ANOTHER TOY STORY

Let me take you back in time. It’s 1979. The Walkman was the hot, new product. Apple launched their first personal computer: it was agreed it would never catch on. Radio-Control toys were all the rage and there was a large, ghastly rubberised spider which lurched towards you and could only be stopped by shooting it between the eyes which caused it to shriek, flash red eyes and retreat.

The name of this unfortunate toy was “Stop Boris!” (I’m afraid I was the author.)

In a week of Cummings and the more balanced and lethal critique from Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Welcome Trust I wondered whether that “Stop-Boris” time was near. Yet in the polls last week the Tory lead over Labour has slightly increased since the 2019 election. Boris is an electoral magician, totally Marmite, loved and loathed but 10% points more lovers than loathers.

And yet. And yet.

As time passes a few realities are setting in. We can’t carry on believing this is a war that we can win. We can’t just send the virus packing. There are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. We have a long way to go to omega before we run out of new mutants. Just suppose that this process of mutation carries on; just suppose that vaccines have to be developed and redeveloped; just suppose we are in this for say five more years or, worse, forever. Rhetoric won’t win and won’t help. Nor do those words “freedom” or “back to normal” make any sense.

We need to manage our lives, assess and take risks not avoid them. We need to live with viruses and work around them. At the moment we seem to think vaccination is king yet Britain the king of the vaccinations is still top of the infection league. We are Covid Island.

So what we know is that we know nothing. The data is contradictory, the models are fragile, the government uneasily veers from hurrah to boo-hoo. The Test and Trace App creating a  ping-demic seems a sledge hammer solution. As one pinged myself I wondered who and where I was at risk (I’d become a hermit – I seldom leave home) but I gather Bluetooth can work through walls so was it someone next door?

 Time to relax. Time to realise we can cope with disease, but it takes time and practical precautions.

What seems clear is we can’t blunder on ignoring the consequences of any of our behaviours. Climate change. Trolling on social media. Computer hacking. New viruses. A lot of tricky issues. If this pandemic does nothing else it’s forcing us to rethink everything.

The Future Laboratory have produced a paper called “Inter Covid Road Map” which considers this. I love their expression about the need for “retailainment” – retail theatre - and the need for brands to focus on sustainability and provenance. Technological developments of online meetings will soon make Zoom look like video in a world of streaming. A new concept, “neighbourhood nomads”, namely becoming real experts in your own locale will emerge.

McKinsey reckon we saw 5 years of digital development in the first 8 months of the pandemic – much more to come. Country is more exciting than cities (not sure about that). We are entering a post-growth era. Chaos in our new norm.

Back to Boris. He loves chaos and is self-confessedly chaotic. But is he right for now and next? I wonder if we shouldn’t be thinking about a National Government. 2021 -24 feels too important and tricky for one party and one maverick to cope with. 

DEJA BLOODY VU - WHAT'S NEW?

“So this is Summer
And what have you done
Another year of Covid
And a new one just begun” …

My apologies to the late John Lennon and Yoko Ono for bowdlerising their Christmas song protesting against the Vietnam war; yet another story of governments getting it wrong and where heavy handed might was neither right nor successful.

This coronavirus is nothing like the horrors of carpet bombing and the lunacy of war. We just need to adapt and get used to a new infected world. This pandemic in various forms will be with us forever. Napalm is not the answer. We are prone to get ill occasionally from flu, colds and much more serious ailments like pneumonia, malaria and norovirus. The more we get out and about the better the immunity we’ll build.

Staying at home isn’t the best prescription. 

For a few more weeks we‘ll still have limited restrictions. Get out (masked), lunch (distanced), travel (only if necessary), shop (are you sure?). Anyway shopping now looks like an increasingly rather muted affair. No Debenhams, Top Shop, Miss Selfridge and so on.  A blighted high street. 

Another high street gap appears as Gap are going exclusively online, John Lewis and M&S are closing many high street outlets. Online is king for these big retailers. 

But, wait a minute; not just the big ones. The corner shop has suddenly been reborn as a series of local delivery operators are being created. These deliver in minutes. And they’re  full time legitimate employees (none of your Deliveroo gig economy). In Brighton ‘Beeliver’ has started – wine, cigarettes, last minute grocery necessities or supper party ingredients – all delivered within the hour.

 A brand called Dija (Dija Vu?) is being heavily backed by investors to be a ‘unicorn’ billion-pound brand. The Guardian, as so often and rather ironically a trailblazer in detecting capitalist trends, recently wrote an article describing this as “democratising the right to laziness.” But it might be better seen as “revolutionising convenience”.  Tesco Express and Sainsbury Local are likely to be the biggest losers. Too slow. Too inconvenient. These new, disruptive convenience-delivery operators also make working from home even easier.

This is yet another example of enterprise unleashed by disaster. Covid has as many winners as losers. And those losers are often architects of their own demise losing their way in terms of stock, style, pricing, customer service. Their failure has been accelerated not created by Covid. 

Despite the dreary weather during June the football has cheered some as has Wimbledon. Yet as we watch a half-full Wembley – it looked pretty packed to me – perhaps the spectators were just fatter – I wonder how this reconciles with government guidelines. I think government wonders too. Still, come what may, with gritted teeth and with fingers crossed the shackles are being removed in a fortnight and then we’ll mix, mingle and have fun again. The government seems finally to have realised lockdowns don’t work – look at Scotland.

Chances are some will party to stay up with the others but many will find their instincts are to stay at home and watch Netflix. Meanwhile BBC and ITV are looking like the Woolworths of broadcasting whilst the streaming services dazzle and shine.

One thing we’re learning is that if you aren’t good enough you are going to struggle to survive in this new cruel world.

Talking of ‘cruel worlds’, watch “Princess Weiyoung” on Netflix and you’ll agree Eastenders and the rest are lost causes. 

Chinese TV like Chinese food is delicious. As soon as you’ve finished watching one series you’ll want another.

LET YOUR PEOPLE GO

Independence is in the air, you can smell the whiff of recession and of rebirth from Padua to Perth. There’s a restless mood of change. Crimea which represents just 5% of the Ukraine has gone home to mother Russia. Scotland is putting its gouty toe into the water of independence and dreaming of “Braveheart” and of Mel Gibson roaring “freedom”.

Just recently I’ve started taking the SNP quite seriously. This is partly because of the lacklustre campaign by the “No” team.  Although to be fair they do have a problem or two. The Tories amongst them know that independence for Scotland means virtually the end of the Socialist party so a large part of their minds would love it to happen. And a whole bunch of ‘schadenfreuders’ in England have a playground attitude of “let them go and see what happens…they’ll be sorry.”
It gets worse…the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Newcastle said compellingly this week that a “yes” vote would be fantastic for them with a migration of business from Scotland south.

But it isn’t any of that that interests me so much as a sense of curiosity as to whether the Scots as a whole, regardless of economic issues, would actually be happier being independent. Too small to survive I hear. Hmm. They’d be bigger than Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Luxembourg who are respectively number 1, 8, 5 and 10 in the “Happiest Nation Index” (the UK, by the way, is 16th).

And who ambitious wants either the been-there-seen-that status quo or the sense of being a small fish in a rather large and unfriendly pond?

Wouldn’t Wales and  Cornwall prefer to be independent – actually come to that wouldn’t London prefer it too – an independent London would be like Singapore only much, much more powerful? The biggest, richest glittery city in the world.

And I see now that Venice is at it, running a poll of ½ million people in the Veneto region of Italy,  voting to secede from the corruption of Rome and the hopeless poverty of the south of the country.

Then there’s Catalonia, Brittany and so it goes on. So it’s better to be independent and it’s better to be small is it? This seems to be the mood. Small is beautiful. Welcome back the apostle of the doctrine…

And that’s why there were 300,000 start-ups in the UK last year and already this year a further 120,000.

As regards size, business units of around 150 seem to be the perfect size. A size where there’s spirit, obsession and energy. This is where creativity seems to peak. Forget about scaling a business; a lot of business thinkers are beginning to wonder if big and bureaucratic isn’t just beastly and unwieldy.

Imagine countries with a population of 5m. and businesses of 150 employees? Maybe this really is the future rather than corporations of thousands or Shanghai’s of 20 million.

This …. and, of course, that bit of freedom.

IT'S TIME TO BE INCREDIBLY AMBITIOUS

and go for it

What brought this on?

Here I am in lazy Brighton in the best weather we’ve had for ages. The birds are singing, the deck chairs are out and the roses are exploding symphonically into bloom. Maybe it’s the glorious Aegean blue skies early in the morning or maybe it’s the people I’m meeting and what they are saying that’s provoked it but I think it’s time for us all to wake up.

Let’s start with the Brighton Festival.

A huge success in 2010, aiming for better things in 2011, the number of Friends hugely increased and with Aung San Suu Kyi as guest director in the year that seems to mark the nadir for dictators. Magic. “We can really take on Edinburgh now,“ I said. No, I was told, this is little Brighton, little sister of London… Edinburgh has the clout, the history and the gravitas. And the Scottish B&Bs and the weather and the distance and the smugness.  Go for it Brighton. What’s wrong with you?

Emily Baker. Young. Singer. Songwriter. She appeared at an event called “Riding the Wave” organised by the local Chamber of Commerce. I spoke. She sang. We are bound together by virtual greasepaint. Will she make it? Conventional wisdom says she’ll struggle because she’s probably too good musically (eh?) and this is so crowded a field. But life is crowded and as BWW said “the fast always eat the slow.” So be fast Emily. Be newsy. Be ambitious, girl. I’m backing you to win.

Jess Wood. Designer. Very young. Running her own business. Just done a pack design job for Nestle. Great presence. Good work. Needs to rocket to a new level by being more daring, mould breaking and ambitious.  Be fast Jess. Dazzle us with your design-sprinting. I’m backing her too.

And Sussex CCC and Brighton and Hove Albion FC and the Olympics. Self- confident. Classy. Winners.
It’s time for the sceptics, cynics and naysayers to bow out or be ejected. It’s May 2011 and I want anyone reading this to repeat after me:

“Let’s be much more ambitious and take more risks. We have nothing to lose but our torpor”

….or our jobs?  In the case of the gloriously self-employed Emily and Jess not even that. And, anway, if that’s the price of renouncing boredom and despair, so be it.

Vote for ambition. Vote for innovation. Vote for freedom.