BAD BLOOD OR BLOODY SILLY?

I’ve been reading “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies of a Silicon Valley Start-Up” about a company that promised to become enormous. Founded in 2003 it raised $900 million from funders,and at its peak in 2013 was valued at $10 billion yet in 2018 was worth nothing. Such things have happened before – the South Sea Bubble 1711, the Florida Property Boom 1926, Enron 2007 – but this scandal had a particular frisson.

Its founder, a 19 year old college dropout called Elizabeth Holmes, modelled herself on Steve Jobs. She set out to create a method of testing blood by taking very small amounts extracted by a painless prick in the thumb. The test machines were intended to be compact like a large laptop. Her dream was eventually to transform diagnostic medicine by having these machines in homes. She had a dream.

She was clearly a charismatic sales person as the funders included Rupert Murdoch putting in $150 million; her board included Henry Kissinger and Fortune Magazine said: “With three former cabinet secretaries, two former senators, and retired military brass, it’s a board like no other.” 

The problem was the blood testing never worked properly and the machinery to do the tests was only ever in laboratory prototype form. Somehow Elizabeth managed to persuade a lot of smart people including Larry Ellison the founder and Chairman of Oracle that she was a genius and, like Jobs was going to change the world. She managed to get distribution of Theranos “blood-testing machines” into Walgreen and Safeway.

It’s not a very pretty story. Elizabeth and her CEO and lover (as it transpired) Sunny Balwani, ruled the company with a mediaeval level of terror. The place was full of ex-government heavyweight security guards. Key staff were fired on a regular basis for any minor offence like asking awkward questions and ex-employees were terrorised by the rottweiler law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. This was not a place to work however good the remuneration. It’s a story of self-delusion and a single woman’s ambition to achieve the seemingly impossible whatever it took and whoever was destroyed en route.
Or is it? Carreyrou’s book is a prosecution case and a comprehensive indictment but there’s something missing for me. I’m not convinced that Elizabeth was a fraudster. I think she had an idea, pursued it rigorously and by dint of her personality enrolled an unlikely bunch of eminent advisors who fell for her charisma and saw what they wanted to see – the next Steve Jobs and this time a woman. And their admiration drove her on to believe in the infallibility of her idea and herself.

She’s obviously a genius at creative communication and a salesperson who deserves better than being burnt at the stake of moral outrage. She had an idea that everyone wanted and she got everything right:  packaging, advertising and media coverage.

Only one thing was missing. A reliable product that actually worked.

And that was just bloody silly.

EXCUSE ME WHILE I DREAM

There are moments when you are so absorbed in something, be it sport or a film or a book, that you lose all sense of time, space and identity. You are, as it were lost in a dream or – to use that lovely old fashioned word – in a reverie.

Losing oneself happened to me at a new play, “Lizzie Siddal” at the Arcola. My goddaughter Emma West plays the lead so, of course, I’m biased and I was likely to be looking at her acting to see her technique, rather like watching a horse doing dressage. Hallo horse. Hallo footwork. But I got lost in the idea of the play, of the intelligent woman being absorbed by the power of Rossetti, only to be ultimately disillusioned as his passionate fire for her became a smouldering ember. As she observes, art in the end is about smudges on paper, just an illusion. Truth is not beauty… not as Keats meant it. Art like acting isn’t real. Emma West does not die. She goes home to a pizza and a glass of Chianti and an episode of "Game of Thrones” – she’s an actress.

The ability to live a part convincingly and to dream along with that performance may seem a far cry from the world of work yet even there I believe in the need to be able to visualise, to see what a scenario might play out like – not logically but emotionally too.

Our experience shows it’s easier to do something so long as people don’t get involved. Jack Welch of General Electric was desperate to eliminate the human interface in customer service. The problem with people he reckoned was they were erratic, subjective and unreliable.  And that’s precisely why we need to have unreasonable people dealing with unreasonable customers. That’s how magic is created. Not by drones serving clones.

Cognosis (a management consultancy) had what Stefan Stern who writes for the FT ironically noted was unusual for their breed. It was an original idea.

And it was this - that a strategy would within a business have a much greater chance of succeeding if the people in the business expected to make it work were excited by it. If in other words other than merely understanding it they got lost in its possibilities. A strategy that was a vision that was potentially and emotionally seen as a real prospect not just some numbers on a spread sheet.

Time, I think, for businessmen to have the odd reverie. Time to dream. Time to imagine.

It’s good to see that even the Scots get it

DREAM-TAKERS, SHERPAS AND TWO FIRST HALVES

I was at a conference about “sporting excellence” last week run by Noggin the people-performance people. You never know about these events do you? Lots of sports people comparing discus throwing with strategic planning - Olympic medals being shown around and stories of daring-do.

Yet there was some really great stuff here.
I became convinced “thriving” was the greatest state of economic grace we individually, corporately and nationally should aspire to….doing well, “doing just what we should do”. Gardens thrive; they don’t win; they don’t go for super-growth (and when they do they fall over.)
I listened in amazement to the juggernaut flattened Gold medallist James Cracknell  (cycling across America for fun he was very nearly killed by a truck) who described the winning strategy of the rowing four – “make sure your worst is better than their best”. He also talked about the recovery from his near death experience and the negativism of some doctors. “Don’t let the dream-takers get in the way” he said. Dream-takers are the enemy of our ambition and excitement.
Many of those talking were very good mentors and coaches with some telling insights. I loved the idea that we spend too much time on autopsies…it’s true that in business much too much time is spent on the past. But it was listening to Billie Bragg on the radio that I heard a blinding definition of mentors as “sherpas”-   helping the people they mentor get to the top of their particular mountain.
And talking of climbing – the extraordinary rock climber Mike Weekes gave advice for life that we should all take. In climbing he said (and most people get this wrong) do the easy stuff fast, only take time over the really hard stuff. And don’t hang on for grim death – this is a fingertip, light touch business. Like life.
Finally the hugely impressive Jeff Grout,  formerly Sir Clive Woodward’s business manager, who described the Lion’s discovery when winning the World Cup,  that they always started the first half better than the second half in matches. So they changed into completely clean kit for the second half thereby playing two first halves. Here’s an obsession with detail and changing the weather in their minds.
Grout said, have ambitions, set performance goals and then step by step set up processes to deliver the goal. If the process is right the outcome will follow.
But I’m still thinking about the weather in my mind…what a great concept.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT...........

This is the work of a 17 year old Singaporean, Leon Yuchin-Lau. Imagine what he’ll be like at 50 if he avoids being murdered by jealous rivals:-


If a boy must wonder

If a boy must wonder

Let him recall

Not the lightning grace of falcons,

The dizzying aeronautics, Darwin’s finch,

The voyage of the ancients

Who saw further, with their charts and sails

And bubbly telescopic minds

Brought ashore hope

To lift

A charioting god to the moon,

But how

Even a rogue dream of stars

Once birthed the possibility of flight.


The art of creativity which lies at the heart of business today (or should do) lies in making connections, in looking at an object and wondering “what if?” It lies in change. It lies in being like children at play and the stories they create. It lies in questions and “rogue dreams”.

Most of all it lies in our ”bubbly telescopic minds” – the ability to look further and to magnify and to feel that surge of approaching new worlds – of keenly wanting to know the unknown.


I really think the most exciting thing in the whole world is a white sheet of paper, a sharp pencil…and that sense of questioning and of potential to “birth possibilities”.

Get bubbling…..