MEMORIES MAKE MONEY AND SAVE LIVES

On Saturday a charity that I chair, responsible for raising funds to restore the oldest building in Brighton held its AGM. Professor Bruce Brown, pro Vice Chancellor of the University of Brighton spoke engagingly about the things that made Brighton special and its being a Super City of the future, according to an HSBC study, owing to its independence of spirit, an  ideal qualification for a thriving SME community.

But I was riveted by what Bruce said about the distant past, when few read and books were unusual, when buildings themselves were like “textbooks” – where pictures, sculptures and decorations all held great meaning and how old buildings, well restored and archived were “memory palaces”.  Google has its own value, of course. The internet allows us to find out how to make a bomb or deworm a cat but a memory palace it is not.

I am not nostalgic but the practical value of having people in a business who know where the bodies are buried and who know how to deal effectively with a crisis be it pandemic, flood or earthquake is immense. I’m not talking about spectators who, seeing a building collapse, are fondly reminded of Fred Dibnah – the TV steeplejack star and demolition expert of the 1990s. Practical memory means having an intuition so finely honed that it and not your brain instinctively helps you do the right thing when there’s no time to stop and think.

And we are placing perhaps too little value on memories and instincts seemingly wired  into an organisation which often determine how it behaves. It’s the expression “it’s in the woodwork” that determines how a Google, News International, BA or even political party behaves. Better to delve into the collective memory to understand it rather than try and brainwash it and hope it will change. Cultures don’t change that easily because of the collective memories that permeate them.

Having recently had a birthday and gloomily counting them forgive me if I reflect on the value of grey hairs. In Japan they give the wise, older executives “a seat by the window” so they can read their newspapers more easily but also because they are a constant resource of memories for others to use.

The current propensity to say in an age of change that the past is like an unwelcome anchor is wrong. We all need access to the past to avoid making the same mistakes and reinventing that same old wheel  which may be diverting to watch but is wasteful.

Memories matter. They inform the future. Ask someone older next time.

WHAT A WASTE...

Seamus Smyth is one of the brightest people I know. He used to work for Shell. Now he thinks a lot and is a kind of intellectual social entrepreneur. He also has very long hair which I miss in the deep thinkers of today who tend to favour baldness. He said this when I asked him what 2011 and beyond held in store:

“The mission to give people more of what they actually want and need, rather than what people make will intensify to a degree that we’ve never seen before as WASTE will become the world’s common enemy.”

I recalled seeing a piece in Fast Company about the iPad wars noting that as many as 80 tablet devices were debuting at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Seamus is right. Over in China, Taiwan or Japan factories employing thousands of people are working away, trying to keep busy and screaming at their sales forces to sell more. What they make is irrelevant. It’s sheer and utter madness.

The voice of marketing is being deafened by the sound of production making “stuff” – most of it not quite what people want. The God “growth” is what fills the minds of City analysts and the media. So Tesco must be trembling in shame for its appalling  1% yoy decline  for quarter 4 2010  whilst Sainsbury is a brilliant A* student because of its +3% growth. Please.

We are wasting a lot of things right now:
·    Resources - the intelligence to rein in on making the unsellable
·    Space - the unneeded buildings we could flatten and turn into parks
·    Our talent - the bright young minds that will remain unemployed and losing the will to think when we could be coaching them into being thoughtful citizens of the new world
·    Day to day waste - all manner of activities in big companies that use up time and money to no good effect (getting people at the coal face of any business to remove waste would save billions and  they would be savings not cuts)
·    Hubristic plans - expenditure on big and irrelevant capital projects – like the high speed train link. It takes 2 hours Euston to Liverpool by train. Who needs faster than that?

The penalty of the quest for economic growth is extravagance and waste. In a so-called age of austerity it’s a brilliant moment to reduce what you do that has no obvious beneficial effect and to spend a bit more time thinking.

Seamus is right. Waste is the common enemy.