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Walking slowly, Old People & the art of human deceleration.

03 Monday Jul 2017

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Speed of life is a funny thing.

(Funny obtuse that is, as opposed to funny Ha Ha)

From what I can tell, it seems that the faster we go, the less we seem to actually do: relatively.

Or to be more precise, the more our doing becomes about the speed at which we do it, the less it becomes about the thing we’re doing.

It seems that in pursuit of speeding up the process of doing something we transform it. The relentless acceleration of the task pushes it to a tipping point where ultimately, thereafter, that task becomes secondary to the process or system by which we accelerate it and the accelerant we use to do so.

We stop doing something faster.

Going faster becomes what we do.

“What are you doing?”

“No idea! But Christ I’m doing it super hyper fast. AND I’m connected to a squillion people so not only am I doing it faster – I am sharing it faster. I am not only a speeding bullet but also a skin-searing wildfire. I’m going like awesome shit-off-a-tech-shovel, me.”

I’d always hoped that there was a simple equal and opposite (satanic Newtonian shyster that I am) to the hyper accelerating self.

For some time I’d put my money on the ‘car-crash slo-mo’ of our primal sensory faculty, which, when engaged by danger or crisis, helps us maintain some semblance of equilibrium and control in that moment by slowing everything down to enable us to comprehend and avoid the particular parts of it that may well, well, be the death of us.

But my monkey/pigeon/lizard brain’s ability to shutter down the speed of any one hyper-fast occurrence, thereby allowing me to scrutinise every infinitesimal piece of detail and information and subsequently better navigate and ride its turbulence doesn’t lead me to avoiding the worst of its consequences. It simply leads me to developing a greater ability to absorb utterly meaningless stuff at speed through the porous edges of the moment.

So that’s not helping me.

The other thing that might have been well-placed to put some brakes on the worst vestiges of my hyper accelerated self would have been Mindfulness.

But Nope. Not doing it for me either. I mean, I get it. To learn and properly understand what it means to live in the Now. To remove the distractions of past and future, to truly concentrate on the moment you are in, appreciate it, bathe in it, turn it over in one’s palm like a polished stone: a remarkable ability.

My only concern is that the Now, devoid of past or future – experience and potential, memory or dream, and all of the information both emotional and rational that comes with them – seems incomplete to me.

Mindfulness seems to do the very opposite for me of what it should do. I kick out any traces to allow me to super-focus on the moment – a form of hyper-vigilance of the Now – but I end up with a load of random other stuff pouring into the spaces left behind – spaces I’d rather fill with the past and future brackets that should encase each experience.

So, what else?

A shift in context and environment perhaps? Well, again, yes, to an certain extent.

Having moved from London to Lewes has compelled me to exist at a pleasantly slower pace of life some of the time.

(At which juncture I’d like to thank Southern Rail profusely for their concerted and sustained efforts in disavowing me of the idea that I live on a highly efficient arterial rail line into and out of the breath-taking speed of the metropolis.)

But like mindfulness, for all of one’s best endeavours, the slower Now of Lewes is forever bracketed by what has gone before (chasing the dollar in London) and what follows (chasing the said same dollar). So solely relying on context and environment alone are not the answer.

And in our relentlessly connected world one can never really escape the accelerant of prosperity.

Even in sleepier Lewes, the long shadow of thriving, or what constitutes the current shiny, slebby ‘got stuff’ model of it, seeps into everything.

Lewes has a great mixture of types: it’s not all DownFromLondons like me.

You have the My F@*%ng Red Trousers of the hollowed-out East Sussex Hooray and their crisply Lavender-ironed wife – the ex-Brighton burn-out, sporting a dog on a string and blue dip-dyed hair shaved on one side clutching a gig flyer – the blue-cloud green-horizon landscape of artsy-craftsy Sussex potter/painter/candlestick and scatter cushion maker – the vintage Linen Interior of the LifeStyle shop owner– the white Sussex Van Man & Scaffolder Bloke, bastion of BREXIT, with a vocal dislike of anything or anyone foreign or exotic; apart from the ‘Chinky’ Chinese and that ‘Itie’ Pizza Place of course.

(Their cultural myopia seems to simply melt away like a wood fired Quattro Formaggi amidst the scrolling menu of Just Eat and Deliverooo.  Note to Self: Deliveroo as the Open University of Multi-Culturalism –  a distribution platform for culturally enlightening and Pro Remain data and facts to Little England).

And there’s plenty of the Hunt Supporter tractor-chic squad here to fill the spaces between the stripped oak floorboards of Lewes society.

And then of course we have that herd of shining individuals, floating above the ground, thrusting towards Waitrose in their hovercrafts of enrichment.

The gleaming lines of Range Rovers and Landrovers (and every other over specified, under-utilised 4X4 you care to mention) with their wholly unused Hi Lo gear ratios (the cockyx of the car world – a left-over from the cars once utlitarian past – not dissimilar to the vestige of a tail that we carry behind us) whooshing up and down the high street – are busy as they are in the furious industry of Doing Well.

(Hands up who leases their 4×4? I rest my case.)

There is no absence of the merry middle class dance here. All manner and strata of people parking up outside elaborately ordained pubs on weekends for overpriced Sunday Roasts and a scrum of collective thriving, cawing loudly of new this and expensively experienced that; of particular schools and exotic holidays – puffing up the brightly-coloured wings of their success, clutching menus like divining rods to the well of contentment hidden somewhere in front of them, just out of sight and reach.

They’re certainly not going to help me decompress from the consuming rush of 21st century existence.

So; the standard socio-economic ladder meets tribal segmentation of life offers little to ease the accelerating self.

In fact, with one’s ears too wide open and a thinner skin on, quite the opposite might happen here. Devoid as charming market towns are of the anonymity of the blurring vari-speed white waters of a city – everyone gets drawn even further into the accelerated need to succeed under the hot spotlight of local visibility.

BUT there is one group – a higher tribe – rendered by life experience and tenure rather than by culture creed profession or class – to whom homage pays dividends.

And they are the source of my new self-penned Sioux-like name – Walks Slowly With Old Folks.

For someone who walks far too quickly at the best of times (as to whether I am walking away from myself or towards someone or something more interesting I’ve not yet fathomed), slowing down to the walking speed of old people is a remarkable fillip to an accelerated or accelerating life.

Various things happen:

Sight – old people spend less time furiously concentrating on the aspect and angle of their trajectory though life – which means they have more time to be aware of what is immediately about them. They don’t suffer what I like to call Thrive Blindness (the loss of the ability to see what’s immediately in front and around us that comes from rushing towards the next ratchet of prosperity.) That’s a good thing.

Connection – old people are far more capable of engaging with those around them because they are not moving so fast that they ‘can’t stop’. Watching various professionally busy White Rabbits (always so terribly late for some important date) in grave danger of tripping over their own feet if they were for one moment expected to stop, turn and actually engage with another human other than those whom might improve their situation makes for little easing in the speed of life dept.

Smell – old people exist in an old world model of associated scent. Simply put, when you slow down your speed of passage through the world you actually smell the environment you are in or are travelling through. Sight and sound and smell and the emotions they generate are more likely to remain in tact, inextricably connected to each other as they should be. A rushed life leads to misappropriation of smells, constantly slung as they are to a newer or abstracted reference point, as opposed to the one just that actually created them.

Mortality – old people exist in far greater proximity to their own demise. They do not need the trending self help manual du jour to tell them that every moment is precious, especially those spent in pursuit of the things that make us truly happy. Relentlessly reminded as they are by the passing of their friends and peers and the shrinking of time in which that passing occurs, they don’t need help making the most of the Now. Its all they have left. The clarity that comes from being able to count the springs summers autumns and Christmases they have left in which to enjoy these things is a tainted gift.

The other observation is that there seems to be a better balance of sensibilities when Old people are present. They are an off-set strategy – renewables of humanity amidst the dirty coal of the industrious being of youth. Trees to the CO2 of an accelerating tech-fuelled life.

So it is my intention at every opportunity to Walk Slowly With Old Folks. Because even at their grumpiest, they prove that all of us eventually will shrug off this distemper of the projected, accelerated and visibly successful self, and replace it with something far more meaningful.

Three cheers (and a walking frame) for that.

 

 

 

 

Mutual desire, shared resilience & A Stairway to Heaven

24 Monday Aug 2015

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2014-08-13-Stairway_TO_Heaven_by_InToXiCaTeD__StOcK

There are many perfect things in the world – but some would venture that the most precious of them are those perfect things that can directly affect the nature of our human resilience.

Luckily, there seem to be lots more people fixated on creating good things we can all share in.

With the advent of a more Shared Value, stakeholder-centric view of the world, we find increasing numbers of enlightened CEOs and MDs, social activists, enterprisers and entrepreneurs, sustainability practitioners, CSR and Human resources directors spending increasingly large amounts of time ‘designing’ new collective, swarm-like, crowd-fuelled platforms, communities and initiatives in which we can all benefit.

Which is good.

The only small thing to bear in mind while applying all of that highly tuned brain power to great collective ends is this: most of those perfect things that compel multitudes of people towards a shared moment or community of like minds and hearts are of the ‘accidental’ variety – rarely originated, planned or conceived for the direct purpose of shaping a good thing. Mostly they begin as very particular and individual acts of self.

Music for example.

Much of music is created as an externalisation, amplification and expansion and of our highly individual inner human ‘voice’ in the world.

Our internal cadences and the rhythms of our conscious self are released through a sonorous fabric of sounds, notes, and chords strummed, struck, fingered, rubbed, pressed, plucked, picked and blown to resonate and reverberate through and across the myriad materials tribes and cultures have found to hand.

Abstracted human ‘feelings’ are moulded into personal protestations of human existence – of love, wonder, sadness, joy, recrimination, premonition, politic and destruction.

But none the less, music has given us many ‘perfect things’ that have directly affected our ability to collectively create better lives– clarion calls for better and moments of shared joy that transcend cultural generational and social barriers and definitions.

Music is both universal and particular in the ‘perfect things’ department – and one of the greatest levers for galvanising collective good stuff (as the guys and girls at Rockcorps have demonstrated to both local and global effect).

As a singular ‘universal’ concept, music is one of the most transcendent and primal forces that can be put to work in and on our human condition: a rhythmic syncopated celebration of the ‘vibration of life’ itself – shaped by the hands and instruments of our ever-evolving species.

It also delivers many highly particular ‘perfect things’. Things rooted in highly specific local and cultural mores and rituals and the social idioms that underwrite them.

I was reminded of this while overhearing three people of quite different cultural, generational and social background discuss the Led Zeppelin song, A Stairway to Heaven.

(One, I believe, was a musician, one a chef and the other a DJ.)

To many, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven is one of those ‘perfect things’ – a jewel of absolute, inviolable synchronicity; between a medium (music), talents, era, emotion, social comment, context, culture, politic and the human condition: a jewel that sparkles with a quite resilient beauty.

It’s fair to say that it’s definitely got something pretty big going on there: some potency or mysticism that has made it globally famous – a piece of music loved the world over.

But does that make it universal? Does that make a song like this a prized tool in the super powered socio-cultural toolbox of rubbing along better in the global village?

What seems to reveal itself on closer inspection is that sometimes the universally transcendent only become so because they are so particular in their nature: so fiercely authentic to and of themselves.

This seemed a philosophical paradox worthy of a rummage at least.

At face value the song is based upon a startlingly simple narrative structure: a combination of a Stairway, a Lady ‘who’s sure…’, and Heaven.

Now, in semiotic and cultural referencing terms, the first two can be rustled up pretty easily in most every culture the the world over.

We all know where we are with a Stairway or some form of step system. And as for ‘a Lady who’s sure…’, greed, avarice and the machinations of the venal are indeed universal.

Both easily make the transition from a British rock culture rooted in the industrial Midlands or Black Country of the late 1960s and 70s to a broader waiting white western culture (of Christian foundation) and ever outwards along the lay lines of the old imperial and colonial powers.

But Heaven. Mmmnnn. Tricky.

In the world in which we currently exist, you need to ‘mind your language’ when it comes to the H word.

You can’t just go bandying words like heaven about willy-nilly without expecting some flack.

There are many different (and fiercely held) ideas of what constitutes a higher existence or plane of being – either spiritual or intellectual. In some, heaven doesn’t feature at all. They are in fact quite anti-heaven.

And if it isn’t God v. Science, it’s ‘my heaven’s better than your heaven ‘cos my Book says so’.

Three steps sideways and suddenly you’re up to your proverbials in pro-life protests, making love through sheets, fundamentalist settlers, abuse cover ups in the clergy, pogroms, public stoning; a light sprinkling of intifada, flag burning and explosive jihadi polemics.

But we can’t just bin the H word. Heaven is not a negotiable element in this song – the song must have it. Pardon the lateral Zeppelin referencing here BUT for the song to remain the same, Heaven is vitally important.

Without it, we’re grounded in a material and physical world focused on structural models and frameworks of habitation and modes of access and ascent, either of internal or external application and construction.

With the addition of Heaven, the ascendant become transcendent. Tick. Heaven endeavours to expand and elevate the spiritual spatial perspective and vista of the listener.

It is also there precisely because it offsets the materialism of the Lady who’s sure…

(Though far more aligned with the avarice of her materialistic certainty, Stairway to Mammon would make for a dreadful reprise and entreat.)

So; Heaven. How does that travel as a universal concept?

Let’s start by gently exploring and dissecting the types and versions clattering about in the global consciousness.

We have of course Heaven as a place adored and yearned for in the theologies of the universal Christian church.

If that’s all we’re worried about, Hosanna! Cue the works of Titian et al and begin the hearty daubing of seraphim, cherubim, chapel ceilings, lush clouds, spirited holiness, bearded men, the startling brilliance of the sun’s rays – and a lot (and I mean A LOT) of heavenly thronging.

But what of the broader version instituted across all the Abrahamic faiths?

And while we’re contemplating whose heaven in whose book, we must also take into consideration that it’s not just the cultural and theological shape or type of heaven: the number is also in question.

It is singular in our song title but in the realms of the eastern faiths that a lot of western rock stars were becoming advocates of in the late 60s and 70s, the single Heaven is replaced by heavens, the plural: or even as far as to count them – 7 Heavens.

And then there’s the issue of the nature of the Heaven or Heavens you are alluding to.

Heaven or its multiples is theologically and literally all over the place.

Dipping even the smallest toe into the subject of Heaven reveals every good reason to keep it wooly in the specificity department

In some teachings, Heaven is framed as being a plane or realm of actual existence that has physical properties and ‘exists’ in a complex intra-related and mostly interdependent set of dimensions in which ours is but one transient floor, corridor, elevator or pipe.

At its most particular, we find either the Seven Heavens of Jewish Mysticism where the seventh is the ultimate realm in which God dwells, or the 5 major types of Heaven in Tibetan Buddhism with the Akanisththa

For others Heaven is a state of being: one shaped and influenced by one’s proximity to one’s god or gods, their teachings and their ‘way’.

Heaven is in this instance therefore both relative and proximal: the closer to god you are the closer your heaven becomes. And therefore the further from god you are the more equally and appositely hellish your state becomes.

And then of course we have Heaven simply as an atomic abstraction – an expansive sub-atomic particular state of otherness – a place and state of existence other than the one we are in but still ‘of it’.

This is the realm of the Cosmic Fizz.

(see https://thinairfactoryblog.com/2014/08/09/celebrating-our-human-existence-the-big-beautiful-boomerang-of-science-and-faith/)

This is a ‘heaven’ that has not been ‘captured’ or appropriated – geo-located or physiologically and physically rendered in any artistic representation or personification – and therefore is the most ‘other’ of them.

The Cosmic Fizz is predicated on the basis that if an atom never dies, then we will continue to exist materially in some particular form after our immediate death – and exist expansively and potentially eternally. In this realm, Heaven as a state of otherness, becomes closer in its nature to the abstraction of the soul than the construction of the body.

This ‘heaven’ is also perhaps closer to the more scientific view of particularity, multiple dimensions of time space, and an infinite number of expanding, contracting and colliding universes. A world of (to punk another prog rock band of the 60s and 70s) quarks strangeness and charm.

(An article in the Economist recently pointed to the fabulous fact that in the realm of the multiverse, we’ve barely a clue as to the construct of the single one we’re currently reading this blog in – given, they tell us, that 96% of matter in our universe passes unseen through the 4% of matter that we can see. So. Is that heaven? The 96%?)

Right. All getting a bit complicated. So let’s go back to practicalities.

What kind of stairway? And where do you want it?

Umm, good question.

Well, if we’re going for heaven as an actual plane or realm from the culture of the band that wrote the song, let’s have a spiralling stairway hewn from the ancient oak wreathed in bluebells, and etched with runic symbolism, looping up and into a West Country sunset.

As for the Where? – pop it over there, on that cowslip-covered Tor: the one with the Druid’s Oak on top. Yup. There. To the left of the winsome, flaxen-haired girl playing tenor recorder.

Great. But, what if we’re in the proximal state-of-being version of heaven? The heaven as defined by the distance between us and god. Does that mean the Stairway is further away from us and, ergo, closer to god; or is it closer to us? This can surely only be answered by first defining whether the particular heavenly theology in question defines you as innately pure at birth or as born with taint (cue original sin) – and then assessing whether you’ve done anything of any substance betwixt birth and death as to shift yourself towards or away from said stairway.

Knowing what form of heaven we’re building a stairway to is key in regards to not only making structural, material and design decisions for our stairway; but more importantly in deciding whether we need a stairway at all

A stairway that ascends to a singular place makes complete sense; but in a realm of multiple heavens we must assume that multiple stairways are required (unless some form of multiple directional Hogwarts stairway can be popped in there). A heaven of multiple realms and destinations would potentially require more of a wonkavator than a stairway.

And heaven as a state of multiple interwoven planes and particularities might preferably require more a beam me up Scotty form of transportation device for ascension.

If you’re clear on where you’ve netted out on this there hopefully is just one other small hurdle. Is your universal concept of a cosmic metaphysical plane within or without?

As the funk prog-rock band Funkadeic and its master blaster George Clinton opined – “Free your ass and your mind will follow – the kingdom of heaven is within”.

If the Kingdom Of Heaven is indeed within, some form of internal stairway is in order. But then, to be punctilious for a moment, wouldn’t that be more likely to be a stair-well? One where we could peer over the edge of the balustrade up or down and spot some other traveller ascending towards a higher existence.

So, ermmm, where was I?  Yes.

The question of whether Stairway To Heaven; a very socio-culturally particular piece of music, has transcended all barriers and idioms to be one of those cultural assets that can be put in the big, sharing, feel-good box of our most resilient humanity?

Dunno. Heavens apart, we can only answer that through the witnessing of its application and effect in the world at scale across myriad cultures.

Do they play it on the radio in The Gaza Strip and Damascus? (My assumption would be that at least one of the settlers from the U.S. will have bought some of their college radio loves with them!)

How does it roll in the Far-East?. I am certain that there are many bars in Korea and Vietnam that feature this on their juke-box.  And given the tsunami of Australians surging through from the other direction, I cant imagine that even the distant hills of Tibet and the northern Chinese provinces are immune to its charms.

In terms of its authenticity and integrity, would a lover of the song in Bhutan just be ‘pretending’ to know its meaning and sub-text just because they’re not from West Bromich and have absolutely no clue as to who the ‘Baggies’ are?

Bridget Jones Diary and the women’s prison in Bangkok comes to mind. The original lyrics of Like A Virgin swapped out for something that just sounds more ‘right’ to the singer in their own cultural opinion.

There’s a lady whose nose only tickles if cold.

In the end it doesn’t really matter. If the feeling is right, does anyone care how it thinks or reads?

All that matters is that there is a piece of music in the world, one of tens of thousands of them, that can bring the most diverse groups of people together in the bat of an eye with no need for social engineering, complex structures, trending language or roundtable debates.

A piece of music that can collectively lift peoples hearts and spirits to expect and demand better. Created for joy and expression. Not utility.

When shaping narratives of collectivism and shared value we should remember the joy part of that. The lightness it brings with it. Because we make a lot of these collectivist and shared initiatives far too serious and far less human because of it.

As Robert Plant asks us directly:

“Do you remember laughter?”

I’ll sing badly in the shower to that.

Now, where’s that ABBA album?

Brands, old-school Diplomacy & the New Humanities

26 Thursday Mar 2015

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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

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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.

verukas, prosperity & the detritus of parental love

02 Friday Jan 2015

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Who pandered to her every need?
Who turned her into such a brat?
Who are the culprits? Who did that?
The guilty ones now this is sad
Dear Old Mum and Loving Dad

Is the quality of contemporary parental love destined to go down the garbage chute quickly followed by the children it breeds?

Is the structure on which it is founded becoming increasingly fragile, facile and unsustainable?

Or will our children or grandchildren eventually just turn against us; crippled by their disappointments, and their inability to repeat or recreate the same or a greater quality of life for their own.

We already know that this is the first generation in recorded history that will be passing down a diminished quality of life to their children by our current measures of prosperity.

This question of whether parental love in its current form is unsustainable first raised itself whilst I was trying to assess and deconstruct the current model of prosperity we currently embrace and pursue.

(Let’s face it, for some the highway commercial robbery of Valentines Day, the poisonous barometer of the Tiffany box, Gypsy Weddings and the reoccurring arrival of Kim Kardashian’s latest ‘one and only love’ has firmly flushed the romantic model down the spiritual khazi already)

The exercise in deconstructing prosperity is a major part of a larger one I am undertaking as part of my ongoing involvement with the Dream In A Box initiative and its UK Dream iteration – which in particular terms seeks to Re-imagine the UK model of Prosperity through the transformation of what constitutes a desirous life.

On closer inspection (hardy surprising) it seems that a large part of what makes up our current model of prosperity lies in how we imagine, perceive, measure, pursue, and demonstrate ‘love’ and attachment: to friends, family, prospective partners, spouses and most pointedly our children.

There is no greater demonstration of loving provision and the profound contract of human care it seems than that hosted within the living bond between parents and their children.

But what was once only noted and measured in mostly invisible and passing terms – the degree to which we throw money at our children’s happiness – now seems to be worn like a badge of honour by everyone from the cord-breeched pseudo-toff urban preppy and the polo-shirt & chino mini-mes of the suburbs to the highly singular estate-inhabiting parent with a Burberry buggy.

The integrity of our attendance to our children’s needs and the strength of the love we hold for them now lies in the measure of its social visibility and worth.

We must be ‘seen’ to gladly or otherwise use every scrap of ‘cheap’ money we can get our hands on to further facilitate our children’s ability to hover above the ugly brutal truths of life.

Increasingly our ‘love’ seems to be wholly predicated on the scale of our investment: and not of the balanced, grounding, attentive, affectionate kind.

It would seem that it is wholly acceptable these days for a child to be intellectually stupefied, emotionally ignored, set aside and abandoned or passed over to some one or some thing – a digital device usually or perhaps a new pair of trainers – as long as the parent can be seen to have ‘invested’ at every turn.

From the designer baby clothes they learn to stand up in, to the grotesque and engorging hoards of seasonal gifts they now receive (from skip loads of Easter Chocolate to mountains of Christmas presents) and the increasing quantity of kit they now require to ensure they’re not seen as ‘going without’ – phones tablets game consoles to name a few – the scale of society’s expenditure on the presentation of the ‘loved child’ is staggering.

This is not reserved solely for the ‘kit’ we deck them out with. It seems to infect every corner of the family model for what constitutes a thriving life.

Another hellish tyranny of loving provision embedded in our current model of prosperity is the family holiday.

Even as I typed the words ‘family holiday’ I was suddenly washed in a sun drenched, lens flared, refracted moment of azure blue sky and crystal water splashes; stress free parents and laughing children perfectly framed against a distant white villa horizon speckled and coloured with the lobster clawed, 3 types of fish, pasta, pizza and west Indian slash Asian slash Mediterranean slash Tex Mex slash barbecue buffet.

The tyranny I refer to has nothing to do with the usual clichéd hooting and wailing you hear from many modern parents about the prospect of 2 weeks locked together in some slightly disappointing family resort.

(On that particular matter it will be music to the ears of every emotionally challenged and ‘highly individual’ parent to know that there are now two good reasons as to why that tyranny will quickly become a faint memory. Firstly we are seeing (so the people watchers tell us) that the 2 week block summer holiday meticulously planned and desperately undertaken is in its death throes in the more advanced mature economies. We are taking more and shorter and more impulsive holidays (with all that extra money we all have!!!) And secondly booking.com is chirpily telling any member of the aspirational mobile middle classes who wants to listen that never again will they have to booking arrive to find themselves trapped in some booking desperate, substandard hell-hole with a pool surrounded by drawn-on people and a dodgy booking breakfast buffet – as long as they book with booking dot com that is.)

Given the tsunami of availability and astonishing social pressure to just say yes to everything, it is no surprise that we’re running up a credit-card based personal debt mountain bearing a striking similarity to a Himalayan range built out of bullion and gemstones.

If a family doesn’t get to go on an all you can consume holiday plus a few weekends away and a second holiday thrown in, then they’re not cutting it. That a family with a annual family income of circa £30-40K quietly expects itself to demonstrate its loving provision through multiple holidays abroad is both financially unsustainable and morally questionable.

Education is another ugly social battleground on which ‘love of the child’ is undertaken with everything but balance. True this is a more particular and less universal truth – something usually set aside by the worthy as a First World problem.

It is of course driven by the clawing desperation of the upwardly aspirational middle-middle classes*, (the downwardly aspirational Toffs and upper-middles being otherwise healthily engaged in a swaggering mockney-gangsta walk through White City, Hoxton, Deptford, and the arse-end of Tooting).

These parents are not the first generation to have realised that the route to securing an improving prosperity for your child is a decent education.

The role of education (and skiing holidays for that matter) in social aggrandisement is not new. Parents with a particular predilection for elevating their own narrow lives on the back of the tiniest increment of superiority have been judging their dinner party neighbour by the scale of their educational investment for many decades. But they were (and still are) of a particular rare breed, reasonably cloaked and easily ignored.

What’s particular in the new trend is the frenzy with which the greater majority pursue this madness in the blinding glare of the social spotlight.

Over subscribed schools, post code hopping parents, dodgy intake policies and the see sawing fashion for Public versus independent versus Free versus State versus ‘who said Grammar? I didn’t say Grammar?!’ schools certainly has a lot to answer for.

But that’s still no excuse for the lack of human elegance, the vacuum of discretion, and the gaping hole that seems to have opened up in their ability to circumnavigate the sensitivities of others.

They take a bludgeoning approach to improving the child that is conspicuous by its conspicuity – gratuitous over expectation, intellectual bullying, litanies of after school clubs, multiple tutors, competitive schooling and the most insidious social engineering are all worn in public like a beacon.

Educational trends currently also raise some rather interesting existential questions – of the ‘life-imitating-art-imitating-life’ kind.

The recent Disney-fication of boarding school culture via one small wizard and a place called Hogwarts has had a large number of parents who can ill afford it sending their little darlings to prep and boarding schools ‘because the child demands it’. There’s only so long you can get away with stuffing the fees on a credit card until the house of plastic cards collapses. And love is rarely proven resilient by the relentless use of the word ‘yes’. But that is how society seems to be shaping the model of demonstrable love in a prosperous life. If the child demands it – the loving parent must give it: and blatantly.

For me these are reasonable examples of how warped I believe our sense of how we demonstrate love for the child has become, and evidence of a toxic model of prosperity.

If one takes these lite examples and generously sprinkles them with tons of over packaged brightly coloured and quickly discarded plastic, £400 bikes, theme parks, and mountains of cheap cotton basics with pointless groovy graphics, the landscape of parental love, certainly that currently exercised by the average emerged economy parent, is looking sparkly, cluttered and bleak, and ultimately unsustainable in so many ways.

Is this love of ours Tainted. Maybe. Is it Human. Very.

Is this progress? Perhaps. Or is this simply the gene pool opportunistically wrapping its progeny in as much as it can get its hands on before the moment passes. Most likely.

Regardless. Navigating the modern world and the byways of fruitful love, especially that which we feel and demonstrate for our children, was never going to be easy or simple.

But re-imagination of the model of prosperity we base our life, love and dreams on: one which holds greater store by that which cannot be bought might give us a few more compass points along the way.

It may well also help clear up some of the side issues: like the increasing population of staggeringly spoilt, increasingly sociopathic children… oh and that of personal bankruptcy of course, and a sparsely furnished dotage.

So, veruka cream anyone?

FOOTNOTES

*the middle middle classes are how I refer to a very active, vocal and seemingly forever squeezed section of the British population. They are, in class terms what Mickey Flannagan’s ‘out out‘ is to going out.

Frothy Identity & the dark art of ‘my name is…’

30 Monday Jun 2014

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“Skinny dry Triplefrappacrappercccinolattechiato for Julian”

What’s in a name? My ridiculous and highly needy coffee order for starters. This should be ridiculed in public. That I have managed to get myself to a three dimension coffee order indicates a pestilence of the spirit at work.

Skinny. (I wrestle with Cholesterol) Extra Shot. (I need more help in the morning these days) Super dry (I don’t like milk).

The source of this madness unsurprisingly rests in the heart of galloping consumption and endless retail growth. (And the ease with which my fragile ego can be manipulated!)

Quite simply, our ‘rapacious’ corporate friends have seized on a good thing – the socially levelling model of respecting individual particularity that lies at the heart of the American Dream – and turned it into First Name My Order strategy for Growth.

The long journey of the customer service model that began with starving penniless immigrants arriving on the Island under the frozen gaze of Liberty, nameless or without papers, ends with the coffee order leaving my lips in public in central London suffixed or prefixed with my first name.

The Dream has taken those immigrants from scratching scraps in the poor streets of Dublin, Palermo, Krakow and Juarez to applying a ‘let me tell you exactly how I want this sub sandwich’ selection system loudly directed with almost papal absolutism.

This is not exclusively the domain of 3rd and 4th generation immigrants in the US. We’re all at it.

“6 inch teriyaki sub with extra green peppers” says Daniel Sturridge (the British footballer) because he likes things ‘his way’.

With the help of our emollient, predatory NBBFs (New Best Brand Friends) now everyone can, as Frankie (that’s Sinatra, not Goes To Hollywood) sang in those golden years, “do it my way”.

If you want a triple-tofu-Chilli-cheese-string-dog in marmalade marinade, white sauce and whipped cream in a floury bap, you’ll find that it is your absolute human right.

You are not a faceless, nameless, choice-less drone any more.

You are majestic, singular, powerful: the text of you illuminated by every infinitesimal nuance of particularity you can cook up in one simple order.

The American Dream has delivered us a service culture that promises, hand on heart, that never ever again will you be told what to eat without some recourse to asserting your ‘identity’. And not just in ingredient or format choice.

The game raiser was in the appropriation and use of every customer’s first name ‘with a slightly creepy familiarity’ as part of the service process.

Direct Mail of the utter drivel variety was suddenly ‘ok’ as it sported our name on it, printed in ‘handwritten’ font.

Our mail pages wi-fi logins and every other device interface we have uses our own name to welcome us back. The existential labyrinth presented by the cautious expression Welcome back Julian (Not you?) should not be underestimated.

Not me? What do you mean ‘Not me?’ You know it’s me. I have given you secret-squirrel passwords, a saliva sample, three hairs off my head, some of the earth from under my first den in the garden of my youth and the DNA strand of my first pet. Surely you should know whether it’s me?

And to expand this interrogation, how would I know if ‘I’ was not me? What other clues are you giving me? Nope nothing.  Zip. Nix. Nada. Niente.

But for these NBBFs of mine it seems that as long as my name’s there, everything is OK. Which I suppose it is; Isn’t it?

Our first name is now used freely by everyone from call-centre staff, the man at the garage who I’ve never met before, strangers in Health Clubs and the shifting sands of receptionists at various dental clinics.

In fact the only person who seems reticent to use my first name in the world these days is me.

I am becoming rather protective of it. And getting a little ticked off that it gets demanded from me so often and used back at me so easily.

When I make my ridiculous coffee order and hear my name tabbed on the end I feel as if I have been quietly mugged.

I am starting to see where the sublime logic of the nom de plume, nom de guerre and alter ego.

‘My name is… my name is… my name is… Slim Shady’ sang Eminem…AKA Marshall Mathers. Smart move. At least he can amuse himself with three names to draw down on at the coffee shop. I don’t see Batman with this problem. Though seeing him turn up at a rather self-conscious Gotham Coffee shop, ordering a Chai Latte and being asked ‘What’s your name?’ would help me to begin to navigate the age of absurdity I feel we have now entered. Batman? Or Bruce. You decide.

Perhaps it’s not just me. Perhaps we are all quietly plotting for when our ‘Anakin’ will turn. When the burgeoning malevolence and negative feelings towards people we don’t know from Adam using our first name willy-nilly, will prompt our ‘Darth’ to answer the question  ‘Welcome Back Anakin (Not You?) with a sharp swipe of a light sabre and a dash of keyboard-melting force.

The liberal use of your first name by every brand and business you even glance at is actually doing the opposite of its original intention. At the outset all of this was to empower the individual – to give the customer a sense of being more than just a consuming machine who was expected to turn up at the supermarket in their 343 instalments-station wagon, fill their trolley with 1/3rd Unilever 1/3rd P&G and with the last third a shared cornucopia of Nestle, Coca Cola, Kellogg’s and Kraft consumables.

But as the consumption grew and the giants who purveyed the products that fuelled that consumtion also grew, the people felt further and further away from the things that secured them – the old touchstones of shops, bars and diners where people knew your name.

As the shopping malls got bigger and the diners got franchised. As the towns splintered and the cities and ‘burbs bloated, people stopped knowing anyone’s name. They barely looked them in the face.

The odd island of camaraderie appeared – between till 3 and till 4 and that nice man at the newsagents. But mostly accelerating faceless consumption ruled.

Cheers, the Boston bar based sit com was a master-class in reassurance television. And its theme tune summed up the age. We like places that know our name. It stops everything feeling so bleak on a wet Wednesday in mid February having just returned from said superMall.

It took a little time to realize that the more faceless the sale the more important it was to make someone feel like they were really important. But we all got there.

For a while it was delightful. The truly entrepreneurial people who did actually give a wholesale shit about the customer as a person turned the others’ heads – creating a new culture that aimed to actually understand and communicate with people like they mattered in the transaction.

But the infinite-growth monsters of the old world simply saw that you could screw a few bucks more per person out of a life time value model by using the person’s first name and by being their new best friend

Soon enough, mass personalization, a rather fetching term for how to industrialise degrees of knowing and intimacy, poured into the world: into every shop, call centre, mobile interface, airport lounge, and restaurant.

Once you have spotted the potency of Names and the wielding of them, a world of endless opportunity reveals itself.

There is also the dark art of Reverse First Naming in the entertainment & leisure sector. Like Reverse logistics in the parcel delivery services, it’s a stroke of mirror loving genius.

If you have been in a franchise restaurant in the last 12 months and had someone tell you ‘hey, my names Siobhan and I’m your waitress for this evening’ – you have just been Reverse First Named. Instead of using your own name against you, in this particular instance they use their own. Genius.

Reverse First Naming is a new brutal and unflinching practice to wreak havoc in the unsuspecting consumer.

It is, first and foremost a method for the suppression of free speech – especially if the speech was going to sound something like the following: ‘this place stinks, the service is crap, this burger resembles something that’s been kicked around a barber’s shop floor and there’s chewing gum stuck to my tights’.

It is a well-documented fact that this first name first mover advantage can be life saving.

In potential situations of violence against the person by strangers, people are trained to ‘humanize’ themselves to the aggressor – telling them your first name, or nick name, tell them about your children, your wife waiting at home – to create a connection that triggers sentiment, guilt, shame and conscience – and ultimately responsibility for hurting not a faceless stranger, a piece of collateral damage, but someone ‘known’ to you.

So suddenly you are responsible for Siobhan’s well-being and job satisfaction. Whether she gets a good tip – or a pay raise or not. So the chances are you’ll be a little more considerate and a little less caustic.

But we cannot simply point fingers in this. We were all so wrapped up in looking at and hearing our name in lights, furiously opening letters inviting our handwritten first name self to the opening of another envelope and buying our own name in an email address, that we missed the moment when marketing Insincerity stole our name.

Now it feels as if one has walked through a time space continuum to a hometown we didn’t know we had, populated by people who’ve never met us before but who feel really really friendly like they’ve known us for years. Our own brand built Truman Show.

And there right there in the middle of it all, is our first name in lights surrounded by bands cheerleaders and fireworks.

So right now, anonymity is the real rock n roll. Now that we’ve illuminated the text of that first name by embroidering it with face-book postings, riddled with tweets and pins. Now is the time to get punk and take our first name back.

The first rule of data confidentiality? Take back the little big data! Starting with your name.

Surname is the new Sex Pistols. Ample use of Mr, Mrs or Ms is where the real anarchy lies.

But right up there at the top? Anonymity.

The Man with No Name, an America Colonies Ronin with a Latinate rasp, walked through the Spaghetti Western Trilogy to the chirp of penny whistle, a guitar twang and the crack of a whip utterly devoid of a name.

When standing at the counter of certain Coffee Shops I am tempted to relive The Man With No Name’s short conversation with the barman when asked ‘I didn’t catch your name…’ ‘I didn’t give it’.

Hearing my name repeatedly chiming out of the person delivering it up to me from behind the cawing frothing barista station with faux hoaky bonhomie is getting a little ‘old’.

To understand quite how powerful the imperative to ‘personalise’ the service proposition is, when you are next asked for your name, try saying No.

Along with the right to order ridiculous coffee combinations, to not give your name is a basic human right.

Try it. You may find your No might just be met with a gaze not dissimilar to that of a rather tired Customs Official when confronted with bag full of hand-guns cocaine and Marmite.

This ‘local global’ serving culture that speaks to me like a regular at a corner coffee shop, liberally uses my name to fulfill a number of functions: as a clearing house dispatch mechanism; as an metronome of service excellence (listen to all these good people we’re delivering coffee to); as a ‘personal touch’ and as a piece of service sophistry. And to render human and real the faceless corporate swaggerdaccio of the global brand providing it.

Sometimes just to lighten this moment, I would love people to be confronted with their gamer names perhaps or their tumblr tags just to see how ‘real’ we want all of these separate personas to be to us.

“Dry frappacinno for #kongworrier”

“Triple chai latte with sprinkles for #foxytankbuttgirl”

Our first names are taken in vain by more than just ourselves and the brands we allow to speak to us through them.

Voice activated dialing on smart phones is a source of infinite street theatre. Watching for example someone saying the name James repeatedly into a phone standing on a street corner shouldn’t be funny. What’s funny is when the phone responds by telling the person she’s calling Mary.

I don’t want Mary. I want James.

CALLER: “Call James”

SMART PHONE: “Calling Mary”

You see the person wonder, ‘what am I doing wrong’? They move the phone to different angles askance of their mouth.

CALLER: “James” “Call James”

SMART PHONE: “Calling Mary”.

This then descends into a dulcet opera of different pronunciations. Maybe they’re just saying it wrong. Perhaps in the last week they developed a speech impediment. A cold sore might be ‘smudging’ the sound file. Or perhaps they were drunk when they made the sound tag and sober now. Whatever.

If only James knew how often his name was being called out in a public place.

And therein lies out perfect existential storm.

At a coffee shop counter: having ordered your identity-asserting ‘eat my individuality World’ coffee with 3 complex dimensions, just at the moment when you are asking your smart phone to ‘Call James’, the lady asks your name.

YOU: “Call James”

SERVER: “James?”

YOU: “No Julian”

SERVER: “Not James”

SMART PHONE: “Calling Mary”

YOU: (To smartphone) “No, James”

SERVER: “James?… not Julian?”

DISTANT BARISTA:  “GrandeToffeechinolatte with whipped cream for #saucyleatherboy

SMART PHONE: “Calling #saucyleatherboy”

So the next time you find yourself being asked your name, pause, take a breath, consider the consequences; and then answer. You might be surprised by what comes out of your mouth.