Author: Nailia Tasseel

Allan Leighton, former CEO of Asda and former non-executive Chairman at Royal Mail, tells a great story about his time as a graduate trainee at Mars.

Anyone will tell you that the Mars graduate trainee scheme is held in very high regard. When Allan started out, he freely admits to being a cocky young grad who, on being asked to spend time on the production line clearing up stray Maltesers as part of his company immersion, felt it a little beneath him.

At the end of several days chasing little chocolate spheres rolling around on the floor he was more than exasperated. He’d sweep one into his dustpan, and another would roll right out again.

Cue his supervisor, who, having watched him for a week, gave him one simple piece of advice. To make his life easier, he should just tread on them first, THEN sweep them up.

Allan Leighton says he learnt an important lesson that day, and it wasn't just about humility. He learnt to learn from those who are at the sharp end of business. They’re the ones who really know what’s going on. They’re the ones who know the tricks of the trade – what levers to push and pull to make things work best.

As employers turn to their employees to solve more complex issues within their organisations, we should do more than just listen. We need to actively seek their counsel. Businesses need to tap into the wisdom of the crowd to source new, innovative ideas that can create efficiencies and better ways of working (and storytelling is a great way of sharing this knowledge).

Involving people in the conversation and allowing them to come up with ideas that make their working world better gives employees a sense of ownership of the process. And from this sense of ownership stems a culture of idea-sharing and the proactive adoption of best practice. It helps them become more valued and engaged, stimulate a far richer dialogue and ultimately become more productive.

Technology has played an enormous role in allowing artists of new generations to create new sounds and experiences for listeners worldwide. Sounds we never thought were possible have been created in real time using electronic machines —  far removed from the classical structure of a beautiful piano piece.

In the 1950s, Karlheinz Stockhausen first started experimenting with electronic music which was key in forming the era of 1980’s synth music and inevitably was an influence on experimental electronic music in the early years of this century.

In a beautiful tribute to these electronic music tracks, some classically trained musicians started recreating these movements with their own instruments. Take for example, Acid Brass, a collaboration between Turner-Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller and the Williams Fairey Brass Band, who recreated the sounds of pioneering Detroit Techno through their (very analogue) brass instruments to verbatim perfection!

So what’s the purpose of this exercise?

My theory is that you have to hear or see something on a completely different wavelength to give yourself the belief that it’s something you could achieve yourself. To quote one of my favourite Podcasts, Radiolab, co-host Jad Abumrad talks about surfers getting involved in jet skis to make it onto the really big waves then realising they can actually do this all with great effort on regular surfboards. This can also be applied to beatboxers who mimic fast paced electronically produced beats and even someone like Chuck Close whose work is clearly based on digital image manipulation a la Photoshop, yet the manual process of his work has a much more far reaching impact than simply a few clicks on the mouse.

So on that note, I’m going to enjoy my weekend trying to recreate some Heston Blumenthal burgers!

Exit not escape

Art critic Suhail Malik once wrote on possible strategies within contemporary art, and the idea of ‘exit not escape':

“Fantasies of escape are where you kind of go back into yourself, this internal reflection, whereas an exit is creatively imagining new scenarios that could change your current condition”.

In The Storytellers' office, we celebrate the unique individuals that make up our space and one area in which this manifests itself is very much the kind of music we play. I would argue that an “escape strategy” to keep everyone happy would be when we play something familiar like Fleet Foxes, the Rolling Stones or a Spotify radio station based on one of George Michael’s many hits…but an exit strategy (in most cases on a Friday afternoon) would be to take us out of our comfort zone, and into a new environment where we can experience something completely new, different, and yes, sometimes challenging. Just try ‘Lions Writing the Bible' by The Third Eye Foundation, or ‘High End Basics’ by Further Reductions and ‘Sea World’ by Young Marco, to name but a few.

“Exit not escape” is a trio of words I’ve really reflected on for a while since reading this original essay and I really love power of this. It teaches you to embrace change, and never stop seeking new areas within any context — music, film, business strategies or even what to have for lunch.

So if you fancy an exit, have a look at this. For an escape, have a look here.