This is a story about rivalry, hatred and petty revenge. It is also about Sir Richard Branson, or rather about images of the man. These images have been coming and going in odd places recently. Last week, Branson's face and wispy beard materialised onto the familiar picture of Che Guevara in the new ads for the Financial Times.
The effect strikes me as disturbing, though maybe that's the point. Yet far more disturbing is what happened to Branson in the Bond film Casino Royale.
In the movie, the Virgin boss appears as an extra, randomly skulking around an airport. But in the version shown to BA passengers, the airline has introduced its own special effect: Branson has vanished, while the Virgin logos on planes have been blurred so you can't recognise them. I phoned BA to find the reason for this censorship.
"We change things so they don't upset our customers," the young press officer said. And then, in response to my incredulous silence, he explained he had just given me "a jokey response".
It might be a joke, but it isn't funny. One could argue that the film improves without the gratuitous sight of the irritating entrepreneur, but that isn't the point.
The decision to eradicate Branson from the movie is one of the silliest, most revealing things BA has ever done. It makes the unfortunate incident last year, in which a staff member was told to remove her gold cross, look almost reasonable. At least the company was following a policy - even if the policy was dodgy and the application daft.
In editing out Branson, BA was following no policy. Instead, it is being led by a deep, undying hatred, from which petty and self-defeating acts naturally flow. It is 14 years since BA lost to Branson over the dirty tricks campaign. In continuing to nurse its hatred, BA is behaving like the divorced couples that waste energy scratching each other out of family pictures. People that do this are neglecting their children.
Organisations that do this sort of thing are neglecting their customers and shareholders. The decision to censor the film didn't come from the top: it was made by the head of in-flight entertainment. This makes it worse. It is a sign that anti-Branson feeling is so embedded in the culture that acts such as this are seen as normal. If BA were a person, you'd say its ego was sick and that psychiatric help was needed.
The story shows how lethal competition can be when it tips over into intense rivalry and hatred. Mostly, competition is a good thing. It is impersonal, and spurs on companies to do better.
Intense rivalry is a bad thing. It distorts judgment, eats up time, and leads you to do petty, stupid things. There is a fine line between healthy competition and unhealthy rivalry, and sensible companies need to tread carefully. At Procter & Gamble's beauty department, eager employees often call L'Oréal "the evil empire." Someone senior in P&G is attempting to keep a lid on it by sending a memo suggesting people tone it down a bit.
Pettiness is rampant in the media. Newspapers aren't very grown-up places at the best of times so the yah-boo-sucks culture comes naturally. Not so long ago, a newspaper whose circulation was rising decided to score some points from a newspaper whose circulation wasn't. It made a giant graph comparing the figures, put it on a billboard attached to a trailer and parked the trailer outside the entrance to the second paper. This was quite pathetic. In most organisations, the ugly feelings between competitors boil over when one rival takes another's staff. Even reasonable managers have a way of getting wildly angry when their best people leave to work for the rival. Never mind the fact that the job market is competitive and everyone has every right to jump ship, managers seem unable to control themselves.
The employee is shouted at, accused of disloyalty. They are sometimes marched off without even collecting their own things.
This is often justified as being necessary to protect assets. The truth is more complicated and is about rage and pettiness too. The right response is to find out why the person is leaving and try to ensure others stay. I can think of only one example in which hatred between rivals has led to something good, and that was following the bitter falling out at Disney between Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. In that battle, the final scenes were also played out on the movie screen.
However, the difference between Katzenberg and BA is that he didn't try to take Eisner out of a movie, he put him into one: the Disney boss inspired the brilliantly beastly character of Lord Farquaad in Shrek.
So here is the moral: if you can turn the spat into a cartoon character that earns you a fortune, fine. If not, tone down the hatred and hang on to your dignity.
