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  • Opinion: American education is beginning to steal a march on British universities

    Finito World

     

    America has seen its reputation seesaw in recent years. This was largely due to the Trump administration, and there is very little to say, at time of going to press, that there might not soon be another Trump administration to add to the noise of the last.

    But, if you look beneath all the bombastic headlines, the data shows that America continues to show considerable strength. It remains, for instance, streets ahead in all global power indices, measuring its cultural, economic and military strength. The dollar has never been stronger against the pound, and the Biden administration has also to a large extent rebounded from its unconvincing evacuation of Afghanistan by helping to orchestrate a strong NATO response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

    As a result of all this, it’s not surprising that many UK students are thinking of studying in the US now – a development which has, in the opinion of some commentators, been exacerbated by the poor outcomes many experience in their UK counterparts.

    We must be careful not to do down British education, which still has much to recommend it. However, a mixture of poor financial management, absent careers services, and wokeness is making some parents and students question the value of a typical degree.

    In some instances, this is leading students to consider apprenticeships as a possible route, with public figures as diverse as Robert Halfon MP and Multiverse head Euan Blair, espousing this route.

    The merits of this are clear: work comes first and the enormous expenditure – and in many cases, debt – which comes with a typical degree are avoided and a paycheck sought and attained with maximum alacrity.

    But it might be that something is lost without university experience. There is the notion that learning is sometimes worth pursuing for its own sake, and that not everything in life comes down to money.

    So if you want to retain the sanctity of that university experience, what are the benefits and drawbacks of heading to America to do so? That’s what Finito World recently set out to do in its exclusive report of the top Ivy League universities. We looked at location, campus culture, graduation rates, careers advice, and other factors in order to compile our exclusive list.

    Either way, the data shows that many students are looking at their options and deciding that the US isn’t so bad after all – and, in fact, this held true even during the tumultuous Trump years – with 1,095,299 students enrolling in the US in 2018-19. That number dipped below 1,000,000 in 2020-21 due to the pandemic, but it will no doubt rise again in the coming years. UK universities beware.

  • Frog founder Adam Handling: “Passion is priceless” in the restaurant industry

    The award winning Scottish chef and restauranteur on sustainability, hard work, and the value of the staff/employer relationship.

     

    My childhood wasn’t idyllic. It wasn’t one where food was about experience and niceties; it was about nutrition. My dad was in the army, so I didn’t really have a childhood where hospitality was a path that myself or any of my brothers and sisters were going to walk down. It was an opportunity to not go to university. It was an opportunity to get out of schooling and get on with some solid work, so I fell in love with the industry after experiencing it rather than dreaming of it.

     

    My time as an apprentice at Gleneagles, a five-star hotel in the highlands in Scotland, was where I was inspired by food and also the culture of the kitchens. I fell in love with the camaraderie, the teamwork, the passion, the fire, the adrenaline, and then my love grew for experiencing food in a different way beyond just nutrition.

     

    About eight years ago, when I opened my first restaurant, sustainability came into the equation – I needed to be able to afford the bills to open up tomorrow. I didn’t fall in love with how things grow and the question understanding where all our food comes from, it came out of a necessity to operate as economically as I could. My first restaurant was a small one. We bought fish from day boats, buying exactly what the fishermen had fished for. We bought whole animals, because butchery skills are very important for me and I wanted to make sure we used every part we could, out of respect for the animal and the farmer. All skills are important to me, to be able to know how to do everything and teach the chefs everything I know. Operating sustainably came into practice when I couldn’t afford to bin anything. It wasn’t about saving the world or being green-fingered, it was about respect of the product and thinking about how to stay open going forward.

     

    I would say that sustainability can be described in one word; tomorrow. The word sustainable can have multiple meanings. How to be sustainable in terms of sourcing or production or people or buildings, or your business. And if you’re sustainable in terms of mentorship and looking out for the future of the industry, you will create wonderful chefs. You should learn a new skill every day, and you should have a mentor; someone that inspires you rather than teaching you something. Someone that pushes you to become better is a mentor. Don’t limit your mentors to one person though, you should be open-minded to everyone who can teach you something.

     

    The way that I think about my business is, first and foremost, how do we teach the staff? You teach them about being respectful, it doesn’t need to be about saving the world. It’s about learning all the skills you can possibly learn. When I say that, I mean whole animals, whole vegetables, nothing portioned, nothing cut, nothing shaped, then cooking sustainably comes naturally. A lot of people chuck that ‘sustainable’ word all around because it’s the word of the moment, but in fact, many of them misunderstand the principles. The thing that I’m seeing nowadays is all these sustainable restaurants are utilising by-products but they have no clue how to utilise the product itself. That’s almost as wasteful as the other way around. You need to understand the foundations of that product first before you can even try and be inspirational and move boundaries. Just because it’s the word of the moment doesn’t mean that you’ve got to bin the prime and look after the waste. They’re utilising waste rather than utilising the products, and that’s stupid.

     

    I’ve never hired a senior member to join my team since the day I opened my restaurant. I’ve always hired young people and promoted from within. So all of my restaurants are run by the same team who’ve worked with me since I opened my first restaurant. They’re the sous chefs and head chefs of all my restaurants now, and we hire based on personality, smile, and real passion for what we do. I lost restaurants in lockdown, and it was so painful because for me the staff are more important than my business, so I had to create a restaurant not out of a love for the stress of opening restaurants, but to find a home for the staff that had dedicated so much of their lives to me. So that’s why I did it. I can’t stress enough: opening restaurants is one of the most stressful, horrible times of your life, and I don’t like particularly doing them, but I do it for the amazing and growing team to give them the opportunity to learn a new skill, to progress, to move forward, and to run under the foundations of what we’ve already created. It means that the ship is not going to get rocked by a storm, instead they’re going to know how to get out of a situation. They’re going to know how I like to operate, they’re going to know the style and process, but then they have the opportunity for their personality to shine through and show their individuality. If I don’t promote from within I’ll lose that wonderful talent.

     

    I prefer apprenticeship paths to university. There’s nothing like learning on the job, rather than sitting in a classroom where you can joke and play around and not absorb what you’re being taught. I prefer being in a kitchen and I don’t tolerate wastefulness in terms of time. Your time is important. Don’t waste it. What’s the difference between wasting time and wasting a product? Both are dangerous to your future. You need to build up your foundations first. For aspiring young chefs, I would say this; find a chef you get really inspired by, be it the food that they cook, the lifestyle they have, or the ethos they represent – it could be one small thing that sparks you. Go into their restaurant, ideally when it’s not in service, and stay there until you get offered an interview. Pester the life out of them. Because if someone is really hungry, a chef will see that and even if they don’t have a position open, they will make one available because you’re hungry as hell. Passion is priceless.

     

    For me, inspiration, motivation, knowledge, those are the three things that keep anyone excited, turned on, and really hungry, and can bring everything into reach. It’s when you start to lose one of them, then the three crumble. I’m a self-acknowledged workaholic. I’m going a million miles a minute, but I love it and I wouldn’t change it.  For me, the work/life balance thing is irrelevant. I’ll work as many hours as I need to achieve my ambitions.  Of course, I don’t expect that massive time commitment from my team. I respect that there is life outside the kitchen and looking after my staff’s mental and physical welfare is very important to me. But when I look at talented young people, I’m going to pick those who are more driven, who aren’t watching the minute hand on the clock, who are willing and hungry enough to put in the time and effort. These are the people who will get better and better, learning new skills and moving up to that next step.  That’s where the knowledge, motivation and inspiration really comes into play.

     

    Photo credit: Adam Handling.co.uk

  • The Archbishop of York at Easter: ‘We’re going to have to live digitally for the sake of the planet’

    The Archbishop of York at Easter: ‘We’re going to have to live digitally for the sake of the planet’

    The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell

     

    York was quite severely hit during the pandemic in hospitality and tourism. My job is to be a voice of the Christian faith – and therefore a voice which is trying to speak up for the poor, and for issues of justice and peace. The Church is always trying to be involved as a voice for good within all the networks of our society; here in the North of England – as it’s known in the political discourse and perhaps it’s the job of the Church in part to constructively hold the government to account.

    Perhaps even now it’s too early to draw conclusions but there has been some fascinating research done about the impact of Covid on the church. For a while there was for a short while a narrative running about the Church being withdrawn – but that turned out not to be true. Two things I’ve noticed have been the building and nurturing of online community; many churches now tell a story of people participating in online church of one kind of another. We don’t yet know whether those people have gone on to participate in person. We’ve nurtured online communities in ways which churches three years ago which once had had 50 participants in person sometimes had 70 or 80 participants online.

    For the whole world, we’re going to have to learn to live digitally for the sake of the planet. There is an opportunity for us to find new ways of living which will be better for the planet – it’s already a hybrid world and I want to see the Church take the lead on that.

    When it comes to the pandemic, and the cost of living crisis, because the church has a presence – amazingly still in virtually every community in this land, we have been in the front line when it comes to providing support and pastoral care to people in need, particularly isolated people. It’s not just been the church, of course, but often the church has been in the lead with others when it comes to doing simple things like during Covid, making sure that an isolated person gets their prescription for them. Then there’s all the other stuff that’s well-known with food banks, debt counselling, homelessness, shelters, it is the Church on the ground which is leading in these things and I think we have seen the benefits of that.

    The question of work is a complex one. The most important thing I do each day is to say my prayers: that is the foundation and heart of my day. The Christian way of inhabiting life encourages us to live by that Biblical principle of the Sabbath. By that I don’t just mean literally the Sabbath, but the Sabbath as a principle which runs through life: God’s good ordering of time and space whereby we give time for rest and refreshment.

    My great hope is that as 2023 continues, we won’t go back to how we were before the pandemic. The first thing we should consider is time for refreshment and rest. Of course, we all do that in different ways; my advice is to weave prayer into the rhythms of your daily life. Even in lockdown, most of us had routines. My advice is to examine the existing routines of your daily life, and see where prayer can be woven into it, so that you stop seeing prayer as an additional burden, by getting up half an hour earlier for instance. Instead, look at your working day and consider whether there is an opportunity to weave prayer in. For instance, if you walk the dog, for example, you might find that that is a good opportunity to pray or be still. Some of it comes down to personality; some of us find stillness much easier when we’re moving. You need to find the way which is right for you. I sometimes worry that people have a picture in their mind of what prayer is and think they must conform it.

     

     

     

  • Dinesh Dhamija: Sunak’s win with CPTPP is a reminder of the importance of a UK-India trade deal

    Dinesh Dhamija

     

    When Rishi Sunak’s government hailed the new Asia Pacific trade deal as ‘the most important since Brexit’, it was putting an optimistic spin on a pretty marginal agreement.

    Official figures show a prospective 0.08 per cent uplift to GDP from the deal over the next decade – so small as to be almost statistically irrelevant.

    What’s fascinating is to compare it with forecasted benefits from a trade deal with India. This, says the Treasury, would result in a 0.22 per cent uplift over the same period. Almost three times as much.

    That’s why people like me, who have championed a UK-India trade deal for years, are renewing our calls for more energy and commitment from government.

    We reckon that a deal would help create upwards of 400,000 jobs in the UK and a million-plus in India. It would add tens of billions of pounds in export revenue each year, opening new avenues for entrepreneurs, students, businesses and investors.

    Still, credit where it is due.

    As a piece of geopolitical theatre, joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is an impressive achievement. As Rishi Sunak says, it “puts the UK at the centre of a dynamic and growing group of Pacific economies,” which includes Japan, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand and Vietnam.

    Quite how the British Isles, which sits firmly in the North Atlantic, qualifies as ‘Trans-Pacific’ is a question for the group’s geographic assessment panel. But it’s always nice to join new clubs and some of these members have terrific beach resorts, with all the facilities needed for agreeable conferences and summits.

    Politically speaking, the UK now has the right to veto new members. China tried unsuccessfully to join in 2021, whereas the group would dearly love the US to reconsider its decision – taken during the Trump presidency – to withdraw from CPTPP’s predecessor organisation, the TPP, and come back on board. The prospect of Rishi Sunak sipping pina coladas with Joe Biden on a Mexican beach, while agreeing to keep China well away from the Partnership, might appeal to both men.

    What Britain joining the CPTPP does show is that Rishi Sunak’s brand of diplomacy and leadership is winning new friends. You can easily imagine that one or more of the 11 members would have been mortally offended by something Boris Johnson said or did during his premiership, causing them to blacklist the UK.

    There remain hurdles to a UK-India deal. In March this year, the Met police stood by while a pro-Khalistani protestor took down the Indian flag at the High Commission in London, leaving Indians feeling insulted.

    But if Rishi can stop colleagues like Suella Braverman from disrespecting the Indian community (she accused Indians of overstaying their visas more than any other group) when trade deal negotiations are underway, and the BBC doesn’t repeat its ill-timed intervention in Indian political life with another hatchet job on Narendra Modi, then the long-promised rewards of a deal with India could soon be realised.

    That really would be something to shout about.

    Dinesh Dhamija chaired the EU-India Delegation during his tenure as a Member of the European Parliament from 2019 to 2020, with responsibility for negotiating trade agreements. His latest book, The Indian Century, will be published later this year.

  • Review: Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries

    Christopher Jackson

     

    This is a strange book to review since it has been almost entirely superseded by the actions of its ghostwriter. It is axiomatic among book reviewers that you must review the book and nothing external to the book, but that turns out to be impossible here.

    For anybody living without Internet access these past months, here is the sequence of events.

    Matt Hancock was a busy Health Secretary, and former prime ministerial candidate with ambitions to digitise the health service. In late 2019, he began getting reports from Wuhan about a virus which would upend his and all our lives. He was a cheerleader for lockdown, and also – as he goes to considerable lengths to point out throughout this book – a driver of the vaccination programme. In May 2021, he began a marital affair with his aide Gina Coldangelo, and when an embrace between them was somehow – we still don’t know how, or by whom – photographed, Hancock was forced to resign.

    Post-government he famously appeared on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, where he made more friends than some had expected. Pandemic Diaries was intended to continue his rehabilitation. However, it was written in a spirit of what now seems gullible collaboration with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott. In the writing of the book, Oakeshott was given access to all of Hancock’s What’s Apps. After the book was released, Oakeshott, pleading the importance of journalism, handed all the messages over to The Telegraph, who proceeded to publish a series of immensely unflattering stories about Hancock which undid much of the painstaking work of rehabilitation.

    As a result, the book has acquired a sort of unexpected intertextuality, whereby we can now see that what is said in the book is a pared-down and smoothed-over version of what was said in real time, now there for all to see in the pages of the Telegraph.

    The juxtaposition between the two can often be comic. For instance, on the unhappy day to which we all know this book is building – the disastrous day when Hancock’s affair is broken by The Sun – Hancock begins his entry with a knowing dissertation about love.

     

    What price love? I’ve always known from the novels that people will risk everything. They are ready to blow up their past, their present and their future. They will jeopardise everything they have worked for and everything that is solid and certain.

     

    The tone is of an earned, rueful wisdom, and we are invited to consider Hancock as a sort of modern Antony or Othello, undone by human failings, one who ‘loved not wisely, but too well’. Perhaps he is but he comes across differently to readers of The Telegraph in the following What’s App exchange on what was presumably the same day:

     

    Hancock: How bad are the pics?”

    Special adviser Damon Poole: It’s a snog and heavy petting.

    Hancock: “How the f— did anyone photograph that?”

    Gina Coladangelo: OMFG

    Hancock: “Crikey. Not sure there’s much news value in that and I can’t say it’s very enjoyable viewing.”

     

    It is The Telegraph version, sadly, which in all its awkwardness has the real flavour of lived experience. Incidentally, I find huge sadness and a sort painful dignity in Coladangelo’s acronym, and I suspect many readers will feel especially sorry for her.

    Perhaps in a ghoulish way it is good to have both versions, but there is an overriding sense that we know more than we’d like or ought to about the whole thing. Anyone who enjoys reading about the destruction of other people’s lives and imagines themselves immune from similar treatment has ceased to think themselves fallible on another day.

    Of course, the question of government by What’s App has now been taken up as a live issue in direct response to the Oakeshott leaks. It seems unlikely that it’s any worse as a form of government, to paraphrase Churchill, than all the others which have been tried. In fact, the real thing at issue has always been between responsible and irresponsible government.

    How does Hancock, and how does the political class, come off in Pandemic Diaries? It’s a mix. The book conveys Hancock’s Tiggerishness very well in the clip of its prose. Developments are often greeted with a one word exclamation. “Stark,” he writes on hearing news that the NHS could have a deficit of 150,000 beds and 9,000 ICU spaces. “Fuck,” he says, on hearing that Nadine Dorries has tested positive early on in the pandemic. “Amazing,” he exclaims when he hears that 4,000 nurses and 500 doctors have rejoined the NHS in 24 hours on 21st March. This turns out to be his favourite word and is levelled at good news on the vaccination programme and at the exploits of Captain Sir Tom Moore. Its obverse: “Very sobering” is deployed when the Covid deaths spike, as they do saddeningly throughout the book.

    The style conveys someone in a hurry, and one is left in no doubt that Hancock had the energy and ability for the job. In fact, he probably had every right to imagine he had a good chance of being prime minister one day. Although his official mentor is George Osborne, who crops up occasionally in the book, Hancock feels more reminiscent of Blair; in fact, he sometimes seems to have self-consciously modelled himself on him. Blair’s astonishing electoral success marked the younger Conservative generation who began to imagine that power would never come their way if they didn’t somehow emulate him.

    It was Clive James who said of Richard Nixon that he could handle the work; Hancock was the same. You can feel that the Health Department, unwieldy and daunting a brief as it is, was in some way too small for his ambition, and that he role wasn’t too much for him. He was equal to the task, and throughout you have a sense of him moving his agenda forward: he comes across as a skilled and astonishingly hard-working minister.

    Even so, I don’t think the book is likely to make people especially eager to enter politics. This might be because we all know that whatever is going on in the book, our hero is hurtling with alarming pace towards downfall and public humiliation.

    But this isn’t the only reason. In the first place, large sections of the book seem to detail something like a toxic work environment which few would wish to join. The undoubted villain of the book is a certain Dominic Cummings, which are the passages I most enjoyed reading, since he seems to get under Hancock’s skin very easily, leading to some entertaining and quite astute rants: perhaps we are never more insightful than when we hate. On March 31st 2020 we get the beginnings of a theme which will recur:

     

    Amid all this, Cummings’s morning meetings have turned into a shambles. I can’t say I’m shocked. The feedback is that no one really knows who’s meant to be talking about what, to whom, or indeed whether they’re supposed to be at that meeting or the one an hour later….Managing No. 10 is a massive and extremely frustrating part of my job.

     

    As much as one can sometimes feel a bit frustrated with Hancock himself, this rings true, and there is real relief in the book which you suspect must have been felt by all the characters in the book, including Boris Johnson, when Cummings leaves.

    Government itself seems ad hoc, and Boris himself very often reactive. Of course, this might be an effect of the genre: we only see Boris when Hancock goes to see him, and then as it’s all being told through Hancock’s eyes. But there seems to be a sort of fatal passivity about Boris, the ramifications of which played out in March 2023 before the Privileges Committee.

    Above all, we’re beginning to realise that these were just very unusual times. That is perhaps the biggest hindrance towards enjoying this book: the events it describes were both appalling and recent. What a terrible thing the virus was and is; how terrible lockdown was. There is no doubt for this reader that Hancock found a single-minded groove over lockdown which to some extent kept him sane and able to function under pressure. It was this coping mechanism which led to some of the worst What’s Apps in the Oakeshott leaks, including the infamous one where he considers threatening to block a local MP’s disability centre. By a certain point, he had come to believe in lockdown as, to use another infamous phrase, a ‘Hancock triumph.’

    The reader is left with the sense that perhaps Hancock went a little bit mad. But one feels that somewhere in his make-up is a man of admirable energy and commitment. He’s not quite in the Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and Ken Clarke category of almost Prime Ministers, but a couple of rungs down, with Nick Clegg for company.

  • Sir Martin Sorrell: “You have to devote your energies to the essential’

    Sir Martin Sorrell

     

    Of course, it has been a terrible time. The 2020-2022 pandemic has been a disaster for so many people, especially the disadvantaged – and it’s been disastrous across all nations. Having said that, people don’t always realise the sheer scale of the digital transformation which took place alongside it.

    Consumers are buying healthcare online, and High Street retailers are struggling here in London. Habits have shifted dramatically: in the media, the streamers continue to gain market share, and free-to- air networks are under pressure, as are newspapers and traditional media enterprises.

    In this context, inflation ought not to come as no surprise. Clients will look for price increases to cover commodity increases. The big question is whether inflation is endemic or transient. We clearly have shortages of labour supply, as well as supply chain disruption, and that means that companies will be looking to cover those problems with price increase. That means inflation will be well above trend throughout 2022 and 2023.

    The priority in central bank policy to date has been on employment, and now there is more friction in the labour market. Employees have more power now: the pandemic has encouraged people to think about what they want to do and how they want to do it. That’s made inflation in wages significant. I expect wage inflation to continue throughout the year but that in turn means that employers will look at their cost structures.

    Crucially, it will also bring automation into the picture. If labour is in short supply and increasingly expensive, that will accelerate the technological changes around AI (artificial intelligence) and AR (augmented reality). The metaverse has been thoroughly hyped but listening to Bill Gates and others, it clearly will have a major impact.

    As we look ahead, I think people who underestimated Donald Trump are going to be surprised – and I also wouldn’t personally underestimate Ivanka. Trump’s moves on the media side with Truth Social are interesting.

    We are still talking to one another in our echo chambers. I spoke to a Chief Executive of a leading package company recently; he had just been holidaying in Alabama, Kentucky and Mississippi on a motorbike; there were Trump fans everywhere. Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, tells the story of the Tuesday before Brexit. He went to see Cameron and right up until the last minute Cameron’s polls told him he would win; Barber told him he was wrong. It is the same with Trump now; everybody underestimates his pull with voters.

    Lately I have been reading Ray Dalio’s book: The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, and that’s an interesting read which I highly recommend. It contains some fascinating graphs on the rise of inequality; the book explains how there are forces at work there whose power we have a tendency to underestimate. It’s a book which makes you realise the importance of China, where his intellectual focus is.

    But I don’t see much reason to despair. Companies were better run during Covid; it meant that the entre was unable to interfere, and individual employees were given greater responsibility. By the end of 2022, we’ve begun to see some of the downsides, having been initially very positive about it. I’d say a digital fatigue began to set in towards the end of 2021, and so we’ve had to manage that.

    Sometimes, I think back on what we’ve lived through over the past few years. I think in retrospect Kate Bingham was the hero of that hour, and I see she has just realised her memoir The Long Shot: The Inside Story of the Race to Vaccinate Britain.  What she achieved with her procurement team ought to be a continuing source of inspiration. She was more focused on getting the product than the cost. That was crucial – that she realised she wasn’t buying sugar or commodities – but something essential. There are lessons there for business: you have to devote your energies to the essential.

     

    The writer is the founder and CEO of S4 Capital

     

     

  • The Sound of Productivity: Clockwise COO Alexandra Livesey on music in the workplace

     

    Alexandra Livesey, COO of Clockwise, leading flexible workspace provider across the UK, talks about their experience in using music to create productive spaces across their spaces.

     

    Post-COVID hybrid working policies are now standard across most industries, and we have seen a steep rise in the need for flexible workspaces. At Clockwise, we give businesses and individuals the opportunity to come together on a flexible basis, in line with this new working model.

    This is how it works. For the days that the team do come together in an office environment, it’s important to have the right spaces to do so. We pride ourselves on creating environments that inspire and generate a sense of community, drawing together people from different industries and market sectors, while also providing spaces without distraction. We consider all senses across key member touch-points; the look and feel, the scent, the temperature and of course the music; which all impact how people experience the space. We then optimise these to support productivity.

     

    That can mean many things but lately we’ve been focusing on the sounds of our work spaces in particular, for which we have partnered with music specialists Music Concierge, who use science to help with their curation process. They have created bespoke playlists for our buildings that drive productivity, motivate and inspire our members throughout the day.

     

    We have considered many elements including the changing mood of music across our spaces at different times of the day and different days of the week. We want not only to support our members in their working life, but in their social life too, and create spaces where they can connect and create with fellow Clockwise members, something that is hugely important to us as a host to many entrepreneurs and start-ups. For example, on a Monday morning it’s all about getting your head down and into gear as opposed to a Thursday or Friday afternoon, where music can aid us by stimulating social connection.

     

    We have also ensured that the mental wellbeing of our members has been considered and prioritised in our work with Music Concierge, and we have investigated ways that we can enhance the mental health of our members throughout the workday through music.

     

    It’s fantastic to be working with Music Concierge and manipulating music in a way that creates another medium through which we can look after our members and improve their lives.”

     

    Rob Wood, Creative Director and Founder of Music Concierge, dives deeper into the science behind office music choices.

     

    “We have been working closely with Clockwise to bring their flexible workspaces to life in a way that focuses, excites, motivates, connects and calms members depending on the time of day. Clockwise offices are multi-dimensional spaces that hold a buzz of activity in so many different forms, and we use music to support this. A working day often promises meetings, solo work, reading, talking on the phone, socialising and so much more.  Spaces, times, days, specific moments and moods all come into play as we curate and streamline one of life’s greatest pleasures, to create an uplifting working environment.

     

    One of the first things we did when we started working with Clockwise, was to look at their different layouts and zones and how music would mirror their uses in sound format. For example, quiet workspaces require linear music that doesn’t change in pace or tempo too much, doesn’t have hugely prominent vocals, and doesn’t have too many different verses and choruses. This keeps the brain from becoming distracted, and actually stimulates our ability to focus and hone in on a task.

     

    In contrast, their reception area required welcoming but calming music that makes its members feel at ease as soon as they walk in door, and likely ahead of stepping into a meeting space. Whereas within a meeting room, music must be linear but can be slightly more enthused to forge a creative, collaborative environment amongst colleagues.

     

    Our work hasn’t just been confined to space but also the time of day is a hugely important factor to consider when curating music for a workspace like Clockwise. From the morning coffee to the afternoon cuppa or occasional glass of wine, our workdays alter in mood and activity, and we work on creating a space where music not only reflects this but supports the flow.

     

    As Clockwise members stroll in to embark on their day, we fill the communal spaces with invigorating music that brightens and awakens the mind, getting us ready to take on the day. As the day goes on, we fade into productivity stimulating tracks and calming tunes. When five o’clock comes around, and we begin to wind down after a hard day’s work, we start to feed in a more vibrant vibe, allowing members to decompress and let go of stress as they move into their relaxing evenings. For those connecting on a social level in the early evening, we pump connecting upbeat music through the Clockwise social spaces.

     

    We all know that Fridays are a whole different ball game to Mondays, and we must reflect that in the sounds we channel into the office space. We want to promote that end of the week feeling ahead of the weekend when Thursday or Friday afternoon come around.

     

    Music brings people together, creating a sense of community and promoting solidarity, friendship and trust. There is nowhere more important to nurture these values than the working environment, as teams work to foster a group dynamic. We ensure to choose music that motivates and connects while dropping in familiar favourites to bring people together.

     

    Social interaction is hugely important in a job, but it is just as important a creating an environment that stimulates and calms in equal capacities and makes for a mentally and emotionally fulfilling workday. One strategy we implement to promote this is by providing pockets of stimulation throughout the day, by creating meaningful moments. We disperse widely unknown songs throughout playlists, allowing members to discover something new that they enjoy and can revisit. It breaks up heads down work and allows a moment to decompress and step back into the moment.

     

    Self-care and mental wellness are instrumental to what we aim to do at Music Concierge, as we orchestrate music to work for our clients and their clients alike. This has become a large part of our work with Clockwise with it being a key value of theirs also. Motivating mindsets are a huge part of what we strive to create through our work. We also want to help people to understand ways in which they can tap into inspiring themselves through music. The next time you’re knuckling down for a hard day’s work (whether it be in the office or at home) and need that extra push, our recommendation is to queue some contemporary classical, instrumental electronica and relaxed jazz styles of music for ultimate productivity.

     

    Clockwise are implementing motivating music across their workspaces up and down the country and they are blazing the trail in the workplace industry, setting the standard for how offices should be run. We hope to see more businesses in the industry follow their practises to promote individual and team wellbeing.”

     

    Founded in 2017, Clockwise provides contemporary private offices, shared workspace and meeting rooms with flexible membership plans in key business locations across the UK and Europe. They have 13 sites across the UK and recently launched their newest site in Bromley, which is their first mixed-use site alongside a restaurant and hotel offering. Their most recent site in Europe also opened in Brussels which aids their expansion plans as they hope to grow to over half a million square feet of office space in total by next year. For more information, please visit https://work-clockwise.com/.

     

    For more information about Music Concierge please visit www.musicconcierge.co.uk.

     

  • Art critic Martin Gayford on what he’s learned from his stellar career

    Martin Gayford

     

    From my experience young people are sometimes perplexed about how to begin a career in journalism. Personally, blundered my way in. I started writing about music and I became jazz critic of the Daily Telegraph which was a small niche, and I was talking to the arts editor one day and she asked, quite casually over lunch, if there was anything else I wanted to write about, and I said art, and that was that.

    I’m not sure if that sort of thing would happen today – and you often hear it said that it’s all much more difficult nowadays, and there are more hoops you’ve got to jump through. But then I was in the position I was as I’d carried out a campaign of self-education – I’d written many pieces and submitted them to until someone said yes. That took a degree of determination, I suppose.

    Contributors were as good as your last piece – if you started to go off, you would be edged towards the door really. I think that’s probably still true in a lot of media; if you don’t perform, people won’t be nice forever. They won’t publish dud columns on the basis you’re a nice person -or not for long. Possibly, if you know the owner it helps!

    Then the question was, could you do it? Having a qualification in journalism would be nice, but it wouldn’t cut the mustard if you couldn’t produce 1,000 words on deadline, and not needing extensive work by the subeditors or anything that makes people who make irritable.

    Do the big artists, the Lucians and the David Hockneys feel that way? Lucian Freud’s charm comes across in the current edition of the letters I’ve written with David Dawson. He would say the two worst things you could think is I’ve spent 8- or 100 hours on this so I can’t throw it away – it must be good. The other is it’s mine so it must be good. Lucian was ruthless at editing work. Francis Bacon was a masochist in his private life, but also quite masochistic in terms of self-judgement.

    David Dawson thinks maybe 25-30% of things were destroyed. You’ve seen quite good, or adequate. He was quite sweet: ‘I’m always in trouble with my pictures.’

    David Hockney preserves things, but I think artists have to be aware – rather like writers – their work is only as good as the last work. You can’t coast on your reputation. All artists who succeed would regard that as a dangerous

    I think if you’re trying to do something new, it carries on the equally difficult, something would only be easy if you’ve established a formula which you don’t want to do. David was saying the other day that turning out product is a dangerous thing to do – piling up a lot of stuff of a fairly similar type.

    Painters have different interests. In the mid-1950s, Lucian got more interested in texture, and Hockney is more of a painter-draughtsman. David would say what’s absolutely fundamental to him is drawing. Lucian started out with that sort of view, but it took him some time to become the kind of artist he became.

    My inherent tendency is to want to learn from artists. There are two kinds of people who call themselves critics: there are one or two who think you should close yourself off from the art world. I was at a dinner party once with a critic of that ilk, and this was aimed at David Sylvester who was also there, and this critic said: “If you make friends with artists, that will undermine your critical distance” and David Sylvester said he thought all critics and art historians should talk to them if only to see how they don’t think.”

    Interviewing artists isn’t like trying to interview the Chancellor of the Exchequer where you’re trying to get them to divulge information they’re keeping from the public: it’s not the enterprise.

     

     

     

  • Costeau on alcohol and leadership

    Costeau

     

    During the short-lived Truss administration, Costeau found himself scouting the terrain for revealing nicknames of the then new PM, before landing on the intriguing nickname: ‘Fizzy Lizzie’. This moniker was relatively unimaginative and more than a smidgin patronising. But in the event of it, Truss survived for such a brief time that the media had no opportunity to think of a better one.

    But the ‘Fizzy Lizzie’ nickname had the merit of referring back to an actual event at 5 Hertford Street when Truss, then trade secretary, hosted ‘Fizz with Liz’ drinks at when hosting US trade representatives. On that occasion, according to The Sunday Times, Truss apparently resisted claims by senior civil servants that somewhere less expensive – and with fewer ties to Conservative donors – be chosen.

    Alcohol is usually a symbolic aspect of a new administration. Boris Johnson, of course, will forever be associated with the red wine he appeared to be drinking on lockdown in the Rose Garden – the same drink he allegedly spilt on his sofa in Camberwell to Carrie’s annoyance shortly before he assumed office.

    But we shouldn’t be judgmental. Drinking in Downing Street helps with the stress job: Tony Blair admits in his memoir A Journey to the following regime: ‘Stiff whisky or G&T before dinner, couple of glasses of wine or even half a bottle with it. So not excessively excessive. I had a limit. But I was aware that it had become a prop.’

    Of course, we’re used to it in Britain. Our greatest prime minister, Winston Churchill, is impossible to imagine without his cigars, his pol Roger and his whisky.

    His delight in alcohol was really an aspect of his living life to the full on every possible front. When this country was fighting for its survival and undergoing deprivations we can hardly imagine today, perhaps it helped to know the man at the help had a passion for the finer things.

    Before him, Herbert Asquith’s drinking was a source of concern even to Churchill, which suggests quite considerable intake.

    Over in America – once the country of Prohibition, let’s not forget –  it can be a different story. What do Joe Biden, Donald J. Trump, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Harrison all have in common? Answer: they were all teetotallers. Even those who technically drank never did so to excess. Costeau remembers being surprised to hear from someone who used to work at Kensington Palace that President Barack Obama enjoyed his cocktails while he was visiting the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. He never drank to excess; it would have been unAmerican to do so.

    Our attitude to alcohol is another thing which divides the UK and America – besides the absence of that trade deal which Truss spent £3,000 in 5 Hertford Street seeking to secure.

    It used to be that work in Mayfair and the City was almost entirely lubricated. Nowadays that’s less the case. As an emblem of this shift, look at the new prime minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak isn’t a drinker – except of Coca-Cola, which he apparently gets from Mexico. In one piece of footage dating from 2019, he described himself to a pair of pupils at a Richmond school as a ‘total Coke addict’ before making it clear at some length that he wasn’t referring to a drug habit. So the cost of living prime minister drinks the same everyman drink the rest of us do, but as a multimillionaire he likes to source it from an unexpected place.

    The world has sobered up, and not just because of the pandemic. It has become more serious, and as over a decade of free money comes to an end, people will be inspecting the cost of their wine as much as the cost of everything else. The name Fizzy Lizzie was always out of touch with the direction of things. Perhaps getting your Coca-Cola from Mexico is too. After all, who will drink to that?

     

  • Film review: What does the case of Elvis Presley tell us about work?

    Christopher Jackson

    We sometimes talk as a society as though being successful were somehow the be-all and end-all – as if it were somehow all that mattered in and of itself. Some time in the 21st century, the cry went up that fame was all, and that a particular set of metrics mattered. In the world of music, it would mean that marvellous Holy Grail: the hit, the platinum disc.

    The history of rock and roll seems on the face of it to make it clear in bold italics that this entire thing was always a gigantic folly. Success as a musician, especially in an era of drug-taking and alcoholism made respectable, has with astonishing regularity meant premature death.

    In the light of the 2020s, the life expectancy of the rock star seems sometimes to veer wildly between those who die very young, such as Moon, Hendrix, Brian Jones, Michael Hutchence and so on, to the recent spate of octogenarians, including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson. It is as if, if you can somehow manage not to die, then a hedonistic lifestyle can shade by gradations of mellowing into a pampered one, until a kind of creased longevity is achieved.

    Elvis, of course, did die – or rather didn’t manage not to. In fact, his death lacks the Chatterton-esque Romanticism of some of his peers, since he declined physically to such an extent before his eventual demise.

    But the fact that the Elvis legend persists is all to do with the enormity of his impact, and Baz Lurhmann’s excellent film, evokes that like no other biopic about Elvis.

    Listening to Elvis today can be a perplexing, even tame experience. Though we still to some extent inhabit the world of Elvis, we don’t always realise it: for one thing recording technology has come a long way since that time, robbing his sound of its original shock and immediacy. This state of affairs is to some extent exacerbated by the way in which the typical Elvis mix on Spotify or iTunes is a bewildering mix of his early stuff, which really was revolutionary, with the later Vegas work, which seems schmaltzy today.

    What lessons does the film have for a music career? In the first place, we see in the early scenes that great achievement is very often to do with being open to influence and to new information. Elvis’ real legacy was to listen to the great black music of the 1950s, and to open himself up to its influence – and insodoing to further it.

    There is a tremendous scene where the boy Elvis, is peeping through a window, and sees a black rock and roll band, and experiences the thrill and pulse of that music as a thing which he must have in his life – and the only way to do that will be to emulate it. It is often said that when Elvis first came on the radio, people assumed his vocal chords belonged to a black singer.

    In all our careers, there is knowledge which may have a forbidden quality; Elvis is a reminder of the potential benefits of running roughshod over that kind of prohibition, and of imbibing influence wherever it can be found.

    In the film, this idea that Elvis sounded black on the radio is conveyed to us through Tom Hanks’ performance of Colonel Tom Parker. The question of Tom Hanks in this movie is worth a small essay in itself. Hanks, an actor – and to the extent that one can be sure of these things – probably a man to admire is nevertheless the main problem with this movie. Some critics have pointed to his disastrous accent as the principal issue with Hanks’ performance and it is indeed a strange mishmash.

    I think the problem with the performance runs deeper in that Hanks, among major artists of our time, seems to me to be someone with an innate relationship to goodness. In this, he is similar to Paul McCartney, who can never keep optimism out of his songs: his inherent tendency is towards consolation. If you look at his performance in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (2019) you can see him exploring a terrain – in that case, saintliness – which he feels a natural kinship with.

    Here, in Elvis, he is fatally severed from the subject matter of human evil, meaning that he is at an odd distance from the essential topic of the performance. It is like a singer choosing to sing out of range, or a writer with no ability for dialogue switching from novel to the drama.

    The resulting performance doesn’t quite derail the movie, though it comes close. Elvis himself seems to have been born with something opposite: an innate capacity to know what could and couldn’t be done with a song on stage. Luhrmann’s movie shows that this ability was something that he first had to learn to wield: nervousness is something everybody must overcome at some point, and it is interesting to see Austin Butler convey Elvis’ tentative first steps into his gift.

    The greatest question for anyone with a creative bent is how to make money from it. It’s quite rare that an ability with the arts comes hand in hand with a talent for administration; the two aptitudes must occupy different parts of the brain, and where the one is accentuated the other is likely to be in deficit. So it was with Elvis; an outsize performative gift opened him up to exploitation, and he met, in the shape of Parker, a master exploiter.

    The film consistently shows Elvis seeking his authentic self in the teeth of the man committed to falsifying that self – and to commercialising the image he has created. A TV show, which looks like it will be an embarrassment of Christmas cliché perpetrated by the Colonel, is pushed back at by Elvis. Later, we see him inaugurating his big sound in Las Vegas.

    Elvis sometimes appears here as a great artist – a man with an unfailing sense of what audiences want, but able to enact something at some farther point just beyond that vague idea.

    In one sense, Elvis is still with us. We still have our popstars identifiable by one name – Beyoncé, Drake, Jay-Z, and so on. They are, to some extent, his inheritors. But not entirely. In another sense, the world has moved past his obsessions, or begun to wise up to the danger of self-indulgence. Today’s young people are often teetotal, and as likely to wear sneakers and design an app as they are to pick up a guitar and take drugs: they’re the better for it. Some of the 1960s susceptibility to self-indulgence was probably an inheritance of the Second World War: when life has been constricted and dangerous for so long, who could resist that bright day when it came along? It was not a time for the stricture of virtue. It was time to live again.

    This is a film which does more than listening to Elvis’ records can to describe his greatness. It shows how the compulsion of the performer can rise to art, and how if that performance can be captured in sound, a memory lingers on.

    What Luhrmann ultimately does is regenerate Elvis, and remind us what he did. He dragged the past with him into the future, and though he died along the way, he is as much an aspect of our lives today as the atomic bomb, or Winston Churchill, or Martin Luther King, or any of the other seismic things of the 21st century.

    The film ends with footage of a magnificent performance by Presley himself of Unchained Melody. Desperately overweight, and sweating under lights, he nevertheless finds the notes as only the great entertainers do – the more so when the chips are down, and the world is difficult. They find the right notes because they have to, because it’s what they do – and because of decades of practice at doing so.