I understand the idea of the risk/reward principle, but I tend to see it as a mindset, a particular lens for viewing life through, or something closer to the rules of a particular game. A game, moreover, often played by people who think of themselves as ‘players’ and see their lives in terms of ‘winning’. Losing is not an option, and all that. It often comes – and no offence is meant to Kate here – with a keen sense of heroics and derring-do.

Although unbuckling might feel appropriate, swashbuckling tends to figure – at the very least metaphorically, so I couldn’t help chuckle when I googled ‘swashbuckling’ and Wikipaedia’s opening line quickly equated it with “rough, noisy and boastful swordsmen”. I know we’ve moved on a bit from rescuing damsels in distress, and nowadays the maidens have an equal right to bear arms. But if my honour – or even my petticoats – were in danger, I’d be tempted to hold for being ‘rescued’ by someone a bit more … well, admirable.

But I also get the nagging sense that most talk and thought about ‘risk and reward’ – despite the talk of journeys, embracing mindsets and the rest – is about the bottom-line: money. We measure success in pounds and pence, and the risk is in losing the coins we have rather than filling our purses with more of them. Which is fine, although we can be oddly coy about being quite that explicit. (“The first rule of Fight Club”, perhaps?)

And I’m one of those people who, looking at the situation, can’t help but think “But …”. It’s not just that the daily news has been rather heavily laden lately with examples where the idea of ‘risk and reward’ looks a bit flaky in the light of day. (As the topic is being done to death so widely, let’s just say ‘bankers’ and ‘bonuses’ and move on.) It’s also that the ‘when we say reward, we mean remuneration’ line of unspoken thinking is more complicated and problematic than success = money. And that voices are being raised that are saying that they think the risk/reward mechanism is malfunctioning. Here, for example, is Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle last Sunday:

Romney is right: Free enterprise is on trial. But he’s wrong about the question at issue. It’s not whether America will continue to reward risk-taking. It’s whether an economic system can survive when the real risks are so disconnected from the rewards.

Americans are starting to feel the game is rigged against them, which may be why Newt Gingrich’s bombastic attacks on “elites” are gaining traction. Workers feel cynical when those at the top get giant rewards no matter how badly they screw up, while the rest of us get screwed no matter how hard we work.”

If we want – maybe even need – people to take risks to keep progress going (and let’s leave the other cans of worms closed for now), we need to make sure the reward mechanism works. I don’t particularly mind ‘risk and reward’ being a cliché, but clichés do need to be essentially true. I agree wholeheartedly with Kate that ‘negative experiences’ can all too often stand in our way: that’s sad – but surmountable – when what we need to tackle is our own emotional and psychological reaction. But when the negative experience is a symptom of something systemic outside ourselves, ‘sad’ is far too weak an adjective. The very mechanism that’s supposed to be motivating us can be the very one that stops us acting if it sends the wrong messages, or delivers the wrong experiences. If risk and reward is going to be a workable equation, the two sides of the equation need to demonstrate balance.

Despite which, do we wrestle with the idea of reward in a broader sense – beyond remuneration or status – more than with the idea of risk? For many people, viewed through the traditional lens, the medium-term prospect is increased risk and static reward. Everyone needs a way forward, but that might – in our current circumstance – mean some mental adjustment. Which might include a model of risk and reward that’s a little broader, a little more flexible, a little more adjusted to the notion of variety. The idea of the EVP (Employee Value Proposition) looks beyond pay and bonuses to identify the other ‘rewards’ that matter and motivate, but I don’t see much activity that looks at whether the risk side of the equation could merit a bit of tweaking too.

What motivates each of us is personal and individual: my reward might not be yours. And, although we have different appetites for risk in its broadest sense, we also have different ideas of what we might risk and what we might not. Career change, for example, would strike some of us as epic folly, but if your idea of reward is centred on satisfaction and your day having meaning, the possible financial risk of change – most people who move sideways see their bank balance move downwards – might be outweighed by the personal reward of their new career. (And the satisfaction of having had the courage to make the leap.) Funny how the standard way of describing such a move uses such negative language: downsizing, jacking it all in …

I’m not a born desecrator of traditions, but I’d rather place my faith in what could be than in sticking with what is (or retreating to what was). So I can’t help but wonder if the thing we most need to take a risk with is risk itself – or at least our model of it. Any working life – indeed, any life – has crossroads or forks in the road where we face dilemmas and conundrums as well as opportunities. Till we get there, any road is one less travelled for us, and we have to decide how to choose between Road to Nowhere or Highway to Hell.

As well as allegedly giving us reasons to doubt or hesitate, age and experience are also supposed to give us wisdom and a broader selection of yardsticks to measure things with. If 2012 is a year where you are planning on making a Big Leap – and what else is a leap year for? – don’t just think about frying pans and fires: think about what encourages you to see them as frying pans and fires. A narrow vision has another name: a tunnel.

I’ll leave you with two very different quotes. The first is from an obscure late 70s Anglo-Finnish band (Wigwam), where the ambiguous tone has always left me feeling that ‘destitute’ might mean more than an accountant’s interpretation:

In his thread-bare outfit tearing through the parking-lot,
dodging his limbs that kick like ancient cannon.
Toting hardware just to shoot his way out of this plot
that holds him to the wheels that Adam ran on.
They say you must assemble your ensemble by detail
or else end up as destitute as Randolph.”

The second is from a classic of literature – EM Forster’s A Room With A View – and subtley makes a rather good point about taking the risk of having a wider outlook:

We residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little. Handed about like parcels from Venice to Florence to Rome, unconscious of anything outside Baedeker, anxious to get done and go on elsewhere. I abhor Baedeker. I’d fling every copy in the Arno.”

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Even if you are a BBC4 watcher with a thesaurus perched next to your remote control, some background might help. Apart from his print and TV work, Meades is also Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and (in the language of its own website) a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. His work, as blogger Aethelred the Unread describes it by comparison with the documentary-maker Adam Curtis, has a point to make:

Like Curtis, he’s not so much a polemicist for a particular viewpoint as he is a polemicist for the necessity of thinking for oneself. Like Curtis, he’s interested in unorthodox juxtapositions (especially of apparently serious and trivial things), and in approaching weighty topics from unusual angles.”

His current TV series focuses on France, where he now lives, although it won’t help if you want to learn about garlic, accordion music or a nice gite in the Dordogne. The angle – to over-simplify monstrously – is to consider France as it would like to see itself, and to ask why it does and why it wants to. France vs. The Myth of France, if you like. His love-it-or-loathe-it style (acerbic but deadpan) strikes many as arrogant or pretentious, although I suspect his response might be to point out that we can’t hope to improve without initial pretending – and then aspiring – to be better than we are. What it mostly conceals, often behind some formidably dense use of words, are occasional moments of righteous anger. One of those flashpoints – from which the title of this piece comes – was a section in Episode 2 that explored diversity.

Meades’ argument was that the French Empire’s attitude to its colonies, and particularly to its colonials, was very different from the English one. Whereas the English saw colonies as places to import raw materials from, the French saw them as places to which to export ‘Frenchness’. The aim was to make these people – in Martinique, Vietnam or French Guinea (which still elects members of the French Parliament and uses the Euro – French. As a constitutional secular country (of which it was clear Meades broadly approved), and a very ‘statist’ country, France has been – at least in theory – ‘colour blind’: as a French citizen, you can grow, learn, develop and so on regardless of the starting point. There was fair warning that, behind the trademark Ray Bans, he would focus on diversity in Episode 1, where the syllable count dropped for the aggressively stated:

The constant injunction to celebrate vibrant diversity is moronic.”

(And if you need proof that someone like Meades can reach a broad audience, that very line was quoted this week on The Official Board For Leyton Orient Fans, whose posters use more refined language than Guardian Cryptic Crossword fans. Another myth blown.)

But, for avoidance of doubt, we’re not into something like Norman Tebbitt’s ‘Cricket Test’ here. Meades’ argument, if I can do it justice, is that emphasising our diversity and clinging to our origins holds us back. By valuing ‘the community’ – a fashionable phrase, but for many people not a particularly meaningful one – over the individual, we restrict and limit our view (and theirs) of what they might be expected to achieve. By categorising people into communities, diversity can actually be divisive rather than diverse.

Aethelred the Unread quotes another excerpt from Episode 1 (which I’m truncating a little):

Identity, in this sense, is a form of communitarianism, which defines people by their race and inherited culture rather than by their individuality, their aspirations, and their talents. It’s a kind of prison.”

As Meades explored in Episode 2, it can be a prison of the prisoners’ own making too. Looking at the tendency in recent decades of some minority groups in France to ‘not play the game’ of assimilation, and to live a quasi-separatist life within an existing country, his concern is that France has no way of making a response. Constitutionally, everyone’s a citizen. End of. Faced with groups of citizens that won’t join, it feels like a jilted suitor: it doesn’t know what to do.

Moreover, he says the problems that this situation poses. How can society help – even if it genuinely wants to – to make the most of the opportunities it can provide to someone who will most likely decline the offer? As one Digital Spy commenter observed, contrasting the French scenario with the British ‘multiculturalism model’:

He equally pointed out the flaws in the French model of ruthless integration. What struck me about the faith / immigration / identity bit was just how dense it was in terms of the opinions he was trying to get across.”

Indeed. If anyone needed a lesson in the challenges that diversity can bring – and not just for ‘the diverse’ – then this was a programme to provide it. The pleasant surprise, judging by the places online comment has turned up since, is that the audience wasn’t as self-selective as prejudice might lead you to believe. (Leyton Orient fans plainly aren’t prisoners of people’s perceptions of footie fans, and hats off to them.)

And difficult viewing or not, Meades continues to attract a generally warm press that respects a refusal to dumb-down. Here’s a TV Review from Spike Magazine:

Illustrated overtly in documentaries about Nazi and Stalinist architecture and more subtly in ones about British culture, the message Meades tries to convey, and rightly so, is that identifying too closely with where one comes from stymies progression of culture and diminishes us as individuals. Modernism, for example, has no ‘nationalist etiquette’ attached to it and was thusly despised by the far right; fascism allows its subjects no identity other than homogeneity. This might sound unpatriotic, but people (those Republican candidates especially) should consider whether they’d rather be defined by their background or by their talents and individuality.”

If you have a professional role in developing others, or helping them to develop themselves, there are some important points to ponder crammed in there. I’m no fan of Modernist architecture (living in Milton Keynes, you discover than aversion therapy does work), but I’m all for people defining themselves by their talents. No final angry point to make, but if you have nothing better to do tomorrow night at 9pm, tune in to BB4 for the final episode. It’ll be a Dundee cake of a viewing experience, but there’ll be enough food for thought to keep you digesting for quite a while.

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I came across an old adage – “Fear can keep us up all night long, but faith makes one fine pillow” – that left me wondering if we don’t put too much emphasis on what we believe about the world around us, rather than on being mindful or receptive to the faith that others have in us? Most of us appreciate the merits of a fine pillow: whether we hold to a religion or live as atheists or agnostics, our lives are still touched by sorrow, frustration, setbacks or doubt, and a little pampering never goes amiss.  In terms of the comfort or sense of strength that it can bring, faith can definitely be its own reward. But I’m thinking about the idea of faith in a less … well, self-centred way: the benefits we can bring about by showing faith in others.

We place a lot of value on self-confidence and self-belief, not least because we do actually believe that (cliché alert) faith can move mountains. As an organisation or a manager, it’s understandable that we’re going to look favourably on the self-confident. Most people’s working lives have one or two mountains that need moving, and it’s the kind of task most of us would delegate given half a chance.

It’s where faith meets delegation that the trouble can arise. Delegation isn’t abdicating: done properly and effectively, it involves making sure that the delegated task or responsibility is achievable. Delegating is about making sure, within the bigger picture, that the job gets done, not just that you’ve managed to remove it from your own in-tray, to do list or workflow system. It’s not about passing or stopping bucks, it’s about helping to make them.

Put yourself in the shoes of the reportee who’s now holding the shovel and ponder how much impact your ability to not just have faith in them but to demonstrate it can make a difference. With only a shovel beside you and a mountain in front of you, knowing someone else has faith in you might not be a pillow exactly, but it certainly helps. (Paradoxically, given the opening paragraphs, The Bible has a good quote to offer:

Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you. [Peter 3:15]“

If your plucky (or, more likely, anxious) shovel-bearer is wrestling with a few doubts, your faith in them can be a step towards them building their own self-belief. This should be a point not lost on any line manager, or on L&D practitioners. When we reviewed the responses to the 2010 Learning Transfer Survey, the questions where respondents indicated the least frequent use of effective techniques in supporting learning transfer and development included:

• Do non-monetary reward strategies encourage learners to transfer and apply new learning?
• Do non-monetary reward strategies encourage line managers to support training transfer?

Other aspects that bear consideration in relation to our hypothetical mountain-shoveller were also brought to light. The Survey showed that Learner Selection for development is the least used cluster of learning transfer practices, including aspects such as learners’ belief in their own competence, and the extent to which they are motivated by achievement. The latter can be a conundrum: those most motivated by an ideal of achieving mastery can be those most affected by a lack of confidence in their own ability to overcome challenges.

This is a situation, as Cyril Kirwan explored in his book, Improving Learning Transfer (which our MD, Anton Franckeiss, reviewed for Training Journal) (download the review as a PDF file), where mentoring, coaching and feedback from a line manager can make a fundamental difference:

Perhaps the most important way in which changes in self-efficacy and motivation are enabled is through the feedback process. […] However, the way in which either positive or negative feedback is given is extremely important. Badly given feedback will tend to widen the gap between perceptions of demands and ability […], while properly given feedback should help close it.”

While it’s worth recognising that some line managers find the progress of those that report to them a threat to their position and status, we should at least hope that the majority recognise that the on-going health of the organisation (or, to put it another way, ‘the hand that feeds’) stands to potentially benefit rather more if everyone’s abilities are developed more effectively. In a manager’s capacity as coach, helping people on their way to greater fulfilment of their promise can sometimes involve helping at the starting point. As another man of the cloth, Martin Luther King, once put it:

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

And if any managers are wondering where their reward in their faith in others lies, there’s a strong argument that this faith is also its own reward. Consider the words of Deena Ingham, interviewed previously on this blog, in her short biography:

One of the main focuses of [my] work in Higher Education is encouraging lifelong learning – getting people to recognise that it is never too late to learn a skill or develop an academic approach that will prove life-changing. Graduates who never had enough faith in their own abilities to believe they could achieve are transformed, and that in itself is inspiring and hugely satisfying.”

For another testimony to the power and impact of placing faith in others – and to the value they receive from your having done so – I’d wholeheartedly recommend a post on Jon Bartlett’s ProjectLibero blog, called The Debt. It’s a tribute to a man who loaned him (without obligation) the money to pay for the completion of his training, and who died recently. Whether we remember good samaritans for their intentions or their money, Jon’s closing words have something important to say about value, and the power of a very earthly faith in one another:

Earlier this week I blogged on price vs value. Although the blog was popular I felt I’d not fully made my point. Little did I know that John would make the point more eloquently than I ever could. He invested in me when I wasn’t sure of my value. There was a specific price to pay but he was willing to gamble all that money on the potential value within me.

Thank you John for that belief in me, for fanning the flames and giving me that chance. I know the money was repaid but I’ll always be in debt to that trust. I’ll miss you.”

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Maybe we should stop talking about ourselves as if we were a different breed.”

Before anyone puts their hand up to ask to complain (there’s a comment box below, by the way), I come not to bury HR (although the praise might not be fulsome.) In some ways, the piece strikes the same nerve endings that The Guardian’s HR: Friend or Foe? article did last year – although in this instance the comments have been much more favourable.

In this particular case, one of the issues raised was HR professionals’ reaction to being laid off: a first person lesson in “this time it’s personal”. As one commenter noted:

Having seen first hand the attitude of *some* HR pros when on the orgs side of the desk vs the being laid off side of the desk this is a great reminder to us all that what HR pros do is not *just* business. It affects the lives of fellow humans in big ways all the time. When we forget that we get it wrong.”

I remembered a woman I met at one of last year’s #connectinghr events, who was in the middle of the same experience. Two things about her reaction were particularly striking:

• It was fairly obvious that she at the very least hoped that she’d always strived to remember that being laid off is pretty damn personal for the person on the receiving end
• Her (very polite) dismay at her professional colleagues’ attitudes to CV-reading and their typecasting of potential candidates based solely on their most recent experience.

As we commented at the time in our write up of the event, her concern was that she was:

[...] being viewed as potential employers as a redundancy expert despite a long career in HR and a wish to be involved in aspects she values as being more concerned with development. Apart from the obvious issue of motivation, there was concern that hidden talents are being further buried rather than disinterred as a result of this Dymo™ label management approach.”

This concern was, despite the sadness of the circumstance, surely admirable in that it combined both the personal and the professional: there was a bigger professional failing at play here than merely her own circumstance – she perceived the HR profession as ignoring an opportunity to make the most of the talents available to the organisation(s) it serves.

But is there a bigger point than just the personal/professional dilemma inherent in HR? That any discipline tends to apply only its own focus on any given situation. Having arrived at its own truth, that becomes The Truth Full Stop. The economic trajectory of Japan, for example, has been something discussed and written about mostly by economists and political commentators. The public has wound up with a viewpoint that, as far as we’re interested in any case, Japan has endured two lost decades and is down to its economic uppers. When this viewpoint was challenged in The NY Times by Eamonn Fingleton, debate broke out on several websites, including a response from Professor Paul Krugman (and a counter-response from Fingleton). The truth, when examined, often turns out to be more debatable than is perhaps convenient: we need bigger nutshells, or to rethink our idea of the best container.

The ‘HR vs Human Being’ strand in Chris Fields’ HRFishbowl also reminded me of another piece of writing: Sunstein and Thaler’s Nudge, where the authors divided the species into ‘Econs’ and ‘Humans’. Reviewing it, we pointed out that the subsequent rather condescending tone all too easily becomes not just patronising but repellent. The message – gained more from the authors’ tone than their words – felt very much like something to the effect of “the Humans need to shape up and learn something from the Econs, who Have All The Answers”. Orwell might not have been writing with a specific profession in mind when he wrote “Four legs good, two legs bad”, but economists and HR professionals wouldn’t be the first of the professional classes to leave others feeling that there was a hint of this in play.

I also remembered a friend’s comment as we left the cinema after watching The Iron Lady, that an inability or unwillingness to take on board opinions from other viewpoints is a root cause of isolation. And the isolated, other than hermits with a BBC News Channel fixation, tend to become not just under-informed, but to lose the ability to understand or recognise the cases or feelings of others. By the time it’s become obvious to those around you that you’re not taking their point of view on board, it’s too late: they will already have realised, and their ability to feel – rather than display – respect will already be diminished.

Nor is this the only shortcoming of not taking on board other points of view: innovation and creativity (including their skinnier business-centric cousin, problem-solving) often thrive in situations where different disciplines meet on level(-ish) playing fields. (Combine several different sets of tunnel-vision and if nothing else you at least wind up with a wider, better lit tunnel.)

Another facet of modern working life we should all be familiar with is teamwork, although – see our earlier article – it’s a term we misuse frequently and badly. When we’re truly undertaking teamwork – rather than solowork, crowdwork or groupwork – the ability to recognise and value the other inputs is vital to the success of the whole. Grandstanding is for violin virtuosi; teamwork is for orchestras.

We also already know that one of the most empowering things we can grant anyone is a sense of their own contribution and ‘voice’. Any professional discipline that doesn’t recognise that this ‘voice’ may speak to them from a different angle on the world is in for a potential shock. If we don’t challenge ourselves, we shouldn’t be surprised if others step up to the task for us.

And we should remember that the search for respect is a universal human experience. Consider the following extract for Roman Krznaric’s recent and very thought-provoking The Wonderbox:

Respect can also emerge in the most unusual professions. I know of someone who shifted from being a refrigeration mechanic to becoming an embalmer in a funeral parlour. The reasons he loves his job is because he receives so much genuine appreciation from people for making their deceased loved ones look peaceful, dignified and even beautiful. ‘I have a folder full of thank-you letters from family members,’ he told me.”

It’s a lovely, touching story. But let’s hope we don’t all have to work with the deceased before we get a thank you from the living.

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The challenge begins with a comparison between economics and psychology. While the latter traditionally sought to address and minimise pathologies (on the basis that an absence of them meant a healthy mind), it has spawned a new paradigm of positive psychology that focuses on fulfilling human potential rather than merely on curing mental illness. The scale was extended to cover not just zero down to a negative figure, but also upwards to a positive figure. Haque contends that economics, however, still operates on the basis of a negative paradigm. What we call a healthy economy is one where ‘economic pathologies’ have been minimised or removed: if we remove barriers to commerce or trade, the economy will enjoy ‘health’. And as business is based on this economic paradigm, business-as-usual follows suit:

“Business” as we know it, live it, and do it is the expression of this economics of antipathology.”

Moreover, indeed:

Just like a patient on a nineteenth-century couch, our regimen rests on a foundational belief: that, at its best, an economy is one that’s not visibly, wheezingly unhealthy.”

That “at its best” duly comes in for a sustained philosophical, economic and intellectual kicking. What do we mean by “best”, and – more importantly – best for who, exactly? Wedded to models forged in the industrial era, we gauge economic health on the basis of output, and GDP on the basis of financial capital, but – Haque contends – we too rarely ask ourselves if these are adequate yardsticks. There is a repeated metaphor that explains it clearly: what we have is effectively a car where we have a rev counter that tells us the engine is spinning away, but no speedometer to tell us if all that revving is actually getting us anywhere.

This metaphor is reviewed in the light of a broader context of different types of capital – natural, intellectual, human, social, emotional and organisational – and recent trends. While much has been made of the stagnation or weakness of financial capital in the aftermath of 2008, indicators for many other types of capital have been falling for some time. Not only are we not generating financial wealth as vigorously as we might have appeared to have been doing in earlier times, but we’re not creating ‘the good life’ – the one that is fulfilling in ways beyond the ability to buy stuff.

Haque’s first call is to move away from the negativity of economics to a replacement based on a Greek word (eudaimonia) that represented their model and vision of this ‘good life’. In a eudaimonic evaluation, any concept of ‘rich’ has to be fundamentally re-written:

[…] rich with relationships, ideas, emotion, health and vigor, recognition and contribution, passion and fulfilment, and great accomplishment and enduring achievement, exactly what “business,” “output,” and “product” seem so achingly deficient at producing. That concept of prosperity is very different than the one we know today.”

Think back to that comparison with positive psychology: this is an attempt to redraw our concept of prosperity to embrace far more than financial wealth and to incorporate ‘higher-order wealth’ – the things that give human life a sense of meaning and fulfilment. (Although the book is a very different outlook on life to Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge – see our review – it’s call for measuring fulfilment rather than the rev counter of product has interesting echoes in the Prime Minister’s interest in a national ‘happiness index’, but is considerably more explicit in its argument that traditional measurements aren’t giving us very uplifting readings.)

This isn’t a book that is going to satisfy those looking for detailed case studies – although detailed research is cited, some of it from Haque’s own Havas Media Lab, revealing that at least some of our world’s largest businesses have started to grasp some of the message and wrestle with some of the issues. (Haque is explicit, however, that even the best performers against his lab’s revised indices still record plenty of black marks.) Nor is it a book that provides neat ‘7 easy steps’ checklists for the reader to obediently tick off – indeed, from his written reactions to some elements of modern “business”, it’s highly likely the author would consider them a form of either self-delusion or torture.

That said, he does provide some outline first steps for organisations looking to move ‘from business to betterness’, and to examine how they can contribute to a higher order human wealth beyond shareholder value. Calling for vision and mission statements to be replaced respectively by ambitions and intentions, the shift is more realistically one of focus. Strikingly similar to another common contemporary failure of corporate communications – the tendency to write as if the organisation is its own audience, as noted year after year by web usability guru Jakob Nielsen as one of the biggest usability gaffes – the problem with most vision and mission statements is that they talk only in terms of what the organisation will achieve for itself.

What’s mostly strikingly absent is any sense that the wider benefit stands to gain anything from its continuing existence. There’s plenty of competitive aggressiveness, but the talk is of shares of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. You don’t need to move far beyond the limitations of a product-output based GDP model to see a link with the very contemporary and very widespread worry about a lack of growth: as Haque has by this point already argued, “business as usual” isn’t necessarily delivering successfully even on its own terms.

What the book quite clearly isn’t is a dewy-eyed call for a return to simplistic living based on an ancient model: it’s a call for humankind to move on, and to do so for its own sake. As the author concludes:

For the Greeks, unfurling the thread of kairos [a turning point or critical moment] often meant daring to challenge the will of the Olympians. But our challenge might be even more arduous: daring to transcend the built-in self-limitations of our own weather-beaten beliefs. Every critical moment asks nothing less of us than assuming the mantle of protagonists in the story of human prosperity. It’s probably a lot easier to just keep punching the time card.”

Even in the digital equivalent of just 64 pages, this is a very challenging read even if it’s a fundamentally modest one on the author’s part – he is firm in his closing paragraphs that his sketchy blueprint is not the answer, but that it exists to be bettered. But what he wants for all of us is for us to live better, truly richer lives and to experience betterness. As he commented on his Harvard Business Review blog:

Creating a better 21st century means choosing to stop living in the 20th century”.

This betterness extends beyond the economic – it takes in the social too. Not merely at the level of Corporate Social Responsibility, but at the level where our definition of economics is adapted to see the role of the economy as being to serve the well-being not just of itself but of the rest of human life too. The message here is that old models have outlived not just their context but their usefulness, and we must face the challenge of changing them. And that challenge is not his, but ours.

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Essentially, the arguments are around intellectual property rights and digital piracy: as we embrace Web 2.0 and user-content (and, by extension, social media, crowd-sourcing and many other topics you may already feel you’ve read your fill of), it’s technically far too easy for people to upload copies of films, music and so on that has someone else’s copyright legally attached to it. (Unless you’ve never watched anything on YouTube or burned a copy of a friend’s CD to iTunes, it’s a fair bet you’ve broken copyright law.) Because it’s easy, it happens; because the end result is free, other people watch, listen to or re-download it. Various high profile websites’ issue isn’t so much with the problem as with the proposed solution: if someone uploads a copy of a Hollywood movie to Wikipedia or YouTube, SOPA would – if enacted – mean that Wikipedia/YouTube has broken the law and could be taken down in total, Google could be forced to remove links to them, and so on … That’s why you either had to do your own thinking or find it in a book yesterday.

Predictably, it’s become something of an ‘old media vs. new media’ battle. In the old camp, the film, music and publishing industries are understandably keen to protect their IPR and their revenue. In the new media camp, they may appreciate the IPR/copyright argument, but they see sledgehammers about to be applied to nuts. Having worked in publishing, in national libraries, and in new media, I personally see something that’s been a long time coming, a number of cats being let out of bags, and a lot of attempts to bolt stables that the horses left some time ago.

At one level, there’s an argument that the media industries might have done well to learn a lesson from the recorded music industry since the arrival of MP3s and the Internet. Technology has wrought profound changes in social behaviour around music: not just Amazon and its ilk undercutting record shops (which are dying out at quite dizzying speed), but sales of physical media falling too. I buy CDs by the sack load, but a) I’m quite old, b) I still burn them to my own computer, and c) I have some sympathy for the performer, as they usually get a slice of slighter larger cake that way. (We’ll come back to that point too.) The trend towards downloading, however, continues: it’s quick and easy, and even where it isn’t free it’s usually cheaper. From the consumer’s point of view, what’s not to like? Meanwhile, when onward distribution is just a click away (the BBC’s coverage of the launch of 60 new Facebook apps says tech reporters are calling this ‘frictionless sharing’), on it inexorably goes.

On a day when Kodak has filed for bankruptcy protection, it’s easy to think that industries might learn to take a keener interest in the writing on the wall. Or the postings on the Walls, the tweets, blogs and all the rest. Kodak actually invented the digital camera, as Techradar.com explain:

A Kodak engineer credited with inventing the digital camera has revealed how bewildered company executives couldn’t understand why anyone would ever want to look at images on a TV screen when he first proposed the idea of a ‘filmless camera’ to them in 1975.”

Nearly a hundred years earlier, Kodak had launched the world’s first consumer camera. The slogan at the time was: “You press the button, we do the rest.” Now, of course, our premise with most tech is “we press the button – or the screen – and we do the rest too”. Kodak’s dilemma is that we moved on faster than the company.

As a musician and writer, however, I can’t help look at the whole debate from another angle. It’s one that was raised in one of 2010’s more provocative books about human interaction with technology and the world it’s creating: Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget (a book we reviewed here earlier). Lanier is also a writer and musician (as well as a technological genius), and is concerned not so much for the health of the industries that license and distribute humankind’s creative endeavours as for the impact of digital rights and payment systems on creators.

Myths about poets starving in garrets for the purity of their art aside, creators need to eat, house themselves, buy iPads and pay their broadband bills too: without a means of making a living from their art, there is no incentive to produce it. There is a basic reward and recognition argument here: we get what we pay for, and we can’t count on not getting what we don’t pay for – it has to come from somewhere.

But there is also a lesson for the digital industry giants here, largely around the rush to embrace what’s technologically possible without necessarily thinking through the larger consequences. In the interest of trying to maintain balance in what is a far more complex issue than the headlines can ever suggest (but then subtlety isn’t the point of headlines), some of the very original pioneers – the ones working in research labs years before any of us had a web browser – had actually given the economics of an online world serious consideration. To quote from Lanier’s book:

[Ted] Nelson is perhaps the most formative figure in the development of online culture. He invented the digital media link and other core ideas of connected online media back in the 1960s. He called it “hypermedia.”

Nelson’s ambitions for the economics of linking were more profound than those in vogue today. He proposed that instead of copying digital media, we should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression – as with a book or a song – and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it is accessed.”

Unfortunately, as a race we have been no more successful in developing a universal online micro-payments system than we have in resisting the early Net trope of ‘information wants to be free’, or in eliminating theft as a human behaviour simply by making it illegal. (Which is, after all, another nutshell way of saying what SOPA and PIPA are trying to achieve.)

Lanier also pointed out another factor that contributed: the sceptical disbelief that one day millions of us would ever want to publish our words, actions, music or whatever for the world to ‘share’. The early pioneers of the New and the web mostly saw it as something we would contribute to rather than merely absorb or consume: even Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay that was to subsequently inspire some of them saw his ‘memex’ as something its user would add to. But steeped in a world in which publishers, record companies and film studios were cultural gatekeepers, many could not foresee “a world with a million active voices”.

Writing with hindsight, Lanier says:

If we idealists had only been able to convince those skeptics, we might have entered in a different, and better, world once it became clear that the majority of people are indeed interested in and capable of being expressive in the digital realm.”

I can’t say that people uploading pirated content to the web are ‘being expressive in the digital realm’: most of them aren’t doing it to make overblown points about property being theft. But theft is a universal aspect of human behaviour. And Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and the rest all already exist: the cat has left the bag and the horse has left the stable. Much as several websites’ behaviour yesterday was a novel form of protest (unsurprisingly attacked in print today – David Aaronovitch’s article in today’s Times is one example), it would be interesting to see if the industries seeking to protect their interests as the world moves on could come up with a new model that not only works for them but accepts that the world has changed.

It’s not a case of ‘the revolution will not be televised’, to co-opt an over-used quote: it’s that the television will be revolutionised and that resistance probably is futile. Possibly confounding our kneejerk expectations of American political divides, the BBC today reported the following among a number of responses:

Senator John Cornyn, a Texan Republican, also expressed his views via Facebook. “SOPA: better to get this done right rather than fast and wrong. Stealing content is theft, plain and simple, but concerns about unintended damage to the internet and innovation in the tech sector require a more thoughtful balance, which will take more time,” he wrote.”

There’s nothing that says the future has to be either the web or the traditional industries (another example of a conundrum that reminds of HRBartender’s excellent Thinking Both/And post), although that’s how it could all too easily play out. And the ball is in the traditional industries’ court, waiting for a well thought through return shot. It’s a big challenge, but one that relies on their forte – creativity – to address it. If they held out an olive branch across the analogue-digital divide, maybe their digital ‘foes’ could work with them to put it in place?

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There were quite a few points I wanted to pick Emma up on, in the nicest possible way. First of these was her surprise at Apple’s apparent introduction of stern social media protocols, given the money it makes from handheld devices that encourage ‘the free-flowing ideas of the individuals on the payroll’. Once some of the world had stopped loading candle apps on their iPads and leaving £400’s worth of hi-tech equipment outside shops to mourn Steve Jobs (I’m no accountant, but a tea-light would have said the same, and been far cheaper and less of a personal data security risk), I got the impression that the control-freak tendencies of the recently deceased were aired more freely than previously. And Apple, for all the design savvy of its products (for which thanks should strictly speaking go to Johnny Ive), is a company that makes it very hard to dig beneath the OS, install open source software, and is very keen that we load our (very profitable) new toys with apps, tunes, books, movies and so on bought from an online store that very much runs by their rules. Apple’s version of the world is impeccably stylish, but pretty tightly closed. I’m not sure everyone wants to rule the world, but Apple is keener than most: their internal application of the tendency didn’t surprise me in the least.

The second point at which I paused mentally was her final point:

Responsible staff understand that for a group of individuals to function together in an effective way, there needs to be an agreed set of protocols. If these are developed in consultation and respect for the impact on valued employees, then their feeling of involvement and ownership can be maintained, even grown.”

The opening words generated a reflex wince: I can’t read that without thinking that “Responsible staff understand” is the kind of opening to a sentence that leaves the firm impression that a) the author considers themselves to speak from a position of authority, and b) has no intention of being disagreed with. When I encountered “for the impact on valued employees” in the next sentence, I’m afraid I winced again. I’m not inclined to be irresponsible or unvalued, but the tacit condescension the paragraph – I hope unintentionally – left me feeling that I might be more inclined to be so if I was on the receiving end of too many more sentences. Surely if HR want people to feel involved and to have a sense of ownership, dividing the responsible from the irresponsible and the valued from the chaff isn’t the most optimistic first step? Some of the people I’ve worked with over the years might have said something quite unpleasant about the horse she rode in on.

But I’m being discourteous to someone I’ve never met, so I’ll apologise. The article’s central argument – that there should be a trade off between protocols, rules and procedures on one hand and creativity on the other, and the tone of delivery of the message is critically important – is an important one, and one that should be central to innovation. But I think the article missed two bigger points.

The first can’t be made without being sweepingly rude about HR as an entire profession, but here goes … I strongly suspect that a large percentage of the working population of the UK routinely does things that HR have issued memos, guidelines, handbooks, procedural documents and entire intranets sternly warning them against doing. There, I said it. Civilisation didn’t end, the ceiling is still intact, and no-one got struck by lightning. Most people are too far from the watchful eyes of HR most of the time to be policed, monitored and cajoled to the nth degree. While the cats are safely occupied in their office on the 6^th floor, guess what the mice will get up to?

HR communications might perhaps give a message – intentional or otherwise – that anything that strays from written diktats will lead to the massacre of the first-born, and people with immense latent creativity might move on to more agreeable shores. But, in most organisations, I don’t think HR is close enough to the action to actually stifle innovation.

The second, rather bigger point that Emma’s article missed was, with due respect, an open goal. Indeed, the point was sitting right there in its title: actually stimulating innovation never quite made an appearance. The argument began and ended with “There have to be some rules: anyone sensible knows that”, but what the rules were to achieve didn’t quite heave into view. Given the distance between HR and day-to-day working life, that’s perhaps not so surprising. But another article – published in McKinsey Quarterly – seemed to strike nearer the mark, addressing the behaviour of people who might rather more directly impact on the working life of others: How leaders kill meaning at work. The opening paragraph makes its point pretty directly:

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle, found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.”

I’m not sure that McKinsey got the target group for its message entirely right: the most powerful influence on workplace behaviour – and learning (application), work satisfaction, engagement and more besides – is the line manager, rather than the ‘Senior Executive’ per se, although McKinsey can perhaps be forgiven for addressing its most probable readership. Indeed, they acknowledge this in a later, important paragraph that – to my mind – came rather closer to identifying where many organisations stifle, rather than stimulate, innovation:

[…] managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions. These include dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off project teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers.”

And perhaps it’s mere coincidence, but their points also echo findings into the most common factors that enhance workplace engagement (feeling that you are making a valued contribution, having a sense of ‘voice’ and the opportunity to take ownership of tasks or responsibilities that you can develop).

The same is true of some of the more important factors that work against successful transfer and application of learning, where a lack of opportunity to practise and a lack of line manager support and encouragement make the Workplace Environment group of learning transfer factors among the least frequently used. If you’d like to read more, you can request a copy of the Learning Transfer 2010 Report – the findings of the first national survey into learning transfer practice in the UK. As one of the respondents to the survey was moved to comment:

I would estimate that millions of pounds are wasted on training in the UK where learners are unable to put what has been learned to use due to other more pressing matters or managers’ lack of support in encouraging learners to apply their freshly invigorated skills-sets back in the workplace. Enlightened leaders are aware of this and challenge their staff to apply new skills and share knew knowledge straight away.”

There’s plenty of good reading to be had about how innovation comes about, and ways in which it can be helped to blossom – one starting point might be our earlier review of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. There’s excellent reading in Gwyn Teatro’s blog post Encouraging Innovation & The Story of the 5 Monkeys (where one of the commenters points out a more valuable side of Steve Jobs, triggered by an interest in calligraphy and a belief that things could be beautiful). The idea of allowing people the space and latitude to be creative is undoubtedly important: as we commented in an online Q&A session with Peter Cook:

There’s an argument that ‘play’ means more that celebrating success and creating great places to work – that it involves giving people the space and the permission to experiment a little, or to extemporise from processes and procedures. Through play, through loose rather than strict interpretation, can come ‘happy accidents’ – serendipitous moments that provide real breakthroughs and insights. These are essential by-products of the quirkiness of people: if human capital is the golden goose, these are the free-range eggs.”

But, to answer Emma Littmoden’s rhetorical question, an HR team that’s aware that innovation needs stimulating within its organisation might want to consider talking to the managers rather than just revising the rules for the employees. It might be not the rules that need changing, but the nature and culture of the game.

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It helped to draw me in that the first two dysfunctions he tackled were lack of trust and avoiding conflict, themes and experiences that chimed with my own thoughts and frustrations when dealing with many global senior managers and executives. Won over by the style and approach, I read on through the remaining dysfunctions and found myself appreciating a very satisfying read. (Satisfied enough to turn to some of his other works, where I found rich material on a range of approaches and ideas to free up thinking, manage meetings and handle change.)

His most recent book, Getting Naked: A Business Fable about shedding the Three Fears that Sabotage Client Loyalty, differs from his earlier output. Rather than the global CEO/CIO population, Lencioni has aimed this book at “anyone whose success is tied to building loyal and creating sticky relationships with the people they serve” – including not just service providers of many stripes but also people in his own trade: consultants.

At the heart of this book is the message and learning point that we help others (and ourselves) more effectively by allowing ourselves to be vulnerable. Lencioni’s argument is that, as service providers, we will get better results if we let go of our basic fears – fear of feeling (or looking) inferior, of being embarrassed, and of losing the client. The last of those is, of course, what all too easily leads us to behave in ways that doesn’t serve them – and, by extension, us – at all. There’s a human logic to us doing that, but it’s not one that serves business logic well. Nor does it really serve either the supplier or client.

As the author himself said in an interview about the book with the Willow Creek Association:

So many service providers and consultants feel the need to demonstrate that they have the right answers and that they don’t make mistakes. Not only do clients see this as inauthentic, they often feel that they are being condescended to and manipulated. We’ve found that what clients really want is honesty and humility.”

Lencioni’s lesson here is that if you can overcome your fear of losing the business, you can find the confidence and honesty to tell them the truth they need to hear – something that any good Trusted Advisor would advocate. (And something that the client is almost certainly not only dependent on hearing, but willing to pay for.) You’d probably also take a short-term cut in fees to maintain the relationship in the longer term, and tackle the awkward or difficult situations that will inevitably turn up at some point rather than circling round them, avoiding the very things that need to be addressed.

Most of us are so obsessed about avoiding being embarrassed that it triggers behaviour that work against us. Afraid of making a momentary mistake or misjudgment, we withhold our suggestions. As a result, dialogue is hampered and ideas don’t flow. Too embarrassed to acknowledge mistakes, we do everything we can to avoid making them – and learn a great deal less as a result. And our anxiety to have our expert status acknowledged, we duck chances to do simple things that would genuinely help where we’ve (wrongly) drawn the conclusion that doing them would somehow be ‘beneath us’.  Ultimately, we’re so busy avoiding making a dozen little mistakes that we wind up making two or three enormous ones.

This is a book whose themes of truth and authenticity have applications that go far beyond the consultant/client relationship. Honest, well-meant truths are things that should be more plentiful in all our relationships: all we need do is overcome our fears – which are mostly fears of being ourselves. If you start off by brushing yourself under a metaphorical carpet, you can all too easily wind up weaving ever big rugs to hide all the problems under: hardly the most productive use of anyone’s time and energy.

In my view, this book represents a great start in the right direction on a whole number of levels, advocating a healthy pragmatism and addressing a whole number of leadership and business management taboos.

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The word fable has come to us from the Latin, and just means a little story, but one that is intended to impart a moral lesson. (Myths and parables fall into the same category, and the technical differences need not worry us for the point we’re making here.) But the idea of the fable – a short, memorable tale with an equally memorable learning point – didn’t just come from the Romans. Cultures around the world used fables both as part of the oral, storytelling tradition and as a way of passing on valuable lessons. There are fables in The Bible, for example. The Arabian Nights stories are fables, and we get the idea of The Tortoise and The Hare from one of history’s most famous fabulists, Aesop.

In the modern age, we tend to think of fables as children’s stories – not unfairly, as writing and delivering them were part of the education of Ancient Greek and Roman children. But the power of the fable to memorably get across an important point isn’t something that needs to be restricted to a young audience: George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a fable too. If you know the expression “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”, it’s because the fable served its purpose: you have remembered the point.

Business being an arena of time pressures, an endless array of things to learn and a need to communicate clearly and concisely, it’s not surprising that the business fable has started to become a recognisable genre of business book. If you’ve read Kotter’s Our Iceberg is Melting or many of Patrick Lencioni’s books (we recently reviewed his The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and a review of Getting Naked is coming shortly), you’ve read a business fable. Some have achieved the level of fame that invites parody: Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese triggered both huge sales and a slew of send-ups, not all of them affectionate. Some – Phil Jesson’s Piranhas in the Bidet, for example – are less well known, but deserve a wider readership (read Anton Franckeiss’ review).

Business fables combine our human love of narrative – something we seek in our own lives (as Richard Sennett has pointed out) and enjoy in hearing from others – with the worklife equivalent of stories we heard as children sitting on a grandparent’s knee. Fables taught something to open learning too: that you make learning accessible and meaningful by linking it to everyday life: the story is the sugar-coating on the educational pill. A point not lost on business leaders, to cite a quote from an article at USA Today:

Timberland CEO Jeffrey Swartz says he reads only Bible parables but sees how a story would possess power. Entire brands such as Nike are built more on myth than on their product, and Timberland finds more success selling “the notion of sitting around the campfire at the end of the day” than hiking boots, he says.”

Just one word of warning, however. Fables should be relatively simple, but never patronising. Like any kind of communication, individual audience members will respond differently. (One of the hallmarks of fables is that they enable the reader or listener to arrive at a conclusion, rather than having one broadcast at them.) As USA Today pointed out, the CEO who loves a fable so much he orders a copy for everyone in the company may not have the impact that he or she imagines, or hopes for,

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams says parables rank among the top 10 reader complaints in his e-mail. Workers feel “terribly insulted,” he says.”

Any kind of communication needs to be informed by its audience: what do they want and need to hear (nb: these are almost certainly two very different things!), what will hold their interest, and what will lose it. Bear those things in mind while you formulate your story, and you should recognise the difference between a page-turner and a stomach-turner.

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The first contentious point is its portrayal – in what has to be acknowledged as an acting masterclass of the highest order from Meryl Streep (and I’m not even a fan) – of the former Prime Minister as an ageing dementia sufferer. Publicly admitted for the first time in 2008 by her daughter Carol, it is the ‘publicly’ that bothers some: an article written by Amanda Platell at the time clearly considers that the daughter’s actions are disrespectful. Others have had different viewpoints: an Alzheimer’s Society press release made the point that “By speaking openly about the effects of dementia, we will begin to tackle some of the stigma that still surrounds the condition …” As the child of a (now sadly deceased) dementia sufferer, I’m personally inclined to the latter argument – acknowledging the illness does not diminish the sufferer’s earlier years, and helps those providing the caring by removing the taboo. I was interested to find myself in agreement with Matthew Parris, writing about the film in The Times (article behind The Times paywall), whose view was that her legacy is public property, that the film never mocks or insults, and that “She and her reputation can take it.” (Streep’s portrayal of the behavioural ticks of dementia – the fading in and out of focus, the mixture of clarity and fog, and the slightly bewildered look in the eyes – is also accurate to the point of being disturbing.)

My major problem with the film – which most reviewers seem to have shared – is that it is a stunning performance in search of a purpose. While we see critical events in her life – the influence of her father, the difficulty of an unmarried woman (and a grocer’s daughter, lest we forget) seeking a Conservative seat to adopt her as candidate, marriage to Denis, the image makeover after her decision to run for Party leader – there is a nagging feeling that we are watching a life with the politics largely removed. For a woman who lived and breathed politics, the omission is especially odd. Nor is this the only thing that is strikingly absent: Sir Keith Joseph, Neil Kinnock and Ken Livingstone have somehow vaporised, along with any other female politician and – as Parris also points out – “no man is allowed a look-in as a policymaker.”

If this is a film about iron, it’s about iron will – as its central character spent decades demonstrating in spades. One of the film’s subtly overt ironies is that it allows its audience to see that, even in capable hands, a spade can wind up digging its wielder’s own metaphorical grave. (Given its criticality in triggering her downfall as Prime Minister, the film might also have given a few more seconds of its screen time to Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech. Even dead sheep can have rather sharp teeth.)

These criticisms are, however, of attempting to view the film as a historical record. As Thatcher’s life is seen in flashback, it is also seen as the surfacing memories of a fading and mentally frail woman and the framing device allows for considerable poetic license – the young Denis was actually 10 years her elder, the Miners Strike came after the Falklands War, Thatcher was not a witness to Airey Neave’s assassination. Scriptwriter Abi Morgan (in an article in the Telegraph) has said that the film is “neither a documentary nor a biopic, but a work of the imagination”, although it seems counter-intuitive to suggest that an audience will attend with that in mind. Such is the nature of the central character and her (very public) legacy, that the expectation will be for one or other of the former. And on these grounds, inevitably, the film falls short: any film that is largely “Thatcher without Thatcherism” can do little else.

I saw it with a large group of friends whose ages ranged from 24 to 70: for the older of them, there were subtle references (the price of milk, son Mark’s wayward absences) that were lost on the younger members of the party, who were left wondering more than their elders quite what the film was trying to say or achieve. As one of those elders commented afterwards, a film about Lady Thatcher that lacks the courage of its convictions is surely an irony too far?

Yet even here, some better placed than I may disagree. To return to Matthew Parris’ Times article, he makes the point that:

.. I’d have liked to see a strange contradiction that matters historically reflected more keenly. The real Thatcher was both hesitant and decisive”

Some of the more robust examinations of her period as Prime Minister might share this analysis: examination of the actions rather than the rhetoric reveals a political leader whose own application of Thatcherism was less than consistent. Iron might, as the film shows, rust, but it is also a malleable, ductile metal. That ‘iron lady’ might have been more appropriate than many of us thought at the time. There are yet more ironies. A woman who espoused action rather than debate and posturing and overcame the very real disadvantages of her gender and class might never have reached party leadership (let alone Downing Street – as she herself said publicly at the time, doubting it would ever happen) without, of all things, an image makeover provided by some very wealthy men.

There are both political and life lessons to draw from The Iron Lady if you’re so inclined: that immense resolve can be both a strength and a weakness; that faith in others can be misplaced (for all her doting on Mark, it is daughter Carol who stays loyal); that overcoming the stigma and hurdle of ‘not being one of us’ might inspire you not to apply the same treatment to others once you’ve ascended the slippery pole; that mothers and fathers experience juggling the demands of working life differently. Or even simply that glory years are, for most people, things that we live beyond – and must then live with. (There’s surely an important lesson about the importance succession planning in this life story.) Some of these lessons, however, might depend on greater knowledge of the events of Lady Thatcher’s years in Downing Street than the film will provide.

As someone who was a young undergraduate at the time of the 1979 Election and lived mostly in London working for various public sector bodies (including education quangos) during ‘the Thatcher Years’, the film only hints at a highly politicised era in recent British history. The film succeeded more for me in its portrayal of the fading of memories and the inversion of family relationships that frail old age typically bring: in parts, it’s a surprisingly sensitive film about dementia. As a portrayal of its central character, its fictionalised nature makes judgement difficult: how, in any case, am I to know how truthful it is?

Any portrayal of a public figure who has been so divisive for so long will probably always struggle to satisfy, and the fictionalisation is equally a strength (in allowing the audience to sidestep some of their preconceptions) and an evasion. I’d recommend that you see it – but see it as a magnificent acting performance. If you want to learn interesting lessons in politics, leadership or the story of a ground-breaking woman, you might be better served by the shelves of biographies that have already been published.

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