Any other business | 1 January 2011

In the land of my Flemish forefathers, I draw a key lesson for 2011: always have a Plan B

To Ghent, in the land of my ancestors, to address a conclave of ‘risk managers’. Though the mother tongue of most participants is Dutch or French, the conference is in English — and I feel obliged to explain that despite my surname that’s what I shall speak too, because it’s 200 years since my silkweaving Flemish forefathers moved from Antwerp to Norwich to take advantage of a tax scheme for migrant craftsmen that would no doubt now be banned by EU ‘single market’ rules. I spare them the detail that I did in fact learn a few sentences of Dutch from a Belgian girlfriend when I worked in Brussels 30 years ago, beginning with telling the time — of which all that remains seared in my memory is the elementary question ‘Hoe laat is het?’, literally ‘How late is it?’, which one day elicited the answer, in English, ‘Too late for you, my new German boyfriend’s waiting outside.’

But still, learning from experience is what life’s all about. And as I relived that traumatic moment in preparation for my keynote speech, I began to ponder the strange new landscape of risks that has been left behind by the financial turmoil, technological breakthroughs and unexpected break-ups of the past few years.

I was especially taken with a presentation on ‘supply-chain risk management’. In essence, many big companies spent the past two decades finding smart ways to shrink their inventories of manufacturing components or of groceries for supermarket shelves while pushing as much responsibility and financial pain as possible on to chosen long-term suppliers. The holy grail was a ‘just in time’ system in which a factory or store might hold as little as two hours’ worth of parts or goods.