Monthly Archives: March 2015

#voom, voices & the murmurations of the twitterati

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Screen Shot 2015-03-31 at 10.11.37

There’s something rather magical about the fluid shape shifting phenomena of social media.

And it has reached far beyond the slangy codified data dynamics and scale numbers thrown around Old Street hot desks of doing.

Dependent on the context and the lens through which you view them, there is something truly phenomenal in the surges swoops and sweeps of the numbers and the geophysics of how where and when they occur

Having just launched the Virgin #voom/Pitch to Rich campaign (not personally of course but as one of a very large team) I have started to view social phenomena through this lens and things are looking quite beautiful. And revelatory.

The staggering social reach and the dynamics of flocking in the social media networks around the campaign and some of the numbers being achieved (45.2 Million social media reach in 6 days-ish) has for me stretched far beyond the need for collective nouns.

(How the #voom/pitchtorich campaign reached this scale of impact is a much larger thing to consider. But the finger points to the spirit, mood, exceptional impact and revelatory nature of the Branson films Bruce Goodison of Sundog Pictures created from the various pieces of paper and email chains – supported by some leading media thinking and doing across a substantial number of interrelated and interdependent media channels, partners and audiences)

The wave of furious activity #voom/pitchtorich has inspired in the social networks bears a closer look. The irony is that the further back you stand the closer you can observe the ‘nature’ – the physical virtual dynamics – of its social phenomena.

Originating in a clumsy joke of mine about twitter and birds flocking – I slowly came to the quieter joke of murmurations of twitterati. I am always astonished and in awe of murmurations of starlings. There is an ‘otherness’ to them – as if they are in thrall to a different dimension of existence – to the magnetic turbulences and older forces at work in the world that remain otherwise unseen.

It is also incredible to think that we as humans get to observe them in ways they will never know from the white heat heart of their furious purpose.

Perhaps the same is true of ourselves in relation to our virtual otherness and the collective behaviours and actions in which our virtual selves participate.

I have always sensed that the shape shifting mass of a murmuration carries its own ‘voice’ within it; a relentlessly changing imprint of cadences, inflections; sharp punctuations and sublime emphasis – an ornithological oratory written across the sky.

It then occurred to me that if we mapped our social murmurations – by numbers and actions across time and space we could perhaps visualise our own greater voice carried within them.

For example if there was a social campaign that could be plotted not only by number of participants (flock) but by intensity (altitude) geolocation (topography) and time (horizon) – perhaps we could create animated murmurations of social phenomena.

If we could do that we could then perhaps study the patterns and nature of them in much the same way that we study sound waves and voice recognition patterns.

And perhaps with the wider ambition of attribution, we could begin to recognize traits and characteristics in each pattern that helps us to define the real voice at work and its source and integrity.

Just a thought that I would love to explore a little more.

Brands, old-school Diplomacy & the New Humanities

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Screen Shot 2015-03-26 at 14.06.29

We’re up to our ‘proverbials’ in Brand Advocates, Influencers & Champions. The social shock troops have to no little degree saved a lot of the big consumer multinationals from themselves. They have proved themselves both central in driving relevance and a vastly improved and far more respectful model of customer service. They are to that end critical in securing the survival of relevance in many multinational brands who until quite recently had acted with old school impunity and arrogance when called to account.

But the blunt grass roots tool for creating better is just one of two required to secure an improved human existence in the face of our stratospheric levels of consumption and the brands who feed it.

The other (just as important as its grass roots cousin in shaping what better looks like) is though of a more nuanced and rarified nature. It is subtler, sharper; multi-faceted, fluid; intricate.

To build the more resilient and adaptive form of governance and influence that multinational businesses are increasingly going to require will take more than just a an MBA upgrade on the usual business school thinking and doing.

It will demand a new creature.

“The effective leader will jettison vertical integration information hoarding and dogma in favour of optimization, recalibration and negotiation.” (CSIS 7 Revolutions).

To navigate the ever-greater complexity and turbulence of our accelerating world, Leadership must be augmented by a new kind of executive corps.

The cats-cradle of interdependencies, interrelatedness and infra-connectedness of global business and the ascension of global brand potency in regards to global acts of responsibility demands more than a just ‘a faster executive horse’.

“A well-run business that applies its vast resources expertise and management talent to problems that it understands and in which it has a stake can have a greater impact on social good than any other institution or philanthropic organization” (CSIS 7 Revolutions).

Execs are increasingly finding themselves participants in and the conveners of dynamic and diverse conventions of actors and agents within the sphere of their commercial and social interests.

This new and more fluid model of engagement in the scale challenges that face both their businesses operationally and systemically and the communities in which they seek to thrive will become the norm.

Strategic coalitions consisting of governments, corporations, NGOs, and academic institutions will be necessary in mounting effective responses and capitalizing on important opportunities (CSIS 7 Revolutions).

The brutal truth is that they will be ill-prepared and increasingly incapable of managing and orientating these groups to any great degree.

This is because they simply do not have the skills and the training to do so.

To be brutally frank, the Davos & Done school of global stewardship needs a hearty and well placed kick up the arse.

Watching the currently fitful and flawed nature of a new world brand conversation should be all the proof we desire.

Current 21st Century Brand dynamics demand that Brand Leaders be capable of meaningfully engaging in a conversation that often spans a staggering breadth and depth of subject matter:

  • operational and systemic excellence, innovation and advancement
  • geopolitical sources of volatility and influence
  • the impact of global and local financial governance & volatility
  • the evolving nature and mandate of labour rights & the social contract
  • enlightened and reasonable understanding of adaptive governance models
  • the impact of technology both systemically and socially on global Value Chains
  • clarity and influence on relevant local, national and transnational regulation
  • a clear understanding of the value of enlightened sustainability practice and value
  • resilient growth modelling that embraces both quantitative short term and qualitative long term objectives

Add to these the escalating nature of responsibility and the multinational businesses ability (and more importantly its obligation) to focus all of its skills on improving both its own systemic nature and ecosystems as well as that of the societies, cultures and environment in which they are rooted and the need for a master-class in Brand Diplomacy quickly becomes critical to the successful evolution of our human existence.

The new leader and those that advise them will not only require an audacious breadth and depth of understanding but also, even more importantly, the artistry to navigate the nuances, multiple agendas and cultures of the multiple actors and agents operating within their realm.

This is what leads me to believe that this is the dawning of what I like to call The Age of Global Brand Diplomacy – and the rise of The Brand Diplomat.

Real diplomacy is a rare gift of the few that exists usually only by accident, quirk or happenstance. It requires a very particular education: a highly diverse immersive and passionate pursuit of breadth over fashion, depth over trend. It demands a real investment of purpose and person – a commitment of measurable integrity.

Given the scale and importance of the challenges they will be faced with and in which they will need to have a profound impact, the new breed of leader will at best be schooled in both the arts and discipline of geopolitics, anthropology, civilisation & culture, the Arts, the history of diplomacy and the intuitive Social Sciences.

So the question for me is not whether a Business School of global merit and stature should do this; but which School? Which business school is going to rise to this challenge and embrace the task of shaping this new creature more formally?

Which school can credibly host the Master-class in Brand Diplomacy?

It requires access to and the benefit of an environment that enjoys an effortless multi-cultural aspect. It requires exceptional immersion in a dynamic accelerating ‘living’ throng, not splendid isolation. It requires an audacious fabric of skills and disciplines to be stitched together into one compelling proposition.

But mostly of all it requires people steeped both in the commercial marketed and applied world and that of the NGO the government think-tank and the venerable institution.

It will also I sense require a new trajectory and term of influence and engagement: a longer and greater arc of nurture and devwlopment coupled and a more interdependent quality of rolling assessment and dispositional measurement from a far earlier point in the shaping of a mind.

It will also demand a clarity of purpose sparked and elevated at an early age – in much the same way that the British Public Schools of old shaped the disposition and the ascent to position of boys from their prep school years – through the study of War Craft, the Classics – a living, breathing understanding of how one fits into and then, if in your interest, how one starts to run and lead a ‘mini me’ hierarchical society; through the use and leverage of various tools at ons disposal – the pride and allegiance of the House system, Corps duty, prefecture and eventually the position of Head of School.

The only difference now is that having stepped through that system – the rest was quite straight forwards – based upon an assumption of position underwritten by an impenetrable right of entitlement.

The modern world has different demands. The fierce competitive nature of it cannot be dissuaded simply by an accent and a tie anymore. Quite the opposite. The brutally mercantile nature of it allows no easy options of rides. resilience and adaptability are critical in the survival of the Brand Diplomat.

In shaping the curriculum of the new Brand Diplomacy we also have the benefit of hindsight and the sensibility of foresight

We have the advantage of knowing that setting foot in the real world beyond the hypothesis and the theory is what ultimately shapes an exceptional leader so we are already one step head of the old model; the raw talent pouring into the world is more connected, engaged, Worldly and far more rounded. We also have the welcome addition of living in a time of the female competitive advantage is in its ascent (something the British Public Schools could have done well to embrace a lot earlier than they did).

The Business School that chose to accept the challenge of Brand Diplomacy would need to very clearly set their sights on those at a school age with the potential to fulfill their potential in this rare space where global politics, commerce, finance and cultural anthropology collide.

I believe that a course in Brand Diplomacy would need to be designed to be the culmination of a journey to enlightenment. And enlightenment is the word here.

No posturing blue-tooth slide show talker will be able to busk or bluff this. We already see in the sustainability and social purpose ‘game’ the limitations of the stage walker: too many rooms: too may panels: too little progress: their ceiling all too apparent to everyone but themselves.

This will demand true leadership skills from enlightened and measured minds.

A meaningful course in Brand Diplomacy should plumb not only the usual texts and case studies to hand but also look beyond the 20th Century scholars and Students of Diplomacy to the Birth of it in the Italian City States of the Quattro Cento and amongst the Bourbon Courts of the Southern Mediterranean. It should look to the life work of the likes of Castlereagh (the subject of Henry Kissinger’s thesis I believe), the much maligned but now redeemed British Foreign Minister from the era of the Napoleonic Wars: a master statesman who shaped much of the best of the interrelated and more stable nature of European politics – but only by virtue of combining foresight and the subtlest of diplomatic arts to everyone from Tsar Alexander and his own Regent to the masterful Austrian, Prince Metternich et al.

To shape the a more resilient future the business world needs to look past the lazy interrogation of the same old business school tenets and brand pillar thinking to the expansive landscapes of the Humanities and the depths of Geopolitics – to look beyond the One Size Fits All model and embrace the diversity of an Renaissance perspective.

idrisi2

Brand maps and models should begin to resemble more the cosmographic maps of the middle ages and the early powers – where character, tribe, geo-centrism, chronology and purpose exist on one plane seen as a whole.

This would be respectful of the new broader more complex and dynamic world that superbrands exist in and in which they have enormous influence on.

And to be frank, I sense it would be a damn fun course to attend.

So my original question stands: which business school?

Living The Dream?! sustainable living & a Great British conversation just begging to be had.

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

images

Funny how some phrases just fall in to your lap. Funny how some just stick. Living the Dream is just such a phrase – a gift horse that was staring me in the mouth.

In the space of two days I had the polarities of Great British aspiration and disappointment writ simple and large on my storytelling wall. Our Great British M&S-stylie Prosecco & Pistachio lifestyle and its poor PaydayLoan & Pork-scratching cousin came gift-wrapped in one exquisitely simple phrase.

In a West London brasserie bar sat a woman, fashionably turned out, the odd fancy shopping bag at her killer-heeled feet, a glass of bubbles in front of her, txting furiously on her i-phone 6. Her friend appeared suddenly, looking a little bedraggled, but on seeing her shiny friend she brightly chirped,’ living the dream babes…look at you…bubbles and everything…’

And within days of the upbeat version wafting in front of me, its poor cousin appeared in North London, just beyond N1. I see a bloke, obviously far from rolling in it: a bag of DIY stuff in one hand, one child in the buggy, the other mid tantrum, on the phone to his partner/girlfriend/wife/babymamma. She is patently giving him an earful. Cue a friend of his walking past on the other side of the street who shouts ‘ Oi Tommy..Living the Dream then mate!?’. The beer-battered sarcasm of this banter simply inspired a meek self-deprecating shrug in the bedraggled bloke on the mobile. True.

As a phrase Living the Dream does what every great tenet, mantra or philosophy of any authenticity and substance should do – it easily and effortlessly embraces every extremity, turbulence, nuance, depth and not so subtle shade of the thing it seeks to define or describe – in this case the quality of life the person is leading at that very moment the phrase is deployed.

It allows enormous complexity to sit just behind it, knowingly, without ever having to say it. The back-stories of these two people were plain to see without having to set them out.

This was the power of the phrase for me.

To be fair I had been searching for one to wrap up a very UK ‘dream of better’ for a while.

We had searched for a conversation starter around a more sustainable lifestyle – one that started in the real everyday world.

In 2013 we ran 4 pilot workshops in London for the UK Dream project to that end – to find a more populist, scalable conversation to inspire a more enduring model of prosperity: a thriving vibrant life open to all, underwritten with sustainable truths.

We needed a new narrative: a new lexicon of better for people to use in their everyday lives. The old narrative was simply not working. Sustainability people speaking to themselves: impenetrable, arcane, complex, off-putting.

For most people the end of the month comes before the end of the world. They are more concerned with making ends meet than with how they might meet their end in some post-apocalyptic climate-induced catastrophe. The old narratives, rooted as they are in the activist roots of environmentalism simply do not chime with your average Joe and Jane.

So we had a chasm to cross. We needed a simple and very UK-centric or British hook that allowed us to start with simple everyday human-sized truths – What keeps you up at night? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What does good look like from where you’re standing?

In a search for this new narrative, we had already applied the 7 stage Dream-In-A-Box methodology (well, three of them at least) to try and shape what better might look like and scaling the everyday conversation around it.

We got as diverse a group of individuals as possible into a room to play with, pull down, interrogate and explore the traits, dimensions, idioms and aspirations of a prosperous life underwritten by sustainable truths. And we did it by first banishing the language of the circular economy, up-cycling, collaborative consumption (a co-created art installation project by 17th Century British poets surely) stewardship, materiality, EP&L, Net Positive and every other phrase on the trending circuit.

The most interesting and charming conversations were sparked around the old arts of thrift – smart shrewd living skills. A form of street smarts for aspirational living. people who know know…

The idea of Lighter Living. Lightening the burden on oneself (bills, cost, beyond ones means) and on the world in which we endeavour to thrive offered an overarching narrative hook that felt aspirational; breezy; cool.

So UK Dream identified Smarter lighter living represented a good beginning – positive – something one feels before one thinks it.

But we still had the tricky D word. Left to its own devices, Dream is a very divisive word, regardless of how you underwrite it; especially in Britain. On the up side everyone likes a dreamy something – we are happy to have the dream job, the dream holiday. But these are specific uses of the word that define a clear and tangible set of benefits and experiences.

Use the D word on a more rarified cultural and nationalistic level and the long shadow of John Stuart Mill enters the room at the faintest whisper of the word.

Dreams. A tyranny of pasteurized living. The death of individuality. An opiate under whose suffocating crop invention withers and spirit is anaesthetised. Dreams: the heartland of the indolent and fearful. The sharp corners and friction of individuality are what keep us alive. Not buttered populist platitudes for us to get fat on.

For the UK audience, Dream just invites the cynic and the heckler to rip it up; test its edges, even when you try and put it in a box.

Hence my search for the phrase that delivered the idea of a dream of better as part of life in the here-and-now; as measured in clear and tangible terms – a phrase that could happily ladder up or down; for better or worse; good or bad; funny or sad.

Cue Living The Dream?!

As soon as we place the ‘Living the Dream?!’ question at the top of our conversational ladder everything shifts – and becomes more human.

It allows us to engage with really simple scenarios to begin with – what keeps you up at night? the ‘mares big and small of every day life – What gets you out of bed in the morning? the dreamy stuff that makes life worth living.

This simple two pillar approach can be used to inspire conversations around identity, fashion, lifestyle, living, food & drink, education, energy, finances, technology, travel & transport, leisure & entertainment, white goods, furniture – anything. Easy conversational doors into complex nuanced stories.

It also means that we can reframe conversations that interweave multiple dimensions (usually only looked at or explored as single threads) and explore them as we find them – as slightly more chaotic jumbled buckets of conversation.

For example:

Love & Shopping

The old intrinsic nature of love and how we demonstrated it – through nurture, provision, protection, empowerment, support and belonging – has been hijacked by brands trying to inveigle their way into a lead position on our purse. We are more likely to make an active demonstration of love through a commercial transaction than we are through a personal one. The extrinsic demonstrable nature of the neu-love we now practice is making us live beyond our means.

So we find ourselves living in a culture that celebrates Saturday shopping in Westfield as an act of bonding and love. Families share in the pursuit of living the dream; even if it just loading love on a credit card for later. Every demonstration of love seems to come with a bar code: DISCUSS.

Faith & Banter

Faith has become more than just the repose of religion – faith and leaps of it are required in every corner: humanists take the leap of faith in humanity and its ability to prevail. Philosophers cross the chasm of the ontological between universals and particulars. Artists relentlessly leap from humanities to science to metaphysics to the primal with an absolute faith in the eventual ascension of something sublime. Even in brittle science, in the absence of an M Theory waiting to be revealed, they undertake a leap of faith of their own every day between the two quantum truths without a bridge to join them.

But in the UK, if you get too serious, watch your language, lighten up and Get over yourself. This is the nation of ‘taking the piss’, heckling, ribbing and anarchic banter. How does something so serious play out in a culture where to be serious is to be dangerous. DISCUSS.

Castles & Cat’s Cradle

Every man is an island and every Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, ‘ish’. Given the level of Great British personal debt, mortgage rates, the ascendence of the pay day loans, just to keep the ‘castle’ from falling down, the old securities of a fixed and stable life are fast disappearing. And as the castle walls shrink or crumble, splendid isolation gives way to dynamic connection and collaboration. We are stitching ourselves back together again in myriad different ways, finding new ties that bind. If 2008 smashed the family china and pulled down the gazebo and the politicians are fracking society who’s got the UHU?

In the gaps and cracks they leave behind new opportunities and alliances form. Run down regions and communities are regenerated. people find new purpose. Can a new more enlighted aspiration for a more enduring life rise with the cultural phoenix? DISCUSS

Wellness in an highly emerged society.

In exploring the Living The Dream conversation, we also realised that culturally, socially and systemically, the UK is so emerged it’s submerged. Simple and very meaningful topics so easily and directly dealt with in other cultures are in ours hidden inside a complex and codified landscape. Triggering conversations around these topics is a minefield: an assault course of social gaffes, trip wires, trap doors, raspberries and silences. So achieving just the right lightness of touch and integrity is critical.

The conversation around wellness and wellbeing is just such a conversation. It is not in the direct line of conversational fire. We speak indirectly of these things, usually as part of a different conversational thread. We are more likely to fall upon the topic of well-being through jokes about Stenna stairlifts, incontinence pants, supersize mother in laws, smoking in bed and Austin Power’s teeth than we are directly with a straight face.

Wellness is a supermarket trend supported by chemist brands – it is NOT a stitched in part of the great british psyche just yet. But we are getting there in our own sweet time.

This is very different to the China Dream where its emerging economy status means that health & well-being are absolutely central to the idea of what better looks like. A conversation that begins and ends with the need for something drastic to happen around air, water, food integrity and diet and their role in building a more resilient and dynamic society.

All in all, Living The Dream?! (for now at least) creates a simple conversational foundation for a bigger conversation around what good looks like and how we might get there individually, communally and collectively. Apply simple rules of smarter, lighter living at the heart of it and perhaps we might move the dial from over indexing on what keeps us up at night and start peaking again on what gets us out of bed in the morning!

All we need now is the right partners to scale the right conversation and start asking the right questions of the right people.

So any platform or brand looking for a purpose in the UK – looking for a conversation to fuel, inspire, support and celebrate – come on down. We have the beginnings of something good.

FOOTNOTES

LivingTheDream is planning to undertake 10 workshops across the UK in 2015 – simply to start asking the right questions of the right people; of what better might look like for them – in their language, in their words and from where they are standing. The curated outcomes will then be shared with the constituencies of action – local communities, councils, faith leaders, collectives, interested parties, brands, institutions and organisations – to adopt, reflect and act upon to start making better a reality.

Living The Dream & the art of smarter, lighter living is an organically developing theme rooted in the original Dream in A Box UK Dream project workshops and part of a wider DreamInABox initiative which includes the founding China Dream movement run in China through NGO JUCCCE and spearheaded by the inimitable Peggy Liu; inspiration and co-founder of all things DiaB.

Restoration, Mighty Fear & the immutable power of Millennial Passion and Belief

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Screen Shot 2015-03-05 at 10.58.40

From the dressing up box of clashing social fabrics, a Queen arose: restorative, reckless, feckless and committed. The Restoration Queen.

Harsh. Brittle. And of Exceptional mettle; and a little crazy perhaps.

But that’s how to get on in this money-sucking carbon-wheeze of a 21st Century.

Too many bankers living in a coke and Purlina lunch schema; tucked up tight with the cross-dressing maid-interfering industrialists who say ‘what the hey, Ill be dead tomorrow…what if some kids drink piss from a rusty wheel rim and the forests collapse. I’m coining it, my kid’s at Harvard and I’m in the Cinquante Cinq’

But down the Production Catwalk of Life strode the Restoration Queen, no knickers and a pair of slab-soled Kickers to put the boot into every rhino skinned half-wit with a double-bubble scratch-card life with Ugly lurking under its soiled foil veneer.

And, wrapped in battling plaids, leaden white skin, and piercing black eyes thus spoke the Restoration Queen:

All the Shiny in the world shall be yours if you make it fairly and in good faith: but make someone else pay in misery and squalor for the colour of your money: and as Not God is my witness I will hunt you down and nail you up on a poster pasted to the honour of your disgrace.

If I find that for even the briefest second of your existence you can question the provenance of your good luck and in doing so find it tainted – dipped in the ink of someone’s diminishment, heartbreak, pain or misery – and in the second that immediately follows the first, do not immediately act to make amends in some way of other – you truly are the lowest in my domain and will suffer accordingly.

So, punchy? Perhaps. Threatening? Most certainly. And mediaeval? Without doubt. BUT effective none-the-less.

Polite entreats to corporate and government, to turn the nature of enterprise to better and kinder purpose, had made good dinner party conversation; the diplomacy of intellect deployed into rare and grand salons and boardrooms warmly welcomed. But you see everything was written in the courtly language of the Academic – and riddles rarely make for revolutions in anything.

Once the conversation had climbed out of the impenetrable linguistic forest of the bureaucrats, civil servants and systemic bourgeoisie; and ripped itself free of the suffocating social creepers of the over-educated, under-whelming middle classes, the language of Sovereigns and Serfs reigned supreme – and it is a surprisingly and disarmingly simple one – heart filled, base, emotional, primal and blunt.

There had been something fundamental missing in the more rarified and courtly conversations: something powerful enough to override the staggering self interest of the die hard industrialist and money monster – something that could present a healthy threat – a razor sharp blade waved at the fabric of their voracious acquisition.

What had been missing was Fear: Fear with a capital F. Fear of being hurt. Of being Humiliated. And diminished. Fear of LOSING!

And if there’s one thing that the Restoration Queen could inspire in the hearts and the underpants of the stolid grey captains of industry and finance – it was fear. because without her they were nothing.The Queen and the land were one. And without her the land would suffer. Poison her, act against her interests and their future would crumble into the sea never to be given a moments thought ever again.

From whence and where the Restoration Queen came is a matter of conjecture to some and legend to others. Her punked credential to rule in a land of shaped hedges, swinging Cul de sacs, subversion, elegance, eccentricity and foot-long sausage rolls was without question. But her conscience? Her fiery righteous conscience written across the world: where did that come from?

Some say from just an hour in a sweat shop outside Delhi – that the shock was too much for even her bullet-proof sensibilities – and that to scuttle from a palatial room to view a button pauper stitching Hope onto jackets put the first fissure in her armour of suburban everydayness – and sparked a more regal purpose in her heart.

Others say that it was that day at the Palace all that time ago, when the stick finally pricked the ardour of her anger at the inequality and destruction of it all.

So the Restoration Queen took stock and a deep breath; and she thought ‘time to knit a new fabric of life: one hitch and stitch at a time.’

There are alternatives, she thought, to the burning, drilling, cracking, fracking, and spilling that props our most industrious purpose.

Why is our ingenuity applied in such dark corners? Why do we abdicate all personal responsibility and accountability to new technology and innovation and the whimpering simpering ripostes of ‘I just didn’t realize – if only I had known’.

And so it was: slowly and surely at every turn and every opportunity: where she found distemper and malaise she cut it dead. In the presence of toxic arrogances cluttering tables and rooms, her acid dismissal followed. Intuitive, and ingenious improvements were made, some small and expensive; some grand and expansive.

Slowly but surely a new dawn arose, as the restorative nature of the Queen spread rapidly across the land. A fresh vibrant shout went up in think tank, factory, mill, studio, office and laboratory.

All Hail The Restoration Queen.

And restorative missives and mantras were pinned (kindly) to trees, walls and doors:

Goes around comes around, Mend and Make Do, Thrifty is Nifty and Waste Not Want Not; Look after the pennies…

Everything was to be restored  – not through the recreation of some over sentimentalised Narnia of what was, clambered into through a wardrobe of smoke-stinking camel hair coats and a barrage of idiot politics – but by tempering a sharp edged, keen and bright future forged out of the mettle of the past.

Back to the future was the way forwards – reaching back into old wisdoms and a sense of fair play. Reaching back to a time when decency wasn’t stunted and twisted by technology.

But this all seems so simple as to almost ignore how long – how terribly long – it took for the Restoration Queen to arise to her throne. Why?

Well, at first, they laughed. The ‘Mostly Men’ of Enterprise and Industry. And they laughed and laughed – at the mad harridan, the witch, the acid bitch, the righteous trollop. Laughed at her assertion that industry can be good: enterprise can be honorable: and business can thrive without extracting every shade and shred of Hope hosted inside every heart of every worker and every thread of natural capital the world has to offer.

Her ridiculous naïve protestations at the tenor of their destructive exclusive diseases raised howls of derision:

Anarchist – tree hugger – lofty lesbian – lefty dyke – punk slut – suburban nobody – clothes hag – freak.

Who are you to question the integrity of our enterprise, the substance of our trade and the provenance and integrity of our wealth creation?

Governance is reserved for those fit to govern, and agility is an over rated skill. Adaptive Governance my arse. We shape the world to ‘me’, not we to it.

And in the end?…Short time living long time dead, Love, so you can stick it. We’re off to the Guinea for a 100 Guinea’s worth of grub.

These ‘mostly men’ who everyday proved themselves to be mostly men (but not quite – perhaps therein lay the issue) would throw buns and scold and mock the Restoration Queen and her little theatre of ‘better’.

Ridicule and sneering was an everyday curtain call.

You can take your silly clothes and your gawky principles and awkward politics and stick them up your ignoble arse.

Everyday the mockery fell from the purses of the industrialists and the bankers. But the Restoration Queen was immutable and immoveable.

Until one day, amongst the hubbub and the screeching and the guffaws and coins spitefully chucked, a chair scrape was heard.

This was no ordinary scrape. This was the scrape of an antique chair crafted in Asian Oak, Teak & Walnut, hand finished in Windsor and reupholstered in St James. This was the scrape of a chair leg across a floor repeatedly oiled and waxed for hundreds of years to a sheen of patrician ‘just so’. This was a scrape of great import.

The dark, bright eyes of the Restoration Queen lifted from her Orb of Hope in the direction of the scrape.

There stood one industrialist: his heart in his hand. Courageously silent; and fiercely vertical in a room of horizontal disdain and louche legs crossed.

One solitary man in a shade of unsexual grey – a knight had arisen. The Restoration Queen had her first champion.

To honour this courageous chair scrape, the Restoration Queen matched with a scrape of her own, as she rose to her full fierce Celtic height – and stepped lightly off the podium and into the swarming mocking crowd.

Together they stood in the mote dusted, smoke filled half-light. The Restoration Queen and her First Knight.

The rising of a champion only served to provoke the laughter to continue louder and the mocking to increase;

BUT through the laughter a small whistle was to be heard. A wry whistle, through smiling pursed lips.

Who’d have thought it? The Restoration Queen has skinned her first Money Monster and revealed the human underneath – with a wish to create better together; not just more for his own.

But that first step to better seems so long ago now; and there is still much to change.

But lets hail the day that a real fear of retribution entered the halls of the mighty, that the possibility of their failure became real.

Praise the day the riddles ended, that language opened up its doors once more and the debate opened out to include everyone, and conversation flowered on every street corner and thoroughfare.

Let’s Hail The coming of The Restoration Queen.

NOTE: The Restoration Queen is the embodiment of the immutable thronging mass of Millennials and Post millennials rising up through the ranks – bringing with them their ‘naive’ assertions that it is incumbent on any business or enterprise to deliver rewards both financial and social, to mind their manufacturing and operational manners, take care of the people they both serve and who serve them, and to take a role in securing a more resilient human existence for us all.