Taking It To The Top '88

A day I won’t ever forget but which I wish I could.
 
On 1st January 1976, I had joined a UK FTSE 100 company called Grand Metropolitan Hotels Ltd based at their London HQ just off Oxford Street. Most of the time was on the road throughout the UK as part of a 6 person audit team. Grand Met was an ever-expanding company and seldom boring. I eventually left some 15 years later and Grand Met is now known as Diageo plc after it merged with Guinness.

I was lucky for most of this period to experience great times and be exposed to a huge range of environments. From luxury Mayfair Hotels to production lines at Express Dairies, Watney’s breweries, Berni Inns, Pasta & Pizza and restaurant operations in the UK, Switzerland, and Germany.

One job I somehow always managed to avoid was the twice a year visit to the Europa Hotel in Belfast, I think the most bombed building at the time. The weirdest job was Berni Inns buying a group of private clinics and being told to audit that the doctors were following the laws on operations for such things as abortions – the directors did not like the idea of being locked up.
 
In the few years before this date, I had been pushed up a ladder and luckily had an excellent team of very competent lieutenants to cover my failings. However in  1988, yet another reorganization was set to give the team of  20 a big challenge and it became clear that although we had support from the directors, politically we were to be swallowed up in a culture and ideology that was far removed from our own. So as to unify the newly merged teams of around 150, a conference was organized by our director with myself and the other two group managers heading it up. The pre-conference strategy meetings were hell, me against the other two and the director wanting to support me more but unable to do so.
 
In the weeks before the conference, I was told I was to be moved to a newly formed division which would largely take me outside of the group and I had been taken on two tours of Switzerland and Germany to have an undercover look at some operations Grand Met was currently negotiating on buying and to test if I would be interested in taking up the new challenge. It was my chance to get out of the political wrangling I so hated and of course exciting but it meant “abandoning” my team in the lion’s den. I did not relish this nor did I like the idea of losing such vital colleagues. I was however very lucky to later get Bliper Nogbad out of the jaws and to join me in Munich.
 
The conference was held at the Camelot Theme Park near Charnock Richard in Lancashire. We took over the place for a day and a night. I have loaded two videos of the day to YouTube.
 
1)      A professionally prepared video that opened the conference. I will always associate Bruce Hornby’s 'The Way It Is' with this day. One needs to remember 1988 was a kind of watershed in the UK – we had just had the 1987 Wall Street Crash, the years of Thatcher austerity, Miner’s strikes, unrest, high unemployment, and uncertainty. This video link may not work as YouTube has informed me it violates certain rights in some countries – Germany is one of them! Hope it works at least in the UK.


2)      After the conference speeches (which I cut out as too boring) and lunch, we took over the fun park and rides and the participants were divided up into small teams all dressed in various shades of training suits to perform various tests. Luckily as one of the organizers, I was spared the torture. I can be seen at 1:08 having quickly adapted a T-Shirt to show I was in a “different” division. Also, appear at 3:07 having knives thrown at me during the evening medieval feast. The highlight was the speech given by the guy in a suit at the end of the video making a gesture as though looking through a telescope - Barry Gibbons, our big boss and one of the best stand up comedians around. Three months later he moved to Florida and was promoted to head up Burger King. This Independent newspaper interview in 2014 gives some idea of his humour - a down to earth Northerner.
 
The day marked the end of an era for me and I am hugely grateful and honoured to have worked with that Berni Inns team, some of whom I can still count as friends as I post this exactly 28 years later to the day in 2016.