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London skyline during his four years with the organization. He champi- oned the BA-sponsored London Eye Ferris wheel that towers over the Thames, commissioned British Airways' exotic new headquar- ters, and served as a chairman in the company that built and operated London's unprof- itable Mil len nium Dome. Meanwhile BA slipped from being the world's most prof- itable airline to showing a loss of £200m. Trivial pursuits: Managers obsessed with triv- ia put their companies in as much danger as managers obsessed with prestige. Shortly before Barclays Bank lost nearly everything in a failed overseas ven- ture, two of the firm's grandees hit upon the key to trading success. They decreed: "Fish must be eaten with two forks, in the manner of the East Anglian Quakers." Such trivia often grows to squeeze out initiative. Universities are classic examples of the law that the amount "The Advertising Agency Song": "When the client's hopping mad/Put his picture in the ad./If he should prove refracto- ry/Add a picture of his factory." Some CEOs have the same sense of ego, using their names of trivia in an organization increases with its age. That is, the newer or more independent the school, the less trivia it has to weigh it down. Not surprisingly, in France the strong business schools are outside the university system; in Britain the lead- ing business schools are independent or part of universities formed in the last 50 years. U.S. universities have not yet had time to accumulate the trivia and traditions that prevent their European predecessors from competing effectively. Self-aggrandizement: The Faber Book of Useful Verse includes and their images to communicate the firm's identity to stake- holders. Versace, Jack Welch, Body Shop's Anita Roddick, and Virgin's Richard Branson are all so strongly identified with their companies that their lifestyles and personalities reinforce the brand. Smart managers use the publicity they attract; others become seduced by their own myth. The business press is partly to blame for this corporate van- Barings was the private bank of kings, a merchant bank that exuded respectability and was run by gentlemen. Nick Leeson, a plasterer's son working out of the bank's securities office in Singapore, bankrupted the company. Not only was Leeson offshore, but his office was ten floors below the peo- ple who were "managing" him. Most disastrous of all, Leeson ran the trading and the settlements office that acted as a check on the traders. Barings had drifted into a business it did not understand. portrait of himself. Offshore adventures: Two recent banking fiascos resulted when companies tried to do overseas what they could not do at home. look for chances to display their portraits everywhere. In the period before Barclays Bank fell from grace, its CEO took to traveling the world, visiting subsidiaries that the company should not have had anyhow. Then, to every overseas office he visited, he gave a very special gift—a despotic dictators, also cessful personality: a celebrity scandal. Egotistic CEOs, like Lacking an appreciation of the finer points of the futures and options business, executives dreamed of a securities business with no risk attached. Therefore, they did not implement the usual risk management systems, according to Geoff Tibballs in Business Blunders. Allied Irish Bank seemed set on repeating the Barings fias- co as it moved from being a very successful domestic retail bank in Ireland to losing control of a trading operation in the U.S. Both banks fell victim to the same double jeopardy: Having found out what they were good at, they tried some- thing else in a new market. In grammar and multiplication, double negatives make a positive. In business, double nega- tives make a mess. Other examples abound. Jean-Marie Messier transformed ity. Famous faces sell magazines, and business magazines are hungry for news of the superstars they helped create. However, publicity-hungry CEOs have to remember that only one thing sells magazines better than the face of a suc- 48 BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 a utilities company into Vivendi Universal, a media giant big enough to challenge Rupert Murdoch. What are the trans- ferable skills between a French water company and Hollywood's Universal Studios? According to The Economist, Vivendi Universal reported the largest annual deficit in French corporate history: a sum equivalent to