Well, one traveller wittily observed: 'Another well-known Paris landmark is the Arc de Triomphe, a moving monument to the many brave women and men who have died trying to visit it'.

But the one I like (principally because I invented it) says that 'All roads lead to the Arc de Triomphe, and there's always a traffic jam around it'.

And how many businesses (large and small) actually practice the 'Arc de Triomphe' style of management without even realising it? You won't find it in any text books, because quite frankly it does not work.

The way to recognise it is by looking at a Company's senior management structure. If the top man has more than few Directors reporting to him, you will see a very flat management structure and a Company that is probably unhealthily dependent on the decisions, impulses, whims of their leader. You will see a bunch of managers who are little more than order-takers - not encouraged or emancipated to use their own brains and make decisions within their areas of competence.

And you will usually see a Board of Directors that has little or no visibility and is frequently overridden by 'the Boss'. 

Such Companies are seriously vulnerable - the owner/manager is well nigh indispensable with no succession plan should the worst occur.

So if you recognise these symptoms in your business, it's high time that you considered demolishing the Arc de Triomphe and replacing it with a devolved management structure built for the future.

It's all too easy to get emotional about bankers (fat cats who should have been better regulated by governments of whatever colour); about trade unionists who said very little when the Pension Crunch hit the private sector or when Gordon Brown decided to apply stiff tax rises to pension plans that had been mapped out on starkly different tax assumptions - no 'grace period' for those close to retirement there - and who now take to the hustings for the eye-catching, vote-catching public sector workers. In fact, in their own way those trade union leaders are themselves fat cats - they have big salaries, protected pension schemes and many are reported to live in low-cost housing, thus depriving others who are more deserving of much needed accommodation. 

Yes, its dead simple to have a swipe at all the ruling classes, but emotional responses are just as irresponsible as the issues that gave rise to them, and they do nothing to help any of us who are labouring away in the real world. When it comes to survival, the fittest will find their own way without any support from government bodies.

If business owner/managers are to come through the present difficulties, they must set all that aside and manage what is in front of them in the best interests of all their employees, not just themselves - otherwise they will be just as culpable as the 'fat cats' who they criticise so readily.

So what does the Pension Crunch mean for small businesses, and what can be done about it?

• Most employees in smaller businesses have little or no pensions provision and it is very hard for them to start making contributions whilst struggling to make ends meet.
• Business owners should be checking that any private pension schemes that are available are adequately funded. They should also be aware that they will be required to make such provision for ALL employees from 2015 onwards - potentially a huge problem that few people have recognised publicly yet. It's one that cannot be swept under the carpet. For more information go to http://www.startupdonut.co.uk/news/startup/staff-pension-provision-delayed-by-a-year
• But the biggest thing that an employer must show is that he understands and cares for the financial plight of all his staff; provide business (not necessarily financial) incentives to raise spirits and give encouragement via excellent internal communications via newsletters, social events and so forth. It's not all 'doom-and-gloom' and even if the going is very tough indeed, one must be considerate of all staff. For one important reason...
• ...Most employees are worried, financially insecure, and quite probably demotivated. In those circumstances performance will suffer and short-term results will be affected...
• ...also, when things eventually improve, unsympathetic business owners will suffer as their employees take any new job offers that materialise to improve their lot and perhaps to give him a 'bloody nose'.

So the Pension Crunch affects businesses and their workforce where it hurts and business owner/managers must demonstrate that they care if they are not to undermine the short- and long-term value of their enterprise, which they have worked so hard to build up.

OK, I'm being a bit unfair to Mister Drucker and he does go into some detail about all the bits that should constitute effective marketing within a business, but I have to say that the actual definition still proves elusive even to someone of his eminence.

And I must confess that even I do not know how to define marketing. And anyone who claims to 'do the marketing' should in all honesty make the same confession if they are to get anywhere close to understanding why effective marketing is so important.

'Why is it so difficult to find this definition?', I asked myself as I stared at my navel.

I think that the clue is in Peter Drucker's quote above. The Managing Director who claims to 'know what marketing is all about' is kidding himself - more often than not such a leader is the business figurehead who does the selling. The reality is that his supporting 'Marketing Department' (if he has one) is little more than a sales or sales promotion department that dutifully does his bidding without question.

But if Drucker is right, then such a business leader will not possess a cogent marketing strategy, and without that his business and eventual exit strategy will be seriously flawed.

'The fault line' I mused to myself as I pulled away from the unedifying prospect of my navel, 'lies in the fact that Marketing should never be defined as a department. It should be regarded as a collective noun describing a collective activity'.

If a business relies on one leading light to bring home the bacon and does not otherwise consider or face up to its product development and service responsibilities from top to bottom of the organisation then eventually its reputation and image will suffer sudden and irretrievable damage.

Take British Airways - at the height of its post-privatisation success it was regarded as 'good at marketing'. Then (following a change at the top) they went a bit mad (symbolised by the curious corporate design that was famously hand-bagged, or rather head-scarfed, by Prime Minister Thatcher). Shortly after that followed a disastrous strike, and a decision to focus more heavily on business class, leaving us mere mortals with our knees up near our chins, and the spell was broken.

More importantly, when the business figurehead retires, he will leave as his legacy one headless chicken and will not secure best value from a future buyer.

Marketing must emanate from the top, but every company department (no matter how technical or administrative its role may be) must sign up to an effectively disseminated business plan and face its customers at all levels and through all disciplines. That way, it will carry on winning new business because the customer will say: 'Let's give the order to xxx Ltd - they're good'. The unsaid bit is 'they're good at marketing'.

So if you get the collective marketing strategy well thought through and embedded in all staff, you will truly make selling superfluous - or at least much easier - and then the struggle to define marketing will become irrelevant.

Which is just as well, because I still haven't defined it, have I? But I could help you to write a good marketing and business plan - so why not give me a call?

Tony Maynard, CMC Partner

The new proposed High-Speed Rail Link (the now-infamous HS2) is a good example. Everyone knows that high speed rail travel is essential yet the protests about this link are short-sighted to say the least. ‘Why spend all that money for the sake of 15 minutes saved travel time?’ And of course all sorts of local issues are raised. The fact that we have a serious public transport capacity problem is wilfully and irresponsibly ignored – and the fact that most of our serious global competitors have been more progressive is waved aside.

 Why is this short-sighted? Well, for a start we should think about the economic advantages and time savings based on getting, say, from Manchester to Frankfurt or Berlin, Rome or Madrid – not just the advantages of whizzing from Birmingham to London. And we don’t need to guess the impact of price or availability of petrol in the coming years on our future travel habits and the need to cut our personal energy consumption.

 And you can throw in for good measure this government’s myopic volte-face on renewable energy that sees a big reduction in Feed-In Tariffs, the elimination of large-scale solar farms on brown field sites, and the almost total absence of any radical policy geared towards making this nation self-sufficient in energy. Gone are the trips to Greenland to demonstrate Tory ‘green’ energy credentials and the Chris Huhne (Lib Dem) ‘radical’ plans to remodel energy and environment policy.

And the reason for this reticence? Ah yes, the need to cut spending; save cash today regardless of the long-term needs of tomorrow. Yet if you take a trip by rail across Germany on one of their super-fast trains you will see towns and villages whistle by (like they would if we had HS2) and outside each one of them you will see a wind farm and many, many houses with solar panels already installed thanks to forward-thinking government and planning policies. Forget about HS2, can you imagine the howls of protest if we adopted wind farms in this country with the same alacrity? So we are left with the absurd sight of one solitary wind turbine (usually not working) leering at us as we proceed past Reading on the M4 powering a near-empty office complex in Green Park plus a few offshore wind  farms that are limited in scope and high in cost. And how many of us are embracing solar panels? Some key major economies are so far ahead of us that it is frankly embarrassing as well as depressing. So when the recovery does come, they will move even further ahead.

So you have popular resistance to projects on the one hand and government reluctance to do anything truly radical concerning energy conservation on the other. Muddle and stalemate are excellent bed-pals, aren’t they? Small, forward-thinking exit-planning businesses cannot afford to follow their example!

 It would be foolish to point the finger at everyone else and not acknowledge that we all need to change our views for one simple reason. All the ‘good news’ about alternative energy sources is elaborate electoral camouflage for an apocalyptic problem that lurks in the next few decades.

Not all the new energy sources in the world put together will satisfy the soaring demand for energy. There will be shortages and economic hardship on a massive scale and it is quite staggering that there are no radical incentives to make each and every business (and home) move rapidly towards energy self-sufficiency.

 The urgency for doing this is best summarised in a few short passages from an article by leading energy expert, Paul Chefurka:

 The amount of electricity we produce from all other sources including coal will increase, though not enough to offset the decline in fuels in terms of the energy they supply….In addition to the loss of transportation mobility it represents, the loss of the enormous contributions of oil and natural gas means that the total amount of energy available to humanity by the middle of the century may be only 70% of the amount we use now… How many ways are there to say the world is heading for hard times?  Losing most of our oil is bad enough, and losing most of our gas as well borders on the catastrophic. Combining these losses with the exponential growth of those nations that can least afford it is nothing short of cataclysmic…. The solution to this dilemma, if solution there may be, does not seem to lie in some Deus ex Machina or in a technological revision of the parable of the loaves and fishes.  If the dark visions outlined in this article come true, we will be faced with a world in which the only way forward is to accept that Mother Nature does not negotiate. 

And that brings me back to the headline. Yes, Cash must be King for short-term survival in difficult times, but all businesses large and small should be doing everything they can to become self-sufficient in energy if they are to have any long-term prospect of survival. It’s all too easy to say that ‘It’s no good, we simply can’t afford it’. But the stark long-term message is that we MUST afford it as well as recognise that we will be largely left to our own devices in so doing.

The simple message should be:

Long-term energy-saving is about survival - it cannot therefore be ignored in any commercial business plan or exit valuation calculations.

It's the time when one might fish out files that normally do not see the light of day for long periods - such as the Company's Disaster Recovery Plan. 'No real need to look at that', I hear you say, 'We discussed it at our Board Meeting months ago and it's been updated - so that's all sorted.'

But maybe it's worth setting aside the coffee cup for a few moments, blowing the dust off the file, and reading it again. Does it really cover all eventualities? Is the Company secure?

I don't know about you, but most times I hear the words 'Disaster Recovery' it usually relates almost exclusively to the question of what happens if your computer systems fail? And, yes, that can and does pose severe problems.

But how often do such plans talk about the Company's most valuable assets - its people?

What would happen if, right now, you choked on your chocolate biscuit and 'shuffled off this mortal coil'? What would happen if your Technical Director who has all the expertise 'locked in his head' suddenly upped sticks and emigrated - to your competitor?

Right now, I can point to a couple of Company owners with potentially severe health problems, and no succession plan should the worst happen. Many small businesses are confronted with the same difficulty and all too often the employees are too worried or afraid of the possible reaction to discuss it openly. Which, of course, leads directly to another problem. The lack of a succession plan usually equates with a lack of career prospects, which results in poor motivation and underperformance just at the very time when you need to buck the economic trend to survive and thrive.

And maybe that Technical Director is more likely to walk off with 'the Knowledge' if that's the climate in which he is presently employed?

Now there's a REAL disaster scenario for you - be careful with that biscuit; make sure you wash it down with some coffee (not too scorching hot, I hope). Perhaps it would be worth spending a few of these vacant summertime minutes going through all the 'What Ifs' you can think of and ensuring that this is the top item on the Agenda of your next Board or Staff Meeting?

And if you need a helping hand, your local CMC Partner (that's me, for one) stands ready and able to help you. We do this for many clients and can offer the type of strategic planning and emergency services that could be the very lifeline you need when you would need it most. 

The worst thing one could do would be to go on believing in immortality and simply leave the Disaster Recovery Plan filed away and barely relevant to the most serious issues that can - and do - crop up.

An American satirist once said: 'Disaster is a natural part of my evolution. Toward tragedy and dissolution'.

So why not chew carefully on that and give us a call?