Happy Friday #8
A few thoughts at the end of the working week
Image: Shutterstock
Yesterday morning I drove through the beautiful grounds of Henley Business School en route to the 17th Annual Conference at the Henley Centre for Customer Management, at the invitation of the event host, Professor Moira Clark.
It was an illuminating and enjoyable day with presentations about: latest developments in the evolution of AI and Apps; case studies about a coffee shop chain and shoe repair/key cutting/photo-print services (a great presentation from James Timpson of Timpson’s); the concept of memory-generation in Customer relationships; and a view of marketing based upon an analysis of a population’s capabilities rather than their demographics. I shall expand on some of these topics in the future but, here and now, I just want to noodle around a few thoughts about one general topic: Age.
It’s relevant, I suggest, for two reasons:
One: our perceptions of the world change as we get older.
Two: the fact that, as Professor Clark pointed out in her wrap-up presentation, across swathes of the planet our societies are aging. Which is to say, the number of people aged 65 years and older is increasingly exceeding the number of those who are 15 years and younger.
Regarding the first point, some of what I heard really forced me to think back. I was born in the 1940s and had to remind myself that, in my first three of four decades, at least, my perception of the years running up to my birth, and my early years, was that they were the bloody Stone Age. So I should not now be surprised to hear younger folks talking about the 1990s as though they were ancient although, to me, they are, so to speak, ‘yesterday’.
Martin Amis (1949-2023) perfectly captured what happens:
Your youth evaporates in your early 40s when you look in the mirror. And then it becomes a full-time job pretending you’re not going to die, and then you accept that you’ll die. Then in your 50s everything is very thin. And then suddenly you’ve got this huge new territory inside you, which is the past, which wasn’t there before. A new source of strength. Then that may not be so gratifying to you as the 60s begin, but then I find that in your 60s everything begins to look sort of slightly magical again. And it’s imbued with a kind of leave-taking resonance, that it’s not going to be around very long, this world, so it begins to look poignant and fascinating.1
One of the unanticipated aspects of getting old (unanticipated by me, anyway) has been the changing nature of friendships with contemporaries as the years go on. Some contemporaries stay healthy or with health conditions that create few alterations to their lives … but, inevitably, others are not so fortunate. As a consequence, one finds oneself visiting old friends who are afflicted with a range of limiting and sometimes distressing health issues.
I suppose, for the sake of completeness, I should mention the other category of old friends - those who have died. But, oddly, that can be easier to deal with. I have lost numerous people who were precious to me but I can conjure them up in an instant, and remember them, think about them, write about them.
Another outcome for me as a result of the conference was, I think, a little more comprehension of one of my favourite Peter Drucker quotations:
Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. ... Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently living in such a transformation.2
Yes, this period that we are living through is not just ‘normal change’. It is, I am more than ever convinced, an epochal change, and yesterday’s conference, titled The Art of Customer-Centricity, provided more insights into what this extraordinary change might entail and deliver.
And, by the way, Professor Clark pointed out in that final presentation that our aging populations, far from fearing Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, might well benefit enormously from them. Bring ‘em on!
Thanks for reading.
Amis, Martin. Martin Amis Contemplates Evil. Smithsonian Magazine, September 2012.
Drucker, Peter. Post-capitalist Society (1993)
I agree with Professor Clerk in that final presentation that our aging populations, far from fearing Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, might well benefit enormously from them.
MIGHT!
But I fear that it could lead to generations of leaders, just like with computers, who have NO understanding of the technology on which our society relies. cf. comments about Johnston at the Covid enquiry. He could not grasp the simplified explanations that SAGE offered him.
My grandkids once asked me "what did you do when you were working?". I replied "the first half of my career I spent my time persuading customers to use computers but when I saw the chaos the world had become for the second half I persuaded them NOT to use computers unless they understood the implications".
This applies in spades to AI or I believe there is a real danger that we, as a species, are doomed. I've spent the last 30 years working with AI and trying to devise "guardrails" to prevent this happening ... but there are still no foolproof was of protecting we experts, let alone the naive public.