I recently had the pleasure to meet with Scott Newton to talk about GLUE, hybrid work, productivity, engagement and a whole host of other topics. Scott is super smart and works and advises top teams on strategy and value creation. So, it was great to have him anchor the conversation and draw so many people together from around the world to explore this idea called GLUE. You can see a recording of the conversation from Linked-in Live below.
Hockney supervises the installation OF HIS RETROSPECTIVE AT THE LIGHTROOM
One of the cultural highlights of London in 2023 was the Lightroom’s retrospective of Britain’s greatest living artist David Hockney. It was an evocative and deeply immersive experience, surrounded on all sides by Hockney’s art, while kids tried to jump in the virtual puddles. Hockney voiced his own world view, as a glass half-full. “There is no such thing as bad weather,” he tells us. “I can look at the little puddles in the rain and get pleasure out of them … if it’s rainy I’ll draw the rain, if it’s sunny I’ll draw the sun … The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much.”
As we look towards 2024, it seems that a much gloomier landscape awaits us – with ongoing wars, instability, discord, and epoch marking elections looming in the UK, Europe and USA. Is it still possible for us to see equal beauty as Hockney does, both in the miserable rain of northern France and the blazing sun of southern California?
The trick seems to be not to ignore what is going on the in the world, but to also look deeper and look elsewhere. Today the news itself has become the news – mistrusted, scandalous and more often taking sides. Are there other ways we can better understand the world than through the skewed curation of an algorithm fuelled feed? Numerous writers and counsellors advocate a digital detox, new deep-work habits, changing the channel, avoiding social media and being more aware of its impact on our mood and our sense-making. Maybe we need more walking, talking and listening to one another? More time spent reading and less social-media feeding. As Barack Obama said of his annual reading list: “While each of us has plenty that keeps us busy, outlets like literature and art can enhance our lives. They’re the fabric that helps make up a life”.
In Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, he makes the case for our lives to be seen in a broader frame than the weight and stress of the moment – the dominant mood of the here and now. Instead, we should fully immerse ourselves in a time management horizon that has real breadth and meaning, not just the next impending milestone. It might feel more possible to do that at the start of a new year, but we need to be armed with more than just some new resolutions. In classes at LBS, we often explore the profundity found in Andrew Scott and Lynda Gratton’s The Hundred Year Life, and the need for managers and mid-lifers to learn again, to re-invest in “intangible assets” (dormant friendships, new relationships) as well as monitoring our health and our tangible wealth.
A good touchstone for this new more optimistic way of looking at the world in 2024, might be through reappraising how we look at our working lives. Before 2019, working from home was a rare privilege, which often needed to be grudgingly “approved”. Employers were reluctant to unleash the autonomy genie of flexible working. Now, hybrid, remote and flexible working is the norm for very many employees. The past three years has seen the greatest liberalisation in the form and mode of professional work ever known. Our corporate leaders have seized the zeitgeist in their garden cabin-offices, where they can broadcast townhall missives in their slippers and shorts. The new norms of office attendance and remote technology have meant a radical recalibration of work and life that we might never have imagined possible just five years ago.
But despite this, no one seems very happy. Gallop report worsening employee engagement, and productivity measures have seen no beneficial ‘uptick’ in our newfound freedom from the commute. Surprisingly, Gallop’s 2023 State of The Workplace survey found that the category of worker with the greatest likelihood to quit their job are those who seemingly enjoy the best of both worlds - hybrid workers. It seems organisations have created a new mode of working, at the expense of some organisational glue.
Now work is not perfect. There is frustration, and monotony and boredom some days. I do not pretend that every organisation treats its employees well, and I know that bullying, malfeasance and other issues do sometimes rear their ugly heads. But for many of us, we are able to work for decent firms, that are normally well led, with good benefits and a sense of purpose. Some fear that 2024 may herald the explosion of AI adoption, and the increasing trivialisation and commoditisation of human expertise and ingenuity. In the near future, many professional jobs may seem more and more meaningless and economically vulnerable. Even JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon has predicted that AI will mean that workers will be needed less and less, and soon no more than three days week.
But let’s take Hockney’s glass-full approach. Perhaps that might also mean we have more time for wandering, meeting others for coffee, for conversation and for nostalgic memories of the past. Of the tyranny of clocking in and out, of five-day working, dress down Fridays and the illicit thrill of the occasional duvet day. David Hockney made every day of his working life extraordinarily productive. Over 15,000 genuine works of astounding art produced, and his greatest productivity found in his Croc wearing, chain-smoking eighties. The outlook for 2024 looks gloomy, but if it is only 52 of the 4,000 weeks we are afforded, how do we make the utmost of both the sunny days and the wet?
My book GLUE is now out in the wild, published last month, and sparking a conversation about a new mode of leadership for the way we now work and live. I was asked by Linked-in Book Club to craft a single page summary for the book, so I settled on the key leadership behaviours that make a difference in creating glue.
If you want to create organisational glue, then your leadership behaviours matter, as they are observed, recognised, and emulated in the firm. Exemplar leaders demonstrate four complementary qualities; an ability to:
Galvanise
Being able to galvanise others when the pressure and complexity gauges are all turned up to 11 is an extraordinarily valuable skill. The leader who can excite others about the future, winning hearts, and minds, and draw the best from all involved is a rarity. They see that it’s not about demonstrating their own capabilities, but opportunities to unleash other’s talents.
Glue pro-tip: Bring together a talented group from very different parts of the business to collaborate on an experiment – a crazy idea that might illuminate some learning, even if it fails.
Listen
As a leader, you’re expected to communicate a clear vision with conviction. But your super-power is probably much more rarely used: your listening skills. Leaders need to hear with acuity, to be attuned to the organisation, its people and mood.
Glue pro-tip: If someone asks you a question, always ensure that you have heard, or understood, it correctly before responding. In that moment of pause, you will let others sense you have listened.
Be Unusual
The best leaders aren’t just authentic and open, but a little unusual compared to the norm. Unusual is important, because it’s rare, and therefore gets noticed. It intrigues peers, colleagues and team members and makes leaders memorable.
Glue pro-tip: Be reassured though, you do not need to look, act, or behave in a crazy oddball contrarian way. You just have to deviate in small ways from the norm.
Engage
The glue creating leader engages deeply and with a purpose. Firing people up is one thing, but maintaining connection, collaboration and engagement over time takes commitment, an investment of ideas, and a personal amount of ‘you'. You need to be found alongside, accessible but candid, and regularly encouraging levity and fun.
Glue pro-tip: turn up unexpectedly to office-farewells or other communal moments. No speeches or formalities, just genuinely (and briefly) join others in saying thanks and farewell. You cannot underestimate how well that small demonstration of decency will be regarded.
The hybrid leader’s principal role is to harness disparate talents to see value in connection, to be the person who joins the dots and helps make work feel meaningful again.
If you would like to find out more about GLUE - head to the GLUE tab and get stuck in.
Lennon and Macartney wrote: “There are places I'll remember | All my life, though some have changed | Some forever, not for better | Some have gone, and some remain”. We often think of our lived experience through people and places, with our emotions and feelings heightened by being there with someone we love. There the setting, the context, the landscape and the shadows of that place matter. Places are important to us, but not just the shoreline, the mountains or the open fields. Our cities as places and their buildings also matter. They really do. In our modern cities, the lived environment is much less evocative than the lyrics of the Beatles doleful tune. For too today many it’s awful; high-rise, unkempt, broken, dangerous and desolate. For every Shard in London, there are regrettably numerous potential Grenfell Towers. For those overlooking the Thames, in their own version of a modern-day Babel, with vertigo inducing balconies, and entrances guarded by camera and concierge, their residents might find solace and anonymity, and be neighbourless, but at what cost to their souls? Modern city architecture is almost universally unloved; unwrapped cold, nondescript and meaningless. Every new Mall and office looks the same. Only, shinier.
Spend ten minutes in central Florence, or Rome, or Barcelona and you are overwhelmed by a sense that buildings, streets, spaces and vistas really matter. Not just as elegant architecture, but as a frame and an ambition ladder to our lives. In 2010, I had a chance to attend the World Expo in Shanghai. I have written elsewhere that the trip had a profound impact on me. Each country represented at the World Fair were able to build a Pavilion – a single structure, a unique building to encompass the essence of a nation, its people, as well as a vision for the future of cities. I visited the UK pavilion, called the ‘Seed Cathedral’ – an extraordinary design and construction by British designer Thomas Heatherwick. A building made of 60,000 thin rods, each containing a single seed, subsequently to be planted somewhere in the world when the construction was dismantled. The building seemed organic, not built by engineers, and it moved in the wind.
Thirteen years later, I am sat on Heatherwick redesigned London bus (Route 38) holding a copy of his new book HUMANISE - A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World. Heatherwick feels our world is losing its humanity and that our cities are soulless and depressing, as if designed for business only, not for human beings. He makes the case for literally re-building society, community and humanity itself through better buildings. It’s an aspiration that seems so remote, challenging and odd that it is easy to dismiss, and simply shrug as we walk-on past yet another edifice of glass and steel. But what if we didn’t and determined to build our cities like Rome again? Maybe we would raise our heads once more, and stop and pause and feel awed and inspired. And if we did that, what might that mean for how we thought about our place in the world, our work, or our neighbours, or one another? Heatherwick’s is a beautiful, rather moving book, that - literally textured - even feels amazing to hold. I hope now it plants some seed of imagination amongst those commissioning buildings, as well as the architects, planners, politicians and mayors.
I have just launched a new irregular newsletter called The Organisational Advantage (or 'The OA' for short) which I will push out via Linked-in, for connections and new followers. The ‘OA’ should not confused with the rather wonderful, but completely bonkers Netflix TV series of the same name, but refers to the ‘organisational advantage’ created by a leader’s investment in social capital, collaborate behaviours and nurturing glue.
Every few months, I will add the latest research, thought leadership, and quirky/sticky stories about 'the future of work' and how leaders can better create cohesion in a hybrid world. A copy of all the key articles/features will continue to appear at the same time on the Wave Your Arms blog.
I was struck by reading the scarily brilliant, concise and confidently written The Art and Business of Online Writing by Nicholas Cole. Cole stresses focusing your energies on posting content on large mega platforms and channels like X, Linked-in, etc., other than - and as well as – personal blogs. I am keen for the widest reach possible, and as Wave Your Arms has grown to cover consulting, creative and GLUE related topics (it remains a repository of everything all articles I have written since 2007) it seems pushing to an audience through large blockbuster platforms is now the recommended distribution way to go. I may be ten years behind the curve, but you learn as you go…I guess a case of Wave Your Arms AND.
All non-business/future of work stuff about creativity, music, film, theatre, and culture will remain on Wave Your Arms, including a long-overdue blockbuster on the extraordinary Big Big Train (to be on here in November). If The Organisational Advantage strikes a chord, pls do subscribe and share on Linked-in. All and any feedback is welcome. You can find the Linked-in post and register for the Newsletter by clicking on the button below:
I was asked to contribute some ideas to an article for Forbes magazine on “How to win back a disengaged team”?” The full article, by Sally Percy, is linked below, but the contribution got me thinking. A lot of the management practice in this area, and much of the focus, ends up being about the pivotal role the leader plays - their actions, behaviours, and communication style. That is right, but to tackle disengagement, you need to be less “corporate” and instead to emphasise accessibility, informality and humanity.
Your corporate instincts might be to rely on familiar tools; ramping up formal communications, offering town halls and commitments to change. Like the errant lover, you might send long missives and make flattering promises but then, within days, act no differently. The trick is to make the organisation look, sound, and feel tangibly different, and you do that by behaving differently yourself. People cohere around other people, so make leadership more personal and relational. This is more difficult when teams are disaggregated, often apart, remote, and on various different working patterns, but there are some practical ways you can do this.
Some of this can be signalled by shifts to working protocols, making your visibility and style more pronounced. Be less formal and more accessible in-person. Don't arrange hybrid meetings - use remote only, or much better: in-person. Avoid doing one-to-ones on Teams or Zoom. Be clear about your working pattern and make sure others know. Work from open-plan space and have conversations others can hear. Don’t broadcast sweeping cliches at Townhalls but invest time actively listening. Ask groups for their ideas rather than try to solve the problems alone. Offer more autonomy, not more management and supervision. Be open to the frustration’s others feel but be radically honest with them about what needs to change. Most importantly, get your best people working together on important things that challenge them. For the disengaged, the grass may seem greener elsewhere, but if your best people are going to go, make it impossible for them to do that impersonally. You need them to feel that they will be leaving you, and other people whom they value deeply, not just quitting a place, a firm, or a job.
The Forbes article is linked here.
All photography by LILY MACKINTOSH {CLICK TO ZOOM]
Wow! Well that just happened! A veritable launch party for my new book GLUE, in the company of some of the loveliest people I know. It made perfect sense to hold the launch party for GLUE at The Union Club. I first visited the club about two decades ago to hear Anthony Minghella talk about film-making, jazz and selling ice-cream in Hull. I was immediately hooked on the place. We held a bash for Hull University Alumni there a few years back and heard from alumnus John McCarthy. I have had many heady evenings and a few long lunches at 50 Greek Street - so there was only ever going to be one choice for the book launch. The Club’s decor is kind of mad - red walls, subtle lights, furniture to sink into and every inch of its walls is covered in artwork, photos, posters and pictures of long-lost members. It was a joy to be joined by lots of amazing people - family, friends, publishers, colleagues, ex-colleagues, collaborators, programme managers and even an eminent architect or two! Rather than talk about what the book is about, of why it is “important” (which I think is the typical mode for a book launch), I talked a lot - probably way too much - about WHERE I have found glue over the years. Suffice to say there was plenty of glue found in the room. Reflecting on some divergent thoughts on loneliness, we raised a small sum for the charity MIND. I am so grateful for everyone who has helped me get to this point and giving the book a suitable launch pad of goodwill. The GLUE story is going “on the road” in the coming weeks and months, with various talks already lined up including one very prestigious overseas engagement. More to follow soon. Let’s stick together.
PS. A short video of the launch is captured below. Thanks again to Lily Mackintosh for capturing the vibe.
Hands up: who would want to be part of the leadership team at a modern hybrid working firm?
Being a leader has always been difficult. While the purpose might be strategic, the reality of the role often means tackling a burgeoning inbox of people issues, technology and process problems, crisis management and disruption aplenty. But those leaders charged with steadying the ship are themselves now being disrupted like never before. Unfortunately, the reality for leaders is that regardless of their best endeavours, their most talented people are already looking to leave, as the ties that bind seem looser and looser every year.
Leading in a ‘hybrid world’ is a whole new ballgame. Since 2020, we have seen a seismic shift to remote, hybrid and flexible working. Managers are now expected to be expert hybrid leaders, connecting dislocated individuals, on different work patterns; some online and remote, some down the corridor, some ever-present, some on flexible terms and some working from a Caribbean island.
Firms are now not just hybrid in working pattern, but “blended” — composed of different generations with differing outlooks, values and needs, and made up of employees, consultants, gig workers and freelancers. This means that managers now have to navigate a complex 4D chess game of people, place, time and mode, and many are, unsurprisingly, exhausted.
In the past three years, the response of different organisations to these trends has been marked. Some leaders think autonomy and freedom is the best way to engage talent and engender ideas. Others believe productivity only increases when workers are in the office together. After the pandemic restrictions were lifted, firms may have hoped for ‘return to the office’ boost to productivity, morale and collaboration. But employees have stayed away, crying freedom from the commute. Some firms have embarked on an employee benefits ‘arms race’ to make their offices more attractive, but too few employees seem impressed, with attendance remaining stubbornly low. The consequences are considerable, with just last month Facebook owner Meta paying £149m to surrender a lease early on its London office at Regents Place, that it never even occupied.
Calls for office returns
As well as sprucing up the office breakout spaces and serving better coffee, some firms have resorted to “office mandates”, with Meta, Google, Apple and others insisting on some element of regular office attendance, with Google subtly warning that attendance will be included as part of their performance reviews. Even video conferencing platform Zoom — a huge beneficiary of the sudden shift to remote working — has asked its employees to return to the office, calling it a “structured hybrid approach” to work. In August, the dating app Grindr gave its workers in the US a return-to-office ultimatum: either agree to work “twice a week” in person from October, or lose their jobs. The BBC reported that almost half of the staff quit.
The outlier — and there always is one — seems to be Twitter (now “X”), where Musk has trashed his predecessor Parag Agarwal’s promise “you can work from home forever, or wherever you feel most productive and creative”, with a wholly different philosophy. Musk describes himself as a big believer in the “esprit de corps” and effectiveness of being physically in the same location.
In November 2022, after completing the purchase of Twitter, he sent a memo to all staff with the subject line ‘Fork in the Road’. It is probably one of the most succinct and provocative counter expressions against the modern trend of employee-centric flexibility and workplace well-being. Musk cancelled the free in-house catering and sent his incendiary memo offering “hardcore” hours, compulsory office attendance and a new emphasis on engineering. To a European reader, his approach to HR policy was hilariously blunt and unusual: “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below. Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.” Media reports vary, but Musk’s own communications later suggested that over 5,000, or nearly 70 per cent, of staff left Twitter as a result.
Musk’s approach is different, and for almost all firms, hybrid is the new normal, but the jury is still out on what this means. Hybrid working is not the panacea some had hoped. The UK Government’s own commission on Productivity seems puzzled that freeing up labour to work from home has produced no discernible uptick in productivity. A 2022 survey of over 500 tech leaders by ‘MassChallenge’ found that tech founders were struggling with the “great resignation” and executives said that a significant number of their top performers have exited. The survey reports an ongoing conundrum: 62 per cent surveyed believe shifting to a more remote model has increased employee productivity, but 37 per cent said they intend to work from the office more over the next year.
A new approach is needed
Firms want their best people to stick around and give more of themselves. Studies have shown that improved employee collaboration and alignment with a common purpose is key to achieving that. But what is the best way to make that happen in the way we now wish to work and live our lives? Some suggest that the emergence of generative AI and new work tools can improve productivity regardless of the workplace setting. But perhaps a different, more human, approach is needed?
The profound loosening of relationships that employees have with their firm and one another, requires a similarly fundamental reimagining of the role of the leader itself. Ultimately, this will not come through new technology, systems, processes, or HR policy (however well-crafted), but through the actions and behaviours of credible and engaging people managers. Firms need to re-establish a sense of cohesion and that needs people who are exceptional good at doing just that. Businesses can’t just issue ultimatums or mandates; they need a leadership approach that “coheres” employees to feel less remote from one another and the firm.
It’s a radically different mode of leadership – and one I call creating glue. The leaders’ role in the future may be more of a coach than a manager, more mentor than monitor, and more shelter than supervisor. A leader’s principal role will be to harness disparate talents to find value in connection, to be the person who joins the dots and helps make work feel meaningful again.
A lot of the debate about the future of work seems to be about the where and how (online, remote, in-person, or hybrid) with getting the “balance right” exercising the HR policy makers. The much more profound and important factor that makes organisations cohesive is with whom I work, and why. Getting that right needs leaders who are great at harnessing relationships to create an organisational advantage. In a hybrid world, the single most impactful thing a leader can do is to cultivate some new organisational glue.
This article was originally published in Information Age on 3rd October 2023.
https://www.information-age.com/what-does-leadership-in-hybrid-world-look-like-123507438/
The nice people at THINK, which is LBS’ thought leadership journal, asked me why I decided to write a book about leadership in a hybrid world. Well the book could not be clearer. Now, more than ever, organisations need leaders who can connect, cohere and engage talented people. Three things have happened pretty much all at once and leaders need to frame some response to them all.
1. Leading has changed. Managers are now expected to be expert “hybrid” leaders, and it is a complicated, demanding and uncharted remit.
2. Working has changed. Work is increasingly a ‘slog’, fun is in short supply, and the benefits of hard work have never been less certain.
3. Workers have changed. Organisations are composed of different generations with differing outlooks, values and needs, who are too often working apart from one another.
A long form article from LBS THINK (best accompanied with a good cup of tea) is shared below.
https://www.london.edu/think/three-ways-leading-has-changed-and-what-to-do-about-it
Publication Day was fun. After months of build-up, spent creating a website called “abookaboutglue”, posting numerous smart articles, creating six new enigmatic teaser videos, firing off network-emails through rigorous spam files and fire-walls, posting on various social media, engaging a Publicist and boring everyone I know with the refrain “did you know I have a new book coming out…on the 4th October”… The BIG DAY finally arrived, and I sat in dressing gown and slippers waiting for my copy to arrive from Amazon. And waited.
Nothing. Then the Linked-in messages and texts started coming in. “Your book is sold out on Amazon!” I click on the site and yes – it’s not available! “Wait! What, it’s Sold out!” Alas no. Veritably no.
After clicking on the same page for the previous three weeks like a religious fanatic with a Prime addiction, I was somewhat overfamiliar with the “Hot New Releases” pages on Amazon and the categories in which GLUE might feature. At one point in the week before release it was the bestselling ‘Human Resources’ book listed, and sat alongside Ali Agbaal’s new book in ‘Organisational Behaviour’. Now Ali has 4.5 million subscribers on You Tube, so I felt in good company, and sent him a message to say “Ali, we should talk!” But now Amazon, on the 4th October – nothing, nada, nista, nic, niets! The book was gone – fallen off all the listings?! My Publisher helpfully and calmly explains some IT/Systems distribution snafu, which makes me feel no better, so I promptly ate a kilo of dark chocolate and sat in a sauna weeping.
Of course, the book is still available from Routledge, Waterstones, Blackwell’s, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org or via your local book store, but I know most of us lazily default to Prime. I have written elsewhere about Bookshop.org who seem genuinely an option by doing less harm to small shops. The book is just about still available in Amazon, via third party sellers, and surprisingly is also already on E-Bay. But “launch day” quickly felt like the first days of SpaceX. Full of hope, excitement and grand ambition, quickly dashed on take-off, leaving Mission Control quiet, tired, full of questions. Anyway, the NEW OFFICIAL launch day for GLUE is now 17th October 2023. We are having a party and more about that will follow on here soon.
In the meantime, the ridiculously expensive HARD BACK edition just landed through the letter box, with a thud. From the Publishers, not Amazon. It looks beautiful. Like a child at Christmas. But on a shelf, one day to simply gather dust. I need to get over myself. Onwards.
My new book GLUE: Transforming Leadership in a Hybrid World, is published today by Routledge. One early reviewer, the amazing Jim Steele, has called it “the leader’s guidebook for the future of work” which is very nice of him. It’s certainly shorter than Thinking Fast & Slow, which I am not sure anyone has actually read, and I am sure it has at least a few more jokes. If you want to read about a new leadership mode for a hybrid world, GLUE is apparently “unputdownable”. Anyway, that’s enough behavioural 'nudges' for now. I am enormously grateful to Julian Birkinshaw, Jeremy Darroch, Costas Markides Peter Hinssen, Richard Hytner, Gary Hamel, Catherine Faiers, Inger Ashing, Chris Allen and Jim Steele for their encouragement, and to the hundreds of leaders who have helped shape my experience and learning - about a new mode of leadership for a hybrid world. Leadership that creates glue. As I write this, Amazon tells me the book is “temporarily out of stock”, which I am trying to convince myself is because of a crazy rush of orders, not a systems error. I ring the Publisher…who tells me it’s a systems error. Exciting, head spinning days.
Head over the GLUE section of Wave Your Arms to find out more.
I finished writing a book about GLUE in late 2022. Back then, I was worried that a new leadership book to address the complicated issues of a hybrid working world would too quickly fade in relevance and the book would be less resonant by the end of 2023. Well, the world kept turning and many organisations doubled-down on their hybrid workplace strategies, while others like Musk and the bankers on Wall Street went back to the future, Gekko-esque, and full of sound and certainty from the 1980’s. But the world remains more complicated than that and leadership requires more nuance, thoughtfullnees and heart. Organisations are crying out for leaders who can take others with them, who can connect, engage and cohere disparate souls, and make work meaningful again. So, today, the 23rd September 2023, almost a year since I pressed ‘print’ on the first manuscript of GLUE, the book finally arrived from the Publishers Routledge. My hope now is that the book creates a deeper conversation about the need for a new mode of leadership in a hybrid world, and in 2024, everyone will be talking about GLUE.
Elon Musk just replaced the Twitter brand name with X, leading many experts to fume. My feed is full of disdain for the move, particularly from Marketing and Brand experts calling out his grave "mistake". How could he kill the bird, the “tweets”, the brand, with an odd symbol of dark negativity?
One article put it this way: “Twitter is only just getting back on the straight and narrow, and not forgetting that he obliterated the workforce, "X, the everything app" looks set to remain but a twinkle in a flaky entrepreneur's eye, not to mention that it's in all likelihood completely unworkable.”
As “flaky entrepreneurs” go, Musk’s record for the past two decades has been nothing short of extraordinary, with PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink and more. Often the moves are contrarian – easy payments that don’t require a bank, early mover advantage on electric cars (with dedicated charging points), space rockets that can be re-used, global internet connectivity that does not require a local ISP.
The ‘X’ itself (long cherished by Musk since he registered “X.com” twenty years ago, even naming one of his children!?) is the clue: a deliberate contrarian play – visually an intersection of divergent points. That divergence was always the plan for Twitter.
In 2022 Musk paid $44billion for a social media platform, full of anger and discord, saying “let that sink in”, but his real reason was acquiring 200 million active subscribers, not its brand or dematerialising advertising revenues. At the time, he was transparent enough: "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app", he said.
His ambition is to build a WeChat for the rest of the world. When I was in China you could not rent a flat, buy an ice-cream, or travel cross-country without WeChat. His new CEO Linda Yaccarino (once in Advertising herself) certainly shares that ambition, so "X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities” she tweeted.
Maybe some befuddled marketers and brand experts will follow those who hated Musk’s libertarianism, and quit the platform. But somehow, I doubt it. Threads unravelled pretty quickly, so people it seems will continue to Tweet or 'Xeet" [a real thing] in their millions.
In a decade Musk may well have built an 'everything' platform that manages half the world's regular day to day spending/transacting – like a behemoth Monzo or Revolut, ubiquitous on a billion phones. Or maybe not. Many are predicting Musk’s move is doomed to fail and the future can have divergent paths – even with a maverick billionaire at the helm.
As Banquo said in Macbeth "If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.”
A BOOK ABOUT GLUE IS RELEASED on THE 4th OCtOBER 2023
My new book GLUE: Transforming Leadership in a Hybrid World is released in less than three months. The launch countdown has begun, but the frustration of waiting has also generated a number of thoughts, reflections and reactions to some of the ideas already locked-into the book. A recent trigger for this was Peter Hinssen, who mentioned a rather dense book called Hustle & Float by Rahaf Harfoush. Her argument is that we have become so obsessed with the “hustle” of work and the demands for greater productivity that we have forgotten how to “float” – negating our full potential and innate creativity. Her thesis reminded me of JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who after the lifting of pandemic restrictions, took a dim view of 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.” There are many pressing issues in the world, but as I scan the newsfeeds, the topics and themes in GLUE seem more and more relevant every day. If you are not yet convinced, I have shared here something of my current obsession with the future of work, the strangeness of the hybrid world, and the acute need for GLUE.
What does the future of work look like in an evolving hybrid and flexible world? Balancing the needs and expectations of the organisation, customers and employees is an increasingly complex puzzle. The challenge is how you deepen engagement, increase productivity, and retain talent in this new paradigm?
Organisations are rapidly adapting and evolving their models of work as they wrestle with a number of societal dynamics; the growth of the gig economy, an employee appetite for flexibility, the normalisation (post-COVID) of hybrid working, remote technologies, and differing generational attitudes to work, collaboration and the purpose of the office. This means greater complexity for leaders who are already wrestling with a perennial challenge, which pre-dates the pandemic disruption. How do you improve productivity, while also improving employee engagement? None of the indicators look good:
Productivity. Despite the enormous adoption of digital technologies, worker productivity has hardly improved the UK, Europe or the US this century. Even before the pandemic disruption, between 2010 and 2015, UK productivity growth flatlined at 0.2 percent a year.
Engagement. Despite flexible working, improved benefits provision, and many imaginative employee-relations initiatives, Gallop report that measures of employee-engagement continued to flat-line too.
Dis-engagement. According to the same organisation, it is even harder to develop engagement with ‘next generation’ employees, who are likely to change jobs as many as ten times between the ages of 18 and 34.
In the past three years, the response of different leaders and different organisations to these trends has been marked. Some leaders think autonomy and freedom is the best way to engage talent and engender ideas. Others believe productivity only increases when workers are in the office together. In June 2021, Deloitte made a bold move and told all its 20,000 UK employees, “you can work from home forever”. Many employees cried freedom from the commute! Others took a different view, notably the “hardcore” presenteeism mandated by Elon Musk, and J P Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, who said home-working “doesn’t work for those who want to hustle”. The tide seems to be following, with even Google last month threatening to clamp down on staff, warning office attendance will be included as part of their performance reviews.
Studies have shown that improved employee collaboration and alignment with a common purpose is key to improving productivity and engagement. But what is the best way to make that happen in the way we now wish to work and live our lives? Some suggest that the emergence of generative AI and new work tools improve productivity regardless of the workplace setting?
But perhaps a different approach is needed? The future of work should be less about an obsession with the "mechanics" of hybrid working - the where, the when and how of work. Instead, it should be about a new leadership model for the hybrid age, so organisations are more concerned with the who, the what and the why of work. A leadership approach that "coheres" employees to feel less remote from one another, around an organisational purpose that embraces disparate hearts and minds. Have you embraced a more meaningful future of work, or are your still wrestling with the mechanics of the past?
The saying goes “an Englishman’s home is his castle.” Well, since 2020 it has increasingly become his and her workplace of choice as well. We have pulled up the drawbridge, reinforced the moat, converted garden sheds into offices, and signed up to Starlink.
According to the Munich-based Ifo Institute, it seems now that Britons work from home more than any other European nation. In the UK, the average worker spends a day and a half at home each week, well above the one day average in Germany and more than double the 0.6 in France and 0.7 in Italy. It also puts the UK above the US, where the typical worker spends 1.4 days per week at home.
Among the 34 countries studied, only Canadians are more likely than Britons to work remotely. But apparently, we Brits still want more with the survey finding “2.3 days at home would be ideal”.
I am not sure that the dynamics that have made so many of us embrace working from home will change. It is time consuming, exhausting, and inefficient to commute into cities like London and Manchester.
But if employers want to reverse the trend - and many do - what are the “pull factors” they might use; the redesign of the workplace, the leadership value placed on in-person meeting, the provision of childcare, the investment in face-to-face development, and some attempt to off-set the costs of being there? They will have to, if we are to avoid being teased by the French for 'slacking off' at home! Surely not! Sacrebleu!
With working patterns changing, I mis-understood that Thursday was the new Friday: a time for colleagues to clock-off early and have a drink together? Well apparently not. A recent survey of UK social habits says that post-work drinks have fallen out of favour, as six in ten Brits say they shun end-of-day pints with colleagues.
An organisation called Togather surveyed 2,000 workers and found that 35% say they avoid going to workplace socials "as they are boring and feel like a waste of their time". A report cited office worker Glen Davies, 34, of Watford, Herts, who said he 'hated' office get-togethers. "As soon as work is over I'm out of my chair like a rocket and on the bus home.'
Hugo Campbell, co-founder of Togather, said that employers should work harder to "provide meaningful experiences that genuinely demonstrate appreciation for their staff."
If this was not dispiriting enough, the next generation are following a similar path. Students in university towns are "not staying out as late as they used to", the boss of City Pub Group has said. Clive Watson, chief executive at the company, which runs more than 50 pubs across Britain, said students were coming home earlier from nights out. He said: “Students work a lot harder than they [did] at university in my day… they have a better work ethic..." Bless.
These emergent social trends begin slowly and then suddenly are endemic. Perhaps we have already heard "last orders" being called on the post-work pub social in the UK? Like Glen, we want to head to the 'burbs, and to get away from one another. We no longer cherish the noise, the cloy of sticky pub carpets, nor relish the therapy of banal post-work gossip. We prefer instead to scroll alone on the bus home. Progress perhaps?
A new report says "empowering employees to collaborate more intentionally" can make hybrid working more productive. I have read a lot of worthy/wordy stuff like this in the past 18 months and this report by Gartner - advocating the "democratisation" of multiple work modes, and allowing employees to "design their own week", all sounds fab and groovy, but it MISSES the most important point of all. Productive, innovative teams are well led, and too few firms, have equipped their leaders with the skills to create real cohesion amongst their disparate, disaggregated team members.
Great team-work is not about workplace "agility, intentionalism and equity", it is about having managers and leaders who can take others with them, irrespective of the work setting. People cohere around people, purpose and meaningful work. Organisations don't need more complicated HR policies and hybrid processes, they need leaders who create GLUE.
The writer William Gibson once said that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” When we look elsewhere in the world, the future is often in plain sight, we just haven't recognised it yet. Sometimes I so wish that wasn’t true. In April this year, South Korea announced its decision to pay boys and young men a monthly allowance of (the equivalent of) US$490 in order to encourage them to leave their homes.
The Guardian reported that 350,000 between the ages of 19 and 39 in South Korea are considered lonely or isolated. CNN said Japan has a similar problem, with nearly 1.5 million reclusive lonely young people, who are known as ‘hikikomori’. Some citizens only leave their homes to buy groceries or for occasional activities, while others just never leave their bedrooms.
In the UK, Europe and the US we have seized the post-pandemic zeitgeist, crying freedom from the commute, logging-on to remote platforms, and filling our fridges with Amazon Fresh, Deliveroo, and Just Eat. Business, political and university leaders have championed hybrid work, remote learning and social media has turned digital content creators into heroes. In 2024, Apple wants us to put on its Vision Pro headset and work, explore and ‘entertain’ ourselves through a 24-hour feed of content and connectivity. Alone.
My head is still spinning with the South Korea story (a wealthy country where the birth rate is now less than 0.8 - the lowest in the world) because we still have time to decide if that is the mode of work and life we want to role-model for our kids. My fear is that in the next decade we are growing a culture that increasingly normalises and celebrates lives spent "scrolling alone.” That’s my profound fear - but what do you think?
[Some elements of this post were shared on Linked-in in July 2023].
It was 2008. I worked for a bank. That was something of a social conversation-killer back then. Who would be part of such a heinous profession? Instead, I could bluff and pretend that I worked in ‘communications’ or ‘change management’ or something equally vague and potentially less offensive.
The popular image then of a banker was already not very attractive – associated with Gordon Gekko, in Wall Street, proclaiming ‘greed is good’ while grooming his protégé to understand that “lunch is for wimps”, and if you want a friend, “get a dog”. Then in September 2008, the world's media zoomed in on besuited young staffers exiting tall buildings, clutching a card-board box of possessions, as Lehman Brothers, and a succession of other global financial institutions collapsed around the world.
There was much gnashing of teeth and genuine alarm as the financial markets nose-dived. In shock, the world became quickly accustomed to a new innovation called government “bailouts”, as a genuine use of taxpayers’ funds. In a world today where the word “crisis” is perhaps somewhat overused, that time genuinely felt like a real humdinger as the world’s media, politicians, and general public looked on in horror as the stability in the markets simply disappeared and the economy contracted and fell like a suddenly deflating hot-air balloon. Even the Governments’ hastily concocted parachute could not alleviate much of the real-world pain felt in the disrupted markets, emptying workplaces and crowded benefits offices.
This summer, I find myself immersed in a new book called Trust, by an American author called Hernan Diaz. The focus of his book is not the financial crisis of the early part of this century, but the financial machinations that caused the Great Depression in the 1930s, a crisis initiated by market crashes on Wall Street in 1929, with reverberations around world. Against that backdrop he tells the story of Andrew Bevel, a Rockefeller type who bestrides the financial world accumulating astronomical wealth, like a 1920’s Warren Buffett, but with an emotional vacuity and mystique even amongst those who felt they knew him well.
Suitably then, the story of Bevel’s wealth and his relationship with his young wife is told from four different perspectives; as an adapted novel, by Bevel himself, by his hired researcher Ida, and by Bevel’s wife Mildred. The opening section, a succinct third-person narrative is written in an elegant style, with a brevity of language and tone that is worthily one of the most compelling pieces of storytelling I have read in years. When Ida, Bevel’s brilliant researcher and scribe reads it she is similarly stunned. Then in a claustrophobic nexus of acute illness, big pharma and high-stakes finance, it ends in horror, and personal madness and pain. The next three sections re-tell the tale very differently, of the man, of the money, of the strange genesis of the Bevel’s relationship with Mildred, of her music, patronage of the arts and the intrigues of New York high society. A strange imaginative blend then of Succession, and The Great Gatsby.
But as Diaz takes us deeper down a rabbit hole of mystery and of phantasmagorical wealth - and all the allure that money creates, he ensures we struggle to come to the get to grips with the truth. Quite literally, who do we Trust? The idiosyncratic and contradictory narrative is like John Fowles’ A Maggot, a jigsaw puzzle like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost. As the reader we have to join the dots, distracted by the contrasting perspectives on the destructive power of unfettered capitalism, set against a caricature of militant anarcho-socialism, literally told from across the Hudson river, far removed from Bevel’s life, as a dirty kitchen sink story. It would be inappropriate and an enormous spoiler to give the game away, but as Diaz lets us dig deeper into the psychological drama of Bevel and Mildred, Diaz reveals the very specific and shocking reason for the Wall Street Crash of 1929, what caused it and why.
Which brought me back with a veritable bump to the recent economic travails – and stories again of Banks being “bailed out”, merged and ‘absorbed’. It is almost a hundred years since Bevel built his great fortune, riding a wave of pulped prime markets, and of governments printing money, amidst a world of oligarch style tycoons avariciously grappling for wealth, power and influence, and here we are again, facing the consequences, of what happens when that bubble inevitably bursts.
It used to be the philosophers, poets, playwrights and priests who shaped our understanding of the world around us. The highly educated would lean into Sartre, Locke, Keynes, Shakespeare and Donne to illuminate our thoughts about the human condition. But, as you know, no one reads books in school anymore, and universities (other than a very tiny ancient elite) are too enormous, amorphous and commercially obsessed with student numbers to impart very much deep learning. So, we absorb and pertain to the world though our shared popular cultural experiences – TV shows, movie characters, influencers and via social mediums, we are connected by musical artists. Billions of people on planet earth know all the words of Bohemian Rhapsody, but don’t much care whether Galileo was magnificent or not. I went to School, graduated from university and tried to read a few books, but I have increasingly found that another modern-day poet, The Boss, was right when he said he “learnt more from a three-minute record, than I ever learnt in School”.
Well Springsteen is on tour in Europe again. But at a price point that made even investment bankers pause before booking. So is everybody else. And So, after too long away, is the amazing Peter Gabriel. Three things then about the extraordinary artist.
1. Gabriel as a Creative Artist
Forty years ago, as the front man of Genesis, Gabriel dressed-up on stage as Fox in a red dress and sang 24-minute-long songs, while jerking in 9/8 time, as if in a fit, hitting a tambourine and shouting about “a flower!” He has, to say the least, moved on some way from that early incarnation in his career, with a series of moody innovative solo albums, a massive global hit album ‘So’ (with its humongous world-wide hit Sledgehammer), written several film scores, produced a millennium show, championed civil and human rights, embraced world music and co-founded the Womad festivals. He has also been at the cutting-edge of embracing technology, pioneering digital distribution methods, built Real World studios, and his recording techniques, music videos and live shows are an extraordinary fusion of creative imagination and digital adoption.
2. Gabriel as a Technology Trailblazer
Recently his technology fetish has also embraced AI and, despite what he described as something of a “backlash” within the music and arts community, he recently ran a competition with a firm called Stability AI called the ‘Diffuse Together Challenge’. Entrants could use six songs from Gabriel’s catalogue, including Sledgehammer, to create AI generated animation videos. Gabriel’s response to the negative feedback, and concerns over copyright, and financial dues to artists, is posted here, but, in essence, he argued that creative artists should not fear the adoption of technologies like AI, but embrace it. “Like the wheel, or the industrial revolution, I believe the changes coming with AI are unstoppable,” he said. You can find out more about the project and extraordinary results on Gabriel’s website.
3. Gabriel as a Revolutionary
The amazing thing – and I mean spookily amazing - is that Gabriel in 2023 is wholly consistent today about his confidence in the adoption of new disruptive technologies as he was, way back in 1986 when he similarly talked about the adoption of computers in music recording and production as a new “industrial revolution.” Many readers here will be familiar with a popular clip of a 1999 interview that David Bowie did with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman. In that interview, Bowie, talking in the early days of painfully slow ‘dial-up’ internet, describes the internet like an “alien life-form” that has landed amongst us, and none of us had yet realised what that impact would be. To quote the great man:
“The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envision at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in-simpatico, it's going to is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.” David Bowie, 1999.
Bowie’s vision, and notably, his way with words, was light years ahead. But some 13 years before that interview, Gabriel was asked by a journalist about his adoption of “new technology, gadgets and computers”. Gabriel was starting to use digital recording techniques, a Fairlight sampler, sequencers, and creating stop-motion animation ideas for MTV videos that would change the way the world viewed music and artists. The clip is posted below from the same artist now co-creating music videos using AI. It’s pretty remarkable and you could copy it from the past and paste it into his response about the dangers of AI today.
“I think that it is like seeing a Revolution take place that is this fundamental as the Industrial Revolution and it and, it's only just beginning. So I think the opportunities that it presents to anyone in all areas, and it shouldn’t be underestimated at all. I mean either the technology has made our ally, or it's our enemy, and I think life will be a lot happier if we make it our ally and come to grips with it.” Peter Gabriel, 1986.
Gabriel back in Greenwich
Gabriel is remarkable and at 73 seems as vivid and compelling as an artist today as he was in the 1980’s when he became a global star. In 2000, he produced the ‘Ovo’ show for an ill-fated millennium exhibition under a huge canvas on the Greenwich peninsula. He invited Paul Buchanan and Liz Fraser to sing the closing song, Make Tomorrow Today, which sums up much of his approach for half a century as a creative artist. Gabriel is on tour with his new album i/o in June, before heading the States in the autumn. 23 years later, he will be back in Greenwich, under that same Canvas, in what is now called “The 02”. I think this time, worth the ticket price.
I am just back from seeing Andy Karl in Groundhog Day at The Old Vic theatre in London. I had seen the show before in 2016 when Tim Minchin and Director Matthew Warchus first collaborated with writer Danny Rubin to revitalise and reimagine Rubin’s original 1993 movie, starring Bill Murray. Karl plays a TV weatherman called Phil Connors, whom we meet grumpily reporting on the quirky festivities of Punxsutawney, a small American town in the middle-of nowhere. Desperate to leave, Connors gets stuck in a time loop and awakens everyday on 2 February, endlessly trapped with the same people, in the same place.
In order to prevent being forced to live the same day over and over again, Connors must change the way he approaches life, and the world around him, divesting himself of his cynicism, narcissism, and misogyny. It’s quite some arc to achieve in just over two hours and although The Old Vic bills the show as a “zany musical” their blurb undersells the impact and quality of the human story that unfolds. Yes, the show is hilarious, full of visual jokes, corny tomfoolery and drunken fun, but in the behaviour of the risible Connors it also holds up a mirror to ourselves; obsessing about tomorrow, not today, neglecting old friends, avoiding our neighbours, shunning the homeless, denigrating colleagues and undervaluing those who serve us in jobs we would detest to do ourselves. The second half is deeply moving, thought provoking and profound. The show’s finale is a beautifully crafted expression of some enormous truths about people, relationships and the meaning of life.
Connors finds that personal change is tremendously hard, if not impossible. In this repetitive parallel universe he is not even given the option of seeking oblivion. Poignantly and pathetically he still wakes in Punxsutawney, living again without purpose. The audience knows what he needs to do (change himself) but he still cannot do it and so knuckles down to hard work, in an endless attempt to work his way out of the problem. He learns to fix cars, memorise the almanac, learn French, recite poetry, become a virtuoso pianist and a doctor, waking every day and working hard at fixing stuff, and others and things - but not himself. Despite his own immortality and his boast “that I am some kind of God”, he cannot stop the homeless guy from dying, he cannot deceive his colleague Rita into loving him, he cannot change tomorrow despite (in his words) “knowing everything”. It is not until he realises that he “knows nothing”, that the dawn breaks in a different way.
An addiction to futile pursuits is difficult to shake and Connors’ commitment and work ethic is admirable, but also familiarly insane. Albert Einstein was once (implausibly) credited with saying “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Using the original 1993 film, some eminent online-film nerds have spent much effort trying to calculate how many days it takes Connors to re-awaken, a new man, on 3 February. I was too busy laughing in the theatre to count the number of times Connors experiences the same day, but in the film he appears in, or describes his experiences of some 64 different days. But he also learns numerous new skills while stuck in the time loop. He confesses it would take him 'six months, four to five hours a day' (244 days) to become an expert card thrower. In an article for WhatCulture, Simon Gallagher cites Gladwell’s hypothesis that it takes anyone “10,000 hours to become an expert at any one subject” and Connors becomes an expert in many, including delivering babies, bank robbery, piano playing and ice-sculpting. Simon surmises that since Connors “is an adult learner, a conservative estimate, based on the idea of him taking lessons every day, it would have taken somewhere around 12 years to become completely fluent bringing the running total to 12,315 days”. That is some 33 years stuck in an endless loop of futile self-improvement. Sound familiar?
Well, here are three applications for the modern world of work:
1. Self-improvement is futile
The corporate world seems obsessed with a similar reliance on self-improvement, encouraging you to dedicate time to build your professional credentials, harness your authentic self, learn to communicate with radical candour, grow a diverse network, and act out, while leaning in. As you progress towards the top team, you are expected to become better equipped, using influencing skills, showing yourself to be both resilient and agile, navigating cultural and intergenerational minefields, while remaining entrepreneurial, inclusive, emotionally intelligent, and ensuring that psychological safety flourishes in your wake. It is exhausting, unreasonable and mind-boggling to even consider the hours of time and sheer bloody dedication needed to manage and lead these days. Ultimately though, no matter how many hours we put in, we still risk continuing to appear a complete jerk like Connors.
2. Flunking is the new achieving
A new generation of workers see the world differently. The current vogue is to disregard the competence addiction of the past, embrace Einstein’s advice and take a more entrepreneurial approach, dreaming big initially, but failing fast forwards, learning and pivoting again. Modern careers can seem an episodic pursuit of not being great, realising it, and quickly moving on to the next thing. Spending 10,000 hours on anything sans-purpose, let alone spending that amount of time with the same firm, is now anathema. Some more heartless than I would call this a new emergent culture of mediocrity, but now the fail fast, or more caustically put, ‘faff around and find out’, is the early twenty first century mode du jour of working. According to Gallop, new employees entering employment are likely to change jobs as many as ten times between the ages of 18 and 34. Perhaps the contemporary early career path is less a ‘squiggly’ drawn one and more akin to something painted by Jackson Pollock?
3. Being inexpert is the goal
But being inexpert is not be sniffed at. It is one of the most intriguing dimensions of future talent and people management. In the world of the ‘never normal’ where generative AI can write your presentation, design the images and draft the cover note to the CEO in minutes, the key to a professional career is no longer about knowing everything, it is about knowing nothing. Peter Hinssen argues you actually need more people in your organisation who “don’t know what they’re doing.” His is not some ironic plea for the virtue of ignorance, but for more of your very best people working on ideas and projects and plans where the outcome is unknown and not discovered in the algorithm. Experience matters less when future innovation is to be found where there is no well trodden path to follow, where there is no blue-print that can be downloaded, or co-opted from a well paid consultant. This is a mission for talent that takes them off the garden path into the wilderness and the rainforest.
After the show
As is my tendency, I have somewhat clunkily navigated out of the snow drifts of Punxsutawney into another muse about the “future of work”. But I think the learning from Groundhog Day is hugely relevant for the humdrum world of modern work.
I have been working for the past couple of years trying to decode the current trends of workplace dissociation and dislocation. There are many fault lines; flat-lining productivity (despite everyone working longer, harder), poor employee engagement (despite hybrid working and an employer arms race of flexible benefits), work itself not working (as an inflation and the cost of living clobbers any sense of reward), a misalignment between older and new entrants to the workplace, and an over-reliance on remote-working tech to somehow create the magical collaborative juice, that was once found serendipitously by colleagues who often became personally close and cohered to one another.
Given this context, I have become convinced that we need a different type of leadership for the way we now work and live our lives. I have written some structured thoughts on that (with some substantiated evidence) in my book called GLUE. One of the punchlines of the book is similar to Connors’ own revelation; when he takes a moment to pause, look over his shoulder and open his eyes to fully see the people around him. The last act of Groundhog Day explores Connors’ literal awakening to the importance of others near to hand, and the enormous value of taking the time and effort to get to know them as people. The same insight was found in my research about those “glue creating” leaders who galvanised others, engendered loyalty and created lasting collaborative networks. These leaders spent less energy obsessed with self-improvement, trying to acquire knowledge, or insider-smarts, or political power, but invested themselves in getting to know their people well by listening, respecting their views, knowing their names, celebrating their achievements, remembering their kids’ names.
Towards the end of Groundhog Day, Connors is challenged by Rita, and he spends a day getting to realise the value of the people he has been gifted to be amongst everyday. Now, rather than be treated dismissively and seen as a series of caricatures, costumes and nameless ensemble cast members, they become Ned, Nancy, Freddie, Debbie, Joelle, Ralph, Gus, Doris and Buster.
The next morning, Phil (Connors) and Rita watch the sunrise, and Phil is transformed.
Groundhog Day with Andy Karl is playing at The Old Vic until 19 August 2023.
GLUE: Transforming Leadership in a Hybrid World is published by Routledge and is available for pre-order now and released on 4th October 2023.
The notification pings on your desktop. Your employer has invited you to take part in this year’s Employee Opinion Survey! Your face makes a strange involuntary shape and you sigh as you hit delete. You already know that this will be the first of numerous chirpy head-office reminders that “your opinion really does count”, so there is no need to leave the invite festering in your inbox. Even if you neglect to complete the Survey, you are bound to receive an invite for some unconnected "pulse" survey to determine how motivated you are and gauge your propensity to “go the extra mile”.
I am assured that there is well proven correlation between improved employee engagement and increased productivity and revenue growth. (Often though the correlation of that data is provided by the major Survey providers themselves, but that’s a petty quibble.) The problem is not that seeking to measure employee engagement is wrong. The real issue is that the design of employee surveys often concentrates on measuring the wrong things. They’re digging in the wrong place.
Often these Surveys are based on employee engagement measures that neglect any focus on the customer, client, or other external stakeholder. Typically they look at employee satisfaction, future retention, how comfortable the working environment is, how the employee feels rewarded, praised or encouraged. Most have numerous questions to gauge how motivated we are, how we regard the senior team, and whether, or not, “we understand the strategy”.
This is all helpful and interesting for the senior leadership team and, no doubt, is difficult to consistently score well against. But, by their very nature, the question set is too internally focused, often more likely to create discussion and feedback around hygiene factors [often literally!] about the workplace itself, rather than about how well supported employees are to serve and delight our customers.
The most powerful item for any CEO and senior team to review together is the employee’s view of how well the organisation equips and supports the goal of meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Existing Surveys can be easily adapted to consider this so that employees can provide feedback not just on how they are served by their organisation, but how well the organisation serves them to provide extraordinary service to clients and customers. Focusing the Survey with this different emphasis would provide a more powerful, purposeful insight for the organisation than a bi-annual audit of internal factors.
This article updates a Linked-in post first written in 2016. Since then, nothing much has changed. The image is a cartoon by Hugh McLeod, from Gaping Void. You can buy prints like this at: www.gapingvoid.com
While Hollywood blockbusters are no longer, you know, busting blocks, new music that sticks seems too rare, and what is left of the social media I dare still touch has become a bot infested Chat GPT generated swamp of dystopia, it needed some inspiration to relieve the creative gloom at Wave Your Arms this month.
So thank you then to the UK, to Blighty, this Emerald Isle, and the good citizens of this rare corner of the planet for restoring much faith. The evidence follows, and it is compelling.
Exhibit #1: Hytner and Hockney
I am just back from Nicholas Hytner’s revival of Guys and Dolls at The Bridge, which took centrally staged immersive theatre to new levels, exploding with song, dance and joy. While the vibrant production in a great venue was life affirming in the moment, a more lingering thoughtful time of affirmation was found at the new Lightroom venue in Kings Cross, where Hytner (again) has curated and produced a three-dimensional audio-visual wonder; in a retrospective, self-narrated by David Hockney. The show called ‘Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)’ transports you through the thoughts, inventiveness and imagination of the greatest living artist in the world, via canvas, iPad paintings, and photography. We are moved from LA to East Yorkshire, via the Opera to Northern France, on floor and walls, in front, beneath, between and behind. The music score written by Nico Muhly is also profoundly good. If you were underwhelmed by a similar recent attempt to make an immersive ‘Van Gogh’ exhibition work well, then this show will reassure and revitalise your sense of the possible. The fact that Hockney was personally involved in its creation has clearly and creatively paid off, and I understand that it will extend its run to October 2023.
Exhibit #2: Forsyth’s Gold
The BBC was once an undisputed cultural crown jewel export for the UK. Unfortunately, it now finds itself increasingly at a nexus of the ‘culture wars’, amidst arguments over social media ‘censorship’ (benching a football host for a weekend and then capitulating almost as quickly), and just this week embroiled in a row with Elon Musk about its funding and a perception of “bias”. My own view (humbly) is that for the intact full-service BBC to survive, or thrive, it will need to continue to tread an enormously difficult tightrope of impartiality, so should neither genuflect to the left or right. As soon as it editorialises on social issues, it risks aping the progressive CNN and NYT. If it feels compelled to berate like the upstart GB News, or Fox News, it merely becomes just another “voice”, or opinion promoter, not a reporter, or news broadcaster of record. But wherever it goes editorially, in a world where there are already a myriad of other channels and online services, it will only have any chance of surviving into the next decade if people continue to tune-in, tap, swipe, or request the BBC out of choice, not obligation. If the future model for the BBC’s survival ends up being voluntary subscription (rather an archaic television license tax) then it will have to continue to produce shows like The Gold. It does not have to compete with others to produce hundreds of hours of low common denominator rubbish, just make more productions like The Gold. The six-part TV series, written by Neil Forsyth, is a wonderful piece of television drama, on a story rooted in a part of London (and Kent) I have lived in throughout the past thirty-odd years. It was brilliant, particularly in how its sense of “period” setting in the mid-1980’s was so precisely and evocatively done. As a bonus, in Jack Lowden’s brilliant enigmatic portrayal of Kenneth Noye, the director and production team had casted genuine gold of their own.
Exhibit #3: Armstrong’s Succession
HBO’s Succession, barely three episodes into Season 4, just had its ‘Red Wedding’ moment, with a shock akin to the Game of Thrones massacre that curve-balled a global audience who hadn’t managed to wade through two-thousand pages of George R.R. Martin’s voluminous source material, to already know that they were about to see the violent demise of protagonists aplenty. In Succession, Logan is an ignoble king in his own modern world, amidst a market tempest, but does not react like Lear, bemoaning his lot and howling at the skies, while his kids battle for the spoils. Here, months after surviving a stroke and a similar haemorrhage of just about every close relationship he’s ever touched, he strides the stairs to his private plane, whimsically engineering another humiliation of one of his kids and a loyal executive, and calls out for a more “aggressive approach” in his business empire. He then simply dies, off-screen, on a toilet, fumbling for his mobile phone.
Succession is often singularly credited to Jesse Armstrong, a British author, screenwriter, and producer. He is even younger than I am, and clearly a genius, but he is also terrific at harnessing other British writers like Georgia Pritchett and Lucy Prebble and a US based production crew to create something distinctively set in the US, about a great American dynastic family, running a US media empire, but infused with something that reeks of British comedy. It is their fusion of a peculiarly British sarcasm (born out of the sweary political masterpiece that was Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It) and some imagined (but I understand deeply well researched) unpacking of billionaires’ psychological hang-ups and psychosis that works so well.
The episode formula is in a way simple enough, and yet distinctive for not being driven by the predominant emphasis of modern screen-entertainment, which is overly issue driven and message fuelled and too often sincerely, but awfully written. Succession is the combination of great writing, acting, direction and production, in a creative combination that makes the drama fizz and the flawed characters pop. Over the four seasons the plot splutters, then stutters, repeats again some similar refrains (just like our own real less-high octane versions of life) but we root for the broken protagonists because the stakes are enormous. The writing is visceral, and cruel, and almost Shakespearian in its iambic-pentameters of f-bombs, innuendo, sarcasm and sibling on sibling disdain. It’s a show about hurtfulness and emotional harm. If like me, you persevered through the dullness of the pandemic inhibited Season Three, sit back because now the gloves are really off, the bullying patriarch is grave-bound, and I cannot wait to see how this mess pays off in the final seven shows.
Someone once said “you should never judge a book by its cover.” Which is, of course, wise advice, and at the same time, complete nonsense. I once bought an unreadable tome on the basis of a cover that looked like a gorgeous Roger Dean album cover, but the book had all the spark and imagination of the reverse of a box of cornflakes. Then I read The World for Sale, by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy, which has a great enigmatic, intriguing cover and the book was fascinating, gripping and I learnt much from diving in and staying with it. It looks great on the shelf too. The new novel by RF Huang, called Babel, looks just fantastic. Even the title is cool. It’s now a Sunday Times and NYT global bestseller. Getting the cover right for online scrolling, or bookshop browsing is an imprecise science and a strange kind of artistry. So, for my humble attempt at a new business book called GLUE: Transforming Leadership in a Hybrid World, I have agonised over how to get it right. Do we go quirky, playful and eccentric, or ballsy, serious and high-minded? In the end, we decided to simply double-down on Glue. Not everyone I spoke to loved the title Glue when I first pitched the idea, but if they read two pages, they said it made perfect sense. If they get 150 pages further then, hopefully, the Glue idea will be found addictive, and will even “stick in the mind” afterwards. Anyway, Glue is coming out later this year. There will doubtless be a few bumps in the road, possible delays, and inevitable tweaks to be made, but I am delighted that Glue has come this far. I can’t wait to be able to share more sometime soon.
Wonderful to be lead one of the best programmes in the world.
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