When I was working
for an IT company, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, there was
a long-standing lack of empathy between the sales force and those of us charged
with delivering what had been sold. One of my colleagues explained it with a
joke of sorts about a delivery manager and a sales manager trapped in a hut in
the arctic. The delivery manager – the practical guy, of course – said that the
first thing needed was food. “Right,” said the salesman, and ran out of
the house in the direction of a passing polar bear whose attention he proceeded
to attract. He then ran back to the hut and in through the door pursued by the
bear, before running out of the back door shutting it tight behind him. “What
are you doing?”, wailed the delivery guy through the window, now trapped
indoors with a very angry, not to say hungry, polar bear. “I’ve caught it,
it’s your job to cook it,” came the reply.
Leaving aside the
obvious comment that it helps to explain why so many IT contracts –
particularly in the public sector – go so badly wrong, it’s also an analogy for
Brexit, as we saw today
from staunch Brexiteer, Andrea Leadsom. She is, for once, absolutely right –
breaking out of a trading block with a common set of rules in order to set a
different set of rules will inevitably lead to greater trading friction, which
will cause difficulties for those doing the trading. It was obvious to anyone
who gave the matter more than a nanosecond of thought at the time, but is only happening
now as all the temporary exclusions and exceptions come to an end. It's a trade-off between economics and the mysterious concept of 'sovereignty' which was always going to have to be made. It’s just
that, in order to make the sale, they denied it vehemently at the time. It was
always going to be someone else’s problem.
Posts
1 comment:
Great analogy
Post a Comment