My Biggest Mistake: Graham Lancaster

The chairman of Biss Lancaster, the public relations consultancy, is also the author of the best-selling book The 20% Factor. Here he recalls a Cold War crisis that gave him a lesson in the value of standard procedure.

THE RED STAMP on the order form facing me as a young manager in the buying department of what was then Hawker Siddeley Aviation read: VOG 'Vulcan on the ground]' The Vulcan bomber - for those too young to remember the era of Ruby Murray, the Vauxhall Velox and 2d sachets of Nescafe - used to be Britain's airborne nuclear deterrent.

It was said there was at least one fully armed in the sky at all times. All I knew was that if I didn't find a source and order the special alloy for the casting needed to get the Vulcan back up there, the RAF would be on our backs. And the promising start to my career plan would be over before it ever began.

What to do, when you think that one mistake from you will leave Nato's nuclear shield in tatters? Standard procedures - that's what I thought. Check the stores for any of the alloy we might be carrying. No luck. Then issue a spec to our usual suppliers and invite tenders. So, like a well-trained dog, I did just that, despite the tiny amount of material involved.

Only one supplier quoted, but at a figure that was more than the price of gold. It seemed they would have to set up the mill specially for this run. My main boss was on holiday, so I sheepishly put the order to his deputy to authorise. He rashly assumed I had used my brain and that we had no alternative. So, looking at the angry VOG stamp, he told me to get on with it. If I had used my brain, I would have checked to see if any alternative alloys were permitted. I would have found them in stock and been able to solve the problem - faster and much cheaper.

My boss returned and had a fit, but mitigated things by ordering tons of the stuff - at virtually no extra cost since the run was set up. The lesson? Apart from a course in colourful English, I learned that 'standard procedures' can prove to be about as helpful as the recipe for tiger stew ('first catch the tiger. . .'). They can become a comfort blanket and a lazy defence against actually adding value.

Equally, I don't trust rebels in a corporate environment. Stravinsky maintained that in order to be creative he needed strict and widely accepted rules of harmony and composition, so that he could bend, shape and even break them on occasions. You find the same in the visual arts. Picasso and Lowry could each draw and paint like Raphael, and it was on these firm foundations - standard procedures - that they built their very different mature styles, to give us a new orthodoxy. I see echoes of this all the time in management. The real mavericks tend to be shooting stars, capable of short periods of apparent brilliance before falling to ground. The managers I admire - those with the style I try to set myself - know their businesses inside out, have stuck to their knitting and realise that business success is as much to do with elbow grease as eminence grise. They take the calculated short-cuts of the master craftsman, using well-honed tricks of the trade rather than flashy, risky sleights of hand.

As I contemplate the possibility that there remains forever, somewhere in England, a Nissen hut full of 'my' alloy, it teaches me the wisdom of knowing the rules (those standard procedures) but knowing them well enough, like old friends, to take advantage of them occasionally.

(Photograph omitted)