Are you out of your tree or what?

This morning I was going through my e-mails after getting back from Oz and I saw the dopiest invitation.

It was from the editor of a magazine called The Informed Executive.

It read – boringly and complete with mandatory jargon and the redundant quotation marks usually found on greengrocers’ windows in Penge:

It may interest you that the business services edition opens with an interview with the DBERR Secretary of State, John Hutton, MP. That piece concludes with the ‘message’ that UK businesses need to be pro-active in doing business with Europe. If you are keen to raise your profile as a European player, this would be a good opportunity to do so.

God, what a breakthrough. Do they think we should be inactive?

More to the point, what can Mr. Hutton teach anyone in business?

His entire employment history before becoming a professional bullshitter under the Bliar reads:

Research Associate Templeton College. 1980-81
Senior Lecturer in Law at Newcastle Polytechnic 1981 – 92

Now, joking apart, what the hell could you learn from a man who has NEVER IN HIS LIFE WORKED IN A BUSINESS THAT HAD TO MAKE MONEY?

Very droll.

Maybe the mag should be called The Misinformed Executive. On second thoughts, though, maybe I’m being unfair. It does pay to know your enemy. Or perhaps this is some kind of post-ironic jape.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

4 Comments

  1. Sounds ripe for the publishing industry!

  2. Ah yes, Hutton of the Hutton Report into the alleged suicide of the scientist Dr Kelly. Well, he can claim to have done something to encourage enterprise and generate money as Cherie and Alastair Campbell’s autographed copy of the Hutton Report fetched £400. How sick can this lot get?

  3. Is that the same Hutton? The Hutton report was written by a wriggling lawyer, wasn’t it?

    There is also the Bliarite buffoon Hutton who fantasised a few years ago in a book called “The State We’re In”.

    This semenal, sorry, seminal load of old cobblers explained why everything had gone wrong, but a good dose of New Labour would put it right.

    To which the only comment has to be, “Not half as bad as the one three-faced Tony will land us in, sweetie.”

  4. Drayton, I fear that I’m mistaken about Hutton. It was of course, Lord Hutton, who ran the enquiry and it only goes to prove you right in your assumption that the incompetent MP, Hutton, could neither sell a straw to a drowning man nor run a booze up in a brewery.
    The job spec for a politician requires no qualifications whatsoever other than £1000 and a sufficiently long snout for the trough.

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