Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Dear Jon

I’d never read or heard of that article, but boy does it show up the gutlessness of the Economist. If that bunch of academic no-hopers had the balls to seize the initiative, they would have mounted a bid, just as I am and just as Alex is currently trying to do.

Also the Elf and safety issue is one which we have considered. They are of small enough stature to be re-trained as chimney sweeps – Victorian style.

I am an occasional reader of The Economist and by and large I like it, but my opinion of their ability to influence opinion by doing something decisive is that they couldn’t start a fire in a phosphorus factory, even if they were equipped with flame throwers.

Now what are your views on the bid, rather than theirs?

Regards


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions Capitalist B*st*rds Ltd.

Spell-check -- didn't work quick enough...

apropos


PT

:)

This is a joke

Sorry about the short delay in communications. It’s my fault for getting into the right mood (Stanislavsky approach to method acting) by getting my staff to copy out all your responses, by hand, onto paper and then post them down a chimney. I never know which fireplace they’ll come out of, so I spend hours wandering from turret to turret and room to room looking for the damned things.

The good news is that I haven’t received any threats to wage a jihad or holy war on my buy-out venture and I won’t if people read the question properly!

Michael (mgoodman), how right you are. It is enormously complex, that’s why I posted a question.

As to it being way too difficult to reach the audience, well, Santa in his current manifestation has been managing to do it for free, for over 190 years and as he is an American concept, I wouldn’t have expected you guy’s to wimp out. OK, his predecessor St Nicholas was much less ambitious in his gift delivery services, but he also managed to rescue sailors tossed in the storm and he’d been doing that since about AD 280 until replaced by Santa Claus in about 1809. The point is that if the modern-old-fashioned Santa does a stupendous job for free on old technology, why shouldn’t we be able to do it better for a small fee on the new stuff? After all, from such small and free beginnings was the internet born.

As to the unfocussed bit about the audience – yeah – right on. After the barrel load of hooch most celebrants consume over the “Festive” period, it’s a wonder that they can stand, never mind focus.

Now scamming the venture capital industry is something I hadn’t contemplated, so thanks for the idea. It is a good one. As I was looking to staff the takeover from our MarketingProfs ranks, I’d hoped that you might be available. Would you be prepared to do two jobs? A marketing role is yours for the taking, but you’ve got to define it. In the meanwhile, I’ve just created the position of Getaway Car Driver. Are you on?

Darcy. The client list and customer demographics is a brilliant idea and it probably adds about an extra ten billion to the value of Christmas Inc, but not to the cost of the bid, as S Claus has not even mentioned it in his books which we have now had a quick look at as part of our due diligence exercise. I’ve taken preliminary soundings from a number of supermarkets and the CIA about parcelling this out, but curiously enough I got a hard cash offer from the Readers Digest without even contacting them.

On that basis, my gut feeling is to keep the info in-house and rent it. Or not to rent some of it, depending on who you are and what you’ve done that only Santa knows about. Rental and blackmail revenues could exceed $2Billion per annum. Would the position of Director of Information Marketing interest you? The remuneration is negotiable, but you’d get a fully expensed sleigh and eco-friendly reindeers.

The challenge is that as far as I can see, the list is detailed, but hand written on vellum, in ink, on about 348 Million pages and is not likely to be receptive to Optical Character Recognition techniques were we to scan it. Thus, it will be a gargantuan task to transcribe it onto my IRM system (Idiot Relationship Management System) in time for Christmas 2007. A possible solution to this is the fact that Bulgaria is joining the European Union on Jan 1st 2007 and that will leave 7.5 million people who all speak English better than you or I with nothing to do, due to all the stupid EC regulations they will have to follow. They’d make great temporary data entry clerks, as long as we offered them some future career possibilities to look forward to, so that they could make use of the fact that they’ve all got degrees in nuclear physics.

More later

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions Christmas Cracker Division

Jon

Diarise away – the question is “How will you know?” The buy out is private and some joker or other is apparently always making up stories about taking over Christmas, but not Christmas Inc, Ltd, SA, Xmas etc. Having read this lot, you can be sure that imitators will follow, long after the bid is in the bag.

Actually, I knew all about the German Chimney Sweeps – we had to contend with their medieval rules and regulations when I was taking the Kane May Combustion Analyser to the world number one slot in the 1980’s. (That was Ferrari number one)

It resulted in doubling the cost for no discernable benefit in order to protect indigenous German manufacturers. So much for the European Free Market. Mind you, their specifications were a cinch in comparison to Switzerland, where they doubled the size of the blasted thing and quadrupled the cost.

Still, as a digger up of arcane information, you would be a useful asset to our team. How does VP of our Analysts Division grab you?


Best wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions, Office of the VP of Fruit and Nut-Cake

Darcy, great ideas, of which more later. In the meanwhile, watch your language.

Downsizing Elves? They are already, in modern HR correct parlance, “Challenged with Vertical Issues” so downsizing is not a desired term.

Lord Almighty, the last time I went onto the toy-shop-floor and commented on an apparent “Elf Shortage” or were an Elf Short” at a particular bench, I was sent on a 3 day gender and disability awareness course.

They will, if necessary be “sacked” as befits Santa and by Santa. Suing someone for unfair dismissal will be impossible at this time of year as the court papers won’t get delivered to the North Pole until next November, by which time he’ll be long gone.

And if mgoodman has his way, so will we.

Regards

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions D

Rjohnni, or can I call you Rajesh? As you asked a question at the end of your posting the answer is yes, you are (Being too serious), but you are being too serious about the wrong things.

I’m not mounting a takeover of Christmas as I’ve got a strong feeling that a few billion Christians, Hindu’s, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Baha’is and Zoroastrians (Sorry if I omitted any other people of faith) would strongly object to that. It’s Santa and all that money making which rides on the back of the 25th of December which I’m gunning for. So it’s got sod all about what Christians really believe in, wherever they live.

Now let’s attend to your points.

On the nomenclature – Red Herring is exactly what it calls itself, on this issue at least. Xmas Inc has nothing to do with religion, except that it has borrowed a holy festival, corrupted the spelling and turned it into an unholy blow-out. Can you imagine the reaction if commercial enterprises tried to usurp the holiest of days for other faiths? It doesn’t happen because there would be riots in the streets and directors of toy companies strung up from lamp posts. You have a point about China though. As most of our presents in the West, from Socks to Plasma Screens are now made there, 3.8 Billion of them at the last count, they have a huge stake in the consequences of Christmas Inc and don’t pay Santa a penny towards it.

This will stop. How, you might ask, especially in a monolithic totalitarian state which until recently didn’t give a fig about international property rights, copyright, royalty payments, human rights and so on? (Especially as they still repress most religions and insist on having their own sanitised “Catholic” Archbishops and the odd “Un-Dali” Lama)

Well, now that we’ve looked at the technology division of S. Claus, we’ve discovered some incredible stuff, which although he’s been using them for 200 years are very much 23rd Century technology or beyond. The thing is that he’s hardly even started to explore the potential for this sci-fi gear. We, on the other hand have. (See posts by Darcy, Telemoxie, papadoc (Steve) etc)

The way he can be almost everywhere at the same time whilst knowing simultaneously both who he is visiting and if they are nice or naughty, clearly contravenes Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal.

Being everywhere at once is achieved by travelling at the speed of light, whilst the knowledge part is sorted by engaging quantum entanglement with the client list. The principal of quantum entanglement is well developed in physics but requires a lot of high level maths to understand it. To simplify things, I’d refer you instead to the author Philip Pullman and his best seller “His Dark Materials” which is scientific tosh, but still a brilliant read.

Quantum entanglement means that we can access the bank accounts of all these foreign corporations, wherever they are, because – guess what – they are on the nice or naughty list! So we can extract our royalties at source with the only channel of recourse to justice being through the UN, for breaching their human rights. And that would be a bit rich for China! Gotcha!!

“Is Santa Xmas?” No. Xmas was created for those too indolent to spell out Christmas and for those who were afraid that Christmas contained the word “Christ”. I.e. Lazy secularists and boorish oiks, so I don’t give a fig about offending them – as long as I (sorry, we) get our hands on their money. As for Winterval that misguided attempt at political correctness was Local Council inspired and aimed at “Not causing offence to non-Christians” As usual with things the governing elite do with our money, it only succeeded in offending everyone, so we will take great delight in stinging councils whether they partake in Christmas inc or not. To be really perverse, if they celebrate “Real Christmas” with a crib and all that stuff, we’ll let them off all charges.

Sure there are loads of people, who think that they are stakeholders, but they don’t pay a cent and fat old Santa has never tried to assert his own intellectual rights. That’s why were going to do it for him, or for ourselves, as by that time, S Claus will probably own an island in the Bahamas and be wearing his red fur trimmed swimmies. That they also don’t hold any documentary proof of brand ownership will also count against them as in a few days time (The bid target is now the 6th of January – work it out!) we will have all the legal Dooh-Dah’s to say that we actually own it.

Finally let’s turn to the trademark issues. We’ve looked at the fighting tooth and nail problem and decided against using the courts. Did you know that the sleigh fleet is armed with writ-seeking missiles? Probably not, but if you try to interfere, you soon will!

If you can come back a bit more positive, we could still find a role for you, but at the moment, I haven’t envisaged a VP of Being Serious.

Best wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions Department for Strategic Warfare

Dave (Telemoxie) that bid by venture capitalists was doomed from the start. Being evil and on the Naughty List, Santa would have known about their intentions long before the bid and a few tons of gold, delivered, out-of-season to the private chimney addresses of the jurors and judges from the International Court of Justice naturally swung the “Natural Monopoly” judgement. This was not a rare example of Santa being corrupt, just exercising influence by being in two states of morality at the same time.

We are not having the same problem as we have always been in the top quartile of the Nice List. I don’t help to run one of the most advanced CRM consultancies in the world for nothing, though I have to hand it to you, our Technical Wizard (Colin) had a bit of a job hacking into those 348 million pages of vellum and eventually had to get assistance from one H. Potter of Hogwarts School of Wizardry.

Yes. We are to an extent repeating history with our intention to rent out the list to Homeland Security but we are also including MI5, MI6, FSB (Successor the KGB) and SPECTRE. The problem with old elvish documents has been overcome these days as the last bid was pre-“The Lord of The Rings” films and to get a nerd who would translate cost nothing apart from the indignity of everyone on the bid team having to dress up as Gandalf, Borrowmere etc, pretend that the berk was Aragorn and refer to him as “My Lord” which was just too much for most 1980’s merchant bankers. These days, most UK merchant bankers can read elvish. At least they think that they can after a good lunch.

I was rather hoping that you would accept a role in the new company – but I realise that owning that list might take some of the fun out of your job. However, just look on the bright side – you’d be able to totally naff-off everyone else in the telemarketing industry by being able to phone people who actually want double glazing and want it now, 100% of the time. I’m not suggesting that you would want to do this for a living, but it would be worth it just to see the looks on your competitors’ faces.

Then there’s the other possibility of using Sana’s, “Being everywhere at the same time technology” I’m sure we can come up with a “Phone everyone at the same time” machine, which combined with the previously mentioned science of quantum entanglement would mean that even if they put the phone down on you, there would be an 99.99% chance that you would still stay connected to the recipient, at least until the end of your pitch as well as allowing you to work the phones for only 0 seconds a day.

So how about accepting the joint role of Director of Telemarketing and VP of Showing off?

Regards


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions, Office of Telepathy Sales

Lori (Positive Thinker) Apropos is a spy-ware Trojan as well as meaning pertinent, so re our bid – I hope that you are not up to something or I’ll set Rudolph on you!

As I used Katharine Whitehorn’s book whist at St Andrews, I might take the quotation you mentioned and change it around a bit and say that if she hadn’t written Cooking in a Bed-sitter, it would have been necessary to starve. She was to all accounts a great Rector.

As you are into history, here’s a bit from St Andrews. The holder of the office of Lord Rector chairs the University Court, but they are elected by the students. That’s very 21st century for an 800 year old institution. They can only be removed by the Queen or King, which is a good old 12th century protection mechanism. All the proceedings and the minutes of the Rectorial are in Latin.

Not many people know this, but I served on the Student Representative Council as Executive Treasurer and Senior Vice-President and had the honour to work with Rectors Alan Coren (Editor of Punch) and Frank Muir (Humorist, Author and Broadcaster). A previous Rector was John Cleese who was in the chair at an acrimonious Court meeting where two professors were arguing semantics. He called them to order and was told to “Keep out of it as he was only a comedian” So he drew himself up to his full 6 foot 7 inches, standing on the Rectors Throne and in his finest Monty Python voice, bellowed “Bloody Shut UP!” He apparently never had a problem with meetings again and went on to use his experience at Court to found Video Arts, a commercial training company, making videos for sales training, marketing, HR and surprisingly, “How to run meetings”

I’ll drop him a line and see if he’ll accept the position of Hon President of Christmas Inc of he’ll chair the Bored (sic) Meetings.

Meanwhile, the position of Director of Interesting Trivia is available. Are you interested?

Stevanus Alkerus ad Unimaximus Solutions.
Sic Nomen Domini, Salvatorum Nostrum.
Amen

Kathy (kathysmithcasting) I hadn’t considered the CO2 aspects of taking over Christmas Inc, but you have engendered a spot of shame on the home-front. I always suspected that getting our hardwood Christmas tree flown in from the Amazon rain forest on our private jet, (It’s specially selected from an endangered species) might be a bit brazen and just a tad environmentally unfriendly but I thought, what the heck – venture capitalists do naughty things all the time. As the CO2 emissions from this could put me on Santa’s wrong list, I promise never, never, never, ever to do it again. Honest, cross my heart and hope to die.

Instead we’ll revert to the 14th century practice our family used to adopt at our Castle in the North of England (See, we can always pre-date anything you guys from the New World can dig up!) where we used a locally grown spruce, decorated with the colourful heads of peasants that had been executed. Sorry, I got carried away with historic detail there and if I’m not careful I’ll be forced into making a public apology for my ancestor’s antics. It was a typo and I meant “Colourful heads of pheasants” Honest.

You’ve hit on one of the many things which we can restore to a child’s perception of Christmas and that is their sense of the “Wonder and Awe” of it all. They’ll soon be really appreciating those presents when they realise just how much we’ll be making mum and dad pay out to get them delivered next year and I’m sure that as a Tinseltown professional, you will understand the dramatic impact of replacing “Wonder and Awe” with “Shock and Awe”.

Our new Director of Delivery Debt Collection, a Mr Rumsfeld (We also try to give jobs to the unemployed) has a neat idea of using stealth bombers to extract payments from the recalcitrant. Maybe you could make a film about it to promote our people-friendly policies along with our tag line – “Remember, we know where you live, so if you don’t want your house bombed back into the Stone Age, pay up or stick to oranges for presents”

Catchy, isn’t it!!!

Actually, apart from offering you the job of Director of Directing for this bid, you could also assume responsibility for casting (we call it employment) as it would appear that the lunatics are in danger of taking over the asylum at this end. Could I ask a favour, perhaps? Your film studio on your website looks fantastic. I used to do stage lights at an arts centre theatre and at university. Any chance I could have a go again?

Best wishes and thanks for the ideas.

Steve Alker,
Really, Really Penitent Division, Unimax Apologies Department
Honest!

Dear bigstarnow

Now that I’ve caught up with our postings, I thought, “What a curious one from someone with a curious name.” Is it intended to be a statement? If so, is it a comment on my intent or a description of your own one liner? If it is the latter, I agree. Your comment is a joke. If it refers to mine, how can you possibly know? Isn’t it rather up to me to decide if what I’ve posted is joke or not? Or perhaps you are offended by the question and this is an interjection.

That would be understandable only if you hadn’t read it, if you thought that we’d offended your religious principals and if you didn’t work for Dodier and Company whose home page alludes to the Pearly Gates and Heaven and offers proximity to both with the alacrity of a 17th century Catholic Priest flogging off dispensations.

Or perhaps it was a question and you just got the words and the punctuation a bit mixed-up. “Is this a joke?” would make more sense and reminds me of the old chestnut in the Philosophy Paper:

Q “Is this a question”
A “Yes, if this is an answer”

So the answer would be, “No, it’s not a joke, but it’s still terribly funny.”

This is deadly serious and having now had full sight of Santa’s Nice and Naughty list, I can tell you which one you are on. Can you remember what you did on 22nd of November 199-? At 3.09pm EST? It’s still not too late to write to him and own up for free, because after the 6th Of Jan, getting off the wrong list is gonna cost ya!

With tons of love and best wishes

Steve Alker
Unimax Dispensations

As twelfth night is now over, it’s time to close the bid. I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed and to comment on the last couple of posts.

Papadoc (Steve): We were going to outsource the consequences of being nasty to those who rent the list! As to the ability to put those billions of mince pies, glasses of milk and tots of sherry to work for good, that was a brilliant idea and though it does not fit in with the over-arching sense of capitalistic money-grabbing morality we had to adopt to get into the mindset for the bid, just doing it would let us sleep more easily in our beds. Sadly the Red Cross and Oxfam have said that they have neither the storage facilities not the logistic to ensure timely delivery. Several Governments have contacted me to say that if they could be converted to armour plated limos, ammo and rocket launchers, they could distribute them directly to third world beneficiaries (For the relief of the poor, of course)

Carrie: I’d be delighted to open a “Discus Ion” board with you as moderator as you suggested, but respecting your pun, would it be restricted only to members who can use a “Plasma Screen” on their PC!

The bid has been made, but a last minute counter bid has trumped us and we should have seen it coming. A strange sounding Mr D. Vader of the Galactic Empire, offered us as many Imperial Star Destroyers as we wanted and the odd Death Star to help us to beat off any competition in exchange for a prior look at the list. We doubted his motives as he appeared to be a fictional character, so we turned him down.

Last night, his consortium annihilated the entire N. Pole operation and made off with parts of the copy of the nice list. Strangely, only the pages with the details of Leia Organa (Princess) and Luke Skywalker went missing before the rest were atomised. Apparently he just wanted to give them an early Christmas present.

Hey ho, you win some and you lose some. S. Clause survived and he’s told me that Hollywood have already offered to re-build the entire Christmas inc. Centre as they want to be able to continue to produce prequels and sequels for ever, so no change there, I’m afraid.

Happy New Year everyone and I hope that you’ve now taken down all your decorations.


Steve