Interesting...very interesting!

Call me sad - you won't be the first - but the most mind-blowing statistic I've read in a very long time was in a recent issue of The Economist. To make matters worse, the stat in question related to the exciting topic of…compound interest!

Please do hear me out though, because I confidently predict that you'll be as gob-smacked as I was.


To kick things off I’ll quote directly from The Economist article (weirdly it was on the subject of climate change, but that’s by the by):

‘At a modest 2% rate…a single cent rendered unto Caesar in Jesus’s time is the equivalent of about $1.5 quadrillion (or about 30 times the value of the entire world economy today)’

Probably easiest if I say this for all of us…wow!

If you thought I was slightly sad to be so excited by a random stat like that, then you’re going to feel even more sorry for me when I tell you what I did next – I picked up my calculator and started doing some sums. And the more numbers I tapped in the more amazed I became. Here are just some of the weird and wonderful things I found as I investigated the mind-blowing effects of compound interest over very long periods of time:

1066 and all that

It’s not that rare to hear of people in the UK claiming to be able to trace their ancestry back to the time of William The Conqueror. So to make things a little more fun I decided to start this exercise in 1066 rather than in the time of Caesar. But having denied ourselves more than a thousand years of interest growth I think it’s only fair that we use 3% per annum rather than 2% – to be fair still a very modest interest rate.

Of course this is all entirely hypothetical (sadly given the results below). But the one thing that every single person in the world today has in common is hundreds, more likely thousands, of ancestors who were alive a thousand years ago (a very interesting exercise in itself, but that’s for another day). So at least we can allow ourselves to dream about what would have happened if just one of them had, in 1066, had the very bright idea of tucking away a single penny as a nest egg, to be untouched over the ensuing generations, for your enjoyment in 2010.



The numbers

- By way of context, at a rate of 3% per annum, a saver will double their money approximately every 23.5 years if they allow the interest to roll up.

- In our example, this means that the initial penny would have turned into just over £1 by the year 1230 when Henry III was on the British throne. Not a big sum after more than 130 years of growth, but we all know the saying about little acorns...

- By 1395, when Richard II was on the throne one penny would have grown into a more impressive £100 – a more than worthwhile sum of money in those days.





- By 1466, during the Wars of the Roses, the penny would have grown into £1000. Now we’re talking serious wealth in the context of the times.

- By 1700, with William of Orange on the British throne, this single penny saved at 3% compound interest would be worth well in excess of £1m! A millionaire in that era would undoubtedly be one of the wealthiest individuals, not just in Britain, but in the entire World.

- Billionaire status would have arrived sometime in the 20th Century, between the 1st and 2nd World Wars. Without doubt the holder of this savings account would have been the world’s richest individual at that time.

- As to the future, trillionaire status would be expected to arrive sometime in the second half of next century.


And my point is?

These remarkable numbers, hypothetical and just a bit of fun though they are, do help bring to life the extraordinary power of rolling up interest over time. And if you were wondering how much interest a penny invested in 1066 would have generated by 2010 had the annual interest been taken out each year rather than rolled up, it would have amounted to a princely…28 pence!!)

For anyone who has children and wants to teach them one of the most valuable lessons they’ll ever learn in life (at a time when they’re young enough to reap at least some of the benefits), could do a lot worse than show them the above figures in order to start getting them excited about what compound interest can do for them. They might even learn a bit of history at the same time.

Now whatever happened to that penny I dropped down the back of the sofa earlier…?

‘Seats to Vote Share (SVS)’ projections suggest democratic car crash is on cards

So let’s get this absolutely straight. If, as seems entirely plausible based on the latest polls, the Lib Dems win more votes than Labour in the upcoming Election, this is likely to translate into around one third as many seats.

Much as we in the UK have learned to live with the absurdities of the ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system, the above scenario is still truly shocking...at least it is to me. It makes a mockery of Britain’s self-image as the 'Mother Of Democracy'. In fact it would not be too much of a stretch to argue that such a outcome would mean than the composition of the next parliament would have more in common with the pre-1832 Reform Act era of rotten and pocket boroughs than with a proud 21st Century democracy.

The reason why the failings of the FPP system are, over the course of the next three weeks, going to be laid bare as never before is, of course, the spectacular emergence of the Lib Dems as a truly credible political force. In today’s Observer, the results of last Friday’s YouGov poll were dissected and projected into electoral seats with the following results:

Conservative: 33% (and projected to win 246 seats)
Labour: 28% (and projected to win 276 seats)
Lib Dems: 30% (and projected to win 99 seats)

The very real prospect of Labour remaining the largest party after the Election, having been actively rejected by more than 70% of voters (and, based on 2005 total turnout figures, actively supported by less than 20% of the total UK electorate) is surely an appalling one for any lover of democracy.

The extent of the bias of the current system in favour of Labour, and to a lesser extent the Conservatives, is shown even more starkly if we translate the above figures into a ‘Seats to Vote Share’ (SVS) calculation (using 100 as a base number – i.e. representing a ‘neutral’ / completely fair – seats per vote share outcome)*:

Conservative: 33% of votes would translate into 37.8% of total seats = SVS factor of 115% (ie. 15% more than ‘fair’ share)
Labour: 28% of votes > 42.4% of seats = SVS of 151%
Lib Dem: 30% of votes > 15.2% of seats = SVS of 51%
*Above figures are based on the YouGov poll on 16 April.

Surely even the most rabidly-blue Tory or the reddest of Labourite would, in their heart of hearts, find it impossible to find anything remotely democratic in the above scenario with Labour standing to win more than 50% more seats than justified in terms of votes and the Lib Dems scraping barely half the seats merited by their popular support.

There has been much well-mannered campaigning on the subject of Proportional Representation over the years. However I now hope, and predict, that the democratic car crash that is about to unfold will provide the shock to the system (literally) that's been needed for so long. This coming election will make an unanswerable case for a move to Proportional Representation and I confidently predict that the momentum toward its introduction will then prove unstoppable.

Conquering the Social Media Hydra

Hercules had it pretty easy. At least when he was fighting the nine-headed Hydra, he only had to contend with two new heads every time he cut one off.

When it comes to getting to grips with the challenge of social media in the modern age, however, things are a lot more complicated. Every time you feel you’ve got the measure of the latest hot new social media trend, website, network or gadget it seems like at least half a dozen more spring up demanding your attention. 

No surprise then that so many people become completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that’s constantly being thrown at them and the seemingly impossible task of keeping on top of everything.

So what’s the solution? 

First of all don’t listen to anyone who tries to give the impression that they’re on top of every single new development in social media. Chances are that they’re either a) Kidding you b) Kidding themselves or c) Living a very, very sad life. 

Back in the real world, most of us have three basic choices when it comes to dealing with the challenge of social media overload: 

1)    Valiantly battle to stay on top of anything and everything new that comes along – an approach that will almost certainly end, sooner or later, in defeat.

2)    Decide that it’s all far too difficult and go into denial mode, reassuring ourselves that this whole social media thing is ‘only a passing fad anyway’.

3)    Take the approach that I strongly recommend, which is to fully embrace social media but to do so in a way that puts it in its proper context and ensures that you are mastering it rather than vice versa.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers – no one has. But as a starting point my suggestion is that it will pay huge dividends to adopt some basic coping strategies - just as Hercules did when he finally realized that frenetically chopping off heads was actually making the situation worse not better.

Here are a few common sense principles that I recommend that you to follow and which are essential to keeping your social media sanity while so many around you are losing theirs.  

Quality not quantity. Spend your time on small number of sites which are most relevant to your particular objectives rather than frantically trying to spread yourself thinly across lots of sites and doing nothing properly.

Little and often. Precisely the opposite approach works best when it comes to managing your time most effectively. You should try to spread your social media time evenly throughout the day rather than in large chunks.

Don’t believe all the hype. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the grass is greener elsewhere and that, whatever you’re doing and whichever site you’re on, there are people having more fun somewhere else.   

Remember the tortoise and the hare. When it comes to learning new stuff and looking at interesting new sites you’ll find it far more rewarding in the long run to spend time researching things in depth rather than flitting between lots of different sites and not really taking any of it in.

Keep your perspective. Remember that social media is ultimately just another tool to help you run your life more effectively.  If it becomes the most important thing in your life, chances are it's time to rethink your priorities. 

Taken together, the above principles will help you tame the social media Hydra. They will also ensure you get the maximum return from social media for any given amount of effort you put in.

Twitter cavalry can’t mask failings in the ranks

From non-entity to VIP in 24 hours…
I underwent a metamorphosis earlier this month.

One morning I woke up frustrated and powerless, worn down by many weeks of trying to get sensible answers out of my ISP's customer services department. They seemed intent on blinding me with science and passing me from pillar to post.

That same night, however, I retired to bed a VIP. Not only had all my problems been resolved but I had been on the receiving end of truly outstanding service. What's more, I'd managed to save myself £100 a year in the process.

If my personal metamorphosis was striking, that of PlusNet, the ISP in question, was truly extraordinary. Their service transformed from blundering inefficiency to the height of smooth professionalism almost before my very eyes.

So how was it that my experience of dealing with PlusNet could have been turned on its head so dramatically in such a short space of time?

In a word 'Twitter'.

Mixed emotions
From selfish point of view perhaps I should be completely delighted at the way things turned out. Not only have I once again got access to broadband speeds which will allow me to stream audio and video to my heart's content; I have also had an up-close-and-personal demonstration of the wonders that Twitter can work in customer service - something I've been banging on about to any client that would listen for months.

Why then was this such a bitter-sweet experience?

Here are some of the wider questions that I believe are raised by what I went through and which, in my view, are not being taken anything like seriously enough at the moment in the stampede to present Twitter as some sort of universal customer service panacea.

The new Digital Divide?
With the vast majority of UK adults now having internet access, it strikes me that the so-called 'digital divide' may be moving into a new, rather more subtle phase. Perhaps it's not online access per se that's the main issue nowadays. What may be a bigger issue is the growing division between the 'haves and have-nots' when it comes to the more sophisticated tools that the internet offers people. Here I'm thinking particularly of the benefits of being in a position to leverage social networking.

All my initial dealings with PlusNet were via a combination of email and their online customer management system. And my experience was uniformly awful. The contrast when I finally decided to make my dissatisfaction known on Twitter could hardly have been greater. Yet it makes me rather uneasy that, for every customer like me, there are, no doubt, hundreds of others who remain bogged down in the system with little or no hope of getting their issues resolved.

Two-speed customer service
Certain companies have clearly been able to integrate Twitter fully within their core customer service processes and their successes have been well documented. However I would argue that they remain the exception not the rule. Far more common in my experience is the 'two speed' scenario I experienced with PlusNet where the quality and availability of resources available to the Twitter 'storm-troopers' are quite clearly vastly superior to those back in the heart of the business. BT Care anyone?

CussNet or PlusNet?
PlusNet's mainstream customer service involved a fortnight of answering the same questions time and time again, at great length, which culminated in me concluding that I'd rather live with 1999-style download speeds than have to spend another minute of my time trying to resolve the problem.

The contrast when the Twitter Team took over the reins was spectacular: a short, sharp exchange of 140 character DM messages, carried out on a single afternoon during which my problem was not only identified and completely resolved.

A Tweet Elite?
My concern is that as Twitter becomes less of an exclusive club we'll simply be back to square one - too many customers with too many problems chasing too few customer service resources. Setting up a separate customer service Twitter Team with the best people and greater resources is not the way to break out of this cycle.

Companies have to find a way of integrating Twitter within their mainstream customer servicing and raise their overall standards rather than imagining that a regular flow of high profile 'wins' on Twitter will mask deficiencies elsewhere.

Sally Bercow: Politics, maybe. Politic, never

It is ironic that two such similar words, with common derivation, have ended up having such very different meanings in day-to-day usage. The Oxford Dictionary definition of politic is ‘seeming sensible and judicious in the circumstances’ and it is almost always used in an entirely positive way. As for politics…well, enough said.

Such thoughts came to mind today when I read the Evening Standard’s confessional interview with Sally Bercow, wife of Speaker John and prospective Labour candidate.

I can’t claim to know Sally well, at least not nowadays. However I did work quite closely with her for a number of months during her self-proclaimed ‘ladette‘ ad agency days.

I’m sure Sally has changed a lot since the mid-to-late 90s.  Who hasn’t?  However to judge from the interview – not just the content but also the rationale behind it – it would seem that much about her has changed very little.      

The sort of self awareness and brutal honesty she displays in the interview are, of course, qualities to be welcomed at a time when British politics is hardly overflowing with either. And Westminster hacks must be beside themselves with excitement this evening at the prospect of having such a provocatively outspoken and interesting occupant of the Speaker’s Apartment (if not of the Speaker’s Chair).

Sally’s almost painfully honest admission of being ‘an argumentative, stroppy drunk, picking arguments…‘ brings memories of several, otherwise long-forgotten, business dinners flooding back.  In those days, to find oneself seated next to Sally for the evening was, to say the least, a bitter-sweet sensation. On the upside, there would be no shortage of lively conversation and she was never less than entertaining company. However, after a few drinks no subject - and nobody - would be spared her whiplash tongue. I still squirm at the memory of the appalled faces of her more senior agency colleagues as she launched into yet another character assassination of a major client (more often than not to their face).

All of which brings me to the question of why Sally decided to open up in this way and reveal more dirty linen than I imagine our esteemed Speaker would have been aware himself, at least until very recently.

Perhaps we should take at face value her explanation that she simply felt obliged to embark on a ‘clearing of the decks’ exercise as a way of drawing the sting out of any future kiss-and-tell type revelations that might emerge to embarrass the Bercows and their blossoming political careers.

Sally freely admits to a string of past one night stands and it was arguably therefore a question not so much of if, as when, one or more of these liaisons would come back to haunt this now very public figure. Entertaining as I found today’s interview I cannot help but think, however, that what was clearly a very considered and planned reputation-management exercise may end up having precisely the opposite effect.

On the one hand she may well be successful in taking the wind out of the sails of any individual ex-lover on the make - at first glance then a prudent PR strategy. I’m not so sure though. The additional exposure could very easily now open the floodgates for more old friends and acquaintances (yes really!) to come forward with previously long-forgotten recollections and stories; equally the media has now had a taste of blood and I would be very surprised if it did not start sniffing around for even meatier stories. A simultaneous increase in the supply of, and demand for, such material seems to me to be a potentially explosive combination.

The word explosive is, I believe, quite apt in this case because Sally always was something of a loose cannon. Rather ironic then that Sally’s careers of choice to date have been Public Relations and Politics - both professions, at least in theory, demanding a far greater level of discretion and judgment than she appears to possess.

All this said it would be a mistake to underestimate this very formidable lady. Anyone who is prepared voluntarily to subject themselves, and their family, to this level of public scrutiny clearly possesses both a strong will and steely ambition.

This evening Speaker Bercow will - I’m sure not for the first time – be wondering exactly what he has let himself in for. The rest of us are going to have tremendous fun finding out.   

Patience severely tested by Guardian

I bow to no man in my love of The Guardian. Yet sometimes in its desire to do, and to be seen to be doing, the right thing, it can end up tying itself in exquisitely entertaining knots.

This week we’ve been treated to an impromptu mini-series, played out in the unlikely setting of the Guardian’s ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ section. This is where, every day, the Guardian takes great pains to set the record straight on any errors made in previous editions. A most praiseworthy concept in principle but sometimes – as happened this week – the media equivalent of continuing to dig when finding oneself in a deep hole.

Here is how this week’s delightful (unless your name happens to be Patience Wheatcroft, the newly-appointed editor-in-chief of Wall Street Journal Europe) sequence of events played out.

Guardian 16 November:

In a full page Media Guardian interview entitled 'It's very dangerous to go free', Patience Wheatcroft was described as...

‘A life-long supporter of the Conservative party, and married to a Tory councillor...’

Well that all seems pretty straightforward. But wait, what’s this...

Guardian 17 November - ‘Corrections and Clarifications’:

A piece about the new editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal Europe should have said that Patience Wheatcroft's husband was formerly married to a Conservative councillor – rather than currently ('It's very dangerous to go free', 16 November, page 5, Media).

Oh I see, they’re no longer actually married – what an embarrassing mistake. Bloody researchers. Oh well, at least Mr P has still got the Tory councillor gig to keep him occupied.

Hang about though, whatever now...

Guardian 17 November - ‘Corrections and Clarifications’:

A piece about Patience Wheatcroft, the new editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal Europe, should have said that her husband was formerly a Tory councillor – not currently. That is also what our correction in this column yesterday should have said, rather than portraying the marriage as a thing of the past. We were misinformed (17 November, page 30).

Right so let’s make sure I’ve got this right. Marriage on, Tory councillorship off. Okay think I’ve got it now.

To be fair, the only mildly disappointing aspect of what has been a thoroughly entertaining diversion that's had me gripped all week, was that uncharacteristically churlish ‘we were misinformed’ note on which the Guardian ended today’s installment. Surely it flies in the face of the whole mea culpa principle of ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ to then go and casually pass the buck.

Right time for a stiff drink and a good lie down before checking in for tomorrow’s developments.

Turnip Taliban was never Normal for Norfolk

"Sorry, no, I have never said I'm anti-women. I have got absolutely nothing against women.

"Who cooks my lunch? Who cooks my dinner? How did my wonderful three children appear? Women, you can't do without them. My god, take my wife."

A Bernard Manning joke without a punchline? A second rate Les Dawson sketch from the 1970’s? No, this is a direct quote from Sir Jeremy Bagge, leader of the group of South Norfolk Conservative Party’s rebels which, dubbed the ‘Turnip Taliban’, has narrowly failed in its campaign to force the de-selection of Elizabeth Truss as parliamentary candidate.

For the past few weeks, the rest of the UK has, once again, been treated to a great laugh at Norfolk’s expense. And who can blame them? I’m sure I’d be having a good chuckle myself were I not a 20 year-plus Norfolk resident who has seen for himself the huge, and almost entirely positive, changes that have taken place in the county since I first arrived here in the late 1980s. Changes which form the core theme running through the current ‘Normal for Norfolk’ marketing campaign, which seeks to dispel, once and for all, the many myths and the misconceptions about the county.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Liz Truss’s past love life, and even taking into account the clear communications cock-up between Tory Central Office and the local party, this whole affair should, and perhaps would, have amounted to no more than ‘a little local difficulty’. All very embarrassing no doubt for a Tory Party determined to spruce up its image and present itself in a more modern, inclusive light. Yet probably no more than a one-week-wonder from a media point of view.

But that was to underestimate the determination of Sir Jeremy and his acolytes to grab their 15 minutes of fame. The national media has, instead, been mesmerised by the spectacle of this stereotypical Woodehousian Sir Peregrine Bufton-Tufton character bumbling into the limelight. And to be fair, in his determination to enjoy one last hurrah by giving those impertinent young whipper-snappers at Tory Central Office a bloody nose, Bufty-Tufty managed, at least temporarily, to set external perceptions of Norfolk back by several decades.

How reassuring then that sanity prevailed earlier this evening and the Turnips have been sent back to their estates with a very clear message…

Normal for the 8th baronet of the 1200-acre Stradsett Estate? Certainly. Normal for South West Norfolk Conservative Association? Nearly, but not quite. Normal for Norfolk? Not a chance.