Welcome to the Christmas 2022 edition of the Company Newsletter. In this edition, you will find “Our New Master's Voice”, reports of recent events – there have been plenty – a trailer for the Charities Supper in January 2023, the usual crop of Member interest stories and a new feature on our Members' volunteering efforts.
Our Master's Voice
Our Installation ceremony and dinner took place on 24 October, representing the start of the Master’s Year, and the new team of Wardens (1W Kanan Barot, 2W Andy Miles, 3W Malcolm McCaig and 4W Collette Stone, together with IPM Steve Cant.
We also welcomed Ian White as a new Court Assistant and look forward to welcoming Malcolm Green in the new calendar year once he has recovered from injury. It was great to have 108 members and guests dining together in the charming and ancient Apothecaries' Hall. At the dinner our principal guest Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, the President of City University, gave us an inspiring speech on "Change through Wisdom". He made a strong connection between Wisdom and Values, a theme that the Faith Group will be picking up in a multi-faith discussion in February.
Other top table guests included Lady Judith Finkelstein, Sheriff Andrew Marsden, Professor Andre Spicer (Dean of Bayes Business School), Peter Aiers (Master of the Charterhouse), Philip Thomas (Master of the WC of Scientific Instrument Makers) and Cdr James Nisbet of the Sea Cadets. Peter Candy of the London Scottish Regiment piped us in, and the Sea Cadets provided an excellent carpet guard.
On 7th November I represented us at the Royal British Legion Poppy Laying Ceremony in the garden of St Paul's Cathedral and later that week, together with David Johnson and Andy and Sarah Miles, at the Silent Ceremony in the Guildhall.
With a three-day business trip for me to Ontario immediately after the Show, on 16th November I was back in town to lead the New Master's Reception at the Guildhall. It was a privilege to admit John Cowdell as he traded up from Junior to full Freeman status, to clothe Alderman Alison Gowman as she progressed from being last year's Sherriff of the City of London to becoming an Honorary Liveryman of our Company, and to welcome Father Tim Handley as our new Chaplain.
We had various members of the Company (Collette Stone, Geoff Berridge, Kanan Barot, John Cowdell, Alison Gowman, Paul Kelly and Patrick McHugh) join me to outline our strategy for the coming year, a copy of which has been sent to all members of the Company. Subsequently I took the report of the Strategy Working Group, which presented some long term strategy considerations to the Summer Court, and merged them together with the strategy for the year, in a report which was to be discussed at the Christmas Court meeting.
Wednesday 23rd November was a busy day. I joined 10 members of the Company at Westminster Abbey for the annual St Cecilia’s service in the morning, followed by lunch. Many thanks to the Music Group under the leadership of Richard Stewart, and to our Clerk, for organising our participation. The quality of music in the Abbey was stunning. (See full report below). Following an afternoon appearance at the Mansion House with the Clerk and Bob Harris at the Lord Mayor’s Annual Address to the Livery, I then joined 10 members of the Company as we turned out in force at the 30th Anniversary of charity talks at Bayes Centre for Charity Effectiveness, chaired by Alex Skailes. The guest speaker was Lord Gus O’Donnell, on the theme of “What’s Next for Civil Society Leaders”.
In terms of events with other Livery Companies, I represented us at the Fueller’s lecture, and am due to represent us at the Solicitors’ Dinner and the Marketors’ Dinner between the time of writing and the Court meeting.
On internal business, we have reshaped the Court of Wardens’ Management & Planning meetings. These now take place on the first and third Fridays of each month. On the first Fridays we cover Strategy, Governance and Events Planning, and on the third Fridays we cover Finance, Membership, and any items raised to us by Committees. My hope is that this will create a greater focus on strategic discussion. There is room for AOB at both meetings.
You will note my commitment to have a one-to-one conversation with every member of the Company this Master's year, whether at an event, over tea / coffee / beer or wine in London at a time to fit in with members’ busy lives, or over a zoom. I very much look forward to this important level of engagement.
Annual Report
The Company's Annual Report 2021-22 has been published and is now available to read or download from our website. The Report includes a review of all our activities over the past year and is a worthwhile read. Many thanks to all who contributed content and to PM Denise Fellows and Suzanne Harris for all their hard work producing it - again!
Events Matters:
Lord Mayor's Show
12th November saw 14 members of the Company parading in the Lord Mayor's Show, with our ironmen Tom Pulford carrying our new, much-admired gonfalon and Andy Miles high-fiving kids in the crowd with the mace. We enjoyed being with both our military liaisons, the Sea Cadets and RAF 600 Squadron on the day. The writing on the gonfalon is visible from a good distance – many voices in the crowd could be heard reading it. One noisy group seemed to suggest we should adopt a new Company motto "Go Manage!"
Lesson in Music Appreciation Efficiency
Freeman Lisa Preuveneers reports:
Of course management consultants would know how to enjoy listening to the choirs of Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedrals and St Pauls all on the same morning - and still have time to join fellow members for lunch. Twelve of us joined the Master at the Festival of St Cecilia - the patron saint of music and musicians – in Westminster Abbey on 23rd November 2022.
The Festival of St. Cecilia provides music lovers with the opportunity to collectively celebrate the joy music brings and to mark the contribution that musicians make to our lives and to raise funds for the charity ‘Help Musician’ formerly known as the Musicians Benevolent fund. It is supposed that St. Cecilia was a noble lady of Rome who, after converting to Christianity, along with her husband Valerian, his brother Tiburtius, and a Roman soldier Maximus suffered martyrdom in about 230 CE.
Company Members have been attending the Festival of St. Cecilia for many years; this was my first. It was a grand occasion; we met outside so we could all sit together. We stood as over 30 gowned Livery Masters – including our own Master Chris Sutton - processed in to take their places in the Abbey trancepts.
Westminster Cathedral’s assistant Master of Music played before the service, which was conducted by the Dean of Westminster. The organ was played during the service by Peter Holder and by the Assistant Director of Music of St Paul’s Cathedral at the end.
The opera singer and Help Musicians UK ambassador, Nicky Spence gave a moving address, telling us of his early years as a struggling musician and how the Help Musicians' charity helped him. He says: “It’s fair to say that I would simply not be enjoying a career if it weren’t for the support of Help Musicians. Coming from a working-class background, it was not the obvious choice for me to become a classical musician, but their support endorsed me on my path.”
After the service we walked through the lovely gardens of Dean's Yard – a former monastery, now a boarding school - to reach the Footstool Cafe located in the atmospheric crypt of St John’s in Smith Square. We enjoyed a simple café lunch and glass or two of wine:
Other events:
Wines for Christmas 2022 - Food and Wine Pairings
This year, the Virtual Wine Tasting Team (Patrick and Ann Chapman and Patrick McHugh) were encouraged to host another tasting, their tenth since the start of the lockdowns. The run up to Christmas always offers some interesting opportunities and this year was no exception as they based their pairings on a selection chosen from the amazing wines from Bordeaux, having realised they had never actually done this before. Bordeaux is the largest wine growing area in France, producing over 700m bottles of wine each year, ranging from everyday table wine to some of the most expensive and prestigious wines in the world.
As in the past, no WCoMC wine tasting would be complete without including everyone’s favourite gougères, as the ideal nibbles or finger-food accompaniment. The team also added a couple of new Christmas food suggestions based around the evening’s French theme. A shortlist of four French wines from Waitrose were recommended:
- Cave de Lugny Crémant de Bourgogne Blanc de Blancs NV
- 2013 Château Rahoul Blanc Graves
- 2019 Château La Croix de Marbuzet Saint-Estèphe
- 2015 Château Suduiraut, Sauternes
together with a couple of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference wines:
- 2019 Bordeaux Supérieur Taste the Difference
- 2021 Bordeaux Sauvignon Blanc Taste the Difference
 These wines gave everyone the opportunity to discuss the different areas within the Bordeaux wine region – particularly the differences between wines from the left and right banks of the Gironde estuary and their cost implications. (The left bank wines are typically based on Cabernet grapes with higher tannin levels – the right bank are more soft, supple and fruity.)
In summary, given all the problems that we face in the UK, not helped by avian flu that has decimated the availability of turkey and goose, the evening went very well. The participants compared the two “value” wines against the more renowned wines of the shortlist. Yes, there were discernible differences – but as we all know, the key to quality is not always price! Bordeaux wines can accompany and pair well with traditional Christmas fayre: their white wines, typically based on Sauvignon Blanc, go very well with starters and fish mains; their more fruity reds from the Médoc area or those with high percentages of Merlot are excellent with turkey, goose or beef.
And to round off a traditional meal, a glass of Sauternes is the perfect finish. The team also introduced a couple of French delicacies: Christmas Brioche, ideal for accompanying cold cuts on Boxing Day, and Galette des Rois, or Three Kings Cake, which really is associated with Epiphany but can be an alternative to Christmas Pudding!
Christmas Lunch
A hardy group of Members and guests braved the wintry weather to enjoy the Company Christmas lunch at Ironmongers' Hall on 12th December. They enjoyed excellent company with excellent food and wine on our own table within a Hall packed out with guests from several other Livery Companies.
CMCE Research Awards - 4th Year
The awards season – in the film world at least – doesn’t get underway until early in the new year. But at CMCE we’re always trying to be ahead of the curve and so, on 10th November, Company members, academics and other members of the CMCE network gathered in a stylish Zoom room to celebrate the best research into management consulting.
Guest speaker and Honorary Liveryman Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli gave a keynote speech on the importance of winning. Praising the role of competition in aiding excellence he suggested that we could place more emphasis on it in the academic world and that this needed more investigation by management consultants and academics.
In the manner of awards ceremonies everywhere, a star-studded list of announcers was then on hand to open the virtual envelopes. In the absence of stars, we had three of the panel of judges and guest Angela Tennent from Elevation Learning (the event sponsor).
PM Denise Fellows introduced the winner of The Changing Environment of the Consultant category: a paper that had shed valuable light on one of management consultancy's main strengths, thought leadership. Will Harvey, author of "The tensions of defining and developing thought leadership within knowledge-intensive firms", said the topic had identified the threats of mis- and disinformation and rapid content development which means people have a warped sense of facts and reality.
The winner in the Client-consultant Relationships Category was David Cross and Juani Swart’s paper Professional Fluidity: Reconceptualising the Professional Status of Self-Employed Neo-professionals which highlighted the problem that the existing categorisations of professionalism that applied to organisations didn’t really apply to consultants working in firms of four or fewer employees. This research is one of the key areas that CMCE will be focusing on in coming months so watch this space.
Freeman Luca Collina was the winner of the Technology and Consulting award for his paper: What are the implications of virtualisation for building trust during the management consultancy lifecycle? which was inspired by his own experience of consulting across international boundaries via Zoom.
Malcolm McCaig ended the awards with the presentation of the Colonel Lyndall Urwick Memorial Cup to Andrew Sturdy for his paper The Governance of Management Consultancy Use: Practices, Problems, and Possibilities. Andrew stated that the governance of consulting was an area that had not been subject to examination and hence his paper was the starting point for what he expected to be further studies in the area.
Many thanks to judges PM Denise Fellows, Malcolm McCaig and Alan Greenwood, presenters Alderman Professor Michael Mainelli and Angela Tennent, not forgetting Master Chris’s video introduction and Bob Harris’s fleeting appearance as guardian of the Urwick Cup and in particular to Karol Szlichcinski for pulling the whole award judging process together. Details of the papers can be found on the CMCE site and the recording of the event is here.
MMIW 15 - Karol Sclinchcinski
For his second outing on the MMIW programme, Karol Sclinchcinski took to the video stage at 3:00 a.m. from a dimly lit hotel room in Kuala Lumpur. Lest you think we went crazy with the timing, it was actually 18:00 our time on 30 November, but such was Karol's commitment to sharing his experience with a select group of about a dozen attendees.
His talk, "In the wake of a Tsunami", took us to Matara in the southern tip of Sri Lanka, and a three month project in 2004. Together with the help of two colleagues, his brief was to help local businesses and develop Sri Lankan management consultants recruited through the local Chamber of Commerce.
Karol found himself on a gruelling conveyor belt of rapid fire consulting projects. Each week started with the new project brief on Monday morning, followed by working frantically for four days to find solutions to help the selected company, and then working through the night on Thursday to produce a report for delivery on Friday.
After the worst Tsunamis in living history, many of the small to medium size businesses were struggling to recover, and Karol choose to three projects to test the audience's skills. We had to guess what solutions he and his colleagues proposed, but few of our guesses came close.
We had the factory making yogurt and marshmallows, but who would have thought about leasing a cow in order to secure a supply chain with the local farmers. And then there was the coconut merchant with under utilised machinery and disagreement between the owners on what to do with it. We hadn't appreciated all the things one can do with a coconut. For instance: husk fibre for rope and mats, pith for horticulture, coconut water for export, and ingredients for making vinegar, soap, animal feed and charcoal. Finally, there was a tea plantation. Did you know that when you pick tea, you can only pick the top two leaves and you have to use a special technique? Mix that a disgruntled workforce and you can appreciate the productivity challenge. A combination of strong HR practices and better amenities for workers was called for.
Karol's talk highlighted the problem solving nature of management consultancy which contains a wide diversity of challenges, and the pressure to learning quickly on the job wherever in the world that may be. Preferably after, not during, the tsunami.
Our Members as Volunteers
During each newsletter in Chris’ Master's Year we will be featuring one or more members of the Company who are volunteering their skills and experience in the profession or in the community. In this edition we are featuring two: First, Freeman Lucinda Peniston Baines.
Lucinda is one of the co-founders of The Observatory International, a specialised management consultancy that helps companies drive growth by transforming their Marketing and Communications resources. Serving mostly global marketing clients from its network of ten offices, her company has supported brands such as BP, Mondelez and Samsung amongst others, to source and optimise their communications agencies rosters.
The organisation joined the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) in 2011, eager to acquire a recognised accreditation that reinforced their existing commitment to delivering excellence for their clients. Lucinda then joined the WCoMC in 2014 as a natural progression of this to enable engaging and sharing learnings and insights with other Management Consultancy professionals. She was invited to join the MCA Board in 2016 and has served two terms, including one as Vice President. It’s a pro bono role that she has found hugely rewarding, both in terms of helping shape the direction of the MCA and in gaining in return the industry-level best practice initiatives and tools for consulting which the MCA has as its core purpose.
The MCA Board requires a commitment to quarterly Board meetings as well as several Working Groups and – importantly – acting as an ambassador for the industry as a whole. It’s a role and a group of peers with which Lucinda has enjoyed engaging and debating and – when she steps down from the Board in 2023 – will leave with a strong sense of achievement knowing the industry body is in excellent health under its continued strong leadership.
Our second featured Member this time is Liveryman Gia Campari.
Hearty congratulations are due to Gia who has been given a civic award as one of the Citizens of the Year, in Fidenza, Italy. For a number of years, Gia has been organising concerts performed there by an international party of her friends. After a Covid-enforced break, Gia gathered her concert company together again, which included some from the WCoMC. It performed in the grand mid-19th century theatre on 11th June.
Gia grew up in Fidenza and still bases there her professional visits to Italian clients. The city makes Citizen of the Year awards in five categories and Gia’s award is in the category Citizen Abroad - for a citizen who has moved abroad and contributed to Fidenza in one of the other four areas – in Gia’s case for her professional and cultural activities. The citation, translated, reads:
In the rich and varied web of events that connote Germana Campari's life, her competence and great determination are striking. Among the numerous relationships in which her life unfolds, she tenaciously preserves ties with Fidenza. They are chains she does not wish to break and that provide further evidence of how vital and decisive roots are. Not by chance, …….. she shares her passion for Fidenza with many friends whom she invites to the theatre, our "Girolamo Magnani" theatre. This Award shows the stage as a representation of our community.
Gia assembled a company of her friends, together with a few professionals who give their time to Gia’s project. Practice singing sessions in London were polished and choreographed in the Theatre rehearsals on the Friday and on Saturday morning. The concert, with Gia as one of the soloists, played to a well-filled auditorium on Saturday evening. For her friends, and with her own determination and feat of organisation as Fidenza has recognised, Gia constructed a wonderful (and now award-winning) long weekend with a fine backdrop of the Apennines.
Climate Action – Survey Results
The Company is an active member of the Livery Climate Action Group (LCAG) - which you can read more about here. The UK government has set a target of reducing carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 and to net zero by 2050 and we are keen to at least play our part, especially by being a leader on this topic across the wider Livery. In the summer of 2022 we surveyed our Members to establish a baseline of their attitudes and approaches to improving the environment. In particular, the survey was intended to:
- Collect information, including new and innovative ideas, and to be able to share them across the Company and indeed the wider Livery
- Act as a prompt to personal action. Ultimately, it’s about challenging the status quo and changing individual behaviours.
The results are now in and are available in two forms:
Thanks go to the team who ran this survey: 2W Andy Miles, John Watson, Jim Foster – all aided and abetted by your editor.
Future Events :
Charities Supper - 18th January 2023
Our annual celebration of our ProBono work, preceded by an admissions ceremony, is open both to Company Members and Non-Members. Now open for booking:
Venue: Saddlers' Hall, 40 Gutter Lane, London EC2V 6BR
For all future events, keep an eye on our calendar, here.
Gift to Guildhall – The last word
Last time, we reported on the handover Ceremony on 4th October but it is worth recording here that the now famous stopwatch has a more presentable and fitting stand:
For the record PM David Johnson provided the stainless steel hook, while IPM Steve Cant provided the marble base (they are firmly glued together) and engraved signs front and back. The final shot shows the watch, plus stand, in its display cabinet at Guildhall.
The final word from Laura Miller – the Clerk: “I have had great fun showing it to your Members, but also to the clockmakers, as it is the only watch in the room and not from them!”
And finally .... Mangled language
 Liveryman Adrian Williams, took exception when he saw this sign locally. Adrian is treasurer of the Queen's English Society, a charity founded in 1972 to promote language, and he wrote to the local paper saying that it was "regrettable" that no one had checked the plaque. He added: "It should have been easy enough to find someone with the literacy skills to tidy up several curiosities of spelling and punctuation that will inevitably distract the public word(s) missing possibly from the tribute's purpose: to record appreciation of an achievement. How sad - not that there are errors to be found - although that is a cause for a regret - but that no one thought to say: “Before we go ahead with this, are we confident that we got it right?” How more sad yet that there will be people saying: “What’s wrong with it?" Councillor David Renard, the local council leader, apologised for the errors.
Thanks to all the many contributors of content for this Newsletter and to you, dear reader, for getting this far. Have a great Christmas.
Steve Cant
Editor
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"Go Manage" 
