Down and dirty: an introduction to British management technique

We tend to disdain modern management jargon here in the UK, where Just In Time refers to the moment you arrived at the pub.

However, as the world's first industrialised nation, our management style goes back a long way and many of today's internationally-recognised methods evolved from our original procedures.

For instance, the basic unit of management - the Threat - has scarcely changed, while its associated technique - ordering people around - survives to this day as the Cascade Briefing.

Being first in the field, we were making this stuff up as we went along, so it took us a while to hit our stride - we didn't abolish the slave trade until 1807 and our initial response to the trade union movement was to arrest the leaders and transport them to Australia.

But we've mellowed since then, introducing more subtle approaches based on greed, for instance, and peer pressure. That these do not always work is demonstrated by the experience of a young man from one of our superstar corporate law firms.

While the £1 million salary was clearly attractive, he realised that to nail that down he had to put in eight years of working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and his response, sadly, was to kill himself. The firm held a minute's silence in his memory, which at their hourly rates must have cost a small fortune.

Of course I'm simplifying it all a bit here, but I know you have limited patience and many important tasks to accomplish. The thing to remember is that more or less wherever you look in corporations around the world you will see management styles which are based on axioms laid down by us, the people who produced the Luddites, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Jarrow March.

Thus, while value migration might seem like a 1990s American concept, we came up with it back when the Cook Islands were a British Protectorate and the top managers on the ground realised that the International Date Line ran through their territory.

As god-fearing people determined to keep Sunday a day of rest for their hapless employees, they would take the obvious step of driving the workforce west across the Line at midnight on Saturday for another hard day's work in the banana plantations, and then of course back east again 24 hours later (guess what?) just in time for Monday.

Have a great, er, weekend.