WMW has built its business on the granite foundation of business insights.

The first, which began our migration away from recruitment advertising and into business to people communications, was the observation that 70% of a company’s costs are accounted for by salary so it would be better to have this large cost item working efficiently.

Another is the realisation that every single structure, from an organisation’s hierarchy to the description of our iconic joined up employer marketing model, can be expressed in the form of a circle.

Still a third is the notion that the psychological and remunerative complexities of the employer-employee model can be described simply and powerfully as ‘the deal,’ a formula as simple and deeply rooted as Einstein’s equally simply energy = mass times the speed of light squared.

Talking of Einstein, our very own Prince Albert – Grant – added to the sum of our brilliance last week. Talking with the gravitas that only Grant can summon, he wisely let slip this pearl of profundity: “You know Thom, all of us are individuals working together. As a team.”

Priceless. Timeless. Gormless.

The ever-shifting problem over what to call Building branding/environment comms/office branding may have been resolved in the favour of Workspace branding. I thought you’d like to know.

So far as our own workspace is concerned, we have updated our mac monkey technology at vast expense and – to keep Kate from her State of Permanent Grumble over the issue – have purchased our very own A2 printer, which we will be calling Hethers. The place is looking remarkably in need of an office tidy up. One must keep up appearances. Perhaps you would like to examine both your conscience and your desks and tidy the latter if not necessarily the former over the coming week.

The tender for our re-tender for Client X is due later today. We are taking out insurance, in the form of high-falutin’ meetings with new business prospects. They are all bubbling merrily away and I am still confident that one if not two major new wins will be ours before the end of this quarter.

Richard’s Recommended Reading: The One from the Other, Philip Kerr. A sharp talking private detective (“My suit fitted me like a glove. His fitted him like a suit,”) gets caught up in double-cross, murder and Nazi war criminals in 1950 Munich. Superb.
Go, Andy Murray.

w/e 15th January

The ‘Fetish’ issue

Dear Reader,

I came in this morning to a distraught Thom. He had been in since before time itself working on a website and will surely be working late into the evening on it. “I’m concerned,” he confided in me, “that people will think that just because it’s my birthday I’m getting preferential treatment.” I assured him that there will no hint of favouritism in this agency and as a result I’ve asked Kate and Grant to get together a list of everyone’s birthdays and ensure that you too can work extra hard on your special day. Just one more reason to be engaged with WMW’s values. Remember the days when Russell’s car gleamed in the car park for all the world as though it had just driven from the showroom?

To Client X this morning, for a presentation. I was struck by quite how excellent the office branding looked. It’s an odd feeling to have seen the work on a layout pad and then on a Mac and then suddenly to see it eight feet high in someone else’s office.
An Essex girl is involved in a bad traffic accident. A paramedic rushes to her aid. “Whereabouts are you bleeding from?” he asks. “Bleeding Romford,” she replies.

Richard’s Recommended Reading: Das Capital, by Karl Marx. My eagle-eyed reader will recall that this was recommended a year ago. But I suspect not all of you may have got around to reading it, which is a great shame. While Das Capital is forever cast as the text book for Stalinist Russia, it is in fact two books in one. The great, vastly superior part of the book is Marx’s analysis of Capitalism. I love his idea of the fetishism of consuming goods with no value other than their trade value. This is truer now than it was 150 years ago when he wrote it. Sadly, Marx’s answer to consumerism/capitalism – communism – was nowhere near as intelligent as his analysis. But someone, somewhere, should surely re-look at Das Capital and offer the world a new, post-banking crisis vision of how a better world could be organised.