But it does not help the innocent victim of the collapse at all. There might even be some short term satisfaction in seeing those to blame suffer too, somehow. That is all very well for us Christians, but what about those who find it hard to trust God and do not know Him to be a loving Father? Those affected may not have the grace and power of the Spirit to be able to forgive and to trust God but they can avoid a downward spiral of blame and resentment. That does not mean we do not plan for the future - He has given us brains and wisdom and expects us to use them! Praying for daily bread might include asking for wisdom to plan well today for next year. So we ask for today and refuse to worry about tomorrow. We refuse to be anxious because we know His nature is love (1 John 4:16). That does not mean God will give what we want but it does reorient us to look to Him not to mere human provision. In Matthew 6:25-34 Jesus teaches we do not have to be anxious. We pray “Give us this day our daily bread” and expect Him to provide for us today.
But does the Bible have any wisdom for us in this sort of situation?Īs Christians, we put our trust in God not an employer or a company or anything else. If the Government had been more cautious and not continued the contracts and placing new ones, that in itself would have prompted a collapse when it might have been avoided. Employee directors would probably not have seen it coming either and might have urged a more cautious approach which might actually have made the collapse more likely. They were confident they would do what they had done before - trade out of trouble. The history of many similar situations suggests that the bosses could not see it coming until the banks refused to lend more money. But the funny thing is that looking forward we have all sorts of ideas about what might happen - the simple truth is that few of them will happen! Looking back we can plot the course of history. It is indeed easy to be wise after the event. The Government should have known it was coming and stopped placing contracts. There should have been employees’ representatives on the Board. The bosses should have known and been honest. Many politicians and commentators are asking “What could have been done to avoid this?” And in workplaces, pubs, homes and wherever people meet many are asking “Who is to blame?” and answering the question forcefully. Many small business owners will lose their livelihood and sometimes their homes, with all the strain and stress that will place on their families and relationships. Sub contractors, however, do know they will lose out on payment for past work and many fear following Carillion into liquidation. Many staff do not currently know if they will be paid for work they do following the appointment of liquidators. but a prominent sight from the ring road). Now there is an air of gloom over the head office (in Salop St. Carillion was by far the largest business based in Wolverhampton and employed 43,000 people worldwide - 20,000 in the UK. I love the reference to the yacht as a “floating Winnebago upholstered in beige vinyl.It is easy to be wise after the event, as the saying goes. It wasn’t clear at all that we were waiting for a new class of device, with a new approach, that would transform the mobile internet from a segment of telco revenue into a near-universal experience that would become the main part of the internet itself. It felt like we were making steady progress.
As a professor at university once told me, ‘people in the ‘Middle Ages’ didn’t know they were living in the ‘Middle Ages’’. But the interesting thing, looking back, is that before the iPhone, it didn’t really feel like we were desperately in need of some catalytic event. Today, one can date ‘mobile’ to before iPhone and after iPhone. But it took until 2005 for the first 3G phones that weren’t bricks to arrive on the European market, and until 2007, of course, for data services deployed on that spectrum to start become interesting. A large part of the reasoning for those prices was the promise of data services to be delivered over that spectrum. I’ve been going since 2001, on and off, when it was in (cold, rainy) Cannes and a tenth of the size – last year there were 85,000 people.Ģ001 was a year after the European auctions of 3G spectrum, when mobile operators, right at the top of both an internet bubble and a mobile bubble, spent €110bn in a few months, and then spent years nursing the hangover. This evening I’m flying towards Barcelona for this year’s MWC, the main annual mobile industry conference. This post by Benedict Evans brought back many memories, of bygone devices, unexpected disruption, and of the GMS Congress in Cannes, which I attended a few times with Microsoft in the early 2000s:
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