Fly-fishing your way to business success

The trout season is underway on British rivers, and fly-fishers are exhuming the kind of clothing you normally see on scarecrows, shaking the bottle-tops out of their fishing bags, filling their hip flasks, reviewing their tackle and buying bizarre hats.

Those with jobs know the close relationship between work and play – and not only because one pays for the other.

For example, PR people have put fly-fishing on their “active” corporate hospitality menu to spice up the constant barrage of golf, clay pigeon shooting and lunch. A summer’s day spent stalking trout on a chalkstream half a mile from your guest is not perfect for deal-making, but it’s obviously better than being roped together in a blizzard on the north face of the Matterhorn.

But fly-fishers also believe they learn business lessons without actually having to go to the office. And even if they are wrong, at the very worst they are by now millions of trout ahead. Here’s an initial selection of such wisdom.

Getting into rivers is easier than getting out. If you've waded downstream in a powerful river, the chances are that you won’t be able to wade back up – and in several of the rivers I’ve fallen into you'll also by now be wobbling on the brink of an invisible slippery ledge, with a sheer drop on three sides. Lesson: always have an exit strategy – a fall-back position could involve drowning.

Why have one fishing rod when 40 or 50 would do just as well? Fly-fishers maintain that you need them in different lengths, actions and materials – and buy more rods than they ever use. In business one obvious parallel is financial reporting, where the x-dimensional views of every last penny can obscure the fact that you’re going bust.

Ugly flies can catch beautiful fish. Successful fly-fishers know that the flies they tie are designed to catch fish, not win prizes. In businesses like advertising and PR there’s a temptation to see analogies with the trophy cabinets of football clubs. But in sport, the trophies are the objective. In business we should look at the client’s ROI as well as our own.

Hell and high water are all in a day’s fishing. Although you returned from the river drenched, broke and knackered, you’re going to do it again tomorrow because you love it. Back in the office, if you’re not having fun you’re doing something wrong.

David Shenk, in his perceptive book Data Smog, says: one of the most vivid consequences of the information glut is a culture awash in histrionics.

PR people are not wholly to blame for this but they’re among the prime suspects. Nearly 400 years ago, legendary English angler Izaak Walton said: Study to be quiet.

These four words are worth a business book to themselves but, taking his advice, I’ll shut up now.

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.

In the nick of time - a new vision for British jails

Our jails are full and this has taken our government by surprise, which is odd. Having created over 3,000 new criminal offences since 1997 you might have thought they'd have seen it coming.

Of course we're ambivalent about prisons in the UK. We know the system doesn't work but we don't mind crooks being subjected to it - after all, if people want to commit crimes then it's just tough if they then find themselves four to a cell with axe-murderers and cannibals 23 hours a day for five years.

It's obvious to me however that prisons are a colossal waste of resources. Locked up in there among the psychopaths are people who have become seriously rich and powerful, and they've got that way by being smart, devious and dangerous.

They have, for example, built up billion-dollar organisations smuggling drugs, trafficking migrants and running vice rings. Increasing numbers are there for their creative interpretation of company law while FDs of blue-chip companies.

There's obviously no point in having these folk sew mailbags, walk round prison yards, take sociology degrees, molest each other and seize hostages. We need to leverage their skills, so here's the offer:

Your accomplices have legged it with the gold bars, your wife's shacked up with your lawyer and you'll be in here for ten years even with good behaviour. You might as well join Wormwood Scrubs plc, keep your brain in shape, and earn some serious money.

Adopting the poacher-turned-landowner model we should be able to develop some world-class consultancies and outsourcing contractors. Prisons would start to compete with each other for talent, and we'd soon have Dartmoor and Holloway bidding for rail franchises, heritage sites and defence contracts. Their tender for a privatised Prison Service would be essential reading.

As management consultants they would have, for legitimate businesspeople, the same attraction that Niccolo Machiavelli would have for politicians had he not been dead for nearly 500 years.

Serious career-minded graduates would be committing crimes geared precisely to the length of sentence they felt they needed before joining Booz Allen or McKinsey on the outside. Some would stay inside deliberately, tactically clouting a warden or setting fire to a cell-block now and again to see an over-running assignment through, while the more practically-minded would be digging tunnels under the walls to get in.

This is clearly a brilliant idea. Why do I get the feeling that it is already happening?