Vale good friend

A good friend has passed away in London after a brave battle with cancer.

Joe and I got to know each other nearly 20 years ago when he started to help me on one of the more challenging projects I ever worked on.  We were ‘crunching the numbers’ for a privatisation process that (arguably) worked better than almost any other such enterprise.   We were tasked with giving decision makers a sense of what would happen to tariffs as a result of a series of decisions that were turning an entire industry on its head. 

The players in that industry were understandably hostile.  And they were the people Joe and I needed to extract numbers from in order to do our work.  They were not above withholding data - and then being fiercely critical of the analysis that was produced.  Twenty years has not dimmed the memory of who cooperated … and who was an a**hole.  Twenty years has not dimmed the memory of who, on our side of the fence, was supportive and who sought to position themselves for the fallout that might follow from ‘getting it wrong’.

Joe and I were a team.  He was the relentlessly cheerful one – who was always ready to ring the guy who had lied to us yesterday to ‘get some better numbers’.  I was the analyst who sought to structure the analysis such that the questions we were being asked could be informed.

‘Informed’ not answered!  I have spent a fair part of my professional life preparing spreadsheets forecasting future cash flows.  Such things appear enticingly precise, but what any decent analyst knows is just how easy it is to make discounted cash flow analysis tell you anything you want it to.

Anyway – working with Joe was a pleasure. 

I have come to see, over time, that my whole life can be read as a series of collaborations.  On my own I’ve achieved little of lasting significance.  Where I have made a difference, it has been because I’ve found a way of working with someone else to do things together that we could not have achieved on our own.
Thank you Joe … and Godspeed …