See them live, while they can still Hackett

I am just back from seeing Steve Hackett play during his three night ‘residency’ (his words) at The London Palladium, as part of his extensive autumn UK tour.  With an amazing band, including guest guitarist Amanda Lehman, and Craig Blundell (drummer with Steven Wilson’s band), he performed a three-hour set; first-up a selection of solo work and then in the second half, appropriately enough, the band played the whole of the Genesis’ 1976 live album Seconds Out.  Hackett, of course, played on the 1976 tour when Seconds Out was recorded and his guitar work on that album was extraordinary then, as it is now.  Whatever your musical preferences, it would be tough for anyone not to be struck by the skill, verve, technical brilliance and imagination found in songs like Firth of Fifth, The Musical Box and Suppers Ready.  Yep, only three songs…and an hour of your life flies by, joyously. Hats off to all.

We were talking in the interval (1,500 middle-aged men taking a much needed fluid break) about the longevity of some, and recent loss of other great rock stars.  Only a few weeks ago Charlie Watts (80) had died and I am still jumpy on the anniversary of the death of Neil Peart in 2020, a mere youth lost at 67. Hackett’s performance was timelessly brilliant and technically wonderful, and ahem, he is 71 years old.  The tour coincided with King Crimson (collective aged about 450) on tour in the US, where four dinosaurs + three drummers are still ripping up the rock rule book stateside with sonic aplomb and weirdness to boot.

Meanwhile in the same week, Genesis have been on tour in the UK with Phil Collins (70), now tragically a shattered, broken imitation of the charismatic front man and thunderously talented drummer that we remember from early Genesis. In the 1980’s and early 90’s, Collins was an Adele-sized success as a soloist, knocking out million selling break-up album after break-up album.  I guess if you are emotionally wrecked for much of your mid-life, it takes a toll on your body and soul, and so Collins now plays live while sat down, his weakened voice lacking pace and pitch, covered by two backing singers.  At least Collins has the joy of having his 20 -year old son Nic, playing drums (in lieu of Chester Thompson) behind him. I read today that the London Genesis gigs have been cancelled due to illness in the Genesis camp. It doesn’t bode well for the European and US gigs. There is hope elsewhere though, as just today, a now bespectacled Peter Gabriel (71) released a picture of him playing/recording in his New World studios.  2022 could bring new joy.

If you cannot get to see Hackett or Genesis live, you can now buy online all the re-issued vinyl, immerse yourself in some remastered box set release, or instantly consume a new Apple “lossless” codec of their masterpieces, Selling England For A Pound, or Foxtrot. Headphones on, glass of something cold and turn the lights down. But somehow, nothing ever really comes close to seeing a record’s creators play, hear the lyricist sing it, and the rhythm section hold the whole mad time 9/8 signature oddity together, live.  So, if you love 1970s prog - go see Hackett while he is still this good and if you love Mike Scott, or The Cure, or Costello, or Paul Weller, or James, from a decade later, and then they are out on the road again, see them, cherish the moment and fall in love with live music again. 

Tubular Bells - it’s still all about the Bass

Ladies and gentlemen. Live music is back!  And fittingly after 18 months in enforced hibernation, it is nostalgia fuelled.  Hot on the heels of seeing the extraordinarily good Rumours of Fleetwood Mac at The Cadogan Hall, I just got back from seeing the ‘50th Anniversary Performance’ of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells at the Royal Festival Hall.  Well, technically it was not the 50th anniversary of the album (which was famously the first record on Richard Branson’s newly created Virgin Records) as the album was released in 1973.  The composition was though started a few years earlier when a 17-year old Oldfield, fascinated by all the instruments he saw at Abbey Road studios, resolved to make an album on which he played everything.  And play he did, creating a wonderful evocative textured and varied album that over two sides is exquisite in its execution, production and, almost fifty years later, still sounds somehow contemporary (horn pipe solo excepted). 

The Festival Hall production was very well done – though unsurprisingly, without Oldfield there.  The London event marks the start of a two-year tour of the show.  The “show” also features an acrobatic troupe called Circa, who perform death-defying contortions and acrobatics, while the exemplary nine-piece band play the album note for note with vigour and verve, particularly the pianist Dominic Ferris, who seemed to be enthralled to be playing live. The idea of the dance troupe, I guess, is to illustrate the changing textures and passages of the music, but their performance probably distracts from the great musicianship, though an earlier non-Tubular segment did feature the bassist Lisa Featherston singing Moonlight Shadow.  She also had the unenviable task of playing out the last 8 minutes of Part 1, where Oldfield’s complex bass figure is played repeatedly with finger achingly accuracy and speed.  A great feat of physical endurance – mirrored by the acrobats swinging from the trapeze above her head.  If you’re intrigued by the bass playing – and why not!, I have shared below a clip from a documentary about Oldfield that I found inspiring.  On some remote island hideaway, he talks about making the record and he also plays the opening bass sequence.  It’s a real wonder to see this shy man, reconstruct a small part of a classic Album that became the template for fifty years of progressive rock, the soundtrack to The Exorcist, inspired a new genre called ‘New Age’, inspired producers and instrumentalists and became a feature element of the opening of the 2012 London Olympics. For me though, it’s still about that bass. 

Why the future of work will still be the Office

This week Deloitte told its 20,000 UK employees “they can work from home forever”. It’s a bold move. For many employees, Deloitte’s decision is the announcement they have craved since the start of Lockdown in March 2020.  A guaranteed commute of merely ten steps from bed to bathroom to virtual office, with all the environmental, well-being and work-life balance benefits that offers is now assured.  It seems Deloitte’s HR departments have bent over backwards to seize the zeitgeist and sound as uber-flexible as possible in their policy response.  Surely, this means the Office is dead and the pandemic has ushered in a working revolution that will reshape our lives for years to come?  

Perhaps not.  

There are five key reasons why the Office isn’t dead yet.  

1.     Offices are a Company’s greatest expression of shared culture

It’s not often included as one of humanity’s greatest achievements, but the office deserves its place amongst them.  Historians can have their Roman Empire, the Pyramids at Giza, and the Constitution of the United States.  Scientists can have their sequenced DNA, the discovery of Penicillin, Moon landing space-rockets and expedited vaccines.  Engineers can swoon at The Hoover Dam, or the Great Wall of China, or the new Shrewsbury bypass, but for the world of Business, the modern Office encompasses the zenith of management achievement in the past two hundred years.  Unlike the Lunar Module, Blockbuster Videos, or Florence Nightingale’s lamp, the office is not bound for the Museum. 

Perhaps the single best expression of a company culture and how it values its people’s collective energies, is the workplace it provides. From Sir Titus Salt in Saltaire, Yorkshire in 1854 (providing decent homes as part of a textile workers’ village) to Apple in late 2021 moving its new London campus to the restored Battersea Power Station, where people have worked together has really mattered. Our Offices also define something of who we are, socially, professionally, organisationally. Lucy Kellaway recently wrote a love letter to the office in the FT. “The office helps keep us sane,” she wrote. “First, it imposes routine, without which most of us fall to pieces. Even better, it creates a barrier between work and home. On arrival we escape the chaos (or monotony) of our hearths; better still, we escape from our usual selves.”  Great modern offices, at their best, are designed with a level of architectural, creative, artistic, and sociological intent that is founded on profound learning. Developers and designers have crafted extraordinary spaces for serendipity, collaboration, openness, transparency, democracy, hierarchy, status, drama, and theatre.  If you spend some time in a great office, like Apple's Cupertino office, LinkedIn's Sunnyvale, or the very best appointed offices in London of UBS, Deutsche, Clifford Chance, Barclays, McKinsey, Rio Tinto or BP and you cannot help be inspired, awed and energised to give more of yourself for the organisation that gifted you that working environment and that proximity to a tangible sense of the organisation itself. No at home minimalist Zoom set-up (even the cool garden Cabin office) can compete with something designed with the vision and for imagination of an accomplished interior Architect. If your organisation does not have a great modern Office for its people, it speaks volumes are about your firms ambition, values and strategy. 

2.     Deloitte needs to compete to hire ambitious talent 

While many have cheered the announcement, I feel for the employees of Deloitte - particularly its new Partners who have shifted some 10,000 billable hours and more to be (at last!) allocated a dedicated enclosed 1000 square feet of real-estate as the signature achievement of their Auditing career.  And now, they face the prospect of gazing out through frosted glass on a deserted vacuous open-plan floor and having to click on Teams to be able talk to someone, at home.  Deloitte are, of course, keen to be seen as an enlightened and progressive employer, enabling a more mature, flexible relationship with its staff.  The recruitment brochure is being re-drafted.  “Yes, you can still join Deloitte this summer as a Graduate Trainee, never attend the office, wear your pyjama bottoms and a crisp shirt on Zoom, and ten years from now, you could be advising the CEOs of Fortune 500 companied on their new strategy.” Unfortunately, the small print does not mention that the downside of remote is that your best friend at work is more likely to be a cat, or goldfish, and your social network will remain limited to some people you met a decade before at University.

The reality is that big firms, want to hire young talented people who want to get on and move up and get noticed in fast-moving collaborative teams. They aren't going to get noticed, or feel noticed, waving at those in the office, from the comfort of their loft-based Zoom set-ups. Being "in" not out, will draw like a magnet. FOMO is a powerful draw. And younger people have a more primal desire for proximity to colleagues that has nothing to do with career management and everything to do with feeling part of something, celebrating amongst a tribe, or maybe, even looking for someone to love.  

3.     Big Tech (and some Banks) have a different view

Deloitte competes for talent not just with other services firms, but also with Big Tech and Banks.  While “big tech” has facilitated the vital online connectivity that has made remote work, these firms also get the need to have the collaboration and serendipity and cultural glue that creates good products. Google is currently finishing its Kings Cross Campus – a “land-scraper” which lies longer than the height of London’s Shard in the heart of a £3 billion inner-city regeneration project.  Google have also just taken an extra 70,000 square foot of space close to the new HQ and are planning for an 80 per cent staff return to the office by September.  The Big Tech companies are the most avaricious and competitive marketplaces for talent since the ‘bulge-bracket’ investment banks. But back in the Banking world, the penny has already dropped.  While Deloitte have headed for the suburbs, Jamie Dimon, head of the biggest bank in the US said this about homeworking: “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.” Morgan Stanley chief executive James Gorman, aghast at the booming dining scene in New York said; "If you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office”.  Tim Cook of Apple has written (though rather clumsily) and instructed his staff to get off the sofa, back into the designer sneakers and head back to the extraordinary HQ that Steve designed and which cost $5 Billion dollars to complete.  

4.     Developers and investors have gone long on the Office

The zeitgeist might be felt to be remote, but the serious money is still being wagered on the Office. In London today there is 250 million square feet of office space. The equivalent of 5,500 football pitches of floor space. Anyone who has ventured into central London, particularly the City and West End during Lockdown, cannot help to have noticed two contradictory things; the lack of people commuting to work and the sheer scale of construction, refurbishment, and development of…new offices. Even Canary Wharf, which itself is over 16 million square feet of space, has ‘strategically pivoted’ to building more housing; though typically these are skyscraper-like luxury apartments, which allow its well-paid residents to be able to walk to work, live well and socialise without ever leaving Canary Wharf. Outside of the City and Canary Wharf, Statista report that in the West End development is expected to reach an additional 9 million square feet by 2024.  These developers seem confident in their plans, the global banks seem committed to writing the loans and the City planners are finalising Cross Rail testing to bring the millions more back into London, faster than ever, from further and further afield. 

5.     Demographic trends trump Sunday Supplement idylls

Much of the broad sheet, Sunday Supplement writing community has eulogised on the benefits of homeworking, escaping the City and grasping the idyll of rural isolation.  But the middle-aged journalist comfortably hunkering down online from his Suffolk retreat is the exception to the global trend, not the norm.  Pre-pandemic the UN predicted that 68% of the world population was projected to live in urban areas by 2050, up from 55% today.  In China, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Chengdu remain the top three cities for population growth in the past decade, accruing new populations of over 20 million in these extraordinary technology hubs. Global population growth maybe predicated to falter, but its congregation point remains the major cities. Interestingly, the recent projected professional class migration from the major cities in California and New York, seems mainly to be a migration to Cities in other states.    

In 2018, I wrote about the “strange death of the office”. Looking back I was perhaps pre-emptively gloomy as many major organisations pivoted to WeWork as the future office base for their people rather than their own personalised collaborative offices. As brilliantly documented by others, that experiment has been a disaster both the lease holder, WeWork shareholders and their clients.

The writer Simon Sinek wrote memorable: “Corporate culture matters. How management chooses to treat its people impacts everything - for better or for worse.”  The single best embodiment and forum for that culture, remains the office. 

Doing a Public Service in Berlin

This week a new tune lands from Public Service Broadcasting. According to their own liner notes, Public Service Broadcasting have been “teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future” for more than a decade now.  I first came across the band when they made a video about Yuri Gagarin, featuring two band members dancing in space suits.  By setting their compositions to archival samples from the British Film Institute - evoking the Titanic, the Battle of Britain, the Space Race, or the demise of Welsh coal mining, they do something unpretentiously artistic and clever and full of memorable tunes.  Better still, their frontman J Willgoose’s best-mate is a drummer and he puts him front and centre of both the sound-mix and live staging.  With a top ten album, on the precipice of pop-stardom, Willgoose then did what any self respecting auteur would do and in mid 2019, packed his bags for Berlin and went to make a Berlin album.  The Berlin sojourn is a route is well-trodden, most famously by David Bowie, who recorded Low and Heroes there in the late 1970’s while living in West Berlin, nudged along and sonically shaped by producers Tony Visconti and Brian Eno.  Before Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop went to Berlin to record a Berlin inspired album and Willgoose describes the new album, Bright Magic, as a “personal story…it’s an album about moving to Berlin to write an album about people who move to Berlin to write an album…”, which reminded me of Ted Hughes take on moon gazing: “The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work. That points at him amazed.” The new record was recorded in Kreuzberg’s famous Hansa Studio recording complex , a couple of blocks from the former Berlin Wall, where Depeche Mode found their extraordinary sound and U2 made their best album Achtung Baby [with Brian Eno again involved].  I don’t know whether the new Berlin album will any good; but in a way that’s the whole point of PSB; they continue to explore and try and experiment.  If borne in the 1970’s they would be bracketed with some progressive rock dinosaurs, producing ‘concept’ albums, sung in Welsh, with guitar solos punctuated by voice samples like Alan Parsons dropped into Dark Side of the Moon.  But today - amidst so little imagination found in the scope of what can be achieved on two sides of vinyl, they are in a category almost all of their own.  I wish them well.  Viel Glück.

A different song about cars and girls

Rock music is full of cliched songs about fast cars and girls. Little Red Corvette, Thunder Road, Pink Cadillac, Born to Run, and, ahem, Cars and Girls even. Nothing too high-brow and with enough grit and gristle to be on one of those ‘Rock n Road Trip’ collation CD’s you still find at the motorway service station till. The vehicle types may vary and head down different Routes, but the formula is as well-worn as the hot tarmac across country. But I recently came across a very different kind of song about cars and girls.

The UK band Big Big Train have been around for years (formed in 1990) but newly discovered by me. In their current form since about 2009, they write beautiful, complex (often long) and sophisticated melodic progressive rock. They have a bespectacled flute playing bald-headed singer who sounds like a young Peter Gabriel. They have also have had, in recent years, Dave Gregory of XTC playing with them, which is a bit like Marillion hiring, you know, Paul McCartney on bass for a couple of albums and a tour! I could eulogise about how good they are - but those who already know that, already know that, and it’s not that interesting simply trying to advocate the merits of a band who do 27 minute long songs about the source of the River Thames, or East Coast Steam trains. But give this story a try.

The penultimate song on their last album, Folklore, is called Brooklands, referring to an abandoned motor-racing track in Surrey. Brooklands had huge banked corners, 100 feet wide, and some of them can still be walked along today. The song is not about the race track, but a racing driver called John Cobb who was an amazingly accomplished and extraordinary brave driver. Cobb held the ultimate track record at Brooklands with an average speed of nearly 144 miles per hour in the 1930’s. He broke several land and water speed records and continued with his record breaking attempts into middle-age. He died on Loch Ness in 1952 whilst attempting to break the water speed record. He had recently married and his wife was at the Loch watching when he crashed and died.

The opening of the song sets the scene as Cobb is driving to Loch Ness to attempt the water speed record. As he takes his boat out onto the water he remembers back to his young days at Brooklands - a “lucky man”, and then his later life as a racer. It’s a stunning piece of music and moving in a way I didn’t expect. A clearer and more eloquent telling of the song’s inspiration is provided by Big Big Train’s Greg Spawton on his blog and the comments section to the story were clearly deeply felt - listeners struck by the songs portrayal of a visceral life lived to the full and this past year, with some having lost loved ones, that nagging sense of “where did all the time go?” It’s quite piece and posted below. Feel free to jump in, or, just let it pass by.

Why Executive Education needs to land on Mars

This week, the US space agency NASA awarded Elon Musk’s venture SpaceX a contract to provide the rocket, manned vehicle and technology to return humanity to the Moon.  In the past twelve months, while most of the world has been distracted, disrupted and variously devastated by the impact of a Corona virus, SpaceX has now launched some 1,433 satellites (part his ‘Starlink’ array to beam broadband quality internet to the whole world) into low-earth orbit, and successfully launched two manned space missions to the International Space Station (ISS).  

Marking the arrival of Crew-2 at the ISS, Musk quickly noted the past year’s achievements and then reaffirmed his vision for SpaceX to use its new reusable ‘Starship’ to establish a permanent human presence on Mars. “We don’t want to be one of those single-planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species,” he said, with less brouhaha than a proud retail executive cutting the ribbon at a new store opening.   

While Musk has had ambitions on the stars, I have spent much of the past year in a small room in my home, stood in front of a green screen, blinking into key-lights and facilitating online learning for executives around the world.  Like many others, I watch the headlines about international travel bans, grounded aircraft, new variants, and vaccine efficacy with the obsession of some dystopian TV soap addict.  If only things could return to normal, then my profession would rebound with all the energy and determination of a rumbustious toddler after grazing his knee.  I’d sniff a little and feel sorry for myself, but I would be quickly back on the roundabout and swings.  And look how high I would go this time!  

Such longing for a return to ‘normal’ might be our biggest problem.  Is our mission in Executive Education to go back to the Moon (which NASA pulled the plug on 50 years ago), or is it to establish a permanent home on Mars?  The analogy might seem ridiculous. But consider the sheer amount of effort, energy, ingenuity and skill that has been poured into a ‘simple’ pivot of switching high-quality learning experiences from face to face classrooms to virtual cohorts, joining online, or in ‘hybrid’ mode.  Frankly, for those of us who have thrived on the energy, dynamic and spontaneity of engaging in-person groups for years, being remote has at times felt wearying.  Yes, we have learned new disciplines from our instructional design colleagues, about crafting content management systems, asynchronous pathways, laddering up and virtual nudges, but while giving one another an electronic “thumbs up”, we have felt at times like a teenager dumped before the school disco.  We still danced to the music like a good ‘un, but somehow felt hollow inside.  

I have dusted myself down, encouraged, heartened and humbled by the feedback and plaudits.  One, a senior executive participant, recently took the trouble to write and said, “John, what two fantastic and inspirational weeks. The range, breadth and depth of what we have just done in two weeks is staggering!  Fair play to you for bringing so much energy and connectivity to us all. You worked so hard to get a feeling of community between us and you succeeded”.  It seems, that at our best, despite the challenges of time-zones, the artifice of online ‘socials’ and the nagging physical and personal non-proximity of the participants, we have in our own little way continued to send up our own rockets into space and watch them splash land safely!    

But in the future, will that be enough?  When airports and skies and borders and corporate training budgets are available again, will the offer of “in-person” teaching be enough to bring execs back onto campuses in their thousands again?  Will the offer of the learning equivalent of the ‘Moon landing’ hosted in London, Boston, Philadelphia or Lausanne (even Fontainebleau) be something that still compels busy high-calibre attendees to travel to learn? I hear over and over again that the draw of “being on Campus”, or “being able to socialise between classes”, that sharing down-time and wellness classes together, will be the things that bring attendees flooding back. You know “like we used to do things”.

Having polished our online offer so thoroughly and marketed the format with such gusto, surely we will ALSO have to raise the level of the in-person experience again, so it feels distinctive, elevated and worth the premium beyond the return to after class beers and convivial socials? Our mission ought to be to make in-person learning so much more powerful and enabling than the online experience, so that those days on Zoom become like the quill pen, the Victorian slate, the loose-leaf jotter, or the Lever Arch binder; materials and tools, consigned to the bin of educational history?

Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen.  Few of us miss driving to Blockbusters to rent a film, or being restricted to only listening to the CD’s that we owned. Once the innovation genie is out of the bottle, there is no going back.  Nor can we be precious and assume that learning associated with a specific place, destination, or venue will hold as much meaning anymore, or be as easy to attend without some hurdles or restrictions. We now all have instant access to learning content from all over the world and it is often free, or for a fee that makes no discernible difference to the bottom line of a Business School with a tenured Faculty, weighty pension obligations and a manicured Campus to maintain.  Depending on the settings Musk decides to apply to his Starlink service, that content may also be soon freely available in the Andes, sub-Saharan Africa and at the polar extremes of the planet.  

The challenge then for educators, programme designers and major learning institutions, particularly Business Schools, is profound. The default business model of survival might be to aggressively sell more seats online (without entry requirements) or partner with better-funded marketing platforms, monetising their legacy “prestigious” brand by allowing it to be ‘plastered’ to thousands and thousands of e-certificates of attendance.  Perhaps some will find a route to survival through this high-volume, low-price strategy, with executive education leaders blithely adopting the example of Tata’s Nano car? In any event, Business Schools will struggle horribly against the enormous marketing spend of PE backed avaricious new entrants offering short course ‘learning shots’, ‘sprints’ and ‘mini-MBA’ courses.

If high-quality executive education is universally available at home, at a price point unimaginable to Dean’s just two years ago, then where does ‘face to face’ Executive Education go?  Well, we will have to be like Musk and not be bound by the ambition of the space race executed in the 1960’s (“like it used to be”) but by a future-focused vision equivalent to the mind-boggling leap inherent in Musk’s inter-planetary ambition. We will need to stretch executive learning, exploration, discovery and transformation experiences to a new level not yet considered.  Learning can be undertaken anywhere. If we can now replicate the experience of “learning in a Classroom” seamlessly online, with virtual participation in 3D rendered 4K high-definition surround sound, then what is the point of simply travelling to attend in that same physical room? Therefore, Exec Ed providers will need to develop learning propositions that make the determination of “HERE” their key differentiator - and to ensure that that destination experience offered is enthralling, deeply immersive and memory making.

I have a few ideas of what the equivalent of a Mars type destination might look like for Exec Ed, and I am sure you will have your own space mission in mind. But for now, I will leave my ideas cooling a little longer, ready to go on the launch pad.  

Not just Once - a short story about Glen Hansard

The Irish singer songwriter Glen Hansard is one of Ireland’s finest musicians.  He quit school early and began busking in Dublin, and went on to form his own band The Frames and later The Swell Season. Some may remember him as a guitar player in Alan Parker’s film The Commitments in 1990, but it was not until 2008 that the wider world really discovered him.  Alongside fellow musician Marketa Irglova, he starred in a low budget small film called Once. The film cost about £100K to make and was shot in 3 weeks on two Handicams. A low-key story about a disillusioned failing musician lifted out of depression by a young immigrant Czech girl, the story was infused with Irish music, but was not your typical cineplex affair.  It won an award at Sundance in 2007 and their song Falling Slowly won the Oscar for Best Song. Their speeches on Oscar night were a joy of genuine humility and wonder.  Roll the musician’s story forward a decade as Hansard made some records, fronted his own shows around the world and toured with the great names of rock.  Meanwhile, Once was adapted into a stage musical.  Borne out of a small production Off-Broadway, the play went on to win eleven Tony Award nominations, winning eight, including Best Musical.  I saw the London edition of the show twice at The Pheonix Theatre in 2013.  It was designed to have much of the intimacy of the original film, and you could buy a pint of Guinness at the Bar on stage before the show and during the Interval.  Hansard in recent years played live with Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam, Ed Sheeran and wrote songs for the soundtrack of the film The Hunger Games.  Roll the story forward to late 2020.  Europe is in lockdown. Theatre, music venues, folk clubs, and bars are closed across the world with Ireland’s lockdown particularly tough on the hospitality sector throughout the past twelve months. For a musician who thrives on a visceral sense of performance and audience in close proximity, this must have been a nightmare. What do you do?! Then this little video appears on YouTube.  Hansard singing and playing guitar, watched by a very small audience indeed. I don’t know the back story, but Hansard is in Sicily, busking again like he did in Dublin in 1984.  As he says when a few coins land, Grazie Mille!

We need the spirit of Citizen Kane

A report today in The Telegraph explores the views of a SAGE insider (a key government advisor who specialises in behavioural science) who explains that the UK Government has deliberately emphasised the threat from Covid-19 without putting the risks in sufficient context, leaving the country in “a state of heightened anxiety”.  They also claim that “inflated fear levels will be responsible for the ‘collateral’ deaths of many thousands of people with non-Covid illnesses” who are “too frightened to attend hospital”.  Think about that for a moment.  A Government, with the explicit aim of protecting public health, has unleashed a relentless fear campaign, perhaps the biggest and most expensively sustained propaganda exercise in British history, to scare vulnerable people so much that they have wittingly (not unwittingly) caused many thousands of additional deaths in the process. Listening to Talk Sport while writing these words almost every single advert tells me to hide at home, fear family members, cover my face and stay safe.  

Normally, we would hope that the UK media would have challenged the Government in its approach at some point over the past twelve months. But almost the only challenge from the tabloids, broadsheets, and mainstream news outlets such as the BBC, ITV and Sky News has been of a particular uniform perspective; that the Government has not been draconian enough, that we should have lockdown earlier, longer, harder and been even more punitive in our treatment of those sceptical of the value of closing the economy for a year and ‘furloughing’ 11 million people.  The popular TV shows like GMTV and the risible Piers Morgan have been particularly apocalyptic and unrelenting in their laceration of any musician, business owner, commentator, or politician who might suggest that we should “open up”, make a personal choice about risk, or even (this week) feel able to sunbathe on a beach without wearing a mask. The bill for our incarceration – currently at about £330 billion, has gone unquestioned by almost all media outlets.   So much then for the “fourth estate”.

Some glimmer of hope seems to be on the horizon [not in terms of a change of Government approach, or policy] but UK broadcast media is likely to be “shaken up” in the near future by the launch of GB News, chaired by veteran journalist and fearsome interviewer Andrew Neil.  It looks like the editorial stance of GB News is not going to be as “extreme right wing” as the Guardian and Channel 4 have claimed; prematurely despoiling the new venture as some despicable UK version of Fox News.  Some clues have already been given by Neil, “teasing” his approach and tone through the weekly “Spectator News’ show on You Tube, which makes sense, as he is already Chairman of The Spectator. With some equivocation, The Spectator has at least provided some room for commentators who challenge the predominant narrative, so perhaps that sense of inquiry and rational debate will make it to GB News.

I would be amiss to make some cultural, creative or artistic leap of faith at this point. Well, our attention in the spring would normally be on some fantastical indulgent Hollywood (Golden Globes, Oscars) or UK BAFTA movie awards celebration.  As we have covered elsewhere on the BLOG, the movie business [particularly with shuttered theatrical distribution] is being disrupted within an inch of its life.  The industry will re-emerge post-COVID irrevocably changed.  So it seemed appropriate that the film that is making all the waves this year is based upon one of Hollywood’s earliest moments and a debut Director’s film probably unmatched in 80 years since; the film Mank, based on the screenwriting adventures of  Herman J. Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman), as he punches out the script for the movie that would become Citizen Kane.  I’ve not seen Oldman’s homage to Orson Welles masterpiece yet, but it did make me reach for the original inspiration.  Kane launches a newspaper and puts his “declaration of principles” in a box on the Front Page.  The UK news media has palpably failed the British public in the past year. I hope someone shows the same clip of Kane’s principled launch to Andrew Neil and his colleagues at GB News.

Why drummers are my Deep Work heroes

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I recently finished reading DEEP WORK by Cal Newport. Cal’s book mainly focuses on smart strategies and techniques for making you more focused and productive in a work context. His very readable book is also highly relevant if you are interested in learning, or instructional design.  While reading, I imagined Cal has one of those rich deep voices used for big budget action movie trailers (clears throat); “Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.”  If that sounds a bit ominous and over the top, he helpfully puts it more simply this way; “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.  To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.” 

Cal explains the profound value that can be found when you create space and distraction-free time for ‘deep work’.  His argument goes something like this: deep work is hard, therefore it is rare, and such scarcity is highly valuable; so, if you become accomplished at deep work, your personal value will be enhanced exponentially. The problem is that in the twenty-first century, we are wired 24-hours a day to be actively distracted, allowing us little room for depth. The act of ‘carving out’ time for deep work is a tough undertaking in itself, which needs planning, discipline and much determination.

Cal cites a few examples of Deep Work in action; Bill Gates writing the first code for Windows, Mark Twain writing Tom Sawyer in a remote shed, Woody Allen producing 44 screenplays in 47 years (using the same Olympia SM3 manual typewriter); JK Rowling holed up in a suite of a smart hotel, writing the seventh Harry Potter book; prolific science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s habitual aversion to the black hole that is social media. Cal’s thesis reminded me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, where he tells the stories of extraordinary personal achievement; from rock stars to professional athletes, software billionaires and scientific geniuses.  There are many factors behind their success, but he argues that the common denominator was not talent, or innate ability, or intelligence; but actual time invested: often 10,000 hours, or more, of absolute dedication to a craft. As my Yorkshire heritage might have described it: great talent knows how to put a shift in. Gladwell’s most famous example is The Beatles, who performed live in Hamburg over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time; laying the foundations in their craftsmanship for the masterpiece recordings later in their career.

While reading Cal’s book, I was, inappropriately enough, distracted by a few articles and a couple of new tribute videos to the Canadian drummer Neil Peart, who sadly passed away in early 2020. For over 40 years, Peart was the drummer in the band Rush, and according to many music writers, fellow rock musicians and, probably most importantly, almost all drummers who have ever held a stick, Peart is regarded as the greatest rock drummer in history. 

Now drummers often get an unfair press; an image is often conjured of the crazy drum beater; Animal in the muppets, the self-combusting drummer in Spinal Tap, Keith Moon of The Who driving a Rolls Royce into his swimming pool.  You know the drill?  The crazy guy at the back, who hits things. But dig deeper, as Cal suggests, and some of the most extraordinary creativity ever gifted to the world came from drummers.  Even Ringo Starr does not get the accolades afforded to John, Paul and George, but listen to his craft in A Day In the Life and imagine anyone else making those fills with such perfect touch and feel.  Phil Collins is remembered more for being the guy at the back who moved up to be the front man, replacing Peter Gabriel and then becoming a 1980s platinum shifting solo star. Some might associate him with a thunderous drum fill used for Cadbury’s chocolate ad, played by a moody Gorilla.  But again, dig deeper, and take a few minutes to listen to Collins playing the ‘Apocalypse in 9/8’ segment of Supper’s Ready from the Genesis album of 1973 and there is simply nothing like it in rock music, ever.  It’s technically difficult to play (clue in the name) but his execution and flair around that awkward tempo is also uncannily brilliant. Collins’ now fronts shows while seated; his 50,000+ hours of dedication to his craft has been quite literally back breaking.  In more recent years, Dave Grohl has stepped out from the drum-stool shadows of Nirvana, to front The Foo Fighters, and make them the biggest rock band in the world. During lockdown, he also enhanced his reputation as the nicest (f***ing!) guy in rock, by bravely taking on an online drum challenge from Nandi Bushell, a ten-year old prodigy from the UK. These are the people I think of when I feel drummers get a bad press.  

But what about Neil Peart? What was it about this humble man from Ontario, Canada, whom they called The Professor? For me, Peart was the archetypal Deep Work drummer.  He developed his craft in extraordinary ways; as the thunderous bedrock of a rock trio, he was renowned for his technical proficiency and his live performances for their exacting nature and stamina. He played thousands of shows, touring the world supporting nineteen studio albums and selling more than 10 million albums in the US alone. In the same rock n roll era of sex, drugs and throwing TV sets out of hotel windows, Peart was also the band’s lyricist, infusing sophisticated compositions with musings on science fiction, fantasy, ancient philosophy, as well as exploring humanitarian and libertarian themes.  He wrote seven novels, as well as evocative travel memoirs. His appetite for learning, creativity and literature was rapacious: “I can honestly say I have never been bored for one-second of my life, because I have always found another way not to be.” 

So far, impressive, but he went further.  In 1994, Peart became a friend and pupil of jazz instructor Freddie Gruber.  It was during this time that Peart decided to wholly revamp his playing style by incorporating jazz and swing components.  The greatest rock drummer in the world stripped back three decades of hard earned technical prowess and began again, re-learning rudiments, adopting a different stick hold and re-exploring expression and-time keeping. He took his playing not just to another level, but to a different place.  He humbly described himself as “having a nack” for drumming, but puts his subsequent extraordinary performances down to “determination”; an obsessive application of theory and practice and practice and practice. There are a number of ways this could be illustrated and YouTube is full of his performances with Rush, but my starting place would be a show he did for The Buddy Rich Big Band, a short clip from a drum solo from 1994 [see below]

To paraphrase Cal Newport, what you will see in Neil Peart’s craft is an example of a life fully immersed in deep work; and as such, it’s rare, precious and full of joy. 

Let's do it for the kids

A few days in and its clear that 2021 is going to be what my Nan used to call a “buggers muddle.”  All hopes are pinned on the life-threatening pandemic being curtailed, to a significant degree, by a massive vaccination programme to protect the vulnerable and the elderly.  The news media describe the vaccine roll-out, jabbing 23 million over 50’s in three months, supported by 200,000 volunteers and 24/7 hour project management as akin to a “war time effort”.  Indeed, the programme is being run by Brigadier Phil Prosser, whose day job is “to deliver combat supplies to UK forces in time of war”.  So far, so good and the sunny uplands glimpsed at the end of tunnel, just round the corner,  are looking hopeful!

But, until the policy makers opine on reduced transmission rates, proven jab efficacy and falling ward admissions, then social-distancing will still be mandated, perhaps for years. So if you love a disco, singing in close harmony, shouting in stadiums, or have dreams of standing in your wellies waving your glow stick in a field, then at best, it is very unlikely that those joys will be allowed in 2021. Yes, this year is going to be the “buggers muddle” mix of being given some hope that it will soon be Friday, while having to wake to an endless series of gloomy Mondays.  

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If we can’t hope for normality in 2021, what about 2022?  Well by the autumn of this year, the UK government aims to give “every adult who wants it” a vaccination jab, and may well be on a second phase of boosters, top-ups and re-shots for the elderly, vulnerable and shielding.  So a year from now - what of the young?  What of the kids?  The students, the youth, the teenagers, the children, the rug-rats, and the graduates whose lives have been on hold?  Perhaps, in 2022, we should collectively make that year “pay back time” for the young?  If the chances of a healthy 19 year-old being killed by COVID-19 are already vanishingly small and the rest of us have the reassurance of a sore upper arm and a new-found sense of security, then surely we should unleash the kids?   In 2022, I propose payback time for the generation we “grown ups” have spent the past year making miserable, anxious and bored. 

For the young, rather than “shielding”, perhaps we should have a government policy of “unleashing”.  A minimum of four hours a day outside the home, not including School.  All feral teenagers will be required by law to meet up with at least nine other kids each week, even if it just to take a selfie and shrug wordlessly. Home-Schooling will be banned by law. Going to the cinema, ice-skating, playing “British Bull Dog” in the playground and hanging around outside McDonalds on Saturday will be part of the National Curriculum.  On Thursday evenings, there will be a media promoted ritual called “clap for parents”, where kids will pay noisy homage, while banging pots and pans. Freshers Weeks at University will be upgraded to a Freshers’ Month across the country, even in Scotland, and a full-on Freshers’ Term for those in Manchester, who were treated with such disdain by their University in 2020.  Older folk will be still be wary of attending football stadiums, so the Premier League will roll out a new scheme, where matches are completely free for kids to gather and scream, though the cost of a pie and a drink will remain usuriously high.  The underage drinking of cider will be banned in parks, outdoor spaces, and behind bike-sheds, and rigorously policed, so Wetherspoons profits will soar. Those fancy “Mark Warner” style holidays, where kids and parents are separated for eight hours a day, will be funded for all pandemic home-schooling parents by Rishi Sunak. Parents will sleep and talk about something “other than bloody corona”, while sipping ice-tea, as their kids learn to skateboard and face-paint, while developing a painful crush on an instructor they will never forget. For the “youth”, raves, underground house-parties and music festivals - with young people gathering together in huge festering clumps of hormonal angst will be celebrated nightly on the BBC.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in 2022, let’s do it for the kids.  

Insert appropriate emoji of choice in the comments section below.  

Double-Trouble Disruption and The Year Ahead

While much attention this year has been on tracking the growth in COVID-19 case numbers, some businesses have experienced exponential growth of a different kind. The ones who benefitted most smartly anticipated some of the emerging trends that were already in train before the pandemic. Within a few short weeks, these trends had become seismic shifts; to online retail, home delivery, remote working, virtual meetings, digitisation of services and a rapacious global appetite for subscription entertainment. As Scott Galloway of NYU said, “While other crises reshaped the future, COVID-19 is just making that future happen faster.

Conversely, many organisations suffered what we might term a “double-trouble” disruption; a combination of Corona-restrictions, which inhibited or curtailed their core operations, while their strategies lacked their competitor’s foresight in aligning with emerging trends.  Many successful businesses were shuttered and could do little but spectate, while others readily capitalised on accelerated changes in consumer and market behaviour.  This “double-trouble” disruption has been catastrophic for some firms and tempered little by public policy attempts to mitigate the damage.  

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Some acute victims of double-trouble have been the Cinema theatre owners and their travails became even worse this week. Warner Brothers, sitting on a slate of deferred and pending 2021 cinema releases, announced that those titles will in future premiere simultaneously in theatres and on their streaming platform HBO Max.  This may well be the beginning of the end for large international theatre chains, which need global release schedules and crucially, exclusive release windows, to secure audiences and revenues. The business model that has fuelled a creative supply chain of movie entertainment for 100 years has begun to disassemble in a matter of months.  Meanwhile, Disney, one of the last century’s great movie houses, have been making digital hay.  During its first year of launch, amidst a pandemic in all its key markets, its Disney+ service reported this week that it had secured 97 million paying customers, exceeding its launch goal of signing up 60 million subscribers by 2024.   

In March this year a neat throwaway term like “disruption” turned ugly and became something that suddenly felt deeply personal and unsettling. As the UK hunkered down, I could see the writing on the wall. I had spent much of the past two decades running interactive, high-touch leadership events, which encourage close collaboration with strangers from every corner of the world. If the Government needed a poster-boy for Corona super-spreading, then short of running a sweaty nightclub, or an all-comers’ wrestling venue, then it seemed I was their man.  In a world of mask wearing, social-distancing and travel quarantines, the halcyon days of running executive programmes, suddenly seemed not only to be impossible, but depending on the various regulations, probably illegal.  For me, a quick return to the old normal could not come soon enough.

Nine months later, LBS’ transition to “hybrid” classrooms (simultaneously mixing in-person and online cohorts) looks likely to be the default learning environment for some time to come.  Our migration of some existing programmes has been relatively smooth and we have also launched some innovative short “live online” offerings as well. Crucially, we were afforded some time and space to transition.  We experimented in June with a new wholly online “Summer Series” for our existing Senior Executive Programme (SEP) and then in October ran a full “hybrid” edition of SEP, with half of our participants attending in-person in London and others joining virtually from various locations, including the UK, Germany, UAE, India and Australia. The feedback has been encouragingly strong and we have learnt much; not just about using the technology (which works well) but a need to hone our approach so we pay more careful attention to each individual learner, as well as the broader cohort experience. Hopefully, as more participants experience these courses, we will draw more attendees who might have (for historical reasons) been sceptical about joining something badged as “online” in the past.

Looking further ahead, the challenge is do more than survive, but to thrive.  Without an immediate return to the business travel, hospitality and social distancing norms of 2019, we will need to continue to closely focus on serving participants wherever they are.  But to really elevate the participant experience, I think there are three key challenges we need to explore and imaginatively resolve. Briefly, these are time, place and impact.

Time. How we think about time will need to change. Recently, we had the pleasure of hosting a participant on our SEP from Australia. Taking part fully meant an extraordinary three-week night shift for him, which we termed “The Danger Zone”.  Now by being fully live online, we have the opportunity to open up access to participants in every place on the planet throughout the year.  Programmes have always been on set-weeks, often diarised in “office hours” and scheduled years in advance. We need to recognise that half the world has lived through much of another day by midday GMT.  If we want individuals to feel part of a global Cohort experience, then we will need to radically re-think our schedules, timetables and programme formats.   

Place. The English poet Philip Larkin wrote of “the importance of elsewhere”. The sense that even an unremarkable setting can inspire different thoughts and feelings, simply by being unfamiliar.  Many of us have spent too long this year staring at the same four walls. We need other voices and distractions than our partners and families. One of the wonders of the participant experience in attending a School like LBS is the place; the Campus, the Park and enjoying the thrills of a world City. As more participants attend major business Schools without flying and residing, how can we still enable them to have that sense of elsewhere?  Can we better support remote learners to attend online, but not from their own home? Can we connect them with Cohort members in their part of the world, or enhance the sense of experiencing London virtually?  The solutions may well be adopting VR and AR tools that already exist, but they also may be solved by again rethinking time. Courses have always been strictly time-bound from registration, onboarding to certification.  Maybe those timelines should be longer and more open? Then in the future, we welcome formerly remote Cohort members into some open-ended continuation of that learning in London.   

Impact. The biggest challenge is to elevate personal impact nearer to that found amongst in-person cohorts. For those joining wholly online, we are still in the foothills.  Participant feedback tells us that we are effective at making the teaching experience seamless and joined-up for participants (the tech works, the mechanics of the class, instructions, facilitation, content, etc) and we are improving interaction and involvement, e.g., collaborative workshops, breakouts and simulations.  But getting participants into a deeper space of observational feedback, or emotional engagement with one another or the learning itself, is difficult.  The very best learning experiences engender self-reflection, build self-awareness and often surface genuine commitments made to one another, to do things differently in the future.  Online executive coaching helps, but for me, that broader sense of a cohort sharing profound learning together still seems some way off.  The goal is to make the virtual experience work as well as it does with all the shared humanity, emotional engagement, openness and fun that groups gradually form when they spend a few weeks living, learning and socialising together on Campus.

As the world shifts back onto a steadier familiar axis in 2021 then the temptation is to hope for a rapid return to face to face executive education as the default format.  But perhaps like the cinema, things will have shifted so profoundly in the interim, that real growth, if it is ever found again, is more likely to still come from virtual learning.  I would suggest that the providers best positioned will be those who can make virtual cohorts connect well across timezones, provide a better sense of attending a place of learning, and focus on making learning impactful, not just educational.  

Three Sides (a)Live

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When I was about thirteen, any song on an album which ran under 18 minutes long was instantly regarded (by me) as mere trivial pop and therefore crap.  Great music then had to meet a number of criteria; be arranged in several different time signatures in the same “song”, have a singer who sounded weird and elated and mystified at the same time; about 14 musicians (well 5 bearded guys overdubbed on top of one another) playing complicated stuff at the same time, indiscernible lyrics that mentioned (often within the same “song”) stars, lakes, forests, spaceships, blackholes, hedgerows, nurseries, alien adduction, war, peace and ageing.  Lots of ageing. Deep themes and concepts were important and were debated heatedly with others (well the two other boys I knew who also liked Prog) and were drawn from classical literature, as well as science fiction and fantasy writers like Tolkien, Arthur C Clark, Asimov and French people I had never heard of.  Lots of people I had never heard of.  And the records themselves were adorned in extraordinary covers, crafted by genius album artists, who could fuse enigmatic fantasy landscapes, animals, nudity, swirly graphics and unusual serif fonts.  Today, all that unbridled and unapologetic creativity is readily available on Spotify and you can easily create a 14 hour play list with just a handful of choice tracks from the era. Under the cover of headphones, I have been secretly transported back to 1993. I am back in HMV records in Bradford, where I met Marillion (still with Fish) and they all signed a copy of Script For A Jesters Tear for me.  That much cherished though seldom played album was subsequently stolen from a student house in Hull, so if anyone reading it now feels guilty, or embarrassed to have Prog in their collection, the please let me know.  Anyway, I am not sure those heights of complete early teenage engrossment will ever quite come back, but someone put me on to Big Big Train and this month has been a nostalgic musical joy.  The band have a singer who looks like a young Patrick Stewart, playing the flute in a three-piece suit and he sounds just like 1973 version of Peter Gabriel.  It is uncanny.  The band also (for a while) had Dave Gregory, of the incredible XTC, playing 12-string electric guitar and despite everything that has happened in 2020, the world is momentarily a place of unbridled wonder again, in 9:8 time.  

Movie Theatres are Dust

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I realised this week that local cinemas will soon go the way of Blockbuster shops. Movie theatres are pretty much shut around the world and many (like pubs, clubs and music venues) will never open again.  There was some hope of survival in September when Cineworld managed to secure a gigantic shareholder backed refinancing. Now Warner Brothers, sitting on a slate of (potentially) amazing 2020 deferred and pending 2021 film releases (including the much-anticipated Dune, directed by directed by Denis Villeneuve) announced that it will premiere simultaneously in theatres and on their streaming platform HBO Max. This may well be the beginning of the end of large international theatre chains, which need global release schedules, coordinated marketing campaigns, and crucially, exclusive release windows, so films can be seen only theatrically before they hit the TV screens.  Today the brilliant Christopher Nolan, who made Tenet, The Prestige and Interstellar, weighed in on Warner Bros’ recent announcement: “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service," he said.  His comments might seem overly precious in an industry turned upside down by a global pandemic, but in a business where great ideas take many years to go from writer’s concept to script to development to production to release, Warner Bros’ decision to suddenly break industry ranks will surely kill many of the theatres that have funded that same creative process. I guess we will see, or rather not see, in the coming months.

Writing

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Yes, I’ve “decided” to start writing again.  Those of you who have followed Wave Your Arms for a while will know how immensely insignificant that statement this is.  Despite the cliched lonely travails of the would-be author, writing is not in the same league as doing a decent job, let alone putting a man on the moon, curing cancer, or solving war zone conflict. It might feel like that, but it’s not. Writing is often a self indulgent pastime, occasionally becoming (for a tiny minority of talented scribes) something noble, worthwhile and meaningful for others, perhaps for a bit.  Yes, books, poems, even lines from a song, can change lives and inspire ideas and hope in readers. For most of us though, it’s a humble harmless pursuit of pointlessness, but it is at least marginally purposeful and for me it was ‘start writing again’, or going to the gym more often.

While on the subject of writers and creativity; this week, the Government have started vaccinating people against Covid-19.  One of the very first to be injected is an 81-year old gentlemen in Warwickshire called, William Shakespeare.  No, you could not make it up. I am sure the PR teams attached the project were bent double with the whimsical wonderfulness served up by the name of their early ‘jab a grandad’ volunteer. They could have chosen Bob Smith down the corridor on another Ward, but then where would have been the headline-writes-itself thrill in that? But somehow watching this all happen “as flies to wanton boys we are to the Gods, they kill us for their sport” was the line that popped into my head.  Sincerely, I wish William and all the other volunteers in wave one of this exercise all the very best. 

Bob Moran's art describes everything I feel and more

I was going to write some over-long angst ridden rant against the new Corona restrictions being announced today in England. The perilous path toward economic oblivion is being senselessly trod. The hideous (unintended?) consequences ought to be clear, but it seems that locking down again has wide support; not just in the press but [according to respected pollsters] by the vast majority of my fellow citizens in the UK; particularly by those who feel immune to the impact of restrictions. Then someone shared with me Bob Moran’s recent cartoons and I pushed away the keyboard. Mr. Moran sees and describes everything I feel and more in just a few images.

You can find out more @bobscartoons

I never bought tickets for Lockdown 1, let alone ask for a sequel.

As I write, the Archbishop of Canterbury is talking of the UK as a nation suffering a form of prolonged PTSD.  According to the opinion Polls, despite economic carnage, the country still seems to have a lockdown fetish, despite COVID-19 deaths now making up less than 1% of all weekly deaths in the UK.  My employer has started making people redundant.  Phrases like “made redundant” doesn’t do the grim stark reality of it any justice. Meanwhile, Scotland has banned students from going to the pub, socialising, or thinking for themselves (surely the point of going to University?) and in England, the Health Secretary - who has a control freakery rating of 11 out of 10 - is talking of banning all students from coming home for Christmas. That said, Christmas itself is likely to banned anyway and all supplies of mistletoe are now being blockaded at the ports.  So far so, no ho ho. 

So, what do you do?  For me, music helps.  Future Islands, Doves, London Grammar, and Fleet Foxes have all shared new tunes this week to sooth the mood.  Future Islands’ latest has a lockdown lyric to match the mood; “So we just lay in bed all day” he croons. Fleets Foxes’ Robin Pecknold reaches out, like many of us, for nostalgia in heroes like Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley, Otis and Jimi.  His escape plan in Sunblind is to “Swim for a week | In warm American waters with dear friends.” Well I’m in. Doves are more consistently doom-laded; in Prisoners; desperately wandering in “dusty halls and hollow shopping malls,” Jez Williams intones that at least it “won’t be for long”.  Great tune, but I am not so sure he sounds that convinced. 

Apparently Bake Off (a show about making cakes in a tent) is a panacea to the nation.  The makers of new shiny Xbox and PS4’s are gearing up soon to save the male world from implosion. Others have dived into books, with interest in fantasy and science-fiction now booming. Solace is being found in the cultural revolution tropes of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, or (in anticipation of new movie versions next year) of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Frank Herbert’s Dune.  To me it makes sense to explore tales of other planets and get lost in some post-apocalyptic visions of elsewhere, rather than here. Those familiar with Asimov’s masterpiece may well already feel that we are a planet and a species being controlled by The Mule.  Or perhaps, that’s just me?  The poet Larkin, on a keyside in Ireland, wrote of the Importance of Elsewhere; his comfort there that “strangeness made sense”.  We surely all now long for elsewhere, for unfamiliarity, for not here.  As of today, the newspaper reports that there are now just nine countries in the world into which you can fly back and forth without quarantine from the UK.  One is Italy, which surely proves, there is some hope left.  

I had a fun exchange this week with Greg Orme, who’s dead clever and writes books that are readable and smart.  We exchanged some thoughts on Ground Hog day.  I have written about the film before and Tim Minchin’s stage adaptation remains one of the best things I have ever seen.  According to some forensic analysis of the original screenplay, Phil Connors, played in the film by Bill Murray, lived through his Groundhog Day 12,403 times.  That is the same winter day for 34 years.  Asked by a child for a weather prediction, his cynicism cuts “It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life,” he said.  But, after suffering being “stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned”, Phil morphs, using his very many Gladwell “10,000 hour” slots, to change from curmudgeonly misanthrope into someone who transforms his own life and those around him. Greg shared the perfect quote that shows the way Phil now sees the world: “When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter”.  

Phil Connor’s transformation reminds me of Dicken’s Scrooge, dragged through the cold winter night to reflect on his past, present and future.  Which brings us back to that new Government idea of banning Christmas.  Like the White Witch in the Narnia stories, they seem to want it to be winter, but never Christmas. Unless something drastically changes, all public policy points towards the next six months being as dull and dreary as a coastal town weekend with Morrisey.  The idea is proposed by an unelected organisation called Sage.  Yes, sage, as in stuffing.  

Tenet is profoundly good

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Nolan’s film about navigating the future and the past is really about TODAY

Apparently being “agile” is a great attribute to have. And now we are required to pivot like there is no tomorrow. Risk on | Risk off. Open borders | Closed borders. Mask on | Mask off. Schools open | Schools closed. Eat out (Mon-Weds) | Don’t eat out. Fly | Stay. Isolate | Perculate. Well, I just got back from seeing Christopher Nolan’s new film Tenet and (yes, Mask On | Mask off for popcorn) it is profoundly good. The main character is confronted with a bewildering array of contradictory information in a distopian world, resorting to mask wearing to survive and trying to make sense of the future, while longing for the past. You literally could not make it up! Or rather Nolan did when he wrote the script. Hats off | On.

10 Songs to Survive Lockdown

According to my Sunday newspaper, there are many inspired ways that others have re-shaped their lives during Lockdown. They have taken the opportunity of home-working to do more than merely endure lockdown, but have imaginatively strived to “improve as human beings”.  Even our Prime Minister has seemingly hauled himself from his death bed to be become a father again and had time to lose a stone and a half running around the garden of Buckingham Palace.  I almost choke on my cornflakes as I hear of writers who have knocked off three new screenplays, sofa to 5K adopters who’ve lost 5KG and others’ teenage children who have learned complex SQL Programming from scratch.  While trying to contend with the sheer bloody awfulness of a critically disrupted market for my own profession [see here for the gory details], I have mainly been focused on harnessing all the diplomacy skills of Boutros Boutros Ghali, just to keep Wave Your Arms towers from turning into the trigger zone for World War III.  Ashamedly, I have read less than I’d hoped, walked millions of steps (though never really troubled the ECG monitor on my Apple Watch) and realised my business book called GLUE, ready to fly in February to the editor, now looks tame and under-cooked given the shit-storm most organisations are going to face in the next couple of years.  

The one thing I did do successful though was go full-on for nostalgia.

Again, the BLOG got a hint of that in April [see link here], and without the patience to sit still and re-watch Lord of the Rings Extended Editions or The Godfather Trilogy, I simply donned the headphones and went elsewhere for a different kind of playlist. There are are some 30 million songs on Spotify.   Despite all my efforts, I found myself repeatedly drawn to a handful from the 1970’s and 1980’s; a kind of mellow, easy listening groove – a bit like Magic Radio, if you know the vibe. Songs that are memorable, hummable and would offend no one.  There are a few more modern gems not mentioned here – but essentially this was the playlist: on repeat, shuffle, repeat for 14 weeks.  The playlist is here. I’m still not bored.   This is why.

The Only Living Boy in New York, Simon & Garfunkel

Simon & Garfunkel’s America is probably in the running for “the best song ever written”, but this melancholy wonder made more sense, when in April I watched the scenes on TV of Times Square, Wall Street and Fifth Avenue with absolutely no one there – like a scene out an apocalyptic movie.    

Tin Man, America 
Still in America, I discovered Tin Man.  I’m not sure how I went 50 years on the planet not realising that “Oz didn’t give nothing to the Tin Man”, but these guys did and what a line!  It gets stuck in your head.

State of Independence, Donna Summer

The John and Vangelis version of this almost made the list, but it’s the Donna Summer cover version that raised it to another level of sublime.  It’s refrain ‘Shablamidi, shablamida” sounds profound and wonderful – perhaps some Indonesian cultural shout of joy, but no, John Anderson said more simply “That just popped up. Shablamidi, Shablamida. It just popped up and I sang it.”  

Johnny and Mary, Robert Palmer

This time the original made the playlist, but the cover version by the extraordinary Placebo is marvellous too. It’s a song without a chorus, or bridge, or a middle-eight. But the repetitive beat and verse plays out a sense of two lives yearning for meaning while a couple under one roof disaggregate. “Johnny thinks the world would be right if it would buy truth from him  |  Mary counts the walls”.  As a narrative, it’s not been topped since LCD Soundsystem wrote All My Friends thirty years later. 

Dreams, Fleetwood Mac

The film Sound City, by Dave Grohl, features the story of how a floundering and directionless Mick Fleetwood stumbled across Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in the studio room next door and Fleetwood Mac (as most of us know them) was born.  The band’s story and the complex relationships that followed are more famous, but just for a moment, pause and just listen to the bass + Fleetwood’s drumming in the first 60 seconds of this masterpiece. They make space and time suspend, framing all the focus on Nicks’ voice and Buckingham’s guitar. 

You’re So Vain, Carly Simon

On our wall we have a painting of a Sicilian hill town by a British artist called Mike Bernard.  Hidden beneath the paint and collage of old newspaper clippings he uses for texture; there is a just discernible picture of Warren Beaty.  He may well also be the unnamed ex-lover so torturously described by Carly Simon.  But more amazing than the lyrics with which his vanity is shamed, there is the chorus to the song. In the backing vocals, alongside Simon’s is Mick Jagger.  I never knew that, but once heard, you can never not hear it again without hearing Mick singing “don’tcha, don’tcha, don’tcha”.

Wrapped in Grey, XTC

One of the most beautiful ‘call to arms’ for creativity, art, self-expression and individuality, ever penned. It was so good that the band’s record company pressed it as a single, then bizarrely never released it, creating a Prince/Sony style impasse between band and record label.  It was not for another decade until they took the soundscape here and produced their masterpiece Apple Venus.   

Open Here, Field Music and A Day In the Life, The Beatles

To Andy Partridge of XTC, Wrapped In Grey sounded like Burt Bacharach, or The Beach Boys.  To me it feels inspired by A Day In the Life, which I have loved for years.  But then I discovered a recent newcomer - Open Here by North East band Field Music. Play these three together, in any order – from very different bands in different decades, across 40 years of British pop music and tell me there is not something special in the water of these Isles?

Golden Brown, The Stranglers 

Dave Greenfield was the keyboardist and singer with the Stranglers. He died in May 2020, during lockdown at the age of 71. He reportedly contacted COVID-19 while in hospital for a heart condition.  When I started to write the Wave Your Arms blog in 2008, it was an enjoyable distraction, writing about films and music and “the narrowing range of artists I could still see live, before they died.” And I guess that’s the problem with nostalgia.  You go looking in the past for heroes and time catches up with your heroes, as well as the villains.  One less hero. 

PS. Someone found the perfect way to create a tribute for Greenwood, video-casting Dave Brubeck and band magically covering the Strangler’s ¾ time wonder. Watch this and DESPITE EVERYTHING that is going on…try not to smile.  

Why the best ideas in business make no sense at all

Counterintuitive ideas are in big trouble. In a world of political discord, social-media tribalism and fake news, we yearn for certainty. We want expertise that can be trusted, for the presentation of indisputable facts, that are indeed, facts.  We scrutinise graphs, plotted by scientific experts, eager to see empirical evidence that public health policy interventions are working. The opinion polls tell us that we want transparency and authenticity from politicians whom we can trust. The brand analysts say that we want companies and products provider who mirror our values and actually deliver what they say they will. In a demanding market for certainty, counterintuitive ideas – which defy logic or reason – may look doomed to fail. 

Which is a shame, because counter-intuitive ideas are the holy grail of the smart thinking business. These are the off the wall ideas that ignite innovation, creating break-out products and industries. Counterintuitive ideas break the mould exactly because they are initially perceived to be mistaken, or the errant plans of the foolish, but are in fact (because of their rarity) the marks of true genius.  If you are not convinced, perhaps some real examples of counterintuitive ideas might reassure? Each story, in its own small way, illustrates some aspect of the genius found in pursuing strategies that really don’t make sense. 

Ignore the prevailing common sense

Like many good stories, we begin on the high seas.  When the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492 to find a western sea route to India and Asia, he defied the common consensus about the huge difficulty involved. Columbus calculated the route heading West to Asia in Italian miles and mistakenly estimated the distance from the Canary Islands to Japan as about 3,000 miles, which, with three ships prepared, he was confident of navigating. The true distance from the Canary Islands to Japan was some four times greater than Columbus’ hypothesis. The common-sense view of most European navigators of the day was that anyone trying a westward voyage from Europe to Asia non-stop would die of thirst, disease or starvation long before reaching their destination. They were, in a way, proved to be right and Columbus dangerously wrong, but in defying the consensus and happening upon the Americas, he literally changed the course of human history.   

Disregard consumer feedback

Famously, when the makers of Red Bull decided to launch their new drink, they undertook significant market and consumer testing. Whatever the market, age group or demographic tested, the feedback came back the same: it tastes terrible! In fact, the agency commissioned to source consumer’s views described the feedback as the single worst reaction they had received to any product ever. But then Red Bull decided to spend less money on expensive market research and started throwing people our of hot-air balloons in low earth orbit, sponsoring death-defying ‘X-rated’ sports and positioning themselves as the default ‘early-hours’ refreshment choice for 20 year old clubbers the world over. They now sell several billion cans a year.

Create new products from inventions that don’t work

The classic innovation approach and the fuel for many start-up ventures is to come up with smart solutions to thorny problems faced by consumers.  The counterintuitive approach would be to invest entrepreneurial energy in coming up with solutions for other problems that don’t exist.  The most famous example is from 3M’s development of the Post-It - borne out of an adhesive that hardly adhered. Some ten years after its glue discovery, 3M launched ‘Post-its’ in the US and a multi-billion-dollar category was born. There are others: The Slinky Toy was developed as a spring to support and stabilise sensitive equipment on ships. When one of the springs accidentally fell off a shelf, it continued moving, and its designer got the idea for a toy. His wife Betty came up with the name and more than 250 million ‘Slinkys’ have been sold worldwide. Play-Doh is a familiar smell from childhood which has kept millions of children entertained. But before it was a brightly-coloured modelling clay, it started life as ingredients for a wallpaper cleaner.

Take away features the customer wants

Jobs gets rid of the disc drive, DESPITE CUSTOMERS using THEM

In 2012 Steve Jobs decided to remove optical disc drives from its hugely popular iMac computers.  Almost all computers used some form of optical drive as a convenient way of playing music, movies and copying data and booting systems.  The tech community thought this would be commercially disastrous for a premium brand manufacturer like Apple. It simply made no sense to do this when all Apple’s cheaper competitors continued to supply drives. But Job’s decision was perhaps inspired by Wayne Gretski’s quote about his success in ice-hockey: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been”.  By anticipating a rapid demise of the market for CD’s, in favour of online music and secure data transfer over networks, the decision to make computers thinner and lighter was less a radical gamble than one of Jobs’ many moments of genius.   

Make things difficult for the customer

In 2006, while still an undergraduate at NYU, Jack Dorsey wanted to connect people with news, views and updates around the wold, so he, counterintuitively, insisted on creating an instant messaging system that was somewhat awkward and inhibiting to use.  From launch, Twitter restricted users (whom often had a lot to say) to a strict regime of 140 typed characters (including spaces) and made the user adopt an unfamiliar keyboard Shift or Option function to address or categorise each message.  Within 6 years more than 100 million users were posting 340 million ‘tweets’ a day. Dorsey is still CEO of a company that now employs over 4,000 people and is valued at over USD24 billion.  

If the shirt doesn’t fit wear it

Doing something that doesn’t make sense can also signal a different level of leadership.  When Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president, he set out to reconcile black and white South Africans after centuries of racial and apartheid division. When South Africa reached the final of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, Mandela walked into the stadium wearing the Springbok jersey, which was hated symbol of white supremacy. On the back of the shirt he had the number 6. Few of us though could ever fathom or anticipate the sheer vision and guts of a political leader who would choose to wear a divisive symbol of the past as a way of signalling his hope for unity. The effect on the Springbok’s dressing room was profound, emotional and galvanising, with the team captained by Francois Pienaar (who wore the number 6 short on the field) winning the game and champions of the world. 

Give airtime to ideas that sound dumb

When we run workshops at LBS on innovation, we ask groups to brainstorm alternative, ‘left-field’ and counterintuitive ideas and we encourage their originators to log these as prominently as the more obvious data-driven customer and product ideas.  When the groups reconvene to consider, rank and select a shortlist of ideas for financial investment, they often hastily reject the odd, the strange and the quirky.  When challenged to consider the merits of a counterintuitive approach, the authors soon weary of the verbal and mental gymnastics involved in defending ideas that make no sense to others. In the debrief, the participants shrug and tell us: “the counterintuitive ideas just ended up sounding dumb”.  Not all new ideas adopted are based wholly on logic or reason, but our intuition, or hard-won reputation for competence, readily urges us to prefer ideas which just seem more viable and credible than the others. Just being aware of this bias adds a frisson to these workshops and a healthy debate about where ideas come from and why so few ideas sound unique enough to thrive.   

A counterintuitive future

Many of us would readily invest in cautious navigators who had double-checked their charts, glue manufacturers who made things stick, entrepreneurs who made unfussy messaging systems and computer makers who gave us more features, not less.  As the world emerges from the shock of a global pandemic and deep economic disruption, many will naturally scramble for sense and certainty.  The economic models and data will be scrutinised much like the epidemiologists’ charts and the old business processes and risk assessments will be dusted down on freshly sanitised desks.  Business leaders in turnaround mode and politicians, with elections to fight, will need to make good rational bets about the future.  The stock pickers and hedgers will have already decided their predicted winners and losers.  

But amidst the predictable approaches, perhaps a brave few will decide to try another way? Despite initially making no sense to anyone, fresh ideas might emerge again that are tangential, bizarre and surprising. Somewhere unexpected, there will be a new idea on a weary Post-It note, stuck there patiently, humbly, ready to be embraced.  Then seized boldly, blinking into the daylight, that idea will slap common-sense in the face and say, “counter that, wise guy.” 

In the new normal, no one can hear you scream

When Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien was released in 1979, the poster featured an alien egg cracking open, with an eerie light and mist.  It was a great poster image, but even better was the small tag line below: “In space no one can hear you scream.”  With extraordinary brevity, Scott exploded the vogue for science fiction movies as heroic, thought-provoking and pretentious (Star Wars, Close Encounters, 2001) and suddenly made the genre stark, claustrophobic and terrifying. In Scott’s universe there are vast worlds to mine and new life-forms to be discovered at the very fringes of humanity’s reach.   But when those life-forms inevitably decide to kill you; in a vacuum, no one will hear your shouts for help, or your cries for mercy.  And it was with that same sense of desperate isolation that I screamed unherd, while watching The Bundesliga on TV this week.

Behind closed doors is apparently par for the course in the “new normal”.  Inspired by the German trailblazers, sportsmen and women around the world are now psyching themselves up, dropping and giving twenty, in determined preparation for competing behind closed doors. They’ve done the Corona tests, been cleared, or have cheered as the antibodies are confirmed, and they are headed alone to some anonymous outpost at the far end of the known universe [some ‘neutral’ disinfected venue], to play for us in splendid isolation.  Watching the Bundesliga players, celebratory high-fives and kisses were replaced with elbow bumps which could actually be heard, while the great unwashed crowds were locked out.  The players looked bored and forlorn, while their uptight support staff stood stoically in designer snoods and $100 face-masks. 

There is talk of the theatre, of live music, of even opera going the same way.  Artists will be able to come out of the shadows, to co-locate nervously and perform, as if released like creative phoenixes, to grace the stage again, while sealed behind doors. If policy makers insist (and all opinion polls seems to suggest we want to be guided by their insistence) then the architects of the new normal will do all they can to replicate the great gatherings of the past (remember full stadiums yelling, Glastonbury flags obscuring and theatre stalls laughing?) but with audiences cocooned away from the alien virus. The Masters golf is to be re-scheduled in a manicured Hunger Games style quarantined course.  Royal Ascot will go ahead, but without Royals, or lascivious wassails swaying, unstable in high heels.  Formula One racing will still be noisy, but as in Ridley Scott’s horror, there will be no one to hear the engines scream. 

Which brings me to another great form of gathering - higher education, and its more grown-up cousins, business or executive education.  The profession has none of the glamour of the movies, or the pulse raising thrills of sport. We occasionally use music, but more to make a point, or signal a change of mood, than to truly lift the soul in the way a great gig or concert can do.  But my fear is that higher and business education may head the same way as the Bundesliga. Policy makers’ timidity will mean School estates staff are compelled to erect plexiglass screens to divide mask-muffled lecturers from sparsely allocated students, as the only way of making classes “safe.” The more cautious still will default wholly to virtual broadcast lectures and Zoom seminar groups and no collective breathe will be risked in the transmission of valuable thoughts and ideas.

It has already begun in the primary and secondary sectors.  We have had two decades of parents’ perennial fight to wrestle their children’s gaze away from the screen of the Xbox, the Playstation or their iPhone.  Now the new normal for the best provided for kids, is to sit for hours with an iPad, or laptop connected to some disembodied remote teacher. And the outcome sought by this endeavour?  Yes, you might win a place, paying over £9,000 a year, to experience the same online with Cambridge University or Manchester. It seems the zenith of educational experience will be to provide something that is “not too bad”.  So, not a life-enhancing experience that challenges the way you think, or the chance to meet your life-partner, or even, the possibility of discovering yourself. No, the ambition of the new normal seems to be, like football behind closed doors, to make it “not too bad”.  

Unless the policy makers change their guidance, then the safety first approach of large cohort education will end up having all the thrills of Bill Clinton’s famous marijuana defence: yes, we say we smoked some at university, but we certainly did not inhale.  The purified air we breathe will be all ours and the familiar walls will remain unchanged as we supposedly learn and grow.  Students in the near future will watch great Campus films like Everybody Wants Some, or Animal House, or Goodwill Hunting and simply not believe it was like that.  

And if you dare tap them on the shoulder while they are watching, they will instinctively flinch and scream.

In A World of Pandemic – what we can learn from cinema

While many sectors have felt the devastating impact of disruption in recent months, the motion entertainment industry, might just have built enough innovation and resilience into its model to survive.  

Rather than being cornered into a knee-jerk reaction and sudden pivot to digital; the content producers still earn revenues through sophisticated global digital distribution platforms. Netflix, Apple TV, Hulu, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime have all benefited from a global lockdown: as we’re stuck at home and hungry for content and distraction. Meanwhile, live music and ‘higher-brow’ alternatives like drama, musical theatre and opera, are scrambling to earn any revenues in a YouTube world where “everything is already free”.  

It’s not all positive for content creators.  A long production freeze will be costly and focus the minds of all players (though New Zealand may benefit from an early opening of facilities) and there is already a dearth of new content.  Movie theatres are in big trouble and some are spoiling for a post-Corona fight with Studios, some of whom provided new titles hastily to online audiences.  But subscription platforms have been overwhelmed with demand; so much so that Netflix throttled streaming quality in Europe.  

The seeds of resilience were sown in the past    

Picture the scene.  Hollywood, California.  The year is 1919.  The halcyon days of black and white silent movies.  A group of ambitious film actors and directors, including Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, launch a new venture called United Artists (UA). Their disruptive idea was to let actors control their own interests, rather than being wholly tied to commercial studios and from that idea UA was born.  In the 100 years since, UA has been bought, sold, restructured and renamed numerous times, but still, some ten decades later (including a brief interlude being owned by Tom Cruise) it continues in a new form as United Artists Releasing.  Today UA is a digital IP distribution vehicle, creating exclusive online content for Walmart’s ‘Vudu Movies on Us’ service.  In an industry repeatedly confronted by change and disruption, it is a remarkable tale of evolution, adaptation and survival.   

But more remarkable is that UA is not alone.  While the Studio mega-mergers have shrunk their numbers, Hollywood’s production slates remain chalked with familiar brand names (Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, Disney) that have somehow survived, in one form or other, for a century or more; producing moving pictures, distributing entertainment, making stars and creating box office.  Behind this there are numerous stories, like that of UA, which began with smart innovation and grew from there. 

In the same year that Chaplin signed with United Artists, a few blocks away, Harold Lloyd began holding “test screenings” of his films and modifying them based on audience feedback, a practice which continues today. Across town, William Fox, founder of Fox Film was busy building cinema houses and investing in a new concept called “sound on film”.  But disruption reared its head and following the Wall Street Crash, Fox merged with Twentieth Century Pictures to form 20th Century Fox.  This new Fox survived World War II, before thriving as cinema audiences grew globally and was acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 1985.  In March 2019, 100 years after Chaplin and Fox were pitching ideas and production technologies, 20th Century Fox was sold by Murdoch to The Walt Disney Company for around $70 billion; the biggest deal in the history of motion entertainment. After 100 years the Fox was finally consumed by a Mouse.  

The future is happening faster

Such longevity is perhaps not normally associated with “creative” industries, but creativity seems to have built in more resilience than we might imagine.  Disruption, innovation, new technology, digitisation, societal change and globalisation have meant a continual process of formation and destruction, impacting whole industry sectors, renowned brands and business giants. To illustrate, of the Fortune 500 companies first listed in 1955, some 90% of them no longer make the list today.   

Every decade in the last hundred has had its share of seismic shocks, those ‘black swan’ moments with devastating outcomes for businesses regardless of their stature.  The health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are already quantifiably terrible; the economic consequences are predicted to be devastating for a whole generation.  But was this sudden dramatic impact on some businesses so wholly unpredictable?  Did the pandemic just dramatically hasten the inevitable to happen?  Before we had heard of COVID-19, was the sheer bloody-awfulness of budget air travel really the zenith of human innovation?   Was standing in a muddy field queueing for a portacabin toilet the highpoint of a music lover’s life?  Was travelling for weeks cocooned on a crowded Cruise liner ever really that great?  Did footballers really need to be paid £300,000 a week?  

Invest in both online and offline 

50 years after Chaplin made The Gold Rush for United Artists, a building in Toronto housed the world’s first iMax cinema, providing what would become both a glimpse of the future and the summit of the past of theatrical experience. But innovation did not end there. In this century, the traditional studios and theatres, bolstered by new audiences and the vast dollars of its digital platform providers, has meant investment in BOTH analogue and digital distribution.  If you went to a cinema in the UK just fifteen years ago it was a pitifully tired experience.  Sticky floors, smelly toilets, predictable programming and underwhelming sound and visuals.  There has been a renaissance in cinema going that has mirrored the growth in on-demand digital offerings.  Now you have choice: retro-chic at boutique Picture house, 24-hour venues, free-parking, drinks, film clubs, high-definition sound, 4D experiences.  If you want to pay more, there are extraordinary iMax 3D venues and the “Lux” offerings with comfy sofas, waiters and fine dining.  A huge change from the ABC I knew growing up!  In the past 50 years, the industry has built both the nuclear bunker (global digital distribution) and still created new pleasure domes (great new theatres) at the same time.  The strategic lesson is that cinema saw digital disruption as both an opportunity and a threat.  Being imaginative in its response to both has proved to be its saviour.     

Some hope from the past 

When Chaplin launched UA, it was only twelve months after the first spring outbreak of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the world was still at war.  Just as today in 1918, movie theatres in the US were forced to close.  Many smaller film companies went out of business and production was halted, as there were no theatres open for audiences – and clearly, in 1918, Hollywood did not have a global digital distribution platform to weather the storm. Some commentators doubted if the cinema would ever have a future.  But post-pandemic and post-war, the actors and directors and producers and their investors became re-aligned around a few powerhouse Studios. By being newly refocused on a new audience appetite for extraordinary storytelling and armed, first with sound, then with colour, the Golden Age of Hollywood was born.  

Which made me wonder, how many industries today will draw upon a post-Pandemic wave of pent up demand, not just re-start their business, but to transform it in ways that make it resilient for the future?    

Nostalgia, not hope, is the key to life after lockdown

 “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. E.M. Forster

DAVID BOWIE - A MAN FROM THE FUTURE, SENT INTO THE PAST TO INSPIRE US TODAY

When will it end? When will life go back to normal again? All our hopes seem to be pinned on the prospect of emerging from a locked-down world and that world looking a lot like it did before.  Remember, like it was before everything went mad!?  It won’t, but that doesn’t mean that the feelings are any less potent.  So, we naturally cling to hope.  But this time our hopes for the future aren’t progress, or difference, or improvement, or even new shiny things. Perhaps for the first time in history, the whole world now longs for the future to be a return to the past.  

Speak to a close friend. Well, any male friend - and say words like “football”, “pub” or “gig” and even via the low latency of a laptop webcam, you can instantaneously see his face twitch, as a powerful neurological and physiological reaction takes hold. Such is the depth and complexity of the human mind that he processes the aurally received concept of a “Pub”, he pictures, considers, reflects, processes and responds (in less time than it takes a Wuhan wet-market bat to flap its wings) and he says something at once relatable and universal. “Fuck yeah, can you even imagine!?”

And we can. We can picture every moment. Heading west on a cramped sweaty tube, shouting above the noise, paying a fiver for each pint, the aggro at closing time, the fights, the stupid messages, the artery swelling junk-food, the cab driver sharing his ‘wisdom’, the hangover, the inevitable alarm clock, the mouthwash, the paracetamol, the weary commute on the familiar journey to a workplace surrounded by other people.  Some of our deepest future hopes are for a rerun of evenings we might at best only half-remember.   

“Nostalgia.  It’s delicate, but potent.”  Don Draper, Mad Men.  

Today is, I think, the 40th day of lockdown. I have been listening to Aladdin Sane.  Bowie’s sixth studio album was released 47 years ago. Forty-seven years!  An age away. And it’s still timeless and idiosyncratic and uncomfortable - a smorgasbord of piano (and what a piano!) and scribbled words, schizophrenically switching styles between haunted moodiness and singalong choruses and then some head-down guitar riff driven boogie.  I hear it again and feel instant nostalgia. 

I can remember listening over and over to the album a few years after it was released. In the late 1970’s I lived in Warley Drive, Bradford and Bowie’s was one of a handful of records I actually owned.  Where I lived was a bit shit. I’ve only been back to that street once in four decades. I have zero nostalgia for that time or place. T’was grim. A lot of what made that past memorable was probably best forgotten.  Perhaps it’s part of the reason that Aladdin Sane still sounds so wonderful today? But I don’t long to return to that past, even for an album that sometimes skipped on side two.    

“The future, isn’t what it used to be.” Foals, Black Gold.

We’re rightly bamboozled by the uncertainty of the future (which may indeed again be “a bit shit”) and hold ever tighter to the deeply felt memories of the past.  In Mad Men, Don Draper said the feeling of nostalgia was like the “pain from an old wound.” What then does pre-Corona nostalgia look and feel like? Is it a longing for Family? Friends? Work? Music? Theatre? Italy? Sport? Because the good news is that in the future that feeling of nostalgia and wonder will still be there - in the locker of the past. On the Zoom backdrop bookshelves of yesterday.  And whatever the triumphs and tragedy ahead, it will be found again in a post-Corona world. That nostalgia will still be there.