Upstream #193
re-enchantment 😲, superpowers 🦸🏻♀️, speculative 🤔, dithering 🚫, exit 238 🐦.
Hey 👋, nice to see you again. Been a busy bee so won’t dilly dally. Let's go.
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
Marshall McLuhan
culture // re-enchantment 😲
200 years ago science wasn’t as useful. It wasn’t needed for professions, latin was. So boys did classical languages, and girls were encouraged to study the sciences (🙄). Which were softer. Scientists were called natural philosophers. In the mid 1800’s the arts and sciences split, and magic died. The result was “disenchantment". The belief that everything in the natural world can be known and mastered and that mystery, wonder, and other emotions have no place in scientific thought. Now we’re questioning what science forgets; the value of experiences, wonder, and reflection. Of thinking beyond ourselves, and reflecting on our place in a longer story. Some see this as the age of re-enchantment. Others think re-enchantment will heal the ills of modernity. Maybe if we’re more enchanted by the world, we’ll be kinder to it, and each other. Let’s hope.
brands // superpowers 🦸🏻
Nike have dominated sports for ages. Still do. But they’ve missed the boom in running culture. Forecasts are off and stock is down 30%. They’ve lost brand power to upstarts like Hoka, On, Brooks and Satisfy. Some think the internal culture is off, others that consumer values and Nike’s are misaligned. They’ve lost touch with real running culture, and invited “others” in by sending the wrong cultural signals. Reading culture and representing it, was their superpower. Product was only one part. But it happens. Big brands can forget. Starbucks are at it too. Their superpower was experiential 3rd spaces. Now they’re witnessing experiential “shrinkflation”, and they’re devaluing their brand. Don’t forget your superpower. It’s what made you great in the first place.
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creativity // speculative 🤔
It’s election season and Helen Edwards wrote about political slogans, and how great ones work by offering two things; a great promise and room for imagination. Great slogans are more poetic “hows", versus more prosaic “whats”. Like “Yes, We Can” or “In Australia I Will..”, they start with audience feelings, and work back. Political group Led by Donkeys, though more direct (like here & here), also think audience first. Great creativity does that. And creates intangible value. The issue is that it’s often viewed as speculative value that organisations are unwilling to invest in. So as Rory Sutherland puts it, we end up "with an efficiency driven race to the bottom rather than opportunity driven race to the top”. Poetry, feelings, imagination, all sound speculative, but that’s creativity at it’s best. And that unlocks the greatest opportunities.
technology // dithering 🚫
We’re all strapped into this white knuckled rollercoaster of technological change. Most of us holding a sick bag. It’s crazy. No industry is immune. But perhaps this is the most difficult media moment ever. An industry with the most acute need for urgent and dramatic change. The CEO of US news site Axios (excellent) James VandeHei wrote a small but powerful piece on it. He says “we in the media need to do more with less; demand excellence at all levels at all times, like other free-market industries; confidently and quickly throw out ideas that no longer work; jump on new ideas and technologies to do things better, faster and more efficiently; and listen closer to what readers like you want or need — then deliver it without dithering". Good universal advice that.
five random (ish) things:
watching // exit 238 🐦.
This lovely piece captures the spectacle of migratory birds (a swallow known as the purple martin) converging and roosting in a mall in Austin Texas, as they make their way across a 5,000 miles journey between North and South America. Awesome 😲.