A Brand New Era Begins

Welcome to 2021. A world of wonder where the new Twitter office has become a touch more civil, Facebook has become more savage, squirrel fur hats are on the up, and orange hair is on the out. Face masks are still required in supermarkets, but at least we here in Australia are allowed outside; even the Tennis is on its way should Rafa not tweak a hammy from watching too much The Queen's Gambit holed up in the Adelaide Hills. Here’s to another ride round the sun 

2020 saw time extended and compressed in tune with the rhythm of our lives. Home schooling, zooming, WFH and health concerns compressed time and drained the colour from life. The period extended as people pondered what to do in the flat spot in the adrenaline wave of uncertainty, ‘Will I have work in a few months?’ ‘How much longer will I have to home school?’ and existential questions like, ‘If you vaccinate against a virus that constantly mutates, will the need for vaccination ever end?’ I made that particular one stop by purchasing some recently rebranded Pfizer stock. Can’t beat em? Buy into the business model.

Productivity does not equal breakthrough 

2020 was the most productive but also one of our least innovative of times. My life had never felt so productive but also never so static. A recent Boston Consulting Group backs up my Trumpian use of feeling as fact. Their survey, grounded in data, found that while productivity scores across five hundred major enterprises had climbed, innovation metrics fell in equal measure. Managers could delegate a task but have yet to figure out how to drive new ideas. 

The myth that people wander off and come back with the big idea is finally being challenged. For every individual Edison idea, there is likely more ideas that are the product of people working together. Ideas take friction, tension and the push and pull of different minds seeing something at the same time. Tasks tend to classic flow states where past experience, aptitude and desire to complete a task mesh and you fly. It favours experience. Most people who can are dealing with the pandemic through a series of flow states, acting from instinct and urgency to drive the best outcome. This is productivity. 

Ideas are is different. It’s a myth that it happens in flow, that the big idea just appears while having a shower. It reveals itself slowly through things other people see, things you see, context changes etc. It favours naivety and it takes novelty, and divergence from what has gone before to drive breakthroughs. While we have been busy pushing the known to new heights of productivity, our future is going to rely on getting back to the technological breakthroughs that have marked human development. This is Innovation.

The death of nostalgia

My favourite voice from our year of madness was Farid Zakaria. He is like a modern day soothsayer. He speaks horrible truths and just sounds so damn reassuring doing it. In his bestselling book 10 Lessons For a Post-Pandemic World he makes the point that since the 1980s we have shifted from a belief in a market economy where the best companies thrive to a belief in a market society where it is winner takes all; in all facets of life. Combine that with watching Gillian Anderson play Aunt Maggie (all too convincingly) in The Crown, as she attacks both the Commonwealth as well as the common good and you start to see the seeds we have sown. 

We all have heard the notion that things were better before. This is true for the middle class but false for everyone else. in 2021, being a billionaire has never in human history been so good. If you had the means you just spent the last year watching your stocks go up and your stress go down. Jack Dorsey pushed the Donald off their platform from the Twitter office in that hotbed of start-up culture, French Polynesia. In a crisis those who can flee, do flee. This was as much the case during the bubonic plague as it is during our own more benign pandemic.

It’s also not true if you are poor. Global inequality has been closing for decades and in one piece of global policy that has worked the millennium development goals have driven substantive change. There is no doubt that Covid-19 is a regression but the delta is towards a continued closing of this gap. Without the adrenaline shot of large government stimulus, in real terms, it’s only the shrinking middle class who look backwards to what were legitimately better days. 

The myth of nostalgia really harks back to a sense we were more together as a society. Less divided in our woes and less split in the spoils of our wins. Perhaps it is the cult of individualism more than anything else that truly ails us. It has created a mono culture that is splitting us apart; society simply needs more substance than the doctrine of Reaganomics and the lack of referees has left us.

Is there a re-emergence to come? 

Brands are projections. There is a term for this. Anthropomorphism. It is defined as the perception of brand as an entity that has analogical human-like features. That is, it holds both mental and emotional states that we believe to be distinctively human like hope, fear, status, wellness etc. Eras in history tend to put a lens on these. The turn of the century was empire and stiff upper class Britishness. The dominant flavour of this era has been an America, anchored in the notion that to achieve we must celebrate the individual before the group. Nostalgia holds us in place misremembering our past in a black and white haze all the while innovation waits to colour our futures in colourful detail. 

From mono to technicolor

Are we about to see our own version of the roaring twenties where WW1 ensured that a new generation got a chance to make their mark? All the forward indicators would say yes. They show that our cultural codes and therefore where our brands draw their power is starting to change. Brands started since the 00s don’t talk to status through the lens of exclusivity but through inclusivity and attention to detail. They don’t speak to American rugged individualism and do it yourself, they speak to do it with us and a global collective. They don’t talk to achievement through conquering others but through conquering oneself. What is cool now is what is technological, what drives the most change is the .org or .com, and what resonates the most is acceptance of yourself as a small dot on our mother earth. Our 2030s will likely be very similar to our forebearers 1920s, as we herald in fully the silicon age and all of its promise and challenge.

Perhaps the new era won’t be home of the free but as ever the future belongs to the brave. 

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Be better to each other.