Business buzzwords of the year

Every year at Christmas, newspapers churn out festive columns to fill space. So The Times business section produces things like a quiz, predictions, share tips and a feature on those who passed away during the year.

One of my favourites, always superbly penned by my colleague Patrick Hosking, is a piece on the buzzwords, euphemisms and plain nonsense that became business-speak over the course of the previous 12 months.

Here are a couple of examples from last Christmas, although headwinds, to my dismay, have become even more ubiquitous (if that isn’t a tautology) than they were at Christmas.

Headwinds: Explanation or excuse for poor performance. Currency headwinds, cost headwinds, labour market headwinds, interest rate headwinds, compliance headwinds – it was a maelstrom out there.

WFP: Working from pub, which saves on the heating required when WFH. Young’s, the pubs chain, started offering WFP days (although I’m not sure this one caught on).

The reason I was drawn to write about this was because I think I’ve spotted a candidate for Patrick’s next column. It’s “profits recession”. For which (unless anyone else comes forward to claim responsibility) we must thank Mark Brumby, the Langton Capital analyst.

His explanation was: “Some numbers out there are looking good but, as one moves down the P&L account, they often get steadily worse…”

In the current inflationary, er, headwinds it is not hard to find examples. Here’s one for instance – St Austell Brewery reported record sales last year that jumped by 34% to £209.2m, but its underlying operating profit advanced by a mere 0.9%, from £11.3m to £11.4m.

That’s not to say the Cornish outfit performed badly, merely that with energy costs doubling and the need to up the ante on incentives to new staff, it’ll take longer than expected to get revenues and profits more in sync. Which is not the worst headwind in the world.

The dearly departed

One regular in the pages of The Times and a 100% certainty to be included in the feature on the dearly departed, this coming Christmas, is Ivan Menezes, the late chief executive of Diageo.

I find it quite hard to acknowledge he’s actually dead given how trim and fit he always appeared. I was actually supposed to join a couple of colleagues for a meeting with Ivan at the end of May but ended up being away on vacation. My colleagues found him, as ever, charming and good humoured. A week later he was dead. He was 63.

Up until then, everything had been going so well for Ivan. He had been knighted by King Charles in the new year honours, he was gradually winding down to retirement after helping to secure an excellent successor in Debra Crew and he would no doubt have been looking forward to playing tennis and golf, watching cricket and cooking Italian meals – all of which he was proficient at. Emergency surgery on a stomach ulcer put paid to those plans.

Although he could come across as a quiet, cerebral man, I always found him convivial and one of the great laughers, who had the knack of getting everyone else laughing too. He was, above all, a kind man, a trait remembered by Alexandre Ricard, his counterpart at Pernod Ricard.

When I asked the Frenchman for a comment on the tragedy, he sent me this: “I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Sir Ivan Menezes. On behalf of the Pernod Ricard board, executive committee and all our employees, I would like to extend our deepest sympathies to his family and all his colleagues at Diageo.

“Ivan was one of the first people to call me personally when I was appointed as chairman and CEO of Pernod Ricard, a gesture I have always remembered. In a competitive business world Ivan remained a profoundly genuine and authentic person. May he rest in peace.”

Those words reflect well on both men.

All of which reminds me of Graham Mackay, the erstwhile SABMiller chief executive, who in 2013 died of a brain tumour at the age of 64. Like Ivan, he appeared to be in the rudest of health right up until he was referred to hospital for emergency surgery. In Graham’s case it was several months before he finally succumbed to the tumour but, like Ivan, he did not live to enjoy the fruits of a lifetime of work.

Graham had transformed the old South African Breweries from a £3.5bn company when it came to London, in 1999, to a £50 billion giant dwarfed only by the mighty Anheuser-Busch Inbev on the global brewing stage. He did not live to see the acquisition of SABMiller by AB InBev.

While Graham came across as an avuncular but tough character, the man who masterminded the merger of the world’s two biggest brewers was a very different type. As Ian King, a former business editor of The Times, wrote:

“It is hard to believe that Carlos Brito, the chief executive of AB InBev, would recognise a hop if he stepped on one. He and his colleagues are hard-driving number-crunchers, brilliant at what they do, which is aggressively cutting costs and boosting margins.”