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Monday February 4 2019 THE NATIONAL MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM, BIRMINGHAM


talking trade Ch-Ch-Changes… 1994 revisited


Roger Morgan-Grenville, director of housewares supplier Dexam, reflects on how the commercial (and wider) world has evolved over the past two and a half decades


time for consideration. Which of us hasn’t sent out a daft email late at night which we have then regretted?


3. The internet: I think this would have broadly excited him. As a means of finding out information, and learning about the world (commercial or otherwise), it has been unbelievably effective. However, its darker side, and the ease with which it can be accessed, would have depressed him.


4. Technology: Unlike his son, he would have


new packaging these days in the name of innovation.


7. Health and safety: I suspect that he would look at each initiative on its own merits and judge it accordingly. He once said that the only good laws that had been passed since the Second World War were the drink drive one and the compulsory seat belt one. If he had lived a few years more, I think he would have added the ban on smoking in public places to the list.


8. Consolidation: He was a small company man at heart, content to mix with other small competitors and accept that you win some, and you lose some. He would not understand the current ‘bigger is safer’ motivation or, if he did, he would ask: ‘for who?’


W


e’ve all heard it all before, and too many times not to be a little bit bored of it. It’s the ‘c’ word


of our lives, and that letter ‘c’ stands for change. My father, who started Dexam with his


brother at the back end of the 1950s, died 24 years ago this October. He was a smart man who simultaneously embraced the future, rather than avoided it, and respected the past, rather than ran away from it. Every now and again, I will benchmark something that is going on now against what he would recognise in 1994, and it’s become a useful way for me to find my bearings, and to validate in my own mind what is good change, and what isn’t. Here are 10 thoughts along those lines:


1. Short term vs long term: Jobs, customer relationships, distributorships etc all tended to be much more long term than now. Whilst it probably produced more security and less angst, it also meant that people got stuck in unworkable professional relationships, and didn’t try as hard as they do now.


2. Communication: Email has achieved much, but I bet my father would argue that our reliance on it runs against all the principles of good, reflective high quality communication and decision making. Even in the early 1990s, most important stuff went out in an envelope, and only when the post went - and this gave


July/August 2018


9. The world outside: On cheap air travel, I expect he would say that travel will get over- commoditised one day if it becomes regarded as a right rather than a privilege - and one glance at Wetherspoons [all-day bar and café] at Gatwick Airport's North Terminal on a Saturday morning tells me he would be right. I don’t think he would find today’s politicians


been an early adopter of a lot of it. Like his son though, its built-in obsolescence and cynical manipulation of consumers would have driven him mad.


5. Corporate decision making: Overall, I think he would have approved of the way businesses go about the act of making a big decision. Small businesses seek outside assistance when they need it, and larger companies structure their boards to include a wide range of skills and character types. Having said that, slavery to institutional stockholders would not have impressed him one bit.


6. New product development: The best and most innovative new products are, I think he would say, way ahead of the old ones in terms of the changes they immediately make, and the sense they make to their consumers. However, I can hear the whisper of


‘emperor’s new clothes’ as he walks down a trade show aisle and sees how many old products just get a lick of paint and some


HousewaresLive.net • twitter.com/Housewaresnews housewareslive.net | 39


any better or worse than in 1994; they are just hobbled by the demands of 24 hour news, social media and spin, and it makes their jobs far more difficult. He would love that you could see a salmon


in the Thames these days, vines in the valley, and red kites soaring over his old garden in West Sussex, and he would be wise enough to know that cleaning up behind us is a huge and ongoing commitment.


10. Finally: It is extremely unfair of me to put thoughts and words into the space he left. He would probably disagree with everything I have written


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