Gulp

Year-end may be a time for reflection but 2011 has allowed for little of that. Most of us are far too focused on what happens next rather than looking back with some sweet and sickly reverence about the good times.

Whilst the pre-Columbian Maya calendar suggests none of us will live to see the end of 2012 (cheery stuff), those who dare to think that far ahead will likely look at 2011 as an ignition point for political, economic and social volatility (my, what an equally chirpy prospect).

The rise of the right-wing ‘extremists” in the US; austerity overload across Europe; heightened concern over nuclear power; equal concern over nuclear stability; the potential of the Arab Spring and the implications of the Arab Fall; a fractured Iraq – and a hawkish Iran; social media explosion and media integrity implosion; and, of course, the point at which last orders at the bar of effective climate management saw cries for a lock-in from those too inebriated to care. If 2012 is the year is which all of these happy little dynamics are realised, then we’ll probably all perish from the deafening shrill of the Mesoamericans crying, I told you so, before the planet even gets the chance to go pop.

The lowest common denominator across each of these events has to be the fact that the elasticity of our social cohesion is reaching its breaking point. We may be no more protective of our proverbial patch today than were our ancestors 5000 years ago, but the fact that we’re now living on top of each other – metaphorically, physically, virtually and emotionally – makes the consequences of misjudged efforts of global socialisation just a little bit more immediate.

Those who have long promoted the benefits of the archetypal village community have oft been disregarded as liberal idealists and out of touch with 21st century living. Enter Prince Charles. But there’s no small irony that the very concept of community has since been adopted by those whose world is far more virtual. The fundamental principle of Facebook is, of course, that people like people who share common interests and outlooks. It is, in effect, a matrix of online villages that, combined, tips half a billion inhabitants. And they exist in “communities”.

The fact is people want communities. They want social cohesion. They want to be part of something that they can see, touch, observe and contribute to. It may be counter-intuitive to point to this year’s riots in the UK as an example of community at work. But even rioters need other rioters to make things happen. You simply can’t have a riot of one. It doesn’t work.

And this is where the dynamism and permanency of social media is so exciting. In 2011 it showed its potential. It was the tool through which people movements were mobilised and governments were toppled. But it remains a communications tool and, if it is to satisfy the human need for community, it has to become far more of a social experience its own right.

For all the power of the written word, few have mastered it such that it can engage and empower communities, with the required degree of permanency. One-dimensional interaction, no matter how sexy the device, has its limitations. And that is the challenge for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and those who’ll likely fund his $100 billion market float, in 2012 – the year in which social media might finally come of age. How can a flat screen provide a more connected, tactile experience that matches that at home, in a store, in a stadium or at a concert?

YouTube has only solved a fraction of the puzzle. It’s success as an entertainment channel makes it little more than that. Entertainment. Social media will begin to fulfil its potential when we become as engaged through our online environment as we are in our good-old-fashioned-everyday-walking-talking-touchy-feely-as-we-were-invented world. That’s when things might start looking up. Which would be great.

Let’s just hope we live to find out.

Reputation in Volatile Markets

Stretching out with the weekend papers and a temperature-perfect flat white whilst the children quietly potter in the garden on a warm, lazy Saturday afternoon is the stuff of fantasy and home improvement ads.

But, quite remarkably, Dr Serendipity made a welcome house-call this weekend past and I had a full 26 minutes before the little cherubs started chasing the wildlife, testing the suffocation properties of a plastic bag and, my now tepid, coffee hit the deck in the subsequent melee.

In these volatile times, you can do a lot in 26 minutes. Bake a dinky little chocolate cake perhaps or maybe just lose a billion dollars on the markets. I opted for the less radical alternative of pawing through the lifestyle pages before the curfew on parental responsibility was lifted.

It’s amazing how insightful even the fluffiest of topics can be when well written, marginally provocative and resistant to the lure of celebrity. Take the world of high-end fashion for example, a place where the wealthy and the beautiful join forces to remind us all that those with the highest cheekbones, win.

As a serious commentator of this ever-pouting world, the FT’s Fashion Editor, Vanessa Friedman, treads a very thin line. Working for a publication where economics are considered sexy and smart thinking is de rigour, she’s always in danger of slipping on her sparkly train of unassailable hope and fatuous self-indulgence.

And yet, every week, Friedman manages to navigate her way down the catwalk of false love and loathing to remind us all that fashion not only remains a multi-billion dollar industry but that it continues to define so much in contemporary society.

Her 10 September piece on family members most likely to inherit the reins of some of the world’s biggest luxury brands was a case in point. Low key and thoughtful, it flagged the very real commercial concerns of aging business leaders where eponymy has become both a help and a hindrance in their latter years. The dilemma is relatively straightforward. There may be better future CEOs outside of the business, but it is family members that pass the thread of continuity between today and tomorrow through little more than a name.

So how do you prepare the future leader of a luxury brand? Well, of the ten names listed (from Silvana Armani to David Lauren), five currently have responsibility for all aspects of public relations, marketing and communications. These are not titles of convenience. They are a recognition that an understanding of brand reputation is as important to future CEOs as the functions of business administration.

To say so is far from a self-indulgent pat on my own industry’s back. It is a simple fact of commercial life that brand equity and business reputation are now considered as significant an asset as any other tangible within a business. All the more so when an individual’s name is the brand itself.

I could wax lyrical about the changing dynamics between market value and brand equity. But in the spirit of deference and delegation I’ll leave that to my colleague at Weber Shandwick, James Abbott, whose article about reputation in volatile markets says it better than I ever could.

The Short Goodbye

You know the feeling. Someone’s leaving. There are a few nice words. A small gift. Perhaps even some tears.

You stand awkwardly at the open door, or cold window or airport gate, hand flapping in the vacant breeze, mouthing something like “it’s not goodbye, just au revoir” (which is fine, unless you’re in Paris).

And then its back to work, or the TV or the evening rush hour and all the emotional trauma is lost in the needs of the now.

Saying goodbye is never easy. But people tend to bounce back sooner than they think. And for the Weber Shandwick team, the prospect of moving into a new Sydney office that’s super-contemporary, yet wrapped in the coat of a heritage site, makes the challenge of saying goodbye just that little bit easier.

Arriving at our new home this morning, the arches of Royal Naval House on Grosvenor Street beckoned like some architectural Pied Piper. The fact that we’re now able to spend our weekdays (and, perhaps, a few weekends) in this wonderful new space is exciting for every one of us.

But we’re certainly not greedy enough to keep it all to ourselves. Like any new home, the more who have the chance to enjoy it, the better it is. Which is why our clients, business partners and friends have a permanent invitation to visit us at Royal Naval House – and not just for the formality of business meetings.

After all, what better way to get over the ‘goodbyes’, than by getting to say ‘hello again’ as quickly as you can.

The Future is Medieval

You know, history has a habit of cheating us. Rarely are historic moments anything but moments in an otherwise uneventful week. It’s only when retrospect gets out its nifty little marker pen that we realise how head-slappingly naïve we’ve been in completely failing to recognise just how significant the moment was.

Like last Friday’s launch of the new Kaiser Chiefs album. Pardon? Yes. Are you mad? No, really, hear me out on this one.

Marginally obnoxious as it might seem today, give it a few months and the fittingly entitled “The Future is Medieval” could be seen as one of those moments that became the catalyst for a whole library-full of retrospectives.

Now I’m no music aficionado, but I doubt that all the fabulousness of the Kaiser Chiefs will make this album THE soporific goose-bump inducer of the 21st century. It’s good in a “couple-of-top-five-hits” kind of way. But that’s not really the point.

Take a look at this particular album through the prism of purchase rather than content and it suddenly becomes a very different proposition indeed. In fact, it could well be the “oh yes, of course, that’s how you do it” moment that the music industry and anyone who does not believe the online environment is a charity-based free-for-all, has been hoping for. And, you could argue, it’s something the cosmetics industry has been doing in the real world for donkey’s years.

The Chiefs have published 20 new songs on their websites. Fans are invited to download their favourite ten and to create an album of those songs in any order they like. They’re also given a box full of artwork to choose, each of which forms the template for their own personalised album cover. Once they’ve personalised it, they then get to download and purchase it for $12.

All of which is nice but not really enough to convince he who wants it for free. So there’s more.

The site encourages fans to then share their personalised album online and, if they post a link to their version of it to Twitter or Facebook, they can sell further downloads for $12 and take a $1 in commission every time they do it. And it’s unlikely they’ll be duplication. With 20 tracks available there are (according to my six year old) more than half a trillion possible combinations.

All of this begs the question why a secondary buyer would pay $12 for something they could otherwise personalise themselves for the same price. But somewhere in all of this there’s a logic that could shed new light on a commercial model for an industry that is otherwise short on commercial ideas.

There are other wallet-stretching incentives for the pondering music exec too. The punter’s decision on which tracks to go for gives a rather accurate pointer to the record label as to which of those 20 tracks they should be releasing as a single. Which is equivalent to a very welcome cheat-sheet in the midst of an otherwise pretty testing exam.

The purists might baulk at the idea of the artiste capitulating to a needy market, of course. But they only need to track the deceleration of those who have built empires on the production of CD players to know that the future has binary numbers written all over it. And history has a habit of telling us that purity is more intellectual vanity than it is valid moral standing, anyway.

It will take a while to know whether the Kaiser Chiefs’ little commercial adventure turns out to be one flabby, misplaced musical belly-flop or, in fact, the Model T Ford of its time. But the music industry will not be alone in watching carefully for any signs of the potential it might have.

Plus ça Change, plus C’est la Même Chose

It’s taken the best part of four months to get back to the Glass House and I’m at a loss to know why. Too busy; too tired; too uninspired. Each a shallow excuse and all the more pathetic for it. So to those who have asked (thanks for caring, Mum), apologies for my death in absentia, I won’t let it happen again and can I come out of the corner now?

Despite the deference, I doubt I’m alone in thinking that the shine of the blogging generation has lost some its lustre. An infrequent visitor to any one blog, but a regular to many, I’ve seen far too many sites that, with the best will in the world, have faded, dulled and dated.

The problem is not so much the quality of the content, but more the fact that there’s very little content at all. What once was a bi-weekly, well-structured thought piece has too often become a gesture of infrequent vitriol or quarterly intellectual tokenism.

There’s nothing wrong with that of course. But it is a stark reminder that for all the acrid fervour around the democratisation of media, it takes self-discipline, unwavering passion and a decent kick up the back side once in while to keep the content fresh, relevant, provocative and consistent. It’s what, in the bad old days, they called an Editor.

It didn’t take two long blacks and a fire-storming Editor to find some inspiration last week. There was an ocean of it at the Next Generation Hothouse, a three-day gathering of some of Weber Shandwick’s (and our sister agency’s) best and brightest thinkers.

In the wholly justified belief that sustained collaboration across organisations is best affected from the bottom up, the Next Generation Hothouse brings 20 of our youngest and sharpest people together each year to explore and develop ideas around a particular theme. This year that theme was Adaptation. And Bali was the place to adapt.

At a time when societies, economies, technologies and climates are in a constant state of flux, it might seem that the ability to adapt is more important now than it ever was. But that, as the Hothouse bods determined, would put societal self-importance ahead of fact.

Change is a constant. The only thing that’s different is the fact that the pace and dynamics of that change means we’re having to manage our deceleration now as effectively as we have managed our acceleration in the past. The peaks and troughs of our operational environments demand an ability to do both.

Of all of the topics we workshopped – personal, corporate, city and country brand adaptation – the one that resonated most was the challenge of creating an office environment that mapped against the needs of a future workforce. The fact that Weber Shandwick moves to a new, purpose-built, bright and shiny office in the heart of Sydney’s CBD next month, probably had something to do with it.

For all the effort and expenditure that corporations put into the aesthetics of a new workplace, few give real consideration to the fact that their next generation of thinkers consider a permanent presence in a single place of work about as appealing as the preparation of a 10,000 word, hand-written dissertation. I’m pleased to say that we have.

It’s far from easy to manage. But like any agency that is thinking as much about tomorrow as it is today, shift-work may soon return to board agenda. And so it seems, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The Dance of the Storyteller

I love the English language. It’s implausible double entendres, over-reliance on a bastardised history of the French and Saxonion lexicon (see previous) and punchy, lumpen and louty variation of tongue has long made it the verbal choice of business internationalists, pugnacious football hooligans and anyone caught somewhere between two such flaky stereotypes.

Across the sodden fields of England, it’s variance and inflection in pitch and phonology is known to show audible shifts every twelve miles. Which is why tourists and adventurists alike must wonder if they missed passport control as they travel between Portsmouth and Peterhead.

Further afield, a nation of Australians and Americans have created their own version of the English language, stretching and compressing vowels like an accordion with hiccups. And more recently, vowels have all but lost the will to live, eradicated by a concerted global affront to the transcription of a language whose centuries of development had not anticipated the limitations of 140 characters.

For all its virtues, English is not all perfection, harmony and teacakes. Like any well-meaning love affair, as the infatuation dissipates, so the flaws of the English language slowly reveal themselves to those who care.

Despite the laudable efforts of Samuel Johnson, the most obvious imperfection in his mighty A Dictionary of the English Language, is the gaps in diction – big gaps, particularly on the emotive side of the fence. Try using one word to capture spirit-raising malicious pleasure (schadenfreude); the accomplishment of a significant challenge (fiero); or your response to your children’s achievements (naches) and you’d be gravely disappointed. More’s the point, one has to assume that even the formidable Mr Johnson died wondering what he should be calling that pale area behind the knee.

And yet what the English language lacks in its lexiconography, it makes up for in its diversity, sensibility and stomp. So many of the words themselves are exquisite and intoxicating in their own right. They demand no adornment, comfortable in their own space and place. A singular tribute to inference and sentiment.

Better still, when strung together, plucked from anonymity and isolation and aligned with others, they become a choreographed flow with the rigidity of their raw form softened. This may sound dangerously like persiflage or pompous bluster, but the well-constructed use of the English language is an aural dance. A rhythm of language that appeals to the most primeval of human responses.

That may sound odd too. We rarely talk of language as the basis for dance. Except that is exactly what it is. We just have a different term for it. We call it a story.

The correlation between rhythm and stories is not random puff. A song – the very best song – tells a simple story with the added bonus of a soundtrack. A story without music is no worse off. Instead, it is reliant on a silent rhythm and use of language that intoxicates its audience and gives them the cause and means to paint a personalised visual of the story being told.

A well-told story has the theatre, drama and raw emotion of any tranche of music and, because of it, its ability to provoke behavioural change is just as potent. The very best storytellers know that, eschewing any temptation to follow a formulaic, paint-by-numbers format and, instead, turning to their inner ear for a balance of prose and their own experience for the right words. Theirs is a very particular craft – a Moses-like dexterity that allows them to navigate a path through the great torrent of language and settle, gently, on the other side, story line in tact. It is far from easy and not for the faint hearted.

In the run up to Christmas, I was nudged again by the implicit elegance of a well-told story, and the wonder of the English language nestled within it. Tired of the turgid and lame biscuit hampers that seemed to be the default annual “thank you” to clients, our firm took a different line to show our appreciation. As storytellers of one sort or another, we sent each and every client a copy of a literary prizewinner that best captured their own story. Which, naturally, required me to take a quick dip in the sea of narrative within – just to be sure.

And what narrative it was. Each unique in its own vocabulary; each definitive in its own rhythm. Perhaps most telling though, was the emotive response that each was able to garner in just a few pages. A reminder, if ever there was one, that the English language, when used with caution and dexterity by the able few, is a font of unfathomable potency with which to capture the imagination of anyone. And that has to make storytelling the most formidable of a professional communicator’s tools.

Simple, Honest Rules to Social Acceptance

Social media is a paradox. It continues to confuse, enrage and enlighten as one. But for those brands that make the intellectual investment to better understand it, there is untold opportunity to connect with the very people whose trust they covet.

Today, The Australian newspaper generously published a piece I authored, giving me the opportunity to express my own views on what that intellectual investment might look like ….

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/simple-honest-rules-to-social-acceptance/story-e6frg996-1225953487004

The Best Advice

We are, in this very volatile little communications universe of ours, very good at dishing out advice. Depending on our constitution or Weet-a-Bix intake on any given day, that advice may be confessional, perhaps even a little too prophetic, as we counsel, coerce, orchestrate and strategise our way through the problems of our clients and the aspirations of those in our teams.

We strive to become, in the words of David Maister, trusted advisors. It’s our professional Holy Grail – a Utopian world of immense gratitude, unrivalled mutual happiness and the excitable prospect of an early settlement of fees. Which, when you think about it, is just a teeney-weeney bit shallow.

When it comes to proffering good advice, objectivity is one thing. But there’s little that beats good-old-fashioned first-hand, roll-your-sleeves-up, in-the-middle-of-it-all experience. In fact there’s nothing that beats it at all.

I’m a big advocate of the Day in Their Shoes type initiatives that are flavour of the month with politicians from Sydney to Seattle. But they have their limitations. The gloss still shines at the end of a day. Truth often takes weeks or months to reveal itself.

Five years ago I met a young lady in a workshop I was running who expressed her passion for the work of Not for Profit organisations. We spent a lot of time talking about it, exploring the pros and cons and testing the boundaries of where moral fortitude sat. And then we went our separate ways.

Some two years ago, I received a short email from that same young lady, now a project leader working with the United Nations providing assistance in some of the world’s most despairing places. It was a revelation. In that time since I had first met her she had become an orator, negotiator, story-teller and diplomatic of extraordinary calibre – a testament to what real experience is really all about. And where the very best advice can come from.

So let me, with her prior permission, give you a taste of what I now look forward to reading every month or so. Here, she tells the story of her time in Haiti – a story that you will unlikely have ever heard before. And it’s all the more wonderful for it:

Humanitarian workers and the media have a tendency to focus on the worst impact and consequences of a disaster: we talk about how many people died and were injured, how many children lost their parents, how many houses were destroyed, the number of people displaced… We analyze and report child trafficking, sexual violence, abuse, prostitution of minors, and media likes to report on corrupt and inefficient governments and NGOs, badly planned and executed interventions, responses that are too slow and too late, and weak or inexistant coordination among humanitarian actors.

The amount of suffering, destruction and pain that we witness every day can indeed be overwhelming. And yet in the midst of this chaos and horror, there are small wonders that take place every day.

Haiti, similar to Colombia, India and Pakistan, has reminded me of the tremendous resilience that people have. In the midst of the aftermath of such a horrendous disaster, I have witnessed the strength of amazing children that continue to study hard and take care of their siblings in the worst living conditions imaginable, communities that come together to help each other in the absence of government support and NGO presence, young adults that overnight become caretakers of their brothers or sisters children and don’t shy away from the responsibility, and people that themselves lost their houses and family members and only a few days after the earthquake start working for humanitarian organizations to help other Haitians that were even more affected by the earthquake than they were.

The Haitians I was able to work with have been nothing short of strong, hardworking, dedicated, caring, kind and committed people –and I am simply unable to put in words the huge amount of respect I have for each one of them. I will miss Haiti and its people, but in particular my team. I feel honored and privileged that I had the opportunity to work here.

The Banana Republic of Australia

From the outside in, politics is rarely exciting. On the inside out, there’s never a dull moment. But there can’t be many people in Australia who are not enthralled by the twists and turns of an election campaign that has gone from a limp rhetoric to absorbing cliffhanger. The current narrative is more Reservoir Dogs than Lassie. And we still have no idea what the ending might look like.

Two weeks ago, it was very different. Tony Abbott, a man who’s gaffs, ears, choice of Speedos and rather non-magisterial standing, looked destined to play little more than a Joker-in-the-Pack role as leader of the opposition Liberal Coalition party.

In the red corner, Julia Gillard had everything going for her. Australia was one of only a handful of countries that had avoided a dip into the recessionary pool. Her government had borrowed heavily to fund a series of stimulus packages, but the multi-billion dollar debt that came from it paled into significance when compared to other Western countries. And there was an unspoken, almost Thatcheresk-fuelled national sentiment about her that suggested the popular vote was hers to lose.

And lose it she did. Two days prior to the election, Gillard was serving up right jabs, tackling the Opposition leader’s fiscal management skills. So Abbot did what any part-time triathlete would do and decided to go on a 36-hour, non-stop door knocking campaign. Which worked.

In a 140bpm heartbeat, the last full day of the election became an all night watch-a-thon in which Abbott played tennis, paced around night markets, spoke to any pensioner that cared to listen and ran the risk of losing his mind during live phone-ins. But he survived, said nothing particularly silly and, in the process, managed to dump any aspirations the incumbent government had of having a serious debate about serious politics.

From there, the Australian election has gone from odd to bizarre. The electorate booed Labour and buoyed the Coalition and the prospect of a hung parliament, with no one party achieving the 76 seats they need to form government, has forced Gillard and Abbott to court four Independent MPs who now hold the balance of power in their very sweaty hands. Given that one of them constructed an entire campaign around the importation of bananas, one outcome of this election campaign could be a surge in demand for apples. Only in Australia.

And then there’s the constitutional issue in which the Queen’s Representative, the Governor-General, may well have to play a referee role in sorting out the mess. Except that she’s in a bit of a pickle herself. In the recently acquired post of mother-in-law to a rising Labour Party star, there’s a valid question about her conflict of interest. Which means, quite possibly, the Queen herself might have to wade in – although that would put the entire nation on the fast track to Republicanism if anything did.

Years ago, a fight with some University vagrant, flogging Socialist Worker, meant I acquired a nonchalant pose to organised politics – that stuck. The political aspirations of the Student Union leaders seemed little more that a rather loose cover to organise legitimate raves that, so word had it, resulted in the arrival of at least one illegitimate child every year. But that has all changed in the past week (the position on politics, not illegitimate children), as I suspect it has for many people who live in this country.

Whilst voting is compulsory in Australia, the democratic isolationist bag that so many carry around has been discarded as a result of this election campaign. So too, I hope, has the protest vote that people appear to have thought wildly amusing on polling day, only to find that the person they voted for got in. Whilst there’s an adversion to the possibility that we could all have to go through this campaign again, there’s an intense interest in where Australia’s political script could take us next. What the country needs is stable government. What the country gets could be very different. Let’s just hope it’s not a Banana Republic.

Cheese, Badgers and Horse Trading

Cheese and Badgers
I keep telling myself to knock Asia on the head. Not in a mad-dictatorish, Risk playing, loony kind of way. That would be silly. Nor because of a sudden, unpredicted aversion to air travel. That would provoke an over reliance on boats. And I’ve done that before.

No, the Asia-knocking thing is more about the deconstruction of a linguistic totem than anything else. The realisation that as a geographical reference point, it doesn’t really help any one any more. It’s all a bit wishy washy and conveniently collective. Like hip-hop, austerity programs and the BBC’s drama department.

I’ve spent the first half of this week in Taipei. A city that looks just a little bit tired and dreary despite the columns and the unfathomly enthusiastic use of the colour peach. I’m now in Hong Kong, a different beast all together. A central district that glints like a surgeon’s scalpel, surrounded by soaring residential towers that pepper the hillsides.

These two vibrant cities may share a heritage, but they’re a world apart. One has legitimately stumbled towards a better, more prosperous reputation as the world’s most productive widgets factory. The other remains a central financial hub for the region, with some niggling doubts about how long that will remain the case. The people, the architecture, the economies could not be more different, despite the view from the outside in. And it’s not just there.

Travel west to China, east to Korea and Japan or south to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the myriad of other countries that are encumbered with the Asia tag, and the diversity thing goes into hyper-drive.

The fact is that most are far more connected commercially, culturally and linguistically to the US and Europe than they are to each other. Some, through the expansion of their middle class and staggering size, have become mini regions in their own right.

And yet we bundle them together through geography and sweeping statements about shifting trends, with little acknowledgement of the variation between them. On the face of it, they may be linked through landmass. But in reality, I don’t know that they’re any more connected than Woolsery Cheese and badgers.

Equestrian Diplomacy
This week’s award for the most diplomatic leaving speech ever goes to my friend and regional CFO, Stephen Ashworth. There’s many a man better than I who would have welled up and wriggled on the floor upon being presented with a poignantly pink and white rutting clay stallion nailed to a book end in a fashionable Hong Kong restaurant. But Stephen, twitching slightly that he was, managed to string a suitably sentimental line or two together whilst others looked on bewildered. Who’d have known that an accountant could become the consummate diplomat at the time when it mattered most? At his very own leaving do.

I don’t know what it is about accountants and their siblings in the banking and financial services sector. I find the older I get, the more I like them. It’s probably because as my life appears to get more wildly disorganised, they seem to carry this serene air of spreadsheetutopia where the facts speak for themselves and rarely, if ever, require an emotive interpretation.

It’s the same with their offices. Always stoic, often sage. A place where the search for moral and intellectual perfectionism colours every piece of furniture and administrative accessory. I’m quite sure that if it wasn’t for them and children between the age of 3 and 6, the pencil sharpener industry would have evaporated years ago. They may be the masters of SAP and business analytics, but give them a sharp pencil and they go a little gooey at the knees. Nudge it from its ninety-degree angle on their desk, and they’ll probably stab you with it.

Mob-Glow
Back in Taipei, despite the peach, I’d been invited to run a workshop for some of the best and brightest young things from McCann WorldGroup, our sister agency. Some minor (although it felt more than major at the time) hiccups on a colleague’s flight times meant that my session needed to expand from an hour or so to a full, and seemingly horizonless morning.

When you have one short weekend and a one-stop flight to prepare a workshop for 45 people who are hungry to learn (and positively ravenous to share their own point of view), there’s a tendency for the mind to become a little blinkered and mildly obsessive. Flight attendants and PA systems suddenly become divisive dementors whose only purpose in life is to disrupt your train of thought. And when the time finally comes to step up to the plate, you probably feel alive because you know you’re only a point-of-view away from a slow and torturous immolation.

Invariably the way such workshops run best is by swiftly trying to establish what those in the room think. When you have such a plethora of nimble minds in one place, it’s never going to take long to get a debate going. Questions are often far more provocative than answers. The difficult bit is making sense of all the different points of view and articulating it in a way that it makes sense to people.

But if that can happen, new ideas flow from old assumptions and before you know it you have enough light bulbs going off to create a warm and fuzzy feeling of collective progress. I call it a mob-glow. It’s enough to make flight attendants appear human again.