Gold, and Gold Plated

Something about performance under pressure.

It may not be easy to spot the difference between gold and gold plate at a distance or on first encounter, but it doesn’t take us long to tell the difference. Gold has heft that gold plating cannot fake. You know the moment you pick it up. Sometimes, gold plate can look better than the real thing; Shinier, brighter, and more extravagant, produced to align with what people think gold should look like. Real gold, that’s a perennial store of value, can appear dull by comparison.

It’s not just appearance, of course. Apart from the weight test, gold plating fails first at points of repeated contact, and delaminates when it’s stressed. It suffers in unfriendly environments, whether that’s sulphur in the air or salt from our skin creating that telltale green black corruption that betrays its true form. Gold plating fails at boundaries, precisely at the point where systems and friction increase. Real gold can be hammered impossibly thin, and I still remember the wonder at seeing gold leaf being produced when I ran a business for which it was part of the process. Real gold can be reworked endlessly and melted and recast without degrading. Once gold plate is compromised, it is difficult to repair and often needs more substance added to it. Building layers adds cost, but not function.

The physics of gold versus gold-plating maps unnervingly well onto our organisational realities. We spend around $2 trillion a year on marketing and PR, and another $70 billion on leadership training, and whilst these functions have an essential core, they have increasingly been subject to the gold-plating brigade. When our PR budgets exceed R&D budgets, the gold-plated nature of delivery becomes clear. The same is true for our leadership training, when we know that most of what is learned is forgotten within six weeks, as the dominant culture erodes what has been learned. For every solid gold organisation or leader, we have hundreds of thinly plated facsimiles.

The gold, of course, is to be found in people and culture, capabilities and collaboration. Like gold, it can often be less shiny than its plated counterpart, but similarly can be remoulded and will stand the pressures our changing world brings.

It feels particularly real to me right now, as I watch what is happening to the BBC and consider my family’s experience with the NHS. At their core, both are pure gold. Perhaps that’s why they are both so attractive to the extractive economy, as they are subjected to the predations of profit media and gold-plated consultancies.

The energy that drives them sits beyond the place that money can corrupt. The beauty of gold, unlike gold plate, is that it cannot be corrupted. They are the gold in our society. They are precious, and we need to protect them. In the end, though, if they do fall prey to the extractive economy, the gold in them will inevitably go elsewhere, and we need to be ready to provide a safe haven.

What disturbs me most is that when we can all tell the difference between solid gold and gold-plated in the organisations and institutions we work for, why do we continue to put up with it when the flaws in their performance affect all of us?

Because, as my grandma used to say, and recent experience proves, you can gold plate a turd, but all you end up with is a shiny turd.