It's been years since I last took an interest in business personalities.
Timpson repair my shoes and mend my watches, though their service offering includes much more.
It's often a magical customer experience when I pop into my local shop on Shirley High Street, Southampton. Not only do they solve a problem I may have, but it's done with sincerity and heartfelt interaction.
James Timpson is cut from cloth of a higher quality and integrity than is traditionally found in retail/service industries.
Is it employing a huge & brilliant PR team which helps you pose as a kinda "rebellious", kinda counter-culture and patriotic regular kinda guy, when you are really an asset-stripping, tax-cheating, selfish, power-sycophantic kinda guy?
Is that it? https://t.co/89Jl3fjEAc
I wrote back here towards the end of the post that I started to take the leaking of information a bit more seriously when the business world started charging money to talk about the subject. At the recent Fifth Annual Global Competitive forum in Jeddah with tickets at $5000 a pop Bill Clinton also appeared and a number of speakers began to talk about the possible commercial opportunities to be had should confirmation that our planet has never really been unknown to extra and inner terrestrial life emerge. Those videos are now online at Youtube and I think the first one by Stanton Friedman is the most compelling.
Former academic turned Silicon Valley investor Jacques Vallee was a favourite scholarly Ufology writer to Terence McKenna. He reconciled the transdimensional nature of the subject with things like fairies in mythology. We increasingly have a similar understand of a lot of things though his polymath skills are superior to mine.
The last speaker of interest is Physics Professor Michio Kaku who makes a reasonable case for keeping an open mind but often appears as the 'authorized voice of materialist science' on Television for the American information consumer.
If you think this is all nonsense you'll be delighted to learn I intend to begin sharing my learnings from some of these pretty compelling topics. I doubt I'll be able to do more than point my fingers in directions to rather than rap my knuckles on something more concrete than pattern recognition and best-guess speculation. But I'm sort of obliged to to get it out there on the understanding you do your own homework too once in a while.
Tim is first class in this interview. It's not entirely about net neutrality. I used that in the title to give you a second chance to score first. Just trying to be helpful.
I guess if the Tom Peters brigade are about top down hierarchical executive command and control, then Tim is about using narrative and accessibility as well as candid analysis to explain the complexity (and excitement) of NASDAQ's fittest and finest. It becomes evident there are super competing visions of the the future at stake. Some not really driven by classical profit margin structuring. It's a zoo out there.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Tim has an accessible and agreeable manner that is fresh and effective. At one point there's even an up front American taboo aired on the gap between what the U.S says publicly and what it does privately. This is a treasonable tangent. Nobody slips off topic like that. It isn't considered sporting. That's why the Marquis of Queensbury rules were created.
But fair fights are unfair when the outcomes are uncertain, leaving irony no longer witty, and exiled in cheeseburger copy land. A decline of slutty but historical necessity.
So rare is it in late American Empire's discourse to hear questions of credence as to the existence or otherwise of hypocrisy that the interview feels situationist. Is a brawl imminent? Is Professor Tim a sleeper into recreational rioting? Once the unspeakable is said it's unpredictable. A business interview with an edge. Sweet Jesus.
The question left lingering is maybe business is now shooting straighter than the professional soldiers? Surely the 'genius of capitalism' deserves one more final tour of duty with fighting talk like that? Maybe there's still enough fight left in the old gal to take on a confederacy of dunces.
Nope. Time isn't on our side, or whichever neo-hipster generational mutation gets to pick up the bill. All other avenues failed. Deferment no longer an option, and choice is reputed to have once been in vogue.
I'm taking a timely piss here over the Busted Boomers, who to be fair were getting stoned long before metastasising into world class stone throwers. Who could have predicted that the finest minds of a generation were to be mugged by reality twice in the one lifetime? It's cosmic piss taking. Gonzo karma, for printing wealth to order while the status quo junkies peddle the past and cash in on the future.
Easily the biggest news of the year for Social Media in China is the just announced 430 million dollar investment by Oak Pacific Interactive for Xiaonei the Chinese Facebook. I posted just recently about China 2.0 over here, with inexpensive ways for brands to get involved with social media, but these guys have just thrown an incredible amount of money into this small start up despite a) the Social Media model is unproven in China b) a revenue model is yet to be harvested from that.This is the equivalent of Google's purchase of Youtube in 2006
Whether this proves a sound investment or not (and its hard to see why a way to make it work wont be found) this is another example of the shift from interruptive messaging of the traditional monologue model of advertising to the dialog model we are seeing all round the world. Advertising may not be broken in developing economies as Russell points out quite correctly, but as long as the shift of eyeballs to computer screens continues it's possible that the massive passive is diminishing a lot quicker than us Asian planners may have first anticipated.
I absolutely love this print and poster advertising. When I first saw a version of it near Liverpool Street Station on the way to a meeting at Poke and a later interview at Mother I stopped in my tracks and had a mind rush about the 30 different things that made me think that if the F.T. have the class to hire an agency involved with the intelligence to come up with a line that defines widely held third millennium principle values and then articulate it with some beautiful artwork, then it's a publication I'd reassess.
But I have one devious question for the advertising aficionados out there who think they know their stuff.
As I mentioned in the last post I came across a terrific, no-nonsense podcast on doing business in China. Most successful non Chinese business people are way too timid to tell it like it really is out of eagerness not to offend their hosts and thus potentially losing the all important government favour.
James McGregor the author of the best selling 'One Billion Customers, Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China', seen by many as the defining book for new ventures in China is the exception to the rule. McGregor isn't frightened of being frank about the idiosyncrasies of the Chinese, but in a way which as he explains is both humorous and done with real affection for the people.
One of the major themes covered in this podcast is the cultural narrow mindedness of huge companies setting up in China such as ebay and Yahoo, and why they have failed so far in their efforts, usually through trying to impose the same business model from the U.S.
This relates to the 'Think global act local' issue, an idea I've long felt is misleading and misguided. It's also a a separate post in itself and one that I intend to cover which should, I guess be called, think local act local. In the mean time here is the podcast which gives me a chance to try out a new widget. Listen to James describe how Western arrogance ignored the intelligence of the maths champion of China when buying an internet business. This is how real people talk. Gorgeous stuff.
