition. Yep, that'll do it for me. And in the definition I choose, black denim trousers count as smart casual. So, I'll keep wearing them until one of my courageous colleagues decides that they have nothing better to do than to try to educate me in how to dress in a way that stops me from having such a casual attitude. Then I'll switch to wearing a dress instead.

Casual dress, casual attitude, indeed!

Referring to yourself in the third person

2011-06-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

Is it weird to speak about oneself in the third person? Tom doesn't think so. But clearly his colleagues do.

It is that time of the month when Board reports have to be produced and Tom always writes his own reports as he assumes that every word is carefully poured over and analysed. So he thinks carefully about the message and chooses every word deliberately.

This month, Tom wanted to make a particularly clear point about what he thought we should do next. But he also wanted to make it clear that it was his view and not necessarily his colleagues view. He thought about saying "I think this..." but he decided that it would not look professional in a Board report to say "I think this, I think that...". He thought abut saying "The view is this..." but decided that merely invited the question "who holds that view?"

So he plumped for "Tom believes that we should do xyz.... Tom feels that we should.....". Satisfied with his handiwork, Tom sent off his beautifully crafted Board report and went off to bed.

Imagine his surprise when the Big Boss turned to him in the meetings and said "so, Tom, look me in the eye and confess, who actually writes your Board reports?"

"I do" Tom replied indignantly causing much unwarranted hilarity amongst his colleagues. Tom couldn't tell whether they were laughing because they didn't believe him or because they thought it was weird to refer to oneself in the third person, or just because they were taking cruel delight in his discomfort.

But Tom did write the report. He did refer to himself in the third person. And he doesn't think there is anything weird about that at all. Gollum does it all the time and Tom is a hard core Lord of the Rings fan. What's good enough for Smeagol is good enough for Tom. Isn't it my precious? Yes, yes it is, my dears. Oh yes. Not weird at all.

Welcome to Noddle

2011-06-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

About eight months ago I joined Callcredit, the credit reference agency, in a new role to revolutionise their consumer offering by launching a fresh, innovative new venture under the Callcredit umbrella.

It has been a fascinating journey so far, starting with consumer research and market analysis, developing propositions, more consumer research and testing, brand development, technology build, convincing money men to put up the considerable funding required, briefing opinion formers, regulators and the media and finally after lots and lots of effort we have got there.

Tomorrow (Thursday) we are announcing our new service, Noddle that will have a big impact on our market and will tilt the balance firmly in favour of the consumer. I am a huge believer that individuals should gain more and more access to their own personal data, wherever it is held, and should be able to leverage that information to their own advantage. You will see me getting more active and vocal about that.

If you are wondering why Noddle, it's because we went down the path of exploring how you as a consumer can use your credit report in a positive way to your advantage. Be smart. Use your head. Use your noddle.

(If you think it should be "use your noodle" you are probably a southern softy. Up North, my colleagues tell me, the correct phrase is Use Your Noddle).

I am really proud and excited. Those of you who have started new ventures know that there is nothing like the moment when you create something new, step out into the world and say "here we are".

Well, here we are.

Noddle: Go use your credit rating

I'm good at failing

2011-06-04T00:21:00.000-07:00

This week I have been doing presentations across the company telling my colleagues about the new venture that I am about to launch. Seven presentations to hundreds of people in three locations over three days. It was tiring but very useful, both to give me a chance to practice my "pitch" and also to work out answers to all the tricky questions.

One question that made me smile was along the lines of "Tom, this is all very exciting but what happens if it all falls flat on its face?"

The simple answer was, of course, that I will be polishing my CV (headhunters stand by...) but I think the real question was "how would you cope with catastrophic failure?"

The answer to that is simple too. I will cry with pain, agony and fury and then I will bounce back.

As a start-up guy you know that you will face failure. And I'm not talking about marginal under performance. I'm talking about big fat, lying in the mud face down failure. The question is, can you drag yourself up, with the smart boys sitting safely on a fence on the other side of the road pointing at you and laughing? Can you drag yourself up, look the world straight in the eye with confidence, wipe the mud off your shirt, notice that the mud tastes good and set up a new business selling mud pies?

Well, I have a good technique. When I fall flat on my face, I cry like a baby. Then I get up, brush the dirt off my shoulder and move on to the next challenge. That doesn't mean I put those failures out of my mind, but I learn from them and they stop me from ever getting complacent.

Some people try to put failures out of their mind and write them out of their history. I have met executives and entrepreneurs who, to listen to them you would think nothing had ever gone wrong in their entire life. But not me. My big fat failures are part of my story and I enjoy them now (not so much at the time). When I experience failure these days I can look back on these episodes and think to myself "I bounced back from that one, I can bounce back from this one."

So, here are some of my choice failures. Point and laugh, people, point and laugh. And next time you fail at something and think the whole town's laughing at you, say "Well, at least I don't look as stupid as that Ilube bloke."

No Snogging for you, lad

Wind back about 40 years. I'm in primary school coming back on the train from a school trip. In those days some trains had corridors with compartments that could seat six. Somehow I had ended up in the compartment with some of the "cool kids". I knew them all of course but I wasn't really one of them. Two boys and three girls. At some point the question of "snogging" came up.

After some discussion it was decided that we should pair up and commence kissing, until a teacher came. Two pairs immediately formed, but the third girl, who happened to be the prettiest girl in the class decided that I was unsnoggable. I sat quietly whilst my snoggability was debated. Who would. Who wouldn't. Finally it was decided that I just didn't make the cut so after a short selection exercise I was sent off to creep up and down the carriage, leaving the giggling gaggle behind, looking for the chosen one and tell him that he had to hotfoot to my carriage to be snogged by the prettiest girl in the class. He was very pleased and thanked me profusely.

But the happy ending to that story is....oh hold on. There isn't one. That's it. Fail. Cry. Bounce back. Move on. (Therapists - is this why groups of giggling girls make me break out in a cold sweat?).

#fail !

McJob Hunting

About 30 years ago I started job hunting. It was a difficult time to look for jobs, much like today actually. Recession. Lots of new graduates. A hundred applicants for each job. But I was a hard core job hunter. A one man personal recruitment agency. I applied to hundreds of companies. I laughed at rejections. I once applied five times to the same company until the European HR Director personally called me and said "Tom, you do not fit our profile so however many times you apply we will not offer you a job." I thanked her kindly, waited a couple of weeks and applied again :)

Anyway at one point, I spotted an opportunity for management trainees at McDonalds. I thought "surely I can't fail at this one". I applied and got an interview! Hurray. The interview seemed to go well but the next step was a "field trial". I was sent off to work for two days in a branch of McDonalds. I served large fries, flipped burgers, swept the street out front, told people that I had never met before to "have a nice day" and wore a funny shirt. But despite all this, a couple of days later I got a letter thanking me for my time, explaining that competition was very high and on this occasion McDonalds would not be taking my application forwards.

How can that be? Am I really the only black man in the world who can't get a job at McDonalds? Damn. If I had succeeded surely I could be a branch manager by now? Oh, well. Fail. Cry. Bounce back. Move on.

#fail !

Dialling for Dollars

In my time as a start-up guy I have pitched for investment over and over again. I would guess that I must have pitched to several hundred people. But as I keep telling people, you only need one to say yes. Getting turned down is par for the course here. I would think nothing of pitching 50-100 times to get to one "yes" and when I hear guys starting out complaining that they have done five presentations already and no-one has written a cheque I feel sorry for them.

That doesn't mean all rejections feel the same. Sometimes you really want to get a certain investor on board, you put your heart and soul in to it and you still get a big fat NO.

My worst experience of this was with a West Coast VC. I had been tracking these guys for years, not being too pushy. Building the relationship. Biding my time. Then the opportunity came up. I was in email dialogue with one of the partners, telling him that I was working on something pretty exciting. He said "hey, Tom, next time you are in the Valley swing by and pitch". I'm in!!! I seize the moment and say "How about tomorrow afternoon?". He's a bit taken aback but say okay.

So I dash to Heathrow. Grab a flight to San Francisco. Work on my presentation through the flight. Hire a car. Drive down Route 101. Get to the big boys office. Put my Game Face on. Turned my Swagga up to level 11 and walked in.

Five minutes in to my pitch. the big boys say "Hey, Tom. Let's stop you there. This is of no interest to us. Thanks for stopping by. See Yah".

Wow! I've had some knock backs. But that was a tough one. On this occasion I did actually go and sit on a bench in sunny San Fran, put my head in my hands and shed a tear. But then I heaved myself up. Shook it off. Came back to the UK and threw myself into pitching, pitching, pitching until I had raised the money I wanted to drive my business forwards.

Because that's how we roll. Fail. Cry. Bounce back. Move on.

#fail !

Alls well that ends well

I'm a planner. I come up with schemes, plans, strategies. Plan A. Plan B, Plan C. So failure never takes me completely by surprise. Even when it hits me hard, I have probably considered the possibility and run through the scenario in my mind.

Exception on one occasion.

Tunisia. Nearly 20 years ago. Hot, hot African Sahara sun. Lovely girlfriend. Diamond ring. Honourable intentions. Everything as I planned.

Me: Marry me?

She: Errr, no thanks.

Me: Oh. Ah. Okay. I didn't expect that.

#fail !

Fail. Cry. Bounce back. But in this case, not "move on". Just to show that all my failures don't end in disaster, I am happy to report that Me and She eventually got married (I can be quite persistent) and nearly 20 years later are still happily married with lovely kids and a great life. I do tend to bring this up from time to time though and She does tend to roll her eyes and heave a tired sigh.

So, people, fail. Fail fast. Fail hard. Cry. Bounce back. Move on and go on to do great things and live a happy life.

Or balance yourself carefully on the fence, point, laugh at us risk takers and be very,very careful that you don't really try anything because that way you can be certain that you will never really fail at anything.

Mid-life crisis

2011-05-28T12:14:00.000-07:00

As I prepare for my mid-life crisis, I have been doing some research to try to understand what goes on with men of my age so that I know where to direct my energies.

After all if I have to buy a sports car and drive around with my top off winking at ladies I am going to need to develop my abs (whatever they are) and shine the top of my head. Also I need to choose a car.

I don't know whether a mid-life crisis is compulsory or optional. I have been assuming that it is compulsory and the only optionality is timing. Which is just as well as I am very busy at the moment and would struggle to fit typical mid-life crisis activities in to my busy schedule.

In any case, what are these mid-life crisis activities? I understand that sports cars are an important ingredient, but I don't really know much about cars and I hate wasting money so do I really have to buy one, or perhaps I can rent one?

Also what about the girlfriends? That is not an area of expertise for me. In my experience (admittedly limited to my teenage years) they tend to giggle at your long neck, glasses and bow legs and are best avoided.

I suppose I could do something dangerous. Wrestle with an alligator? Swim with sharks? Throw myself out or a plane? I'm scared of heights. To be honest I'm a bit of a scaredy cat and wouldn't these things be a bit, well...dangerous?

Run a marathon? Too much effort. 400km bike ride? Might fall off and hurt myself. Learn a new language? I tried that once. Japanese. Spent ages and only learnt how to say "toothpaste" and "ministry of education".

To be honest, I think the whole thing is just too much effort. I don't think I'll bother with one of these mid-life crisis things that makes you take on all sorts of impossible challenges just to prove that your life isn't over and done with and you've still got something to offer the world before you are consigned to the wastebin. I will stick to launching major new companies, creating multimillion pound schools and founding pan-African educational charities. Oh...

Preparing for take off

2011-05-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

I love launching new companies. It's exciting and scary at the same time.

And now I am weeks away from launching another major new venture. It's got to the stage when everyone's heart starts to beat a bit faster and your palms becomes a bit clammy as you realise that the months of effort and planning are about to be exposed to the world.

We have been working on this new venture for nearly nine months.

We started by reviewing the market and conducting extensive consumer research. We made no assumptions about what direction the venture would take. We wanted to be driven by what consumers were telling us and the opportunities in the marketplace.

A proposition started to emerge and we kept testing it with consumers, in small, qualitative research groups. We tuned the proposition, focusing on what we were being told and we started to narrow down our target market.

We decided we needed a new consumer brand and went through a fun process of creating the brand. Three great brands emerged. We tested them with our target market and were left with two options. It was a tough decision but we made our choice and have ended up with a brand that will stand out in our market.

Meanwhile, we were going through cycle after cycle of business planning, presenting to the money men, refining the model, cutting out cost, reducing risk until we felt we had a model that works.

We put together a small, expert development team alongside one of the best user experience designers in London and they worked flat out to bring the proposition to life.

Now we are nearly ready. There is still a ton of stuff to be done .We have To Do Lists as long as your arm. But we've picked our date and we will be ready to go.

We will work and work and work and then it will go quiet. The calm before the storm.

And then we'll launch.

How far would you go to meet Wills & Kate?

2011-04-24T00:24:00.000-07:00

How far would you go to see Prince William and Kate Middleton?

I know how far I would go. 230 miles exactly according to Google Maps.

I know this because a few weeks ago I was invited to the opening of a school in Darwen. Being very busy I wasn't sure I would be able to go but when I was told that William and Kate would be opening the school I polished my shoes and the top of my head and set off to see them. This was, after all, their final pre-wedding engagement and therefore the closest I would get to the Royal Wedding.

Given that I am willing to jump on a train and travel 230 miles to look at William and Kate at very close quarters I have concluded that I am a die-hard Royalist or possibly a Loyalist. I thought I might be a Cavalier but having searched the web to check what it means I'm not so sure any more.

In fact I am collecting Royals. So far I have ticked off Prince William, Prince Edward, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne. I need to get Prince Charles and the Queen to get a full set. Then I get a special Royalist Stalker prize.

My favourite film

2011-04-01T10:32:00.000-07:00

Recently I was involved in a "get to know each other" exercise with a new team. We each had to fill in a form answering some questions and then we had to guess which set of answers belonged to which person.

After the event I reflected on my answers and wonder what impression the other folk made of me based on my answers. What do you think?

WHAT IS THE FIRST EVER DOWNLOAD/CD/TAPE/RECORD YOU BOUGHT?

Ballroom Blitz by Sweet. I'm a glam rock child of early 70's London. I knew all the words to this song.

FAVOURITE SONG?

That's pretty obvious. Mr Bojangles by Sammy Davis Jr.

FAVOURITE HOBBY?

I don't really have hobbies. I read, watch a few films, watch lots of rugby but my main hobby is Tai Chi.

FAVOURITE DISH?

Sausage and mash. I wish I didn't have to keep going out to posh meals. I also accept pie and mash.

FAVOURITE FILM?

Has to be the one and only Bladerunner. "I've...seen...things". What a scene. What a film.

FAVOURITE TRAVEL DESTINATION?

So many places. So many choices. But I went with San Francisco. I just like the city and get a bit excited whenever I have a reason to visit.

WORST EVER FASHION FAUX PAS?

Well, I used to have a bright white suit that I used to wear with a purple shirt and purple shoes. I also had a purple suit that I wore with a white shirt and white shoes. Both combinations with afro and dark glasses of course. Thankfully pre-digital camera days so I don't think there are any photos out there. But this was in the 70's so I think I was actually very cool at the time.

So I have to go with the time I went out wearing brown corduroy trousers and a brown corduroy jacket. Top to toe cords. It wasn't my finest fashion moment.

THREE WORDS THAT DESCRIBE YOU

1) Wierd

2) Passionate

3) Loyal

(I asked my wife and son what three words best described me and they both said "wierd" without even thinking about it!)

THREE THINGS ABOUT YOU. TWO ARE TRUE, ONE IS NOT. GUESS THE FALSE ONE

a) I once played James Bond in a film

b) I once played rugby on national TV

c) I met Prince William and Katherine

I think its fair to say that after reading these answers you pretty much know everything there is to know about me!

School report: Could do better.

2011-03-17T23:24:00.000-07:00

I attended Parents Evening at my son's school last week. Like many fathers of young teenage boys, one approaches these things with a degree of caution. And sure enough, teacher after teacher leant back in their chair with the words "Ahhhhh, so you are his Dad. Right, let's see..."

The general conculsion was that he is a "teenage boy".

When I got home, I sat the lad down and droned on for an hour in a fatherly way about the need to focus, work hard etc. Then I decided to impress him by showing him my school report from when I was exactly the same age.

That's where it all started to go wrong.

Or possibly that's where it all started to go right.

It turns out I was also a "teenage boy". In fact when I read parts my report my wife could hardly tell which was mine and which was my son's.

So, to give hope to all you teenage boys out there (not that you actually bother reading at all at this stage) here is the report of a 13 year old boy who went on to get several degrees, build several companies, become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, present alongside Bill Gates, be invited to attend Davos and do one or two decent things (I think) in education. So, parents, have hope. If your son's report looks anything like mine, all is not lost.

English: 66% Thomas works well with enthusiasm and intelligence. He is always willing to take place in class discussions

(where is my classic story about the potato? A masterpiece.)

Maths: 56% Tom works very hard when the work interests him. If he concentrated on the harder parts he could do better.

(I loved maths and loved the maths teacher. Made me feel special. Best teacher of my life. Wish I could remember her name)

Science: 31% Tom is a very capable lad but he is a great source of distraction to others and resents rebuke very strongly and spends a lot of lesson time sulking. A pity

(How ironic. I was actually always fascinated by science and went on on to get a degree in Applied Physics. But I really didn't get on with that science master. It was war every day.)

History: 61% Shows interest. Good project work.

Geography: 67% Work standard generally but not always good.

French: Grade A. A vast improvement since last year. 4th in group

(The result, I'm afraid, of a pretty French teacher replacing the old bloke we had the year before. Sorry. I was a teenage boy.)

Physical Education: Grade B. Unfortunately a change in Tom's attitude has retarded his progress. He continues to be an outstanding all round sportsman.

(Readers, please note: "Outstanding all round sportsman" :) But did he just say "retarded"? Can you write that in school reports??)

Music: Grade C. A capable but moody individual. Effort very variable

Drama: Thomas is very good in this subject, particularly where there is any movement involved.

(I am very proud of having been "Young Johnny Jones" in the school play. Although I didn't like it when they made me "black up". I refused to go on stage.)

Art: Grade A-. Has talent in this subject

(Hold on, capable in music, very good in drama, talent in art. Why did I end up as a computer geek?)

Metal work: Grade B. Has shown keeness and above average ability in this subject

(Do they still do metal work? We made some dangerous implements in that class, some of which were put to work in the playground...)

Form Teacher Summary: Thomas works well and in general has improved. But if he causes distraction to other in the class his work will suffer in the end. He must learn to concentrate a little harder and put maximum effort into his work.

(Improved! Gosh, I must have been really bad the year before)

Section Head Summary: Good work standard but I am concerned about his immature behaviour which is distracting others from working in some subjects. CHANGE YOUR ATTITUDE IN SCIENCE!

So there you have it, warts and all. And calm down about the science - I did change my attitude! To be honest, most of the work was trivially easy so I felt my main duty at school was to make the lives of anyone who sat near me as entertaining as possible. I hope life worked out for the poor souls who sat next to me (sorry guys, wherever you are !)

Mind you, this is all an improvement on my report aged 7 from primary school which included the legendary phrase "Can be rather slyly naughty". Moi? Never!

A little haiku

2011-03-15T16:55:00.001-07:00

Shaken from slumber

Screams fury at her children.

Cold blanket brings sleep

Do you have a mentor?

2011-03-11T08:50:00.000-08:00

Mentoring is on my mind at the moment. I have just been invited to be guest speaker at an awards event for a national mentoring scheme, and I sometimes get asked whether I will be a mentor myself. I am also trying to help organise a mentoring programme for students at the new Academy that I chair.

I have never really had a mentor as such, not in a formal sense, and I feel I suffered from lack of a mentor at times, particularly early in my career. But I think in a way I have always had informal mentors. Individuals who I have looked up to, listened to, watched and learnt from. A nudge here. An eyebrow raised there. It all adds up to a mentoring relationship.

Personally I am not a great formal mentor. The formalised process of meeting regularly to listen and dispense advice doesn't fit with me personally and I really admire people who are able to give of themselves in this way. I would feel under such pressure in that situation to say something profound and meaningful that the responsibility would be too much. Or I would say something that sounds like common sense to me, the mentee takes it as if it was a blinding insight and then I would feel like a fake who is only inches away from being found out.

But I think I am quite a good informal mentor, if you can call it that. I am always happy to have one-off, ad hoc meetings with people, over a cup of coffee, to listen and share my experience. I try not to say what the other person "should" do (I hate "should's"). I try to give him or her another perspective to add to the various perspectives that they have already. I invite them to use whatever they find useful and cast aside the rest. If they use none of what I've said but my input helps them get clear that the choice they were going to make anyway is definitely the right one for them, then that's fine with me too.

I think the worst kind of mentor is the one who is very directional. You "should" do this. You "must" go that way. Or the mentor who pretends to be impartial and open but is actually quite manipulative and guides the mentee in the direction that they "should" go, deriving feelings of satisfaction out of their subtle skills. I have certainly encountered (and suffered at the hands of) that type of person before I woke up to what was going on.

The advice I tend to give to young people when approaching someone about being a mentor is not to start by going straight for the jugular. Finding a good mentor is like Big Game Hunting. The person you are approaching is busy (probably) and gets asked a lot to be a mentor (probably) and generally graciously declines (probably).

So you have a sales job to do - AIDA - awareness, interest, desire, action. Does your targer mentor know you exist? If you pop up from nowhere with an email and say "hi, I am no-one you have ever heard of but please mentor me" then you will be lucky if you even get a response. Target-mentor has to know you exist first.

Then, what is is about you that Target would be interested in? What have you done that's relevant to their life? Have you done anything useful for the Target, or do you just want to take from them? I operate on the 3:1 rule. I must do three useful things for you before asking you to do one useful thing for me. Is Target interested in you?

Only then start to create some desire in Target for the idea that he might want to assist you. Has Target watched your development? Does Target feel part of your journey? Are you at a stage where you could do with a bit of help and Target feels like they want to help because they have a stake in your success?

Now you can move to action. Only ever ask Target for a quick coffee, never to "be my mentor". Target hates commitment. Target likes to help. So ask for 30 mins for a coffee so that you can bounce a fe thoughts off them and get some input. Don't ask for a long term mentoring relationship. If you have a good first coffee (and by the way, in that meeting, do you do something, anything useful for Target or did you jsut take from them?) then Target might say "if you fancy catching up again at some stage, let me know". When Target says that, don't whip your diary out and schedule six more two hour sessions. Casually say "sure that would be great, I'll get in touch". Then leave it two weeks (don't be a stalker and email the same evening!) and suggest a date for a coffee in 3 months time.

Remember, you are never too old or senior to have a mentor. But the same rules apply. It is a drain on the mentor to mentor you, and they want flexibility so you take your time and build a relationship.

In fact all that talk of mentors makes me feel like I want one! Right, time to identify a Target and go hunting. I wonder if they'll spot me coming.

Is Rastamouse the new Gollywog?

2011-02-21T00:32:00.000-08:00

Have you heard of Rastamouse? Neither had I. Until I heard that a friend of mine had called in to a phone-in radio show to complain about this cartoon character and many others had written to the BBC asking for it to be taken off air. Not to mention the middle class mums on networking sites debating the dangers or otherwise of the dreaded Rastamouse.

Rastamouse is a cool, black mouse dude, dripping with stereotypes, who apparently is very popular with the under fives on CBBC. He is a laid back rastafarian mouse detective who speaks in patios, loves his "cheese" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and has a bunch of cool black stereotypical mouse friends. Where's the harm in that and why are people gettng so hot under the collar about dear old cool, black stereotypical rastamouse (after all are we black people not all cool, laid back stereotypical fellows? In fact some of my best friends are cool, black and stereotypical. I'm not racist).

I think what is happening is that black people of a certain age (i.e. my age) are wincing at the playground experience that must surely follow from the widespread popularity of Rastamouse. Whenever you get a new, cool black character on TV (or a white character pretending to be a black character) then as sure as night follows day you will get white kids in playgrounds renaming their black friends accordingly.

In my day it was the friendly old Gollywog. A lovely black character. I even had a gollywog of my very own. I had a gollywog and a wheelbarrow although at the time I used to say I had a "wheelwog and a gollybarrow". I collected gollywog badges with pride. I am still strangely fond of gollywogs, apart from the fact that I have been called Golly, Gollywog, Woggy so many times now that I've kind of gone off the character a bit. Then of course you've got good old Chalky, or Kunta Kinte (who hasn't been called Kunta Kinte eh? You've got to laungh), or the various Lenny Henry characters over the years.

So now a new generation of young black people get to be called Rastamouse until they come to hate the nice little mouse and lodge it away in their subconscious ready to dredge up in a blog post in years to come. And the good folk at the BBC who thought him up (what on earth were they thinking? Did someone say "hmmm, playgrounds are a bit light on racial banter these days. Anyone got any ideas?") don't even realise that they are continuing a long tradition of causing unintended pain to little me as my best friend starts shouting across the playground "hey, little Tommy, hey Wa'gwan Rastamouse? Want some cheese mon? Hahahahah" and everyone, including me, burst into laughter (because you've got to laugh haven't you? It's only a little racial
banter. No big deal. Why is everyone so sensitive about it. I mean, for goodness sake, come on)

Mind you black kids today shouldn't complain. In my day we had proper, high grade Class A racial banter in the playground. Who doesn't remember having 20 kids standing around you in a circle chanting that inspiring song

"Hey Tom

Wogs the matter?

Feeling a bit Browned off?

Didn't have your Coon-flakes?

Nigger mind

Go Black to bed

You'll feel all White in the morning"

Ah, those were the days. The good old Seventies. You've got to laugh. Hahahaha. Wa'gwan, Rastamouse.

Under Pressure

2011-01-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

I love the Queen/David Bowie song "Under Pressure" ("dum dum dum diddle dum dum, dum dum dum diddle dum dum" you know the song). There is something about Bowie's strained voice that feels like he is right on the edge of breaking point. That "tears behind the eyes" feeling when stress builds and builds and there is just too much pressure.

Dealing with stress is something that is difficult to learn by yourself and we don't teach it in schools. But perhaps we should, because it is often in schools that young people get their first taste of high stress and that build up of pressure that can overwhelm you. This is particularly the case for those who are doing really well. They generate internal pressure on themselves, they carry the heavy burden of ambitious parents expectations and they feel the eyes of the school and their hard pressed, results hungry teachers on them.

How many A*s will they get? What University will they get in to? Even on the sports side, will they get signed for that all important netball team/rugby club/olympic squad? Why are they only Grade 8 piano? How big is their scholarship? And all they hear from friends, family, teachers is "ooohh you are soooo lucky. I wish I was you. It must be so easy. You've got no problems."

So they smile with glistening eyes, but internally they fret. Their tummy in knots when exam time comes because they might get an awful A instead of an excellent A*. Or only get into a top Russell Group University, one of the best in the world as it happens, instead of getting that all important Oxbridge offer and listen to aunts and uncles say "well done for getting a place at University" but what they hear is "Hah, you didn't get Oxbridge, you failure, you might as well give up now". They say "So and so is much cleverer than me, He/she will do so well" but their friends hear it as false modesty. What they are really saying is "Please give me a break and let me get on with stuff. I'll do the best I can, but please take your expectations off me and let me breath!"

So how do you deal with stress like this? I don't know to be honest otherwise I would have written a self help book, sold millions of copies and be living on my very own private island (probably worrying that it was not as big as the island next door, or that it might sink), but with 30 years of hindsight there are a few things that occur to me.

Think about medium term goals, not about short term tactics. So, don't get hung up on the very next step in front of you, whether that is going to this sixth form or that University. These are important, yes, but they are tactical steps. You should focus on the medium term goal. Create a picture in your mind of you in 5 or 6 year time. Where are you? What are you doing? Are you excited about being there? Are you proud of being there? Then work back from there and shape the five or ten different paths you could have taken to get there. They are all equally valid. You might have a preferred route (or someone might have a prefered route mapped out for you) but that is just one of many. Don't get hung up about it. By all means go for it flat out with everything you've got but if it doesn't come off, don't sweat it. You have lots more routes to get to your medium term goal. Keep the goal in mind, adjust the tactical steps as you go.

Remember you will have at least three careers, perhaps more in your lifetime. So you are thinking "do I want to be a Doctor or a Writer? I really love them both. I can't decide. It's so stressful". I bring glad tidings - The answer is that you will be both. And two more things as well. You don't need to make an either/or decision. You just need to decide which order you are going to enjoy your life in. There is no decision that you can possibly make now that defines your life forever more, so relax, enjoy, follow what feels right and when it stops feeling right do something else instead.

Learn how to fail. Your problem is that you've never really failed at anything, so you don't know how to. You always get As, the worst you get is a B. You always get into places you apply for. When was the last time you really went for something and landed flat on your face? So, you haven't learnt how to fail. You are scared of failure. How does it feel? How do people look at you? How will you look at yourself? But life is going to throw failure after failure at you and it all depends on how you bounce back. Get busy failing now while it's safe to do so, while you've got the support around you. It will help you in the future. Set yourself some real stretch goals and go for them. Gosh, you failed! Who cares? Has the world stopped spinning? Does your mother still love you? See it's not scary at all. Don't be afraid of failure - I do it all the time. It's no big deal. I am very bounce-back-able.

Better out than in. Never ever, ever, ever, ever (...) ever bottle up your stress and do that stupid stiff upper lip thing. Find a friend. Cry. Shout. Scream. Write. Blog. Sing sad songs. Paint. Get it out. Express it. You must not bottle it up. Did I say ever, ever enough? Have you got the message? Good.

What's the big idea? Somewhere in you is the Big Idea. You don't tell people because it sounds like you are boasting or just dreaming. But you are going to save the lives of 10,000 children. You are going to be Prime Minister. You are going to cure Aids. It is true. I have seen it. So, when you are stressing yourself out over some trivial issue about University A or University B, or one micro-grade vs another then remember these are tiny issues compared to what you are here on earth to do. You have a Big Idea. It is very big. Every and all paths that you take now will take you towards your big idea. It is impossible to be blown off course by some trivial decision that some small minded person makes today. We call such things "small matters". We dismiss them with the words "huh, these are small matters. I am here to do something bigger than you can know, than you can understand". We deal with these small matters and move on.

Alternatively if none of this works you can try the therapy offered by my son when he was younger. When someone in the house was being a bit stressed, he would follow them around, at a safe distance, chanting in a low voice "stressy stressy moo moo, stressy stressy moo moo". If all else fails, get yourself a small boy to follow you around chanting under his breath and see if that helps.

The Curse of BCC:

2011-01-23T05:33:00.000-08:00

Nothing is more likely to breed suspicion amongst colleagues than the regular use of BCC: or blind copy on emails. It is a curse on organisations and I blame Microsoft (and the others) for ever inventing the feature in the first place.

The most obvious problem that I have fallen foul of time and time again is when you receive an email by BCC: but don't realise, so you just Reply All: Oh yes, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. However at least you are not the one who will be embarrassed. The Blind Copier cops the blame and looks like a shifty so and so for sending a BCC: in the first place.

The real problem is that if someone is a regular Blind Copier and you are the recipient of these, then you must assume that any emails they send to you are probably being blind copied to someone else. Both scenarios leave you in an awkward place.

If you have been BCC:d on something, then do you know about it or don't you? When you meet the people who were sent the email, can you engage in the conversation about the issue in the email or do you have to play dumb? What if they somehow know that you know, but you don't let on that you know? Then you look sneakier than ever, through no fault of your own.

Equally when you receive an email from a Blind Copier you are left wondering who was BCC:d on your email. When you meet your colleages, were they BCC:d and they are just not letting on or do they really not know?

And what about the Blind Copier? Did they BCC: you because you need to know this information? If so, why is it so important that other people don't know that you know? Or are they just showing you how tough they are being about some issue, a sort of cheeky wink at a friend as they pile in to do battle, leaving you grinning complicitly on the sidelines.

Oh the permutations are endless. But any way you look at it, BCC:ing is a bad idea. If you have something to tell people, tell them. If you don't, don't. Creating these wheels within wheels risks a climate of suspicion that doesn't do anyone any favours.

I never use BCC: myself. I get lost in the complexity of who I've told things and what I've told them at the best of times, let alone whether I've told them something secretly, so I stick to plain, open emails. If I want something kept confidential, I say "Please keep confidential". In fact I generally try to write any email on the assumption that I wouldn't die of embarrasement if its contents were posted on the office noticeboard.

And I think I will revert back to my hardline BCC: response strategy. If anyone BCC:s me I will immediately Reply All: so that everyone knows that I know and I don't have to pretend about what I've been told. If that causes the Blind Copier some embarrassement, well my guess is that it will only be the once. I doubt they will BCC: me again. If they do, I will simply post the email here for all of you to read :)

A Brush with Suicide

2010-11-22T00:37:00.001-08:00

Last week I read in The Evening Standard that there were no less than three suicides on the London transport train and tube networks on a single day. That is so tragic and so sad.

It always makes my heart skip a beat when I hear about suicides under tubes because it reminds me of an experience I had on a tube platform about 20 years ago. It was probably the closest that I have come to a suicide incident since the one time that I seriously contemplated suicide myself years before (but that will have to be the subject of another post, perhaps).

On that particular day I wandered down to the platform as normal and flopped down on a bench next to a middle aged man. I noticed that he looked a bit sweaty and agitated, albeit normally dressed in a suit and tie as I was. He was muttering to himself and I remember thinking "oh no, trust me to sit next to the nutter. Must get in a different carriage when the train comes."

I tried to ignore him but then I heard that what he was muttering was "Do it, do it, do it" and he was wringing his hands. I started to get worried. Do what? Could he be planning to....? Do I ignore him in true British fashion or do I say "excuse me, strange muttering person, are you alright?" If I do, does he tell me to mind my own bloody business?

I sat, pretending to ignore him. He kept muttering, geting louder "Come on, do it, do it". I could hear the tube now coming, getting louder. He was getting louder "DO it, DO IT". I was really worried now. We were both still sitting down on the bench. The tube thundered in to the station. He is shouting "DO IT, DO IT". I am staring straight at him now, shouting "DO WHAT? DON't DO IT ! NO! SIT DOWN!" He is white as a sheet. I am terrified. We are both still sitting on the bench.

Train slows to a halt. He leans back. Bursts in to tears. I get up, shaken. Board the train. We don't make eye contact. We don't acknowledge each others presence. I have no idea what he was going to do. Resign from work? Leave his wife? Jump under the train? Book tickets for a footie match? I genuinely have no idea. I have no idea what he did next. I have no idea whether I was supposed to have done something different. Something more. No idea.

But everytime I hear the phrase "person under a train at station xzy" that 30 second incident from 20 years ago pops into my mind and my heart skips a beat.

When is the best time to kick a man?

2010-11-16T02:09:00.000-08:00

I had never been chased by debt collectors before, until last week. It is not a nice experience.

It was all the more annoying because the bank that chased me made the mistake that caused them to chase me in the first place!

In my case it was all cleared up within a day or so with a phone call and an apology from the bank but it gave me a small sense of what it must be like if you are being hunted for real. And "hunted" is definitely what it feels like.

A couple of weeks ago I got a letter from my bank saying that one of my credit cards had been compromised in some unspecified way so they would be sending me a replacement card with a new number. So far, so good. A bit scary that they didn't say what had happeneed to my old card but at least they were being proactive about it.

The new card duly arrives. I cut up the old one and activate the new one. All good.

However around that same time my regular monthly direct debit is taken by the bank to pay the card balance. This is when the fun begins. The payment goes to the old card number but the bank has moved the outstanding balance to the new card that it has issued to me. So, on their systems there is one card with a healthy positive balance and another card with a missed payment. The result is chaos!

An alarm bell must go off inside the bank. "MISSED PAYMENT ALERT, MISSED PAYMENT ALERT". I have images of debt collection types in black ski masks swinging down on ropes and crashing through windows.

My mobile phone suddenly lit up with calls from a mysterious number. I ignored it a couple of times as I don't answer calls from numbers that I don't recognise but when it kept going off I answered and it was completely silent. How spooky is that. Now I'm worried. Who is this and how did they get my number?

Then it occurs to me to google the number. Up come loads of discussions asking "who owns this number?" and replies saying "it's such and such bank's debt collection department". Light dawns, but I am irritated that I'm being houned. As I'm busy at work, I make a note to call them later when I have a chance.

When I get home the first thing my wife says is that my bank has been calling and apparently needs to speak to me urgently. She is concerend. Is there a problem? One of my children mentioned that she answered a call from my bank. "What's that about, dad?" Those who know me will know that at this stage I am getting, how shall we say, erm, "focussed".

Before I called them, I logged on to the bank website to see if I could see what was going on. I tried to send the bank a message asking a question but a box popped up saying that I am blocked from sending messages and I must call debt collection immediately. Those who know me will know that at this stage I have grown horns, my eyes have gone all big and starey and I am speaking very slowly, quietly and deliberately. Yes, I. Would. Like. A. Cup. Of. Tea. Thank. You.

I call the bank. It is a short and quite focussed conversation. They start from the assumption that you are obviously in debt and that you've probably got some story to try to fob them off with. They've heard it all before. I speak in One. Word. Sentences. With a little help, they realise their mistake, apologise and call the dogs off. That didn't stop me getting three more silent, menacing automatic calls over the follow 12 hours though!

I think I must have got about ten called to my mobile and home in a 24 hour period due to their mistake, despite the fact that I had a big positive balance sitting on the old card plus quite large sums of money sitting in savings accounts at the same bank. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience and that was just for me who (a) hadn't actually missed a payment and (b) has been a senior executive in a bank so is quite capable of dealing with such things.

It made me wonder what it must be like if in these difficult times of job losses and so on, you really do find yourself in trouble and miss a payment. All hell must break loose. Imagine that you've lost your job. You have three or four cards. You are trying to keep the plates in your life spinning in the hopes of finding another job soon. You are under pressure at home. YOu are trying to be the breadwinner but you are feeling battered. YOu miss a payment. Can you imagine getting 30 or 40 calls to your home and mobile as the pack descend, just when you are at your most vunerable? The thought makes me shiver.

Talk about kicking someone when they are down. But, hey ho, this is life I guess, and as the old saying goes "if you can't kick a man when he's down, when can you kick him?"

A view from the top: Don't look down!

2010-11-09T01:13:00.001-08:00

A colleague of mine mentioned casually that in his spare time he jumps out of aeroplanes, about 20 times a year. I am hugely impressed. That's real action man stuff. I feel even more whimpish now that I have to admt that I am scared of heights.

What's puzzling me is that I didn't used to be scare of heights. I seem to have developed vertigo as I've got older. I didn't know that the ageing process had anything to do with fear of heights but I was surprised when my older brother revealed that he too has developed a fear of heights in the last few years. How odd.

In my case it has become quite acute. It doesn't help that my holidays keep taking me to places with amazing views. The cable car climb up Table Mountain, Cape Town, had me clinging to the middle of the car for dear life like a paralysed pole dancer. As people gasped at the glorious sunrise on the edge of the Grand Canyon, Arizona, I sat shivering and slightly dizzy looking resolutely in the opposite direction. The Stratosphere at the end of the Las Vegas strip where you can see straight down, the stairs to the middle section of the Eiffel Tower, driving through Rift Valley, Kenya, overlooking Niagra Falls and even the view from an old look-out tower atop the hills in the Peak District - all left me scared, sweaty and shaking.

So, how do I confront this? Some people insist that you face your demons. Kill or cure. It's time to "Man Up". Feel the fear and do it anyway. Me? I'm past all that macho stuff. I think I'll just change the places I go on holiday. Holland is looking pretty attractive all of a sudden.

Ties that bind

2010-11-02T01:50:00.000-07:00

What exactly is the point of a tie?

That long strip of material that we men are obliged to wrap tightly around our neck and squeeze to the point of nearly, but not quite, cutting off all blood supply to the brain.

I have two offices in my current role. One requires me to wear a tie and the other doesn't. At the tie-office it doesn't matter what job you do - finance, marketing, customer service - you are not complete until you attempt to hang yourself with a dangerous piece of cloth which, if it got caught on a hook as you rush from one meeting to the next, would cause your legs to go flying and you'd land flat on your back like a cartoon character. By wearing a tie you will be able to do you job better. And when men from outside come to the office wearing their own ties you will be able to look at each other in a spirit of brotherhood and say "yes, we are men of ties. Respect, my tie-wearing brethren."

At the non-tie-office it doesn't matter what job you do - finance, marketing, customer service - you are not complete until you strip down to your neck, brazenly flaunting your adams apple for all to see, causing young ladies to faint at the sight of it bobbing up and down as you talk. By not wearing a tie you will be able to do your job better. And when men from outside come to visit, naked from the neck up, you will be able to hug each other with cries of "hey, you hip, young, non-tie-wearing dude. Rock on, buddy!"

Oh, no. I've just realised that wearing a non-tie is as much a uniform as wearing a tie. Is there no escape?

Perhaps I can find a third way. Wearing nothing but a tie.

The Establishment

2010-10-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

Those amongst you who are keen readers of the Court and Social announcements section of the Daily Telegraph will have been excited to read about a dinner at Haberdashers Hall last week to mark the installation of the new Master of the Information Technologist's Company, a City Livery Company.

You will have been even more excited to note that at that very event, one Tom Ilube was installed as Panels Warden of said Livery Company. My mum reckons that I am now part of "The Establishment", but if I am it is only because I have climbed in to "The Establishment" through a broken downstairs window and am currently hiding in "The Establishment's" basement hoping that they don't spot me and toss me back out on to the street.

City Livery companies are ancient (and some not so ancient) guilds that represent trades that are or were practised in the City of London. In the old days you had to belong to the relevant guild to be able to practise the trade - if you wanted to be a goldsmith, join the Goldsmiths. They date back hundreds of years, some even claim a thousand years. The "Premier" Company is The Mercers, grand old fellows who I believe used to trade silk and such like around the world. Others include the Goldsmiths, Tallow Chandlers, Glovers, Skinners and many others, including the Information Technologists.

The Information Technologists' are the 100th Livery company. I am told that we could have been higher up the list but we deliberately held out for this binary number and we are very pleased with ourselves (although no-one else seems to care!). We have over 700 members, mostly CEOs, Chairmen, Directors from across the IT industry and a few honorary luminaries such as Sir Tim Berners Lee, Vint Cerf and Bill Gates.

Everyday phrases such as "Hallmark", being "at sixes and sevens" and (possibly) "keep it under your hat" derive from Livery traditions. And tradition is what Livery companies do best. The world around us changes but Livery companies keep to their traditions generation after generation. I think that's what I like about being involved. It fits well with my Tai Chi/Yin Yang mindset. In the innovative, fast moving, constantly changing world that I live my life and thrive in, I enjoy the periods of calm and constancy that come with the Livery movement. The same dinners, the same speeches, the same long meetings discussing the same agenda points, the same little jokes that I have heard for the last ten or more years make me relax and say inside "ahhhhh, thank goodness, some things don't change".

The main thing that Livery companies do, apart from upholding City traditions, is charity work. We collect and distribute tens of millions of pounds and this is were I get busy. Spending it, that is! My company, the Information Technologists', and the Mercers are sponsoring the Hammersmith Academy, our new school that will open in September 2011. This new school, specialising in ICT and Creative and Digital Media, is an exemplar of combining the old traditions of excellent education with the new creative and digital industries. We are raising over a million pounds for the school and all of that is coming straight out of the pockets of the members of the Livery company.

So, if you are wondering what a modern, high tech entrepreneur like me is doing hanging out with old Livery companies, that's the reason. Leveraging the deep roots and traditions of the City of London over the past thousand years to get exciting, innovative, charitable things done today is why I do it.

And I'm very proud if it.

PIPhobia: Alert the BBC !

2010-10-09T06:35:00.001-07:00

Am I alone in the land in being terrorised daily by the BBC? As the nation's public broadcaster I feel it is incumbent on Auntie to be more responsible to minorities such as myself who suffer from PIPhobia rather than leaving me with sweaty palms and a pumping heart-rate practically EVERY MORNING!

I refer of course to the PIPs.

Whenever I listen to the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 I dread the clock ticking towards 9am. I enjoy "Thought for the day" especially if we are treated to the great Lionel Blue. I relish the ritual skewering of slippery politicians as the loincloth-clad, spear wielding John Humphries creeps up on his prey.

But I feel the tension rise as we approach the dreaded hour. At 08:55 I debate whether to switch off the radio or tough it out. At 08:57 sweat breaks out on my brow as some waffling interviewee meanders around their answer with the clock ticking down. At 08:59 when Evan Davies decides to squeeze in one final question I have been known to scream at the radio in horror. What is he doing? And please God don't let it be Robert Peston who gets the final word.

At 08:59 for goodness sake! Can't they see the PIPs standing silently, menacingly, black cloaked just outside the studio. Can't they feel the terrifying presence of the Five plus The Great One, their chill breadth permeating the glass surrounds? You can't fight the PIPs. You can't.

And then. And then. In a desperate dash for the line Sarah Montague realising their dreadful mistake and in a cry for mercy and forgiveness screams "THAT'SALLWEHAVETIMEFOROUREDITORSWERE..." and with a smash of glass and the howling of banshees the Five plus The Great One burst into the studio, seizing control. Leaving silence. It is over. It is done. Fade to black.

I collapse back into my chair, spilling tea over myself. Dazed. Stressed. Heart pounding.

Today Programme, I beg of you. Glide us in gently. Reassure us. Don't fight the PIPs day in day out. They will win. Submit to their greater will and stop giving me a near heart attack every morning.

Heroes

2010-10-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

We all had heroes growing up. Football starts, freedom fighters, rock stars. Mine were physicists.

So I was very excited the other day when I tuned in to a BBC Radio 4 programme about the wonderful life of the physicists equivalent of a rock god, Richard Feynman.

It was guys like Feynman, Paul Dirac and Murray Gell-Mann who inspired me to rebel in my teens and read physics at university instead of a sensible subject like engineering or accountancy. I tricked my Dad by claiming that it was just my strategy to get into University and I would swap to Engineering my second year, but as soon as I got in amongst the electromagnetism, weak nuclear force and wave particle duality I was smitten.

Unfortunately as the maths got harder I came to realise that my dream of the beautiful life of a physics professor was not to be. How sad. As Feynman said, maths is the language of physics, and I'm afraid my halting, pidgeon maths was just not strong enough to take me to the higher levels.

I did meet one of my boyhood heroes in real life though. I bumped into the Nobel-prize winner Murray Gell-Mann himself.

I had to go quite a long way to bump into him to be honest. Nearly 20 years ago I got married and for our honeymoon we (okay "I") decided to go to the States, hire a car and cruise along the legendary Route 66 through Texas and all the way to New Mexaco. Little did my wife know that the journey would end in a little town called Santa Fe, the home of a world famous scientific institute for the study of complexity. Fortunately Santa Fe happens to be a lovely, artistic, creative town so it wasn't a complete disaster.

After a week of driving around together, I was given permission to go and roam around on my own, so off I went to the Institute.

And so it came to pass that, while I was photocopying papers on the behaviour of ant colonies or genetic algorithms or something, I came face to face with the Great Man Himself.

He looked at me. I looked at him. Paused. A moment, frozen in time. Then in that unmistakable, gravelly voice he said "excuse me young man, I want to use the photocopier."

Wonderful. Wonderful. My hero. I will treasure those words for ever.

We were more popular than they were

2010-05-09T13:46:00.000-07:00

I was in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and Kampala, Uganda working on the launch of the African Gifted Foundation when the British elections were on recently. So I missed being in the thick of the UK elections. But I did pick up a uniquely African perspective on its conduct and outcome.

Firstly there was amused puzzlement. Why, I was asked, did Britain decide to use Nigeria's electoral commission to conduct the elections? It was obvious that the outcome would be allegations of fraudulant (postal) voting, demands for recounts, queues of angry voters putside polling booths with electoral officials shouting "go home, ballot paper don finish" and party leaders squabbling over who actually won.

Secondly, there was general acceptance that after many years of rule by religious "Northerners" (in this case Scottish Calvinists rather than the usual Muslim North much beloved of Western news media) it is time for the leadership to be zoned to the Christian South (in this case, Notting Hill), this being the natural way of things.

Thirdly, it was deemed right and proper that "moneybag political godfathers"should seize office in their hometowns. Afterall, if you can't use your wealth to purchase an election of your choice now and again, what is the point of democracy?

Finally, the rise of extremist groups is well understood. Such groups, having been frustrated at the ballot box by perfidious and penicious corrupt and undemocratic forces may, like their African counterparts, resort to kidnapping foreigners to actualise their agenda of resource control. Africans visiting the UK are advised to be on the alert and avoid visiting particularly dangerous areas without escort. However to be fair, some Africans feel sympathy for these marginalised groups and oppressed minorites and there is talk of a major concert designed to bring their plight to worldwide attention.

I love this newly imported British politics! It reminds me of a diehard African politician I was chatting to. he recounted a recent election struggle that had concluded in his partys favour. "Tom" he said, "it was tough. We rigged but they counter-rigged. We bribed, but they neutralised our bribes with even bigger bribes. At the end of the day, the only luck we had was that we were more popular than they were."

Democracy. Its not perfect anywhere. But it kind of works.

The Shortest Job Ever

2010-03-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

Last week a new member of staff joined the Garlik team. For 27 minutes. Then he left. Does this take the prize as the shortest job ever?

At the time we were quite surprised, but we had to laugh afterwards. It turned out that he had been in the running for another job whilst he was talking to us. He had accepted our offer but a few days later got offered the other job and decided he was going to take that one instead. However, instead of ringing up to tell us, he turned up on the appointed morning, presumably intending to tell us in person first thing (quite brave actually).

But before he had a chance to speak, we welcomed him with open arms, introduced him to the team, sat him at his desk, gave him a laptop, pass and all that good stuff. I thought he was looking a bit nervous as he smiled at people and said hello. It took hm 27 minutes to build up the courage to say "errr, errrr, excuse me, could I have a word please?" We didn't even have time to organise a leaving card before he left and we are still waiting for the leaving drinks!

This episode highlights a few lessons that it's worth remembering if you are a small
company recruiting in a market that is gradually getting more active and competing
against the big corporates with plush offices and deep pockets.

Firstly, I always take the view that when you think you have found someone who is right for your company, you swoop and make the offer. Sometimes people worry too much and keep waiting for "Mr Right" to come along. What if the very best candidate is the next CV that you haven't received yet? What if "Miss Perfect" is just around the corner?

My advice is don't worry. Go with your instinct and hire the person in front of you who feels right and has the skills you need today. In any case however careful you are the best possible outcome is that you will be "right" 75% of the time. One in four of your hires will turn out not to be right for your company and you will have to deal with that, so make decisions, move on and deal with the issue if and when it arises. By the way, if you are hiring sales people and you get a positive hit rate of better than 33% you are doing really well!

Secondly, if the person you are interviewing is any good then you can be certain that
they are having several other conversations as well as yours, even if they swear blind that they only have eyes for you. The market for good people is always competitive. Just accept it. There is nothing wrong with that. The candidate hasn't tricked you. That's just life. And, in fact it's a good thing because if they do come and work for you it means they really wanted to, not that you were the only available option.

Thirdly, candidates will say "I really want to work for a small, entrepreneurial company, I'm done with stuffy, big corporates" and then when a big corporate offers then a job, don't be surprised if they change their mind rapidly. Not everyone is cut out for early stage companies and people are easily seduced by a big brand and a big office. Don't worry about it. It's not a reflection on your company.

Finally, its worth bearing in mind that the market for recruiting good people is
changing. We have seen a definite change at the start of this year. When you put a job advert out there, you get a lot of candidates, so there are clearly a lot of people still looking to get back into jobs, but you have to sift through a lot of CVs to get to the quality and at the moment the best candidates have a number of choices. More companies are hiring, more projects are kicking off. That's good for the economy as a whole, but means that its harder for you and me.

The Icarus Principle

2010-03-05T10:40:00.001-08:00

This morning I delivered a three hour, intense presentation to a group of executives. The feedback I got was that it was an excellent session and I am relieved as I put a lot of effort into preparing for it and I never take these things for granted. The question, though, is how much effort should you put into a presentation like this? Well, in my case it was about three days. yes, three days of going back over a subject area I know inside out, of structuring my thoughts, preparing my slides, running through them to see if they hang together and packaging it all up!

Now this was an exceptional case but the reality is that preparation is everything and as a rule of thumb you should be putting at least three times the presentation time in to the preparation time. You should spend three hours in advance on your one hour presentation. And you should practice, practice, practice.

I still shudder when I hear about people who have sweated to prise open the door to an important business prospect and then turn up on the day saying "I haven't really prepared but, ah well, let's wing it." Wing it? Wing it! Are you some sort of bird? The audience know, you know. They are not stupid. You can easily see someone who is busking their way through a presentation and someone who has taken the effort to master their subject and their pitch.

Even the basics get overlooked. Listen people - the rule is 4 minutes per slide. This is not optional. Okay, I'll let you slip in one or two extra slides if I'm in a good mood, but if you are given 20 minutes to present, make sure you can tell your story in FIVE slides. If you can't then get out the way and let someone who can take over. You think its clever to flash through 15 slides in a 20 minute presentation? It's not. It's amateur. Five slides, people, take it or leave it.

And let me tell you straight, even though I have never heard you speak. You talk too fast. SLOW DOWN. At my son's primary school, they had a great way of teaching them to present. When you get to a comma, count to one. When you get to a full stop, count to three. It's amusing to watch the kids say a sentence, pause and silently but obviously say "one, two, three" then start again. But it force you to slow, down and as it becomes natural and your confidence grows it means you present at a measured pace that is right for the audience. Try it. If it seems too slow and unnatural, you have probably got the pace about right.

But if you are one of these fast-talking, gum chewing, all guns blazing guys who wanders along, grins a cheeky grin and says "let's just wing it" just remember what happen to that other over-confident guy who winged it - Icarus.

Do Business Bullies Win?

2010-02-25T15:38:00.001-08:00

The debate about alleged bullying at Number 10 has got me thinking about bullying bosses in the business world and I am in danger of drawing the conclusion that bullying bosses often win the battle! What do you think?

Business bullying takes many forms. I've seen managers who shout and swear at their staff and suppliers. I've worked with the subtle psycological bully that wears you down and leaves you in tears. Jovial bullies who steamroller right over the top of you whilst smiling and laughing. Nasty pieces of work who get a kick out of making your life hell in the office. They are all out there in the business world and if you are going to hunt in the business jungle you are going to encounter these hateful beasts, so steel youself and figure out how you are going to deal with them.

The sad truth is that over and over again I've seen these people rise to the top. I know an entrepreneur who literally screams out loud at his staff, kicks over the flipchart if the meeting isn't going well and f's and blind's at suppliers just because he can. What happened to him? Sold his company for tens of millions, that's what. I know City traders who hurl keyboards across the room at support staff. What happens? They collect multi-million pound bonuses. I've worked with smooth snake-like operators who slither to the top leaving wrecked careers in their wake. Sure, stupid bullies get their come-uppance. But the smart bully bosses often barge their way to the front. It's a shame.

But what can we do about it? Become a business bully yourself? An eye for an eye? No, that's not the right route. If we go down that path, the whole world ends up blind. Confront the bully head on? Yes, definitely. We must drive this awful behaviour out of the world of business. But pick your fights carefully. You have to be smart in this business game and this isn't Tom Brown's Schooldays. If you stand up to the bully and punch him on the nose, he might not run away crying. He might wait for you in an alley with a baseball bat.

Making the Grade

2010-02-19T03:07:00.000-08:00

This week was half-term. The roads are quieter, the schools are closed and the kids are at home. Well most of them are.

Some of the more ambitious young people are out and about doing work experience. So it was that I came to be shadowed by a couple of exceptional young people during this week. I enjoy sharing what knowledge and experience I have gained over the years. I feel that I missed out by not having these opportunities earlier in my career, or perhaps I just didn’t look for them hard enough.

The only downside is that young people today are so focused and driven they make us (well, me, at least!) look like right slackers. My hotchpotch of school qualifications pale into insignificance in the face of today’s determined young people driving firmly towards huge numbers of A*’s.

But perhaps us older folk can pass on some tips and tricks about navigating life. In fact as entrepreneurs wrestling with the day to day struggles of building your business it is so important to do more than just watch the balance sheet and count the numbers. Giving something back gives meaning to what we do.

On Wednesday I gave a speech to 180 Masters students at Cass Business School, London (which is where I did my MBA, although I was horrified to discover that most of the current students were not born when I was there!). The questions they ask you as an entrepreneur make you think about what you do and why you do it and that’s very healthy. As an entrepreneur I encourage you to volunteer to speak to students at your local school, college and university. You will get a lot back.

Being a start up guy is more than about keeping score, be it your sales, your business’s size or even your personal wealth. There must be more to life than that. As one of the young people said to me, with wisdom beyond her young years “at the end of my life, I want to be able to say ‘I had a good life’ not ‘I got good grades’”.

What will you be able to say?

Moving Office

2010-02-11T13:59:00.000-08:00

Garlik is in the process of moving office. After an extensive review of the options, we are planning to move from one part of Richmond (10 minutes from where the Chief Exec i.e. me, lives) to another part of Richmond (also 10 minutes….).

Property, leases and sorting out offices for your start-up are things that they don’t teach you at business school. You learn on the job but if you make mistakes it can be very costly indeed. I have seen businesses fold because they have ended up lumbered with a bad lease.

The key is flexibility. That’s why it is best to spend the first few years of your life as a start up in serviced offices. You will pay a premium, but you can scale up and down at the drop of a hat.

There was a time that companies in serviced offices were not taken seriously but those days are long gone. No-one, clients or staff, with any sense cares anymore.

Then when you feel ready, you move to your first office on a longer term lease. The most important things are (a) get a lawyer who really understands commercial leases to advise you (it will cost you £5k and you probably think you can sort it out yourself with your wife’s brother-in-law’s cousin who did a bit of law once, more fool you) and (b) get a 2 or 3 year break-clause. Make sure you have the flexibilty of that early break-clause and don’t trade off a tempting rent-free period for an early break-clause.

Also think through what happens if your team suddenly expands by 50%. Can you still fit in the office? You don’t want to have to move that quickly. Or if you shrink by 50% – can you sublet to help cover costs?

If it all looks good then go for it. Get yourself a real office, a home for your start-up that you can call your own. But make sure its still 10 minutes from where the Chief Executive lives!

African Gifted Foundation takes shape

2010-01-31T04:16:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a dinner for the Trustees and friends of the African Gifted Foundation. The charity is really beginning to take shape now and I am excited about the coming year.

The dinner was held in honour of our guest from Uganda, Professor Paul Mugambi, President of the Uganda National Academy of Science and Vice-Chancellor of Nkumba University, Uganda. Prof Mugambi from Uganda will be joining our Board of Trustees as will Andrew Alli, CEO of the Nigeria-based $Bn fund Africa Finance Corporation and Lord Avebury, the renowned human rights peer and a respected member of the House of Lords.

We are also delighted that the eminent South African campaigner, academic and businesswoman, Dr Ramphele has agreed to be Patron of the Foundation. Amongst many other achievements, Dr Ramphele was a Managing Director of the World Bank and Vice-Chancellor of University of Cape Town.

So, the Foundation, which will be pan-African from the start, has senior support from South, East and West Africa as well as strong UK and international connections.

Over the past couple of months we have worked through the process of setting up and registering the charity in the UK, appointing bankers, auditors and lawyers and we heard last week that the Charities Commision has just issued us with our charity number, so we are now formally established as a UK registered charity.

In 12 months time the African Gifted Foundation will hold its first 2-week Academy residential session for children gifted in maths and IT from across Africa and we are now working towards bring together the young people at a leading University in Africa, with experts from Africa and the UK. We are working out the programme and raising the funds right now. If you can think of anyone I should be talking to about becoming a donor please let me know.

Perhaps the most exciting thing that happened last week though was an unexpected package that arrived in the post via a very talented author that I met recently. Apparently a number of schools in Botswana have heard about the Foundation spontaneously assembled a dossier containing a list of their most academically gifted young people, complete with school reports, identity documents, achievement certificates and letters of recommendation. This is before we have even gone out there to tell people what we are doing! The achievments of these young African gifted children are very impressive, despite the odds some of them face, and I am certain that there will be no shortage of extremely bright young people for the Foundation to work with.

Meeting Royalty

2010-01-23T04:28:00.000-08:00

Watching Prince William tour New Zealand and Australia last week reminds me of the my first meeting with a major Royal. In my case it was the Princess Royal, Princess Anne. But I have to confess that I made slightly less of an impact than the young lady in Australia who managed to plant a cheeky kiss on William!

Nearly 20 years ago I organised some charity work that resulted in money being presented to one of Princess Anne's charities. Along with a number of other people who had done some very impressive fund raising things, making my efforts pale into insignificance, I attending a reception to be presented to Princess Anne.

We were coached on how to stand, how to smile, how to bow, what to call her. My head was getting dizzy with all the instructions.

Then came the moment.

Standing in the line. Flunkies floating in front of her, I found myself looking down at my feet, chanting "yes, ma'am, no ma'am, yes ma'am, no ma'am".

Then I looked up and to my surprise there She was, right in front of me.

Princess Anne (posh voice) "And who are you?"

Tom Ilube "Errrrr, ermmmm, errrr, nobody really"

Princess Anne (posh voice, slight pause) "You must be somebody?"

Tom Ilube "Errrrr, mmmm, not...I mean...not really"

Princess Anne (quizzical look, pause, posh voice) "Ok, well, well done and keep it up"

Tom Ilube "hahaha.....yes...quite...thank you...errr Ma'am"

And with that a hole in the floor opened up and I disappeared forever, banished to dark places to wallow alone for eternity in my shame.

Board meeting or Bored Meeting?

2010-01-22T02:23:00.000-08:00

This week we had Garlik’s monthly Board meeting. We gathered in the hallowed office of our venture capital investor and updated The Money on how the business is performing. The Many Headed Money hangs on to your every word. They miss nothing. Woe betide you if your numbers don’t add up!

In my experience you can think of your monthly Board meeting as a right pain in the behind or you can use it in a positive way. As a busy entrepreneur, you work flat out on ten things at the same time, wrestling with the day to day challenges. But once a month you are forced to press the pause button, take a step back and look at your business. To me that’s a good thing.

A good Board meeting is down to two things. Firstly a Chairman who knows how to chair, keeps to time and to the agenda and makes sure that the key decisions get made. It is very useful to have someone other than the CEO chairing the meeting. I am not a fan of being both CEO and Chairman – they are two very different roles and this really shows up in the Board meeting.

Secondly, preparation, preparation, preparation. I spent a half a day preparing for our two hour Board meeting The week before the Board meeting I produce a 3 or 4 page written Board note, including a half page Executive Summary and a section on each major area of the business. We add to this a “dashboard” with the key business metrics, the monthly management accounts and the minutes of last months Board meeting. That Board pack goes out to all attendees a few days in advance.

Preparing the Board pack is a great way of forcing me to take stock of the business as a whole and think about what direction things are moving in. Even though I have to put aside at least a half day (generally a Saturday afternoon, groan!) it is actually a very useful discipline to get into.

So, if you tend to avoid having a proper Board meeting or you leave them to once a quarter, I would strongly recommend that you put a bit of rigour into you free-wheeling business and subject yourself to the discipline of the monthly Board meeting. Or perhaps I’m just a masochist !

A picture of me, Naked

2010-01-05T14:11:00.001-08:00

As a result of the latest terrorist attempt to bring down a plane with exploding underwear, it appears that we are all going to be subjected to x-ray airport scanners that can apparently see through clothes.

I am torn between a strong desire not to be sitting next to a guy with combustable pants on the one hand when I board a plane and a strong desire to hold on to the last vestiges of privacy. But the momentum towards installing these scanners and the frequency with which I fly means that my naked image is going to be stored on Government databases all over the world within a few years.

And Governments have been known to lose personal data. So I have to assume that at some stage pictures of me, naked are going to appear on the internet for all to see.

It is possible that due to the poor quality of these so called x-ray scanners, the body images may not be as clear cut as they could be. One may get the impression of flab around the midrift when in reality no such flab exists. This would be most unfortunate for one's reputation. Afterall I am not known as "Iron Body Ilube" for nothing. Apparently there is even an emerging market in "enhancers" that can be appended to ensure that the image presented to the diligent airport security operatives will be appropriately impressive.

Therefore, in order to retain some degree of control over my own sense of privacy and identity I have taken the unprecedented step of pre-empting this situation by publishing my own, 100% authoritative picture of me, Naked.

How was it for you?

2009-12-30T15:44:00.000-08:00

31st December 2009.

We finally come to the end of the decade. The Noughties. And it does feel like the end of something and the start of something new.

As it is the end of a decade, I thought I would look back on the last ten years of my life and reflect on the highs and the lows. For many of you, doing this will take a lot of time, as you sit with a glass of wine and ponder. The extroverts amongst you will chat to people who went on the journey with you saying "Oh, yes, remember when we went to....". The introverts will grab a pencil and notebook, sit alone and sketch out a timeline.

No such effort for me. I simply go to my files, pull out the folder marked "My Life" and skim down the date-order list, selecting major events. What do you mean that's a bit weird? You mean you don't have a year-by-year list of events in your life to hand? Hey! You're the weird one, buddy!

It's a funny list though. Some years clearly had more of an impact on me than others. For example

Year 2000: (intentionally left blank)

(it appears nothing of particular note happened in my life that whole year)

Year 2005: Left Egg plc. Founded new company, Garlik. Received Honorary Doctorate of Technology. Elected Fellow of the British Computer Society. Visited Poland, South Africa, Jamaica (for wife's big family reunion), USA (New York, Los Angeles, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas), Nigeria. Met a President or two. Found a long lost sister in a country thousands of miles away.

Overall the "noughties" has been a positive decade for me. I became a grown up (i.e. reached the splendid age of 40), bought a new house, became a Freeman of the City of London, was invited to 10 Downing Street, appeared on national TV & radio, attended Davos, travelled through USA, Europe, Africa, India, China, learnt the Wu style Tai Chi Long form, met the world's richest man and some of the poorest, set up a new charitable foundation, and emerged from all this only about a stone heavier than I started!

By far the low point of the decade for me was the sad and untimely death of my brother-in-law Roger Gill in early 2006. Roger was like a big brother to everyone who knew him and just a wonderful, warm, down to earth, hilarious man. We miss him so, so much.

The high point was undoubtedly searching for and amazingly finding my half-sister in Uganda after over 30 years of having completely lost contact and not even knowing whether she was alive or not. The story of this experience is worthy of its own telling so I won't rush it here.

Poised on the edge of another decade (the "One-tees"?) I am very excited about the future. The world is getting nicely interesting. It's throwing some head-scratching challenges at us, just in case we were getting a bit complacent. Hey humans, thing you're clever huh? You're in control? Got it all sussed? Wrestle with a downpour of global warming with a dash of terrorism thrown in, it's saying. It's given us these vast technological landscapes to explore and it's given us friends. Friends, friends, friends everywhere we look. It's given you to me and me to you.

So, celebrate the highlights of the last ten years. At midnight share the very best thing that happened to you with the friends and loved ones around you. And then let's boldly go and explore this fascinating new decade together!

Happy New Decade to you all

Mr Bojangles

Boxing Day Group Therapy

2009-12-27T01:28:00.000-08:00

On Boxing Day like many men across the UK I attended a large scale, group therapy session. We stood in a huge circle and were encouraged to express our inner feelings in public, not something us stiff upper lipped types tend to do.

We call this ceremony a "Football Match".

I have come to believe that going to football matches is a great form of therapy and that must be its main attraction. Why else would hundreds of thousands of otherwise sensible grown men troop out onto the terraces shivering in the cold and rain when they could just as easily be sitting in the pub, pint in hand, watching it all on a wide screen TV?

There are three reasons why I and my fellow believers in Football Therapy left our families on Boxing Day and went for our therapy session.

Firstly, the SCREAM. How often do you get the opportunity to scream? I mean really, really scream. Let it all out in one primal howl that practically bursts your lungs? When was the last time you lept in the air, arms aloft, punching the sky, screaming and hugging complete strangers in a big group (apart from immediately after sex of course)?

We live in a repressed world. When you are "grown up" you are supposed to control your emotions. You "behave". Something great happens at work and you say "jolly good show, well done everyone" whereas what you want to do is scream like a banshee and run around the office with your shirt pulled up over your head, fist punching in a piston like motion shouting "get in my son, yessssss". Well at "A Football Therapy Gathering" you are allowed, nah, encouraged to behave in this way and it is very relaxing. Try it. Try it now. You'll enjoy it.

Secondly, the WOMB. When you immerse yourself in the midst of 22,000 fellow believers, you effectively re-enter the womb. You are surrounded on all sides, completely safe. You have no responsibility at all. You don't have to manage the team, yet you know exactly what "should" be done and you let them know in no uncertain terms. A bit like being an investor in a start up company I wold imagine. Take that donkey off, put that striker on. You demand action, but don't worry, you are not responsible so if they lose you can complain bitterly anyway. Relax. It's Not Your Fault. It's Not Your Fault.

Thirdly, the BROTHERHOOD. When you attend a "Football Therapy Weekly Group Meeting" you become part of a band of brothers. There are the 22,000 of you of course. For that moment all unquestionably committed to the same cause (unless a cheeky Manchester United supporter has sneaked into the Fulham end because that's the only way he could get tickets, and then he forgets to jump up a cheer at the right time). But more important is what we called your "Football Hug Group". These are the strangers directly around you, the other season ticket holders whose names you don't know, whose histories have never crossed yours, who you will never meet across a Board room table and yet who you will join in a group hug and cling on to for dear life as the curling free kick lifts over the wall and dips into the top left corner. Or who share your pain and anguish as Chelsea score a late, lucky winner in injury time.

Oh, your Hug Group. How you love them. Shouty Sweary Man and Shouty Sweary Man's Dad in front of you. When he leaps up, points at the linesman and screams "You F...ing Blind Lino????" you know that everything will be okay. Gnarled, Fed-up Bloke AKA "Sit Down "(or "Sidddaaaarnnn") sitting behind you. Grinning Bobble Hatted Clappy Lady to the right. Massive Fat Geezer to the left who really ought to have paid for two seats instead of taking half of yours. This is your Hug Group. You might pass them on the street, but in the heat of the moment, you will rely on them, you will leap up with them, you will join them in a group hug. And remember, your Hug group is a safe group. What happens on the terrrace stays on the terrrace (a fact I neglected to explain to my son when we started attending these sessions, who came home one day and walked into the lounge singing a popular football chant. We have since clarify the point regarding the importance of Football Therapy Confidentiality.)

Imagine how much better you would feel if after a particularly good pitch to a group of VCs, you could leap up and scream at the top of your voice, run around the room with your shirt over your head, hug your accountant and legal team and when the rooky VCs asked those silly questions they ask ("erm, shouldn't you be trying to sell some more stuff, errr?") a big tatooed bloke next to you would leap up, point straight at them and boom "You Don't Know What You're Doing, You Don't Know What You're Doing".

So on any given Saturday, when you see me and my fellow patients gathering at the clinic, don't be confused. We are not out enjoying ourselves and wasting time when we should be at home with our families. We are attending a Football Therapy session and making ourselves Better People.

Doing the deal

2009-12-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

As the year comes to an end and at a time when I should be winding down, preparing for outrageous Xmas parties and generally getting demob happy, I find myself negotiating one last deal that we are trying to wrap up before the end of the year.

I wouldn't say that I am a brilliant negotiator but I am a disciplined and decent negotiator. This is because I still use that most basic of negotiating techniques - the Like, Intend Must (LIM) model.

Anyone who has had any sort of negotiation training will know this model, or variations of it, but if you haven't then you might find it useful. It's very simple and it has served me well over the past 20 years whether it's been negotiating my next meal or multi-million pound deals.

The key, in my experience, to negotiating a deal that you are likely to be happy with is to put in the effort up front to work out what that deal would look like. Some people jsut get straight into the action and start haggling. They haggle away on instinct, calculating the pros and cons of doing the deal in real time and arrive at whatever deal is doable with a view at the time as to whether it feels right.

I don't. I sit down and plan out up front what an acceptable deal looks like. Whether it's negotiating a job and salary package or a major investment, I know from the start what the deal I am looking for looks like. I will almost ceretainly have it actually written down on a piece of paper somewhere, so that I can look at it, sleep on it, wake up the next day and take another look and be sure that its the right deal for me.

I structure it using the LIM principal. What would I LIKE the deal to end up as, in an ideal world? What do I INTEND to aim for? What MUST I get, otherwise I am going to walk away?

Get a piece of A4 paper, draw two lines down the page and mark the columns Like (right), Intend (middle), Must (left). Okay, you are ready.

Start with LIKE. Write down a long, ambitious list of all the things that you would like to receive as part of the deal. Don't be ridiculous, but don't hold back either. If the sun was shining, birds were singing, small cockney lads were tipping their hat to you and saying "G'Day to yer, Guv" then what would you get? Write it all down. Add a couple more items. Okay, thats in your "LIKE column.

Next go to your MUST column. Be completely and utterly realistic. What would you put in this list that you MUST get otherwise you are going to walk away. Don't kid yourself. Don't add a bit extra. This is the real, absolute bottom line. Want a salary of £40k? What if it was £38k? Would you really walk away from the job? £37k? £35k? What is your real bottom line? That's what you write down in the MUST column. There shouldn't be more than a handful of items in this column. If there are, you are probably kidding yourself and that's not going to be helpful in your negotiation.

Finally, go to the middle INTEND column. The way you do this one is to pick items from your LIKE column and copy them across, perhaps modifying them a little, but still being optimistic. There will be less items in your INTEND column than your LIKE column but there will be a lot more than your MUST column.

When you start negotiating, when the other guy says "so what are you looking for?" you are going to judge where to pitch between your LIKE and your INTEND list. If you are feeling strong or lucky you will go closer to LIKE (perhaps even start there). If you want to get the deal done quickly you will list INTEND and make it clear that there is not much room for negotiation. Then you haggle away, between LIKE and INTEND. If you are luckly you will end up somewhere around INTEND with a few nice bits thrown in.

But if you get pushed you may fall below INTEND. That's okay. You sit on your MUST list. That is deep in your mind. It's your bottom line, so you know exactly how far you can be pushed before you walk. That gives you confidence and you can't possibly do a bad deal. You can't be talked into anything below your MUST list and if at the end of the day the only deal equals your MUST list, then you do it because it is what you said you MUST get and you've got it. So don't whinge, don't complain, do the MUST deal, take what you came for and move on. Did the world end? No, it's still going round. Take your deal and move on.

I don't have a lot of patience for negotiating. Some people will go on and on for months, squeezing out another drop to get a slightly better deal. I don't. I prefer speed and certainty. I draw up my Like, Intend, Must. I pitch, I haggle a bit, I get to the right place. I do a deal or walk away. It's done, move on. Can't lose. Can't go below Must, so it's always going to be bottom line or better.

Two weeks of haggling to go on the deal I'm in at the moment. Wish me luck. Merry Xmas!

The Ballad of Big Red

2009-12-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

As an entrepreneur, you are constantly talking your business up. But there is a fine line between pitching hard and lying through your teeth. Sometimes you stay the right side of the line but you pitch too hard and to your surprise you actually get what you pitched for!

That can be a bit of a shock and that brings us to the Ballad of Big Red. But more of that later.

There is a game that start-up guys and Venture Capital guys play.

Start up guys are expected to "pitch up". Your business is going to be a BILLION $$ business. Your market is a BILLION $$ market. You have a WORLD CLASS team. You technology is WORLD BEATING. Your business model is PARADIGM SHIFTING. You are the new [INSERT LAST SUCCESS STORY HERE].

In some cases much of this might actually be true but whether it is or not, as a start up guy you pitch it. In fact you will learn to speak IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

VC guys demand that you do this. Ever seen a pitch where the start up guy says "I think we might at a stretch build a £10m business and you might make 2x your money - can't promise anything though. Let's see how it goes"?

VC guy needs to hear you pitch up, and then they immediately discount it. However if VC guys likes what he's hearing, he starts to pitch to you too. He is SMART MONEY. He's got CONTACTS. He can TAKE YOU IN TO CHINA (whether you want to go there or not).

By the end of it you and the VC are PRACTICALLY SHOUTING AT EACH OTHER across the desk, STRUTTING AROUND LIKE PEACOCKS. Start up guy and VC in full flow, going at it hammer and tongs. It is truly wonderful to behold.

In reality, you should pitch what you believe. If you believe that your business will turn over £100m next year, pitch it. Why not? It's your business. You are going to have to make it happen if they say yes. So pitch the future that you believe you can create and if the other guy doesn't believe you, go find someone who does.

If the other guy does believe you, you had better be ready to clamber aboard and ride your heart out. Which brings us back to the Ballad of Big Red.

So, a couple of years back I'm on holiday with the family in upstate New York. Wife wisely rests at the hotel whilst me and the kids go horse riding. We arrive at the stables and pay our money. Now this is where things go a bit wrong.

In mitigation I would like to remind you that I am a middle-aged man, comfortably into my 40's who has been known to boast to my kids on occasion about my extraordinary capabilities and can on occasion puff out my chest when in the company of the younger, fairer sex. So the cards were stacked against me, really, when the cowboy who assigned us to our horses turned out to be a cowgirl.

Having assigned midget pony things to the kids, she turned to me and drawled "do you ride much?" My son looked at me expectantly. He knew the truth. How could I have slaughtered all those buffalo "back in the day" if I didn't ride? Surely I wasn't lying when I told him I had ridden Camels in the Sahara?

I heard myself pitching up. "Sure, I ride a bit" I said in a fake American accent that I think came out a bit Lithuanian.

When I say I ride a bit what I meant was that in th early 70's myself and my elder brother once rode a donkey on a beach in Spain. It jiggled up and down and made us laugh a lot. But I didn't bother to go into detail. I "pitched up".

"Cool" smoldered Cowgirl "let's give Big Red a run out this afternoon."

"Look" says me in my best Hugh Grant "I err, errr, what, eh, what, I mean, are you sure?"

"Oh, its no problem, Sir"

When American's start calling you Sir, you know you are in trouble. "Step away from the car, Sir", "Let me see your hands, Sir", "Is this your goat, Sir?" You know how it goes. Best to give in.

Then they bring out Big Red. ARRRGGGGHHHHHH. A giant mutant, elephant of a horse that clearly was not in the mood for games.

I let the party trot gently off into the woods, saying that I would follow behind before starting the lengthy process of hauling myself up onto the BEAST FROM ANOTHER PLANET. I lay on its back, gripped everything I could grip and fortunately the T-REX IN A HORSE COSTUME decided to walk calmly after the rest of the horses.

All was well until Cowgirl called out from the front "Let's give them a run". Off they shot and off went Big Red. ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

Anyway, all's well that ends well. I survived but I learnt three lessons

1) sometimes when you "pitch up" the other person believes you, so you'd better believe yourself too

2) if you walk into the VCs office and anyone around the table is dressed as a sexy cowgirl, don't inflate your figures by 100%

3) if you do find yourself sitting on top of Big Red, hold on for dear life and ride the damn thing! You'll live.

Worshipping workshops

2009-11-28T00:54:00.000-08:00

In the business world there is nothing we love more than to get a bunch of executives together to do a bit of "brainstorming". Got a problem? Quickly, collect a gang together, grab some post-it notes, hug a flip chart and let's bang our brains together. We worship workshops. We bow before a good brainstorm. We love it !

But there are problems here and I often find myself on the receiving end of them.

The main problem is that brainstorms must have been invented by extroverts. They are a source of at least dismay and at worst downright fear amongst introverts.

As an introvert myself, I speak from experience. If I want to get into a problem, I want to think about it. Then discuss it a bit. Then read. Then ponder. Then talk again. It's a long, thoughtful process. No hurry. It's the "Tai Chi" style of brainstorming. It's the quiet force of a flowing stream wearing down the problem, cutting a new path.

But the extrovert pushes us I-types into a room. They time-box the problem. They leap about. They make decisions there and then. It's all action, action, action. Don't reflect, just Do. Think Karate. External Power. Chop. Thrust. Hack out a new path and surge forwards.

There is quite a macho thing in this, I think. As an Executive you feel you need to be seen to be decisive. I see this a lot in up-and-coming execs who want to prove themselves (to themselves? to each other? who to?). I see it in VCs, usually the younger ones and the analysts who jump in with cutting and barely thought out views whilst their more experienced colleagues sit back, take it in and ponder.

There is some issue to do with peoples' relationship with time here. A sense that everything is urgent. We must solve it NOW. I have very rarely come across a problem in business that needs to be solved now, now, now. There is always time to think, to reflect. It is very rare that you have to get together and solve it right now. Perhaps at the sharper end of stock trading, but not when it comes to business strategy. Never.

But what introverts do is to allow themselves to be swept along by their extrovert brothers. We turn up to the brainstorm. We pretend to enjoy it, but inside we are hating it. We barely get a word in edgeways as the extrovert throw ideas at the wall to see what sticks, running things up flagposts to see who salutes. And then horror of horrors, they actually rush out of the meeting and start ACTING on the discussion. Those decisions that were made in the few minutes of brainbanging were REAL! Yikes!

As usual in business, as in life, there is not a right or wrong way to tackle problems. There are just different ways. And lively, boisterous brainstorming sessions are certainly one of the tools in the kitbag for executives to use. But for introverts they can be a real pain and extroverts need to be aware of that before they go galloping off down that path, shouting yehaar and dragging their depressed looking introvert colleagues behind them.

How much is your daughter worth?

2009-10-25T05:25:00.000-07:00

One of my sisters in Nigeria is about to get married and the thorny issue of "bride price" has arisen. It is a fascinating and complex process steeped in tradition. My father has issued to the prospective groom's family a carefully drafted, typed list of 36 very specific items required before the traditional wedding can proceed.

I can't go in to all the details as negotiations are reaching a critical stage. Mediators have been appointed. Venues for the bilaterals have been agreed and talks about talks have commenced (although at this stage the UN Security Council has not been brought in to play). However I can reveal that the precise number of "smoke dried pure river fish (maggot free)" may be disputed.

For those whose culture does not include a "bride price" this whole exercise is easy to misunderstand. The brides family is not "selling" their daughter. The thinking is this. A man comes along and says he wants to take your daughter away. Naturally you refuse. Who does he think he is and why does he think he can deprive you of your beloved daughter? Go away and leave us alone, you cry. Our daughter is ours and we want to keep her.

Oh we beg , the man's family says. Look, they say, come on be reasonable. You say you love and value your daughter. Well, tell us how much you love and value your daughter and we'll see what we can do to help soothe the pain of the loss that you will suffer?

The girls family go in to a huddle. Wise old folk gather and discuss the issue. Remember old so-an-so's daughter? We loved and valued her this much. Then there was Mrs Muggings daughter. It was that much. Okay, let's put our list together.

A list is draw up. it is non-negotiable. It is a statement of the worth of the daughter in the eyes of the family. It is designed to send a message so it is pitched high. Some items are there to amuse and entertain. Some are genuine points of negotiation. Some are for the celebration (in the UK the bride's family pays for the Wedding, in Nigeria the Groom's family contributes a lot to the Traditional Wedding and that gets added to the list). It's part serious business, part pantomime. Finally in a serious of complex manouvers, the list is handed over.

The boys family are in a tricky position. On the one hand they are obliged to recoil in horror at the huge price being demanded by the bride's family. However, are they saying that their family isn't wealthy enough to afford the price? How embarrassing. Or are they saying that the girl that their son has chosen to marry isn't worth that much? Hmmmm. Tricky business.

And although I said that the list isn't negotiable, a compromise can always be reached. The position taken by the brides family is this - the list is a clear statement of the worth that the bride's family puts on their daughter, who they don't want to part with anyway. However the groom's family will come and present what they feel they can present and after much grumbling and dissatisfation from the brides family, including threats to walk away from the whole thing, everything will get sorted out.

Now, as the father of a clever, beautiful, talented young daughter here in England, I will not have the opportunity to set a bride price. But boy, oh, boy if I did have to put a value on my daughter let me tell you the groom's family, friends, casual acquaintances, descentants and anyone else who knows the groom would be paying out for generations to come!

My Gap Year

2009-10-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

When I am all grown up I am going to take a gap year.

I am saving it up so that I can really savour it. like the last sweet in the packet. It's not something to be rushed. I don't know when I'll do it or what I'll do with it, but I am looking forward to it.

I would probably travel, but I don't like the idea of backpacking and slobbing around in dingy hostels. Perhaps I would travel from 5 star hotel to All-inclusive resort around the world. I'd love to tour around the USA. To go to India, China, Africa. High in the Swiss mountains. Paris. Ahhhh.

More likely I would go and sit in a library somewhere for a year and browse interesting books. I'd find some books that were so complex they would make my head hurt. But I don't know if that would keep me busy for a whole year.

I might try to learn something new. Pick a new topic, a new domain and immerse myself in it.

Or I might get out and about, meet interesting, intelligent, thoughtful people from around the world and think of interesting things we could do together.

I would want to create new things. New initiatives. Things that I could look at and say "wow, did we just do that?"

I think I will try to do some good in the world. Try to have an impact and change some things for the better. Or at least flap my wings like a butterfly and see what storm blew up across the world.

I would spend lots of time with my family. Watching, talking, helping, enjoying. I would want to spend time standing on the touchline and cheer my son scoring tries at rugby. I would want to have the time to go to concerts with my daughter and "throw my hands in the air like I just don't care". I would want to sneak off to the cinema with my wife, buy huge illegal buckets of popcorn and munch all afternoon.

I might even see if I could start a company. But not any old company. I would start an outrageously ambitious company that was trying to do something completely new. that if it worked would change the face of the world. And if it didn't then it wouldn't.

Hold on, hold on just a second. Aren't I doing all these things anyway? I seem to be doing exactly what I want to be doing. Now what am I supposed to do on my gap year? Damn!

Kasparov, Karpov and Simutowe

2009-09-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

After 25 years Kasparov and Karpov, the chess Grandmasters are back to their old ways, battling it out for supremacy.

I am filled with awe when I think about the brain power that must be being set to work when these two meet. Intelligence is an interest of mine and I enjoy being amongst exceptionally smart people.

Not that I lay any claim to be exceptionally smart myself, although I did once score 104% in a maths exam. But when you meet people who are really, really clever then if, like me, you fall into the category of "definitely not stupid" you have enough smarts to appreciate what they are capable of.

Speaking of chess, I am not bad at the game myself. I wouldn't say I was a keen player, but I can put up a decent fight. However at my old software company, we had some really smart developers who were excellent chess players. Not that I ever played against them but it just wouldn't have been worth it to them. They would have beaten me as if I wasn't there.

Then we hired a testing analyst. As well as being a jolly decent software tester, he turned out to be an English Grandmaster . On one of our team awaydays, we set up about 20 chessboards for all of us, in a horse-shoe and he played against all of us simultaneously, moving swiftly from board to board. He beat us all as if we were children. Only one of our software engineers put up any sort of resistance, which I think he foundquite entertaining. For his own amusement, when all of us had succumbed, our grandmaster reset the engineer's board and then replayed the whole game from memory talking us through the moves as he went. Amazing.

However, he would admit himself that there were other international grandmasters who would beat him as if he was a babe in arms, and those grandmasters would bow their heads if they ever came up against a "super-grandmaster" such as a Kasparov or Karpov.

So, where does that leave me on the intelligence ladder? Slightly above a cabbage I think. Fortunately I have never felt bad about not being "the smartest guy in the room" because I grew up with two exceptionally smart brothers, so there was no point trying to compete on that score. In fact I find myself drawn to genius, I enjoy observing it, just being in its presence.

Sometimes I get mistaken for being smart and this is unfortunate, as happened when I was doing my physics degree in Nigeria. There was a mathematician who shared a couple of courses with me. He was super-smart and somehow got it into his head that I was too. So, when other lads were heading off to the bar for a bottle of beer or two, he would beg me to stay behind for an hour or so to "solve vectors" with him. Oh, the happy hours we would spend, him with the chalk at the blackboard scribbling away, turning occasionally to say "what do you think, Tom, is it correct, Tom?" Me lying on the desks, legs crossed, smoking away, pondering for a few minutes and then pronouncing, to his great relief "by jove, I think you've cracked it". I never had the heart to say "I have absolutely no idea what those funny little squiggles you put on the board actually mean, but can I go now please? Beer doesn't drink itself you know!".

Over the summer I have been reading extensively on the nature of intelligence, how to identify those with a real gift in certain areas and how to unleash their full potential. I am fascinated by gifteness and intelligence and I am also puzzled as to why the African continent has not managed to unleash its fair share of genii and what happened to my vector-analyzing friend who was easily as smart as the smartest people I have met since from London to Silicon Valley. Did he fulfill his full potential or did the rigours of African life mean that his awesome brainpower was put to the task of making a half decent living day to day? If so, what a waste!

For example, in a continent of nearly a billion people, why is there only one chess Grandmaster, Amon Simutowe from sub-saharan Africa? Is there a different distribution of intelligence across the African population? I don't believe there is. But if there isn't then that means that, just taking the young people, of which there are about 400 million across Africa, there must be something like 8 million (2%) who would be eligible to join Mensa!

I imagine what the continent could be like if we could find and unleash some of this brain power and so I am creating a charitable foundation to take on that challenge. In Britian, USA, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and all over the world countries are investing millions into gifted and talented programs for their young people and I want to make sure that the same thing happens across Africa. I have been working on this for a couple of years now and the bits of the jigsaw are coming together. It's an impossible challenge and it's going to be a long and fascinating journey that will start in earnest next year when we run our first major gifted Academy program. The outcomes are unpredictable and that makes it even more exciting.

And if in ten years time all I suceed in achieving is finding and unleashing 10,000 young people who all beat me at chess as if I was a babe in arms, then I will be very, very happy.

Mingling with the Party Boys

2009-09-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

Today I attended the launch of a policy document by the Conservative Party shadow Justice Minister Dominic Grieve QC. The topic was the surveillance society and government databases and as it looks a fair bet that we might see a change of Government in 2010 I thought I had better accept the invitiation and hear what the thinking is from opposition quarters.

The content of the paper and discussion is covered elsewhere (here and here for example) so I won't bother repeating it. Suffice to say that despite not being of a Conservative persuasion myself, I was a bit surprised to find that I agreed with pretty much everything in the paper and I was impressed with the way Dominic Grieve handled himself during the lengthy Q&A session.

But having never been to a real live "launch" of a political policy document before I was keen to find out what it was like. So I put on what I thought looked like a Tory sort of suit and set off to the invitation only event held at a Microsoft office in London.

The event was smaller than I thought it would be. There were about 40 people present and I suspect at least 10 of them were party faithful. Judging by the number of badges on the reception table when I arrived, I think the majority of guests were present (perhaps 10 or so missing) so it seems that these launch events are not designed to be the big "show and tell" affairs that I had assumed.

Speaking of party faithful, I do like watching young politicians on the make. They tend to be caricatures of whatever party they belong to. I slipped in and sat on the back row just as the event was getting going and a young lad in his twenties spotted me, glided across the carpet and pressed a copy of the report into my hand. I say young lad and I think he was a young lad but he somehow managed to look as if he was comfortably into his fifties. He looked as if he had been born in his fifties. This may be the look you go for if you are an aspiring Conservative. I must find out what the Labour lads try to look like these days. I know what your typical libdem aspires to.

After a brief introduction by someone important but instantly forgettable, Dominic Grieve stood up and made a few remarks about his document. Then we got down to the meat of the event - the Q&A. Dominic sat between two other folk, a mate of mine and all-round good egg called Jerry Fishenden and Eleanor Laing MP, Shadow Minister of Justice. I must say, I was slightly taken aback to see Jerry up there, not because he shouldn't have been but I just hand't expected it and it's always a surprise when you see someone you know unexpectely out of context, being all grown up and speaking in deep, well modulated, authoritative tones. Jerry was, I believe, the techno-totty (on account of knowing what he is talking about when it comes to technology) and Eleanor's role was to agree with Dominic and repeat what he said but in a soft reassuring Scottish brogue.

Despite it being a small and largely friendly group (why would you invite your critics to your own launch party, after all?) the questioning went on for a good hour and was very persistant. This was the bit where I was reminded why I will not make a good politician. Most of the questions were pretty good as the audience knew its stuff, but some were self-serving drivel and it would have been quicker if the questioner had just stood up, waved their arms in the air and said "Yoo Hoo Look at me. I'm here!". That's when I would have said "yes, yes, yes, we've all seen you, you ARE big and you ARE clever, now sit down", Dominic however looked thoughtful and came up with half-decent answers that gave the impression that he gave a damn about the questioner. Impressive.

Probably the most impressive was a question that the chap next to me asked about ISO standards verse kite marks. I assumed that Dominic would immediately pass the question over to Jerry, who might have stood a chance of knowing what the question was about. Indeed, I thought I caught Jerrry shifting uneasily in his chair. But to my surprise Dominic responded to the question himself and actually answered it pretty well.

As I didn't understand the protocol for asking questions (such as did your question need to make sense or not) and because my personality type makes it illegal for me to speak unless spoken to in strange public settings, I didn't get around to asking a question. But almost everyone else did and the session had to be cut short and brought to an end.

Job done, the group prepared to retire for drinks, nibbles and networking in Microsoft's plush offices (Microsoft have been very smart boys, getting so close to the opposition, no other tech companies in sight at this stage). Networking is something the young party boys really know how to do and I could see them stretching and limbering up for a good session of trusting about, grasping hands insincerely and looking just past your left shoulder as they speak to you just in case someone slightly more important hoves into view. I should really have stayed and sprayed business cards around, but there is only so much I can take. I made my excuses (to myself, under my breadth) and fled.

Son's new school sets me homework!

2009-09-05T09:40:00.001-07:00

My son looked resplendent in his new dark green school blazer and tie for his first day of secondary school yesterday. Suddenly he looks all grown up. Time has passed so quickly.

I still remember my first day at secondary school. Me and the boys going by ourselves on the train to Teddington in our brand new school uniforms, messing about on the train. We threw paper at each other, climbed on the seats and made loads of noise. What fun!

I also remember my second day at school. The second morning, at Assembly in front of the whole school, the Headteacher slapped his cane on the table and shouted "Four new boys were seen in the school uniform, THE SCHOOL UNIFORM, messing about on trains. If you were one of those boys STAND. UP. NOW." All 1,000 boys sat in complete expectant silence. Then one by one Tom, Stephen, Steve and Ross (not necessarily in that order) stood up, quivering like jelly and as the whole school looked on sniggering, we made our way to the Head's office to be disciplined!

These days caning is out and health and safety is in. No more horrible Mr "VZ" taking a run up and whacking boys with his trainer. It's forms, forms, forms now. There are so many forms to fill in when your child is going to a new school. Clubs to join, health and safety to worry about and the trickiest of all - the Ethnic Origin form.

This school has a long and complex list of options available for me to tick to identify my lad's ethnic origin. It was easy to dismiss most of the options - Irish traveller, Polish etc. But then we were left with these "black" choices:

Nigerian
Caribbean
Black European
Black and any other ethnic group
Other black
Other black African
White and black African
White and black

Well this is not as easy as we thought. Let us consider the situation.

My son was born and has lived his whole life in England. He is a south London, rugby playing, Fulham football club supporting geezer. One of his parents was also born and grew up in London of Caribbean parents. The other parent was born in London with a white English (plus a quarter Irish) mother and a Nigerian father.

So what variety of "black" is my boy? I puzzled and puzzled. I could of course have opted out and just not ticked one of the boxes but I think its no bad thing for the school to be aware of the diversity (0r not) of its student population. Finally after much thought and voices saying "oh for goodness sake, just tick something" I came up with an answer.

I'll tell you what I did later, but what would you have ticked?

Confirmation that I am the ladies choice

2009-08-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

Great news! I finally have irrefutable evidence that Ilube is the ladies choice.

I know many of you have thought this for some time, but now there is hard evidence to back it up.

Okay, perhaps that's not the same Ilube. Mind you, it's cooler to be the ladies choice than to be a lubricant for dry eye conditions.

Having said that, I prefer being an eye lubricant than a biomass project in Slovakia or a socio-linguistic research project. But I guess I don't get to make these choices. If you've got a name that lends itself to a wide range of products and services, you get used to it. But for the avoidance of doubt, let me explain where the name ILUBE originally comes from.

To do this, I need to tell you a story that goes back to the tail end of the 19th Century. A young lad in what is now Nigeria, West Africa was hard at work under the hot sun, clearing bush to plant his seeds when he was "seized" by warriors. He was kidnapped, taken hostage by warriors from a rival tribe and taken into captivity.

The boy was dragged off to Urhobo land in modern day Delta State (which reminds me - if any of my Urhobo friends are reading this WILL YOU PEOPLE PLEASE STOP KIDNAPPING MY ANCESTORS!).

The young lad grew up amongst these Urhobo people as a captive/servant and he eventually married a local Urhobo/Itsekiri woman called Inene from a town called Okpara Waterside.

The couple's first three children were born there. Their second child, and first son, was a boy who was named, Oritseritseilubeye, which is an Itsekire name. Snappy name I know, and for day to day use it was shortened to ILUBE - a ha!

The couple settled down and engaged in fishing and trading commodities (not as in "BUY GOLD, SELL OIL" on the international markets but "buy fish, sell bananas" in the local market). At the time Inene was pregnant with their third child.

However, one day the captive lad who was now a grown man was at the market in Abraka when he overheard some traders speaking in his own language, Emai, that he had not heard for many years. After several months he plucked up courage to cultivate their acquaitance and eventually disclosed his true identity and how he came to be in this strange and distant place so far from "home".

This is now the first half of the 20th century and British Colonial administration was gradually creating an environment that made it more conducive for displaced persons, refugees, prisoners of inter-ethnic wars and slaves to migrate back to their ethnic areas.

Our hero determined to try to gain his release from his captors and make his way home. With his wife heavily pregnant, the local "Oracles" were consulted and revealed a surprising insight. The Oracles claimed that the unborn child would refuse to be born until a solemn promise was made that the child would be taken to its father's land.

This caused much panic particularly amongst Inene's family and in the circumstances Inene and her people, after a number of family conferences, eventually gave in and agreed that after the child was born, the family would be allowed to leave. The child, Itakhor, therefore agreed to be born and everything went smoothly.

However about 6 months after Itakhor's birth there was still no sign of the captors releasing the man and his family and Itakhor fell ill and refused to respond to the usual medication.

The Oracles were again consulted and not surprisingly the unfilfilled promise was quickly identified as the root cause for the child's illness. Rapid arrangements were made and, as the Oracles predicted, the child quickly recovered, so the family set off on the epic trip on foot through dangerous terrain back to Emai land. The baby Itakhor was strapped on to Inene's back, as is the custom, and young Oritseritseilubeye sat astride his fathers shoulders. The family set off at a pace set by the little daughter and oldest of the three children, Uledikun, on a dangerous journey that took several weeks, following a route and directions obtained from the Emai traders.

Years later Oritseritseilubeye or Ilube for short, now settled back in Emai-land, had children of his own and as is sometimes done, his sons decided to take his first name as their surname, thereby establishing the Ilube family. One of his sons is my father and you may not believe it but I actually met the lady Inene when I was very young and she was very, very, very old, blind and simply terrifying.

So now you know the origins of the name Ilube. Mind you, that's not to say that I was wrong in my starting assumption. Oh yes, I'll say it again for the hard of hearing. I am indeed the ladies choice :)

Talking to strangers

2009-08-09T01:11:00.001-07:00

Internet security types, like me, are always advising people to be wary about who you are talking to on the Web. We advise parents to tell their children not to talk to strangers, and rightly so. In particular we try to advise teenagers about "stranger danger".

So, why was I not surprised when I was told about a fairly new site, set up by a teen for teens that is sweeping across that generation like crazy.

Enter Omegle - tagline "Talk to Strangers". Yes, it's a site that encourages you to chat to strangers on the web immediately without any controls, restricitions, nanny-words about being safe etc. Just dive straight in and chat to strangers about nothing. Waste hours chatting to strangers.

At the same time as being slightly "creepy" it is a great lesson in targeting customer needs, if you are thinking of creating a start up. Start with your customer, in this case teenagers, and think about their requirements. Two stand out. One - Annoy your parents by doing the exact opposite of what they tell you to do. Two - achieve this whilst wasting time in an entirely non-productive way.

It's wierd and compelling and apparently loads of kids use it in an idle moment. Sitting near your computer and mind wandering? Reach over to Omegle, click the button, chat to a stranger amongst millions somewhere in the word. If it gets boring, disconnect and carry on staring at the lightbulb. Brilliant ! And spooky! No wonder its so popular.

It's interesting to see how kids use it too. They are quite brutal. If the conversation is threatening, wierd or boring they just press the "disconnect" button and start another chat with a new stranger. Perhaps there is some useful learning going on here on how to deal with annoying strangers online - you disconnect them without a second thought.

I was explaining it to some of my technical colleagues and they were dubious. They said they think you are not chatting to a real stranger. They think you are chatting to a robot, a piece of simple artificial intelligence software that is able to engage in a fairly believable conversation by reflecting comments back to you. So I thought I would put this to the test. Here's what I got (I am YOU and the stranger is STRANGER).

Omegle conversation log

2009-07-27

Connecting to server...

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

A word of advice: "asl" is boring. Please find something more interesting to talk about!

Stranger: hi

You: hi, are you a real person or a computer?

Stranger: i'm a real person u idiot! :)

Stranger: female or male?

You: yeh, that's what a bot would say

Stranger: haha

Stranger: okay then how are u doing?

You: i'm doing wednesday, u?

Stranger: not so much really..... what is wednesday?

You: i'm pretty certain you are a computer program

Stranger: okay then i dont want to talk to a person who thinks that i'm a computer program!! see u

You: hey don't go!

Stranger: why?

You: i am from the future

Stranger: haha! u are not funny

Stranger: are u a male?

You: sometimes, but only after 6am and on green days

Stranger: are u sure u are okay?? because it doesn't sound like that to me..... call a doctor!!

You: i am a doctor

Stranger: yeah..... how old are u... doctor?

You: the square root of pi minus the height of the moon

You have disconnected.

So, was I talking to a person or a Bot? I think it was a person but I'm still not 100% sure. Have a play with it and let me know what you think. Horrific or harmless fun? And if you get arrested for grooming teenagers don't blame me!

Bojangles Birthday

2009-07-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

Somedays you must focus. Focus on the business, the fund raising, the revenue, the cost base, getting the PR right, wrestling with the technology.

Other days you focus on one thing and one thing only - yourself. Nothing else matters. Wake up selfish, be selfish all day and as midnight creepes towards you, let your selfish head rest on your selfish pillow, breath out and relax.

That day is called your birthday and today was Bojangles Birthday.

I woke up late and slowly opened my pile of presents. I love opening presents. It doesn't matter what they are, I just love opening them. I take my time. Prod them, rattle them, sniff them and then slowly unwrap them.

I wander off for a mid-morning breakfast with my wife. Full English and a steaming hot mug of tea.

I arrive at work just a few minutes before lunchtime and disrupt everyone by telling useless jokes and generally behave like a naughty schoolboy. Then I wander vaguely off to lunch with a couple of my favourite Professors and my Chairman. Sitting in a French cafe overlooking the River Thames in leafy Richmond, I laugh and joke with my mates until its time to drag ourselves back to the office.

I arrive back in the office in time for my two - yep, two - birthday cakes to be lit and then I settle down to an afternoon cuppa and a couple of slices of cake. A big piece of chocolate and an slice of the jam sponge one. By the time I had finished that it was nearly time to go home.

Got home in time to prepare to go to dinner with the family. A great turn out - it was going to be just the four of us but over twenty turned up. My mum, brothers and sisters and the kids turned out in force and we had a jolly time, taking over a restaurant that usually only gets about four diners on a typical evening.

Finally, I get home, make myself a jasmine tea, take a look at facebook, smile at the "happy birthdays" people have sent me and then settle down one last time for the day to listen to my old friend, Sammy Davis Jr, singing my tune - Mr Bojangles.

"He said his name was Bojangles, then he danced a lick
Right across the cell
He grabbed his pants, took a better stance, jumped up high
That's when he clicked his heels
Then he let go a laugh, Lord, he let go a laugh
Shook back his clothes all around

That was Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles
Mr. Bojangles, Lord, he could dance"

Today was my birthday and it was all about me :)

Play up! Play up! And play the game

2009-07-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

Strategic planning for start ups is just a game. Literally, in our case. We don't do long term, 3 or 5 year strategic plans. We create a "Game" and then we play it full on. Play up! Play up! And play the game.

A lot of companies produce sophisticated 3 year plans, full of precise detail and copious spreadsheets. Business schools churn out battalions of MBAs capable of producing a 3 year plan at the drop of a hat.

But our approach is different. We define two things. One is the "Enduring Purpose" and the other is "The Game".

The Enduring Purpose gets defined once and never changes. It is a statement of why the company itself exists, what its ultimate purpose is. It is a single, clear, carefully thought through sentence and it is aspirational. You may never achieve it but that doesn't matter, it serves as a guiding light that you are constantly working towards.

The Game gets defined frequently. It typically has a 12 month timeframe, but it can be shorter (Garlik's current Game is a 6 month game) or longer. However its best to think in terms of 12 months.

The Game starts with a sentence, usually along the lines of "By the end of 2010, we will have...." and it needs to be a clear step towards achieving the Enduring Purpose.

Underneath the sentence or two that defines The Game you will write some Conditions of Satisfaction. There may be 3 to 5 conditions of satisfaction and these are the statements that make it clear how you will know whether you have "won" the game.

For example, if you are running an environmental company, GreenCo, then...

Enduring purpose..."GreenCo will change the world by giving families real power over their impact on the environment around them and inspiring them to reduce the harm they cause."

The Game..."By December 2009, GreenCo will launch its GreenHome online platform to consumers across three continents and establish itself as the leading player in consumer green issues".

Conditions of satisfaction....

a) GreenHome will be launched in USA, UK and India by December 2009
b) GreenCo will acquire a critical mass of users by December 2009
c) GreenCo will be recognised in the environmental industry as a thought leader in the USA

This whole structure should fit onto a single side of A4. If it's much longer than that then it probably isn't clear or focused enough to be useful. Underneath each condition of satisfaction, you will list 1 to 3 "measures" that make it absolutely clear what you mean by "critical mass" for example or "recognised in the ... industry".

The final step is to allocate accountabilities to each condition of satisfaction. Whilst there may be several people involved in each item, you need to give someone (including yourself) the primary accountability to hit that CoS.

The process of putting this together should take you 2 to 3 days of debate and discussion and plenty of flipcharts and if you can you should tackle it off-site so that you can clear everyones mind of the hassles of the day to day. In fact you might want to start off by having some discussions that help people to get their immediate angst out of the way.

As you get into the debate, you and your leadership team should test each word to make sure it says what you mean it to say. Words are important here because you need to get clear on what matters to you. There may be some debate amongst the team about the wording so remember that ultimately the Chief Executive gets to decide and the rest of the team aligns behind the CEOs decision.

But what about years 2 and 3 I hear the MBA's chant. Don't worry about them. Play your Game full on for the short period you have defined and as you get to the end of that period, define the next Game, consistent with the Enduring Purpose, for the following period. Nothing matters except The Game.

So, Play up! Play up! And play the game, and everything else will look after itself.

Leo Sayer made me do it

2009-07-16T13:57:00.000-07:00

Over the past 3 years we at Garlik have put a lot of effort into building a state of the art semantic technology platform. We raised millions of pounds from hard nosed VCs, hired brilliant software engineers, bought bucket loads of servers and developed some pretty impressive software.

And then last week, we took the core bit of technology (something called an RDF store for the geeks amongst you) and GAVE IT AWAY!

Yes, we released that software, 4store is it's name, as open source software, free for anyone, anywhere to download and use for whatever they want.

Why one earth did we do that? I hear you ask (not dissimilar to my investors reaction). Simple. Because Leo Sayer told me to. You see, I'm just a boy, giving it all away.

Actually, the real reason is that we want to help the semantic web grow by encouraging as many businesses and other organisations as possible to publish their data in the right way, so that it all links together into one huge web of linked data - the next generation of the web. They need tools to do this, we have those tools, so why not give them away and see what happens? That's how the web itself grew after all.

Within the first 48 hours, thousand people from all over the world have visited 4store.org and projects are springing up using the software. It's exciting. It makes me feel like dancing.

Sometimes when you do stuff like this, you can feel like a one man band. Nobody knows or understands. Is there anybody out there wanna lend a hand?

p.s. for those of you old enough to remember Leo Sayer, here's a bit of trivia for you. When he was a huge British pop star in the 70's he lived in Richmond...and my grandad, Maurice Christian, used to tune his piano! There, feel free to use that. It may come up in a pub quiz one day.

Who the hell are you, my friend?

2009-07-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

Facebook and other social networks have highlighted a troubling social phenomenon that is causing people like me a real problem – “Asymmetric Memory Retention” or AMR.

AMR is the situation where you interact with someone who has a shared experience with you, but whereas one of you has a clear recall of what happened, the other has no memory of the event or even the other person at all. I’m not talking about a vague and distant recollection. I mean no trace at all.

Whilst AMR has existed forever, in the past the likelihood of you meeting someone who you had completely and utterly forgotten was very remote. But with the advent of Facebook, twitter and all the rest it is becoming increasingly common. We’ve all had that friend-request out of the blue from someone saying “Hey, Tom, you old rogue, remember that day with the red bowtie and the halibut?” But how are you supposed to handle that situation? What are the social norms of interaction when you are a victim of AMR?

To gain some insight into this, I turned to the academic literature on AMR. This turned out not to be very fruitful because I have only just this second invented and named the concept of AMR so no-one has actually studied it yet. However, I am confident that before I finish typing this blogpost, a Professor of AMR will emerge to challenge outdated notions of AMR treatment and present their own theory, along with a best-selling book entitled “Who the hell are you, my friend?”, on how to embrace the joys of AMR for fun and profit.

The issue popped up for me recently because I came across an ancient photo album containing scenes from my distant past – nearly 40 years ago. The picture above is me back then with my great friend, Raymond (who I do remember very well of course), aged about 9 or 10 I think. Some of these pictures I look at and remember exactly, in a very deep way. I couldn’t tell you the date, perhaps, but I remember not only the event but exactly how I felt. In fact when I look at them I am not observing them from the outside, I actually feel as if I am experiencing the events again. I looked at one and tears immediately welled up in my eyes, as the painful emotions I felt at the time reappeared.

However, there were some photos that I looked at as if I was a stranger. I could see my younger self standing there looking back at me, but I had no recollection at all of being there. That’s a very odd feeling.

It is even odder when you are contacted by someone who was in the photo, who knows you really, really well but you remember nothing at all of them. The face draws a blank however hard you stare. The name doesn’t ring the tiniest bell, the events are a complete mystery. You have no idea whether they are just lying or whether your memory has been wiped clear. We call this Deep AMR. I say “we” but I mean “me” as no-one else has heard of AMR, yet.

I am wrestling with just such a Deep AMR problem. I have a message and a friend request from someone that I have absolutely no recollection of, but they clearly know me very well so we must have hung out together at some point. Mind you I was a bit distinctive in my youth – I think I was the only “dark glasses with 5 inch afro, poncho and clog wearing physicist” hippie in West Africa at the time, so perhaps more people remember me than vice versa. But what is the correct social etiquette in this Deep AMR situation?

Do I come clean and say “sorry, old bean, I appreciate that you know me well but I have zero recollection of you, so we will have to start again as if we are complete strangers” Or do I bluff saying “hey, you old dog, how’s it hanging homie? Remind me about the good old days again” and hope that some glimmer of a memory of him returns.

It’s quite unsettling really and no doubt someone will tell me it’s the beginning of the onset of altissimo (I say “altissimo” because I tried to spell that word beginning with A that means you lose your memory but I mangled it so badly that the spell checker offered me altissimo instead and I liked the sound of it). But I don’t mind it. I find it fascinating and I’m wondering if I am the only silent AMR sufferer out there or whether Facebook is inflicting this previously hidden problem on loads of us.

The importance of being lazy

2009-06-26T23:58:00.000-07:00

I was at a dinner a couple of weeks ago sitting next to a high powered Washington executive when a young investment banker came up.

"How's it going?" the Exec said. The young banker excitedly said "It's going great. I haven't had a single day off work for the last 6 weeks. I've worked straight through, including every saturday and sunday."

"Excellent" says the Exec. "My staff never go home before midnight. The other night I said goodnight to them at 3am and they just laughed and said "do you mean goodmorning, boss?".

They then both looked at me expectantly. "Ooooh", I said "Well, erm, well, sometimes I do up to 2 hours of productive work a day. On a good day of course". Phew, just listening to these two was wearing me out.

You see, I discovered something interesting a few years ago. It turns out that a lot of what we do at work is a complete waste of time. I reckon that if you work for a large corporate then 60% of what you do makes no difference to anyone anywhere and if you work for a start-up it's more like 40%. Fortunately your corporate competitors probably waste 70% of their effort so your 60% of non-productive effort is pretty good going.

You can do lots and lots of this timewasting stuff in the hope that if you do lots of stuff then you are probably doing a bit more useful stuff. Or you can try to figure out what the useful stuff is and just not bother to do the rest. That's what I try to do.

My strategy is to try to do ONE really high impact thing each day. One critical decision, one cut through phone call, one killer email, one transforming conversation. I know in myself when I've done something that really makes a difference and once I've done it, I relax. Sure, I'll do a few other things but knowing that I've done that ONE BIG THING is enough for me to declare that day a good day's work, even if it only took me 5 minutes.

Mind you, this strategy doesn't work if you kid yourself about whether the thing you did really was a high impact thing. You need to sit down, look at your To Do list and see whether there is anything on it that will make a real difference. If there isn't then prepare yourself for redundancy! You can hid behind "being busy" for a while but it will catch up with you. Come on, is there really anything on your "To Do" list that makes a serious difference? Then, do it.

The other important thing to making this approach work is not to feel guilty, once you have done your ONE BIG THING. If your boss comes around the corner and you are relaxing with your feet on your desk, sipping a cup of cocoa, are you sure the ONE BIG THING is big enough to stop the top of his head blowing off? If it is, then sip away my friend, you've earned it.

I like to think of this strategy as a "Tai Chi" approach to business verses the standard hard-form Karate style of business. It's a soft power approach. If you enjoyed Chinese films in the old days, then you would have loved it when the muscle bound young man attacks the old, blind begger with his powerful karate blows and kicks, but the old man uses his relaxed, almost nonchalant tai chi style to block all the blows, whilst calmly eating a bowl of rice, before causing his over-enthusiastic opponent to punch himself in the head.

Actually the principle I am interested in is that of "Wu Wei", the art of doing things "without action". So, you run around if you want to, hustle, bustle, put those hours in, show those bosses that you've got what it takes. Me, I will think carefully about my objectives, I'll do my ONE BIG THING each day as effortlessly as possible and then I'll relax and cheer you on with my feet up. Good luck!

Sports day in Cape Town

2009-06-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

Today the World Economic Forum in Cape Town was all about sports, well for me at least.

This afternoon I joined delegates on a trip to Greenpoint Stadium that nestles between Table Mountain and the Atlantic ocean.

When we arrived we were met by a barrage of photographers and journalists. I knew we were important but not that important, surely? It turns out I was right because after we collected our hard hats and sat in the auditorium for a briefing on the stadium, we were asked to stand to welcome President Jacob Zuma and various other eminent personalities, including the Secretary General of Fifa. Zuma was there to kick off the one year countdown to the first match of the 2010 World Cup.

The President literally kicked off the countdown, as we all went out onto the pitch (I can claim now that I have stood on a World Cup football pitch). In front of what must have been several thousand construction workers, Jacob Zuma spoke more eloquently and fluently than I had heard him in front of the WEF audience, then as we counted down, kicked a ball into the stands.

I did enjoy the fact that, after signing disclaimer forms and donning hard hats, in the middle of the massive construction site, standing under cranes as high as the sky, the South African national anthem was played and we all, including the President, immediately took our hard hats off and held them to our chest. That must have been the health and safety officials worst nightmare!

Later on that evening, I attended a soiree in honour of the 800 WEF delegates, in the presence of President Zuma and a number of other African Heads of State. Again the whole thrust of the evening was the 2010 World Cup. There is such enthusiasm building up here, it is going to be one HUGE party and I am definitely going to come to Cape Town in 2010 to be a part of it.

I thought I had done enough sport when I finally got back to the hotel at about 11pm, only to find all the hotel staff wearing British Lions shirts over their uniforms, because the Lions had just checked in to the hotel that I am staying at. I can see a group sitting round the pool now and I can hear some gentle rugby songs wafting upwards. I have a feeling that this hotel is in for a lively time over the next few days!

African Flavour

2009-06-10T14:54:00.000-07:00

This week I am attending the World Economic Forum on Africa event in Cape Town, South Africa. WEF events are remarkably similar, whether they take place in Davos, China or Africa but this one has a definite African flavour.

Mind you, it's a subtle aroma rather than a full blown, assault on the senses type of flavour. Rather like Cape Town itself. I met an English couple in the hotel this evening and the wife said "this is my first trip to Africa". I felt like saying "Lady, you think Cape Town is Africa? You ain't seen nothing yet".

On the surface this WEF event is identical in look and feel to the others I have been to, whether in Switzerland or China. The "WEF Welcomes You..." banners at the airport, the meet-and-greet staff who direct you to the WEF branded mini-buses. The 5* hotels chosen, the shuttle buses to the conference centre, your WEF bag with the participants book on registration, the security badge are all identical from country to country. Inside the conference centre they have literally lifted up the whole of the Davos look and feel and plonked it down on a different continent thousands of miles away.

However just below the surface there are a couple of differences. Not many, but one or two that give it that slightly distinct flavour.

For example, at WEF events the dress code is business casual. That usually means open necked shirt and jacket, or even shirt and no jacket, particularly amongst tech guys. But at WEF Africa business casual means smart suit and tie and properly polished shoes. In fact it means exactly the same as business formal. When you are going to a business meeting in Africa, if you want to be taken seriously you wear a suit and tie and that's that.

Interestingly, out of the 800+ delegates here from all over Africa not one man (so far) is wearing traditional African attire. Everyone is in Western suits and ties. That's quite unusual really and tells me two things. One is that the delegates are not entirely comfortable with the environment. They don't "own" it. They are guests at this event on their own continent. Secondly it tells me that there are not many Nigerians here, because if there was a strong Nigerian contingent you would see the brightly coloured flowing agbada's being worn with pride. Nigerian's "own" wherever they happen to be at the time, they wear what they like, they will talk as loud as they like and if you don't like it "you can go to hell, blorry idiot".

Some of the women are wearing traditional outfits though, the most notable being Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the World Bank Managing Director (pictured above) who ALWAYS wears her traditional outfits with pride. Ngozi is a very impressive lady. I have seen her speak on several occasions and she is a match for anyone. Today she shared the stage with the likes of President Jacob Zuma and Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the UN, and she more than held her own.

The other African thing that happens here is that the audience applaud after every speaker makes a comment, however short. This is traditional African respect - you are in the presence of your "seniors" and betters, so if they honour you by speaking to you then you should show your appreciation. African's are quite formal, you know. This is something that is not well understood by non-Africans, but the formalities of greeting correctly, showing respect to your elders and knowing your place are deeply ingrained in African culture.

This can sometimes prove an unexpected problem in a Western setting. For example, a young man brought up within a mildly traditional African family will show respect for an older man by looking down rather than looking him straight in the eye, shaking hands carefully, sometimes with two hands and generally transmitting a tone of subserviance. The younger man doesn't actually feel particularly subservient but that's how you treat your elders. Now if that young man goes for a job interview in London, where you are supposed to stride in, hand outstretched looking your interviewer in the eye and talk to someone 30 years your senior as if you "are mates", well he just doesn't stand a chance.

Greetings are all important too. The more junior person greets first and then there can be a lengthy to and fro of greetings that can quite easily take 5 minutes, before any real conversation starts. For example, in my father's area (Afuze, Owan East Local Government Area, Edo State, Nigeria) it will go something like this

Ah hello Sir

Hello boy

How are you sir?

That's good. How are you Sir, still fine I hope?

I am still fine boy. Nothing has changed since we last spoke

That's good news Sir. And the wife Sir, how is she, Sir?

She is fine, boy

The wife is fine, Sir? That is good. Fine is she, Sir?

Yes, boy, she is fine

Good, good. And you Sir, you are fine?

Yes boy, fine

Good. Anyway, I was just passing and thought I'd say hi, Sir

Ok, boy

(silence ensues for a few minutes)

Anyway, Sir, I will be going

Ok, boy

But before I go, I just wanted to ask, how you were Sir?

Fine, boy

And the wife

She's fine too, boy

Ok, Sir, I will be going

Ok boy

(this can go on for several days until one or the other of the participants faints with hunger, allowing the other to sneak off, unless someone else arrives in which case it starts all over again)

So, this WEF event in Africa has a definite if subtle African aroma. It's sort of in Africa but not quite in Africa. It's more "on" Africa than "in" Africa. But that's okay, at least the challenges that the continent faces are getting some attention by an influential group of people and that's got to be a good thing.

In a diplomatic bubble

2009-06-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

I attended a quite unique dinner at the Dorchester, London last night. It was in honour of the Diplomatic Corps and I found myself in the company of 128 Ambassadors and High Commissioners, 19 Lords, Ladies and Barons, 24 Sirs and an assortment of Professors, Bankers, Diplomats, Field Marshalls and political and media folk.

I found myself sitting amongst a small group of political observers, including Adam Boulton of Sky News (he left early and when I got home and turned on the TV, there he was again, reporting live outside Downing Street!), Michael Prescott (former political editor of the Sunday Times) and Anji Hunter (Tony Blair's former spin doctor, who I have since realised is married to Adam Boulton, which explains what I thought was a level of over-familiarity not entirely appropriate for such an event). There was a flurry of excitement and chattering amongst these folk when news filtered through about another Ministerial resignation.

You can always rely on a good speech from senior diplomats and we were not disappointed. The Ambassadors all laughed at the standard joke told at such occasions about the definition of an Ambassador being "an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country", turning to each other to say with perfectly straight faces that that was possibly the funniest joke they had every heard.

We were a bit more confused when the senior diplomat appeared to say "I really believe that we are an honest and corrupt nation". We tittered politely. Did he say that? Did we miss-hear? Perhaps he said "honest, uncorrupt nation" but that's a strange phrase too.

Much of the main speech was about the power of new media, blogs, twitter, youtube and so on. This is an interesting challenge for the Diplomatic Corps who are in the business of controlling communication, not letting it rip. These social media give mere mortals a direct view inside the diplomatic bubble and the senior diplomats will have to move quickly to get on top of them. In fact I heard of a new concept, a "digital coach" who apparently works one to one with a senior executive coaching them through the world of social media (isn't that sort of like a paid grandchild?). I enjoyed tweeting about diplomats talking about tweeting.

This piercing of the bubble by social media will be very interesting, because that world really is a bubble. For a few hours one is dinning with over a hundred senior diplomats and other guests in one of London's best hotels and you are completely disconnected from the everyday world outside. Then at the end of the evening, we go our separate ways. The Ambassadors step into their long, black limos with uniformed drivers (picture a hundred cars all with number plates like "COUNTRY 1" parked in 3 rows on Park Lane) and stay in the heart of the bubble.

Mere mortals, like me, wander off to our parked cars, rip off our bow-ties, stick on some roots music and zoom off back to reality.

Me vs My Belly

2009-05-31T12:42:00.000-07:00

How we laughed. How we laughed. It happened when my father entered his forties and suddenly from being a tall, slim fellow, he became a tall fellow with a podgy belly. It seemed to happen almost overnight much to my and my brother's amusement and we immediately christened him "The Fat Man" (not to his face of course and please don't mention it to him if you see him).

I think the idea for the name "The Fat Man" came from Sydney Greenstreet in that classic 1942 film Casablanca. Which is odd because I have never watched the film, but I know that there is someone called The Fat Man in it.

So there we are, chortling away, year after year at the fat man, when all of a sudden something terrible has happened. I am harmlessly going around in my mid-40's, I happen to glance down and - shock, horror - there right in front of me is a huge, podgy belly !

How did this happen? Who put it there? My children thinks its very funny. They have taken to calling me The Fat Man, after a film that they have never seen (not to my face of course, but I know what goes on behind my back).

But I am determined not to give in so easily. After all, I have proven in the past the sheer strength of will, of mind over matter, and I will defeat this creeping blubber.

For example, years ago I used to smoke. You didn't know that did you? I smoked through my late teens in to my twenties. I even used a cigarette holder, like The Penguin. In those days I had an iron will. If I wanted something to happen, I made it happen, whatever stood in my way. So when I decided to stop smoking, I didn't agonise about it. I didn't get counselling, apply patches, seek hypnosis. I just stopped. And two weeks later I started again! That was amazing. I looked at myself with a mixture of amusement and disgust. How dare my body try to dictact to my iron will. I laughed in the face of my body's pathetic resistance, bent my will to the problem and crushed the life out of my smoking addiction.

About ten years ago I decided to give up drinking alcohol. I think I must have been drinking for about 30 years, but one day I decided enough was enough and it was time to stop. I stopped overnight. Immediately. No questions asked. Just stopped. Never touched a drop since. Hah!

So, now I'm the Fat Man, eh? Fat Man 2.0. Well, I can deal with this. I just stop eating. Well, I don't mean stop eating completely, but stop eating the pies, the muffins, the sugar, the popcorn, the butter, the full fat milk.

But somethings going wrong. My iron will seems to be wilting in the face of my jelly belly. Yesterday, I was watching the telly and suddenly found I had slipped a slice of cake into my mouth without even noticing. Today I convinced myself that cracker biscuits don't count, so I ate about ten of them.

Am I getting old? Is my will fading? Or is this dieting thing a whole new level of challenge? I am rapidly developing a newfound respect for people trying to diet.

But I'm up for the fight. I'm not ready to be Fat Man 2.0 yet. Me vs My belly. Let battle commence.

(oh, by the way, if anyone's got any advice, I'd love to hear it)

Grokking Pizza

2009-05-21T15:29:00.000-07:00

Are you familar with the term "grok" ? If you are, then go back to your code hacking and read no further.

Yesterday I made a pizza for my daughter. I was showing off, because the day before I had managed to assemble pasta with some sort of sauce and salad which was greeted with a positive sounding "Hrummph". Flushed with success I thought I would up my game and go for the pizza.

When I say "made a pizza" I am perhaps stretching the definition of "made". What I mean is that I took a packaged pizza from the fridge, read the instructions and carried them out. The instructions were crystal clear - remove packaging, place on tray, set oven to 220 degrees for 12 minutes. All these things I did, exactly as instructed.

Imagine my surprise therefore when the oven beeped after 12 minutes, I opened the door and, hey presto, there was the pizza BURNT TO A SMOKING WRECK!

This has happened to me before. Not with pizza but with other things. I burnt tomato soup because the instructions said to put it in a saucepan over the heat for 5 minutes and when I came back the soup had vanished completely apart from an accusing stain around the edge of the pan which I had to throw away as I couldn't clean it. I once boiled an egg so hard that I was able to bounce it off the wall.

There is something about following cooking instructions that just doesn't seem to work for me. This, I have come to understand, is because I don't "grok" cooking.

I mentioned the pizza fiasco to several people and they immediately said "ah, fan oven, knock a few minutes off the time". I rechecked the instructions. Nowhere did it say to knock a few minutes off the time for a fan oven. I checked my oven. Nowhere does it say "I am a fan oven and I will burn your pizza to a crisp unless you knock a few minutes off". How am I supposed to know these things?

Apparently I should just "know". People who cook just "know". A pinch of salt? They "know" what I pinch of salt it. When I put in a pinch of salt it immediately renders my food inedible. A "dash" of whatever? They "know" what a dash is.

To "grok" something is to "know" it in such a fundamental way that it becomes part of you. The knowledge seeps into your bones. It's way, way beyond learning something. It just "is".

You can "grok" all sorts of things. I used to "grok" maths, in school that is. I never seemed to have to learn it, I just knew it and I couldn't understand why other people seemed to struggle their way through it step by step - until I got to university and suddenly had to learn some maths. Boy, did it feel odd. I still got decent marks but I knew deep inside that I didn't grok it anymore. Something was gone. It was quite sad in a way. For a while I rediscovered this feeling of really "grokking" something when I was an Assembler programmer in the mid-80's. That's long gone now.

I can and do learn new things. I learn the Wu-style Tai Chi long form and I practise it over and over. But when I perform it alongside my Tai Chi master, whilst to the untrained eye we probably look identical, I know that I have just learnt it and he really "groks" it.

I wonder if I will ever get that grokking feeling again. That complete immersion in something where you know it and it knows you as if it was part of you. Beyond intuition. Perhaps I will. Perhaps I do in some areas but don't realise it.

However I can assure you that cooking is one thing that I will never grok. I remember the day we launched the internet bank, Egg plc, back in 1998. We had a long day and I decided to make myself something to eat before the evening's launch activity really kicked off. I put my microwave meal in the machine, pressed the buttons and got on with my work. Next thing I know the fire alarms were screaming, a fire-engine arrived and the whole building was cleared of several hundred angry people, hard at work trying to get everything lined up for launch.

As we stood around outside, shivering, the head firefighter came out with a weary look on his face "No panic" he says "it was just some idiot who had warmed up his dinner in the microwave for 40 instead of 4 minutes". Grok that!

Kim Jong-il, Beyonce and me

2009-05-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

Kim Jong-il, Dear Leader of North Korea, Beyonce, the bootylicious singer and me - who's the odd one out?

Yes, it's me and for one obvious reason. I am the only one of the three of us that does not have a body double able to stand in for me. Kim Jong-il has long been suspected of having a double (see picture). In fact the latest rumour, repeated in the Times no less, is that he died in 2003 and the country has been run by a double ever since! Beyonce's double managed to fool an art gallery into believing she was the real thing.

The reason I want a body double is that by some quirk of timing, I find that I have eight external meetings, presentations or conferences to attend next week and on Tuesday alone I am speaking at three separate events. I just wish I could send my doppleganger along to some of these and spread the load a bit.

Monday evening I am speaking at a gathering of potential donors to highlight the progress we are making with the Academy that is being built in Hammersmith.

Tuesday morning kicks off for me as a speaker at an event on "Biometrics and Young People" at the Institute of Mechanical Engineering. Then I move on to speak at a workshop organised by the IAAC, being held at the British Computer Society. The day rounds up with me being "guest entrepreneur" at an event organised by Cityzone.

Wednesday sees me getting in to network security discussions at the Technology Strategy Board and then on to a conference entitled Private Data, Open Government at the QEII Conference Centre, Westminster.

Thursday has me delivering a speech to the National Archives, Kew on data retention in the digital age.

And on Friday I head up to Manchester as a keynote speaker at the huge Futuresonic conference that takes place every year.

So you can see why I wish I had a double to stand in for me and share the load. Actually I think there might be two of me somewhere. Last week I received an email saying "Dear Tom....You are invited to an event to meet Tom Ilube....RSVP....Pay £xx". I have of course registered for this event and paid as I am very keen to hear what I have to say.

Play rugby not football

2009-04-30T14:22:00.001-07:00

I am sure you will all agree with me that rugby is a much better game than football (that's "soccer" to some of you). In particular, if we want to produce a nation of entrepreneurs then it is vital that we abandon all junior football related activity immediately and divert all attention and resources into mini-rugby.

The reasons are obvious. I observed them again first hand at the London Irish mini-rugby festival last Sunday. I spent 9 hours down in Sunbury, with 2,000 other people, coaches, dads, mums and of course the hundreds of young players themselves from across the UK and Ireland.

It's not so much the game itself. After all if people want to run around in dinky little shorts to kick a ball around that's there business. But there is a real contrast between the average junior football session and a mini-rugby match

There are four things kids will learn if they take up mini-rugby that will stand them in good stead for starting up businesses.

First, rugby is a hard, hard game. You play hard, take knocks, hit the ground hard, shake your head, get right back up and get straight back in to the game. If you writhe around on the floor shouting "Referee, it's not fair" then the game moves on and you get left behind.

Second, rugby is a team game, and it takes all sorts. Big guys in the front row. Lanky lads at Number 8. Tiny, speedy guys on the wing. It's great to see all the lads in all their diverse glory on a Sunday morning playing for the team. You don't want to be the "superstar" because the opposition will make it their business to squish you.

Third, the rules are the rules. You play by them, you play to the whistle and if the Ref says "penalty" it's a penalty and that's it. Don't mess with a rugby ref. Football refs are, well, different.

Finally, rugby dads are a breed apart. We all played rugby about 30 years ago, so we all think we know how to play now. We are all there on the sidelines, screaming away, shouting "Drive over, drive over", "take him down", "tackle him, the bigger they are the harder they fall, son" and the good old "come on, get up and get back in there you woose, it's only an ear, you've got another one haven't you?". But we never shout at the ref and we never shout at the opposition Dads.

And at the end of every mini-rugby match, no matter how hard and painful it was, no matter whether the ref was great or rubbish, no matter whether it was a friendly or the Cup Final, all the boys line up and shout "Three Cheers" for the other team and then they shake hands. Woah betide the one boy who is so upset that he doesn't want to cheer the other team off and shake hands. He will suddenly find a group of Dads and coaches telling him to get over there with the rest of the boys, after all "this isn't football you know".

So, the boys learn to play hard and bounce back from hard knocks. They learn that teamwork is everything and if you try to be a superstar you are going to get hit. They learn to play full on but to play by the rules. They learn the value of a good, hard coach and they learn to respect the opposition.

I can't think of a better set of rules for being an entrepreneur.

Mind you, when it comes to making big money, those ball juggling glory boys over in the football camp have got that wrapped up. And it's not like I hate football. After all I do support what is generally accepted to be the best team in the Premiership.

But on any given Sunday in the winter season, come rain or shine you will find me and my boy down at London Irish learning how to live life the rugby way.

How long does it take to raise VC money?

2009-04-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

I enjoy chatting with other start up guys about their ideas and sharing my experience of the early stages of starting a new company. One of the questions that always comes up is "how long does it take to raise VC funding?"

In my experience, guys who haven't been through it before always think it will be quicker than it actually is. So, I will tell you how long and how much effort it takes to raise VC money.

It takes 9 months from start to finish. 9 months of focus, energy, commitment, pitching and negotiating. You will have perhaps a hundred conversations.

Most of the conversations will happen in the first 3 months. You hit the phones. Hit the email. Get out there. Pitch, pitch, pitch. You have to figure out quickly whether the VC you are talking to has any money or not. You would think that they might tell you if they don't actually have any cash to invest, but for some reason VCs seem to find it very difficult to say that they are skint.

The next 3 months are all about negotiating. You have got down to the handful of investors who are actually interested, a combination of your existing investors (if you have any) and new ones. You haggle, adjust, talk about pre-money valuations, liquidity preferences, management incentives as you edge towards a deal that everyone will accept. Then it falls apart and you start all over again. As you do this, the economy is changing around you and the VC industry collectively changes its mind. You do this three or four times until you get the actual deal agreed.

You're done. You're there. Congratulations. Break out the champagne! You have closed the deal. Haven't you? No, you think you have, but you haven't. You are just entering stage 3 - "Legals".

The final 3 months are a lengthy process of their lawyers talking to your lawyers. Your lawyers talking to you. You talking to yourself. And so it goes on. For weeks and weeks. Until the documents are complete. Then you send them out for signature and start chasing. Chase, chase, chase. Keep chasing until its all signed because if the markets crash, if the mood changes, if the VCs see someone new and sexier to chase after, then they will be off and you will be left standing there. FINALLY you get all the signatures back and the cash is transferred.

Only at that point can you truely say that your funding round is finished. When you look at your company's bank account and it has risen by several million, then and only then can you say that you have closed your funding round.

And on 21st April, Garlik's bank balance increased, the bank manager burst spontaneously into song and we cracked open a bottle of bubbly.

Now, back to the real business of building a successful, innovative technology business. As an early stage entrepreneur fund raising is something that I have to do and I'm not bad at it, but I really don't enjoy it. But building the business - that's the fun stuff.

Tapped on the shoulder by the Terrorist Police

2009-04-14T12:07:00.000-07:00

Do I look like a terrorist to you? Go on, be honest. I am told I can look a bit shifty at times. But a terrorist? Really! However it seems our boys in blue have a different view.

My first meeting in London this morning was near Green Park station and the next was lunch with a Google exec in their offices near Victoria. As it was a nice day and I had a bit of time, I thought I would take a gentle stroll to Victoria through Green Park.

As I got near the Buckingham Palace end of Green Park I was approached by Officer Kevin Moloney of the Metropolitan Police. "Excuse me, Sir" he says politely "do you speak English?"

I pause momentarily, a bit taken aback. "Yes" I say. "Many black people in the UK are almost fluent in English nowadays" I add in The Queen's English, which I felt was most appropriate given that we were not far from the Palace. Actually I didn't say that last bit, I've only just thought of it. Damn. I have got to work on my real-time, witty responses.

"Ah, that's good" says PC Moloney, Warrant Number 219635 "I didn't want to waste my time saying everything only to discover that you don't understand!"

"Very wise" I sneer (actually I didn't say that either. I just said "Yes" again. However it did occur to me that he might think I only knew the word "yes" so I started to look for opportunities to use other words from the English language to prove to him the breadth of my vocabulary).

Now we got down to business. "I have stopped you under Section 44 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act as I have seen you with a briefcase" says Officer Kevin.

"That is probably because I am a businessman going to a meeting" I say. I do actually say this. I am wearing a grey suit and white shirt, looking at least a bit like a businessman. I am feeling a little irritated to be honest at this point. And embarrased. But also slightly nervous. Do we do orange jumpsuits in the UK? I'm not certain.

Anyway, PC Moloney searches my briefcase as I stand there trying to look nonchalant and passers-by stare at the good policeman searching the swarthy looking gent in his cunning businessman disguise. I am hoping no-one I know wanders past. That would be strange and uncomfortable for both of us.

Kev asks for ID and I show him my driving licence. He takes it and starts to write something into a yellow notebook. Now I get interested from a data point of view. "What are you writing" I ask "and who does it go to?"

"It's just a record of my search. It doesn't go anywhere, it's just there in case someone needs to check back who was stopped and when. I'll give you a copy of it"

"Does that mean I will go on to a database somewhere?"

"Oh, no I don't think so. Only if there is a reason for it to. Otherwise it's just there in the files" he says reassuringly, although slightly uneasily as I seem to be taking an unusual interest now.

"So let's be clear" I probe "are you saying that it definitely doesn't go on to a database or that you don't know?"

Officer Moloney signs "If you want to make a complaint Sir" he says in that slightly tired policeman voice that is usually followed by a request to accompany him down to the station sir "if you want to make a complaint, I will give you the details". He gives me the name of one Inspector MacDonald of the Hyde Park unit and then he gives me my copy of the form.

Form 5090(X) is just a little bit of paper, but it carries a lot of information. My full name, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, height, address. Reason for stopping has four choices - behaviour, action, possession of an item, presence in area. Mine was "presence in area". It seems I was stopped for being "present in that area". Fair enough, given that it was definitely an area and I was clearly present in it.

"Search Grounds" was handwritten as "section 44 prevention of terrorism act in place...subject with rucksack (crossed out) briefcase". It was interesting that he instinctively wrote "rucksack" even though I was standing in front of him in a suit holding a briefcase!

At the bottom of the form are a series of codes. Mine were entered as T (for Terrorism s.44), J (for Terrorism s.44(2), as opposed to H which is Terrorism s.44(1) - don't ask me the difference) and I (there isn't an I on the codes, but I think/hope he meant 1 for No further action.).

The whole process took about 10 minutes but it felt like hours. I have never in my 45 years been stopped by the police before. I managed to miss the era of "sus laws". But I got a tiny sense of how it must have felt. Even though my old mate PC Kevin Moloney was just doing his job and was quite pleasant, I felt silly, embarrased, demeaned, powerless, annoyed and nervous. I was thinking to myself how is it that I can go from visiting Number 10, from attending Davos, from advising the UN on cybersecurity to being stopped and searched under terrorism laws in my own City? Do you think if I had mentioned to him that I am a Freeman of the City of London with the right to drive my sheep across London Bridge, he would have let me go?

On the other hand, I am very, very, very keen not to get blow up by real terrorists on the streets of London and the police and their friends in the shadows have done a marvellous job of keeping us safe over the past few years, so perhaps this is the price we have to pay. I get stopped to keep you safe. I'm sure it will happen again and I am sure I will get used to it.

But just remember, next time you see a foreign looking chap carrying a suspicious looking bag being questioned on the street by a police and you think to yourself "thank goodness they've caught that terrorist" bear in mind it might just be me on my way to lunch with a senior Google executive!

Entering politics

2009-03-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

When is the right time for a technology entrepreneur to enter politics and what motivates such a move?

The answer, according to my wife is "NEVER" or possibly "WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER" whichever comes first. She has promised me that if, due to some mental abberation, I decide that I must heed the call of the people, then she will immediately kiss and tell. I told her that I haven't done anything worth kissing and telling about, mores the pity, but she assures me that dirty linen will be found or manufactured, and washed in full public view. She is then quick to remind me of one or two incidents that convince me that the will of the people must be resisted at all costs.

Clearly Chris Kelly has a more understanding wife when it comes to politics. Chris is the Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook and I had breakfast with him last week during his brief visit to the UK. Chris joined Facebook when it was just a handful of people and he has been part of its amazing success and growth to perhaps 175m users across the globe and nearly a thousand staff. Now it's time to move on and I was surprised and impressed to hear that he is planning to throw his hat in the ring and stand for Attorney General of the State of California.

State Attorney General is a big, big job in the USA and with a population of over 36m California is the biggest in the USA. Successful State Attorney Generals go on to be Senators, even Governors so its no mean feat even to be taken seriously in the race.

And what a race it promises to be. Just chatting to Chris about what's involved, the fund raising, the lobbying, positioning, campaigning - and that's just the primaries. It sounds like you fight like crazy to get adopted by your party and then you start all over again for the actual elections (in 2010). But Chris seems up for it and I wish him the best.

As for me, I think I will keep my dirty linen firmly in my closet. And if "the people" come calling, they can jolly well speak to my wife first.

Time to Twitter

2009-03-15T16:12:00.000-07:00

Twitter this, twitter that. Everyone is twittering these days, it seems. I turn on the news and another civilian is out there, twittering to their hearts content, screaming at me that it's the new, new thing and if I'm not twittering then I'm a nobody. "Blogging is, like, soooo 2008 Darling".

Well, I guess that means its time to twitter.

But how to twitter?

I signed up a few weeks ago but to be honest I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do next. I registered my phone and waited for something to happen, but nothing happened. I didn't know what to "tweet" and I didn't actually know how to "tweet". So, I left it and got on with my life.

The troubling thing was that I kept getting emails saying "So and so is now following you on Twitter". Spooky. I would spin round in my chair to catch them but no-one was there. I could sense them "following" me though, even though I hadn't twatted. Twyped? Twanged?

Finally, this evening I decided that if people were going to follow me on twitter I had at least better figure out how to use the damn thing. Once I had got that bit sorted (easier than I thought - give it a go), I had to decide what to say.

Some people seem to twitter almost minute by minute on what they are doing. Others share deep, profound thoughts, several times a day. I was at dinner with a chap who has over 20,000 followers (does that make him a religion?). He tweets constantly about practially everything he is doing. Yes, everything!

A lot of people feed their stream of tweets into their facebook updates. I'm not sure about that. If you are on the receiving end, then it feels like one of your friends just talks and talks continuously and no-one else can get a word in edgeways. It's one thing to actively choose to follow someone on twitter, it's a bit different if someone keeps sticking their head through your living room window or popping up behind you on the bus and shouting "Hi there, I'm just washing my goose" (actually that would be intriguing, but you get what I mean). So, I won't be doing that. If you are my facebook friend, you get to see my occasional, quite personal facebook updates. If you follow me on twitter, you see something else.

I notice that some folk have given up blogging and switched to twittering instead. I wonder. I think blogging and twittering are different things. They feel different to me. On the blog I can talk, share, rant, waffle, paint. I feel the need to do something different with twitter.

"I feel". That's important. I'll use twitter to express feelings rather than facts. I'll tweet about what's going on at a point in time, wherever I am, but rather than saying "I am doing...." I will say "I am feeling..." and if you follow you can decide for yourself what I might or might not be doing. Sometimes you'll be able to tell from that days blog post, but I won't work too hard to tie them together.

So, I'm going to express feelings in my tweets. But in what form? I think I will go.........hmmm.....errr...ahhhh, got it ! I'll go all Haiku on you. I will base all my twittering purely on how I feel and I will express it in the form of badly written haiku poems.

That should drive those pesky followers away :)

Kai, Kai,Kai

2009-03-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

There is a Nigerian phrase, or rather exclamation, that sounds like "kai". It is usually preceeded by biting the side of one's forefinger and then swishing the hand in a downwards motion, causing the fingers to slap together with a loud cracking sound. You use this whole sequence when confronted with something startling, surprising, unexpected. Kai, kai, kai.

On Tuesday evening I had a very nice meal with some interesting folk at the appropriately named Kai of Mayfair, the most expensive Chinese restaurant I have ever been to. The decor was exquisite. We were in a little private alcove downstairs, surrounded by very attentive waiters. The gentle chinese music wafting through the opening created a beautiful mellow ambiance. The food was melt in the mouth to-die for (and that's saying something from me, the ultimate fussy eater). But £11 for sesame toast and £57 for crispy duck? Kai, kai. I made the mistake of glancing at the wine menu, opening the pages at a bottle of Petrus 1990 for £5,880 and closing it again rapidly. Kai, kai, kai !

I was meeting with a few folk to share my African project idea. It's simple really. In any given population of young people, anywhere in the world 5% will fall into the category of being gifted and talented. There are something like 400m young people in Africa today. That means perhaps 20m might count as gifted of which perhaps 8m are smart enough to join Mensa!

Many developed countries have specific programmes or initiatives to identify and engage with its young gifted and talented population. UK has the Young Gifted and Talented scheme. USA has the National Association for Gifted Children. Hong Kong has the International Centre for the Gifted and Talented. So I am going to create a gifted and talented academy for Africa to see whether we can find and unleash some of that amazing intellectual talent that doesn't happen to be born into a family that can support their special educational needs.

Not what people usually think of when you think about helping education in Africa and that basic school building work desparately needs doing, but countries around the globe are focusing effort on their gifted and talented so why not Africa? Besides, I like a challenge :) Find and unleash 20m gifted young people? Kai, kai, kai.

So, I am bouncing the idea off a few folk and getting some excellent feedback on the realities of charitable ventures in Africa, where to locate the initial Academy, who to contact, how to shape it when I get chatting to the chap opposite about origins. He mentions he's from Nigeria. Well Nigeria is a big place with a population of about 140m, so where abouts? He says it's near Benin City. I am surprised as Benin has a population of just over a million and it is the part of Nigeria that my father hails from. I push again, where abouts in Benin? He says well, not actually Benin, it's actually a place called Ora.

Now it's getting wierd as you are down at the level of towns with a few thousand people in them and the area he is referring to is next door to the town/village that my Dad comes from. Which Ora town? I ask. Well, he admits, it's not actually Ora, it's actually more like Afuze but most people know Ora so he usually says Ora.

"What?" I exclaim. "Afuze is the actual town that my Dad grew up in! How are you connected to Afuze?"

"Well I'm not really" he says "but part of my family come from a tiny village near Afuze, just next door to a village called Uokha"

Dear reader, you have never heard of Uokha. There is no reason why you should have done. 99.9 % of the 140m Nigerians will not have heard of it. It's only got a few hundred folk in it, if that. It just happens to be next door to even smaller village, Ugboa, that my Dad was born in.

Neither of us had ever met anyone else inside or outside Nigeria who has any connection with that miniscule dot on the map thousands of miles away (so small that when you search for Ugboa on the mighty google is says "did you mean Ugbox")

And now we have. In the most expensive chinese Mayfair reastaurant I have ever been to, where sesame toast for starters costs £11. Kai, kai, kai !

Repelling sharks in Paris

2009-03-05T22:46:00.000-08:00

This week I found myself in Paris attending a gathering of Cybersecurity specialists. We Cybersecurity types know a good thing when we see one, so when I was invited to this meeting at the British Ambassador's residence I jumped on Eurostar and headed across (under) the Channel.

The event itself was an interesting gathering organised by the Cybersecurity KTN Network, with attendees from across Europe and the USA trying to assess risks and responses to the rising global threats posed by cybercrime. It was sort of about keeping sharks at bay.

So it was kind of appropriate that the first picture I noticed as I wandered around the magnificant residence, poking my nose into various rooms, was Damian Hirst's "Pardaxin". It's not a "usual" Hirst (if such a thing exists) in that it wasn't an animal cut in half. It was a canvass with some coloured spots on it. 42 coloured spots to be exact. No two colours the same. Handpainted. I think it was art. Hmmmm....

On another wall was a work by Alex Pollard which was a bit more to my liking, being a closet geek. It is called "8-bit Landscape" (named after a computer game apparently) and consisted of a large canvass with a small eraser, pencil, button, nail and a few other bits positioned on it. I counted the bits and there weren't 8, which immediately threw my brain into a mass of confusion. Was that deliberate? Can't he count? Also it turned out the items were not actual erasers and pencils, but plaster casts of erasers and pencils, handpainted to look like real ones. Cunning, eh? Hmmmm....

Next to this was a piece of twisted flourescent lighting tube, made into a sentence that says "Time here becomes space/space here becomes time" by Wyn Evans. Across the way was another piece saying "Space here becomes time/time here becomes space". I had to read the card to help me on this one. The card explained "The two sentences call to each other providing a spatial commetary which both contradicts and complements". Head spinning, I felt it was time for a nice cup of tea and a sit down somewhere quite.

The Cybersecurity meeting was opened by Sir Peter Westmacott, Her Majesty's Ambassador to France. I was soooo hoping that a butler would appear with the Ferrero Rocher but it was not to be. It was a fascinating conference including memorable phrases like "a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge", but during the break I returned to my search for a work of art that I could understand.

It was lunchtime and whilst the setting was stunning and the lunch was delightful, I was slightly put off my lunch having just seen Gayle Chong Kwan's work Babel. She has constructed and photographed a scene of the tower of Babel out of raw, dried slices of meat. Oh, that reminds me, we had Steak and Kidney Pie for lunch.

The afternoon cybersecurity session was led by the American contingent. I do enjoy American security types. They just seem so, well, like American security types.

As the day drew to an end and we prepared to leave I strolled into a very grand room with massive paintings covering the walls and finally found the picture I was looking for. There it was. As tall as a building. Commanding. Confident. In control.

"The Duke of Wellington" 1845 by Alfred, Count D'Orsay.

Now, THAT'S what I'm talking 'bout :)

The Silence before dawn

2009-02-26T21:37:00.000-08:00

It is 5am. I am sitting in the kitchen in that calm silence before dawn. Birds still deep in slumber. Roads outside are quiet. No planes overhead descending on the flightpath to Heathrow. The house is silent. No-one's up except me. The silence before dawn. It's a quiet, restful time. The chance to prepare for a big day ahead.

I got up because I woke at about 3am and couldn't get back to sleep. I am alert, awake and very, very focused. Today I go into a series of meetings to sort out the next round of venture funding for Garlik and by the end of the day I will know what the future holds.

Being an early stage entrepreneur means that you are constantly raising money. Find some "seed" capital to get started (a few tens of thousands typically). Raise a "Series A" round from your first set of VCs (half a £million, a million perhaps?). When you've got momentum, pull in the "Series B" money (now you're in to the £millions). Then on to Series C.

Each time you go through the same lengthy process, uncertain what the result is going to be. There are so many variables. How is the business doing? Has it got "traction" (the dreaded T word) ? Did it meet its last milestones? Have the VCs actually got any money to invest? What's the overall market doing? What's the right company valuation?

A lot of entrepreneurial effort goes in to this continuous cycle of fund raising for your early stage company. For example, over the past nine months this effort has dominated my mind and focus. I have probably spoken to about 30 investors across three continents, had well over a hundred meetings and calls, been close to a deal several times, seen it vanish, then reappear and now it all comes down to a couple of hours of meetings today that will decide it.

I was sitting next to a high profile start up guy at a dinner last week in London. Very nice networking dinner at a private house for about 14 entrepreneurs and investors, a range of fine wines, none less than £100 a bottle and beautiful food. Wasted on me of course (I took the precaution of consuming a McD fillet o' fish with large fries beforehand just in case the food was too posh). When I arrived a chap in a suit opened the door. I beamed and shook his hand warmly. He looked a bit embarrased "Errr, I'm the house Butler, Sir, may I take your coat". Whoops! Anyway I was sitting next to this high profile start up guy and we were swapping stories on the sheer effort that goes into fund raising and the games people play, at crucial times for your company. Imagine if I had had 100 meetings and conversations with partners and customers over the past few months! Somethings not quite right in the current venture model, if you look at it from the entrepreneurs perspective.

So, today, we sit down, negotiate and get to where we get to. Check back here and I'll tell you how it went.

The silence before dawn. It's a quiet, restful time. The chance to prepare for a big day ahead.

Human Augmentation

2009-02-22T04:10:00.001-08:00

As I arrived at church this morning, the priest was having a chat with an elderly lady and her adult daughter and son-in-law. "I'm so sorry to hear about your husband" said our priest. "Why? What's happened to him?" replied the elderly lady, smiling but looking slightly puzzled.

The daughter looked sad and pained. "We have told her that he died last week, Father, but she just can't hold on to it".

When the priest announced at the start of Mass that it was dedicated to her husband who passed away recently, I saw the look of upset and surprise on her face, with just a twinge of "this is something I know already, I think" buried in there somewhere.

How incredibly sad.

A few weeks ago in Davos, I attended a session on Human Augmentation. It was probably the most interesting session I attended, looking at how technologies can directly augment human ability, physically and mentally. I am also aware of research projects into areas such as "memories for life" that augment memory by capturing and storing everything you do. I find this a fascinating area of research and it really makes you think.

For example at the Human augmentation session, one of the speakers had two false legs, below the knee, which he revealed halfway through his talk after striding confidently around the stage. He joked (I think) how he was sorrry for the other folk on the panel who only had normal human limbs because as time passes and technology advances his legs keep getting better and better whereas theirs just get weaker and weaker.

Another chap spoke about mapping the human brain and eventually being able to manipulate the neurons and pathways to augment intelligence. You want an IQ of 168? No problem, Sir!

(oh, by the way, it appears that lots of the funding in the USA for this type of research is coming from Military and Defence pockets. Watch out for technologically enhanced, super intelligent GI's coming to a battlefield near you!).

Memory is an interesting aspect of this type of augmentation. It is interesting what all this digital storage is doing to our memories. Capturing, storing and making instantly accessible things that would have faded into the deep recesess of our memories in days gone by. Imagine if every time you blinked a snapshot of that moment in time was stored for later retrieval. Is that good, bad, scary, exciting? I don't know yet but I sense that we are moving in that direction.

Just think of those of you that Twitter away constantly. I know folk who tweet 10-15 times a day, every single day. What they have just done, what they have seen, eaten, felt, thought. Imagine if they keep that up and have that available to explore in ten years time. Wow!

I am trying right now to recall my earliest memory. When you reach back that far, it's difficult to tell what's a memory and what's a story that you have been told and are just replaying. However I feel as if I remember being a baby, sitting on a sofa (or at least high up) watching a group of other babies and children playing. I also feel as if I remember being pleased or even happy. I am told that I was a few months old when that all took place. Do I remember or not? I can't tell.

What makes it feel like a memory though is the element of "feeling" that I attach to this situation or event. And as I reflect on other events tucked away in my memory banks, it is the feelings that make a memory special. The feelings of joy, of pain, of fear, of laughing so much that I truely understood the phrase "split his sides laughing". Those are my real memories. The "facts" are secondary.

Over the next decade and more we will see huge leaps forwards in our ability to record everything we do, every place we visit, every word we utter, every image we see. But will we capture the emotions that went with the moment?

A tale of two schools

2009-02-19T15:46:00.000-08:00

Today I got the excellent news that my son has been accepted into the secondary school that we had hoped for. He will be starting this September and by coincidence it is exactly 30 years this year since I finished secondary school (well 5th form anyway). Gosh. 1979. That's a long time ago.

Actually I went to two secondary schools, not one. The first half of my secondary school career was here in London. The latter years were spent in Nigeria. It is fascinating, as I am very involved in secondary education now though various charities, to compare what my old schools were like verses todays high tech temples of learning. But it's even more interesting to compare my two old schools to each other.

My first school in London was a State run, comprehensive, all-boys day school. The second in Nigeria was a private, all-boys boarding school (although I and a few others attended daily so were known scathingly as "Day Goats"). The schools had just two things in common. Both were all-boys. Both had a brilliant, inspirational maths teacher. Apart from that they couldn't have been more different, and in some unexpected ways!

Perhaps I was just drawn towards maths teachers as it was a subject I found I could consistently get A's in without trying too hard. Whereas french, for example, was a mystery to me and all I learnt how to say was "The boy sat on the bench" which when translated into bad schoolboy french had the capacity to almost kill silly little 1970's London 11 year old boys with laughter (if you know why, please comment for others benefit. I can't type it out without giggling and risking the French teacher rolling her eyes and saying "Oh for goodness sake, Ilube, grow up").

I wish I could remember the names of my maths teachers. The London lady spotted me really early and got me doing all sorts of interesting stuff when I could easily have spent my time disrupting the rest of the class. Most of my friends' reports said "XXX would do better if he didn't sit next to Tom Ilube". They say there is always one teacher who really inspired you and you remember. She is mine. I must find out her name.

The Nigerian maths teacher was pretty special too. In the morning all the teachers parked their cars under the high trees in the shade because the sun was hot, but he parked away from everyone else. By early afternoon when the sun was fiercest, the shade from the tree had moved across the carpark, nicely covering his car and leaving all the rest baking hot. It was the same every day. We smiled to each other about this.

I noticed the difference in attitude towards academic achievement very quickly. At my London Comp it was generally best to act a bit dumb. No one wanted to be some sort of brainbox, teachers pet. So act tough. Mess about. Head for the back of the class. Don't answer questions. But do enough work to get decent reports and to make sure you didn't get chucked out of the top stream (we were streamed by ability in those days).

I went to Nigeria and was immediately surprised to find that if you were smart you were supposed to act smart and even you school mates respected you for it. One day the maths teacher set a test in our Additional Maths class. we did our best but a lot of the kids complained because he had included some questions that he hadn't taught, although he claimed they were in the book. After much moaning he agreed to give everyone an extra 10 percentage points to be fair. This meant, however, that I ended up with 104%.

The next day when I arrived and was walking past the three story classroom block, boys from all year groups came out on to the balcony and started waving their arms and chanting "Addiko, Addiko" (a sort of nickname for someone who had mastered additional maths). Practically the whole school came out because word had got around about the 104% and for ages afterwards I was often referrred to as "Addiko", until I was assigned a new nickname when I went to University (hopefully not know to any readers of this blog!).

In my experience this respect and excitement about brainpower or as they say - people who"know book" is very strong in Nigeria and other parts of Africa and still very weak in our schools here. That's a problem. I could have scored 200% at my London Comp and all that would have happened is that someone would have kicked me and said "smartarse".

Discipline was another matter though. My London Comp was no soft touch. We had some tough boys (think Chelsea supporters, 1970's style) and the teachers knew how to handle them. Our sports master wielded a mean gym shoe back in the days when caning was still allowed. Our Deputy Head used to be a Borstal (Prison) Warden and when he barked it stopped you in your tracks.

But the Nigerian school took things to a completely different level. My first direct experience was for the offence of talking in class. The teacher called out "Ilube, come here and kneel down at the front of the class". My jaw dropped and I look incredulous. "Naaah" I said in my London drawl "I ain't kneeling down for no-one".

"What!!!" she screamed "Kneel down, kneel down". Suddenly the whole class joined in "Ilube, kneel down, what's the matter with you, don't disrespect the teacher, kneel down". Finally in tears I went to the front and knelt to a cacophony of laughter and jeers from the whole class. Then for my disobedience, the teacher commanded the whole class to form a line in front of me and one by one they walked past and gave me a hard knock on my head. Some of my friends delighted in giving me the hardest whacks! That's standard classroom discipline, Nigerian style!

Once, a year or so later, I was sent to see the Head for some misdemeanour. I went in to his office and as I looked to my left I saw one of my friends clinging to the top of a cupboard, where he had been left to hang after a caning and ordered not to drop down. He nodded at me sadly and I nodded back. By then the surreal scene didn't seem like much of a big deal. Can you imagine if that happened in London today!

The one thing I completely didn't expect though was that I would change colour when I moved from London Comp to Nigerian Private. I'm mixed and in London that means black. No one had warned me that in Nigeria that basically meant white!

So on a bad day at my London Comp in the Seventies, there was a little song the lads would gather around and sing to me. It went something like this

"Golly, Ilube. Wogs the matter? Feeling a bit browned off? Didn't have your coon flakes? Nigger mind. Go black to bed. You'll feel all white in the morning". This was followed by much laughter and goading to try to get me to pick a fight with someone.

And on a bad day at my Nigerian Private, there was a little song the lads would sing. It went something like this

"Oyibo pepe. If e eat-e pepe, you go yellow more more" (roughly translated "white man, pepper, if you eat pepper, you'll turn yellow"). This was followed by much laughter and goading to try to get me to pick a fight with someone.

Bearing in mind that I was a boy in my mid-teens going through my adolescent years, seeking to understand who I really was and I think you will understand why I am the poor messed up soul that stands before you today :)

(oh, by the way, I was a rough little rugby playing lad and quite able to stick up for myself so generally the other lads had to be pretty careful before they decided to start singing - just in case you were getting the wrong impression that I was bullied or anything. I refer you back to my University nickname!).

Secondary schools are fascinating places. That's why I love being involved with them today. I am a Governor/Trustee of two UK secondary schools and am busy leading a project to build another high tech secondary school in London, and I am working on my project to build a really interesting Academy for Gifted and Talented young people in Africa. I actually loved my time at both my secondary schools, with all their failings and I hope that my lad has as brilliant a time as I did.

Venture Capitalists say the funniest things

2009-02-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

It's not often I pick up the Financial Times, read a headline and burst out laughing. But thanks to my venture capital friends I had a good belly-laugh this morning.

Get this. Apparently UK venture capitalists are lobbying the government to throw them a lifeline by bailing them out with £1 Billion!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....

No, seriously. Their pitch is that if the Government doesn't give the venture capitalists £1 Billion to play with, then hundreds of technology start ups will go to the wall. They are doing it for us. Not for themselves. For me! The VCs are lobbying the Government for £1 Billion for ME!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....

Oh, darn it. I've gone and cracked a rib, laughing.

On the record, off the record

2009-01-31T02:55:00.000-08:00

It's a bit unclear at Davos when a session is on the record and when it's off the record. In years gone by (I am told) part of the magic of Davos was the opportunity to hear the thoughts of global leaders off the record. But in the digital age of bloggers, twitter and YouTube the dividing line is less clear. And I think that is a good thing. Davos is much more transparent now.

The place is awash with bloggers and "tweeters". Folk like the legendary Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur of France and Richard Muirhead of Tideway in the UK broadcast continuous updates to their twitter followers running in to the tens of thousands around the world.

However, sometimes you get caught out. I gave a presentation on the emergence of the semantic web as the next generation of the web, and to grab the audiences attention and make the point that this shift to the semantic web is a quiet yet incredibly powerful revolution I started off by performing a bit of Tai Chi. Little did I know that moments later it would appear on YouTube (cringe).

Some old campaigners are far more astute. At yesterday's British Business Leaders lunch, Lord Mandelson was told that it was being held under the Chatham House Rule. Looking around and spying a few high profile journalists in the audience, he didn't fall for it for a moment, particularly when one of the journos ask "Lord Mandelson, do you think the pound has fallen enough?"

Some sessions are definitely on the record though. Many sessions have an official rapporteur whose job it is to try to summarise an often complex, fast moving hour long dialogue into a pithy one page summary. This morning I spoke at a session on whether the Internet itself is at risk, alongside Dave DeWalt, CEO of security company McAfee, Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of Mozilla Foundation, Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Andre Kudelski, Chairman of the digital security Kudelski Group.

We had a lively conversation, including contributions from folk in the audience such as Craig Mundie, Chief Research & Strategy Office of Microsoft and Howard Dean, former Chairman of the USA Democratic National Committee. Acronyms flew in every direction - identity theft, routers, botnets. The poor old rapporteur came up to me afterwards asking for a card "...in case I have to clarify anything."

"....oh and by the way" she continued "you have nice dimples".

Davos is full of surprises!

Green shoots pushing through the Davos frost?

2009-01-29T12:22:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of gloomy talk about the recession but there is another conversation here that perhaps points to some green shoots desperately pushing their heads through the Davos frost.

The narrative goes something like this. Yes, we are facing one to two years of recession followed by a slow recovery. But during this period the opportunity exists to make major strides in certain areas, the main one being climate change initiatives, and that's getting people excited. It’s giving people something to focus on and when two thousand global influencers focus on the same thing, you get the sense that something might just happen.

You hear this narrative in the speech given by Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama. You hear this in the venture capital lunch where early stage investors talk about where the money is going next. You even hear it in the shuttle buses that ferry groups of participants between the conference centre and the hotels dotted around Davos and Klosters.

Lots of unexpected encounters and serendipitous conversations happen in these little vans as delegates are thrown together at random. This evening returning to the hotel, I got chatting to Professor Daniel Sperling of the University of California, Davis, a leading international expert on transportation and energy, a key player in shaping California's thinking in this area. He was quite upbeat about the direction things were going in and when I asked whether the automotive companies were playing ball he pointed out that they are, after all, seeking huge amounts of support from an energy conscious administration at the moment. Green shoots out of the frost indeed.

Speaking of unexpected encounters, I had one of those surreal "Davos moments" today. I had just finished chatting to Stelios, founder of Easyjet, who asked whether I was going to the Prince Andrew hosted event. I said no as I was heading back to my hotel. Kofi Annan, Former UN Secretary General, was dropping his coat off and we nodded at each other as I pulled my snowboots on. Then David Cameron came though, paused to chat to Kofi briefly and carried on down the corridor, stopping only when he came face to face with Boris Johnson heading in the opposite direction. As they chatted, Tony Blair whisked past with his minders, again pausing to exchange pleasantries with Kofi Annan.

Head spinning slightly, I trudged off to the shuttle bus through the Davos snow, keeping my eyes peeled for green shoots.

Three Nuns and an Archbishop

2009-01-28T15:34:00.001-08:00

Some of the most interesting meetings at Davos take place over dinner in the evening. These happen away from the Congress Centre, in the hotels scattered around this picturesque town. They are small informal events, usually with about 30 guests and 3 to 5 speakers with topics ranging from The Future of Entertainment and Preparing for a Pandemic to Leadership Lessons from Shakespeare's Macbeth.

This evening I was a speaker at a dinner entitled "What Was Privacy?". Alongside me were, amongst others, internet luminaries such as the A-list blogger Robert Scoble, Reid Hoffman, Chairman and Founder of the $Billion social networking site, Linkedin, and, er, the Archbishop of Dublin. Yes, that's not a typo, it was the actual Archbishop of Dublin, who turned out to be remarkably well informed about a range of privacy issues.

A lively discussion ensued, moderated by the leading French blogger Loic Le Meur. The bloggers took a fairly strong "privacy is dead, get over it" line arguing that the benefits of exposing yourself online (literally in the case of Scoble's pictures of himself in the shower) in terms of support from friends out there on the web, far outway the loss of privacy. I took a strong privacy position arguing that individuals must take control of their online identities.

Following debate over dinner at the five tables, we fed back our views. However, to bring it to life a bit the chap feeding back from the Archbishop's table unacountably kicked off his comments with the phrase "Let me tell you an anecdote about three nuns....".

The Art of Business

2009-01-28T03:39:00.001-08:00

Three hundred powerful Davos executives standing up with their arms outstretched, singing Happy Birthday at the top of their voices to a complete stranger balancing precariously on a chair at the front? That's what happens when you attend a session led by the Conductor and management guru Benjamin Zander. That's what happens when you mix the arts and business and that is typical of the mixing that goes on here at Davos.

Zander took us on a journey from the Nine Dot problem to the Holocaust, from a spontaneous, deeply emotional performance of Mozart by a string quartet to the whole room thundering Ode To Joy in German. His message was simple. It's up to us as individuals to decide how we look at the world. We decide whether our conversations are about downward spirals or about possibilities. As his father told him "there is no bad weather, just inappropriate clothes". We left buzzing and it certainly made a huge contrast to a parallel session that I think should have had the title "That's Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into".

Thus inspired, I now need to deliver my own talk this afternoon at a Harvard Business Review session, on the emergence of the Semantic Web in the artistic Pecha Kucha format. You get exactly 15 slide images. Each slide stays on the screen for exactly 20 seconds. And that's it. 15 pictures and 5 minutes to explain to a completely non-technical audience one of the most fundamental, technical changes that is happening to the Web over its 20 year life.

You can take this "art of business" thing too far, you know!

Back to school in Davos

2009-01-27T13:59:00.000-08:00

Returning to Davos this year has a "back to school" feel about it. Last year I was a just a new boy but already I feel like a veteran amongst this year's newbies with whom I shared the short flight from London and the long coach ride from Zurich up into the mountains of Davos and Kloisters.

I dispensed sage advice to the usual eclectic mix of Davos attendees; the Oxford academic Director of a cutting edge research institute, the charming Chatham House diplomat, the Dutch developing country agriculture specialist who had just flown in from Delhi via Beijing.

As they told me about life changing medical treatment, food production in the Chinese counryside and geopolitical maneuvering, I told them about the importance of snow boots, how to barge billionaires out of the way to get the best seats and what not to wear at the British Business Leaders Lunch (apparently comfortable wooly jumpers are out, as I discovered last year when everyone else turned up in sombre business suits).

Speaking of sombre, the media is making a lot of the sombre mood in Davos this year. That is at odds with the excited chatter in the coach that I'm listening to. I just overheard someone say that a couple of years ago he and hundreds of others received a cocktail party invitation in the form of an ipod. He said he didn't know what it was back then so he threw it in the bin! Well, we may not get ipod invites this year but the Davos crowd is having its first day back at school and it's as excited as ever.

Last Week was Today

2009-01-26T03:59:00.000-08:00

Last week marked Garlik's first appearance on the BBC's flagship Radio 4 programme, Today. It was a short piece (5 minutes 47 seconds to be exact) but I think it worked well.

After the broadcast I got an email from a contact wondering who our PR company is (Band & Brown if you are interested) and how we managed to end up on such a high profile news programme. So what goes in to putting together a 5 minute 47 second slot on a major news programme like Today? Well, about 6 months of effort as it happens.

In this case, Angus Stickler, the BBC investigative journalist who led the piece got into contact with me around the middle of 2008 to talk about the big issues in the world of personal information. We talk about some research I was doing into the way the UK Government handles personal data and we decided that this would for the focus for a piece.

I then issued about 25 Freedom of Information requests to major Government departments asking them a series of questions about how they handle information. I got a range of responses (from "here's the answer" to "why do you want to know?") and spent several months chasing up, arguing, negotiating with these departments to get a coherent set of replies.

So, about two months after we first got together Angus came back in to pre-record an interview with me. In the meantime he had found another independent expert from the British Computer Society, who also had a strong view on this issue and recorded an interview with her.

When he came in to record the interview with me, we got everything set up and he reviewed the list of departments that I had received replies from. However he decided that there were several key departments missing, so we had to cancel the interview and I went back out and issued another tranche of FoI requests bring the total to about 35 (subsequently grouped together to end up as 30 responses). This took another couple of months and we were now into December.

Angus came back in and spent a couple of hour recording the interview. He even had to record "background noise" around Garlik's office. I asked why they don't just use general background noise but apparently if on a BBC radio programme they say they are in an office and you hear keyboards tapping away and background office chatter, they have to be actual keyboards tapping in the actual office they have referred to!

Next step was to contact the Information Commissioners Office to see whether they would be willing to put up a spokesperson. They agreed and that needed to be scheduled, so a few weeks later off Angus went to Wilmslow, near Manchester, to record that interview.

Finally the package was all together and it was put into the hands of the Today Programme editors to decide when to run it and whether to try to get a Government Minister onto the programme to answer questions. After a week or so back and forth with the Cabinet Office about providing a Minister, Today finally decide to run the piece.

So we wake up early on Wednesday morning at 6am waiting to hear the piece go to air. 7am nothing. 8am nothing. 8.45am nothing. Finally the 9am news comes on and the item is not mentioned. After all that. Damn!

We get an email that evening saying "sorry about that, something came up but don't worry it will go out tomorrow". But this time I didn't bother getting up early. I got up at 7.30 and tuned in. As there was no mention of the story by about 8.30am I left the house and jumped on the bus to head off for a meeting up in London. Five minutes later I got a text from my wife say "Just heard you on the radio. Don't know what you were saying thought".

6 months. 30 plus Freedom of Information requests. About a hundred emails and phone calls. Several hours of interviews and editing. And I missed it !

Next time you hear someone on the radio, talking for a few minutes and then getting cut off by an agressive interviewer or the clock striking 9, spare a though for the effort that has gone into it behind the scenes.

300 Professors

2009-01-20T23:57:00.000-08:00

Yeserday I found myself face to face with The 300.

300 Professors that is (more or less). And not exactly "face to face". Actually I found myself face to face with the paperwork that 300 Professors are capable of producing when bidding for large scale research funding. It was truly awesome.

A while back I agreed to sit on an EPSRC (research council) panel to evaluate bids to set up three new "Digital Economy Hubs" each of which will be given about £12m. The Hubs will exist for five years and involve hundreds of multidisciplinary researchers looking at all aspects of the digital world. In UK academy research terms £36m is BIG money.

What I had not fully appreciated was that BIG money would result in BIG documents, BIG names, BIG ideas. I don't think I have ever read so much paperwork. Staggering.

I can't say much about the outcome. I did wonder about the process though. Shouldn't a Digital Economy Hub bid be a bit more, well, digital?

In the company of genius

2009-01-13T22:12:00.000-08:00

2009 kicked off properly for me yesterday with a fascinating few hours in the company of genius.

I organised a meeting of minds for a free flowing discussion about a rapidly emerging area of the semantic web called FOAF. It was a bit self-indulgent really because I love hanging out with really, really smart people, in the hope that some of it might rub off :)

To my right sat Professor Nigel Shadbolt former President of the British Computer Society, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, Libby Miller co-creator (with Dan Brickley) of FOAF itself. On my left sat JP Rangaswami Managing Director of innovation & strategy at BT Design but perhaps better known as the blogger Confused of Calcutta, Luke Razzell, the creator of the acclaimed BlogFriends app on Facebook. At the end of the table sat a group of very smart tech guys from various areas of the BBC and my frightenly bright Garlik tech team were scattered around the room.

Unusually for me, I let the conversation flow in a fairly unstructured way, although my personality type was perched on my shoulder screaming "Impose Order, Demand Structure you weak willed, crazy-sock-wearing, happy-go-lucky hippie". But I resisted, sat back and enjoyed the debate.

It was fascinating to watch and listen to such a group of extremely bright people having a conversation. At one point someone suggested that we do a straw poll around the table on our attitude towards privacy defaults, but I felt obliged to point out that you couldn't assemble a more unlikely and unrepresentative "focus group"!

I have a particular interest in understanding and unleashing gifted people. I am developing a charitable educational project to introduce "gifted and talented" education on a huge scale across Africa. Generally educational projects in African start at the level of putting a roof on a building and providing second hand books and that basic work is essential. But at the other extreme, if we use the same criteria as we use in the UK to identify "gifted and talented" young people (i.e. the top 5% by ability) then there are 20m children across Africa who would receive special attention as being the most gifted and talented if they happened to be born elsewhere. Imagine what might happen if we could unleash them? If those minds were working on Africa's challenges and exploiting Africa's opportunities?

So, I think my theme for 2009 is going to be about unleashing brilliant minds to do brilliant things and act as a cheerleader. WoooHooo. Go Genius. Go Genius (cue pompoms and high kicking).

The Last Post

2008-12-31T13:33:00.000-08:00

This is my Last Post.

I started blogging almost exactly a year ago, on the 4th January 2008 and it has been a fascinating experience. I had to invent a new person - Mr Bojangles - and give that person a voice. (Incidentally, I also gave that person an extra Xmas present, from Tom to Mr Bojangles :) and Mr Bojangles got exactly what you would expect him to get).

I found my voice through Mr Bojangles and I told my story as it happened. I had to find my tempo too. Do you blog every day? Once a week? Once a month? I blogged 73 times in 2008, about 6 times a month and that worked well for me. I think I captured the main events of my year and only missed out one major incident, concerning a pot of glue, a left handed badger and two unusual shades of the colour mauve!

2008 turned out to be an eventful year for me.

January took me to Davos for the World Economic Forum where I slipped and slid in the snow and rubbed shoulders with the great and good
February saw me sneak in the doors of Number 10 Downing Street and sneak off to Paris on valentines day without my wife (ohhh, errrr, misses)
March caught me crooning Sexual Healing to a crowd of "admirers" in Central London
April had me being strung up from the nearest tree for being black
May locked me in windowless rooms in Geneva on UN work, then served me eggs sunny side up in Silicon Valley
June had me battling with the wrong socks and battling with a mid-life crisis
July beat a confession out of me about having been stabbed as a youth
August took me back to school to be re-educated and to Wilton Park which is not in Wilton Park
September stretched my passport, taking me from Silicon Valley to China
October turned me into a Powerful person
November opened my eyes to the might of India and saw me taken to Court
and December caught me half naked in a car park and gave me a prize

What a year. I've had a good year. Garlik has had a good year and this blog has had a good year. But all good things come to an end. So this is my last post...

...for 2008.

See you all in 2009 :)

Happy New Year to you all and best wishes for 2009.

Mr Bojangles

When Geeks Rule The World

2008-12-21T13:28:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago a friend of one of the Garlik team popped in to the office. She was introduced as a Geek Anthropologist. Not Greek. Geek. Anthropologists study humanity and, as I understand it, a geek anthropologist studies that branch of humanity knows as geeks, if that's not a contradiction in terms.

Co-incidentally, we were in the process of putting a new service into public beta, and it's a pretty geeky service at that (if you have never heard of FOAF - do NOT click here). So the office was a bit of a geek-fest, with people shouting syntax across to each other, wearing t-shirts with lines of code proudly displayed across their chest, suddenly and unexpectedly diverting into the detail of obscure films and random gadgets and having an all round good time. Including our friendly geek anthropologist, who blended in like any good ethnographer, whipped out a note book and proceeded to make notes in an unobtrusive "just think of me as a member of the tribe" sort of way.

Now, most of the time I think of myself as a businessman. A "tech entrepreneur" is what I claim to be. But I think underneath this thin veneer there is the heart of a geek pulsating strongly ready to burst out in an Alien-like way (Note: spurious cult movie reference). I think it traces back to my early computing days as a mainframe Assembler programmer. Sure, like any old beast, I have been shoved aside by new thrusting young alpha-geeks in the tribe, but I sit there up on the hill, a proud, old geek has-been picking at my fleas.

I am proud to have geek blood in my veins though, as ultimately geeks will come to rule the world (cue evil genius-like behavour, mwahahahaha), whatever Fiona S thinks.

"Who's Fiona S?" I hear you cry as one. Who indeed. Let's go back about 35 years. I am in a train carriage on the way back from a school trip with the cool kids. You know. Guys like Mark A, David W, Hilary P and of course the class pin-up Fiona S. We are 11 years old. The cool kids decide that, given the absence of a teacher in this particular carriage, we will pair up and do some snogging. Arrgghhhhh ! How did I, one of the class geeks, end up in this carriage? Pairs were quickly formed and there were two people left over. Me and the class pin-up Fiona. She looked disgusted. I looked at my feet. The girls went into a huddle, came to an agreement and Fiona turned to me.

"Oi, Tom", she said "you've got to leave the carriage".

"Oh, oh, okay" I said, dissapointed but quietly pleased that Fiona S, the class pin-up, had actually spoken to me.

"Yes" she said "go down the corridor and find Steve and tell him to come to this carriage for snogging".

You see, that's the lot of the true geek. To be sent away, and not only sent away but told to summon another cool kid for snogging. But our day will come, I tell you. We will rise up and reclaim our place in the carriage. Do the cool kids have their own anthropologists? No way.

And if Fiona S came up to me right now, begged for forgiveness and offered that snog that was so cruelly snatched from my grasp 35 years ago, I would merely snort with derision, quote some really cool movie line and turn away in disgust. Probably.

Caught on film half naked and given a prize

2008-12-05T13:44:00.001-08:00

Last night I stripped in a car park in Mayfair. As I stood there in the freezing cold, naked from the waste up, I glanced up and saw a CCTV camera smiling down at me - whoops!

There was a reason for this moment of madness, trust me. Following a days worth of back to back meetings up in London, I had to do a quick change in my car into "black tie" so that I could attend the annual British Computer Society Awards event at the Dorcherster, Park Lane. I was in two minds about attending at all but Garlik was up for awards in two categories and a couple of Garlik colleauges were attending with me so I wrestled with the suit in the back of the car, slipped on the cufflinks and strode out of the carpark, across the road and into the warm embrace of abut 1,000 luminaries of the UK computer industry.

The compere was Gyles Brandreth, and he was amazing. Hilarous. I laughed so much, I actually had to clutch my belly with delight. He controlled a crowd of over 1,000 people effortlessly and punctured any pretentious characters, including himself. If you are ever organising a big event - BOOK GYLES ! He's brilliant.

After a good, solid dinner (including mash potato so it couldn't go wrong) the awards part of the evening kicked off. Gyles, who knew nothing about the industry, seemed to be filled with pure joy as the name of every winner was read out. He did tease almost every winner as they went up to get their prize and I had my fingers crossed that we wouldn't win, as I could only image the fun he would have at our expense with a name like Garlik.

So it was with a mixture of surprise, delight and trepidation that I heard him saying "oooohhhh, you'll like the taste of this one" when our first category came up, the best Web-based Technology Project. Sure enough, we WON! Hurray. We strode up, collected our prize and went off to have our official photos taken. What a lovely surprise.

We had only just sat down back at our table when the big prize of the evening, the BT Flagship for Innovation, was being announced. We were down for it, but having won the earlier one, we didn't expect to win this one too. Amazingly, we did! I was genuinely shocked and really, really pleased.

In fact I was so pleased, that I found myself dancing to Abba songs and waving my hands in the air like I just don't care (and so on and so forth). One of my colleagues attempted to down a glass of champagne in one, only to discover that the effect of the bubbles renders this near impossible and quite entertaining. The other colleague regaled me with the benefits of undergarments of a magical nature in the context of award ceremonies.

All in all it was a tremendous evening and a big pat on the back for the Garlik team. We started the year as winners of the World Economic Forum, Davos Technology Pioneer 2008 award and we are ending the year as winners of the British Computer Society's flagship innovation award. We've done okay :)

Of Fast Cars and Celebrities

2008-12-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a day of fast cars and celebrities. It is funny the places that you end up and the people you bump in to as a tech entrepreneur.

In the morning I and a Garlik colleague travelled out to the Oxfordshire countryside to visit the headquarters of the Williams Formula 1 team. The marketing guys there wanted to explore some very innovative branding ideas, a novel way of opening up the massively powerful and international world of Forumla 1 to the VC and start-up community. The 17 F1 races that take place around the globe each year are watched by over 600m fans in 189 countries and attending an F1 meeting is a bit like attending "Davos on wheels" as you get to rub shoulders (and do business) with chief executives of major corporations and take your key clients for a stroll around the pit lane. Anyone interested?

Then we went on a quick tour of the facilities. Wow! Talk about British innovation and engineering excellence. Williams can go from a new car design to a handbuilt formula 1 car on the test tracks in 6 weeks. I held large bits of engine made of special material so light that I could balance it on one hand. They are at the cutting edge of "clean tech" with a flywheel device that stores energy when the car slows and releases it on request. They took us to a huge room containing practically every Formula 1 Williams car going back 30 years. Each car costs about £10m, so I was probably looking at half a billion pounds worth of vehicle! I tried to think of good "bloke" type of questions to ask but could only think of things like "So, does that car go really fast then?" Fortunately my colleauge knew the right questions to ask and I trailed along saying things like "core" and "wow". I also found that if you repeat the last word of a sentence that someone has just said whilst nodding, you can appear very knowledgeable.

In the evening I attended the Medical Futures 2008 Award ceremony. I was a judge on the main prize of the night so sat on a table near the front. Which was good because it was a bit of a UK celeb-fest as Jonathan Ross, Tony Hadley (Spandau Ballet), Andrew Marr, David Mitchell (comedian), Vanessa Feltz (TV and radio), Anthea Turner (presenter), Melanie Sykes (presenter), Mishal Husain (presenter), Michael Buerk (news reader) and Martha Lane Fox (co-founder of Lastminute.com) came up one by one to appeal on behalf of the charities that they are involved in supporting. Jonathan Ross was a big hit with the hundred of doctors in the audience despite his recent problems. In the auction, he offered to leave a personalised message on the answerphone of the highest bidder :)

There was a brief moment of slapstick when an eminent gentleman (who shall remain nameless) turned the wrong way after speaking on the stage, took a step and disappeared off the side of the four foot high platform. Organisers rushed about in a panic (I think this fell into the "what's the worst that could happen" category for the organisers) whilst one of the hosts joked "is there a doctor in the house?"

The lifetime achievement award was won by Sir James Black OM, the Nobel Prize winner and inventor of the beta blocker, a true titan in the medical innovation field. The list of medical innovations coming out of the UK as the awards ceremony progressed was staggering. If the guys at Medical Futures succeed in unleashing the potential of all this talent, a whole new industry will emerge in the UK.

Oh, I should throw in a Royal I suppose, since I'm namedropping. I was nearly mown down by HRH Prince Michael of Kent as I was coming in and he was leaving. It is funny the places that you end up and the people you bump in to as a tech entrepreneur.

Why I was summoned to the Old Bailey

2008-11-30T02:33:00.000-08:00

Throughout my life I have managed to steer clear of the judiciary, the police, the law, the Courts. I have only once given evidence, at a discrimination hearing, and being questioned by a tricky lawyer was not a nice experience.

So it was a bit of a surprise when I found myself "invited" to the Old Bailey, the central criminal Court in England, a couple of weeks ago. But when you get that sort of invitation, you don't turn it down. I put on my most grown up suit and tie and off I went. When I told the taxi driver that I had to be at the Old Bailey at a certain time and could he hurry up please, he asked if I was a lawyer. No, I explained, I am going to be questioned by the judges. "Good luck, mate" he said, looking at me sadly in the mirror as if he didn't expect to see me for a long time.

I had been invited to meet an Old Bailey judge. Actually not just one Old Bailey judge, but ALL the Old Bailey judges at the same time!

The occasion was one of those City of London traditions that stretch back hundreds of years. The daily luncheon at the central criminal court hosted by the City of London, which actually runs the Old Bailey. Two Sheriffs of London (did you know there were still Sheriffs of London?) reside within the Old Bailey building and by tradition they invite all the judges to a three course lunch every day. They also invite a guest or two and on that particular day I was the guest.

So I arrived at a special side door and was ushered up to the Sheriffs apartment, where I was met by a senior City Alderman and a very nice judge. A chap tried to tempt me with a crystal glass of the finest champagne presented on a silver tray but as I don't drink I asked for a plain orange juice instead. Such fineries are wasted on me!

Then we wandered up the corridor to another very ornate room, where I walked into the amazing (to me) scene of a couple of dozen fully wigged and robed Judges, a handful of Justices of the Peace an Alderman and an Under Sherriff who is also known as The Secondary (but nobody seemed to remember why). We sipped tomato juice. I asked if this was another ancient tradition, but it seems the judges just like tomato juice. Unlike me.

Then we were called to lunch and processed two by two to the grand dining room. The chaps in the red robes went first (I think they were the ones called "The Hon. Mr Justice so and so") followed by the Alderman and Guest followed by Judges, JPs, Under Sheriff.

The food and wine was delightful (obviously I didn't eat much of it, having taken my usual precaution when going to posh meals of eating a sandwich beforehand). That's not completely true - we had shepards pie so I ate the mash potato from the top of the shepards pie. Judges are very entertaining lunchtime company, I found. Incredibly smart and slightly other-worldly, with astonishing memories. They chatted about events that happened back in the 60's as if it was yesterday.

The Honourables found me quite an interesting specimen I think. They questioned me forensically about what Garlik does, about the internet, identity fraud and cybercrime. Several of them had tried fraud cases of course so they had a deep knowledge of the law in this area. As my name plate described me as "Dr Tom Ilube", the Honourable opposite me asked me if I was a medical Doctor. I said "No, Doctor of Technology" and he said "Ah ha! Very good. Now, why is my broadband so slow, eh?". Thus began one of those surreal conversations where we talked through his PC settings and broadband provider and I offered advice whilst several other judges listened in nodding wisely.

As we left the hall, I was chatting to a few of the judges about social networking. "It's that Face thing, isn't it?" one of them said. "Facebox?" "Facebag?" "Facebook!". We finally got there. I explained that they could set up a profile on Facebook and keep in touch with the many people they had come into contact with over the years. The Honourables looked at each other slightly horrified and quickly concluded that perhaps they wouldn't be embracing social networking afterall.

They invited me to sit in on some of their cases in the Old Bailey that afternoon, but I decided I had spent enough time inside Court for one day and was a bit wary of being accidentally "sent down", so I made my excuses and left. I must say, this was one of the most fascinating lunches I have been to in a while and I felt very honoured to have been invited.

Gateway of India

2008-11-14T06:29:00.000-08:00

I am in Mumbai, India today pitching Garlik to the VC arm of one of those huge Indian corporations that are the size of a small country.

It's my first visit to India and one thing I can say for certain is that there is serious money in this country...and serious poverty too. As I watch the breaking news about India's moon landing satellite and read todays paper with the Forbes list of Indian multi-Billionaires I am reminded again as I was in China a couple of months ago, how the old order is changing.

Mumbai is somehow much more familiar to me than Beijing was. It's the type of developing country I recognise and understand from Africa, with its dust, noise, energy, free-wheeling exuberance and raw ambition. Some people find big Indian cities crazy on their first visit. I just switched into Africa-mode and actually found Mumbai strangely calm, safe and well organised by comparison. Even the traffic lights work here! True, the taxis largly ignore them, but they do work.

I put my Africa-mode mindset to the test in a side street store. The store manager was delighted to see me, positively rubbing his hands with glee as I wandered in. "From England, Mr Tom? Man United eh, Mr Tom? Cricket eh? Just look at this one Sir, don't worry about the price. Look at this one. She will love it. Don't worry about the price, I will make you a fine, special price Sir".

So I asked the price. He looked pained as if I had pointed out an unsightly boil on his nose, but forced himself to tell me. Then the haggling began in earnest. Or rather it didn't, as I adopted a little known technique called SILENCE. I invaded his body space, stared at him quizically and went silent.

"What's the matter Mr Tom? What price do you want? Name your price. Don't be embarrased."

I said "I want the price please".

That is the correct price, he claimed, then grabbed a big calculator, theatrically proded some buttons and showed me a new price that was 10% lower. Look, he said, almost as if he was surprised himself, that is the new price? Okay? Is that okay? Why are you staring at me.

I smiled and stared. I want the price I repeated.

This went on for about half an hour. He dropped his price three more times. He hit the side of his head angrily. Threw the calculator on the floor. Begged me to say something, name a price even if it was zero. Accused me of wasting his time. Advised me to join the police if I was going to stare at people like that. Explained his family circumstances and appealed to my better nature.

Finally he stopped speaking. I stared. He stared. We stood nose to nose in a little upstairs store in a backstreet of Mumbai staring at each other in silence for five minutes. Sweat pouring from his brow. Me, smiling quizically. Then he broke "Okay", he said "take it for this price" and he threw up his hands in disgust. Then the final insult as I handed him the money "You lied. You are not from Britain at all. Where are you really from?". I smiled, invaded his bodyspace one last time and left.

On the way back to the hotel, as dusk drew in, the driver stopped off at the majestic Gateway of India, standing proudly in its faded Mumbai glory with people teeming around its base, selling giant orange balloons (why?). I swaggered around in Africa-mode, pushing past outstretched beggers, waving away balloon sellers, threatening photographers, stopping traffic imperiously as I crossed back over to my car and driver.

That's when I noticed the small boy walking along next to me. About 6 years old I would guess. No shoes. Rags. Silent. Just inside my bodyspace. Staring at me. I stared back and waved him away imperiously, like Emperor Nero. He looked at me. I looked at him and saw my son, a few years ago. I thought about the life this little boy will lead and I thought about our lives. People, if you have a computer and you can read this then you are soooo unbelievably lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky. Recession? Credit crunch? Job security? If we think we have problems, we just have no idea.

As a nearby hotel security guard wandered over with a stick to drive the small boy back into the snarling traffic I did something I never do (in Africa-mode). I reached in to my jacket, pulled out a decent sized note that would mean nothing to me in pounds and handed it over with tears behind my eyes. He looked at the note as if there must be some mistake, looked at me with empty eyes and darted back into the traffic before I changed my mind. As we drove away I looked back across to the Gateway of India. I saw him skipping, yes, skipping along. Like a 6 year old boy. Oh, God. What sort of a messed up world do we live in.