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To my wonderful wife, Sallie, who tries to manage me and protect me from the ravages of the world, and to my sons, and the rest of my loopy barking mad family who drive me nuts and who I love very much

Some years ago, while being interviewed on radio, I was spouting my usual outrageous opinions on business. After the show I received a mysterious phone call from a sinister individual who asked if I had ever written a book, and if I hadn't, would I like to. I replied no and yes in the correct order, and found myself in a glittering tower, speaking to my future editor who worked for one of the world's biggest publishers. I was overjoyed by the proffered cheque, and overawed by the brief: ‘We want an iconoclastic look at business.’

As my wife and I drove away, I was euphoric with the aforementioned cheque in my pocket. My wife, whom I work with, was worried however. ‘Money’, I mumbled. ‘Money.’

‘You have never written anything in your life, you can't write,’ she said. ‘Anyway, what does iconoclastic mean?’

Now there's a point. What does iconoclastic mean? According to the dictionary, an iconoclast is ‘one who assails cherished beliefs’.

A recipe for disaster if ever I saw one, but the fact was that I was not that much au fait with businesses' cherished beliefs, anyway. My field was business persuasion, sales, customers, negotiation and all that sort of thing. I wrote about what I knew, and the result was Resistance is Useless, a book that is quite iconoclastic for most people and which did very well in any event, but then the weird stuff began to happen. As a result of writing the book, and its attendant publicity, I became bounced into the world of business guru-ship. There was the lecture and conference circuit, a bit of telly and, most astonishing of all, invitations to lecture at prestigious business schools. My title, the Alternative Business Guru! And now, after a few years of guru-ing, I think I am ready, so here is the real iconoclastic look at business.

It is very difficult to know where to start, because at first sight it would be easy to say that nothing works. It would astonish you to learn that virtually every retailer, car dealer, bank, airline, holiday company – or whatever – spends millions on customer care and sales training, but we can all plainly see that their staff and service are crap. Are they mad? Are we mad? They have customer service departments that just provoke us to a frenzy of frustration.

There is an orgy of quality programmes that are a complete waste of time. An aluminium company I know had 30 per cent of its products rejected 20 years ago. Now it has achieved ISO 9001, through TQM (total quality management), and has a quality manager who belongs to the International Institute of Quality Thingys and trails off to their conference every year to re-affirm his beliefs. They now get 31 per cent of the product rejected. Ha!

We have salespeople who don't sell, drivers that don't deliver, and promises that are not kept. Why are companies torturing themselves with all this stuff if it doesn't work? What is the point? You may feel that they undertook all these programmes in an attempt to find a more profitable and easy way of working. In other words, to find a way of making more money, but that doesn't seem to be the case. When asked ‘Why are you doing this? Why set these targets?’ the reply is often bluster and jargon. They don't know why they are doing it.

While we are on the subject of jargon, let's have a list. Empowerment, re-engineering, TQM, kaizen, change management, customer focus, benchmarking, bandwidth, flat organisations, no-blame culture, and responsiveness, to name but a tiny fraction.

In my presentations, I like to think that I use a little humour to make points. This tends to outrage the anally retentive who feel that I am adding levity to a very serious subject. Similarly the more advanced a business book is the more difficult, it is believed, it should be to read.

Because I am a very simple minded person, I intend to make this a very simple book to read. I admire Handy, Peters, Drucker and Hammer. Their messages can be useful, but by the time the international consultants have turned their thinking into reports with a few charts and graphs, the whole thing is beyond normal human understanding. So, in my defence I would suggest that as most companies employ and sell to normal human beings, doing anything beyond their understanding is utterly useless. I know that those nice people in human resources will translate it all for us simple minded creatures, but like all written words of lore since the Bible, translation is a dicey business. Think about it in medieval Europe, when a monk was translating the New Testament for the monarch, and he came to the bit about red hot pokers being inserted in kings: do you really think he translated that part? When HR gets to the ‘why we no longer need HR’ document, would they willingly share that information out?

To understand all these trends and theories, and to try and make them work where they didn't, I had to simplify them, and that is what this book will try and do. I promise you that making things simple is very hard to do, and implementing things simply can be very complicated indeed. So forgive me if this book is easy to read, but don't let that devalue it. I am, in my own way, very serious and quite a fanatic, so let us risk a little iconoclasticism that might just lead us all to making lots more money with a bit less stress.

The title of this chapter, as you will have gathered, is ‘Arming the Peasants’, so perhaps an explanation for that is needed as it may be the inspiration for the book. The word that started the whole thing was EMPOWERMENT. A great buzz word and one that is used freely amongst management, but what does it mean? That was not a rhetorical question. Before going on, be completely clear in your mind what your definition is. Like all the great management words, it has lost its value through overuse. In fact, it lost its meaning – that is, if it ever had one. I get bosses ringing up and saying: ‘Empowerment!’

‘To feel empowered to move this company forward into the new millennium through empowerment.’

‘Erm, empowered, empowered to do what they're told. Yes, that's it, empowered to do what they're told. I want you to empower some discipline into them!’

‘You see, I think that empowerment is about moving the decision-making process into the front line, down the food chain, so that your lowliest and cutting-edge staff are able to make executive decisions.’

On one occasion, the guy I was speaking to was the chief executive of a carpet company and at the mention of the word ‘money’ his little piggy eyes lit up.

‘Well, take the very bottom element of your company, the carpet fitters. They have the most customer contact, and therefore most customer impact. Imagine the scene when we have empowered them:

Fitter – ‘Oh gosh, you're right, I am so terribly sorry. You must be so disappointed. What would you like me to do?’

With that, the fitter will pull out a bundle of notes, and count out ten £5 notes.

‘You're a complete loony. Are you seriously suggesting that we give our fitters cash?’

‘They'd bugger off with it, that's the problem, they would clear off to the bookies before you could wink.’

‘The sort of people that would bugger off with our cash, that's who. How can that save us money? It will cost us money.’

Fitter – ‘These carpets are crap – buggers to fit too, if you think the pattern's funny, you wait till it starts to smell!’

Fitter – ‘Can't do anything – got ten more of these things to fit. You'll have to ring the office.’

Customer Service – ‘Thank you for ringing Happy Pile Carpets. Can I point out that a carpet is a naturally woven product and you can expect some differential in pattern and colour, and if you're unhappy with that, tough!’

The customer at this point can do a selection of things, but all are bad for business. They might vanish forever, or they could tenaciously start to percolate up through the organisation. With each rejection, they gather ire like some infernal snowball until they reach the top, by which time their demands have grown: "I WANT A FREE HOUSE FROM YOU!"

I sometimes use this tale to entertain audiences at conferences, and they laugh because they can give knowing nods about the behaviour of their own fitters, drivers or whatever. What I am trying to do, I suppose, is to show that despite the risks, genuine empowerment is the only way to go, but that is very easy for me to say. If we dismantle the story, it becomes truly complicated and, I suppose, the driving force for this book.

Why on earth did the fitter say his company's produce was ‘crap’? Is he mad? He is damaging the company that pays him, but it is a classic situation. If we worked in a meat pie factory, there is one thing we would never eat. ‘Don't eat one of those – I work there. I know what goes on. We lost a rat the other day, I swear it went in the chicken and mushroom!’

Why do people do that? We have all done it. Do we stand around the photocopier and say: ‘This is the finest company in the world and I intend to strive, through my simple effort, to make it better’? Well, you don't say that if you want to avoid a kicking from your colleagues.

I have noticed recently that a few business books have used Dilbert cartoons to give a wry insight into management, but despite them being very funny I hate the Dilberts of this world. Dilbert is lazy, disloyal and seditious.

The first battle, then, is for the attitude of the entire team. We will deal with this whole subject later but just as a teaser, ask yourself: right from the start, when you recruit are you looking for attitude or skill? If you don't actively look for a good attitude, then people are very unlikely to suddenly develop one.

But where to? Do people understand what the company's ambitions are? This brings us to the second problem, and that is of the confusing messages we give out to our people. Again, a subject for much more discussion later, but for now how do we set, measure and reward this fitter's work? We also need to consider the problem that originally drove the working practices. Maybe they only fitted four carpets a day and, by introducing a bonus scheme, we were able to raise that to ten. What was the priority here? I know this is the old piecework chestnut, but let's take a slightly different look at it. More than the piecework thing, the biggest threat is that the fragmented component divisions of a company all have different objectives, goals and priorities, that can often damage the goals and priorities of the other departments. I suppose this brings us back to Point One, which is that we should all be working for the same goal. Simple.

As an old hippy, I would call this the holistic approach. The Islington trendies call it joined-up government, and Hammer calls it process re-engineering. Process re-engineering is a simple, elegant way to make a company streamlined, productive, and efficient. When you read books on it you think that it looks easy. You do it, and it doesn't work. To get my head round the carpet fitter problem, and the intricacies of re-engineering, I needed to develop a much simpler model that would fit my much simpler mind. So, instead of all the complexities of a modern company, I have decided to go back to a simpler time.

Consider the situation of a medieval Baron. The old Baron has died, and the young zesty son has inherited a hell of a mess. It is interesting to note that the hell of a mess thing is often only noticed when there is some kind of dynastic change. Perhaps we are happier living with our own mess than going to all the uproar of changing it. Anyway, I digress. The new Baron is horrified at what he finds. There are weird arcane practices, strange hierarchies, bizarre rituals and hundreds of priests, soothsayers and minor Lords. Worst of all, shed loads of money is haemorrhaging out of his coffers. None of his internal advisers give honest advice because they jealously guard their own sinecures. There is no choice but to call in the medieval equivalent of consultants, which in this case is Machiavelli and Co. After taking a nice fat learning curve fee, they suggest that things cannot progress without a full staff audit. This agreed, they set about conducting one, and soon return with the results and another large bill.

‘We've found your problem,’ they say while capering gleefully around. ‘There are just too many people, what you need is a bit of process re-engineering. Look, you've got your peasants – that's where all your production comes from, growing the crops, herding the cows; OK, there's the blacksmith – makes all sort of useful bits and bobs, and with maintenance jobs, he's worth having around. There's the miller, grinding corn, making bread, you can see the point of him. But when you get to the castle (or head office as we call it), well what a state, there are ladies in waiting, marketing, knights, alchemists, accountants, soothsayers and sages. Get rid of the lot. What this will give you is the classic flat organisation.’

‘Beautifully. It's simple – peasants work, you gather profit. Two levels – peasant/baron. Baron/peasant. No middle.‘ (By the way, reader, you can put yourself anywhere you like in this model.)

It's not long before the Baron's shiny new flat organisation is up and running. Costs are slashed, production is up and the Baron is rich and happy, but a cloud is gathering. The still inefficient but aggressive Baron from next door eyes our third way Baron with a greedy glint. He hasn't laid off his knights and men at arms because although a very expensive and ill-used resource, armies can be useful when fighting. In fact they are only useful when fighting which I suppose begs the philosophical question does supporting an army tend to make you want to fight more, and do acquisitive companies have to keep making acquisitions, just to justify themselves?

Anyway, the wicked Baron has been massing his army on our hero's border. The young Baron views the scene with horror, and scampers back to Machiavelli and Co.

‘I wouldn't worry, you're still a much bigger organisation than he is, you've got far more people and land than he has.’

‘Yes, I know that, but it's all production and peasants. Haven‘t you ever heard of a leverage buyout?’

‘We solved it. The classic solution in re-engineered and flattened organisations.’

‘Arm the peasants, are you mad? You're a loony.’ (I'm getting a bit of deja vu here). ‘You are seriously suggesting that I give my peasants GUNS?’

‘Sure is. If I give my peasants guns, the first person they'll shoot is me. They hate me.’ (Just the way fitters will bugger off with cash.)

A short time later the consultants are back, and they can hardly contain their excitement. ‘Boy, oh boy, we have got it sorted now. What you do is Arm the Peasants. You can give them guns, but then you don't give them ammunition. To the world they will appear armed, but we know that they can be of no real danger.’ So there we have it. ‘Arming the Peasants’ explains a lot of strange goings on.

I stayed at one of those motorway stops where the money is taken from your credit card when you go in. You get a reasonably clean room, shower and TV, but if you want food it is sent from the motorway services along with all the attendant service area quality problems, i.e., a pizza that is like a Frisbee with tepid vomit glued to it with rubber cement. Oh well, that's what you pay for, that's what you get, and anyway there is no human to complain to – they've got your money so ‘c‘est la vie’. Until one day I was leaving one of these places, followed by my fellow ‘guests’, when a thing dressed in a bilious-coloured suit leapt out and said ‘I'm Tracey, your hostess. Thank you for staying at Gulag Inn, could I ask you if everything was OK with your stay?’

She stared at me with a look of growing panic and confusion, her lips moving on auto-pilot, but no sound came. Obviously someone had pressed a hidden reset button, because her eyes blinked, she regained her composure, and looked past me to the man behind. ‘I'm Tracey, your hostess. Thank you for staying at Gulag Inn, could ...’ An unarmed peasant if ever I saw one. She looked armed, but had no ammunition.

You may think this tale makes some kind of profound observation, which I will then take as a learning point, but it isn't that easy. I am not entirely sure what is learned, or what point I am making. In my most depressed state, which I will be in a later chapter, I may suggest that customer care is (in this sort of company) stone dead and, in any case, offers little benefit. The old saying I used to churn out of finding and keeping customers being the only profitable activity of any company has become a little devalued now, and to be frank, companies like this couldn't care less. They also know that tired, dispirited punters will trail back to them to suffer horrid food and zero service because this is the ‘benchmark’ for roadside service and, anyway, those that dare to take a packed lunch and sleep in their cars will be replaced by lemming-like hordes of fresh fodder for their mill. Also, while we are at it, the staff are systematically crap, disloyal, disinterested, and basically untrainable beyond simply walking upright and not fiddling with personal orifices when preparing food in view or speaking to a customer. They are the sort of people who would bugger off with the cash, and there may not be anything better on offer.

So why bother teaching the lumpen thing the speech anyway? Maybe it shows a commitment to some attempt at good service. No, it doesn't. In actual fact it is pulling a trick that dear old Mother Nature has been using for years, and that is that an unarmed peasant works until it has been rumbled. For example, there is a completely harmless, unarmed but very tasty butterfly, that when its wings are spread, presents a pattern that looks like the eyes of a fierce animal many times the butterfly's size. This works extremely well, putting off most predators. Similarly most customers do not tenaciously test the veneer of useless promises (I'm Tracey, I'm here to help). The whole thing falls on its arse when the predator is hungry enough to give it a go, and finds a yummy, unprotected morsel. Word gets around, and soon there is a species of frog that dines entirely off our ingenious chum.

Our own high street giants have fallen prey to this. For years, people have come up to me and asked me to do a bit of guru-ing for them, with the brief ‘We want service levels like you-know-who on the High Street.’

‘Why? They're rubbish, their service is rubbish, they have total contempt for staff and punters alike.’ (Actually contempt suggests passion, indifference would be a better word.) The shock this statement used to cause was comic, you would think they had been slapped.

‘Well, um, they give great service, if you want something they haven't got, they, er well, there is always someone to er, they, they, er, don't mind if er, well you can always take stuff back. I took something back, they gave me another one.’

‘Because the wheels fell off, but even if it's the wrong size you can take it back.’

But then – snap, they took a bite, the shares started to tumble, the feeding frenzy started, and the game was up.

While we are back at the peasants, what did I want the girl to do? Again, like the carpet fitter, a cash refund might have been nice (no, not vouchers or discount off my next stay). ‘I'm so sorry you were disappointed. Please let me refund the cost of your meal. We would hate to lose you as a customer.’ And, with a couple of crisp tenners in my pocket, the world would have seemed a better place.

That may seem ideal and a simple solution but, as previously stated, simple things become fiendishly complicated on implementation.

Let us imagine that we have helpful, loyal staff who could use judgement and be trusted to handle cash responsibly. Thus whenever a customer received a poor meal, they could be delighted with a cash refund.

‘Oh no!’ the service area owners wail. ‘The food is consistently horrible, everyone would get a refund, we would be ruined!’

Then (and now we get into deep water) the ‘hostess’ should feel aggrieved at having to give money away, and should go to the kitchens and be able to command the construction of a better pizza.

‘Now look here, I get pissed off with having my complaint fielded by powerless peasants.’

There's the rub. Even when companies have large (I was going to say sophisticated, but I couldn't hold the pen for laughing) customer service departments, they cannot actually change the product or the policy of the company. This is quite clearly a ludicrous state of affairs which upsets and humiliates the customers when they realise that only platitudes and vouchers are coming their way, and that nothing has really changed.

If we return for a moment to our Baron, imagine you were in his situation and felt that the idea of the unarmed peasant bluff was not worth risking. Other options have to be considered. The first is that of using outside talent; after all, this whole thing was started off by consultants. Why not continue the process? As it has already been stated that armies are only useful when fighting wars, then surely it would be sensible to find a company whose sole business was fighting? They could devote their resources, training and equipment to the subtle art of killing people. I get confused, because at the start of my business awareness everyone was shouting ‘Diversify.’ Now they are shouting ‘Stick to the knitting, stay with what you know.’ I saw a television programme on business where a catering company was trying to sell its services to an insurance company.

‘How much of that is devoted to training people in how to select and prepare soft fruit?’

‘Precisely. Eight per cent of our training budget went on our soft fruit programme. The other 92 per cent was all food and hygiene related. Why on earth are you messing about employing your own catering staff?’

What we are really talking about here is hiring mercenaries (HIRING CONSULTANTS IS JUST LIKE HIRING MERCENARIES. WHICHEVER ONE I HAPPEN TO BE TALKING ABOUT, AMUSE YOURSELF BY DRAWING THE ANALOGY BETWEEN THE TWO). No one hires cheap mercenaries – well, no one who subsequently doesn't regret it. You hire them by reputation and you Don't save money by hiring the second fastest gun, because your opponent only needs to hire the first fastest. We must ask ourselves how they got that fast, and the answer is fighting for others. Where is the future career for them? Again, fighting for others (hopefully not for your enemy, but of course it will be, because it is your sphere of business they understand). I make my living from consultancy. I am a hired gun, and I gather all my insights and experience from previous clients. When you choose your mercenary/consultant, you don't want the hair-trigger 24-year-old MBA. You want the Yul Brynner, the man in black with a few scars, a piece of ear missing, well used guns, a black hat, and eyes like steel bearings. Be warned, you only control him while you pay him. When you stop, he could, without emotion, become your enemy's hired gun. Marketing companies, research outfits, direct mail, lawyers, PR companies and management consultancies all work on this principle. I would never profess to be clever, but I have gathered knowledge, like a bee gathers nectar, from a thousand companies. This is the deal. You pay for the value of this experience, but part of the fee is that you are also contributing experience that can be used on the next assignment – useful for a short time, but also expensive. Then, maybe, the hired gun could teach the peasants to fight (watch The Magnificent Seven to see how this is done).

This, the Baron thinks, is the right course of action and the consultants return. The first problem to solve is why the peasants want to shoot the Baron, or why they don't seem to care if they are invaded but, after all, being enslaved to another vicious, heartless git is no different from being enslaved to the current one. Why do employees steal, disparage the company and produce poor quality goods? Perhaps because they are seen as peasants. Finance departments always put them on the liability, not the asset side of the books. Short of work? Cut staff.

Companies just do things without consultation, and then they wonder why the peasants didn't buy in with unbounded enthusiasm. We therefore need to explore how we get that buy-in without resentment. Later, we will see how to achieve that essential change in attitudes.

The Baron, in the meantime, does all the trendy third-way things and retitles the peasants as stakeholders. He then launches a hearts and minds campaign that makes the peasa ... – sorry, stakeholders – love him. They also see that as stakeholders they now have a vested interest in protecting the baronial lands, or should we say stakeholderdom. Let's now take stock. We have a team that is loyal, loves and respects their leaders, and wants to work for what they now acknowledge as the common good. This is looking great. Do you think this may be the time to arm them? Yes?

Can you imagine a bunch of enthusiastic peasants let loose with modern battlefield weapons? All hell would be let loose. They would shoot themselves in the feet, you in the arse, and all with the best possible motives. I'm sure you are now one step ahead of me, and will suggest that training is required. The carpet fitter is the same. If he loves the company and respects the products, and is scrupulously honest, could he still, in real terms, be responsible for your refunds policy? With enough training you can turn your peasants into a finely honed fighting machine – an army, which kind of takes us back to square one. Truthfully it is even more dangerous than that. What you have actually got is a vicious fighting force that will do agricultural work for you because they love and trust you. Betray that trust, speak with forked tongue, nick their rations, and it will be hanging from a lamp-post by your heels time. In the real world it is a risk most firms don't feel is worth taking, but when attacked by the fanatics who are their competitors, they have no defence. The ‘monster/butterfly’ trick doesn't work because they would have attacked the monster, dangerous or not. They believe that there is nothing better than to die in the jaws of a slavering blood beast for the glorious leader, and worse, when they find out we are bluffing, we are quickly overwhelmed.

So there it is, arming the peasant and all its attendant difficulties. It is hard and dangerous if you do it – fatal if you Don't. Hopefully in the next few chapters we will explore how it can be done with the least risk.

The benefit will be not only loyal, hard-working people, which a lot of firms claim to have, but people that actively promote the company they work for. People that don't only keep current customers but actively help to find new ones. Every accountant, salesman, driver, receptionist, engineer and cleaner will understand the overall vision and goal and will work together to achieve it for you. I offer you a fierce, loyal, fighting peasants' army that will give their all to win your battles.

To explain, for those of us who have been living in the jungle for the last few years, not knowing that the war was over. The ‘process’ is not the art of getting great whirling cogwheels to mesh in such an artful way that 50 million halved cherries are placed dead centre on 50 million iced bakewell tarts. No, that is the old, boring, nontrendy, logical description of the process. No, apparently what it now means is the process of the activity of the whole company from marketing, sales, production, through logistics and, to those of you who can suspend a viciously cynical sense of humour, even accounts. Why? To cut bureaucracy, and to streamline and flatten the organisation to the benefit of all – except those who get the chop, of course!

Now, I don't really know where to start, but the whole thing goes tits up fairly quickly on the first golden rule of re-engineering, and that is: ‘Everyone is Involved’.