Текст бизнес-книги "Now We Are 40"

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Just Be Good to Me: How Business Became Sexy

Like many X-ers I had no vocation. In 1993, when I left university, I had no clue what I was going to do. The idea that you dedicated your life to a company or institution then retired on a nice, big, final salary pension was being knocked out of the park – my friends’ parents were being laid off all over and there were chilling tales of suicides in the papers. The professions were unattractive to me – law looked boring, medicine was what my dad did. As I drifted about, I thought that probably the most suitable ambition was to try as many things as I could in order to build up as rich an experience of life as possible. Experience, after all, was far more interesting than money.

I wasn’t afraid of work – I had a Saturday job in a sweet shop from the age of 14, I waitressed all the way through my university days to pay my debts, I thought nothing of double shifts to save up for a holiday. X-ers are not shirkers – in fact I often curse myself for such a Protestant work ethic; it is uncomfortably at odds with a life of travel and a fondness for high-octane leisure.

A team of contemporaries noticed our generation’s demand for a high-quality lifestyle, but also that the world’s demand that we work for it was at odds with the life itself. They set up The Idler, a media brand in praise of intellectual pursuits and creating the time and place for reflection. They threw very good parties and its founder, Tom Hodgkinson, has tried to monetise it in the form of workshops, classes and a magazine (man and woman, it turns out, cannot live on poetry and fishing alone).

‘In essence it was about freedom,’ says Tom. ‘I felt stuck in a job I hated, in contrast to the experience I’d had at university, school and my first job working in a record shop. There I’d had lots of free time to play in bands, work on magazines, listen to music and engage in cultural pursuits and philosophy. I wanted to find ways to re-engage with that side of life.’

Following a hiatus in which Tom moved to the country and had children, the brand is now back, and enjoying something of a revival, particularly through its Idler Academy, a school where you take courses in everything from learning Latin to playing the ukelele. ‘We’ve narrowed it down to three fs now – freedom, fun and fulfilment,’ says Tom.

But at this rather junior point in my life, I was happy to accept that work was a means to enjoying a lifestyle, not building long-term wealth. Double shifts in Pizza Hut meant I could go travelling around India and Central America. In Douglas Coupland’s Generation X he called these ‘McJobs’: ‘A low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who had never held one.’

This way of working – of taking shift work to save up for a period of extended leave – has definitely stayed with Generation X. My colleague Anthony, now deep in his forties, turned up for work recently with a backpack on his back. After he finished his shift as a sub-editor he was off to New Zealand with his girlfriend for five weeks. She had a slot to show her art film at a festival out there, and they knew some friends of friends who said they could come and stay – and that was enough.

Thinking that my kids at home and my staff job afford me no such freedoms I felt uncomfortable pangs of envy before checking in with Douglas again: ‘Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permanent residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone-call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent-flyer programmes at parties.’ Note: written before the age of Skype.

But after university I did want to get ahead, get on with things. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do – I took a secretarial job in a PR firm as that was all I could get. This was 1993 and the recession had jammed everything up. But the job was in London and I could afford to move there with my friend Lara because back then housing was within our reach. The job paid about £13,000 p.a., which was not bad, and we rented a studio flat in Notting Hill off the boyfriend of a friend of ours. The rent was about £350 a month, which was just about do-able when we split it between us, especially when we nicked the toilet roll and teabags from work and had egg banjos for dinner most nights. We saved our money for Cosmopolitans and trips to Hyper Hyper. Obviously.

It wasn’t as if PR was my dream career, but clearly it was just the beginning of an exciting professional adventure that lay before us. The media was booming – glamorously, and what’s more it looked like the young and cool were in charge. Very few of my peers wanted to go into public service or the charity sector. ‘I think people were ambitious,’ says Martha Lane Fox. ‘They may not have been money ambitious but they were ambitious. But a lot of it was about ambition for yourself as opposed to that wider sense of the world. How that’s changed now.’

For Generation X the dream career was finding a job in one of the cool bits of youth culture that were exploding. Serena Rees, who founded the erotic fashion brand Agent Provocateur with Joe Corré, says her party and her work life were entirely intertwined. ‘Going out was dancing, wearing crazy outfits. But I worked really bloody hard too, in advertising, and had a lot of fun.’

For Rees, the clubs were her university of life. ‘I left school when I was 16 so I didn’t ever have that grown-up education where you’re hanging out with people and sharing your ideas. We did our sharing of ideas in clubs and bars. In the early Nineties I met Joe and started working with his mum, Vivienne Westwood. Everyone was grafting – even the people that were running the clubs.’

The work ethic, she thinks, came from Thatcherism. ‘There’s got to have been some good in the bad with Thatcher. That work ethic to get yourself out of the shit gave everybody the push to go and do it. We were also given the opportunity because we were in a recession and it was like, right, you’re brave and you fight and you’re not scared of failure. Just go and do it.

‘When we opened that first Agent Provocateur on Broadwick Street in Soho, Katie Grand, Stella McCartney, Giles Deacon – all that lot used to come and hang out. Isabella Blow and Philip Treacy would pop in for a cup of tea. All the people I’d known from my club years, all the kids at St Martin’s round the corner in Charing Cross, would come and sit on the steps and share what they were working on. Back then there was only a handful of places to go, whereas now I suppose it’s less congregational. Kids these days don’t have places where they go and hang out, because they are all on their devices. No one does an actual physical shop because you can do a shop online.’

For Rees, the path to retail goddess was organic. ‘Joe was trying to run his mum’s shop, but he was struggling so I went to help him. Everything is pretty fundamental about any business, I think – you’ve just got to roll up your sleeves and get on. Joe and I wanted to do our own thing, so we started researching this idea in our spare time. My first job was working for this company that produced all the books for the top models in New York, Paris and Milan, so I knew every photographer, stylist and model from all around the world. Every day I was seeing the best photography. Then working in the advertising agency, I learned about getting a photographer or an illustrator or graphics person, bringing an idea to life and making something. I’d had a good training. All the campaigns we did for Agent Provocateur, all the fly posters and shoots – I knew how to do all of that.

‘The difference between now and then, is back then we didn’t care about being successful or making money, that wasn’t what it was about. It was nice when it worked and there was a queue of people. But what was exciting was sharing what you think is great, and finding out everyone else thinks it’s great too.’

The brand grew, eventually to over 100 shops in 13 countries. Its success lay in the careful shepherding of its balance between sex and fashion – crotchless panties may have sounded tacky, but when they were shot on Kate Moss by Ellen von Unwerth, they were the acme of desire. Joe and Serena surrounded themselves with the coolest models, artists, film directors and celebrities, which powered the brand into the high end fashion arena, even though it was selling a bedroom fantasy. Where Joe brought the raunch, Serena brought the taste, with an uncompromising demand for quality fabrics and design. This brand was more Prada than Ann Summers, and in 2007, 13 years after they opened that first shop, a private equity firm bought an 80 per cent stake for £60m.

‘Kids now think you can be successful quickly – there’s too much Dragon’s Den giving them this false hope,’ says Serena. ‘It’s not going to happen unless you work your arse off and you’ve got a good idea.’ She now invests in and advises new businesses, and doesn’t like what she sees. ‘People are doing it because they want to be famous, to make loads of money. That’s their drive, rather than it being real.’

As Agent Provocateur proved, first you need a good product (and post Gerald Ratner everyone now knew that) and second you need to tell a good story around it. ‘The marketing guy used to be the least important person in the business,’ says Richard Reed. ‘But in the Nineties you saw the rise in priority of telling a story about your product. It’s got more and more important, to the point now where the marketing guy’s actually on the board. It’s product and story: the whole company has got to really care about what you are producing and serving up.’ Marketing became a creative art.

The pursuit of money, or going into business, on the other hand, was not perceived in any way as creative at that time. It was for people in suits who carried briefcases and wanted to hang out with dreary bank managers. Besides it was all about money – and money, post Eighties, was vulgar. Business was Arthur Daley or Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney – only for the greedy and the brash. Post Eighties, we all know where that ended: Black Monday, a property crash, the collapse of the economy. Thatcherism was deeply unfashionable. Nevertheless, the idea anyone could now have a go – could propel themselves up the social and economic ladder – should they so wish, was embedded in Generation X. The subliminal message of Thatcherism struck deep. It was to supercharge the entrepreneurialism of the next decade.

‘It’s always been quite trendy to Thatcher bash, but for me the idea about freeing up the ability to do your thing was a really important part of my psyche,’ says the fitness trainer Matt Roberts. ‘As a 15-year-old, I had the idea for doing the business I now have. I grew up in the leafy county of Cheshire, a white, middle-class area. But my parents came from South Wales, my dad was from the Valleys, and only got out because he played football. First for Arsenal, then Wrexham, which was how we ended up in Cheshire. He had this great opportunity for leaving the Labour heartlands of the Valleys. My grandmother had a council house on an estate in Swansea but when my dad retired from football – and in those days you didn’t have anything like the cash you have now – my mum made the money by setting up a clothes shop. For my friends, that wasn’t the case. They’re from classic Labour-supporting families and didn’t believe they could go and do anything different. They settled for being in the same four-room box house.’

But the idea of what a business was and could be was about to change. There were already two trailblazers offering a different type of model: Anita Roddick and Richard Branson. The latter started out by setting up a record label (obviously cool) and the former was militant in using her business to promote a new kind of ethics: not testing products on animals. These two voices may have been alone in the idea that business could be a force for good, but they were also very loud and influential. It was not to be until the time of the Millennials – when business, aided by the digital revolution, became the new rock ’n’ roll – that the idea that business should help shape society took hold. Innocent was about to show how it could be done, how business could marry our values and social consciousness, and be interesting and fun at the same time.

Founded in 1998 by three student friends who met through their shared love of house music, it mixed up the cool of nineties advertising and marketing messages with the health of a generation on a hangover. Their cute, colourful bottles of mango and passion fruit, strawberries and banana and kiwi, and apple and lime juices, spoke directly to the customer, promising ‘to help you and heal you’, advising you to ‘shake before opening not after’ and even flirting with you: strawberries were included because they ‘go very nicely with your lipstick’ (‘wackaging’ or wacky packaging, as it came to be known). At the time, this challenged all the ideas of what big companies thought of as business. Innocent started with the consumer first. What do they want? What language do they speak? When they think of Innocent do they want to think of a boardroom of suits or someone like them?

Richard is now a handsome fortysomething who is still sporting scruffy hair, T-shirt and skinny jeans, exactly the same outfit that so disrupted the business community back in the Nineties.

‘Innocent was always just a little bit subversive,’ he says. ‘Other businesses were obsessed with supply chains and the bottom line, whereas Innocent was about thinking about the individual first. We are a very individual generation. In the Nineties we saw everything had started to change, that you could reinvent what it is that you want. You can say, Do you want a blue sweater or a red one? Or you can say that you don’t have to have either. Reinvent the choice architecture.’

What they did was pledge to donate 10 per cent of all their profits to charity. They also invested their staff in their company, gave everyone beer on a Friday and handed out £1,000 scholarships. Headquarters was ‘Fruit Towers’ in Notting Hill, a colourful building with astroturf, table-tennis tables and beanbags, and they drove around in funny-looking trucks covered in grass or painted in cow print. (This was just as Silicon Valley culture was beginning to make hoodies and office table-tennis tables a thing. Now of course, they are a total cliche.) Innocent caught our attention – partly because no one had been sold a fruit drink promising ‘ground-up cats’ before, and partly because the City and the business pages had never met ‘businessmen’ like this before. ‘If you’re going to turn up to a meeting in a T-shirt, you’ve got to be even more on top of your game than a guy in a suit, so people take you seriously,’ smiles Reed.

Being nice to people was the company culture too. It wasn’t solely about feathering your own managerial nest and hitting your profit targets, it was about having a nice time. After all, Reed and his partners, Adam Balon and Jon Wright, had started out in business putting on club nights together. ‘At Innocent we had ten babies out of it – everyone was copping off with each other!’ Business started to take on a new kind of shape. ‘Hippies with calculators’, is how one newspaper article described them, which Reed likes a lot. The father of hippie capitalism.