The concept of a Head Office is something that has slipped quietly into our psyche and acceptance of the modern day way of doing things. To speak from my own experience, the current trend is to discourage physical contact whenever possible and carry out business wherever you happen to be on the mobile phone, ipad and laptop that are glued to your side 24/7. No doubt some bod in Tesco’s think tank is currently exploring the pro’s and con’s of introducing meeting rooms into their stores. Somewhere to jump on a conference call while picking up the weekly quota of frozen peas and Prosecco.
What about the 89% of UK businesses that employ less than 10 people?
It’s perhaps a bit of a revelation to discover that Britain has become a nation of micro businesses. The presence of foreign owned corporations making the majority of everyday stuff that we mistakenly may have considered quintessentially British, has masked what seems to be a move backwards. Should there be a mass exodus of foreign owned manufacturers, then we could find ourselves back in 1914 when we entered a war importing 75% of the stuff we needed to live and running the gauntlet of negative foreign policy.