Saracens seems well placed with the latter: the Fez Boys with their silly hats and sillier putting

Saracens seems well placed with the latter: the Fez Boys, with their silly hats and sillier “putting the ‘fluence’on you” gestures, have done wonders to change the game’s stuffed-shirt image.Even if he is wrong, the amount he loses on Saracens helps spur him on to make money elsewhere, Wray says. And there is something else: “This is going to sound appallingly fanciful: despite losing buckets of money over the last few years, I have still gained more from the game than the game has ever gained from me. I have met some wonderful people and learned some very important lessons. You don’t have to be a shit to be the best; you can be modest, caring and still have that competitive edge. Some of the best sportsmen I have met have also been the best human beings. It is a complete load of nonsense that you have to be a hard, nasty bastard,” he says.I can imagine his opponents calling him hard, but it is hard to envisage Wray being called nasty..

Management fads come and go. But it is becoming increasingly clear that one of the more enduring is going to be outsourcing, the process by which organisations consign all but their most “core” activities to specialists to run on their behalf. It started with support services such as cleaning and catering – thereby playing a significant part in the growth of the likes of Rentokil-Initial and Compass. But it really took off when information technology took business by the scruff of the neck.
Perhaps oddly, given that outsourcing is supposed to happen to activities that are deemed peripheral to the main business, this seemed to begin when IT ceased to be a small support function that helped a few clerical staff keep on top of things and became what is now termed a “key business driver”. It was almost as if it had grown too important to be left to the companies’ managers and had to be hived off to people who at least claimed to know what they were doing.Though some might argue that mastery of IT – and of the market intelligence it produces – is too central to be left to outsiders, it appears that organisations from investment banks to international oil companies see the benefits of having specialists run that side of things; the companies are then left free to extract the so-called competitive advantage from what results.It is on such an attitude that the rapid expansion in recent years of outsourcing specialists, such as Andersen Consulting and EDS, has largely been founded.What gives outsourcing its staying power is its seemingly constant capacity to produce new twists. The latest stems from signs of a desire on the part of organisations to get rid of responsibility for the premises from which they operate. Regus, the fast-growing provider of managed offices around the world, expects much of its future expansion to be fuelled by the desire of businesses to improve their earnings capacity by ceasing to own the properties from which they operate.The company sees a particularly ready market in professional services firms on the grounds, according to one executive, that they recognise the importance for their reputations of having administrative and reception staff meeting the standards that they expect of the fee earners but do not always have the ability or motivation to achieve.Such an approach can be seen to fit in with the general thinking about core and support activities.

But consultants at Booz-Allen & Hamilton have spotted signs of a trend that perhaps strikes at the heart of the core/non-core debate even more than IT did.In the latest edition of their firm’s quarterly journal Strategy & Business, Charles E Lucier and Janet D Torsilieri suggest that a new division of labour is needed to achieve the improvements in productivity that initiatives such as re-engineering and quality improvement have often failed to deliver.Their article, entitled “The End of Overhead”, calls for companies to cast out those workers many would term invaluable – those at the top of their fields. Challenging the orthodoxy in the way consultants love, Mr Lucier and Ms Torsilieri claim that in most companies a good deal of work does not properly tax those who are most expert at it. Far better, they say, to allow more junior people – or even the customer or client – to do this, freeing the true experts to concentrate on the complex things.The problem? Most organisations do not have enough really taxing things to keep these people occupied, so they become too expensive to hang on to.The solution? Hive them of into super specialist organisations where they can spend all their time selling the benefits of their expertise and honing it in ways that would not have been possible within the confines of their more conventional employers.In this way, say the authors, “Companies will both eliminate expertise- driven overhead and better manage the productivity of knowledge workers.” Sounds like great news for professional firms, especially the management consultancies, which must have been the main beneficiaries of the outsourcing boom.. The latest figures from the Confederation of British Industry confirm the picture of Britain as a manufacturing nation in decline. But while the manufacturing sector’s continuing loss of jobs might appear to sit oddly with efforts to promote the country as a centre of creativity, all is not lost in the innovation arena.
The Design Council’s Millennium Products initiative involves the selection of products for display in the Millennium Dome. The latest list includes the Ford Focus, Pfizer’s Viagra drug and the Co-operative Bank’s biodegradeable Greenpeace Card.The council – which next month is co-sponsoring a London conference under the title “What’s the Big Idea?” with the aim of helping companies design and market “world-beating products” – also acknowledges the role of design in services. For example, one of the Dome’s exhibits will be Hairnet, an internet training service for the over-fifties.Few organisations seem more convinced of the potential role for design in this area than Ideo, the product design consultancy that has developed products as varied as Nike sunglasses and Yamaha interactive keyboards.Tim Brown, who runs the London operation of a company that now has 350 people spread between six offices in the US, Japan and Europe, sees opportunities.

“Hardly any service companies are doing what I would describe as R&D,” he says, adding that they should be spending about a 10th of their turnover in this area.When Mr Brown returned to the UK from California, where Ideo has offices in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley, he was at first worried that there were not very many technology companies with which to work.”Then it became more and more obvious that the real opportunity was to work with service companies,” he says.A significant part of what he describes as “a huge space to work in” is creating links between technology and service through what is being called “information appliance”.An early effort in this area was a series of radios designed for BBC digital radio. What Ideo came up with was a variety of set designs catering for a range of listening needs. One of them was a flying-saucer-shaped set.In the US, Mr Brown adds, there are increasing numbers of information appliance products, including the Softbook, an electronic book that Ideo helped develop, and HealthBuddy, a service that enables doctors to deliver much better care for sufferers from Parkinson’s Disease and other elderly people.But the notion is starting to take hold on this side of the Atlantic. Suspicious of the “technology push” approach to innovation, Ideo is seeking to match technology to people’s needs.

And for service companies, this often requires executives to make “a leap of faith” about appropriate routes to market. This is one reason why Ideo has bought a 25 per cent stake in a recently established consultancy called the Fourth Room. It sees this collection of designers, communications specialists and advertising and marketing people as bringing expertise that even its broad-based organisation does not possess and as aiming to influence the executives that can seek the services of an organisation like Ideo.Even though service companies are more apt to see themselves as “knowledge organisations” than the manufacturers they are usurping in the new economy, they can still have trouble when it comes to creating the right conditions for innovation, suggests Mr Brown.”Innovation is a catalytic process It’s about creating the right environment,” he says “The job of CEOs is to create the space. They are architects and they need to create the space for people to fill.” As he acknowledges, creativity is also messy. This is apparent from a film about Ideo aired on US television earlier this year.