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I stumbled out of bed, went downstairs and staggered through the Saturday morning ritual of forcing as much finely ground coffee into the espresso maker as is physically possible (at that time of day) to achieve the necessary caffeine hit required to deal with the kids’ inexplicable enthusiasm for early morning daylight which had been audible for several hours prior to what might be considered ‘normal’.

The next stage, prior to Saturday’s light fluffy pancakes – griddle baked to a golden brown, lovingly stroked with lightly salted butter and smothered with lashings of Canadian maple syrup – was to open the post whilst waiting for the caffeine to make sense of the weekend. So as I sat in the kitchen wearing little more than my nightie and curlers, I was more than a little put out to open a mailer from a publishing house announcing that as a Director of Birddog Ltd. I had been identified as one of the UK’s most successful businessmen and that my profile had been ‘chosen’ to be listed in the said publisher’s directory of most-brilliant-awesome-people 2008.

The mailer told me, at some considerable length, how well wicked I was, how well wicked they were as publishers and what a complete privilege it was for me to be selected for inclusion into this few, this happy few, this band of brothers. I was to be honoured. I was to receive the attention I so rightly deserved. I was to be applauded for my unsurpassed business acumen – and could I please just visit their website and complete further details about how truly magnificent I absolutely was.

Well bollocks to that then. I immediately fired up my laptop (not my favourite Saturday morning pre-caffeine activity), located the publisher’s website and searched for the ‘shove it up your arse’ button. Duly located, I told them to shove it up their arse and hope never to be distracted from my pancakes and Canadian maple syrup again.

I’ve never been a big fan of sending business communications into the home – but nor have I realised how vehemently opposed to it I quite clearly am. I’m aware that company Directors’ home addresses are readily available from Companies House and I have regular discussions with clients seeking to reach a Senior Executive audience about whether or not they should use a home address database. I always advise ‘not’ – and now I know why. I can’t actually recall another such mailing that I’ve received at home – either because it hasn’t happened before, or just because I’ve simply refused to engage with it and put it straight in the bin. But this one was different.

I regret to admit that the difference was that I nearly fell for it. Flattery, ego-massage, self-gratification… all of those things are powerful response generators. I like to think I have a healthy and well-formed opinion of my own ego and I like nothing more than to blow smoke up my own arse (metaphorically speaking you understand…) so I should have loved this. And here’s the thing. If I’d received this mailer at work, I probably would have loved it. I would have happily wasted the day filling in a form extolling my own virtues, blowing my own trumpet and massaging my own ego. The publisher would have been able to build a rather astonishing database of directorial detail that I would otherwise be unlikely to tell my own pedicurist. Instead, they got nothing.

It may well be that the publisher was genuinely just seeking to publish a directory of the great and the good of British business and I’ve just scored an accomplished own-goal. But it didn’t feel right. It felt like an invasion of privacy that, if left unattended, would lead from the database to a mountain of other unsolicited business communications in the home. There’s work – and there’s the weekend. They’re related, no doubt. But nothing should ever get in the way of screaming kids and Canadian maple syrup.

Scot McKee
Managing Director
Birddog Ltd.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Blog, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.