To get us thinking about things from a different perspective, each of us has planned an outing for the team, with the stipulation being that that it should not be work/project related. For my outing we went on a guided walk from St Paul’s to Temple Bar taking in Blackfriars and Fleet Street on the way.

I’d given Geoff, our Blue Badge guide, a bit of a brief, but hadn’t dictated the route or what he should cover. That made some of the ideas triggered by what we heard or saw all the more striking.

Cloaking in the 18th century

Or how to launch something that’s not quite what people expected….

Sir Christopher Wren used this ploy when he found that the Church would not agree to some of the design features that he wanted to use in the cathedral. As he enjoyed the favour of King Charles II, he decided to go ahead and stray from the agreed design with the results being hidden from prying eyes by the scaffolding erected for the construction. Once the scaffolding came down, it was a fait accompli and so he had his way.

Early 20th century principles

On Monday we worked on outlining some principles for the way that we would work during the project. We struggled with finding succinct wording for some of these and we got some unexpected inspiration yesterday in the Blackfriar.

 

The Blackfriars area of London gets its name from the attire of the monks that inhabited the monastery that stood in the area until Henry VII came along. The Blackfriars pub is somewhat newer, dating from 1904 and was decorated in the Arts and Crafts style popular at the time.

 

When a snack bar was added in 1914, the decoration really went over the top with marble, copper and mosaic being used in the vaulted room. As a final flourish “feel-good” slogans adorn the walls at ceiling heighth and some of these really chimed with some of the things that we had discussed.

Among them were:

 

DON’T ADVERTISE IT. TELL A GOSSIP

 

A GOOD THING IS SOON SNAPPED UP

HASTE IS SLOW

Now you could just say that these kinds of generic slogans are an early example of corporate clap trap that often spews from multinationals in their attempts to spread their word, but I’m willing to be charitable!

18th century venture capitalism

The tribulations of Samuel Johnson raising funds for his Dictionary of the English Language aren’t dissimilar to those of a startup raising funds from a venture capitalist and the behaviour of Lord Chesterfield, who refused to cough up additional money needed by Johnson to complete the work, but then offering the money for a stake after it was complete sounded all too familiar today. Let’s hope that won’t be the case for us.

Cloaking 12th century style

We ended our walk at Temple Church which is, of course, associated with the Knights Templar. One story that I’d like to believe is about why there are two people on the horse on the emblem of the Knight Templar. The legend goes that Richard Lionheart wanted Saladin to think that he had fewer men than he actually did and so each knight carried a foot soldier on his horse to confuse Saladin. The ploy worked and Saladin was defeated (on that occasion). For our project, in the 21st century we may want to turn that trick on it’s head and make people believe that we have more people than we actually do in our team. In fact, I suppose we do – we’ve got the whole of The Economist Group behind us.

A busy first day with a packed schedule which was great. Apart from spending time getting to know each other, we tried to set out some guiding principles for the project and started to think about how we would structure the next six months. Mike mentioned that many of the experts that he and Ludwig met in San Francisco commented that the first thing they would do is ask for more time to complete the project. That won’t be happening for us!

Looking at the schedule and seeing how we will have to rely on outside developers and others made me quite anxious. I’m ready to dive in now and want to start exchanging ideas but we do need to make sure we are all on the same page and we have to set out a clear structure about how we will work on the project. We divided the task into four basic items: setting up a framework for how we develop ideas; brainstorming and choosing the best idea(s); developing the idea(s); and then writing the business plan and presenting the finished product. We figure the last part will take about two weeks and the first part will take one week. But we don’t know how long it will take to come up with a good idea and without knowing what the idea will be at this point it’s hard to gauge how long it will take to develop! What if we can’t come up with a good idea after one month?

Today was a day of building blocks; attending to a number of key components which would underline the overall project moving forward; introductions from team members, scoping some broad principals to guide the project, examining the breakdown of the available time frame, combined with the more mundane setting up of computers, phone lines, email addresses finishing with the requisite ‘get to know you dinner’. A fair question from Ludwig asking if “The Real Greek” was being re-named in our honour “The Real Geek”.

In this way from the outset it becomes abundantly clear the challenge before us; to juggle theory and cerebral activity with cold, hard reality and action.

This will be a pressure cooker situtation; six months to create something, market-tested with a defined business plan and currently no pre-conception of what the idea will be; other than web-based.

The action starts now.

Overall feeling: tentatively reaching out at this new world.