The feed includes blog entries, publications and page updates.
Yesterday we met in the Library of the Charlotte Street Hotel for a couple of hours of thinking time with critical friends. We wanted to try and progress and challenge our thinking on how organisations leverage their cultural assets. How can heritage & history work better to inform present and future directions? How can relationships with archives and museums go beyond the Christmas party or the odd team-building exercise and be part of the fabric of innovation and business development? What role can libraries and librarians play in deepening and broadening the resources and rigour of the organisation? Ellen Collins, Francesca Valli and John Spencer joined us for a broad ranging conversation which boiled down to three things:
We’d written a paper to guide the conversations, which we called Converting cultural tactics into a strategy for resilience: putting the soul into the 21st century firm and opened with a recent quote from Wallpaper magazine, from the CEO of Mont Blanc, who make extensive use of their collections & archives:
‘A company like Montblanc, with its century-old tradition, must keep questioning itself, must always be prepared to explore new options, not breaking with tradition yet remaining open to new forms of audacity and creativity….That is why we see our collection as [being] not decorative but rather provocative.’ (Luz Bethge, the current CEO)
We slowed down to review and think through our choice of the words “resilience” and “soul“. Resilience felt like a very strong word – something that embraces but moves beyond pure business purpose, makes you stop and think a bit. Soul was more troubling, but not necessary bad-troubling. (Professor Clive Holtham, of Cass Business School actually coined the term, so it wasn’t a kind of hippy-new-age thing.) Perhaps we could carry off the word soul, if we were bold about it, backed up with sturdy and reassuring method? The combination conveys a sense of fighting discomfort. And can carry the core of our thinking into planting interruptions in established but troubled environments to make room to pay attention to new opportunities and insights, but also create a familiar, connected place where the needs of the individual and the organisation find common ground for the time of their shared journey, and beyond.
As we continue to gather examples of the tactical, and at times strategic use of cultural assets and interventions in organisations (such as partnerships between museums or academic institutions to foster insights into doing business in new geographies; the use of cultural references and metaphors in leadership development; reference to art collections in brand equity; the use of a company’s archives in new joiner inductions) we are building the scaffolding for the way tailored interventions can reinforce organisational texture.
The main thing we got out of last night, in addition to additional insights into the challenges businesses face today (fragmentation; a shift from contract of employment to contract of employability; succession planning and the influence of Gen Y priorities; making a merger perform as 1+1=2.5 and not 1.8… ) was that to our guests we did not come across as mad. Which is good and bad, I suppose. But it provides the momentum to continue to build, with a sense that there is a lot of new ground to be broken, but that the tools and techniques shaped by us over the last decade with our habit of cross-referencing disciplines and activities all come into play.
A final note to say that although the library at the Charlotte Street Hotel is in a way a hybrid sort of space, part hotel event space, part library in quotation marks, there is indeed something that ‘seeps out of the books’ (to quote Alan Freeman, the economist at the GLA who worked with us on the knowledge transfer enquiry) when one hosts discussions in spaces that establish a transition between the street space of work-life and the private space of reflection. We thank Ellen, Francesca and John for joining us there.
