National Savings

I am a product of the National Savings Bank. My parents both worked at its head office in Kew and after a whirlwind 13-year courtship, they decided to get engaged.

The other day I found some photos of the NSB, taken between the late 1940s and the early 60s, when my parents married and my mother accepted a 'dowry' in lieu of a pension. I told my mother about the pictures but she showed no interest in seeing them. However, she did tell me a few anecdotes.

I learned that the women were all expected to arrive at work wearing white gloves and that if a pair of shoes hadn't been polished properly, a reprimand would follow. In the early 60s, a young man, who had clearly fallen under the malign influence of the Beatles, arrived looking slightly scruffy and was given a stern talking to. The next day he turned up in a top hat and tails.

I also learned more about the notorious serial killer John Christie, who worked in the same department as my father. Apparently, Christie had asked my mother's friend Doris out on a date, but after some deliberation she decided to say no. After Christie's arrest and execution, Doris was haunted by the thought of what could have been.

Serial killers aside, it sounded like a very ordered, regimented world. I had to get my mother to explain the many acronyms she kept mentioning - CAs, COs, HCOs, EOs and HEOs and tried to estimate out how many Clerical Assistants and Clerical Officers there were under under Higher Clerical Officer, before I began to get a sense of how it all worked.

At lunchtime, everyone would file into the huge staff canteen and the CAs, COs, EOs and HCOs would all sit on separate tables, never fraternising with each other. If a newcomer accidentally sat at the wrong table, they would politely put straight and shown where they would be sitting tomorrow.

 

My mother was given special projects, as she had a particular aptitude for numbers. At one point she uncovered a serious case of internal fraud and reported it, but nobody dared to take action. Frustrated by the inertia of her employers, my mother wrote a 'humorous' poem about it for the staff journal. Every copy was seized and the offending poem was scored out, badly, before the journal was recirculated.

In the early days, the offices were dominated by women that my mother referred to as old biddies. They should have retired, but had kept going while the men were serving in the armed forces. My mother disliked their austere manner and drab clothes and was glad when the office began to fill with younger men.

But not all of the men were fit for work. Some had been irreparably damaged by the War and struggled to get through the working day. One man had been held a prisoner of war by the Japanese and regularly suffered from bouts of malaria, during which he sometimes thought that he was back in the jungle. Another sat alone in the corner, reeking of whisky, looking broken.

Life at the Bank was governed by strict rules and regulations, but it wasn't a completely sterile, joyless environment. It had its own library and organised trips up to town to see the latest ballets, concerts and plays (on one occasion, my father saw my ballet dancing mother-in-law on the stage, blissfully aware that their paths would cross 30 years later).

My parents were both very happy at the bank and regarded it as a huge improvement on the jobs they began they working lives with: an electrician and an assistant in a chemist's. My father even began to think of himself as middle class. My mother never did.

My father would have happily have stayed at the National Savings Bank until retirement, but the Government decided to start moving Civil Service jobs away from London and his job ended up in Glasgow. As none of us would have made very good Glaswegians, my father reluctantly moved to another department and ended up doing something far more enjoyable.

For a generation blighted by two world wars and the poverty of the 1930s, the Civil Service offered an alluring security. If you were working or lower middle class, with no capital or assets to speak of, the job security and attractive pension made it a good career choice.

But what's this? Miss Clutterbuck is outside without her white gloves on! The strumpet. I bet she didn't last long.

The Wheel of Misfortune

In a recent post, I mentioned my horror of modern working practices like team building exercises and earnest discussions about brand identity. I also mentioned the term 'brand wheel'.

Until five years ago, I'd never heard of brand wheels. I'd chosen the relative penury of bookselling so that I would never have to sit in boardrooms, having serious conversations about things that didn't matter. It was an unspoken agreement.

Then HMV bought the company I worked for and suddenly books were called 'product', knowledge became 'learnings' and the staff were called 'resource' (always singular, I noticed). The agreement had been broken. It was a horrible time.

One day I was invited to a regional meeting and an ambitious young manager revealed a diagram of a thing called a 'brand wheel'. It consisted of various segments that represented different aspects of running a bookshop. Things so painfully obvious that it seemed unnecessary to write them down.

There were lots of words like knowledge (not 'learnings', on this occasion), authority, communication, enthusiasm and development. I suppose it was more positive than my approach, which was to simply Not Be Crap.

But there was a reductive quality about the brand wheel that smacked of totalitarianism (I'm sure that Stalin would have had one if he'd known about them): this is who we are, this is what we think and this is what we must do.

Here are some examples of brand wheels. Let's begin with a simple one:


It looks nice doesn't it - I like the colours - and it's reassuringly simple: forming an idea, deciding who it should be aimed at, how to communicate it and how to avoid screwing up. That's the first slide in our Powerpoint presentation.

Now I'm going to turn up the wheel to Level 2:

That's at least 15 minutes' worth of nonsense, assuming that the speaker limits themselves to around two minutes per segment. At this point in the presentation, I'm usually wondering if I can get away with taking the last Bourbon biscuit without looking desperate.

Then things start to get really nasty:

At this stage in the presentation, my benign contempt usually turns to rising anger. I feel like Peter Finch in Network. This is the end of civilisation as we know it. Once we talked with passion about justice, equality and fraternity. Now we're discussing the 'purchase experience'.

In the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the future, six-fingered historians will hold the charred remains of brand wheels and conclude that we deserved to die.

I am now going to turn the Brand Wheel up to 11:

By now I feel like Charlton Heston at the end of 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes', grimly pressing the self-destruct button. I expect someone was very proud of themselves when they created this wheel.

Would you want to be friends with them?

If you work in an environment where people have serious conversations about 'brand positioning', then I recommend that you include the Level 11 Brand Wheel in your next Powerpoint presentation. It will baffle and impress in equal measure.

The only downside is that the people you really like will hate you.

But it isn't just dull corporations that have brand wheels:

It looks like a rather dull daytime television quiz - "I'll have Cities, Jim" - where the answer could just as easily be Germany or Belgium. I wonder how much money was spent coming up with this fatuous representation of a complex nation.

Local authorities have also joined in:

Brand wheels contribute nothing to the good of mankind and they should be treated with the contempt they deserve. But as we enter recession, employees will probably feel less able to speak out against the rising tide of banal, business-speak in the workplace.

I only hope that as the recession deepens, paying people to develop brand wheels and hold team building exercises will be increasingly viewed as an unnecessary expense.

Rant over.