AGE SHALL NOT WITHER....

On Sunday summer kicked off and we had one of those balmy bumble-bee-buzzing days. As I sat on our balcony catching the whiff of burning BBQ meat I began to drift off in that I’m- floating-away-like-a-balloon way. My last cogent thought was it would be poor form if our world leaders were caught doing this. We expect them to be at it thinking and strategizing 24/7/365. As I slept I imagined George Osborne (45) was in the Treasury surrounded by economists plotting our future.

But in America come November the candidates for the world’s top job will be two months shy of 70, 70 ½ and (if you include Bernie Sanders) 75. So chances are they’ll be snoozing quite a lot. As will Putin (64) - he sleeps in late apparently. Age derided by some - a client of mine described Jack Welch as an “old fossil” (81) doesn’t seem to have damaged Warren Buffett (86) too much.

Anyway maybe snoozing lightly and thinking about stuff is a good way of sorting out complex thoughts. Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman (82) whose award was for his studies of the human-mind, believes our just sub-conscious is operating at its best when left alone to do its work. (My best work is often done when I’m asleep.)

But something strange is happening in America. Not only are the candidates rather odd as well as old in a country where glamour is one of the most highly rated qualities - hence the adulation of JFK. They have Trump intent on “winning bigly” and Hillary snatching defeat from victory’s jaws and Bernie - think intellectual Corbyn (67) -  who has grabbed the imagination of youth by things like:
“If a financial institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist”

But given that age isn’t an obstacle or not the obstacle that it once seemed why, oh why didn’t Josiah Bartlett stand (aka Martin Sheen (75) of “West Wing”)?

Maybe we’ve just got the age thing wrong - wisdom is one of the greatest under-used assets. And wisdom increases with the perspective of age for some whilst the ability to create is undimmed.  Roger Daltrey, (72) co-founder of the Who still has “magic in his eyes” and still performs so long as he thinks he’s “got it”. So do the Stones (Jagger will be 73 in November) and so does Bob Dylan (75) and Leonard Cohen (82).

Maybe, just maybe all these old fossils have something to offer that would prevent the hyper-active get things moving at all costs.

We need our Vardy’s (29) up front and doing battle but we also need Claudio Ranieri (65) - the Leicester City Manager - managing the affairs of state, guiding and inspiring their young talent.

 As he says:

 "I am happy when our fans are happy, when our players are happy and our chairman is on the moon."

(All ages shown are as of November 2016 - US Election month)

WHAT'S THE STORY?

Storytelling is on the lips of people in big business right now. I keep on coming across self- styled professional corporate storytellers and hearing about storytelling courses. Makes a change from my childhood when I got into trouble for telling stories. Nowadays you don’t get to the top unless you are a storyteller - this goes beyond advertising and branding - this is the narrative that drives the strategy.

And you can see why because we are living in a world so complex and unpredictable where for instance this week it was discovered that sawfish were commonly having virgin births. Slightly less extraordinary than one thought when the experts suggest species will go to extraordinary ends to survive. And sex is a primitive way of achieving that end.

Yuval Noah Harari has written a book called “Sapiens: a brief history of humankind”. In it he explores the reason why Homo Sapiens has been so successful. Part of the reason is the exotic and descriptive language that our species started to develop.  It was beyond nouns, verbs and rational specifics. We traded in speculation, gossip, abstract and the unknown. Homo Sapiens, he suggests in short, made it because we could imagine the future, tell stories and thereby invent things.

I was talking first to a senior executive recently who lamented the inability of his key guys to inspire people when going through their sales pitch which always seemed to become a rather left brained selling proposition-based event. Tell them I said, to get their clients to imagine a future transformed by the product or service the idea they were selling. Take the John Lennon route:

“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try”…

And then to an entrepreneur who had a product idea imported from Asia which was priced awkwardly (sorry, that’s code for “too expensive”.) The solution I suggested would lie in packaging and marketing magic whereby the intrinsic virtues of the idea could be romanced, enhanced and increased in value. In other words it needed a story to be built around it.

Why are Game of Thrones, House of Cards and the X-Men film series such compulsive viewing for so many? How have Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Stieg Larsen and Terry Pratchett storytelling defined our view of written stories over the past two decades. The popularity of these and longer form TV series and film legends like Star Wars and Star Trek have happened because they are great primal stories involving exploration, fear, ambition and love but most of all because they carve out new worlds and new possibilities.
We’ve had a week where the Iron Throne of FIFA has been vacated and we face a future of a footballing Arab Spring…write the next part of this story but bear in mind it’s going to get very nasty. Stories like these will be spoken of long into the future.

Our lives are rich in stories. That’s why humanity got to be so smart (and sometimes so crooked.)

SPLENDID ISOLATION

Presumably this shows why the debate in Brussels was so important….incidentally Paris came 24th
 The top twenty financial centres in the latest index (GFCI 10) which was published in September 2011 are:

	GFCI 10 Rank	GFCI 10 Rating	GFCI 9 Rank	GFCI 9 Rating	Change in Rank	Change in Rating
London	1	774	1	775	-	-1
New York	2	773	2	769	-	+4
Hong Kong	3	770	3	759	-	+11
Singapore	4	735	4	722	-	+13
Shanghai	5	724	5	694	-	+30
Tokyo	6	695	5	694	+1	+1
Chicago	7	692	7	673	-	+19
Zurich	8	686	8	665	-	+21
San Francisco	9	681	13	655	-4	+26
Toronto	10	680	10	658	-	+22
Seoul	11	679	16	651	-5	+28
Boston	12	678	12	656	-	+22
Geneva	13	672	9	659	+4	+13
Washington DC	14	670	17	650	-3	+20
Sydney	15	669	10	658	+5	+11
Frankfurt	16	667	14	654	+2	+13
Vancouver	17	661	22	626	-5	+35
Melbourne	18	656	24	621	-6	+35
Beijing	19	655	17	650	+2	+5
Montreal	20	652	26	615	-6	+37

HOW SPLENDID IS ISOLATION?

We all get a warm feeling being elected to a club or being picked to play in a cricket or football team. It’s good being wanted. Winning the struggle to get a good job because they prefer you to the other guys or quite simply being a popular person matters.

Don’t be embarrassed.

We all want to be liked.

So what happened in Brussels last week was very uncomfortable. We were cast out. Like Judas. We were the lonely 1 out of 27 - although I do wish that David Cameron had swaggered more instead of looking apologetic and sorry for himself. He needed to look as though he was right and they were wrong which for month after month they have been.

Trouble is it keeps on happening to us. A few months ago it was FIFA kicking dust in our face with Sebb Blatter asserting his corrupt right to rule and now this.

But the 5th biggest economy in the world is Germany, followed at joint 6th by the UK and trailed by France at 9th and Italy at 10th. Yes we are that important.

So the real tragedy here is for the EU who, in not wooing and, yes, making concessions to the UK, the second biggest economy in greater Europe, and thereby persuading us  to play a big front of stage part in solving the Euro-crisis, has now almost certainly led to the crash of their doomed currency. Especially as France who seemed pretty pleased about (as they saw it) seeing off Britain, are rumoured to be likely to lose their triple “A” credit rating this week.

It’s important to realise that Europe contrived to exclude us not vice versa.

You will gather I am not an entire fan of France but to be fair their President has just four more months before elections that look likely to unseat him and he’s tried to play the “see how I beat Britain” card as a desperate political stratagem.

But it still feels lonely and rancorous for us today. It’s not nice being blamed and being told, as Paddy Ashdown did, that forty years of foreign policy had gone down the plughole in a single night and being told off by the Lithuanian Prime Minister.

But how isolated will we be in the end?

The last words on that go to Terry Smith CEO of Tullett Prebon the broker…
“…as isolated as somebody who refused to join the Titanic just before it sailed”.

"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.