Only the paranoid survive

The late Andy Grove is one of America’s most admired business leaders. A hungarian emigre, the engineer was the third employee of Intel and one of the pioneers of the semiconducting industry.

Grove went on to become Intel’s chairman and chief executive, helping transform the company into the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductors and is considered one of the greatest business leaders of the 20th century.

Along the way, Grove wrote many books about his experiences, his trials and tribulations, his successes and failures. One of those, high Output Performance, has achieved quasi-biblical status in Silicon Valley. It’s one of those titles that every Apple or Amazon employee and wannabe-entrepreneur is told to read to find out the secrets to running a successful business.

Grove’s secret? It’s a simple one. Whether you are a chief executive, a scientist, teacher or consultant, it is to learn how to manage. And if you want to become a great manager, improve performance and productivity of your organisation, you must start by training yourself. Sounds easy? Only when you know how. It’s a lesson that Dominic Cummings,

Boris Johnson’s top adviser, wants the civil service to understand as No 10 prepares for the biggest shake-up in Whitehall for generations. At meetings just before the Christmas break, Cummings told Government aides to go away and read the book. It shows how serious the Johnson/Cummings team is about lighting the fire of reform within Whitehall’s departments.

The first fire to be lit has been at the Ministry of Defence following Johnson’s promise to head-up the biggest review of the department since 1945. Officials and ministers have already been primed to plan for a radical reorganisation of procurement, starting with aircraft carriers.

There are also plans to revolutionise flexible contracts, to maximise links between the military services and industry, allowing business leaders to move across more easily. The aim is to bring more top- quality brains into the general staff but also to improve productivity.

Where else will they light the fires? expect similar reviews at the Department for Business, energy and Industrial Strategy, which has more than 41 sprawling agencies. This will be a hugely important department if it is to play a role in Johnson’s plans to turbocharge the regions and kick-start big infrastructure projects. There are other clues to what they are planning. There is to be a bonfire of planning restrictions to boost housebuilding across the country.

SO FAR, so good. But it’s still only tinkering. Nothing we have seen yet of Government policy is enough to boost the economy or change the fact that the South east remains the place where most businesses want to be.

every government, of whatever colour, has tried over the past few decades to bring life back to the regions but has failed to achieve scale. It’s not just a UK problem: towns everywhere in the world are getting poorer compared to cities.

But there is one big difference in the UK: our big cities, such as Manchester and Sunderland, are less well-off than comparable cities in europe and the US. That is mainly because of decades of underinvestment and, strangely, they have not benefited from what’s called the agglomeration effect.

So if Johnson and Cummings are serious about restoring prosperity to the regions they need to scale up investment, not only in infrastructure but with training and education, starting with engineering. The UK has a shortage of 60,000 engineers.

They should start by learning from the vibrant regional economies which have sprung up around Oxford and Cambridge, both fantastically successful eco-systems which have grown because of their universities and the commercial spin-outs.

If they are serious about making the UK the global leader in science and technology, they should start in the North. The region has eight of our greatest universities, and one should be chosen to be the centre for a British version of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At the same time, more deprived regions across the country should be given enterprise status with low taxes and bigger r&D reliefs to attract businesses from outside.

Winning the election was the easy bit. Now they have to deliver to those who lent their votes. The Intel chief wrote another bestseller, warning how success breeds complacency and complacency breeds failure. The title is Only The Paranoid Survive. The Cabinet would do well to read it.