Featured image: 87 year old Florence and 4 year old Charlie: we need to include more people, more of the time.
Let’s rethink the local and who are customers: work, technology: high streets: supporting business and creativities….
Although we’re often preoccupied with work, training and self development, changes to the cultural environment of work, blurring of boundaries between work and play allows us to be preoccupied with a self development that is often only a competitive strategy and makes real communication about the things that really matter to us difficult.
We get used to talking about things, situations and people but not so much in actually doing things differently. We need to feel that we can do more and then reflect.
Although we have instantaneous communication, it’s hardly ever used in workplaces to really improve the working conditions in manufacture, distribution and related services. People may be highly skilled outside their job vocationally or even professionally in new technologies and really want to practise and implement them but nooooo….the bulk of the jobs we do were defined by the 19th or 20th centuries.
It’s not just people in their early twenties who are frustrated: everyone of every age and background wants to see technology used in a practical yet exciting and visionary way but… there is no real community development around technology across age, gender, class and ethnic boundaries.
Most people assume that technology belongs to men, to big business. Yet technology needs to come to every household in a way that re imagines shopping and what a shop can be for a whole community in the 21st century.
Shops in a town centre should each be rich resources, not just of the people who have created them but they can also be culturally rich if they’re allowed to grow vibrant relationships across the community. Innovative architects, construction companies, markets, farmer’s markets and independent shops could evolve far beyond the seemingly permanently temporary spaces allotted to them in society and we need to work out how.
The local ground is important. And even if we can’t have the quality we need (yet!) we need to begin to act as if we can change everything, eventually. Having a kind of beginner’s mind when we look at the banal, the boring, the suburban, the way things are just now, what if we could look at things thinking what am I seeing, what is really here.
Our eyes are baggy with too much of the same kind of looking, seeing, assumptions.
Learning brings everyone together product, about the market, about the people and the links across the world about the product and the supply chain for all age groups in the shop
We need to get high street landlords more involved in the local world around us: how can we allow more toxic nail bars and gambling shops to fill the local empty spaces? The call and response from the homeless street into these businesses is a sound we need to really understand, change evolve, develop into something much, much better.
We need to recognise that the success of a few on the backs of under privilege: gambling and addiction isn’t really success.
The reason they don’t thrive is because we have neglected economic and business development in the inner city and discouraged innovation in the universities. What if the founder of Bet 365 and children of other legacy businesses, instead of using her first class econometrics degree from Sheffield University had been encouraged by her tutors, her family, her friends to think about her life completely independently of what her family expected and instead of learning how to super deliver gambling online, if she’d been able to think about how the people in her local area could share in a vision that could dynamise the many, not just the few and really bring innovation.
This street scene: people sitting on the street, gambling shops, nail bars, casinos, pawnshops, the idea of the market as something that’s advertising for inward investment rather than something that should be respected and nurtured needs to be challenged.
Business isn’t just about the existing family companies being reiterated in perpetuity, it’s about assisting us all to make a good living throughout our lives, not outdated means of exploiting people when we just don’t need the unknown realising we know nothing and can always do better, get better whoever we are, whatever our background, our life journey and contribution should be valued as unique.
The lesson we need to learn in 2019 perhaps, is that Asset Management is for objects and should never be applied to people: we’re free to make things much, much better.
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