Boris Johnson is facing a barrage of critiques over his new ‘moonshot’ testing plan. He has also suggested that for many large families, Christmas this year may in effect be cancelled. Meanwhile, Richard Raymond has some sage advice for business leaders.
Leadership in Focus
Richard Raymond founded Saltash in 1986 and remains managing director today. The SME contractor has grown steadily in that time and the secret, according to Raymond, is a constant focus on quality.
Writing in The Parliamentary Review, he explained:
‘Since our formation, we have resisted the pressures of a growing turnover, rather concentrating on delivering quality services and continuous reinvestment. We focus on contracts that are aligned with our business plan and current capacity, reflecting the specialties we have proven experience in delivering.
‘We have successfully delivered on a wide range of contracts across various sectors. These include central government, arts and culture, schools and universities, healthcare, and social housing. Over the past 30 years, we have developed a high standard of service delivery throughout central London and the southeast, and maintain key strategic contracts for clients such as the Parliamentary Estate, the City of London and many other prestigious clients.’
He also made the point that they have always had a directly employed workforce so that everyone feels connected to the company, something that the firm’s employees will no doubt have appreciated in wake of the Covid lockdown and subsequent furlough scheme, whereby employees were accommodated far more easily than contractors.
This demonstrates that building a solid, sustainable foundation can have unexpected benefits. While it may be tempting to chase ever-increasing profit margins, it is more important to get the basics of your business right. The bottom line for Raymond and Saltash is quality above all:
‘This formula of well-balanced resourcing and controlled business planning enables us to procure business without affecting ongoing commitments. All throughout this process, we aim to provide a quality service, exploring and delivering innovation in a demanding environment. We believe in building for a better quality of life, and aim to implement this philosophy with every project taken on.’
Leadership Today
The Times leads with the news that a number of experts have raised questions about Boris Johnson’s mass testing ‘moonshot’ plan to avoid a second lockdown.
Under the plan, which leaked documents suggest cold cost more than £100 billion, over ten million people per day would take Covid test and be given a ‘passport to mingle’ if the test was negative. A memo said ‘this is described by the prime minister as our only hope for avoiding a second national lockdown.’
Sir David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, raised the point that false negatives could throw the entire system into disarray.
“That doesn’t matter so much perhaps if you’re just being stopped going into a theatre — the point is it is not just a matter of testing. You’ve got this whole downstream business that that person will be told to isolate, their contacts will be told to isolate, and so on.
“And if you only have 1 per cent false positives among all the people who are not infectious, and you’re testing the whole country, that’s 600,000 people unnecessarily labelled as positives.”
The Telegraph focusses on the fact that Christmas may ‘bring little cheer’ with the looming possibility of family gatherings being curtailed. The prime minister said it was ‘too early to say’ if such measures would need to be taken.
The paper also reports on Mr Johnson’s new ‘Covid-secure marshals’ who would be recruited to ensure social distancing rules were being enforced.
A senior government source said: ‘If we look over the next three months there is nothing that’s going to work in our favour and several things that may work against us – particularly the closing in of the seasons ... because people live indoors, in closer confines, with windows shut.’
Leadership in history
On this day in 2008, the The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, thought to be the biggest scientific experiment in the history of mankind, was powered up in Geneva, Switzerland. This followed more than two decades of preparation.
‘It’s a fantastic moment,’ said project leader Lyn Evans, ‘we can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.’
