SO WHAT'S NEXT?

The answer is no one has any idea. What’s worse no one even has a plan. It’s tempting to look into the future and write an Aldous Huxley dystopian vision of the world to come. It’s equally tempting to look at the centenary anniversary of the Somme and say “here we go again” or to say “this summer is like Britain wet and useless” like the England football team - “we are just a bunch of losers.”

There are certain realities, however, in our lives:

• Life will go on. The shock and dismay will end.
• Human resourcefulness always get us to good places…the EU is not the only answer.
• The time for analysis and philosophising is over.
• We live in a very fast moving world so making things happen fast is critical. Remember that line from the 1981 TV series Hill Street Blues? “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us”
• Or what ex-boss of GE Jack said:-

James Ashford, a Jack-the-lad online guru, described his son’s school sports day. An Intimidating experience for a six year old especially having to do the “Egg and Spoon Race”.

Watching previous races he realised all the kids spent a lot of time looking left and right to see how their friends were getting on…chaos…collaborative mediocrity. So James told his son…”Ignore the others look at me on the finishing line and run towards me.” It worked.

Great advice… stop worrying about what the world or anyone else thinks (by the way a lot of them think we are barmy, to be pitied or on the verge of crisis) decide what you want to achieve and go for it.  The greatest opportunity of our lives may lie in the fact that all around people are looking at each other wondering what to do next. This is a time when MBAs, PHDs and cleverness is a positive disadvantage.  Eat a plate of steak tartare, have a big Jack Daniels, light a cheroot, play the theme music of the “Magnificent Seven” or “The Great Escape” very, very loudly and go and kick ass.

Well you get the idea anyway.

This is a period as interesting as the 1980s when after the first shock of Thatcherism some realised it might be working; when the “Big-Bang” financial deregulation in 1983 turned gentlemen stockbrokers into pirates.  We may be entering a heady period of “lawlessness” where we behave as though those imaginary (mostly imaginary) shackles of EU bureaucracy are removed and we start to push the boundaries back and vigorously compete.

We can behave like that or, of course, we can mourn the passing of the most civilised half decade in the history of the world.

Well, we have no choice as enterprising people … do we?

And the final thing that’s clear is we must treat the politicians as contemptuously as they’ve treated us.

Ignore them and get on with it. You take control - not them - because they don’t get it.

"EXCUSE ME, AREN'T YOU A PRIEST?"

Such a question being addressed to me in the street by a stranger would not be worth commenting on were it not about the fifth time it’s happened to me this year. It has not so much ruffled my agnostic feathers as made me ponder deeply on perception – the magic tool of the marketer.

And talking of magic here’s what David Berglas, Former President of the Magic Circle, said on talking about Harry Houdini: “It’s not the trick, it’s the presentation that counts.” Not that Harry wasn’t a genius …no, but he was an especially brilliant actor.

Change can impact on perception. The weather has hit my perception of life. On Saturday when I awoke in Brighton which had just undergone unusually brutal Arctic weather to find all the snow melted I had this weird feeling that Christmas had just come and gone.

WikiLeaks has changed a few perceptions too – the Americans are good guys – a bit on the naïve side but nice and the Russians are rascals. Rascals because a Spaniard said so, said it was run by the Mafia – have you noticed how this opinion has in a flash become established fact?

And FIFA. England’s derisory vote has brought about a sphincter tightening sense of national isolationism not experienced since the Suez crisis. We are a bit like Millwall Football Club and their battle cry “nobody likes us and we don’t care”.

It’s not that they don’t like us just that they don’t rate us…little England v. Big New World Russia ….the past v. the future… Cameron v. Putin (even an absent Putin)….a huge deficit v. loadsamoney. A man from Mars would have chosen Russia purely on commercial grounds. Our perception of ourselves is awry.

Back to our priest – and who wouldn’t have wanted to be one if they could have become a bishop with a great hat like that? There was something curiously exciting to have been taken for something I was not. I left this encounter preening my feathers, as it were, and feeling remarkably cheerful. Looking back at this, a rich news week I thought “we just don’t do boring around here any more do we?”

At least that’s my perception.

THE POWER OF TEAMWORK

“They think it’s all over. It is now”…..
I refer of course to the myth about the power of individual talent, forever blown by the England Football Team with their so-called crack individuals proving they are a crap team.
You don’t need to be a footballer or even a sportsman to know there are two formulae demonstrating the multiplying impact of teamwork and the reductive effect of its absence:-
5 + 6 = 14

and

5 + 6 = 7

England enacted the latter and Germany the former; that simple.
To work and the world of the corporation.
In the offices of Britain and the global corporations of the world the myth of the hero is tarnished and dying. The quest is to build teams NOT of the greatest individual talent but of the greatest team impact.
No more shall we have or accept teams where to quote Alan Hansen “our defenders behaved as though they’d never met each other before”.
The HR director who described herself as “a casting director” got it right.
It’s time to create teams that know, like and work for each other in all walks of life.