The new head of Tesco in the UK merely invites cynicism when he talks about love

I FIXED my gaze on Niraj’s red shirt, not daring to meet his dark eyes.

“Do you love me?” I asked.

He put the Vanish stain remover into a plastic bag, acting as if I hadn’t said anything.

After a pause he enquired: “Do you have a Clubcard?”

I said no, I didn’t have a Clubcard, and repeated my question, this time looking at him straight on.

“Do you love me?”

A look of worry crossed his face. “Excuse me?” he asked.

I told him I was following up on something his boss had said. Richard Brasher, the new head of Tesco in the UK, had just been quoted in the London Timessaying: "What I want to do is embrace the staff, love the staff, so that they in turn will love the customers."

What I wanted to know was how Niraj felt about Brasher’s embraces and about passing them on to me. But he shook his head uncomprehendingly and looked at the queue forming behind me. I said I was sorry if I had embarrassed him, took my shopping and went home.

Later, I ventured out again to increase my statistical sample. This time I accosted a young man putting food on to shelves. I asked if he knew that his boss had promised to love him so that he could love me. Richard Brasher, I repeated. He shook his head and said doubtfully he didn’t think that he had any of that in stock. So I asked where the Coco Pops were, and this time he obliged with alacrity.

So in this corner of London, they aren’t feeling the love, and they aren’t passing it on either. This may simply be because Tesco has 294,000 employees, which is quite a lot of loving and embracing to get through, and maybe Brasher will get to Niraj and his colleagues if they are patient.

In the meantime they seem to be getting on fine without his love. I don’t go to Tesco often because I’m trying to support the Kurdish corner shop opposite that is being slowly killed by the supermarket group.

When I do go, Tesco’s staff are perfectly civil and are good at opening another till whenever a queue forms. They do what their customers want, which isn’t love, but speed.

Indeed, customers want so little love from supermarket staff that they seem increasingly to favour automatic checkouts, which are as unloving as it gets.

However, Brasher isn’t breaking new ground in insisting that his staff love customers.

In 2003 Jimmy Lee, a vice-chairman of JP Morgan, wrote to his underlings in corporate finance and ordered them to “take the time today to call a client and tell them you love them”.

Back then I wrote a column declaring this to be the high watermark of corporate idiocy. I decided that it was explicable – if not excusable – on the grounds that bankers were so high on vanity and money that they felt like God, and God loves everyone.

It’s more baffling in Tesco’s case, as grocers are high neither on vanity nor on money, and don’t feel like God. Though I suppose Tesco, like the deity, is omnipresent, so maybe there is a parallel there.

What Brasher should have said was that he wanted to show respect for his employees, so that they would show respect for customers. By talking incontinently about love, he invites cynicism and looks like a fool to his staff – or would do if many of them read the Times or had any idea who he was.

Just as he was banging on about love, Frans van Houten, the new head of Dutch electronics company Philips, was spouting nonsense of another sort. A few weeks ago I wrote disparagingly about an e-mail in which he described the company’s new management initiative as a “journey” called Accelerate.

Last Wednesday he was back at the cookie jar of management guff: “We are today announcing our new Philips behaviours: Eager to Win, Take Ownership and Team Up to Excel . . . Let’s adopt our new behaviours today and apply them to everything we do – and bring Philips to the next level together!”

Everything is depressing about this. Behaviour is a mass noun and has no plural – and Philips isn’t a computer game on which one advances from level to level. “Take Ownership”? If staff take ownership of their minds they may surely find themselves disinclined to adopt these three “behaviours”, which are bland cliches that don’t suggest how one should behave on any given occasion.

And so I’m wondering: who would I rather have as a boss, Brasher or van Houten? It’s a close-run thing, but I’d rather the former. A crass approach to my heart is easier to ignore than a prolonged and crass campaign against my head.

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)