The Weekly Distillation No.18
Rhythms, Wildfires, Productivity, Coronavirus, Work From Office, Bosses, Climate Change, Whisky
Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash
This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial organisational leaders and aims to help identify themes of our current context and provide questions, tips and tools that can help in navigating these times.
“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” - Mark Twain
”If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.” - Marcus Aurelius
“People should stop the endless carping about testing and look at what this country has achieved” - Jacob Rees-Mogg
“I believe in that old adage that 'as goes California, so goes the country.’” - Kamala Harris
“To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?” ― Michael Jackson
“HISTORIC day for PEACE in the Middle East — I am welcoming leaders from Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the Kingdom of Bahrain to the White House to sign landmark deals that no one thought was possible. MORE countries to follow!” - Donald Trump
“The more the SNP decries the Internal Market Bill, the more I warm to it. Initially, I considered it sensible enough but wholly insufficient given the constitutional threat facing the United Kingdom. (Less keen on the law-breaking bit, mind.)” - Stephen Daisley
Skim it in a minute
Thematic insights from the news and the web to help you think about potential future and current contexts and how to be productive, creative and successful in your work now
Coronavirus
Photo by Christian Stahl on Unsplash
Turns out we hate our neighbours. I don’t mean personally (my neighbours are great), but at a national level the British are more divided (and judgemental) over Covid than Brexit - which was pretty divisive to state the least. Local lockdowns and calls to report people to the police (does anyone remember The Stasi?) won’t help cultivate an environment of community. It seems a long time ago our whole street stood out to clap for the NHS.
The UK is tracking negatively on cases (this is not just due to more testing). More local lockdowns on the way surely. I stick by believing if we get to the Scottish school holidays (Oct 15th) without the schools here being shut down we’ll be doing well. In the last 24 hours we’ve seen local lockdowns extended to the North East of England and a cluster appear in Edinburgh.
But if you step back and take a look at the bigger picture, there’s an encouraging sign in the data. Yes - cases are rising again in Europe again, and India is going off the charts in its attempt to surpass the US, but the 300,000 cases a day number (see chart below) is proving a really interesting ceiling. India is c. 1/3rd of daily global cases now. If Europe goes all in on a 2nd wave (Spain at 11k cases daily, France 10k, Brazil 36k, US 40k) then it’s going to be painful again for a while. But at a 30k foot level - we can be confident we are getting closer to a vaccine, lockdowns are more targeted, Asia ex India seems largely under control and even case numbers in the US are in decline. Some positives to remember. The other positive is even with the cases rising, the fact it’s millennials spreading it across Europe has, so far, kept the death rate down.
If you’re in the mood for some great visualisations of Coronavirus data (and their perception of what activities are the riskiest, which is a tad simplistic for me) then Information is Beautiful is worth a look. While we are learning more about how Coronavirus spreads and works, we’re still not clear on everything - and when we are making very targeted decisions on this basis, experts could be leading us into unnecessary restrictions.
Spare a thought for the football team that suffered a 37-0 defeat due to coronavirus.
Who wants to be Swedish? It turns out the country famous for ABBA, Volvo, Saab Fighter Jets (no?), Spotify, neutrality, Ericsson, H&M, Zlatan, Stefan Edberg and Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget (the last one is a story I’ll save for another time but involves adult diapers, Santa Lucia day and a hedge fund), is also doing exceptionally well on Coronavirus cases after its controversial approach to lockdown. Expect an almightly debate after this is all over as to whether they just outplayed everyone else with their decisions.
The future of work
Photo by Dan Boțan on Unsplash
I went to a face to face meeting this week. Invited by a client to come in for a sandwich lunch, it caused me to stop for a minute and think about what I wanted to do. It’s actually really great to see people in person. I still enjoy working from home but there have been several days in a row this last week where I have forgotten to step out of my house for even 1 step.
One of the places I work is having a deep clean shortly - but will people rush back to the office? The ONS claims that 62% of workers in Britain travelled to work during August - I’m skeptical on that being anything like 5 days a week. Almost every knowledge worker I know is continuing to work from home and will do so into 2021 in most cases. Do people trust their bosses? (Spoiler: No). Will employers incentivise staff to return to the office? Will we all be replaced by AI like the OpenAI’s GPT-3 platform that “wrote” this article - albeit with some human editing and splicing.
London based investment banks are encouraging/mandating/forcing staff back to the office. There is a growing backlash to working from home from employers.
Is the events industry facing its Napster moment?
And when the CEO of Infosys, one of the world’s largest IT Services companies and historically a real thought leader, says that they will be looking to hire more humanities students going forwards, there is a shift in the technology sector away from hard code engineering, coding, building and maths. Just in time for the big push into STEM of recent decades to lead to lots of quant minded people looking for a job……..
Are you going back to the office soon?
The rediscovery of the value of simplicity and rest
Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash
I’ve worked more this last week than I have in months if not years. Consistently after 11pm at night, weekend working, waking up before 5 or 6 thinking about work, moving, zooming, getting things done. As a Western society we all know we are so poor at resting even in the less busy weeks and seasons. Is it any surprise that this lack of rest, combined with a more challenging external environment (that’s banker speak for it’s pretty disastrous out there) has led us into a growing anxiety crisis?
If you work with your mind, sabbath with your hands, and if you work with your hands, sabbath with your mind. - Jewish rabbi Abraham Heschel
I’ve talked before about the tools I use to control the volume of tasks, but there’s another side and that’s rhythms. I’m pretty convinced we need to rediscover rhythms for how we live, work and play. Here’s the rhythms I work to:
Daily - exercise (theory), read for at least 30 mins (mostly), pray & reflect (mostly), walk outside (rarely) and sleep 8 hours (the dream).
Weekly - switch off my phone and email for 24 hours (or more) from Saturday night until Monday morning. Don’t think about work, read about work, talk about work. See a friend (aspirational). Church.
Monthly / bi-monthly - My wife and I have an intent to take 1/2 day “retreats” to make space on our own to stop, reflect and plan. Life has a tendency to get in the way of this one.
Annually - two weeks a year of going off grid 100%. Stop, rest, recharge, set goals. Holiday with the family. Time at Christmas to stop, reflect, reset goals.
This Marc Andreesen interview on his productivity has some good insights on rest and rhythms for a top performer.
When you get a rhythm going, it’s like recharging your batteries. Where are your rhythms off and how can you reset them?
A long read for the weekend
Wildfire craziness once again in California. The American political system turns this into a debate - climate change or not climate change, burning forest floors intentionally or not, right to build houses in the woods or not, human behaviour or natural cycles. Whatever is the cause, I believe climate change is an inevitability and so this article on the coming climate change migration in America is not just relevant to the US but may be one of the biggest themes of the century.
The other weekly distillation
“the action of purifying a liquid by a process of heating and cooling.”
There’s a fantastic little distillery hidden away in the trees near Kingussie in the Cairngorm Mountains. The Spey distillery, owned by the Harvey’s family through John McDonough and also by some investors in Asia, is one of those classic gems you imagine people the world over will travel to see. It has the trickling stream, the stone bridges, the heritage that goes back centuries and a story to rival many distilleries.
The distillery itself opened up in 1990 and has just 4 employees on site. You can read about the company’s interesting connections to British royalty and even how their whisky was illegally imported by the family into the US in the prohibition era and consumed by none other than Al Capone. Kingussie and Capone. I wonder who he supported in the big shinty rivalry.
I was at the distillery for a meeting a few years ago and the three of us who went were all presented at the end of the meeting with the very generous gift (and yes, it was declared through appropriate procedures!) of the Spey Chairman’s Choice Single Malt. The story behind the name is that the Chairman used to choose the finest casks on Christmas Day each year for the family to enjoy. The tradition has carried on to this day. I love the box it comes in, with the signature of the Chairman on the front.
“Every time I am in the cellar carefully selecting the whisky, I am humbled by God's hand in the maturing of the whisky. Even with over half a century of experience, I continue to be inspired by the pure flavor and fragrance of the whisky as if God had a hand in it.” - John McDonough
I may crack it open next week if my father-in-law makes it across the Irish Sea to visit us on Sunday, given Covid restrictions.
And an independent review from a Hogmanay recently:
“Also being finished off will be the SPEY Chairman’s Choice Single malt. I tried and fell in love with this whisky at the BigMix festival in Aviemore in September and have been holding off finishing the bottle in my possession until the time is right. Well, that’s the vacuuming sorted.…The current bottle is full of stone fruits, brioche rolls and just a hint of Dundee cake.”
Available from Master of Malt and of course the distillery itself.
If you have a favourite spirit you’d like to write about, or you make spirits, please do get in touch as I’d love to share about them.
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