Writing for life

"Working it" column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 15/10/2007

Gravity issues – that’s what they called them.

This was back in deepest, darkest 1996, when I was working with Transco, the UK infrastructure and pipeline utility that was part of the former British Gas. In an effort to boost morale, promote team-building and foster innovation (sound familiar?) they’d decided to send all employees on an American style “soft skills” training programme called “You make the difference”. It was all very touchy feely, group huggy kind of stuff. Still, quite a lot of it made sense – especially the message that every individual employee has a significant contribution to make.

But I digress. I was talking about gravity issues.

Gravity issues are things that happen that we have absolutely no control or influence over. We can’t do anything about gravity – it’s just there. We learn to live with it, we work around it… we accept it. In short, unless we’re about to head over Niagara Falls in an oak barrel, or dive head first out of an aeroplane, we tend not to worry about it.

There are lots of things in life that we have absolutely no control over – and yet we still fret and worry about them constantly. Things like traffic, for example… or the fact that our six year old twins are going to fight at some point during the day. We can’t change these things – but we can control the way we react to them.

The decision by American biotechnology giant Amgen to “indefinitely postpone” its massive investment in a new plant at Carrigtwohill, Co. Cork, is an example of a gravity issue. For all the political posturing, finger pointing and point scoring that’s been going on since the decision was announced, the simple fact is that, as the IDA was quick to point out, Amgen’s decision wasn’t based on local economic conditions. It wasn’t based on anything remotely connected to Carrigtwohill, Cork or even the entire island of Ireland.

The decision came about through a review of their global business operation in response to commercial pressures from outside our borders. These pressures were spawned by warnings issued by America’s omnipotent regulatory body the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relating to certain Amgen products. That’s the long and the short of it.

When you’re dealing with big multinationals, who, lets face it, bring an awful lot to the Irish economy, you have to accept that these corporations are influenced by myriad commercial concerns that are simply outside of the remit of Irish state agencies and government departments. All we can do is make the environment here as conducive as possible to attracting international business, advertise that fact as widely as we can, and then make it easy for them to operate here. After that, the commercial decisions are theirs and theirs alone to make.

Instead of whining about Amgen’s decision to pull out of the deal in Carrigtwohill, or pining about what might have been, we need to accept it as a gravity issue and move on.

The conditions that originally attracted Amgen to Carrigtwohill in the first place presumably still hold true. Rather than getting embroiled in a tit-for-tat spat about whose fault it all is, surely what the various stakeholders should now be doing is trying to attract other businesses in to take Amgen’s place.