Why Musk’s Twitter pursuit is pointless

I joined Twitter in March 2009 and found the experience at once exhilarating and somewhat unnerving. I had never really bought into social before, being almost non-existent on Facebook, and suddenly the ability to read, comment, respond and connect with others was instantaneous. I shared a few views, liked a few pictures and jokes and, as people jumped on, I secured a few hundred followers, and I tweeted a lot about writing (and the common challenge of getting read) and met some others who shared my pain.  Good times.

But Twitter was ruined and the experience turned into a shit-show when Brexit brewed, divided and devoured Britain. I had a vague hope that it would become palatable again, but then COVID struck, and the subsequent Twitter algorithm and bot engineered pile-on against (for example) any expressed scepticism about the “merits” of Wuhan style lockdowns made me quickly reach for the delete button. On Twitter, campaigns to cancel just about anyone with an opposing view were played out like a dystopian ‘war-game’ between the left and right, right and wrong, conservative and liberal, religious and atheist, enlightened and un-educated. Every issue was seen through the narrow lens by which your ‘tribe’ perceived the world. Twitter, Facebook and other social channels have spent very many billions on processes, filters, buttons, badges, people, editors, curators, warnings and censors, to ensure that these social forums remain safe spaces, free from hate speech, threats, antagonism and vitriol.  They’ve failed. It’s now the Brexit toned divisive shit-show, but on every topic from Bake Off to Bournemouth beach huts.

So, Elon Musk has decided to ride to the rescue.  Not content with several kids, being the richest man on earth, with compelling ventures that include space exploration, a manned mission to the Mars, the fastest growing car brand on earth and providing internet connectivity from low-earth orbit to the whole planet, Elon wants to save “western civilisation” by ensuring free-speech in the “public square” of Twitter. He may well succeed - and if the funding is “secured”, then he has every right to take his share offer to existing shareholders and convince them on the basis of the price-value call he has made. But why bother?

Pursuing Twitter now is like getting belatedly agitated about the dominance of Murdoch’s News International a decade ago, or getting hung-up on the vagaries of editorial independence at CNN, or the Wall Street Journal. Like these crumbling legacy ‘organs’, Twitter is a dying platform. [See Worldwide user numbers - basically flat for over 7 years in a sector associated with exponential growth. Also, if you factor for the ubiquitous ‘bots’ who dominate the platform, the real-person users numbers have collapsed.] Twitter’s explosive growth from 2010 was borne out of a once in a generation coincidence of the internet suddenly being in “our hands”, on our iPhones. That made its founder Dorsey horribly rich, but did little to enrich public debate and discourse. Celebrities have already moved on to Insta, or Snap, or TikTok, or coordinate their own multi-channel campaigns, riding a wave of growth. Meanwhile users have flocked to subscriber content, closed channels, Patreon-only access and ‘value-for value’ content creators.  You Tube users add 720,000 hours of content every day. Twitter thrives on letting politicians and drunk people on the bus let off fumes; but essentially, it's the same people shouting the same things at one another.

So, please Mr Musk, continue to focus on the mid-21st Century challenges of climate change, autonomous electric cars, giga-power and a longer-term ambition to colonise planets.  These seem visionary, bold and noble business endeavours.  Someone wise once said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Well given the culture inherent on Twitter, surely for Musk, its better to pass, pause and watch Twitter simply devour itself. 

The staggering value of "other stuff" sold by Apple

Apple have just announced that their annual developers' conference WWDC will remain online in 2022. You can look forward to 4 days of nerdy tech stuff about coding iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, etc. Which got me thinking about my first Mac, bought in 2002; an angle poise iMacG4, with swivel neck and 256MB of memory. Apple Inc has done well since then. What I should have done in 2002 was not buy a shiny machine that was redundant just two years later, but purchase some Apple stock.

In 2002, an Apple share was $23. By 2019 the share price was $230, but interestingly, that story of enormous value growth was not about the Mac, or even the ubiquitous iPhone, it was also about a clever cultivation of the “Apple eco-system", or rather "other stuff" to you and me. To illustrate, the market cap of Apple in 2002 was about $23 billion - which is about the same as the 2020 revenues for AirPods alone. Staggeringly, the replacement business for "earbuds and cases" is estimated to be worth over $7 billion in revenues.

My point? Well, who knew? Growth doesn't have to be about just swimming more effectively in the same lane; it's about developing adjacent and "non-linear" business, which can sometimes outstrip the core product offer. So beware of keeping ploughing down the same lane and make your "other stuff" as attractive as the core offer.

[Ed. Article originally published on Linked-in.]

The Great Resignation is endemic, but is there another way of making talent want to stay?

The 'Great Resignation' sucks, but as a senior leader or business manager, what can you do?  The key question in the 'war for talent' used to be how you could answer "why should I work for you?"  Now amidst the disruption of the 'great resignation', the big people challenge is answering "Why should I bother staying?"

A recent report by PWC [see link below] delves deep into the mindset of 'millennials' (for them, employees aged 31 and under) and maybe provides some clues to the root causes of the talent exodus. None of it bodes well.  Attracting young recruits is not the issue; but keeping them for long looks impossible. The headlines, summarised in brief: 

• Loyalty is for the birds. Over a quarter now expect to have six employers or more, compared with just 10% in 2008. 38% of millennials who are currently working said they were actively looking for a different role and 43% said they were open to offers. Only 18% expect to stay with their current employer for the long term.

• You can't buy loyalty with cash. Development and work/life balance are more important than financial rewards, with cash reward rated only third. 🧐

• They're 24/7 Connected, but not to you. It's difficult to build meaningful relationships and the critical "glue" when remote and hybrid working is the policy 'du-jour' and 41% say they prefer to communicate electronically at work than face to face or even over the telephone. 

• They want promotion, and now. Career progression is the top priority for millennials who expect to rise rapidly through the organisation. 52% said this was the main attraction in an employer.

• Doing good isn’t enough anymore. Strong employer brands are waning in importance. In 2008, 88% were looking for employers with CSR values. Fast forward three years and just over half are attracted to employers because of their CSR position. 

If you’re looking to attract and RETAIN new talent, it’s a sobering read.

My own take on the solution to the Great Resignation is that all of us, as employees, thrive on a different kind of ‘glue’. It is a sense of belonging that makes our work more meaningful, engaging and (hopefully, at times) inspiring.  Those who have worked with me before will know of my ‘addiction’ to Glue and bemusement at the scant attention organisations pay to it. Creating glue isn’t about a tactical set of hurriedly adopted hybrid working policies, annual pay tweaks, mission statement comms, and an improved canteen; it’s about building leaders who genuinely love what they do taking people along with them. People cohere around people, not around a strategy, or product offer. Post-pandemic, firms need to take a long hard look, but not at WHAT they do, or WHY they do what they do, but WHO they are, and how they make working with others, inclusive, involving, collaborative and sticky.  WHO you work with, WHO you are led by and WHO you serve is critical to creating the right glue.

So, do you know anyone out there who is creating great ‘glue’? Let me know and give them a shout out!  

The excellent PWC report is attached here. 
https://lnkd.in/e_EZnadZ

2021 - A Year in Review

Listening

Once finally re-opened in the summer, live music rocked in London. Artists were finally unleashed again after over a year of being locked-out from their originally scheduled dates.  Amongst many great nights, Admiral Fallow at The Omeara, Steve Hackett at The Palladium, Courtney Marie Andrews at The Union Chapel, Public Service Broadcasting at Brixton Academy, and Kawala at their ‘homecoming’ venue of Kentish Town, were all worth the wait.  In 2022, radio will discover Kawala and they are going to be enormous. Watching 73-year-old Steve Hackett play for three hours was humbling and inspiring, while across town, Genesis played with a physically shot Phil Collins in a show that at best inspired mixed feelings.  Elsewhere in Devon, it rained and rained at The Leveller’s Beautiful Days festival, where Gary Numan’s set was suitably apocalyptic and dark, until he was hit by an inflatable banana from the crowd.  What joy!  

My record of the year is a six track EP called Since the Dog Died by Manchester band Fuzzy Sun.  While the punchy guitar-riff singalongs are good enough, elsewhere their stunning arrangements, melodic soundscape, and plaintiff vocals on songs like Moviestar and Kolm, are gorgeous and point towards a future sound altogether more mature than a five-piece guitar band from Manchester might naturally churn out.  One to watch, and more here.  Sadly, the wonderfully talented David Longdon [pictured above] of Big Big Train died on the eve of the band’s long delayed tour.  Intriguingly, Longdon once auditioned and came very close to replacing Collins as the singer for Genesis in the 1990s.  His death was a huge loss, and with the ‘accidental’ circumstances clearly odd, a low moment in 2021. Records of the year: 

Fuzzy Sun, Since the Dog Died
Tori Amos, Ocean to Ocean
The War on Drugs, I Don’t Live Here Anymore
The Weather Station, Ignorance
Alfie Templeman, Forever Isn't Long Enough
Wild Front, Drowning in the Light
Admiral Fallow, The Idea of You
The Anchoress, The Art of Losing
Nick Hudson, Font of Human Fractures
Wolf Alice, Blue Weekend. 

Honourable mentions also go to Kawala, Prioritise Pleasure, Circa Waves, The Magic Gang, Spector, The People Versus and Portobello. If you feel tempted, there is a Spotify Playlist here of the best of the above and some other tracks that made 2021 a musical return to form.

Watching

One of the best films of the year was probably the smallest.  While Spider-Man NWH was head-spinningly great fun and the overlong swansong for Daniel Craig in No Time to Die finally put some much-needed cash into the local Picture House tills, it was a tiny movie The Dig, that reminded me of how good well-made films can be. Watching Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan set against gorgeously filmed English countryside, The Dig was beautifully written, acted, produced, and shot.  The cinematographer tried to make east of England appear like something out of Lawrence of Arabia.  The Dig was streamed, not exhibited.  I don’t know if the intention ever was for it to get a theatrical release. Film buffs will still breathe deeply, frown sagely and let you know that there is nothing like seeing a movie in the cinema, wide-screen, surround sound, in the dark, munching snacks. I saw Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE, on a huge canvas, reclined, in crisp Dolby Atmos, in the ‘XL’ format at my local Cineworld and it was indeed, draw droppingly good and I am desperate to see it again.  While something like Dune is hard to match from the comfort of your sofa, the production values and quality of the very best of TV is now so extraordinary that its harder and harder to make the case for theatres only, or even ‘features’ as the pinnacle format.  There is too little of any quality on Netflix, or Amazon Prime, but if you can get HBO streamed, or Apple TV, then Westworld (first two seasons), Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian, The Witcher and Succession have raised the bar for streamed TV to a level make the pile it high and stream it cheap approach of Netflix risible.   

Foundation was long awaited and much anticipated - based on the most extraordinary series of books I had read as a teenager. The showrunners took some huge liberties with the story and production direction, but the look, the feel, the mood, the scope and the scale were all extraordinarily well done and the choice of Lee Pace as ‘Brother Day’ and Jared Harris as Harry Seldon was just perfect. Back in the real world, I was outside The Criterion Theatre, pretty much the first day theatres were allowed to re-open and enjoyed the verve and quirkiness of Amelie. Back to The Future at The Adelphi was a life-affirming nostalgic blast, but shows booked at The Bridge were postponed to next year. Most enjoyed watching of the year: 

Dune
The Dig (Netflix)
Foundation (Apple TV Series)
The Mandalorian (Disney TV series)
Succession (HBO TV, season III)
The Witcher
Spider Man - No Way Home
The Last Duel
Midnight in Soho

Elsewhere

Locked down during our 25th wedding anniversary, there was no option to return to Italy, so we found a new hideaway at The Pig, in Combe in Devon.  It is a remarkable place, found down a rough unmarked track, it is beautifully kept, with roaring log fires, out-door fire pits, fresh garden produce, great dining, and sumptuous accommodation.  Securing a weekend room at The Pig is akin to a lottery win – both in terms of the scarce chance of it happening and the unfathomable expense, paid in advance.  We finally got back to Italy in November 2021, where I developed an unhealthy obsession with obelisks.  

Writing

I read very little fiction in 2021 and wrote even less, though I did devour some terrific thought-leadership books (see Reviews). I discovered some amazing source reference material for a book about Seven Dials, with field trips to Weybridge (to see more obelisks) and Tunbridge Wells.  I remain determined to produce something coherent in 2022.  The BLOG continues to get good hits and this year, I continued to develop the #Smorgasbord, a listing and reference resource of the best 250 business/smart-thinking books written in the 21st Century.  You can find out more here.  

Coda

Thank you to everyone for reading and for those who have sent me your comments, twitter follows and feedback here and on Linked-in.  Like millions of others, I have found the past couple of years deeply affecting – and seldom in a good way. I remain hopeful the tide will turn.  In 1666, it took the ferocity of the Great Fire of London to finally wake up the English to the squalor, deprivation and poor hygiene of much of the City and to rebuild and move on from the devastating plague to more prosperous time of peace, enlightenment and revolution. In 2022 we don’t need a fire, or some major geo-political “distraction” (which I do fear might be sprung) to turn our minds from lockdown addiction. We do though need to awaken from the stupor of the past two years, look up and move on. Some of the tunes, viewing and places mentioned above form the soundtrack to a partially wasted year. No time to waste in ‘22.

That was the year that wasn’t

My annual year in review will be here shortly (see above). I did not bother writing one in 2020.  I struggled in 2021.  Music, film, sport, theatre, the arts, culture, collaboration, fellowship, singing, worship, fun…all became at various points in the past 20-months, initially ill-advised, then banned, made illegal under emergency legislation, with public objections and protests ignored, then repressed ‘regime-style’ with fines, arrests, and prosecutions, while the mainstream media sneered from the suburbs and the politicians sat in Downing Street quaffing cheese and sipping Beaujolais.

This was not some dystopian sci-fiction novel, but the reality of the public-policy response of numerous governments around the world and, inexplicably now again in late 2021, the approach of the UK Governments. I am hopeful that when the critical gaze of history and hindsight looks back on 2020/21, it will not be a write-up of heroic vaccine roll-outs and the billions spent on furlough; the key conclusion will be the abject failure of public institutions, governments, and vain politicians to see the ‘bigger picture’ beyond COVID-19 and their sheer narrow-minded obliviousness to the plainly obvious and unforeseen consequences of lockdowns, enforced social-dislocation, and the innumerable health and mental-health harms that sledgehammer policy responses create.  Perhaps as we end 2021, the newspapers might slowly start to smell the horrendous consequences of their own obsequies. In the UK, there were 223 child deaths, including that of tragic Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, reported by social services departments across the country between April 2020 and March 2021. Meanwhile, 6 (six) under 18s with “no underlying health conditions” died from Covid-19 in England in the same period. By any measure, a criminal neglect of vulnerable children, while the politically blinkered prioritised the ‘protection’ of the vast majority with little or no chance of being harmed by the virus. Please don't judge the veracity of my argument on the basis of my probable ignorance, there are innumerable sources of scientific and alternative commentary that say that the rich, the middle-class, the professionals and the public sector civil servants have largely been beneficiaries of lockdowns, hybrid working, financial bailouts. The poor, the vulnerable and the isolated (particularly the very youngest and most elderly) have been irreparably harmed.

If anything, 2021 proved the vital importance of “elsewhere”. The poet Philip Larkin put it beautifully: “Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, Strangeness made sense.”  Like Larkin, we might not skip with joy through the streets of elsewhere, but we make better sense of our thoughts and feelings whilst there. When our surroundings are less familiar, the unfamiliar sights and sounds provide a different context, and we look up more – at the sky, not the pavement. The absence of elsewhere could not have been felt more profound than in 2021.  Despite military scale vaccines rollouts, social distancing, mask-wearing and the omnipresent smell of hand sanitiser, most citizens in the UK (and around the world) simply stayed put – isolated at home, not venturing elsewhere, for the first half of 2021.  I went onto the Campus of London Business School about four times in the first part of the year.  The School quad was sign-posted with one-way systems, designed it seemed for the benefit of the tumbleweed that trundled across the path. If I had anything social had been pre-booked, it was cancelled.  If I wished to go abroad, then I was either prohibited by some red/amber/green nightmare list of rules, or I was threatened with confinement on entry by the same bureaucratic variable nonsense in the destination of choice.  Friends, colleagues, and clients around the world were similarly locked-in, prohibited from escaping the familiar for the less familiar.  Somehow, policy makers decided that endemic viruses would respect borders and turn back when they saw the officious border guards. The policy, as we knew then and know now, was akin to the pompous vanity of King Canute’s entourage – encouraging him to hold up his hand to the waves and expecting that they would simply recede.

After a brief glimmer of hope, tantalisingly teased by the UK Government in August, we end the year under renewed mask mandates, work from home orders, vaccine passports, closed borders, entertainment and hospitality on its knees, and with the ever-present threat of a new lockdown in the offing. The media fuels a putative public debate about enforced vaccination of citizens and the mandated unemployment and ostracism of those hesitant to be jabbed. It is as if, during the steepest and most profound learning curve in post-War history, our governments and leaders have learnt nothing at all.   Whatever the modellers and epidemiologists say, the reality is that no one really knows how the pandemic will pan out, but policy makers know with certainty that more kids will be harmed and abused, their education and social skills will suffer, and others, like poor Arthur, will be killed by further lockdowns.  Surely in 2022, the governments and their learned advisors much change tact? I hope.

Fuzzy memories of Reservoir Road

Good Question DEREK

Thirty years ago, or thereabouts, I lived on Reservoir Road in Birmingham, with some members of a band called Good Question Derek.  They were a close-knit group of friends who had met at Birmingham Poly and after graduating, stayed in a cluster of houses, almost on top of one another, with roadie, manager, and girlfriends all in the mix, a few streets off the Hagley Road.  The band gigged and gigged across the country, from the South-West to the Shetland Islands, recorded a few LPs, appeared on BBC TV with Danny Baker, and had an almost hit with a tongue in cheek song called Ugly.  At times, it was like living in a fly on the wall documentary, lodging “amidst the sights, sounds and smells” (Marty DiBergi) of a hard-working and talented band.  For me, a fish out of water in Brum, I learnt lots and despite having a besuited job, slept little.  I’m not sure what happened, or rather why it didn’t happen, for them.  

GQD were great live, worked hard, had a sack full of tunes and tonnes of personality. I saw them live at The Powerhouse in London and they shared dressing room riders with Wilko Johnson, The Sultans of Ping FC and various others. They didn’t become famous and split a few years later, though they did get back together to record a nostalgic single just a few years ago.  The thing that struck me, messily embroiled in those heady days of 1992, is how simultaneously near and far “breaking it” feels to a band every time they go out to play, and how perilously close to saying “fuck this” they equally feel the next morning.  GQD played when there was no social media, so they relied on word of mouth, entertainment officers who took a chance, band members and managers on the phone ALL THE TIME, sending out tapes and clippings from newspaper reviews.  All this, with the vague chance of some serendipitous one in a million happenstance of being spotted, loved and signed for a six album deal later that night.  There is no rhyme, nor reason, no magic formula, no secret sauce. I have no idea why fame didn’t grab Good Question Derek, but I was privileged to be in their bubble for a while and grateful to experience the ride.

Memories of GQD came flooding back on Monday at a small gig at The Grace, above The Garage in Islington.  It could have been 1992 again.  A new band from Manchester, Fuzzy Sun, were in London on a miserable wet night.  On tour again, after the disrupted shit-show that was much of 2020 and 2021.  Fuzzy Sun are an indie guitar band, fronted by a long-haired guitarist and singer Kyle Ross, who sounds a bit like a young Roger Hodgson, and their music is strangely genre-defying, part Blur, part Nile Rogers, with touches of Radiohead and The 1975.  Because of this, they may well be completely stuffed in a world of “categorisation” where the algorithm of Spotify or iTunes will not easily find them perfect song-list bed partners.  

But at The Grace, they play with verve, the songs soar and the set slowly builds, creating a joyous singalong and they shared enough earworm tunes to keep us humming on the Tube.  I had a brief chat with Kyle after – while he was selling t-shirts and vinyl (again nothing much has changed for bands since 1992) and he was warm, genuine, humble and generous with his time.  I don’t know what will happen in 2022 for Kyle and the band.  Like GQD in 1992, all the ingredients are there: the playing, the song-writing, the ambition.  I wish them well.  You can see a glimpse here.  

Fuzzy Sun, live in London, December 2021

Starlink might be bigger than even Musk can imagine

I signed up for Starlink. I paid a small fee for a service that doesn't work where I live...and it won't for at least a year.

Still, I am pretty sure it is the best early adopter decision I have ever made and when it launches, it will demolish the current eco-system for network, data and mobile systems. It might seem a bold prediction, but the market is ripe for disruption and the destructible elements (expensive incumbents, static market, monopoly behaviours, over-regulation) are already starkly in place and ready for a new ready player.

Consider the state of the current proposition:

• Broadband (expensive, unreliable, bundled with stuff you don't want);

• Mobile: ugly masts, dominated by undifferentiated operators (in the UK, Vodafone, EE, Three and O2)

• Handsets: a three-opoly (Apple, Samsung, Huawei) and 3 major OS (iOS, Android and Harmony)

• Coverage: good in cities, but 5G over-hyped, and no coverage up mountains, in rural areas, deserts, forests, at sea.

Disruption is often there in plain sight. We take the expense and annoyance(s) of the current service proposition and expect it to trundle on forever. I own shares in Vodafone and I know that they will be toast when phones move from using 4G signals to internet calls connected by an array of satellites enveloping the world. A planet-sized (not just metropolitan) market opens up. The legacy players' PR defence will be immense, and vicious, and early adopters will take on some risk, but I predict Starlink will be more enormous than anyone can possibly imagine, even its visionary founder.

And if Musk pivots from Tesla Cars, to Tesla Phones (just as Apple is reputedly and confusingly pivoting from phones to autonomous cars) then the handset market will find a radical fourth option, where battery life worries will be a thing of the past.

[I will book mark this post. Give it three years. JD]

Navigating Rome by ancient Obelisk

After two years grounded, we finally got on a plane last week and went back to Rome; the greatest outdoor museum in the whole world. Rome remains an extraordinary place; perhaps the best place on earth to get quickly re-acquainted with all the best things that lift the spirits and inspire; history, art, architecture, great food, delicious wine. There is much that is wonderful to report about a familiar and much loved place, but also a few things have changed and others that seem worthy of note. We start in predictable fashion, queueing for food.

The Sandwich shop

The Romans have gone slightly crazy post-lockdown...for a particular type of sandwich shop. All'antico Vinaio, is like an uber-high-end sandwich shop, with spicy meats enveloped in flatbread, with cheeses and sauces that melt in your mouth and put a sizeable dent in your wallet. The queues started hours before opening and stretched down the cobbles.I am not sure if the offer will translate everywhere, but they are already proudly packing pavements with 'lines' in New York and Los Angeles, as well as a 'home' shop in Florence. Which got me thinking, what are they doing differently that compels young adults to queue for two hours in the rain at 11 pm for a sandwich? Then I took a bite...Bada A La Fume!

The Pensione

We stayed in the centre on Piazza della Rotonda at the Albergo Abruzzi. We had stayed there some 27 years ago when it was a ‘humble’ (in other words, ramshackle) Pensione. The entrance was the same, a step off the street, and the welcome still eclectic [an immediate over-familiarity, which I am sure might rock some back on their heels and disconcert others], but the rooms had been improved, the stairs had carpets and this time we didn’t (as he had to in 1994) have to share a bathroom and showers with other guests on the same floor. When we had first stayed there, rooms were about 90,000 Lira a night, which I recall was about £30. There had been some hyper-inflation in the intervening period, so the price was radically different, but the view from the rooms overlooking the Pantheon remains the most amazing in the whole of Rome. Priceless.

The Obelisks

The best way to navigate Rome is not by the Maps on your phone, or via the free crumpled handout on the desk of the Pensione. The City layout, its greatest sights and dramatic open spaces, are often signposted by the placement of some staggering Obelisk. There are more obelisks in Rome than in ancient Egypt. In fact, there are more obelisks in Rome than anywhere else in the World, eight ancient Egyptian examples, five Roman and a number of modern ones. By methods we cannot fathom, these vast Egyptian precision cut stone monuments were mined and erected in a land of Pharaohs (or perhaps in earlier unrecorded times), then ransacked, packed and transported from Egypt during the Roman Empire. In the same way no one really knows how they were excavated intact from the quarries of Aswan and moved hundreds of miles to Thebes or Luxor, no one is really sure how they were then shipped across the Mediterranean to Rome. But they must have done - because here they stand in prominent positions throughout the City, marking out the map like monolithic Google pin drops.  Each one is stunning: Piazza del Popolo, at the summit of the Spanish Steps, in front of the Pantheon, at The Laternum, and across the river in St Peter’s Square.

The only obelisk to have remained standing since Roman times is the Vatican Obelisk on St Peter’s Square in the Vatican. The famous unmarked Obelisk sits dead-centre in St Peter’s Square, in front of the enormous Basilica and frowned upon all around by the statues of former Pope’s and Apostles. Over 25 meters tall, it is estimated to weigh some 330 tonnes; far heavier than a 747-400, and the equivalent of 26 London Routemaster buses. When it was erected in the Square in 1586, its relocation (from the nearby Circus of Nero) was started in early April, using hemp ropes and iron bars weighing 40,000 pounds, plus 1,000 men and 72 horses, and was finally completed on Sept. 10 of the same year. It took years of planning and then five months of astonishing effort to move just a few hundred metres. Numerous illustrations survive to commemorate the sheer scale and drama of the process. The mind boggles that it took such engineering skill and physical resources in 1586 to move the stone across a relatively level prepared route to the Square and elevate it to a vertical position. How some 1,300 years earlier they moved it several hundred kilometres - including the sea crossing - from Heliopolis seems unfathomable. And how it was cut, excavated and moved and erected in Heliopolis over a 1,000 years before that is just beyond comprehension. There are theories, but much of ancient history is a collection of guesses and surmises that never really seem certain, or definitive, regardless of the ‘expertise’ of the scholar. The only thing that is truly solid is the stone. Standing timeless against a blue sky, watching the petty mortals who hurry and fuss across the Ages, which seem to it just a brief moment in time.

Arriverdverci!

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

View fullsize

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.  

View fullsize

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.  

View fullsize

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

View fullsize

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

View fullsize

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

View fullsize

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.