A TRUE STORY OF CREATIVITY

I was asked to talk to a group of small businesses in Lewes. If you haven’t been to Lewes go there. It’s perched on a hill which runs down to the River Ouse, the fragrant scent  of Harvey’s the Brewery suffuses the place with its antique shops and organic cafes. Once upon a time Oxford was like this, reflective and inward looking. At night Lewes quietens as its inhabitants go indoors to pubs and dining rooms and talk, drink and think. The architecture is Elizabethan in part, unlike its rowdy brother Brighton with its Regency look-at-me white stucco. Lewes is alive with a sense of rebellion, independence and talent. Home to Glyndebourne, musicians and craftsmen it’s one of those places that remind one why Britain is so extraordinarily rich and stable a country.

So there I was in the genial Con Club, sun shafting through the windows. As I started, my key theme being you should tell people about how good you are and be assertive - because you are your own salesforce, I reflected on the irony.  There I was an ex-Ad Man who’d worked on big budget commercials, talking about why marketing on a shoestring was so wonderful, a bit like a chef talking to hungry people about dieting.  Yet I learned so much from them and about their businesses and felt humbled as, following my advice they expressed themselves vividly, confidently and with passion about their products and services.

A carpenter who talked of his love of wood and his passion for working it, another saying he loved what he did, really understood it and had an absolute certainty of success, another who talked of the joy of transforming people they taught, another of the sheer pleasure of giving pleasure in her B&B (I want to stay there) and another who talked about photography with an appetite that’s rare and an ability to project magic - “at my best I do photographs that knock people’s socks  off.”  It was a morning of passion, insight, self-belief and colour. They all, when it was drawn from them loved what they did. Life was a formula balancing passion and pragmatism; a compromise between art, joy, a story to tell and paying the bills.
I learned  small is really beautiful. These were people who lived, breathed and spun threads of love around what they did. They used all their senses not just their left brain. From Pilates to theatre to arts to caring I heard great stories, people describing change as though it was fun and normal.

Respite from writing my book? Yes but also an education in the terror and the ecstasy of being your own person not an employee. I hope I boosted their sense of being special and helped them become a bit more marketing assertive. These were great storytellers when unleashed. And that‘s the best marketing tool of all.

Some of the slides from my presentation are included

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.