WHAT SORT OF WORLD HAVE YOU CREATED FOR ME GRANDAD?

I spend a lot of time nowadays thinking about the future of our grandchildren and great nieces. This is not our world - it’s theirs and we are just looking after it for them for now .

What a bloody awful job we’re mostly doing. Brexit – crash there goes all the china! Trump being voted into office - ouch that’s our dog and cat both run over – fake road kill! The Italians veering to the right – Mussolini tortellini!

We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We’re the caretakers of a wonderful world  who’ve gone to sleep, woken up woozily and then in a panic made a series of sloppy mistakes so serious that we’re going to go hoarse saying “sorry”.

We’ve created our world of walls that doesn’t listen enough (cover your ears darlings …. la-la-la-la ‘can’t hear you!’) is selfish, unjust and grumbly. Theirs is better. Luckily the youth we’ve let down so badly are here to rescue us.

Airbnb and Uber demonstrate the asset-sharing concept  but are grown so big the values which inspired them have drowned in dollars. Expect there to be new and more socially sensitive versions of ‘sharing’ to emerge. In Copenhagen public transport and car hire with businesses like “Let’s-Go” and “Car2Go” are so easy and cheap (around 30p a km) that no one wants to own a car.

It’s really very simple – friends share their possessions and our next generations will be much friendlier than we ever were.

Pendulums swing back so expect a resurgence of libraries in a modernised form (not those grim council-run places) communal centres of shared learning and inspiration.  Places where you can eat a simple meal, drink a glass of wine and quietly read for an hour in a comfy chair.

We are talking about a simpler less materialistic world with less emphasis on flashy possessions. Not good news for old fashioned retailers and superstores. But great news for foragers of food, fun and fashion. Minimalism sounds a bit too austere for what I have in mind - think Shaker-stylish rather than Puritan-shabby.

I see the arts as becoming more important because making art – poetry, pottery, painting or live performances are just so much fun. I foresee more people abandoning career ambition for a richer lifestyle. Denmark, the happiest country in the world, is happy not least because of its sense of social support, its freedom to make life choices and its culture of generosity.

One other thing will be people seeking is global experience. No longer is there or will there be an attitude of “my home is my castle” but rather “this world is my oyster”. So many 20 + year olds go to Athens, Istanbul or Barcelona for a weekend….less expensive than going to Leeds and more fun.

This will be their world. Why does it sound so much more fun and so simple? Because it will be.  Let’s applaud and help them get there.

THE WORLD OF THE NEW COULD BE EVEN MORE THRILLING

I’m not against big businesses. They’re full of people who are smart, civilized and charming. I like Google and Apple (who couldn’t?) I used to love the spirit Nike had in the period of their pre-21st-century glory. I love the confidence with which companies such as John Lewis, Heinz (now 3G) and BMW go about what they do.

I enjoy seeing challengers like Aldi disrupting the market and behaving small when they are actually the 90th biggest company in the world - quite a lot bigger than Tesco with twice as many stores in 18 countries. I ‘m thrilled by the narrative of British Airways and the problematic relaunch of Coca-Cola. But there’s something about big companies that’s beginning to worry me quite a lot. It’s that being big can make you a bully and turn you prematurely deaf.

Being big makes you think ‘There’s my way and then, of course, there’s my way.’ Most of all, being big makes you an enemy of marketing. The big decisions you make will be about cost and margins, about downsizing, consolidating and acquisitions. They should be about people and what they want and need. They should be about marketing but they won’t be. And when you get too big to focus on marketing, you’re going to die. Big, old companies often get trapped in their own legacy with an out-of-date business model and old fashioned products. They get uncomfortably stuck with a redundant overhead too expensive to write off yet dragging the minds of the company downwards and backwards. New businesses are about the future. They are about risk and about change. They are now and next. They are where innovation thrives. They are about learning. They are busy doing important things. Like visualising how the world might be in the future. Thinking radically and being inspired.. New businesses are lucky. They generally don’t have shareholders. They don’t have a lot of out-of-date plant and property they don’t need. They don’t have a huge workforce or a lot of bureaucracy. But what else don’t they have? They don’t have enough money to have much wriggle room. So they need to be very smart or lucky to survive. 

In a recent conversation between Professor Clay Christensen and Marc Andreessen (Silicon Valley entrepreneur) at Startup Grind Global 2016, Clay Christensen said there was capital everywhere looking for a home. Unfortunately return on investment was virtually zero overall and there was an astonishing $6 trillion in negative yielding bonds. So why isn’t more of this money being invested in start-ups? The success rate of start-ups is improving and starting from zero is recognised as a great place to set off from. The world of the new and disruptive is amazing. Consider. The biggest media company in the world is now Facebook, the biggest Hotelier is Airbnb, the biggest producers of films are India and Nigeria (Hollywood comes third.)

Excited? Well I think we should be.        

THE GRASS WAS GREENER YESTERDAY

Nick Robinson of the BBC Today programme discovered something that national treasure and hero Winston Churchill said:-
“We cannot aim at anything less than the union of Europe as a whole, and we look forward with confidence to when that Union will be achieved”

Looking back is seldom as rewarding as this. This week, for instance, I was at a stately home near Daventry called Fawsley Hall at an old friend’s birthday lunch. It was a cheerful and charming event. I sat opposite two young guys who’d been 6 and 9 when I’d first met them. They were reflecting on what they supposed was a better life before their own when our world was pure and simple and kids played in the street.

Yeah. When skylarks arose exultantly the whole time and butterflies danced on the corn as high as an elephant’s eye. I roundly disabused them saying life today was much better, that standards were higher and people were smarter and nicer.

They seemed rather surprised by my enthusiasm.

As I sat there I wondered how many people of my age and beyond feel. Because, you see, I don’t really identify with a lot of them, their thoughts and behaviour.

Between 55 and 75 men drink 12% more than other adult men.
Sexually transmitted diseases have doubled amongst 50 -90 year old in the past decade
The  average man in the South can expect to live to 82 ½
He’ll have spent 17 ½ years (longer if a senior civil servant) lounging about on cruises, getting drunk, having hip replacements and creative sex.
Voting SDP so long as his wife doesn’t find out

You’re right; many of our older citizens are a bit of disgrace.

Virtuously teetotal currently (because I’m writing a book) I‘ve been thinking about the world of marketing I used to occupy.

We are experiencing something of a revolution right now. By the way, beware when a marketing man talks about seismic shifts or revolutions - we all tend to exaggerate. But in this instance I think “revolution” is right … the old institutions are struggling to survive as new disruptive forces rewrite the rules - enterprises like Airbnb (biggest provider of bed nights in the world now - Intercontinental should be worried I guess). Uber and Deliveroo are setting the benchmark for change just as Amazon, Apple and Google have already done.

But it’s people who’re changing fastest….most of them. They work harder than ever before. They show more entrepreneurial spirit. They shop around promiscuously and concepts like brand loyalty are looking threadbare. They watch some of the greatest film ever produced from hundreds of different channels. They read more, sing more, talk more and have more friends with whom they’re in constant touch. They are much more serious about life, about values and about their community.

This is not the materialistic society that I grew up in.

This is the future and I applaud it.