Leading customer centricity: don’t think about your customers

The attention-grabbing title had to have a pay-off and it is this: don’t think about your customers, think like them.  In this article, the third in the series marking the launch of LIW’s Leading Customer Centricity service, we will explore how leaders can transform their organisation’s culture to get everyone – including themselves – seeing through their customers’ eyes.

Organisational climate is the area that will differentiate the organisations who are truly customer-centric organisations from those that say they are.  Many companies will state their intent to be customer centric and then give their people the ‘try harder’ treatment.  These people are, in fact, often committed to the task but fighting the systems and culture to serve their customer.  How can organisational climate become a positive contributor to customer value?

The answer is a combined ”top down led, bottom up created” approach.  People operating in a climate that encourages and enables those closest to their customers to contribute will respond quickly to customer experiences that are not optimal.  Leaders need to pave the way by creating the space and processes required to make this happen.  Leaders also need to genuinely communicate and implement the ideas that are identified as being achievable, and having a high impact on the customer.

The advice to think not about your customers but like them is from Stuart Dalziel, the global service expert and fierce customer advocate in “Keep Calm and Carry on Leading”.  Thinking about customers will take you only so far and is an ‘episodic’ activity, but thinking like them will give deeper insights – it is a permanent mind state that will yield continuous results.   Easier said than done … but definitely worth the effort.

How can you and your organisation think like your customers?  A powerful process, developed by Disney, can be used to engage everyone in the organisation and transform the way people see their roles.  Called the Customer Centricity Cycle, it is created through a collaborative effort at all levels of the organisation.  Cross-functional teams map their customer’s journey from start to finish identifying all the touch-points (when actual contact is made) and the thought-points (when the customer is considering the transaction without contact).

Each of these steps is then analysed, looking first for all the things that can go wrong – ‘Tragics’.  The teams then explore ways not just to fix that problem but to turn it into a really positive experience for the customer – a ‘Magic’.   These ideas are then assessed and a plan made for execution.

Simple and powerful, when facilitated well, this methodology can transform organisations and become a sustainable and essential part of their climate.

Other things you can do

Let us help you!  If you would like to explore some refreshing new strategies for achieving your customer goal contact Dan Meek at LIW for more information: dan.meek@liw3.com

Order ‘Keep Calm and Carry on Leading’ for you and your team.  Available from www.lulu.com for $6.00 plus postage and packing.  Discount apply to orders of five or more copies.

Take a look at LIW’s Leading Customer Centricity program.  Click on ‘Leadership Solutions’ above to download the brochure.

Leading customer centricity: getting clear from the start

In this article, the second in the series marking the launch of LIW’s Leading Customer Centricity, we will explore how leaders can assess potential strategies from their customers’ view point and engage their employees in defining the what and the why of their roles.

A few questions come up in performance conversations a lot more than others.  If you had to write these questions on cards, two of them would be the dog-eared ones in the pack. ‘What is expected of me?’ and ‘why you are asking me to do that?’   Well thumbed, maybe, but almost always they elicit a thoughtful response in the negative.

How does this disconnect play out at an organisational level?  Stuart Dalziel, in ‘Keep Calm and Carry On Leading’ tells the story of the head of customer service at a very large global retailer who employed them very effectively.  When she started her role, one of their couriers was delivering poor service and had earned themselves a bad reputation inside the organisation.   At first, she joined the nay-sayers but eventually took the time to let them know what standards of service were expected of them and why it was important to the retailer (who had built their reputation on service).  Problem solved – just like that.

Leading customer centricity starts with establishing clarity.  It is a crucial job of the leader to ensure that everyone is clear what the organisation is trying to achieve and why and what their role is in that endeavour.

Strategy: what does the customer value?

Once you have set your vision as being customer centric, how exactly are you going to do it?   What should you focus on?  The customer can guide you in this.  How is success defined in their eyes?

How do your customers determine ”excellence”? Is it convenience? Friendliness? Flexible choices? Price?   These will all have some value to the customer but Frei and Morriss in  their book ‘Uncommon Service’ define great service as addressing needs in the order of importance that the customer gives to them.

The customer: built-in purpose

Clarity of purpose will guide the organisation in the long term and also, as Dan Pink tells us in his book ‘Drive’, is an essential component of individual motivation.  Articulating a deeper sense of meaning within the organisation beyond commercial gain develops a strong connection for the individuals working within it. This passion and belief is passed onto customers in the actions of its employees and in turn develops a deep sense of loyalty.

Measures: hearing the voice of the customer

Humans are fallible and sometimes we fail to delight customers through simple mistakes. The question is how do we know how we are tracking in their eyes and how long do we wait until we get the feedback? Sometime it’s too late and the damage is done. Yearly customer satisfaction and engagement surveys provide valuable historic data but we may miss the opportunity to truly integrate the customer’s feedback in a more collaborative and regular way.

Being clear on what’s working and why (and what’s not) creates the optimal opportunity to ensure the customer’s voice shapes the future success of the organisation.

 

Other things you can do

Let us help you!  If you would like to explore some refreshing new strategies for achieving your customer goals contact Dan Meek at LIW for more information: dan.meek@liw3.com

Order ‘Keep Calm and Carry on Leading’ for you and your team.  Available from www.lulu.com for $6.00 plus postage and packing.  Discounts apply to orders of five or more copies.

Take a look at LIW’s Leading Customer Centricity program.  Click on ‘Leadership Solutions’ above to download the brochure.

From tragic to magic: Leading Customer Centricity

This is the first in a series of short articles to mark the launch of LIW’s Leading Customer Centricity program.  This program is a collaboration between LIW and service expert and customer advocate Stuart Dalziel.  In this article we introduce the topic and ask why we, as leaders, should be taking another look at a subject that could appear to have been done to death.

 

I was recently copied on an email with a detailed record of a conversation between the call-centre representative of a credit card company and the relative an account holder who had recently died.  The conversation would be funny if it weren’t so sad: the customer service representative insisted on charging the bereaved caller three months of late fees because the deceased had not informed the company of her death.  The story did the rounds and gathered a number of comments from disgusted but unsurprised readers.

A brief search on the internet showed that the conversation was, in fact, fictional and had been circulated several times with different financial institutions playing the bad guy.  That is a relief but what was surprising was that the story was accepted as plausible by so many people – including me.

 

Do we really have to talk about this again?

Is service really so bad that we think that could happen? Frances Frei and Anne Morriss think so.  They recently published ‘Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business’ and when asked in an interview with HBR whether we really needed a new book on customer service, they pulled no punches: “Good service is still shockingly rare”, they said.

HBR advocates “a powerful case for a new and systematic approach to service as a means of boosting productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage.”   One could also add “reducing organisational risk”.   Recent research from Satmetrix shows that 84% of people considering a purchase now look to friends, family and online reviews for information – all shaped by the service they have received. Put simply, a organisation’s success in the future relies heavily on its service today.

 

No more heroes

What Frei and Morriss discovered in their research of companies’ service is exactly what we see in the broader leadership arenas.   Doing it well does not need ‘heroes’.  In fact, the authors take a stand against customer-service heroes saying that it makes us all feel good in the moment to rescue someone but great service should not require heroics.

Great service organisations deliver reliably and as a matter of course with heroics being icing on the cake.  They also noted that well-intentioned, energetic people are most likely to fall into these traps.   So what can a well-intentioned, energetic leader like our reader do to create an organisation that does not rely on heroes?

 

Try harder!

The typical response of managers of organisations whose service is failing is to look to the front line staff and say (or more likely, email) “try harder!”  Even as customers, we find it easier to blame the check-out staff for delays rather than to look deeper at the complex and slow systems they are fighting with.  In essence, we see poor service as an ‘employee problem’ but what’s needed is to widen the lens to see all the conditions required to deliver to complex customers in a complex world.

In this series of articles we will explore a more systemic view of delivering service and look at practical things that leaders can do to put customers at the heart of their business.

 

Other things you can do

• Let us help you!  If you would like to explore some refreshing new strategies for achieving your customer goal contact Dan Meek at LIW for more information: dan.meek@liw3.com
• Order ‘Keep Calm and Carry on Leading’ for you and your team.  Available from www.lulu.com for $6.00 plus postage and packing.  Discount apply to orders of five or more copies.

The surprising power of the obvious

Arthur Schopenhauer: self-evident truth

A client of ours recently spotted a quotation by Arthur Schopenhauer that contains a depressing conclusion for those of us who are trying to promote new ideas: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed.  Second, it is violently opposed.  Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

So you do all that work and you end up stating the obvious?  Surely, we all wait eagerly for that moment when everyone realises that we were right all along and we are carried aloft in a moment of ecstatic vindication?

Putting one’s ego aside for a moment, there could also be something positive here.  What if the ideas you espouse are not that new?  What if they have already been ridiculed and violently opposed?   What if one could simply enjoy the stating of self-evident truths and the ready acceptance with which they are greeted?

As the purpose of this blog is to promote the ‘truth’ about a new kind of leadership, another recent discovery led me to conclude that perhaps it is the fact that these ideas are not so new that makes them truly relevant today.  A colleague of mine was looking through some old project files recently (those long evenings fly by when you a leadership consultant…) and she found an article entitled ‘Responsibility Based Leadership‘.   Written in 1993, it describes succinctly some of the ideas that we promote here.   The extracts below give a flavour of the thinking:

Responsibility Based Leadership places the emphasis on leadership as doing rather than role holding; on expertise sharing rather than power-position deciding; on initiation rather than reacting to direction; on support for others to perform rather than directing others; on team consensus rather than leaders decisions.

It implies that the leader is not only the most senior executive but is also every individual in the organisation. Leadership becomes key, not who is the leader.

Every time people take action to help make the organisation more effective they are taking leadership.  It has become the axiom in many modern organisations that all members of the organisation need to be empowered or enabled to take this leadership.

In Responsibility Based Leadership mode the organisation’s systems are deemed to be temporary and change, adaptation and innovation are the norm.

The leader is not so important as the practice of leadership.

Self-evident?   It might be now – 20 years on – but with any luck this piece of paper has already suffered two decades of ridicule and violent opposition.  It’s just possible that its public is now ready to receive it – without fanfare, of course.

Given the mess that those two decades of old-style leadership have left us in, surely it is time for this ‘new’ view of leadership?  It’s obvious, isn’t it?

Keep Calm and Carry on Leading. Download it here.

What can leaders do to make the most of 2012?  In this short e-book by Professor Peter Sheldrake, Stuart Dalziel and Pia Lee we propose three priorities that we believe are critical for leaders in the upcoming year: better thinking, customer focus and execution.

Developing people, not things: becoming a partner to Africa, not just a donor

When LIW was asked to address the Government’s public inquiry into Australia’s relationship with the countries of Africa earlier this year, we asked the African leaders we have worked with what message they would like to send.

“Don’t develop things, develop people” was the plea from a senior government official in Tanzania.  This challenge sheds light on how Australia (and other ‘developed’ countries) can renew its engagement with Africa at this crucial time.

Read more in Pia Lee’s article in PayDirt magazine: Pia Lee in PayDirt magazine, November 2011

 

Also, listen in to Martin Kwakwa’s interviews with Deepak Gopaul from Mauritius and  Dr Mathew Davies of ANU on 18th November on SBS Radio at 5.30pm and 5.45pm respectively.

Related articles

• Partnerships key to development (zimdev.wordpress.com)
• IMF Opens Fourth Regional Technical Assistance Center in Africa (appablog.wordpress.com)

Lost decade? Speak for yourself!

Lagarde: ‘the risk of … a lost decade’

The comment this week by Christine Lagarde, the head of the International  Monetary Fund, that if the problems in the global economy are not resolved, ‘we could run the risk of what some commentators are calling a lost decade’ showed that she has a talent for headline-grabbing but less for leadership.  Clearly, it is her role to help fix the considerable economic problems that we face and she may have needed to create some drama to inspire action.  However, the reality is that the coming decade will be at least a much-needed ‘reset’ and at best a true renaissance.

Over recent decades, the citizens of the West have allowed themselves to measure their lives by money.  The gap between rich and poor is widening and yet some of the richest countries have the highest rates of depression.  Something is wrong.

Many of the managers that we work with, raised on the logic of ‘Management by Objectives‘ (MBO), have lost the ability to enrol people in what they are doing without some financial inducement.  ‘If you want someone to do something, you had better pay them to do it’ has become the firm belief.  And yet these same people give of themselves generously as football coaches, scout pack leaders, carers, contributors to online advice forums etc and see others doing the same.  No money changes hands but quality work is done.  It is almost as if the rules of MBO can be left at work on Friday but have to be picked up again on Monday morning.

Dan Pink‘s recent book ‘Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates’ sheds some light on this phenomenon.   Pink tells us that only simple, mechanical tasks are completed better when there is a financial inducement whilst money can actually reduce performance for more complex tasks.  His collection of research, including some funded by (as he calls it, tongue firmly in cheek) ‘that notoriously left-wing socialist group’, the US Federal Reserve, shows that this is not the case.  Once you pay people enough to take money off the table then more of it does not improve results.

What actually motivates us is:

- purpose (does what I am doing have a positive higher intent?)

- autonomy (am I able to decide what I do and how I do it?)

- mastery (do I feel like I am excellent at what I do?)

These three – each elements of the conditions for success, Clarity, Climate and Competence – are crucial for leaders as we strive to achieve even more than ever in the coming decade (and certainly not ‘losing’ it, as Ms Lagarde suggests).

It is said that the Mandarin character for ‘crisis’ is made up of the characters for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’.  With good leadership, this crisis presents us with the opportunity of a lifetime.  During this crisis, what we have been taught to want (money) is going to be in short supply but what we actually want (purpose, autonomy, mastery) can be plentiful.

Will we grasp this opportunity to change our values system and rediscover some more fundamental and fulfilling drivers?  With money scarce, can we finally find those illusive things in our lives that we have been raised to think that money can buy?

 

More on this subject…
See a beautifully animated summary of Drive at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
More leadership resources at www.liw3.com

Despite appearances, it’s not so tough at the top

The news this week that the CEO of Lloyds Banking Group, António Horta-Osório, is taking stress leave was met with mixed feelings.  An online poll in The Guardian asking the question ‘Do you back the Lloyds boss?’ showed an almost even split between the supporters (Yes – stress affects all of us in different ways) and the detractors (No – he’s paid well enough to take it).  These options somehow miss the point: does being at the top always mean that you will be stressed?

Research at Princeton University reported in UK’s Daily Mail earlier this year concluded that it really is tough at the top. Levels of stress hormones were collected from males over a nine-year period and they found that alpha males were more stressed than their beta brothers.

The authors say that the stress is likely to be down to the energy needed to maintain their lofty social position rather than to the psychological factors that come with their status.

The thing is, this research was on baboons.  While the researchers extended the results to ‘possibly’ include humans, we actually have a greater ability than baboons to choose our responses to the situations we find ourselves in.   We therefore have greater control over the stress we put ourselves under  – even more so as we rise to the top.

As a fellow human being, we can sympathise with Horta-Osório.  He has had a big year by any standards: against the background of a global financial crisis he has led Lloyds to take a £3.2bn provision for the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) and to launch a new round of cost-cutting measures.

However, there is a danger that Horta-Osório’s stress leave could reinforce  our perception that stress rises as you go higher in an organisation.  This perception ignores several things that you get more of as you go up:

Money: when Horta-Osório joined from Santander just one year ago, he received a signing bonus of GBP4.5million.   This is equivalent to 145 years earnings for the average person in the UK and the seven whole lifetimes’ earning for someone on the minimum wage.  Yes, there is research to show that, like with baboons, the pressure of of maintaining status in your peer group can create stress, but can we really believe that this is equates to the worries of a low-paid single-mother only just making the rent payment each month?  You are paid well, so chill.

Smart people: one thing that gets better as you rise in organisations is the quality of the people reporting to you.  If you do not use that talent and focus on doing your job, then you will work yourself into, at the very least, a spell of stress leave.  The book The Leadership Pipeline by Ram Charan et al once again gives us invaluable guidance here: be clear about the value of your job, do that and delegate the rest.  You have a great team, so chill.

Control: when Sir Michael Marmot, an Australian-born epidemiologist, published his ‘path-breaking’ Whitehall II study he destroyed the myth of ‘executive stress’.  He followed British civil servants of all grades over several years and showed that, far from being tough at the top, the lower your status at work the shorter your life expectancy.  At the heart of the matter is that all jobs are demanding but only higher up do you have high levels of control: it is the combination of high demand and low control that increases the risk of heart disease and a range of other serious ailments.  Yes, you have a demanding job but you have some control, so chill.

Purpose: we will only be able to choose our reaction to pressure if we know why we do what we do.  This clear sense of purpose – beyond making money – provides the inner compass for leaders that can bring the calm and a sense of direction in the storm.  At the top, leaders have the opportunity to define purpose for themselves and their organisations.  Tony Hsieh, the perpetually breezy former CEO of Zappos, a company committed to transforming their customer experience, was quoted as saying “when people do something that actually contributes to a higher purpose that they really believe in … research has shown that actually is the longest lasting type of happiness.”  You are on a mission, so chill.

So, while wishing António a swift recovery and a bright future, leaders should also take a moment to think that if it’s tough to be you, it is even tougher to work for you.

Crossing Live: self-leadership in Tanzania

by Deogratius Kilawe, 3^rd year student at Mzumbe University, Tanzania.  Deo tells his leadership story in which he rejects the expectations of someone with a poor upbringing to make a positive impact on the lives of other students.  He was helped along the way by leadership workshops run by LIW at the Tanzanian Global Development Learning Centre (TGDLC).

It was in 1999, the year I was about to finish my primary education, when I first began to hear about the strikes and demonstrations at Universities.  Students were striking to pressure the government into increasing their student loan amounts so that they had more money. Sometimes the students destroyed University property and other times they were injured as a result of striking.  Often I saw universities closed due to these strikes and even in February this year, (2011) the University of Dar es Salaam was forced to close due to students demanding an increase in their student loans.

In 2008, my first year at Mzumbe University, I came up with the idea of setting up The Achievers’ Club.  I realised that the real problem for my fellow students was not the government student loan but the availability of money itself – many students believe they have no other option but to depend on the government for their money and when the government fails to provide them with money on time, they simply have no means of survival.  Many of my fellow students come from poor families like me, so they resort to striking by putting pressure on the government into giving them money so that they can at least survive living at the University.

The purpose of The Achievers Club is to create a different source of income so that when one source is in crisis, the other source will compensate it.  This involves training students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and encouraging them to think about investing and engaging in various businesses while they continue to study.  The vision for The Achievers’ Club is to have a student-owned company at every University in Tanzania and other east African nations.  This company can either be medium or large as long as the students are the key shareholders.  Students invest the amount of their government loan into the company and many of them take casual jobs within these companies.

Our mission is to provide a forum where all university students can discuss important issues for  our nation and give their opinion. We continue to face a lot of challenges within this club – many people have asked me to stop running the club because I am from a poor family and they believe that I cannot do something that needs lots of money to implement.  However I still believe that it is ideas that change our lives, not money, despite it being useful.

In 2010, we officially began our club events and we held several seminars on entrepreneurship, launching book readings and sharing business and life skills.  Though this usually requires money, with some influencing, we managed to run these workshops at zero cost.  In 2010 I met with Pamela from Tanzania Global Development Learning Centre and she told me about the LIW Leaders of Change video conferences.  I attended every one of the series which included dialogue, learning and application of leadership tools.  As a result of these programs, I have seen growth everyday in myself, my life and my club.

On another level, I have learnt a lot of lessons; how to deal with adversity, empowering women, leading yourself with purpose, vision and values, cross-cultural leadership, stakeholder management and creating a leadership architecture.  Each of the video conference programs made me stronger and more mature in leading my organisation.   My biggest learning is that in order to build my organisation and determine its leadership architecture, I must take responsibility as the builder to ensure that those who are going to ‘live’ in the organisation are safe and that they enjoy their life.

During the video conferences, we discussed the principles of using the 3Ws and the 3Cs to create the right condition for  the success of others.  These tools helped us to move from one step to another in January 2011 when we decided to  open a student microfinance institution.  These tools continue to help us as we continue to ask ourselves; ‘what do  we want to achieve, where are we now and what next?  Using this process led me to realise that in order to run the organization effectively,  I need to further my development so I attended another videoconference course run by the Tokyo development learning center, called Microfinance training of trainer (MFTOT).  At the end of this course, I am going to teach my fellow students the content and we hope to begin operating our microfinance institution through member contribution and further  donations.

We have now expanded to other universities like Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial, Institute of Financial Management (IFM) and the University of Dar es Salaam.  We hope to secure sponsorship in the future from people who are interested in building our community.  Using the skills I learnt from LIW, I am determined to bring about these changes and larger changes in the future.

My experience of learning leadership tools has enabled me to realise that my options are limitless.  There are not many students in Tanzania who interact with others in the global community and the reason for this, they say, is lack of money.  I refuse to believe this and choose to ignore it as I think that if I have an idea I can manage.

As a result of the video conferences, I am taking the lead in changing people’s perspective towards poverty by helping them to see it as less of a barrier.  I decided to join AISEC international as a Project Manager and this involved me taking an internship in Kenya as a Volunteer at Mathare Youth Association (MYSA).  It was here that I had the opportunity to network with lots of students from China, Japan, Holland, Britain, U.S.A, Egypt, Slovenia, Nigeria, Kenya and Germany.  When I returned home, many students began to question: ‘well if Deo from a poor family can manage to go abroad for an internship, why can’t I?  So, nowadays  lots of student go abroad for internships to places like India and other parts of the world far away from Tanzania.

My lesson is that by learning and applying the tools from the LIW leadership videoconferences, one person can influence and lead many others to achieve their goals.

UK riots: it’s time for moral leadership from the people, not just the government

by Dan Hammond

Having recently returned to the UK it was hard to believe that I could feel any worse than I did watching the riots in London spread across the country.  However, I hit my personal nadir while watching the well-respected late-night news programme, Newsnight.  I found myself agreeing with former editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie.  It does not get worse than that.

The riots reflect profound social problems that may have been gestating for decades.  If Patrick Dunleavy, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics is to be believed, this represents a catastrophic disconnection between the government and the people that shows the vulnerability of the British state.

The fires were still burning when the blame game started.

The politicians predictably blame each other.  The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman, laid the blame at the feet of the government and specifically, their tripling of student fees and the Educational Maintenance Allowance.  The Conservative Party Chairman, Baroness Warsi, blamed Labour for allowing social decline to occur on their watch.  The people of Britain themselves who were interviewed for radio and TV also blamed the government for their poor policing and ‘the cuts’.

The rioters themselves are silent.  BBC reporter Ben Ando tweeted on Wednesday: “Hard 2 hear the voice of unheard youth. All the young ppl I spoke 2 during the nite in London refused 2 B interviewed.”  The few people who spoke to camera, their faces covered with bandanas, had nothing to say and could not justify the actions of the crowds.

The blame in fact, lies with us, the majority.

We can no longer expect the government to set the moral tone and recent events show that we cannot count on the media to support them in doing so.  The breakdown of hierarchical social structures, coupled with social networking, puts not just the tools but also the responsibility for leadership into the hands of the people.

The Daily Mail’s Max Hastings said the rioters “have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame”.  It is up to all of us – parents, teachers, business people, whoever we are - to ensure that the compass is set.

This will require a great deal more of people than simply staying out of trouble.  In a microcosm of society as a whole, the riots were watched by large groups of ‘law abiding’ people filming the action with smartphones.  On the streets, the majority inadvertently obstructed the police and encouraged the looting through their tacit acceptance of it. In everyday life, the same is true: passivity and acceptance are part of the problem.

The majority now needs to show that kernel of personal leadership: to choose what society they want to live in and to take some action to move towards it.

There are a few notable successes when the majority asserted its will that give us cause for optimism.  A Twitter campaign using the hashtag #riotcleanup generated bigger crowds with armed with brooms to clean up the streets than those that had caused the damage the night before.  In Dalston, a group of shopkeepers peacefully saw off a group of potential attackers.  West Yorkshire almost avoided trouble completely through strong engagement with communities: since 2005, the county’s police force has followed a strategy “to improve awareness of the relevant agencies and the work being done to reduce crime and disorder, to increase participation by communities and to improve trust and confidence in the police.”

What Mr MacKenzie said on Newsnight that had me, and I am sure many others, surprising ourselves by nodding was that the rioters have no point to make “except that they want a 42 inch Samsung TV.”   We must not dignify the riots by trying to give them a higher purpose than entitlement-fuelled violence and greed.

Rioters mug the injured Ashraf Haziq, a Malaysian student

Many people in Britain feel rightly aggrieved about the ever-expanding difference between rich and poor even, at a stretch, about the shooting of a man in Tottenham at the weekend.

The question is: how are these problems going to be solved by robbing of a Malaysian student by people pretending to help him, by setting  fire to blocks of flats inhabited by families or by ransacking the small businesses owned by people, who themselves are fighting to make a living?

The answer is that it won’t.

It is time for the people, not the just the government, to show some leadership, take control of their communities and to build the cohesion that is required not just to stop, but to prevent, the catastrophe that is still unfolding on our streets.

dan.hammond@liw3.com