There is no miracle in music he declared only work

“There is no miracle in music,” he declared, “only work.” On occasion he did go too far, once so exacerbating a Rome orchestra in a particularly trying session that the players threw their music at him, bringing an abrupt cancellation of the engagement and a permanent rift.Celibidache was born at Iasi, capital of the Romanian province of Moldavia, where his father was a government administrator. His ultra-sensitive ears fasten on the slightest deviation from his intentions, and he sings the phrase as he wanted it. Yet the performance which follows, so assiduously prepared, comes across with astonishing freshness and apparent spontaneity.He once said that the quality of an orchestra governed the number of rehearsals he needed, and the better the orchestra the more he rehearsed it, because the possibilities were greater. Yet his meticulous preparation made possible a degree of instinctive insight when it came to performance that could achieve powerful conviction. Documentary evidence of this came recently to hand with an hour-long video, commercially issued in Britain in 1992, of which over half is devoted to the conductor’s rehearsal session with the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra for the performance of Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony that follows thereafter.
Working as usual without a score for music he already knew down to the smallest detail, and letting the orchestra leader give any necessary cues, he is seen to smile and joke with the players (in German, of course; English subtitles are added) to illuminate his batonless gestures.

And this is backed by a depressing lack of familiarity with the tools and techniques which are supposed to be helping and which, when they are used, do not give the expected results.”Paul Fuller, partner at Deloitte & Touche, said that the lack of understanding might explain why so many change projects failed to meet their targets.. Among the most idiosyncratic of orchestral conductors, Sergiu Celibidache was a rare figure in Britain, where his visits in the past 40 years can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Always a perfectionist, he priced himself beyond most orchestral budgets by his demands for rehearsal time, requiring a minimum of five or six sessions for any programme, and for similar reasons he restricted his association with orchestras with whom he was not familiar. He said there was frequently a stand-off on boards, in which accountants presented figures in a complicated way and the directors were afraid of showing their ignorance by asking too many questions. The challenge is for finance directors to present the information in such a way that it was easy to see what was happening in the business.The study, which questioned 500 finance directors in large, small and medium-sized companies, adds: “There is a lack of consistency between what organisations are measuring and what, apparently, is important to them. Indeed, they argue that, if the Anglo-Dutch company squeezes dry this source of “difficult learning” it could emerge stronger rather than weaker – and that it should be P&G that is worried.In other words, today you can be riding along on the crest of a wave, but tomorrow you could be caught in the undertow.. Britain’s finance directors have admitted that they neither understand nor use many of the latest financial management techniques, writes Roger Trapp.

A survey by the Chartered Institute of Management Accounting may explain the volatile performance of many companies. Only 13 per cent of respondents understood the value management concept, while only 24 per cent could get their heads round the widely publicised business process re-engineering. Even activity-based management was understood by just 42 per cent of respondents.
Shareholder value came off particularly badly, with fewer than a third of finance directors having a good grasp of the idea. The marketing disaster of Unilever’s Persil Power has been obvious: the discovery that in certain conditions the soap powder rotted clothes led to the company announcing a write-off of more than pounds 50m.But the authors argue that this debacle should not put Unilever off. Then along came Cott Corporation of Toronto, almost unheard of until 1994. Its sales have mushroomed largely as a result of selling to Sainsbury’s and Safeway in Britain, Ito Yokado of Japan and the aforementioned WalMart, each of which puts its own name on the cans.Whether Cott will continue to prosper is open to question, but its rise owes a lot to the growing power of the big retailers.But this itself leads to uncertainty, argue White, Hodgson and Crainer.If the success of private label products leads to retailers marketing their brands in a similar way to Coke and Pepsi they could become locked in a marketing rivalry that threatens their price competitiveness and – as they say – what happens then?The other ”war” is the one that broke out between the detergent giants Unilever and Procter & Gamble of the US. The first involves cola – traditionally dominated by PepsiCo and Coca-Cola of the United States.

“There is no escape from the maelstrom of change, innovation and fear.” And the successes will be those that abandon safety and confront uncertainty rather than seek to avoid it.Take, for example, the two ”wars” described close to the end of the book. “Amid the confusion and messiness,” they add, “some corporations and some leaders are seizing the new uncertainties and are making them work”.Their examples come from retailing, where, for example, WalMart is faring much better than its similarly named rival K-Mart; from accountancy, where Arthur Andersen is increasing revenues at nearly twice the rate of some rivals; and from the highly complex and turbulent world of pharmaceuticals.But, as they point out, the same things are happening everywhere. Industries once regarded as stable and slow moving are now beset by the bubbling white waters of change,” they write before offering a glimmer of hope. In the first group are: difficult learning – because only difficult learning will help individuals and organisations; maximising energy – being effective rather than just busy; and resonant simplicity – a fancy name for straightforward beliefs that mean something to the workforce rather than instant sound bites. In the second are multiple focus – which is self-explanatory – and mastering inner sense, which is less obvious, but means that managers should look inwards at things like knowledge as well as concentrating on tangible matters, such as reports, budgets and the like.

Moreover, far from claiming to be a book that solves managers’ problems, they say their effort “creates more problems in a corporate world already beset with problems”.After that not-so-helpful start, the authors set out the key skills – composed of three enablers and two channels. According to White, Hodgson and Crainer, these five skills will help the manager of today and tomorrow cope with the environment in which they find themselves But they stress that they will not make it go away “Uncertainty is here and here to stay. True, executives are having to grapple with all manner of problems, to imagine the unimaginable and generally be fleet of mind. But that sounds more like life in a chemistry lab than in an inflatable raft.