Where I have been all these months
Let's hone in now and examine intangible value, and how it might slip through your fingers if it goes unnamed.
After a short break from your regular programming of Ideas Economy Essays and Mental Models, we return. On this much-needed pause, some of you may have noticed I was hopping across cities — Shanghai, Perth, Sydney, London — engaging with people across what I’ll call meaning- and taste-making industries. That is, people across placemaking, brand, film and TV, music, policymaking, arts, entertainment, theatre, festivals, and the like. I describe them as meaning- and taste-making because they sort of do just that. These are industries which help the rest of us understand and make sense of the world we live in, of who we are, discover beauty, and have ways to express all that and be seen doing so. I was especially curious about how people at the forefront of these spaces were approaching meaning- and taste-making from where they were in the world. Londoners were talking about different things to the Shanghainese, and the discourse in Australia is different still. It’s a lot and I’ll likely distil all this over time over future Ideas Economy essays. What I can definitively say now is that this writing break has given me some space to discover and refine what I share with you here moving forward.
As Ideas Economy evolves, so too it does with me. You’ll see my earliest essays were my attempts to dissect what I coined to be the capital of ideas, which, to put less abstractly, is how parcels of our imagination might be structures to create tangible, commercial structure. (To give you an example: Spiderman. Stan Lee would have just thought of this character at one point in time. And then we cut to today, where the IP of Spiderman is worth something like $28 billion.) That notion still fascinates me, of what kind of structures must intentionally fall into place to generate value like that. It’s also fascinating to me as someone who has an extremely active imagination, and I’m sure there are many characters in many people’s minds which never hits a valuation of anything beyond zero dollars or pounds. So, while that is still incredibly curious, I now find the next evolution of what naturally pulls me, beyond creative IP and imagination. It’s this: what exactly are the invisible dynamics that rule human behaviour, and therefore relational dynamics, and systemic functions at large?
There are so many things in this world that drive meaning and taste, and most of those things can’t easily be quantified or line-itemed in a spreadsheet. Outcomes are so influenced by power dynamics, how much trust exists, sense of belonging and of place, identity, ego preservation, fears, reputation, charisma and magnetism, tactics and manipulations and persuasions. Outward intentions don’t always manifest exactly how one wishes. And humans are not always truthful, especially to themselves.
As a closer-to-home example of this kind of invisible value, think of how a company comes to recruiting a personality hire. Maybe it would feel a little condescending to be called this yourself, but think about what the personality hire actually does. They are usually the person who is the most highly attuned to every other person in the system. They raise boost moods and raise morale. They give people a small dose of meaning in their daily work, which ties a stronger sense of purpose to what everyone in the team does to contribute. The personality hire likely also do a lot of pre-emptive smoothing, creating harmony and trust in communications between others (team members and external stakeholders alike) that might otherwise rupture into conflict, relationship breakdowns, or significant company errors — all that never manifest because one very socially-adept person has it sorted by their presence alone. What I’m suggesting is, much of this value you can’t neatly put into a resumé. (‘Nice to meet you, I carried my team as the personality hire for 2 years.’) And this is just one expression of one invisible dynamic that yields value in a system.
What started for me as an exploration on creativity, ideas, and innovation, is now a much deeper investigation into truth and meaning — and how truth and meaning translates effectively into the commercial world. I seek now to give language to and name those elements of life which serve to instrumentally shape the value of an outcome, and which we equally struggle to articulate aloud. Finally, I’m also curious to know how much you think deeply about these dynamics yourself, as I do.
Everyone wants to do successful work. Everyone wants to see real value exist in our markets. Not just socially and in our relationships, but also reflected in our brands and organisations and commercial exchanges in market. The world of business should not be exempt of that. The corporate world is not a place where humans suddenly stop being the complex, messy, imperfect humans that they are (no matter how much corporate-speak attempts to pretend otherwise).
The strongest companies are as such because they have entrenched themselves as our taste-makers and meaning-makers of today. They do it through their brand presence and their advertising and their communications and the way their employees and clients imprint on them. So, let’s start digging into — and naming — what exactly goes into actualising that kind of reality. The invisible dynamics already exist between people. Let’s now give it language so it can be yielded with intention, and not amass a reality that we otherwise may not have intended.
If all those pieces of intangible value slips through our fingers and goes uncaptured within the systems we create, how might we retrieve what is wasted?