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This weeks Money Programme advises Get Your Life In Order. Apparently we are all time-scarce and stressed by the demands of modern life. In the 1970s we followed Tom and Barbara to the ‘Good Life’; left work, commuting and the rat race generally to grow our own onions. Today, an ever increasing number of us are off to inhabit a virtual world through MORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). A recent survey has found that approximately 1/5 of current players consider the in-game world as their main place of residence.

It’s a toss up as to whether digging up onions is preferable to waiting on the platform for a Virgin train to arrive and it doesn’t seem so long ago that I was pushing notes under colleagues’ doors to check whether they had received my emails. I am by nature suspicious of technology, so virtual worlds are probably not the solution although they do suggest a new way to ignore the cleaning. So, what about a lifestyle manager?

The programme describes how more of us are employing people to organise and carry out our more mundane tasks and there is certainly no shortage of suppliers. In the last month I have had about twenty fliers through the letter box offering services ranging from specialists in wheelie bin cleaning to the more comprehensive approach which offers to manage your lifestyle. The programme predicts growth in this latter area and suggests that the stress reduction and time gain can more than compensate for the cost. The implication therefore is that these will somehow be different from many of the other service organisations that we deal with.

As such services would be intrinsic to our lifestyle and often performed in our own homes they would require a degree of personalisation and customisation which are not present in many of today’s service offerings. The growth in demand for many services, however, has led to centralisation, standardisation and automation. Surveys and anecdotal evidence highlight that customers are generally not happy. Only last week yet another example of poor service hit the headlines as a whistleblower BBC reporter found that a major UK bank had ‘treated customers with contempt’. A study, currently being conducted by OU researchers, which asks customers about their experiences of negative service encounters, suggests that time and time again our objectives are thwarted and our negative emotions aroused by the problems we encounter with a vast range of service organisations.

So what happens when growth in demand leads to the scenario we are all too familiar with? –

Press 2 if you want to know why your cleaner didn’t turn up; 3 if you arrived at the hotel and your room had not been reserved; 4 if your dinner party was slightly spoilt because we forgot to hire the caterers and 5 if ……….Unfortunately our lines are likely to be busy due to an unusually high number of calls and if you could ring back at the weekend, or preferably log on to our website we will continue to offer the level of service which you can expect.

I’m off to dig some onions in a virtual world. The cleaning can wait.

Further reading

• Outsourcing – what does it mean, and what makes is so compelling?
• 24 hour working – discover what’s driving our long hours culture, and its impact on our health
• Get Your Life In Order – One in ten of us now employs domestic help. The Money Programme talks to the people outsourcing their domestic chores, and investiagates the companies making millions out of this growing industry.
• 'The Dancers at the End of Time: Researching the Future through MMORPGS' by Nick Gadsby, to be presented at the Market Research Society Golden Jubilee Conference in March 2007.
• Mis-selling is 'rife' at Barclays

Blogging about

Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world - and down your street.

In ‘Elle: Super Business Model’, we see that Elle Macpherson is acutely aware of the value of her image.

Paul McCartney once said that when the Beatles were becoming popular, he had no idea it was possible to own a song. Today, though, legally owning songs can elevate people into multimillionaire status.

In the commercial world, anything with value can be exploited, subject to the limits of the law. Where those limits are drawn is often a matter of debate. A developing area of concern is the right of celebrities to enjoy a reasonable expectation of privacy against published use of their images, and to have intellectual property in their own images.

Elle recently won a Press Complaints Commission (PCC) ruling against the magazine HELLO! because it published pictures of her sunbathing on a beach on Mustique. The photos showed her in a bikini. She asserted that she was staying in a private house with a private beach, and said that she had chosen the location in order to stay out of the public eye. The PCC accepted that, whether the beach was technically a public or private place, she had made an effort to find a private holiday spot. The PCC did not believe that that HELLO! had made a convincing case to warrant publication. So it ruled against the magazine.

Doug Pickett, of Wilmington, North Carolina, is not a household name but millions of people in many countries will recognise him. It was his face, on an advert a few years ago for a Ralph Lauren fragrance, which a great many people assumed was that of Leonardo DiCaprio. The advert did not attract litigation but the debate on how far the law should protect personal images became enlivened.

The former world-record holding 10,000m athlete, David Bedford, threatened legal action against the company responsible for the “118 118” television adverts. He claimed that the advert traded on his distinct persona including his former hairstyle, moustache and skimpy shorts. He discontinued his action but his complaint to the telecom regulator Ofcom was upheld and the company agreed not to use his image any more.

Cases alleging misuse of a real photograph of the claimant go back to 1901 but a recent development is the allegation of defamation through the photograph of a "look-alike". In 2001, the High Court rejected the claim of a woman whose friends and family were horrified to see what they thought was a photograph of her in a Sunday paper posing in an advert for a pornographic website. The photographed woman was her double. Following the human rights legal requirement to permit freedom of expression unless a restriction is "necessary in a democratic society", Mr Justice Moreland ruled that "it would impose an impossible burden on a publisher if he were required to check if the true picture of someone resembled someone else who because of the context of the picture was defamed". It would, in effect, bring an end to newspaper photos of riots, or of anyone involved in criminal cases, because all look-alikes might sue for defamation. 

Further reading

• Securing your brand – how do you build value into a brand? More to the point, how do you preserve that value?
• Bad boys, good business? – did 50 Cent's tie-up with Reebok make good business sense?

About the author

Professor Gary Slapper is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. He is the author of various books on English Law, and corporate crime, and has written about Law for The Times for fifteen years.

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Conrad Black may or may not have been a greedy man, but either way he stands accused of defrauding his company and its shareholders. If he is finally found guilty, how was he allowed to get away with it for so long? It’s the role of a public company’s board, and in particular its non-executive directors (NEDs), to oversee its executives and ensure they behave responsibly. The case of Conrad Black is not a one-off, as a series of corporate scandals on both sides of the Atlantic bear witness too. So, should our systems of corporate governance be put on trial?

The case for the prosecution is strong:

NEDs are meant to be independent and capable of subjecting executive decisions to objective, critical scrutiny, but too often boards appear to be a cosy club. Although shareholders may have to vote for their directors it is the board that nominates them in the first place and so the danger is they become a self-perpetuating elite. Many NEDS are current or former executives – they often have a vested interest in not rocking the boat. This is what Bob Monks a founder of shareholder activism in the US has to say:

‘Trying to make boards function is like squaring the circle. You can huff and puff all you want, but you can’t make a legitimate governing institution out of a self-perpetuating body.'

Monks should know, he has served on many corporate boards and was thrown off the board of Tyco for pointing out things that were wrong, before the CEO at the time was later indicted for his lavish perks.

Perhaps a bigger, but less noticed, scandal is that of executive earnings and share options. As a recent survey by the Guardian showed executive pay has soared in the UK, growing by 28% in the latest year. Top chief executives pay has risen from 25 times what an average staff members earns not long ago to over a 100 times. In the US it has been estimated that up to 10% of equity was transferred to directors as stock options in the 1990s. This is often justified by the myth that top pay is linked to performance, but research suggests there is little relationship between FTSE performance and directors’ pay. Clearly putting non-executive directors in charge of executive pay has done nothing to control this gravy train.

Further reading

• Corporate Accountability and Ethics – a disregard for ethics can lead to trouble: remember the Enron saga.
• RAGM.com – one of the best places to start is the Robert Monks website
• Corporate Governance by Robert A.G. Monks and Nell Minow, Blackwell Publishing

About the author

Chris Cornforth is Professor of Organisational Governance and Management at the Open University Business School. His research focuses on the governance and management of public and non-profit organisations.

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Money Programme

Get the facts behind the big business and finance stories from around the world - and down your street.

On a recent Saturday evening Channel 4 presented a programme aptly titled 100 Greatest Sex Symbols. Amongst the usual collection of beautiful or sexually attractive celebrities was the not unexpected appearance of Brad Pitt. Whilst not wanting to detract from him his acting skills or his large back catalogue of films (for example the superb science fiction thriller Twelve Monkeys) the programme focussed on why he was a sex symbol. Using a variety of female commenter’s, it would appear that Brad’s sexiness doesn’t lie in his facial features but his ability to get a six pack. For those who are unaware of what a six pack is let me inform you. Rectus Abdominis,and the external and internal oblique are a group of muscles that collectively form the abdominal muscles or more popularly called “washboard abs”. Quite simply the women commenter’s reduced Brad’s sexiness to his flat “six pack” stomach and how he used it so eloquently in a sex scene in the film Thelma and Louisa and a host of other films since. As a male viewer, seeing a highly skilled actor reduced to the muscles in his stomach area only served to remind me how body conscious we have become, regardless of us being men or women.

And here lies the problem for British men in the 21^st century. We live in a consumer driven society where young, muscular male bodies are presented to us as a health and sexualized ideal. It is the stark contrast between an idealized fantasy of a six pack and the reality of increasing obesity amongst men in Britain that the diet industry aims to exploit.

Yet what stops men from dieting and sliming down? One issue is time. We live and work in a society where time is precious, where work dominates and valuing yourself often comes second. This lack of self valuing can lead to low self-esteem which may only heighten an individual’s denial over their body weight. Compounding this denial is the association with dieting being for women only, a perception that maybe reinforced by the diet industry itself. An argument that can be illustrated by remembering the last time you saw a diet related advertisement featuring men? It is these associations that the diet industry needs to overcome and overcome fast, but how? The answer lies in how we perceive what is being sold to us. In other words, marketing can tell us that a weight loss program may make us healthier, feed into our masculine need to compete against others and even make us feel sexier without using the D word. And for those who don’t think men are so easily persuaded then just think that twenty years ago the idea of men moisturizing and cleansing their skin was something only women did. Twenty years later, thanks to marketing, the British male cosmetic industry is rapidly growing in size and value. The diet industry using a few carefully chosen words with some clever marketing can get men losing weight and getting healthier. Just don’t mention the D word.

Further reading

• Competitive advantage – how can companies ensure they've got a lead over their competitors?
• Join the discussion – should more men be dieting? How would you persuade them?
• Fat Man Thin – The Money Programme investigates the companies trying to get men dieting.

About the author

Andrew Lindridge is a senior lecturer in marketing at the OU Business School. He writes for a range of management and marketing courses and his research focuses on the examination of the tensions arising from acculturation, culture, ethnicity and consumption.