Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

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Filip Matous At Like Minds

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My report of the latest Like Minds breakfast talk is now up on the site.

The guest this month was Filip Matous of Evergreen Reputation. He spoke about … reputation.

I sat with David Terrar of D2C Limited and Robert Bean (he really needs a new web site!), who gave the Like Minds talk back in April.

Robert and I discussed football. He’s a QPR fan. I’m a Hearts fan. So there was mutual commiseration while we wondered who’s team had suffered most in recent months. David and I talked about a mutual friend. That’s the beauty of these events.

After Filip’s talk, I interviewed him out on the ME Hotel’s Radio Bar terrace. The nice people at Organic and DHP Studios create the videos. Organic also took some photos. Here’s one of Filip on the terrace surrounded by those involved in filming the interview. I’m the rather distinguished and handsome guy at the extreme right of the shot. Yes, really.

Interview with Filip Matous
Photo courtesy of The Organic Agency

Feel free to click on the image for full-fat close-up goodness.

Philippa Snare at Like Minds

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I’ve been slow linking to this. Apologies.

Early last month, the guest at the Like Minds Women in Business Salon Talk was Microsoft CMO Philippa Snare. As someone who has long been a bit negative on all things Microsoft, I must confess that Philippa’s talk had me re-evaluating some opinions. For a while, at least.

Anyway, here’s the report of Philippa’s talk on the Like Minds site.

And, apropos my reference to Steve Ballmer at the end, I think it’s only fair to include this piece of video magic:

Josh Kaufman At Like Minds

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Once again, the nice people at Like Minds have allowed me to publish my thoughts about their latest breakfast event on their site.
Josh Kaufman
Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, was the speaker this time. He has a new book out – The First 20 Hours – and his talk was about the process of acquiring a certain level of skill in almost anything very quickly. He played us the ukelele to demonstrate. Hence the action shot accompanying this post.

I interviewed the extremely pleasant Mr. Kaufman after his talk and the video (minus me, of course) will no doubt be up on the Like Minds site in the next couple of days.

Minter Dial At Like Minds

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Like Minds has established a late afternoon series of talks now to complement their breakfast events. I was fortunate enough to be invited along to the first of these “Women in Business” events at the start of the month.

The speaker was the energetic and entertaining Minter Dial, who spoke about “Digital Innovation in Retail”. There were cupcakes, too. My report of the event is on the Like Minds site.

The next Breakfast – with author Josh Kaufman – and Women in Business – with Microsoft’s Philippa Snare – events are both next week and I shall be posting reports of the talks on the Like Minds site shortly afterwards. (Your notion of ‘shortly’ may not be the same as mine, of course.)

Robert Bean At Like Minds

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Given Robert Bean’s achievements working with brands such as BMW, BT, and Honda, it is a little surprising – and pleasing, of course – to find him so modest, approachable, and downright likeable.

The modesty may have something to do with the fact that he is QPR fan, of course.

Robert came to speak at Like Minds in April. Here is my report of the Robert Bean event.

After his talk, we went downstairs to the basement of the ME Hotel and taped an interview. You can see Robert’s replies to my questions here.

Writing In Collaboration

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In a goody bag I picked up at one of the excellent Like Minds breakfast events, there was a Harvard Business Review booklet called Life’s Work. It’s a collection of short interviews with ‘wildly successful people’. I’m not sure what the Harvard Business Review definition of a wildly successful person is. It must be the opposite of the domesticated version, I guess.

The first interview in the book is with Ai Weiwei, the wildly successful Chinese multimedia artist. And person, of course. Here is the exchange that stuck me.

Ai Weiwei

You often work collaboratively. Why?
I think I can be creative only in a group. It’s all about the communication. It can help you build something that would not exist if you were working separately. It’s not just one plus one but something more.

When I work with clients who are writing books, they often tell me that not only does the writing become easier when they know I will be editing and cutting and making suggestions but that it also becomes more fun.

Not ‘more fun’ because I wear silly hats for Skype calls or hand out sweets at meetings but more enjoyable because working with someone else is generally more stimulating and feels less pressured. In the days when I thought I might be a TV scriptwriter, I discovered that working with a writing partner made the blank page far less terrifying. It’s like creeping downstairs to the basement in the dark knowing your best friend is beside you. (It also means that, according to the old chestnut, if something nasty lurches out of the darkness towards you, you only need to be able to run faster than your friend.)

In short – bringing us back up from the basement and into the light – it can free your creativity to be working with someone else.

This is not the creativity of the brainstorming session, which, in my experience of corporate life, is often a case of one manager looking desperately to subordinates for help. No, this is the creativity of partners invested equally in an outcome working together to play at getting the best possible result.

I’ve written before about how ideas take new forms and develop when written down. This is magnified when those ideas are shared and discussed. I love the process of receiving some text from a client, trying to improve the flow or the structure or even the words themselves, and then sending it back with questions. Then the next version comes across and what I had thought were improvements have then been improved upon further. And so the process continues.

Ai Weiwei probably doesn’t mean collaborative writing in his answer, although there is no reason to assume he dismisses such a thing in his work. But working in an organisation often gives you the chance of collaboration by another name. Think of the memos and manuals and emails and specifications that cross your desk. Instead of taking these as the final word on something, what would happen if you plucked out an idea or two from each document and found new – and better – ways to express them? (Please note that I’m not suggesting you tweak the CEO’s latest announcement and return it, unless there has been an explicit request for ideas for improvement.)

But one thing collaborative writing does do well is help you get away from worrying too much about how something is written. It’s a quick way to get the internal editor off your back and lets you focus instead on the ideas behind your writing. Knowing that someone else is going to play about with the ideas and that you will then have a chance to refine the writing further means that you concentrate on the simple message and the thing you want to say without getting hung up on trying to make it sound clever.

Try it.