This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at my early years growing up in Birmingham.
Why I Didn’t Become a Metal basher
I grew up in Birmingham. At the time it was a city in decline. There was a malaise, a resignation about it. The buildings were dirty. The factories in old-style redbrick. The new government buildings in brutalist concrete. In the words of an advert from a few decades later, there was no “Va-va-voom.”
My Dad owned a factory making precious metal electrical contacts – pins for plus in gold or silver. The factory had been his father’s before him, and his fathers-in-law before that. The family were classic Birmingham industrialists. Similar to the Mittlestand in Germany.
The factory was always an amazing place to visit. It was what seemed to be a huge brick house with floors made of polished wooden planks. There were little staircases everywhere. There were rooms full of little polished machines, brass gleaming in the low lights with men (I don’t remember women) working over them as they spat out hundreds and hundreds of little golden gadgets. The rooms were warm and always smelled of oil and crushed metal. Decades later I can still catch whiffs of the smell.
I loved going into the vault. It wasn’t quite the vault of an ancient medieval king. There were no chests of gold and silver coins, no boxes of gems. There was gold though. Silver. Platinum. Lots of it. It was all in wire. Bales and bales of it – hard to pick up. Every bale had a slightly different shade. Different gadgets required different purities of metal.
This book, in part is the story of why I didn’t take over the works like my dad had like his dad had before him. It’s in part the story of why that factory no longer exists.
Deeper than that it is the story of why so many businesses around the world are failing, and are doomed to fail with no hope of survival. It is a story of how businesses, really their leaders, can look into the future and find a golden path that helps them avoid that doom
If You Want to Read More
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