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Monthly Archives: November 2013

Buttery Invention and the perils & possibilities of a frictionless life.

26 Tuesday Nov 2013

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brands, corporate responsibility, Frictionless living, volunteering

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If utterly friction free living ever arrives, we’re all toast. Thankfully, I sense the human condition will never allow it to happen.

Whatever the technology buffs and lifestyle innovators might claim or predict, our everyday humanity is rather attached to the grubby, physical realities of its ruck and maul existence.

Furious invention is doing its damnedest to move us all out of the real world into a new era of technological and existential hovering – an avatar and clone-like experience of existence that allows us to remove any need to touch the scratchy sides of real life at all.

We now find that even the biologists are in on the game, creating data-based life forms capable of reproduction and evolution, utterly devoid of any human interaction. Soon we can just task a genome-mapped data-modelled living clone of ourselves to live the grubby truths of our ‘real’ lives while we hermetically seal ourselves in some floating chamber of frictionless fabulousness.

The death of ageing is yet another example of our need not only to remove the experience of friction but also the evidence of it: in this instance, that of our very existence and its impact on how we look – God no, we cant have that. That would be, well, rubbing our faces in it so to speak. Friction, of a different kind but friction none the less

Ok, yes, some frictionless living is very welcome and gratefully received.

With everything from frictionless payment to Iris recognition passports, travelators and the soon predicted absence of any friction of the London Transport staff kind on the Underground, one could feel that we’re well on the way to friction free living.

So it’s not for want of alternatives or invention that we still broadly stick to each other and the real world.

Perhaps it has been bred into us to cling to our mortality and its incumbent human flaw and frailty.

As centuries of poets, writers, artists and philosophers have tirelessly pointed out, it is only when we’re closest to the mortal, fragile truth of our own humanity that we feel most alive. Right now, thankfully, that seems to be the way we still like it.

We wouldn’t it seems change it for the world. Why? Because it’s in the scrape and the scuff that we remind ourselves that we are living feeling beings.

Indeed, some would say that it is only the addictive nature of human friction that will save us from a data-mapped genome-shaped self-generating binary oblivion.

The good news it seems is that the harder technology and lifestyle innovations try to separate us from the scratch-and-sniff interaction of human collision, the more we seem to crave its reality.

It is for the best that technology and its providers (and in turn, the brands that utilise their miraculous invention) are forever enabling us to hover just that little bit higher above the world by ever increasing degrees.

It triggers the Newtonian truth of equals and opposites. Which is both good – and of course, bad. Which is, in its own way, good.

There seems to be a direct correlation between our degrees of rare being and those of our base doing. The increasing speed of our ascent to technologically enabled dislocation seems to be matched only by the equally increasing speed of our descent into a playground of a more primal and connected nature.

As a species, we need to watch how life plays its self out both in ourselves and more importantly in others – it’s part of how we learn – it’s part of how we commune – it’s part of how we improve – it’s part of how we evolve as creatures. In the crash bang wallop of human contact.

It is only through our proximity to our own kind that we learn to navigate both the heights and depths of ecstasy and desperation in our human existence; and in turn proof ourselves against its worst rages of circumstance. It is also only in our real-time bumbling through our immediate environment, and in our connection to it, that we can truly gauge how and to what degree we and our surroundings are co-dependent – and in more human terms, decipher where the edges of our misanthropic and philanthropic selves truly lie.

It is only in being human amongst humans that we remember how to be human.

And it is only by our scraping by, getting through, and rubbing along that we remain sentient extant human beings connected to the world and the people around us.

Human Friction is the root of responsibility – the thing that keeps us on the right side of the walled ghetto of separated existence – and friction is what we as individuals and collectives need to secure our base human reflex to protect and care for our own and the environment in which they thrive.

The ever increasing generational and communal dislocation that exists in our supposedly civilised societies and cultures – the removal of the friction between the old, the dispossessed, the poor, the disadvantaged –  brings only one reward – a stunting of the cyclical, fluid, ever increasing improvement of our human condition. I find it no surprise that the most recent generation in our most civilised societies are the first in centuries to look forward to a poorer quality of life than their parents, as measured by almost every indicator.

If a brand wanted to champion a more evolved human existence they’d move the ‘frictionless’ dream and every new piece of technological improvement that delivers it out of the ‘human progress’ tray and into the ‘table stakes’ tray: their development a cost of doing business and being best in class: as opposed to being their ‘purpose and reason to be’

Having done that they should lift every communal and people powered initiative they have up and into the centre of everything they do.

Frictionless life is no life – friction is the visceral, flawed dirty engine of our humanity. And in a Newtonian world, the more you remove one form of it, the more you need to add of the other.

When people take back control of their own destiny – and when communities take back control of their own everyday lives, the impacts are astonishing.

For example, brands who unlock the desire of young people to apply their precious time to recreating the frictions of ‘together’, reap an exceptional reward. The rise of youth volunteering in communities around the world: and the impact on brands of organisations like RockCorps are both beautiful and redeeming – but more importantly they point to the value of friction to improve our existence.

When people re-engage with the beautiful human truth of finding the right way to rub along together; when they remember that their fellow and neighbour is if not ‘family’ mostly a friend; when they learn how to embrace the good bits of progress and all of its technological toys as a means and not an end; suddenly humanity blossoms.

Any brand or business therefore has to realise that our increasingly frictionless life needs an offset strategy – it needs friction.

They must realise that for every leap forwards that technology might proffer their ambitions, an equal and opposite people-powered investment in people’s everyday lives must come with it.

So figure it out please. If you don’t, we’re going to need a whole lot of peanut butter, marmite, honey and jam.

Galloping Consumption, sacrifice &; The Woman Who Rode Away: elegant gestures for a lighter life.

25 Monday Nov 2013

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DH Lawrence

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Saturday-night’s BBC2 documentary on DH Lawrence and its focus at one point on the re-interpretation of his work, The Woman Who Rode Away, struck my post ‘Dr. Who + Twiglets + Quality Street’ addled-mind as very of the moment.

Having spent a lot of time recently debating the role of arch sacrifice as a flawed strategy for success in regards to transforming the way the early majority of folks out there consume life,  the documentary just served to underline how far apart the motivations of the Early Adopters and those of the Early Majority really are for me.

This fresh interpretation of The Woman Who Rode Away sees the woman’s act of submission to the sacrificial ritual of the local Native Indian tribe as a way of escaping (both spiritually and physically) the crashing claustrophobic banality of her silver-seeking husband’s venal, materialistic nature and purpose.

Her submission to the Indian Elder’s knife in the dark open mouth of the cave is now seen by some as being representative of a far greater universal human gesture towards redemption – that of the need to cleanse our collective soul by sacrifice of the temporal cancer of materialism and in turn to liberate our spirit from the conceits and capriciousness of the false and shallow concept of ‘civilisation’ that accompanies it.

This fresh interpretation of DH Lawrence’s narrative presents us with a new poster child for the more fanatical Early Adopters of a more sustainable human existence (as opposed to the older one which viewed it as an insidious misogynistic piece of propaganda from the pen of a racist proto-pornographer)

In absolute terms, the emphatic nature and the scale of the woman’s sacrificial gesture and the ecstatic experience of its enactment could be viewed by any self respecting hard line activist as the only immutable and authentic act of a sentient human-being against the bleak nihilism and banality of a materialistic life – the only fillip against the galloping, unfettered consumption that blights our planet.

For the pure, only the greatest sacrifice imaginable cuts it (pardon the pun). Only a gesture of this personal magnitude has the cosmic chutzpah and swaggerdaccio to deliver a profound and atomically fused connection with the world and greater cosmos in which we dramatically yet fleetingly exist.

Certainly for some fervent believers out there, the current model of material thriving and the status-obsessed cod-civility of a life could do with a good dose of sacrificial pointy knife or at least a burning or three.

Even to the gentlest of early adopters of a more ethical and sustainable life, sacrifice of some sort – the compulsory setting aside of seemingly relentless pleasurable material gratification and our insatiable socially-inspired obsession with stuff – is not discretionary: a small gesture in the grand scheme of things.

But what about the rest of us out there? The Early Majority? – given that we’ll not be queuing up to throw ourselves onto some smouldering Wiccan pyre of  fully recyclable IKEA flat-packs, or the sharp dolphin-friendly point of a Global Sushi knife any time soon.

Even those of us wholly committed to undertaking rituals and sacrifices in pursuit of a more enduring and kinder lifestyle would stop far short of ‘sacrificing’ our whole lifestyle to the great cosmic being to make a sustainable point.

We are actually quite pleased with the scale of the sacrifices we make and the rituals we undertake – we are consummate in our respectful incising, skewering and consumption by festival fireside and barbecue of our favourite, fiercely-championed wholly traceable, wholly organic preferred meat; dispatched we hope from this earth to the mellifluous chords of Ode To Joy by a friendly smiling butcher. To us the time given over to our weekly pilgrimage to the supermarket car-park to post our cardboard, paper and glass votives into the dark mouths of green, brown and blue wheelie bins as opposed to slothing in the pub or playing a couple of hours of Call Of Duty: Black Ops is sacrifice enough in a busy cluttered life

Thankfully, crossing the chasm does not demand that we force the gently committed folks to suddenly throw themselves on a burning sword in a some massive gesture of conscience. Thankfully Lawrence’s accidental eco-hero makes a far bigger point with the nature of her disposition than she does with the scale and absolutism of her fatal commitment.

Those who would happily bully and hector the point with the early majority should note that the most striking point here is that she chooses of her own free will the nature and the administration of her desired sacrifice and its undertaking.

No big stick. No hectoring.

In this particular fictional instance, the hectors and the bullies should note that the sacrifcer, (mostly used to having to expeditiously reorder the atomic make up of said sacrificee against their better nature and immediate wishes) had his sacrificial lamb pootle into his front parlour, rub herself in oil and botanicals and say ‘hands up who’s for cleansing?’

Lawrence’s character was happy to be atomically reordered by ‘the great spirit’.  We on the other hand are only happy to reorder through recycle reuse and reclaim.

So I sense that in the sacrifice department if we are to apply it at all, we need a bridge – a people friendly action somewhere between indifference and absolutism.

We need a starter-for-ten – a simple way of predisposing the gentler less brutally committed of us to a more enduring aspiration and lifestyle – something for those of us wishing to make a small cleansing or ritualistic gesture towards an improved and more spiritually and cosmically aligned model of existence just to reset our head.

Perhaps our first step might be to find a slightly less onerous form of sacrificial offering to ease people into the idea – something a little more everyday – a joss paper app perhaps – that let’s you write up your previous years most pointlessly consuming material desire – whoops that’ll be an i-phone triple up grade in one year!! – which in turn uploads to a massive virtual bonfire of collected material vanities that then gets reduced to cosmic ash – at which point we all, just for a moment, symbolically release ourselves through virtual fire from the hellish incarceration of materialism and the burden and blight it brings on us.

A sort of western lifestyle app. equivalent of the Chinese ritual of burning Hells Bank Notes as an offering to the deceased.

And while we’re doing it we can quietly contemplate how we might bring ourselves the strength and more importantly the luxury to embrace a few changes that ultimately will leave us and the great spinning orb we perch upon in far better off.

Or, alternately, we could of course grasp the nettle and take ourselves out to the middle of the New Mexico desert with our materialist trolley loaded high and find someone who will quite happily dispatch us and it into the great ‘other’.

Of the two types of sacrifice I sense I know which the 85%+ of people will choose first!

Infinite Sexy & Cool – a brands-eye view of sustainability

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

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If you’re done with looking up through the supply chain and the science at the challenge of how to make sustainability more engaging and attractive to the masses you may also have become equally bored with cajoling water up various degrees of incline and compressing mineral blocks until the viscera emanates!

So one suggestion – try taking a brands eye view on it – pop on your ‘caring about what people care about’ glasses and have a peek down through the human insight and the everyday. Have a gander at the whole thing through the weekly shop, the interiors magazine and the afternoon saturday shopping ritual – and there, laid bare, will be the base human first world need to pursue stuff – and quite a lot of it shiny!

Do that and you’ll quickly realise that to most everyday people the primary thing they wish to sustain is their best, shiniest, sexiest, gene-pool-consideration-ladder-climbing self and all that might come with it.

So the compelling reason for them to engage perhaps, in smarter lighter living and the brands products and services that help them do that, isn’t Climate Change or the end of the world or even those poor trees and little farmers – its the possible death of sexy – the killing of the killer heel; of shiny things – the disappearance of all that they believe make life bearable and worth living – the things that define and differentiate them from the rest of humanity’s heaving mass.

If we take every sustainability and CSR ambition, target, initiative, innovation and action, and use them to underwrite and add integrity to an aspirational life that is systemically constructed to go the distance and built to endure, that just might unlock the populist conversation. Brands using all of those processes commitments and systemic drivers to maintain their ability to delight, to serve, to entertain, connect and elevate our human existence would be far better placed to capture the value they have already created by instituting and committing to them in the first place.

So desirable and seductive storytelling needs to march in here. We need to transform desire based upon both the gene pool imperative and the deep rooted sustainability truth speaking in unison, and with one light human voice.

The old dark arts of creative storytelling to influence behaviour as used by Hollywood and Madison Avenue are deployed with one clear imperative – to create desire. Desire for something just out of reach – something that if captured would sprinkle some pixie dust in our everyday lives.

Now Id rather we used those dark arts to influence the early majority to buy smarter than just to buy less. Trigger the smart cool shopper reflex in them and allow them get on with filtering the more toxic degrees of their consumption themselves with a few top tips sprinkled in along the way.

Don’t show them your science project or your conscience: don’t sell them A Kind Shoe Range rendered from Net Positive wholly replenishable natural materials and reclaimed and up-cycled leather from accredited sources.

Sell them infinite sexy & cool – sell them the ability to keep wear killer bamboo louboutins with vintage leather uppers forever  – they want to, so you’ve sorted it and they can. Love you forever.

This brings me to the topic of lightness of touch generally.

Lightness of touch is essential when speaking to people who are struggling to still present themselves as thriving, vibrant individuals whilst struggling with income, household bills and credit crunching.

So glass half full storytelling is crucial in successfully shifting people towards a smarter more enduring model of prosperity that they can all still aspire to.

And involving the storytellers from the glass half full world in communicating the amazing things going on under the bonnet, we’ll engage far more people with far less pain and a lot more positive consequence than we are now.

Now: where did I put that gorgeous pair of Jimmy Choos? You know the ones – with the reclaimed-hemp uppers hand woven by tribeswomen – and the Maker-Made 3D Printed soles made out of recycled bottle plastic?

The Blue Brick Road – the perilous journey of managing long-term Sustainability truths into short-term Profitability businesses.

13 Wednesday Nov 2013

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authenticity & belief, Behaviour Change, believers soldiers & cynics, brand guff, corporate cowardice, Create & capture Value, dreamers, Identity, managing the room, operational disdain, people powered, politics of desire, profitability from sustainability, purpose beyond profit, the tyranny of positivity, wizard of oz

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Picture the scene: the Conference Suite (named after a president of some distant windswept yet troubled corner of the world for a reason no-one can remember) in a contemporary style, world-traveller hotel (reasonably priced, and reasonably placed at a point where the ley-lines of plane, bus, rail and car intersect – substantial rooms, fragrance in the lobby, free wi-fi in the room and all off-set by the set-price ‘graze & boost’ conference working-lunch special)

The Conference Suite’s windows look out onto the car park, which is pretty full – top of the range saloons mostly and the odd sporty number show that there are some bosses attending the 3 conferences running simultaneously – or their advertising PR, and media agencies have been invited.

In the conference room sit 6 espresso-sharpened, buffet-boldened execs – the words ‘Blue-o-sphere Innovation’ illuminated on the touch screen outside the double teak-look doors revealing the conversation within.

We meet them at a perilous ‘pregnant-pause meets Spaghetti Western stand-off’ moment. Something has been said that we are not party to. But it is a moment of consequence.

Doug ‘Ozzie’ Oswald – CEO – sits side on to the conference table, hands behind his head and leaning back on the sprung chair to reveal the nascent underarm salt lines he is renowned for. He looks down the table into space, looking through and past Dorothy in search of an answer.

Doug is both Believer & Cynic – ‘Ozzie’ (his nick-name due to his Black Country accent, and his love of 1970’s heavy metal played loud in his petrol head sports car) believes the business has to embrace bluer thinking, smarter technology and more engaged employee culture because a) he read an article on it in HBR b) it’ll big him up in the legacy department and, most helpfully, c) it will save them a shit load of money which will set the capitalization of the business at a nice level come earn out time. But he feels a powerful need to denigrate all this fervent sustainability thinking. The ultimate saint and sinner, his conscience struggles with the fact that on the one hand the business and he are inextricably linked at a DNA level; but on the other he struggles to give a shit frankly, being only one year off his earn out. He is very tech savvy, and loves kit, but this is a simple smoke screen to hide his terror and confusion with the progress of life  – and its impact on his dreams of a small quiet life carp fishing.

Dorothy Scarperosso – MD – sits at the far side of the table opposite Doug, one hand playing with a loop of hair while jabbing a smart phone and i-pad simultaneously– to her left sits The ‘Vitsch”, to her right, Bob ‘Sleeps Tonight’ Lyon.

Believer – she’s on a journey to future-proof her business – shaking the tree with root and branch reforms at every level – systemic, operational, human resource and product innovation – and all done with her killer intellect and signature scarlet Louboutins to the fore. Dorothy came to the world of sustainability champions through the back door (the front one being not exactly seductive or magnetic to the average person) and entirely by accident. To save money and too much effort on the part of anyone senior, an employee engagement initiative got dumped into the ‘who cares?’ action tray along with an energy mitigation drive and a small product upgrade launch. Quickly rolled together and given to the employees to play with, POW it was an instant facebook success. One small moment of truth and a slice of proof later, and she was a believer. Staunchly, and against all the odds, Doug’s recidivism and a couple of other notable female bosses points of view, Dorothy is a great champion of flexible and home working practice to engage and retain more women at a higher level: for which her catch phrase currently is – “there’s no place like home”. Run-ins and clashes are regular but she knows where she’s going and her irrepressible optimism keeps her punching through.

Bob Lyon – COO –  sits slouched, short-sleeved arms crossed both defiantly and defensively across his chest.

Cynic – He usually can side-step the green tree hugger bollocks that comes with sustainability wonks and activists at the factory with ‘I’m busy making stuff so we can sell it’ deflections. He doesn’t like what the expense of a production line conversion to an innovative refill packaging line – and improving some of his supply chain partnership management is going to mess with his figures short term and ‘Ozzer’ (his derivative)  is watching his projections like a hawk. Most problems are salved with the easy familiar masculine ‘phwoar’ of golf bravado.  BUT Bob has a dirty little blue secret – he has been teetering on the verge of a Damascene moment for a while now. He is struggling to find the courage to face his inner hippie – and admit he’d follow Dorothy over broken glass. And no-one has yet noticed that his Jag’s been dumped for a Prius.

 Li Tin Gei – R&D Innovations Packaging specialist – is slumped across the conference table amongst files and scattered sticks, furiously tracking back through his Time Machine application to find the presentation where he is certain he emphatically stated the long term impacts of the packaging recommendation in regards to mitigating vulnerability to global oil prices over three years.

Dreamer – Li is  strangely whimsical for a biochemical engineer and uber-nerd. He believes everything in the visioning presentation is great and should happen immediately regardless of cost to the business. Bob can’t help sneering at him, not because he dislikes him (though Lin’s buttoned up purposefully nerdy looking gingham shirts irritate him a lot) – Bob just despises ‘fluffy-ness’ in a tech guy more than in than anyone else – “you’re an engineer for chissakes. Cut the fluff” – But Li is one of Dorothy’s favourites, so Bob likes him in her presence. Li is a hyper-rational believer in everything blue but lacks the heart to really make anyone, let alone everyone take notice

Jean Scayrcro – CMO – She teeters at the far end of the table next to Doug – so near yet so far. Her eyes are fixed on her hero Dorothy, her body language coiled and ready to strike if needs be.

Soldier – Jean’s nickname is Jean Scayr-Cro-Straw-Pants – as she spends her life getting her team and her agency partners to build endless straw man presentations but to little avail as she ends up writing them herself. Her presentations reveal that she runs her own little off-set strategy – balancing the lightness of her more academic intellectual rigour with a substantial instinct for how to turn some of the ‘cool stuff’ that Li’s team are doing into some great storytelling. POW! She’s no visionary but she’s got heart and the marketing nous to know exactly how to use cool stuff to grab some extra brand bucks for the business – give her the tools and the info and she’s unstoppable.  But she’s on a professional iceberg in a warming sea – enjoying an ever-reducing platform with the CEO. And a slightly suspicious relationship with Rick from the ad agency isn’t helping! The ‘Vitsch’ will see to that.

Mike ‘the bitch’ Vitsch – Head Of Global Brand – who currently seems to be almost hovering in the middle of the conference room table. His perfectly moisturised lips are drawn into his signature ‘wicked’ grimace, the product of continuously having to disguise a smug smile behind a picture of faux pinched contemplation or concern.  The air that floats between Dorothy and Mike couldn’t be less poisonous. He needs the next three minutes to go his way

Dreamer of his own success,  Believer in his ability to deliver it, Soldier to his own cause and Cynical user of anything to get it, Mike takes no prisoners. An ex- management consultant and Fund manager, he eats Bob for breakfast, and makes Doug very nervous, in both a good and a bad way. Though scary, he has a very vulnerable though utterly sociopathic side which he tucks neatly away from sight behind pressed Armani and razor sharp Prada boardroom shoes. Speaking of which, Dorothy’s are the ones he wants to step into – and he will make it happen or die in the pursuit! With his therapist and his life coach on fast Dial, Mike plays the Blue line when he needs to and then slips off and debunks it in every direction at every dinner party and junket he attends – but always in an ‘I couldn’t possible say that’ manner. He adores all things shiny and sexy, and thinks that’s what everyone buys. Not geeky scractchy knit your own yoghurt worthiness. Conscience is just not a gene pool imperative in his beautifully tooled and exquisitely embellished brand book world.

Welcome to a world of BRAND X vs. BRAND S Diplomacy – a world populated by Dreamers Believers Soldiers and Cynics and the perilous strategies of managing long term Sustainability truths into short term Profitability businesses.

Watch this space for more on how a profiling-lite approach called ‘Dreamers, Believers Soldiers & Cynics’ might help you navigate the journey more efficiently and insightfully, turn a more interesting social strategy from the inside out and ground up – and have some fun along the way

 

 

Destination Christmas XIII – Virtual Insanity

11 Monday Nov 2013

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I am uncertain as to what disturbed me more – the emphatic nature of the blistering neon pronouncement or the fact that it was up chirpy-as-you like on the 1st of November.

Its punchy though – with a sense of movie scale to it – bought to you by the people who bought you Destination Christmas XI – Return of the Killer Heel and Destination Christmas XII – Judgement Day.  

Also, at least its cleared up the answer to the ‘where will it all end?’ question. Whatever binge and flail we get into over the next 45 days or so, at least we know where we’re headed. Thank Christ for that I say. (And I say that as a gesture of precise theological acknowledgement.)

Not that 90% of the people out there flailing and bingeing with us will have any interest in The Christ’s Mass – and would probably view its rendering in two words as a spelling error. But for those who still view Christmas through a more traditional if still commercial lens – as a religious festival with a large meal and a shopping trip attached – its a fair and meaningful target to aim for. 

The other saving grace for many of the indigenous tribe is that, in the increasingly politically correct world of ‘happy holiday’, it is religiously prescriptive.

I must say though that the word Destination carries with it a slightly bleak undertow for me. It suggest to me that, for all the struggle and endurance it took to get through hell, high-water and the last minute Christmas Eve rat-race of throwing women and children behind you to get to that last ‘squeeze and talk’ inflatable i-tablet at inflatable cost, come the 25th it’s all over. BOOM!  After that, if liquidity issues of a financial form, like Bankruptcy, haven’t done for you, liquidity issues in the form of galloping cirrhosis, Carol singer spittle, drunken injury and increasingly inebriated, increasingly irritating in-laws probably will

Destination does though give a fair representation of our insanely commercial and emotionally over-cranked Christmas Surge & Stop and its foreshortening effect on our ability to see beyond the end of our reddening yo-ho-ho noses.

With this tsunami of ‘ding-dong-merrily-on-high madness’ strung all about us, it is not only difficult to picture any life beyond Christmas – it is almost impossible. Everything is rendered with such an all-consuming and finite neon bright absolutism that its proving difficult to even peek past quarter-past-six on Christmas Day eve and see what’s coming.  Boxing Day and New Year’s Day are currently presented as some mutated form of Christmas Afterlife.

If Dante were alive today I sense his Inferno would be replaced by a spiralling, thrashing, gnashing descent through a hellish virtual HD Advent Calendar towards a small stable where the baby Jesus,  illuminated by the celestial touch screen light of an i-pad (parental locks on of course) lies back on an IKEA manger rendered in reclaimed wood, generously upholstered with Liberty scatter-cushions, flanked by Mary, decked in full D&G, on WeChat with the girls post baby-drop and Joseph, a gamer programmer carving IP wonders in binary code where he stands, sporting a Gaultier Clog carved in wholly replenishable pine. The livestock would be provided with total traceability by M&S Food & Wine: and the 3 Wise Men would be sporting both Google sponsorship and Glasses, having not quite deciphered where to head off to post-visit and in need of a little magical guidance: that ‘in need of a Destination’ issue again.

So Destination Christmas XIII. We know you’re here. We can see you, boy can we see you. You could hardly be missed. But frankly, come January 6th 2014, you’ll be more than just ‘not missed’ – you’ll be actively scorned, cursed, pilloried and blamed for the emotional devastation and financial burden you have wrought in the world – and the pressures you have ‘forced upon’ every one of us who foolishly forgot to just be happy with one big pressie, a few small ones and a stocking just for fun. Damn You!

 

 

 

Celebrity CSR Smack-down: Cigarettes Versus Booze!

09 Saturday Nov 2013

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An easy outcome to predict surely? Judging by the response in your average CSR or Responsible Business Jane or Jonny to the merest mention of the potential for working on developing a CSR strategy for a tobacco company predicting the winner looks like a shoe-in.

The sudden onset of both a prostrated writhing fit of conscience and a vertiginous nose-bleed from foot-stamping across the moral high-ground is a bit of a give away.

But mention the same opportunity with an alcohol business and barely a murmur of approbation.

So, cigarettes are CSR Satan. They lose. Booze wins – every time. SmackDown!

But I am curious (and not just because I am a sometime smoker).

Both cigarettes and alcohol cause escalated ill health and death, fuel anti-social behaviour, nurture toxic generational legacies and put pressure on the civic services and health systems of every country in which they thrive. But to be fair, in the sudden death and disorder stakes booze seems to rises majestically above the other in so many ways.

So, why does the Booze business seem to get off lightly relatively speaking in the smack-down world of CSR integrity?

I can only imagine it is a legacy of the ‘great lie’ by the cigarette companies – their wilful and criminal lack of disclosure of what they knew to be true and subsequently their accountability for causing the cancers and critical illness the habit engendered in the millions of people they continued to coerce into a highly addictive and carcinogenic habit in the full knowledge of the deceit they were perpetrating and its possible consequences.

But put the booze businesses under the glass and, bar the ‘big lie’, the rest is right up there.

Some would contend that the booze businesses have a very healthy track record in using aggressive pricing and promotional strategies to drive up harmful levels of consumption and nurturing potentially addictive habits and behaviours in drinkers, especially young ones, in both emerged and emerging markets.

One might also point to a rather convenient blind spot around their seemingly primary role in the creation and escalation of the socio-cultural distemper and degradation undertaken ‘under the influence’.

Anti-social behavior, public disorder, domestic and sexual abuse, escalated violence, underage drinking, critical illness and injury, often leading to fatalities, and the subsequent financial and resource pressure that boozing and boozers bring upon the health and social services are but a few of the things that can popped on their doorstep.

Yes, ok; the Portman Group. I get it. Nice flagship of concern. But I can still find outrageously priced multipacks of low quality booze on most shelves and very little in the way of policing of underage drinking (and I’m talking the ‘8 year old found drunk in public park’ kind of underage drinking – not the ‘whoops the 12 year olds’ dug out the bols advocat from the drinks cabinet and made themselves sick at Christmas’ kind).

It does not help matters that there are a few ‘get out of jail cards bandied about by both parties – those of the “we are just supplying an existing demand in a world populated by consenting adults exercising their own free will” variety – Ole!

And the truly skilled ‘diplomat’ from either side can also muddy the pitch with a casual reference to the complicating factor of the role of ‘pop culture cool’ in driving habits and behaviours.

Pointing to the legendary status ascribed by society to the highly addictive tics and traits of celebrity ‘substance – pick a substance, any substance’ abusers and their central role in inspiring behaviour – The Dorothy Parker meets Charlie Sheen multiplied by Lord Byron and Edina from AbFab to the power of Sherlock Holmes; all to the square root of Oliver Reed Effect – is fair enough.

But really, the disparity in the scale of healthy approbation aimed at one versus the other needs readdressing if we’re going to get any clarity.

If it is simply the ‘great lie’ that demonises the tobacco industry over the Booze industry I think we might need a, well, rethink.

Why? Because I fear that in the absence of any super smart and ‘purpose beyond profit driven’ minds to help tobacco businesses and their hundred’s of thousands of employees and suppliers navigate the journey from toxic shocker to a tobacco based business devoid of cigarettes, the likelihood that there will be any real progress is small.

And all the knee-jerk howling simply serves to give their boardrooms ample excuse to rarely and barely engage in the real root and branch reforms, product innovation and reconciliation that would need to happen to ‘civilise’ the industry.

Until the howling stops and we climb out of the archly worthy teenage debating society when it comes to the cigarettes debate we cannot claim to be taking any high ground – quite the opposite. We are a lynch mob to the thousands and thousands of people who earn their livelihood from the Tobacco Industry.

Throwing bricks from the outside might be fun: but the real courage would be that demonstrated by someone who chose to climb inside the beast and try to effect some real and meaningful change.

Till then, I say lets put on some brightly coloured lycra, bring in the baying mob and get back to that smack-down!

Transforming Desire. What gets everyday people in and out of bed when it comes to sustainability/CSR

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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There’s nothing sexy about a Materiality Report. Delicately revealing your intimate water stewardship credentials is unlikely to get any one hot under the collar. And no one at your local is going to leap out of bed for a carbon reduction conversation.

Dream In A Box is a methodology I have been working on for some three years with Peggy Liu of JUCCCE and China Dream fame. It has its own dream: to help people re-imagine a more enduring future-proofed model of prosperity at scale: a prosperity that aligns itself with a populist aspiration – a new aspirational concept of thriving within our own, our communities and our immediate world’s means.

For me that begins and ends with how we frame – how we visualise and speak about – this new model of prosperity. Because at the moment we’re falling at the first hurdle. In fact currently we’re often still doing a fair job of making it as unpalatable, impenetrable and unattractive as possible. 

Dream in a Box uses a relentless 7 stage Convene And Curate methodology – Frame – Voice – Vision – Forge – People – Share – Measure – to mine old wisdoms and new insights and the vernaculars and vision of everyday people, create actionable themes and initiatives and reframe the whole sustainability conversation. The Curation of multiple strands – of everyday language, wisdoms, visualisation and co created ideas, all viewed through the lens of popular culture takes it from the old Glass Half Empty view of the world – looking up through the supply chain and wrapped in the mitigation and reductive mantras of the Environmental Movement – to a Glass Half Full view of the world – looking down through the everyday human insights and desires and wrapped in the aspirational language of a Prosperity Movement.

There is nothing new in the Box – it simply re-purposes the power of storytelling – the old dark arts of hollywood scriptwriters, soap opera creators, comic book culture and Madison Avenue Ad-land creatives – for good; with the sole intention of delivering up richer and richer insights to create the killer brief against which to story tell.

Dream In A Box does not claim to deliver the answer – the continuous curation is designed to enable us to ask the right questions of the right people. Asking someone what their idea of a more sustainable life is in a pub in Macclesfield on a wet Wednesday night is unlikely to garner much joy. It is worth remembering that for most of the everyday people out there – the 80+ % – not living in the bubble of S/CSR world or early adoption, the End of the Month comes before the End of the World – and they’re having enough trouble navigating themselves and their families towards that – so some portentous and highly worthy approach to brighter futures and the end of planetary destruction is hardly going to resonate.

Equally, some flip, trite and usually peripheral “do-the-right-thing” corporate campaign saying ‘look – aren’t we good at responsible sourcing, patting lambs, and treating people really nicely, honest’ simply makes people think ‘good, I won’t bury you in the social networks…this week at least”. 

We need to find the right language and visualisation that gets them out of bed – the keys to unlock their interest in a new form of desire and consumption – one underwritten by sustainability truths, not propped up by unsustainable myths.  

Dream In A Box Curators aim to convene an audacious diversity of people at every stage to just that end. Finding the right culturally attenuated everyday framing is a lot more likely to align with the underlying truths of our human condition.

The reality is that to paint the currently unsustainable culture of consumption as solely driven by voracious satanic consumer corporations hell bent on just selling us shite we don’t need to make stacks of cash is for my mind a convenient simplification.

They have simply taken advantage of our weakness (I’ll cover off corporate predation in another piece) – that is the reflex gene pool imperative driving desire to appropriate and accrue in all of us, however sentient and ‘conscious’ we feel we might be. The more stuff we have – clothes, cars, white goods, furniture, meals, holidays, art, jewellery, technology, experiences, memories – the further up the gene pool consideration list we move – Result! – taking us closer to a superior class of preferred mate and the greater likelihood of an immortalised gene pool – survival of the fittest has mutated into survival of the richest. 

Dream In A Box is not just designed to deliver a ‘co-created culturally shaded re-imagination of prosperity’ – it is also designed to enable brands and organisations to capture value around the Sustainability and CSR investments that they have already made by revealing a better form of storytelling around them – meaningful and relevant to normal people not just the Supply Chain wonk and the COO. It is designed to engender a new paradigm in both consumer and supplier – Survival of The Smartest.

To close, its worth me putting it out there that I have a dream lurking outside the Dream.

To really deliver against this ambition or re-imagining prosperity, I think the sheer scale of galloping self interest and self publicity in a supposedly shared interest world and the multiple organisations and consultancies taking cheap and underhanded pops at each other and each other’s methodologies needs taking in hand.

Cheap is as cheap does – consultants and organisations treating each other with quiet derision and mocking and undermining each other at every opportunity to protect their revenue streams and ‘reputation’ just cheapens us all. If I were a client I would simply sit back and let us all squabble like children over train-sets and sweep up every Jam Tomorrow presentation packed with IP that I could get away with. All in the spirit of ‘co-created’ ‘open-source’ thinking and futures. 

My Dream is based on the the quiet concern that I don’t think we’re really going to get anyone into or out of bed until we sort out our own crap. We are as much the blockage now as the language and the framing – our competitiveness and divisiveness means that one ‘way’ is undermined by another ‘way’ until we simply breed inertia, indecision or both. 

So my Dream is that the various consultancies, agencies, players, movers and shakers out there advising clients and organisations on how to frame S and CSR in more central brand friendly and business smart terms get in a room with brand agencies and PR companies and figure out how to live with each other – the shape of the constellation and how they all fit into it without offering overlap and loss of ‘added value offering’ or IP.  That could be fun. In fact, I sincerely believe that could be revolutionary.

And as the artist, Grayson Perry, pointed out recently, perhaps the most shocking thing we can do these days is to act with sincerity.

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