There was a fascinating piece in The Times Magazine in which leading figures from the worlds of arts, science and business talked about their workspaces, among them Sir Stuart Rose, executive chairman of Marks & Spencer, describing his office - a small affair, “not a centimetre bigger” than those of his colleagues, he emphasised, and decorated with familiar items including a clock given to him by Sir Philip Green, a shield providing a reminder of a childhood spent in Tanzania and, most intriguingly, a rubber chicken.
“When I first came here, it was a useful management tool,” he said. “We had a meeting every Monday and I’d award it to the person who had done the most stupid thing. He or she had to keep it on their desk for the week. We may have replaced it with more advanced management techniques, but I’m still fond of it.”
It was one of those revelations that raised more questions than it answered. Who, for instance, originally gave Sir Stuart the rubber chicken? Did he earn it via some act of great incompetence? Was the weekly recipient permitted to hide the rubber chicken in the event of visitors? Was there a certain cachet to winning the rubber chicken, in the way some kids think there’s a certain cachet in being awarded an asbo? How did the rubber chicken make the employees of the recipient feel? Has the rubber chicken ever been cited in cases of workplace bullying or unfair dismissal? What “more advanced management techniques” has M&S since adopted? Was it just any old rubber chicken or was it a M&S rubber chicken?
Moreover, given the cataclysm of errors made by the company in recent years, not least the decision last year to combine the role of chairman and chief executive, which has so annoyed institutional investors, the controversies over double-D bras and sagging underpants, the overspending on store refurbishment, the profit warning, Sir Stuart’s retrospectively premature use of the word “recovery”, which was almost as ill-advised as the attempt the company once made to win back customers by opening a Life Store selling top-of-the-range Italian furniture in Gateshead, one of the most economically deprived areas of the UK, how did they manage with just giving away a rubber chicken once a week? Surely it should have been an accolade awarded on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
Indeed, not only does the rubber chicken strike me as being a rather brilliant management technique, better than many of the supposedly sophisticated motivational strategies propounded on the pages of People Management and the Harvard Business Review, but I can think of several people at M&S who deserve to be given it right now, not least the executive responsible for the M&S “salad” range.
Advertisement
This is something of an obscure pet hate and I realise the concept of salad varies across cultures, with the Dictionary of American Food and Drink calling it “a dish of leafy green vegetables dressed with various seasonings, sauces and other vegetables or fruits”, the Italian definition encompassing everything from cold roasted peppers to cooked meat, and some people even extending it to fruit and warm food. But M&S is taking the mickey with its “sweet chilli chicken with fireburst rice salad, with a chilli & ginger dressing”, which is, essentially, a cold Chinese takeaway, and its “nutritionally balanced masala chicken with spiced Indian lentils with seared sweet potatoes, creamy masala dressing & crisp spinach”, essentially a cold curry. What next? Kebabs flogged as “warm salads”?
Rubber chicken recipient No2: the company’s environment adviser. M&S has made a huge fuss about going green, charging 5p for plastic bags, sending out party invitations made of post-consumer waste and soya-based ink and announcing that Sir Stuart had switched his Bentley for a hydrogen-powered BMW. Except it transpired that he had swapped his car for a petrol BMW, still had a Bentley for personal use and used private aircraft to travel around the country. He recently claimed he’d got rid of the Bentley but a question mark remains over the private aircraft and, frankly, you’d have thought his green adviser would have spotted such a contradiction before he was sent out to gloat about being so green that he washes his undies at 30C in order to save energy.
Which brings us to rubber chicken recipient No3: the 60-year-old executive who keeps banging on about the brilliance of the M&S suits he wears, when one of the main problems is that the store hasn’t enough young customers, whose pay package increased from £1.375million to £1.765million in 2008-09, even though M&S has reported a 40 per cent fall in full-year pre-tax profits, who hired and fired an executive to head M&S’s troubled food division in such a way that the company ended up paying more than £1million for only 112 days of the man’s time on its board, and who the other day claimed that “glass ceilings barring promotion in the workplace no longer exist” (“women can get to the top of any single job that they want to in the UK ... you’ve got a woman fighter pilot who went in to join the Red Arrows yesterday ... I mean, what else do you want to do, for God’s sake? Women astronauts. Women miners. Women dentists. Women doctors. Women managing directors. What is it you haven’t got?”), even though recent research shows that every full-time working woman in the UK is paid on average £369,000 less than a man over the course of her career, and that women hold only 11 per cent of FTSE 100 directorships and account for only 19.3 per cent of MPs.
The executive in question is Sir Stuart Rose himself, of course. Which may be the reason he’s holding on to that rubber chicken.