Hive Health

I came across this title back when I was poking stool samples in a Jo’burg path lab. I have just read it again for the miracle of remade memory. This is one of the offbeat, off-format, cut n’ paste, journal- style little hardbacks that went massive in the 90s, packed with illustrations, doodles, postits from God, concrete poetry and the like.

Gordon Mackenzie was an artist who found himself in middle management at Hallmark Cards Inc. While his role was in products and marketing, he transcended executive approval and production line stupefaction by becoming a self-appointed mentor, a champion of autonomy. He delivered workshops on “responsible creativity”, the space between suicide and total freedom:

“To find Orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance where you benefit from the physicial, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organisation without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution”.

Our own hairballs are our memories, how we learn by rote to replicate a baseline standard of past successes. We learn it from each other too in our hunger for herd wisdom. His prescription is the courage to be genuine and to be led by intuition versus “pallid corporate appropriateness”. First you must find the goals of the organisation that touch your heart and release your passion to follow those goals. Inevitably you will fly off on a tangent, and passion will keep you in orbit, not subsumed by the corporate hole nor spinning away from it.

15 years later, some of the anti-establishment jive feels a little outdated – perhaps this is because I’ve never worked in a place which had 600 creatives on staff. Gordon’s workshops took place in Hallmark and other big companies, and his method was to shock corporates out of their masks with nonlinear tricks. I don’t feel it’s authenticity that strangles meaningful agency work, or even a lack of autonomy. If this century’s work culture is gradually unmasking, it’s perhaps becoming quite hard to focus without distraction.

It’s obvious that personal counterculture can make an employee potently valuable, and that creative energy is the stuff that makes the organisation greater than the sum of its parts. What Gordon teaches is that it doesn’t happen with the silencing of rationality. He tells us to transrationalise – to soar above the rational on the parachute of intuitive reason.  It sounds a little lonely, and it is. Not even Gordon can hold our hand when we fly. But we’ll be OK if we remember that parachute.

Tom Kelley of IDEO talks about Gordon MacKenzie here. 

Buy the book here.

We are ready to go now. We have had enough of Wardour Street. She has been good to us – vivacious, wild and at times a little weird.

Our new office was completed yesterday bar snagging, the annoying complexities of bringing the ‘internet’ across from the other side of Piccadilly  to Oxendon street and the worktops being refitted on the bar (my mistake).

It’s been a project I have held close to my heart.  Jas and Ian have kept a healthy distance, either in text book delegation or just scared to get embroiled in midnight discussions on rubber floors, iroko, oil painted car bonnets, fabricated steel and suitable adhesives for false glass eyes. I have been working with wonderful contractors in Spruce and working day to day hand in hammer with Wayne, our excellent project manager  who has dealt with me with the patience and understanding I can only hope to achieve with my clients. It has been a full-on 4 week build. Not just as we have been ploughing to get in as early as possible, but the enforced budget, has made me search high and low for the interesting and cool without spanking it all down at Vitra, which isn’t really ever going to be our style. Anyone who knows us, will know that we like a deal, and the chance for a huge treasure hunt is too good an opportunity to pass up.

The driving force behind this obsession with materials, space and interior design has been the brief. A few months ago we did a hackathon, which has influenced the very nature of  a huge number of elements of the office. Alongside this templated ride, sits the weight of having nearly 60 of the best waiting politely for their new home.

We kick off with our first monday in a few weeks, until then the lid is tight on this baby. Visits strictly limited. All that research into the concept of the modern office, space as facilitative collaborator, relational aethetics, and a penchant for school laboroatory worktops has culminated in 7000 square foot of what I hope one and all will consider blinding.

We have a a new phrase that popping up all over the place. Its as much a summary as a mantra. ‘Hand it over proud’. Whether ‘it’ be a brief for a mailer or a piece of copy it’s got to be you-right. Hand on heart I am pretty comfortable that Haymarket House, 1 Oxendon Street fits in with this. I cannot wait to hand it over. Nervous, expectant of everyones views, but proud nevertheless.

The picture above is where it all started. In the ‘research’ phase way back in June. In a freezing shed in Hatfield I discovered a job lot of salvage  iroko lab worktop from a local school. Four schools later, calls and trips to Merseyside, Hertford and Enfield and a little bit of folded here and there. We had gathered 30 square meters and enough of this most soulful of materials to start making some furniture and get the backbone of our new office.

When we kick open the doors I will  flickr a stack of photos for you. Wayne described  the space this week ‘an office with Soul’. By far the best complement I think I have had for a while. I hope that if you fancy it, pop in or come along to the tea party we are having once we are in an settled and everyone has got to grips with the quooker.

Despite what I can only consider to be one of my finest puns. This is a more serious blog that usual and one that comes after my biggest absence from blog writing in almost 5 years. Its time for a resurgence and as I am on holiday from tomorrow, I have vowed that I shall get back to the keyboard and get word-pressed again.

Sitting in The French House with a Change Consultant I met at Central St Martin’s, we got chatting about the respective reputations of the industries we have worked in. My company had worked across oil, banking, Microsoft and a much more diverse corporate world than I have to date.  When we got into The Hive Group,  the conversation typically shifted to pharma’s reputation, selling life and of course the usual Constant Gardner discussion.

It was only when we started to discuss the drug development cycle, was it apparent that the model, whilst far from perfect, has been successful when it comes to bringing patient benefit to life in our very real world. From CML drugs to new surgical proceedures, the profit motive and doing good by doing good has delivered a stack of life.  The fascinating part of the conversation was the proximity we both had to people who had needed those innovations – notably in cancer. When discussed those close to ourselves, and crisis requirements, then the profit motive seems to be more acceptable. Move away from our own families to a societal level  and the conceptual approach and a desire for a utopian world was in my drinking partners view morally much more acceptable. Clearly, keeping Society away from an individual level is permissible mist a solid session of half pints!

With recent news of huge fines and further coverage of us evil drug pedlars it’s been interesting to see the impact that this has had. It certainly increased the number of conversations I have had with friends and ‘bumpers’ about what we do as an industry.

For the last 4 weeks I have working closely with a team of contractors, builders, carpenters and associated trades on our new office (more to follow) Mid way through a on site morning meeting, there was some concern voiced that our business was going to be impacted by the news of the fines being paid in the US. Their concern was about the impact this would have on the people they see in our agency – the real world of healthcare business people. People not across the Atlantic or in corporate towers, but in the same postcode – local people who do good by doing good, or earn profit whilst making people better – depending on your view point.

Where the bubble of ‘anti’ has risen is in the more recent candidates we have interviewed for entry level postions. The news clearly lessens the supply of graduates who through in my view is a misguided moral view, would rather not work for a equivalent of Barclays Bank. Regardless of the naivety of this. It does prevent us from having a conversation about innovation, models of developing medicines and past performance of the sausage machine of health.And the simple fact is that is reduces down the talent pool for an industry that desperately needs young thinking and fresh perspectives.  I still feel the industry should be confident and cynical enough to be exploring new sustainable drug development methodologies whilst not being shy to admit that profit is a motive in the purest sense if you believe that without it the system can be efficient enough to be as life saving as it has.

Sam and I were due to be travelling to Istanbul for a European brand team meeting last Sunday. However, a few weeks before the meeting the location was changed, and it was confirmed that the new location would be Madrid. At the time it seemed like a much less exciting place to go seeing as I’ve never been to Istanbul before, but these things happen. The weekend before we were due to leave, it occurred to me that this was the day of the EUROs final, and Spain were playing Portugal in the semi-final on Wednesday. When they won (just about!) suddenly my disappointment about going to Madrid instead of Istanbul turned in to massive excitement – I was going to be in Madrid on the day Spain play in the EURO 2012 final.

We arrived mid-afternoon and decided to head out in to the town centre to watch the game, hoping for a bit of atmosphere to soak up. We found a little place called ‘Taberna San Bruno’, ordered some patatas huevo (egg and chips to you and me) and settled down for the game. As it got closer and closer to kick-off, the place filled with more and more excited Spaniards donning their famous red shirt.

Needless to say, as the game went on, the locals got more and more excited, singing and cheering like I’ve never heard before. When the final whistle went to signal the end of an historic 4-0 win, the place erupted. We made a move pretty soon after, only to find that the streets were buzzing with thousands of people celebrating the victory. We heard a drum beat down a side road and went over to investigate, only to find a guy in his window playing the drum, his neighbour playing a trumpet of some description, and scores of people dancing in the street below. You can see for yourself here:

Eventually we decided to get a cab back to the hotel to get some sleep before our 8am start where we were up first presenting. On the way we were faced with a woman knelt in the middle of a busy street waving a Spanish flag around here head whilst being swerved by the traffic, and this joyous fellow through the window of our taxi:

Despite being an Englishman, it was an absolutely amazing experience, and it was on a scale I just wasn’t expecting. Everybody showing such joy at the success of their national football team was really inspiring, and it was fantastic to be able to be a part of it.

So it turns out that you shouldn’t be too disappointed when that meeting invite you receive doesn’t seem like it will be very exciting. You never know what you might end up seeing.