The Weekly Distillation No.28
Christmas, Pandemic, China, Baseball, TikTok, COBOL, Cyber, Child Poverty; WhatsApp; Gin
Photo by Dan Kiefer 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.
"The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater." - J.R.R. Tolkien
“I would urge people to change their plans. I won’t be seeing my parents this Christmas.” - UK Home Secretary Priti Patel
“A smaller Christmas is going to be a safer Christmas and a shorter Christmas is a safer Christmas” - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson
"Reflect upon your present blessings -- of which every man has many -- not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." - Charles Dickens
"All of the emergency departments in Northern Ireland are seeing ambulances queued outside to various degrees. We are seeing the pressures right across Northern Ireland." - Dr Nigel Ruddle, medical director of the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service
"This has never happened in Antrim hospital before in my memory, never. We got to a situation last night that we had so many people waiting in the Emergency Department to get into beds that we simply had no room left. We haven't got out of the second surge, in fact, our numbers are rising. We have the highest number of inpatients today that we've ever had with Covid. If this doubles, I don't know how we're going to make it through." - Executive from Northern Trust , Northern Ireland
"Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before! What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!" - Dr. Seuss
Coronavirus
Well that didn’t last did it? The benefits of the lockdown in England swiftly dissipated. Unsurprisingly when you put a blanket on top of a fire and then quickly remove it, it will burst back into life. Was there any point to it? I was really struck this week by the BBC story of hospitals in Northern Ireland, demonstrating the UK’s creaking hospital infrastructure and the story behind the panic on coronavirus.
On Tuesday night, doctors treated patients in ambulances with 17 vehicles outside the hospital at one point.
An emergency department consultant from the Ulster Hospital said one patient there had waited 28 hours for a bed.
In another shocking story this week, UNICEF launched a domestic emergency response to the UK’s child poverty, setting out to feed children that have been impacted by Covid-19. When a nation cannot feed its children, what is going wrong?
On a more optimistic note, Coefficient Capital has carried out a good analysis of economic trends and spending trends from the US in 2020, and what we might learn about future purchasing and activity trends. This is well worth a view.
I hold a pretty optimistic view towards 2021 - I think it’s eventually going to be a far better year, with high levels of economic activity, pent-up spending being unleashed, and a lot of people looking to enjoy rediscovering what they lost this year.
The rising geopolitical threat
I don’t know if you remember where you were on 21st December 1988. Maybe you were not even born. I remember being in the living room with my parents, listening to the radio (we had no TV and the internet and smartphones didn’t exist) when the news came on that a plane had crashed within 25 miles of our house. Pan Am Flight 103.
The rest of the evening and following days is a blur, but for others it was the beginning of a night of horror - donating blood in case there were survivors, collecting kids toys from suitcases splattered across the countryside, putting out fires where entire houses had been turned into fireballs, walking the fields and hills to collect body parts.
Lockerbie is a small market town where nothing much of any significance ever happened before then. It’s a great little town.
That was the day its future changed.
This week stories emerged of the US planning to charge a new individual with making the bomb that blew up the plane. Apparently Abu Agila Mohammad Masud is a Libyan intelligence officer and is in custody in Libya. Motivations for Libya’s involvement remain speculative, but may have been partially in response to Qadaffi’s daughter having been killed in an air strike. Either way it was a continuation of a long standing conflict and a symbol of Qadaffi’s enthusiasm to support terrorism.
This week it will be 32 years since that horrific night. I often think of it when I am in the area and watch the transatlantic flights traverse Scotland as they head up to Greenland.
There remains an active threat from terrorism in the UK, with alert levels at SEVERE meaning an attack is highly likely. This basically means we expect it to happen, we just don’t know when or where. A potential black swan in 2021 would be a major terrorist event.
I’ve been reading about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor and China’s Maritime Road Initiative. Backed by heavy lending to countries involved, China has been extending its influence over multiple countries in South and East Asia, as well as Africa and Europe. However, recent lending trends show a different picture. Some people say this is not the whole picture, and China is just lending differently. However, if China does retreat from this initiative it will be a major policy failure - which seems impossible given the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China (“CCP”). On my reading pile at the moment is The Hidden Hand, looking at how the CCP is reshaping the world.
When it does come to the next war, there’s a reasonable chance that it won’t just be humans against humans at an individual level of combat. France has given the go ahead to its military to develop “bionic” (ie. augmented) soldiers.
How technology is shaping our future
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
This week I wanted to dig into the media sector. From the rise of streaming, the trends in social media, the platforms finally deciding to take responsibility for what content is allowed and not allowed, and alternative networks being created - the media sector remains highly influential on our values, our behaviours, our consumption and our hopes and fears.
Social media has become so polarised that people are now simply seeking platforms that echo their views. New right wing social media platforms are just the latest trend on this - it’s not exclusive to the right, both sides are at it. Civil discourse is largely dead on line.
Cyber security remains a major threat - with news this week that Russia (presumably) had access to US Government emails for a long time, there’s no way you can be too paranoid on who is reading your emails and stealing your data. However, you can take steps to proetct your data from leaking from social media networks.
Did you know how central the programming language COBOL is to the financial architecture around the Western world? No? Then you probably also didn’t know that most COBOL programmers are ageing out of working and there is a major legacy systems issue brewing. My wife started her career in this field as a coder and we keep hoping that one day we’ll cash in when she is the last remaining programmer in the world that can remember COBOL.
Fred Wilson, an exceptionally smart and insightful venture capitalist, believes that the move to remote work as a permanent feature, the socialisation of distance boards and pitching, plus the growing global enthusiasm for entrepreneurship will lead to a much greater spread of where the next generation of entrepreneurs come from. This week I had the privilege of a call with Noeline Kirabo in Uganda, who I am likely to be coaching next year - she has spoken at TED Women in the US and runs an exceptional non profit. She is very representative of some of the entrepreneurs we’ve been working with through Creo this year from Myanmar, India, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania - driven, intelligent, creative and passionate about changing the world they inherit.
Zuck wants to monetise WhatsApp. It is hard for Americans to grasp the centrality of WhatsApp to the world as it is not as big in the US, but across much of the world outside of China it remains a massive app - with 400m users in India alone.
TikTok was one of the businesses that won 2020. How will it do in 2021?
What will paywalls do to the newsletter world?
A long read for the weekend
Photo by Christine von Raesfeld on Unsplash
A shorter long-read (just 7 minutes) this tackles the challenge of the decline of industrial activity in the West through the story of one firm that makes baseball gloves and asks whether free trade has had its day.
There are strong arguments being made in the business world for re-shoring factories from China, as a result of the pandemic and the breakdown of critical supply chains. I told my children this morning over breakfast about how containers were backing up at ports in England and this might mean that they don’t get their toys for Christmas. I like to keep expectations low, it leads to a better Christmas. (I did tell them later I was joking!)
Have a read about the last baseball glovemaker in America. Do you ever think about whether what you buy is #madeinchina or whether it is craft manufactured in your country? And what that might mean for the conequences of how you purchase?
The other weekly distillation
“the action of purifying a liquid by a process of heating and cooling.”
With over 500 gins now in the UK, there’s quite a few people arguing gin’s peak has passed. I’m not seeing that in the market data or anecdotally amongst my friends. Gin seems as popular as ever - and seems to have replaced the glass of wine before a dinner with friends. The challenge as ever is genuine differentiation. For some it’s the flavours, for some it’s the bottle and for some it’s the story of the process, the distillery and the brand. What’s fascinating about the Lakes Pink Grapefruit Gin is it hits a bit of all of those. At £33 it’s not outrageously priced - but not a bargain either.
Last week the Guardian described this as “the new, really scrumptious and full-strength The Lakes Pink Grapefruit Gin (£33 for 70cl, 46%), which genuinely does taste of fresh pink grapefruit”.
The Lakes Distillery is one of the first English Distilleries to distill Whisk(e)y - obviously not Scotch, but still a portfolio of drinks that are winning awards. The distillery itself is heavily reliant on visitors and tourists, so it can’t have been the easiest year for them. If you ever get to go, you might meet the Alpacas. Seriously.
One for Hogmanay (translation for people outside of Scotland = New Year’s Eve) celebrations to welcome in 2021. Or at least say goodbye to 2020!
You can buy the gin from the distillery online shop. One to check out. Let me know what you think of it.
And finally
There will likely be no newsletter for the next two weeks. I hope you have a restful, restorative and meaningful Christmas. I’ll be partially spending it in Northern Ireland with my in-laws. Here’s hoping Santa is still allowed to cross the Irish Sea without a customs check. Thanks for reading this newsletter in 2020. Like everything else, I hope it will be better in 2021.