DRIVING TASTE

Drivers of taste… 

What is it that creates a craze? When I was in the toy trade I watched the overwhelming impact of licensed merchandise with agents selling the rights for Bond and Marvel and so on. Ordinary toys went to the back of the toy cupboard. 

In the late-1950s Connie Francis was no.1 pop singer with “Stupid Cupid” but by the mid-60s, a turmoil of change, the demise of Tory government and a sense of  rebirth, regionally- accented groups strutted the stage; the advent of pirate radio stations promoted rebellious music further. 

Old Pop was demolished as smart middle-men marketed new groups and  UK music became entrepreneurial and global, defining the booming spirit of the times. We still talk about this golden era. 

Live performance needs stages. Thus as wealth grew and tastes refined opera thrived as Garsington, the Grange, Glyndebourne plus a myriad of outdoor venues emerged. And then theatre in pubs, in gardens, in hotels. Actors and singers were busy. We thought that trend could never end. How wrong. How ironic.

Cars had their day too with E-types and Minis exciting people  with unique style. For a while cars became stars. Remember the “Italian Job.” How cars looked said a lot about their owners.  But as some petrol-head gloomily said “now all cars are being designed by a computer and look alike.”

In the turmoil-ridden 1970s (strikes, 3 day weeks, 27% inflation) the staid US advertising agencies that dominated the post-war years were usurped by bands of brothers (like the Saatchis) and a cluster of bright young creative minds fleeing to London from the unemployed provinces. Smooth public-school ad men were usurped by school failures who suddenly came to life and wrote funny ads. that people loved. 

What’s in common here is the collective exuberance that inventors, salesmen and rebels, discovered , developed and produced and sold a lot of, all trying to outdo each other.  

And why? In virtually every case three things coincided –  social upheaval,  shifts in technology and groups of middle-men who were great salesman. Dealers, agents, fixers. Almost nothing happens without these “wily” agents. People like Ray Croc who took the McDonald brothers’ product and concept and created a worldwide phenomenon. Would the Beatles have been as big without their manager Brian Epstein? Would Saatchi have been successful without Tim Bell – wheeler-dealer supreme? All of them could smell money in creating new excitement and selling unusual ways of looking at things.

And, it seems, it was ever thus.

I’ve been reading  “The Taste Makers” which describes the scale and the genesis of the craze for Louis X1V furniture in the late 18th and early 19th century. The French Revolution  followed by the tumultuous rise and fall of Napoleon created turmoil, uncertainty and change. Times like those when dealers and entrepreneurs saw opportunities to define taste to their advantage resemble times like ours when normality has been overturned. 

Uncharted territory. Turmoil. Technological innovation. Young talent. Desire for change. A rebel spirit. Salesmanship.

Game on.

   

LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL?

Sam Goldwyn said “it’s hard to predict especially when it comes to the future.” Forecasters are currently either catastrophists or Panglossian. On Friday one-time Father of the House, ex-MP and possibly the best Prime Minister we never had, Ken Clarke, said on the BBC Today programme we should probably expect the worst in terms of unemployment and company failures, that the exceptional economic downturn will destroy many small and medium sized businesses that aren’t quite good enough or needed enough and many nice-to-have, but not essential, jobs will disappear. 

On Wednesday I went up to London, the first time in sixteen weeks. The train from Brighton was almost empty, Victoria Station was quiet as was Central London. It was like a Sunday. John Lewis in Oxford Street was closed. The few people hurried past wearing masks. Return to normal? Definitely not. It’s difficult to see when and how the momentum will return. Difficult certainly for the taxi driver almost in tears who said to me that there was no business and that things were hopeless. Boris’ upbeat words and braggadocio will not be enough to shift that taxi-driver’s despair.

It’s all exacerbated by the lack of human contact. A big feature of my life has always been lunch. I was better at lunch than most. I almost lived in Odin’s, now gone (and what a tragedy that was.) Before anyone had heard of the term Odin’s tables were “socially distanced” from each other. I learnt more over lunch than I did at University. Lunch was when people went off script and told the truth, lunch was when trust was earned or lost. In its smaller and less satisfying way it was the coffee machine or water cooler where office politics happened. People are social beings not distanced.

Zoom, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams and the rest can’t replace spontaneous face-to-face conversation. Whilst it’s probably true that working from home can be more productive, teams will become harder to co-ordinate and motivate and leaders will have to find a new way of behaving. 

“What sort of leaders shall we need or get post Covid?” 

That’s what I was asked last week. 

Two things. Firstly when is post-Covid? Next year? Just when will the masks come off and the conversation turn from health? Secondly the models of leadership globally are not promising. In business Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk and others like them are setting the pace. In politics, Xi, Putin, Trump, Erdogan are leading voices right now. The trend is towards egotistical authoritarianism.

In 1920 when Baseball star, Joe Jackson, admitted he cheated in the 1919 World Series, reporter Charley Owens wrote “Say it ain’t so Joe”. That’s how any lover of people would respond to the trend towards dictatorships.

Leaders we should hope would be less greedy, more modestly paid, better listeners, better teachers, more visionary, much more inspirational and much smarter.

If that happens we’ve a chance of getting out of the tunnel. But if not…..

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

In the midst of this quirky summer the answer is they’re in our garden. What started as a way of consoling ourselves in lockdown became a thing of overplanting just to see what happened.  The mallow, campion, scabious, cosmos, salvia, lavender and penstemon are all jostling for position in our flower beds and getting taller and taller. It’s rather exciting.

Where have all the bees gone? Well we saw few last year but now our garden is crammed with swarms of humming, happy bees. They are accompanied by butterflies – and I’d nearly forgotten what they’d looked like. 

Like many people I’ve tended to take bees for granted. I’d heard of course of their dramatically declining numbers. This year it’s different. The bee crisis got celebrity publicity through Morgan Freeman and Jeremy Clarkson both becoming bee keepers buying millions of them Clarkson calls them the ”corner stone of everything… the keystone species.”

But bees are quite complex. There are over 270 different bee species in the UK – there were over 300. The females work incredibly hard collecting pollen and making honey. The males lounge about with their friends in the hive – if there was such a thing as a Bee Bar they’d be leaning forward with a glass of nectar and saying “I sure fancy that queen.”

What I realised the other day were not just the economics of bees and the benefits of honey but that the buzzing of bees and their sheer business – rushing from petal to petal – reminded me of being a small boy again. Back then bees, butterflies and cricket were what summer was all about.

But the economics of bees is not irrelevant. As I watch them at work I am blown away by the unremitting industry they show. The average hive produces 24 jars in a season and the value of their pollination of farm crops and trees is valued at around £ ¾ billion a year. 

So as Chaucer coined it, time to get “busy as a bee”. After nearly four months of slightly aimless inertia it’s hard to get the motor firing up again – we have all become hermits retreated into our furloughed sanctuaries. It’s not so much a question of “distancing” ourselves from each other as excluding ourselves from social contact. Greta Garbo was alleged to have said “I want to be alone” – I know how she felt because I’ve started to feel like that myself.

As I read the paper each day I see a mixed world right now. Anger. Solitude. Protests. Division. I don’t see too much joy except, thank God, in nature.

Happy bees are  the best news of all.  Time to reflect. Me? I’m reviewing my life options right now. Our house is gleaming with fresh paint. It’s up to all of us to make the best of life just like those bees. Let’s make this a better (not an angrier, adversarial or dirtier) place. Let’s just enjoy a wonderful summertime.

NUDGE, NUDGE.....

 “Nudge Theory” popularised by Thalers, Sunstein and Halpern in 2008  became very popular. David Cameron, Barack Obama, the World Bank, UN and the EU were supporters. It showed how suggestions rather than instructions and positive reinforcement could change behaviour more effectively than more doctrinaire methods. In behavioural economics it was the go-to philosophy.

I liked it. In my mentoring establishing a positive platform of optimism focusing on good things rather than trying to implement a programme of radical behavioural surgery has always seemed the better way forward and upwards.

Change is funny stuff. We may proclaim ourselves as advocates of change and of wanting to be ahead of the curve but most of us are more timorous and want to inhabit the known world rather than shooting off to Mars.

It’s the little things in life that make the biggest effect. When we embarked on a programme of post-coronavirus home improvements by hiring a genius called Darren, the swathes of  fresh white paint in a lightwell and renovated and repainted doors earned approval. However it was the tidying up and concealing of unsightly electrical leads in our library and the mending of a dripping garden tap that got bigger smiles, applause and delight. Fixing minor irritations is a key to happiness.

Similarly small successes in customer service are what we remember more than the predictable reliability of Amazon. I ordered a case of wine last week from a local wine merchant, Butlers of Brighton. They promise next day delivery but on this occasion they delivered it an hour later. Amazing.

I emailed the nursery at Leonardslee to see if they had delphiniums to replace the lupins which has done their turn. I got an email from Maxine their deputy head gardener, explaining how to cut back the lupins so as to get a second flowering and a tutorial on perennials. Amazing.

Little things, all of these, but they stick in one’s mind and restore faith in humanity. They are like the skilled adjustments a great driver achieves. We live currently in a world of handbrake turns or, as Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times, people trying to drive a tanker without a steering wheel. No nudging towards improvement. No attempt to learn from failures.

Our system , we’re told is broken, useless, needs destroying and rebuilding. I see the Germans call our Prime Minister ‘das Großmaul‘ – big mouth. Others I know call him other things but this isn’t another Bash-Boris piece. Just this…do we really believe that in the midst of the pandemic, a tottering economy and a battered and upset electorate the right course of action is revolution?  Surely what we need is quiet, systematic competence. We need some BMW engineering not eccentrically different concept like the disastrous Delorean.

If there’s nothing else the past few months have taught us it’s to make decisions carefully, see them through and then critically execute them effectively. Nudge to success. Not just bound hopefully to infinity and beyond.

   

TIME TO CHALLENGE ALMOST EVERYTHING

Last week I advised people how to restart their lives.  I think it hit the mark although it had a sense of “pull yourself together” about it. Sorry. 

We live under a mile from the sea and have been there once in 14 weeks. I’ve not lost my spirit of enterprise but the risks involved in being in one of the most popular venues for the heavy-drinking, young released from their incarceration in the grey, coronavirus-ridden suburbs of London, are too great. The pleasure I get from the Brighton seafront just isn’t enough. It’s not exactly Nice after all.

Time to challenge almost everything?

Let’s start with the tricky business of managing people. Government have shown they’re inept, astonishingly so. Switching from defining red lines – “stay at home” to pink lines “stay alert” to no lines at all is like removing all speed limits. If you’ve travelled on a German autobahn you’ll recall the terror of being driven at 260k kph by someone with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a mobile phone and having an argument. All round the world there are spikes in virus transmission because of the removal of speed limits and thus social distancing. Getting the economy going did not mean allowing crowds to assemble and become hooligans. 

Next, as though it has suddenly taken them by surprise the Italians have realised there are over 450,000 Airbnb listings in their country (up from 52 just over 10 years ago).  We give away what we have for a bit of cash and then regret it.  Cruise ships account for only 3% of the Venetian economy ($450 million) and have done more damage to the city than anyone can calculate although it’s estimated the pollution of the yearly 600 cruise ships docking creates the same as 8 ½ million cars.  We should challenge the easy, cheap access to historic sites and the erosion to them it creates.  Airbnb was a brilliant concept as were cruise ships but can they make sense post-coronavirus?

Silicon Valley is an easy target.  But if it’s true Apple impeded the UK’s “test and trace” plan – flaky though that might have been – then it’s what I’d expect.  Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, Cook etc. believe they’re more important than any government.  Strange to hear Sir Nick Clegg on the BBC justifying Facebook’s behaviour.  A rumoured $7 million package is all it took to get him to join them. 

Allegedly Bernard Shaw asked a woman if she’s sleep with him for a considerable sum of money. She blushingly said she would.  He then asked: ‘How about for a pound?’  The exchange that followed was like this:

She: 'What kind of woman do you think I am?'

He:   'We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.'

Challenge why people do what they do. The price is too often the key.

It’s time to challenge everything.

As children know ‘why?' is the most potent and infuriating word there is.

YOU'VE GOT TO SELF-START NOW NOT HOPE FOR THE BEST

As things get back to that normal people talk, and have been dreaming about they’ll be shocked to find their business is going or has gone bust or if they’re in employment that they’ve been made redundant. It’s nice to have a pint again, even if it’s in the street in the drizzle. But with as many as 4 million unemployed, 30% of small businesses failing, over 90% of which were trading at or above forecast pre-coronavirus, drastic measures need to be taken.

Think about starting your own business. If you lose your job or your business what will you do instead?

1. Think small - It’s no time to be grandiose. Think hard. Stick to what you are good at. Design something that you can do well and quickly.

2. Focus on people you know and build a relationship grid - Never cold call. Waste of time. Short cut to despair. List everyone you know whom you rate and like and you think rates and likes you. Use LinkedIn to find who they know; build a big map of potential supporters.

3.Relearn the forgotten art of conversation and debate - Too much PowerPoint. Not enough thoughtful talking.

4.Avoid the chit-chat of social media - The bane of business. Avoid it. All the smart people I know are talking 1X1 not on time-wasting-messaging.

5. Avoid politics or dissent; it has no place in business - You may hate Trump, Boris or wokeness.  Leave them out of your mind …focus on your service  or product and its immediate context.

6.Write clearly, simply and with joy (or get someone to help you) - Hilary Mantel and Philip Pullman prove the power of the word. Write a lot. Find your own clear, simple persuasive voice.

7. Avoid exceptionalism - Do not try to design from scratch when modification may work as well. The Test and Trace App fiasco should be a warning to all.

8. Have something to sell people want and is worth talking about. - Do not waste time by being abstruse. Better to be very good at something than trying to be unique. Be thrilled talking about what you do.

9. Be generous to others -  Don’t deride competition. Be nice.  It’s easy to be a killer or to want to be a Master of the Universe but be nice if you can. Good humour and good manners work well. Customer service is key.

10. Look for opportunities - Get your curiosity working all day, every day and look for better ways of creating something. Be an optimist.

There are no easy answers in life but with the right frame of mind you can overcome depression, recession and apparent disaster. And if at first you don’t succeed be smart enough to pivot and start again. The great thing about self-starting is you are free of office politics and are your own boss. Better by far to be a happy greengrocer than a miserable salaried person.

This book may help.

PUSSY CAT, PUSSY CAT WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

In our garden. On our plants. That’s where. Constantly. Last Thursday on my thriving Pulmonaria - all over its glorious leaves. A spectacularly loose bowel movement. Until recently I have never been ailurophobic (fear and loathing of cats). In my life I’ve had a total of 13 cats the most outstanding of which was a long-haired tabby imaginatively named Pussy.  But I have recently become a cat loather as I watch them slink with an unmistakable pre-lavatorial gait towards our recently stocked garden.

Enter technology. I have just purchased two waterproof, high-power, ultrasonic-lazer-light- flashing cat-repellers. This adds to the cat deterrent pepper-powder.

I confess I’ve become obsessed with cats, with toxoplasmosis a particularly nasty feline-feces disease that’s more frightening than Covid 19. It’s a feline trademark virus that will give you headaches, confusion, poor coordination, lung problems that may resemble pneumonia and blurred vision. Hang on. I have most of those already.

Cats aside, aren’t we all becoming a bit obsessed? Since the end of March we’ve been locked-down, switched-off and living performers of Groundhog Day, the film where every day is the same and you can’t get away. 

Most of my life I’ve been regarded as being energetic, spirited and upbeat. I’ve espoused the cause of banishing negative thoughts. I’ve even seen some positives coming from the pandemic – a growing support and understanding of climate-change, an improving sense of community, a scepticism about buying solely on price, a burgeoning support for local rather than global and, of course, an intensifying hatred of cats – did you know they kill 27,000,000 birds a year? Bastards.

But being upbeat is a pose hard to maintain when we watch a collision of racism, right wing extremism, incompetence in government – yes crude incompetence is always depressing – and a growing sense of nations simply growing apart, the EU and America collapsing politically and the currently widening divide of rich and poor. As I write this I hear the roar of crowds of 10,000 in Brighton affirming their support for the importance of black lives. 

Black lives matter. So do all lives. Because people matter. Love of mankind matters. In the hysteria of crowds this somehow gets obscured. Protest marches and mass rallies fill me with despair. I thought we’d solved a few issues but the scabs of healing wounds are being scratched off again.

 

Back to upbeat. 

 

Someone said what should we do? Create a movement I said (no mass rallies) whose mission is “to think the unthinkable and the unthought-of and recreate your business and your life”. They thought this rather ambitious but if we don’t try this this really will remain Groundhog Day.

I actually think we can do it – that we have no choices with a 20% decline in GDP. Mass unemployment and company failures will follow but new, brighter businesses can be created. Think Silicon Valley, think advertising in the 1970s, think about the future not the past.

And do not get a cat.