Sir Alan Sugar and the Meaning of Sisyphean

October 24, 2010
sisyphus

Excellent article by Lucy Kellaway in this weekend’s FT Magazine, still probably the best of the bunch even after its much-anticipated redesign. The estimable Ms Kellaway interviews Sir Alan Sugar, and sets herself a task of Sisyphean proportions. Yes, she decides to try to make Sir Alan smile.

Needless to say, she not only fails but is fired, thus providing a fresh twist on the nature of Sisyphean tasks, for ordinarily they are ineluctable and, to our knowledge, none of those on whom they have been inflicted have yet been deemed unworthy of their attempted completion. This, indeed, is the essence of the Sisyphean task: it goes on and on forever, unsuccessfully.

But back to Sir Alan. Upon reading the FT we sent an intrepid young hack to Sugar Towers with a mission: to find out if, behind closed doors, Sir Alan did occasionally smile. Here is what he reported.

The scene: Sugar Towers, deepest Essex. A bright Sunday afternoon with a moderate breeze. I easily evaded Sugar’s security and found my way into his garden. There I encountered sundry wailing folk, all of whom had been fired from one Sugar enterprise or another. I ignored them, for there is no room for sentiment in this world. Instead, I continued to a large window. Upon peering inside it was clear that it was Sir Alan’s living room. The great man sat on an armchair, reading the FT Weekend magazine. As he read, a grin played upon his chiselled face. It became a smile and then, by the time he’d read enough to fling the magazine to the floor, it mutated into laughter, pure and simple. Sir Alan seemed not only to be capable of smiling, but laughing uproariously.

Sir Alan’s convulsions continued for perhaps five minutes. Even when his wife Ann entered the room, the laughter continued. Indeed, I fancied I heard Sir Alan say: ‘It’s good, innit, this game with the media?’ before Ann, too, fell about in hysterics.

I think the pair of them proceeded to clasp the FT Magazine and dance a jig together, but I could not be sure. A security guard tapped me on the shoulder and, having blindfolded me, said: ‘You’re fired’. I didn’t think it was a very original thing to say, but the Sugar smile lingers with me still, perhaps proving that just because it is Sisyphean, it is far from a myth.

Pictured courtesy of Coconut Headsets: Lucy Kellaway in the midst of her interview with Sir Alan Sugar.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.