Elided Views 3: Strategic Report

Central Nottingham, April 2017

Myth is a story that can be retold by anyone, with infinite variation, and still be recognisable as itself. The outline of surviving myth is re-recognised in the lives of each generation, in a parade of receding illumination.  The Board remains focused on ensuring that the Group’s risk management and internal control systems are effective in underpinning robust decision-making on major activities, but the odds against winning are incredible.  It’s not a fairy story or a religious myth; it has no monsters, gods or wizards in it, only human beings. It’s not a parable. In place of a moral, it has a plan of action (the stillage of suffocating membranes).  The Board has continued to debate and develop its understanding of risk, risk appetite and tolerance, risk testing and how we can maximise our opportunities. (It Could Be You).  As we move forward, the Board’s challenge will be to oversee the integration of these systems with the Group’s strategic priorities as they continue to evolve.

The entry level for national myth is high. It’s not that the mythical hero must have some basis in historical fact: that might actually be an obstacle. It’s that any individual must be able to interrogate their own memory to assemble their own version of the myth.  Transparency is compromised, apparency - wrinkled.  The vast majority of our UK retail colleagues are already realising the opportunity to earn top quartile reward (Semi-Skimmed) with over 88% of the Executive Committee and UK retail colleagues at Work Levels 1–5 having the potential to earn upper quartile reward (2.272L).  A crazed starburst of damage emerges - A Little Better Everyday.  Rather than, as in the past, repairing the damage by some combination of tax increases and public spending - we are being prescribed cuts, cuts, cuts.  Fracturing is checked in plain sight.  Behind the twisted rhetoric of a hardworking majority oppressed by a welfare-mad government, a modern version of the medieval world has been constructed, one where the real poor are taxed more heavily than the rich (The Bagging Area).  This was a strong performance in a deflationary retail market and against a background of intense competition.

There is a cynical view which says that as long as the majority of the population feel they’re doing all right, a democratically elected government is safe to squeeze the poor and pamper the rich.  Every Little Helps.  If those who attempt to interpret the world do so only through the prism of professional thinkers, and ignore the persistence of myth in everyday thought and speech, the interpretations will be deficient. There is a shedding of skin and a caging of waste.  Three scenarios have been modelled, considered severe but plausible, that encompass these identified risks. None of these scenarios individually threaten the viability of the Company, therefore the compound impact of these scenarios has been evaluated as the most severe stress scenario.  Insofar as bandits have a ‘programme’, it is the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things ‘as it should be’ (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past).  Various contra-indicators point the way.