This month has been characterised by the normal end of year rush to get work completed on multiple fronts, while also preparing for the holiday season. There was a Heidrick Board meeting in New York and several important sessions in Parliament with the Commission. My former sporting prowess as a rower was brought back to mind when I undertook a lunchtime speaking engagement with the Institute of Directors at the Leander Rowing Club in Henley-0n-Thames. While my previous life at Accenture came back into focus with several meetings and reunions with former colleagues.
I also managed to spend a few days away skiing with Alex and Matt in the Dolomites and was part of a winning team in the Peaslake Free School Quiz. We had an exiting Christmas with the family at Winterfold, which was enlivened by the lack of water for over three days following a Christmas Eve storm in the area. We went on a great outing with my brother and his family to see the RSC performance of Wendy and Peter Pan at Stratford. Sandy and I escaped from one lot of storms to spend a blustery New Year in Devon, while the boys enjoyed parties in Surrey (Matt) and up in the flat in London (Alex). The latter appeared to involve a sizeable proportion of his old school year and a set of interesting bedding arrangements as they worked on how to sleep 20 people in a three bedroom flat! Meanwhile there has been a lot of “progress” with the new London house at Cowley Street, as the hole in the basement gets deeper and the roof is taken off and all the internal walls stripped out!
One of the last pieces of work for the year is normally the Heidrick Board meeting in New York in the week before Christmas and, for once, I did not have to worry about getting trapped on the wrong side of the pond by the snow. This was another very important Board meeting as the process of identifying the next CEO of the organisation moved ahead and we listened to two of the global practice leads outline the opportunities and challenges in the the Financial Services and Industrial sectors. It is clear that the overall market for executive search is picking up as the global economy returns to moderate growth and the levels of business are even more dependent on having the right talent, connected to the right networks, in the parts of the world where the action is. New York is a very festive place at this time of year and I was able to take advantage of downtime between Board sessions to get in some last minute Christmas shopping.
The main action this month though centred around the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. We had a lot of regular business to attend to; reviewing early findings from the Kenya Child Mortality study I referenced in last month’s post, scrutinising work in progress on a report into the Department for International Development’s Learning effectiveness and undertaking preparatory scoping for forthcoming studies into Nutrition and Scaling Up Spend in Fragile States. Aside from this there were several sessions with the IDC Select Committee in Parliament.
December saw the Commission issue its first “Red” traffic light report. We have produced thirty reports since our launch in 2011 and this was the first time that we evaluated a development activity as having the most serious deficiencies. The programme concerned was called Trade Mark Southern Africa and was designed to make a series of interventions to improve the trade flows, market effectiveness and logistics between countries in the region. The Commission found multiple weaknesses in governance, management and impact. The response from the Secretary of State, Justine Greening, to our report was an immediate decision to shut the programme down and to seek new ways to achieve the same goals. She came before the IDC (International Development) Select Committee and made numerous references to the value of the Commission in bringing the issues to light. It is clear that the visibility and impact of ICAI has been raised by this report and its implications.
I was also called before the Select Committee as an expert witness on aid programmes targeted at health in Burma. My time as Chair of the WEF Global Health Initiative on HIV/Aids, TB and Malaria came in handy, alongside my role as Lead Commissioner for the recent report on the subject, as we spoke at length about the challenges of drug-resistant malaria which is prevalent in the region. A significant scale-up in aid is planned as the country undergoes reform and opens up. We have a very busy start to 2014 planned as well and I will be undertaking two field visits in January – one to the Philippines to follow-up on the humanitarian aid given in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, and a second trip to Zambia as part of a thematic review into aid aimed at improving nutrition among the poor of the world.
My work with the Commission was at the centre of my comments to the Christmas lunch organised by my friend (and former co-archaeologist!) Sue Dormer for the Business Forum and Institute of Directors at the Leander Club in Henley. It was fun to have a guided tour of this hallowed home of rowing and to be again amid the racks of eights and fours which were such a big part of my college life. Watching the elite rowers in the midst of their training schedules however made me very glad that I was no longer strapped to an ergometer or doing squat thrusts each day! The lunch was a lively affair and the audience seemed to appreciate the chance to learn a bit about the UK aid programme and the work that we do to scrutinise its effectiveness and impact.
We had a seasonal Team Foster reunion meal at which Dani Heaven and Claire Allen joined me in saying farewell to Christina Dyer (and husband Adrian), as they prepared to emigrate to Canada in January. I had a great lunch with another member of the Team, Shirley Adams, and was delighted to get a call from Mark Knickrehm who is taking on the new Strategy Consulting group which has been carved out as part of the latest operating model shift at the old place. The move of the more process and change-related skills within Accenture Management Consulting back into the industry Operating Groups has been on the cards for some time, and it will be interesting to see how the differentiated skills are retained and reinforced in the new, more integrated, go-to-market constructs.
The re-combination of Strategy with the Technology Consulting group has a real potential to strengthen the transformational ideas which Accenture can bring to its clients in a world where technology and business strategy are more and more closely linked. This is all in the future, but I also had a chance to walk down memory lane when I attended the splendid retirement party held for Keith Haviland, Phil Swallow and Andy Stafford at the Banqueting Hall in London. I shared a table with many faces from the history of the Accenture in the UK, including three former UK Leads – James Hall, Ian Watmore and Lis Astall. It was also a real pleasure to catch up with many other former colleagues including Jo Deblaere, Karl-Heinz Floether, Stewart Clements, Deborah Campbell (another former Team Foster member) and Richard Lumb.
The most fun of the month came in four days of skiing which I managed to grab with Alex and Matt at the start of December. Despite Matt suffering from some dreadful lurgy, we flew to Venice and drove the two hours up to the resort of Cortina D’Ampezzo in the Dolomites. The weather was glorious throughout and the early snow from a week or so earlier meant that most of the high runs were open. We had the pistes largely to ourselves and packed in a lot of skiing over the time we were there, enjoying the mainly black and red runs set amid the wonderful craggy scenery.
Alex took great pleasure in measuring his speed down the slopes and apparently clocked over 100 kph at one point – unless that was just his phone shifting in his pocket. This was our first visit to this region and while there was a bit of shuttling required between the different ski zones it is a great addition to our normal Italian haunt of Madesimo. Matt played his final game of rugby of the season and, much to the amazement of all concerned, he both scored a try and was able to walk off the pitch unaided by St John’s Ambulance!
Christmas started for us with the now traditional walk into the forest to select and cut down our tree. The heathland clearing work that we have been doing has reduced the potential supply somewhat, but we still had plenty to choose from. The tree was carried back to the house by Alex and Matt and looked splendid when decorated – even if it did collapse rather spectacularly during Christmas dinner shattering countless baubles! This was not the only mishap to strike as the storms in the South of England on Christmas Eve, together with ensuing flooding, resulted in our local water pumping station being put out of action. The tanks ran dry during Christmas morning as the family, bolstered by Grandma, Grandad and Grandpa all tried to have a shower.
We survived without triggering a major case of legionnaire’s disease or typhoid outbreak in Surrey and were fortunate not to join other local friends who had no power or water over the break and were reduced to cooking the turkey on the barbecue! We met my brother and his family at Stratford to see a very special Christmas production of Wendy and Peter Pan – a brilliant new treatment of the story in which a fat grumpy Tinkerbell was a particular highlight. The year has ended in the midst of yet more storms at our holiday home in Devon. We were able to enjoy some lovely walks on the nearby cliffs in the sunny breaks in the clouds and saw in the New Year in style in a favourite local restaurant, the Blue Groove. Our house, which is perched on a promontory above the beach, has been buffeted by some pretty strong winds but appears to have survived so far…though there are more storms on the way as we enter into 2014.
This is true both literally and metaphorically. While the business environment in the UK and the US is apparently improving, the picture in Europe remains very mixed and Asia’s giants are getting used to more variable levels of economic growth. How different sectors will respond to the shifting markets and the acceleration in the disruptive impact of technology will be interesting to see in the year ahead. There are continuing challenges with youth unemployment, personal debt levels and structural competitiveness in many parts of the world and the next generation of post-recession business leaders have yet to set a clear direction for the future or step up to strategic investments.
Meanwhile the Middle east region looks set to dominate the agenda again in 2014. Syria has been knocked off the headlines by the violence in Iraq but the civil war rages on and the impact of Sunni and Shia differences within the Muslim world are continuing to ricochet around the area, bringing renewed destabilisation to the south of Beirut, which I visited earlier in the year. This will be the year when the UN looks to set the Strategic Development Goals for the period after 2015 and the opportunity for the world to mobilise more clearly around the bigger long term challenges for the planet will come into view. On a personal level, I see 2014 as a year when the transition from the initial set of choices I made when I left Accenture will begin, and the shape and focus for the rest of the decade will become clearer too. All exciting stuff! Happy New Year!
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