Portfolio | March 2018

ISSUE

147

THE ANTIBIOTICS CURSE As antibiotic resistance rises, once easily cured diseases have become potentially lethal. Science has began the fightback – but is it too late?

LUXURY HOTELS

TECHNOLOGY AND ETHICS

The challenges facing top brands

Where is AI leading us?

VIETNAM’S TECH DREAMS

THE FUTURE OF PUBLISHING

Can it become the next Silicon Valley?

How the book deal went viral

Senator Chronograph

Beijing · Dresden · Dubai · Geneva · Hong Kong · Macau · Madrid Nanjing · Paris · Shanghai · Shenyang · Singapore · Tokyo · Vienna

MARCH ISSUE 147

The business of life & living

Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class

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MARCH ISSUE 147

CONTENTS UPFRONT

16

SHOEMAKERS

An English cobbler with heritage

LIVING

74

22

BANGKOK LUXE

A villa with a difference in the heart of the Thai capital

HOTEL

A classic Paris hotel with views of the Eiffel Tower

79

30

MOST WANTED

The must-have items for the one per cent

38

BOUTIQUE BATTLE

Why the big hotel brands are jumping on the boutique bandwagon

INVESTMENT PIECE

Why comic books can be a smart investment

84

GOING VEGAN

How London’s restaurants are embracing veganism

88

EXHIBITION

A must for Van Gogh fans in Dubai

90

COLUMN

How to develop as a leader

09

33,349 copies January - June 2017

MARCH ISSUE 147

CONTENTS FEATURES

42

ANTIBIOTIC ANTIDOTE

Scientists aim to prevent the overuse of antibiotics

50

PRIVATISATION PROBLEMS

Governments try to solve the problems of privatisation

56

CAT PERSON AND WRITING 2.0

How a New Yorker short story could herald a new era for book publishing

62

ETHICS AND THE FUTURE

The ethics of the fourth industrial revolution

68

EASTERN RISING

Vietnam emerges as Asia’s most entrepreneur friendly tech hub

10

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UPFRONT

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MARCH / MARKETING

ISSUE 147

The rise of the bots A new breed of programs is helping marketers reinvent their services. CJ Hannon investigates

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elcome to the era of the bot. Yes, those automated messages you get everywhere from customer service platforms to Facebook Messenger.

Research from Forrester released in 2016 revealed that five per cent of companies are using chatbots, 20 per cent were piloting them and 32 per cent were planning to use them in 2017. Bots are here to stay, but they present businesses, and especially marketers, with a number of challenges.

A bot is a computer program that automates certain tasks, usually by chatting with a user through an interface. The most advanced bots are powered by AI, and these bots ‘learn’ over time, being able to understand more complex requests, personalise responses and gradually improve the quality of interactions. The code that powers the bot is, of course, written by a human, and they essentially follow a set of rules, adhering to a set of ‘if-then’ statements and writing canned responses.

From message boards like Reddit to crypto-currency websites like Kucoin, bots are becoming more and more commonplace.

They will over time become more and more prevalent and, in theory

at least, make all our lives easier, particularly as they are integrated into the everyday apps we all use. Imagine, for example, you are talking to your friend about meeting for dinner later that night.

When she confirms a time, you can (in the same conversation) ask your friendly bot to order you an Uber to the restaurant. The key is solving people’s problems in the apps they already use, such as Whatsapp, and not dragging them away to another app. This is currently the big advantage of bots, they save time and help consumers find solutions no matter where they are, and save wasted time spent searching, scrolling or moving to a different app.

So how does this relate to marketing? Let’s look back a few years and examine how marketers talked to consumers. It wasn’t pretty: endless spammy e-mails, cold calls and disruptive pop-up ads that made browsing many websites a chore rather than a pleasure. Then, content marketing arrived, which many believed would herald a new era in how consumers were communicated with. And while some content marketing was great, well thought out and well executed, it was often overdone. One day you

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UPFRONT

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bought a pair of shoes online. You then started receiving ‘editorial’ e-mails from the store, filled with photo essays and travelogues, as well as links to the latest shoes on the market. While the content might have been well put together, it wasn’t relevant: you had just bought a pair of shoes, so why would you want to spend your time reading about more shoes?

Of course, marketers do improve their offerings over time. If enough people opt out of e-mail, or unsubscribe, good marketers find other ways to communicate. And so we come to the bots. But while some hail the emergence of this new form of AI as a magic bullet for marketers, caution is advised.

As anyone who has interacted with a bot can testify, the experience can

be frustrating. Bots have no context for your interaction, have no idea how long you have been waiting to talk to someone, and often don’t make it clear that they are not human, which can lead to further frustration. They frequently forget what you said two seconds later and are limited in their ability to problem solve.

For marketers, it’s essential to understand why people use bots in the first place. According to a HubSpot report, of the 71 per cent of people willing to use messaging apps to get customer service, many do it because they want a fast solution to their problem. It’s not just traditional customer service platforms that are using bots. Take Facebook’s Discover. This is where developers

100k

Number of bots active on Facebook’s messenger service

can submit their bot to Facebook’s messenger service. There are already more than 100,000 active bots on the platform so marketers face an uphill battle to ensure their bot gets noticed. With Facebook confirming it will start pushing out ads to monetise its 1.3 billion active monthly users, you can be sure it will be looking at ways to monetise the bots as well.

Facebook’s rules of bot engagement are interesting: within Messenger, a brand can only send a message if the user started the conversation. Users can also opt out of any future communication within 24 hours and the bot won’t be able to contact them again. “We see a lot of innovation happening,” Martin Barthel, Facebook’s head of global retail

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ISSUE 147

“The development of artificial intelligence will make the chatbots more advanced and truly smart” and e-commerce strategy, told Fast Company. He added that some brands are still in the testing phase and that activations are ramping up significantly.

Facebook isn’t the only social media experimenting with bots. Kik is a Canadian messenger company with more than 300 million users.

It has about 20,000 bots operating on its platform, with everyone from CNN – which uses it to promote its articles to a younger audience – to Victoria’s Secret. Things are still very much in their infancy, however. “The development of

artificial intelligence will make the chatbots more advanced and truly smart,” Forrester senior analyst Xiaofeng Wang told Fast Company. “However, AI is still in its childhood. Companies need to understand the limitation of chatbots today and leverage the existing capabilities to deliver customer and business value.” Wang points to success stories, such as OCBC Bank’s Emma, a chatbot focused on finding home loan leads that helped the Singapore bank close millions of dollars in new loans. “To companies, the point is

whether technology can help deliver business value, not chasing new technology all the time,” said Wang.

It’s not all been plain sailing, however. Microsoft was forced to deactivate its chatbot, Tay, when it learned racist speech through interactions with internet trolls.

Microsoft has since unveiled a new – and supposedly less suggestive – bot, called Zo. Microsoft’s chatbots are different to the bots that marketers use, in that they are machine learning experiments rather than customer service tools.

So, will human customer service representatives disappear?

We only have to look at supermarkets, where more and more outlets are utilising selfservice checkout tills. Humans will not disappear from the customer service space altogether, says Wang. “It’s just like digital media/ online marketing took over some share of print media/traditional media, but they still coexist.

Chatbots will coexist with e-mails and human chatting.”

Even if bots don’t replace humans, they can replace more expensive tools such as customer apps. Also, brands don’t have to convince customers to download something extra – something most retailers find difficult – because bots are already on platforms people use, such as Facebook. Bot development is also significantly cheaper than app development, usually about a third cheaper of the $500,000 it can cost to build an app.

So, the future is more than likely going to include you interacting with AI on an almost daily basis.

How this will work remains to be seen, but the smartest brands are already pushing ahead into this brave new world.

UAE TO GAIN MOST FROM AI According to research by consultancy PwC, the UAE is to gain most from AI in the Middle East, with the use of technology contributing almost 14 per cent of the country’s GDP by 2030. Saudi Arabia came second with AI expected to contribute about 12.4 per cent, while the rest of the GCC countries will see a contribution of 8.2 per cent to their economies. In Egypt, AI is expected to contribute nearly 7.7 per cent by 2030. Overall, AI will contribute about $320 billion to the Middle East’s economy by 2030. This is equivalent to 11 per cent of the region’s GDP.

Companies such as Amazon will see more of their workers replaced by bots in the coming years

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UPFRONT

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MARCH / FASHION

If the shoe fits

Lauren Razavi talks to the CEO of one of the world’s most prestigious luxury shoe brands

I

f you’ve ever thought that women are the only ones to get excited about shoes, you’ve clearly never visited London’s Royal Arcade. Tucked away in this storied and historic shopping destination is a company that’s made a name for itself – over the course of several generations – as producer of some of the finest leather shoes for both men and women. Meet George Cleverley, a brand for shoe aficionados from every corner of the globe.

Innovative collaborations with the exclusive designer fashion retailer Mr. Porter and the awardwinning British film franchise Kingsman has now put the brand firmly in the spotlight for a new generation of fashionistas. But what’s so special about a pair of George Cleverley shoes? And what does it actually take to create one of the brand’s spectacularly bespoke designs?

The story of George Cleverley Shoes begins at the turn of the 20th century when a boy named George Cleverley was born. Cleverley spent his childhood selling bootlaces and shoe polish to passersby before he was recruited to work in a British army boot factory during the First World War. As he grew up, his love

for shoes grew with him, until he joined Nikolaus Tuczek – a bespoke society shoemaker that was very popular at the time – in 1920. It was here that he learned his trade as an ambitious apprentice.

Fast forward to 1958 and Cleverley finally felt that he had mastered the shoemaking craft enough to strike out on his own. Soon after, the George Cleverley brand was born – and the luxury shoe market would never be the same.

Over the past six decades, George Cleverley has gone from strength to strength to become one of the most esteemed and celebrated shoe brands in the world. Cleverley’s iconic designs are ever popular in London, capturing something of its impressive high-class culture in their aesthetic, and have become quite the talk of the town in cities across the world. In fact, everyone from Sir Winston Churchill to British fashion designer Alexander McQueen has owned a pair.

Cleverley himself passed away in the 1990s at the ripe old age of 92. He was still actively and passionately working until the very end of his life. Following Cleverley’s death, two long-time

10

Number of pairs handmade every week by the brand

$3,500 Starting price in dollars for a pair

ISSUE 147

colleagues who had been working alongside him since 1978 took over the business. One of them was George Glasgow Jr, current CEO and co-owner of George Cleverley shoes, who has steered the brand towards new heights in recent years.

“Going into a department store that has made maybe 1,000 versions of a design is not luxury – it’s machine-made for a high price,” he says. “Now we’re seeing a lot of younger guys coming in because they look at shoes as an investment as well as a luxury.

They want something that’s going to be comfortable and they’re willing to spend on it, rather than get a shoe that doesn’t last, is nearly as expensive and has been mass-produced.”

George Cleverley is best known for its classic, refined styles and its dedication to creating footwear that is bespoke to each customer. Every pair of shoes the company produces is hand-designed, handcrafted and made from the finest leathers available. Most business comes through word-of-mouth referrals; having served iconic 20th century celebrities like Cary Grant and Fred Astaire in his early days as a shoemaker, it’s not been much of a challenge to keep George Cleverley’s momentum going over such a long period of time.

Today, the brand’s clients include Apple CEO Tim Cook, retired English footballer Gary Lineker and actors Sylvester Stallone, Colin Firth, Michael Caine and Jason Statham. “They all come to Cleverley for their shoes. I’m not talking about a pair here and there; they’re active customers ordering all the time,” says Glasgow.

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UPFRONT / FASHION

The brand’s clients include Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Jason Statham and Apple CEO Tim Cook

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But being a style institution for the stars doesn’t make for the quiet life. “Running this company requires an extensive amount of travel. We go to more than 13 cities in America twice a year to hold trunk shows, as well as four cities in Asia. We also visit cities in Europe to see clients that aren’t able to come to London on a regular basis,” Glasgow says.

(Trunk shows are events where craftsmen preview their products and allow select customers to purchase them before they’re made available to the public.)

So does all that travel help build a strong luxury brand? “Definitely.

People like feeling truly looked after rather than having a shop at the end of every street. It should be about personal experience and a personal relationship. That’s really what luxury has always meant in London, whether it be through private members clubs or something else,” Glasgow says.

“They remember you, they know you and your style, you’re not just another customer. People like a personal connection and luxury really should be about connection.”

The shoemakers of George Cleverley rarely produce more than 10 pairs in a week, and these are made on-site in a dusty old workshop above the London

Top and above: George Cleverley in his workshop.

Opposite: George Glasgow Snr and George Glasgow Jr

shop. They use no machines at all in their production, and the average pair of George Cleverley shoes has had four or five different people work on them during the process. Shoemakers go through an apprenticeship of at least three years, just as the founder himself once did, to ensure the brand’s distinctive style and quality is maintained.

Today, George Cleverley is one of few shoemakers left anywhere in the world still dedicated to fully handmade shoes. With this claim comes a high price – their custom designs currently start at around $3,500. Despite the price tag, staying true to traditional shoe craftsmanship results in a long wait between ordering a pair

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UPFRONT / FASHION

LUXURY BRAND BULLISH ON 2018 Kering, the French luxury brand, has posted better than expected profits for the fourth quarter of 2017, and expects 2018 to be a very profitable year in the luxury sector. Rising online sales and a recovery in the Chinese luxury market have helped sales of group’s brands such as Gucci and Balenciaga. “Kering delivered a phenomenal year in 2017,” chairman and chief executive Francois-Henri Pinault said in a statement. Kering said its overall revenues rose to €4.26 billion in the fourth quarter, up 27.4 per cent year-on-year on a comparable basis, which strips out acquisitions and currency swings.

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of shoes and flexing your toes in the finished product.

“The first pair of fully bespoke shoes will take between six and nine months,” Glasgow explains.

“First, we have to make the individual’s bespoke ‘last’, which means taking all the measurements [to create] a replica of the client’s foot. This is so we can ensure that whatever he’s looking for, we can make to fit him exactly.”

Comfort is usually a customer’s biggest concern when they’re looking for custom shoes, as made-to-fit styles like those

made by George Cleverley take into account the differences in size between everybody’s left and right feet. This attention to detail means it’s important the client is involved at various stages throughout the process.

“Say a customer places an order in January. The shoe would be completed without the sole by May. At that stage, the customer tries it on, has a little walk around in it, and sees how we’ve interpreted his measurements.

Then any alterations that need to be made can be made,” Glasgow

6 to 9

Months it generally takes to make the first pair of fully bespoke shoes for a customer

explains. “After that, the sole is stitched on and the shoe is finished. Subsequent pairs are quicker. The second pair can be ready in about four months, because we already have the bespoke ‘last’, which we keep for each individual customer.”

The George Cleverley brand has been successful at keeping up with the times, however: “Last year was our best year in a 60-year history, so we’re keeping really exceptionally busy,” Glasgow says.

“Our shoes are a truly luxury product: made one by one, by hand. This obviously takes time.”

Many things may change over the years, but people’s passion for finding the perfect pair of shoes continues. The legend of George Cleverley seems likely to define the footwear of generations to come.

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ISSUE 147

5 bedrooms

5 bathrooms

Pool

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Tropical elegance A contemporary slice of Thai villa chic in the heart of Bangkok

T

his private residential project features two elevated Thai villas, a multi-purpose clubhouse and a 24-metre swimming pool.

Inspired by the Amanpuri Resort in Phuket and landscaped by architect Bill Bensley, it’s only a 25-minute drive from the centre of Bangkok. Each villa is set over 6,400 square metres and features five en-suite bedrooms, hardwood flooring, and an openplan, built in kitchen. The materials used are secondto-none: golden teak, white oak flooring, sandstone and terrazzo bathrooms, black granite walkways bordered with black pebbles, meticulously assembled grey roof tiles and black shining pool and pond tiles.

That level of detail is reflected in the grounds, with a barbeque terrace, landscaped gardens, a series of ponds and sculptures and state-of-the-art lighting.

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UPFRONT

Is your dog ready to be an Instagram star?

Alex Williams examines the business behind social media’s canine stars

O

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h, Tuna, you really do have it all: a quirky breed name (a Chiweenie!), everydog imperfections (that overbite!), the sad-sack countenance (I mean, if Buster Keaton were a dog…).

You even have the heartwarming backstory: a rescue, adopted from a farmer’s market in Los Angeles. No wonder you have become the canine equivalent of a Kardashian: an Instagram star, @tunameltsmyheart, with millions of followers and your own line of calendars and coffee mugs. And you are hardly alone.

Dogs are everywhere on social media, particularly on Instagram, where the concept of the pet influencer has become big business for some owners. But not all breeds are created equal.

Consider the five most popular dog breeds in the United States of recent years, as compiled by the American Kennel Club: labrador retriever, German shepherd, golden retriever, bulldog and beagle.

Except for the bulldog, whose days of toil baiting bulls are long gone, these are sporting or working breeds, most with big floppy ears and obedient personalities, several

of which have played the lovable family dog in generations of dogfood commercials. Compare that with the five most popular dog breeds on Instagram. The list, which the social media company compiled based on a search of breed names in users’ posts, is strikingly different: pug, bulldog, terrier, chihuahua and husky. (The data did not distinguish between types of terriers).

What conclusions may be drawn? For one thing, Instagram puts a premium on superficial dog traits like cuteness over ones like intelligence or obedience.

“Instagram and social media is impacting everything, and influencing all kinds of lifestyle and consumer decisions, so it makes sense that it would influence what kind of dog people choose,” said Cameron Woo, publisher of The Bark, a dog-culture magazine based in Berkeley, California. In that way, Instagram is like television was in an earlier era, Woo said. “Lassie” inspired a midcentury collie boom; “Frasier” propelled a Jack Russell terrier moment in the 1990s.

That was certainly the case with Aleksandar Gligoric, a dog breeder from Serbia who named

MARCH / SOCIAL MEDIA

his online dog store Frenchie World. “People are considering Instagram worthiness in all aspects of their life,” he said. “I felt that the Frenchie would be the next big thing on Instagram.”

So, what dog traits are favoured by Instagram users?

Well, for starters, they like dogs that look like them. Breeds like pugs and Boston terriers “really resemble humans, or babies”, Woo said. These brachycephalic breeds, with their shortened heads, flat faces and barely there noses, “are very photogenic with their large, forward-looking eyes”, Woo said. “They appear to be grinning or smiling,” never mind that the “smiles” are often caused by breathing difficulties native to their breeds.

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A dog’s popularity can increase exponentially when it has a signature style flourish, the canine equivalent of Anna Wintour’s sunglasses or Pharrell Williams’ hats. Case in point: the Gene Simmons-length tongue of @marniethedog, a shih tzu rescue that at this point may be more famous than the real Gene Simmons, thanks to an explosively popular Instagram feed.

And if the flourish isn’t genetic, an owner can create one with careful grooming. Take Agador (@ poochofnyc), a Maltipoo with teddy bear looks who has appeared in ad campaigns for Google and a teaser for Katy Perry’s Bon Appétit video.

Agador’s explosive orb of coppercolored frizz is gussied up into a spherical confection atop his head.

The almost human-like face of pugs makes it easy for their owners to anthropomorphise their pets with costumes, hats and accessories Pug owners don’t disagree.

“With their smushed-in faces, all the rolls, and their funny tails, pugs are the least doglike dogs,” said Leslie Mosier of Nashville, Tennessee, whose pug, Doug (@itsdougthepug), is one of the most popular pets on Instagram, with 3.2 million reputed followers.

“They are more like humansslash-pigs-slash-dogs.”

The breed’s almost-human face makes it easy for owners to anthropomorphise their pets with costumes. Mosier plays off Doug’s perma-frown by dressing him – wrapped in towels, say, with cucumber slices over his eyes, looking like a moneyed divorcée taking refuge at Canyon Ranch.

It is a look that conjures Bob Ross, the TV painter who died in 1995.

And who isn’t going to follow “the Bob Ross of dogs”, as Agador is billed on Instagram?

“It makes him instantly recognisable,” said Allan Monteron, one of his owners. “People stop us on the street and say, ‘I follow that dog on Instagram!’” Exaggerated features are a plus, too. Take corgis, those squat-legged canine courtiers to the queen. They are certainly hot on Instagram, with accounts that have “corgi” in the user name rising 200 per cent over the past year, according to Instagram, and that cannot all be attributable to the breed’s occasional cameo on The Crown.

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UPFRONT / SOCIAL MEDIA

“People prefer the real, natural dogs, as opposed to say, poodles, which give off a pretentious vibe”

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Every feature of the corgi works as a visual punch line: those oversize Yoda ears, the squat “Honey, I Shrunk the Collie” body, the 50-per cent-off appendages.

The same may be said of bulldogs, the one breed that appears in the top five of both Instagram and the American Kennel Club. Outside of social media, bulldogs’ popularity will be assured so long as there are Anglophiles, Marine Corps veterans and college football fans in Georgia.

On Instagram, where user names that include “bulldog” surged 60 per cent in the past year, bulldogs check multiple boxes: They look like people (specifically, grumpy old men), have inherently comic features (the volleyball-size head, the tiny bow legs) and are easy to anthropomorphise.

The breed has also reaped a windfall of “it dog” publicity from celebrities, including Brad Pitt, Jessica Biel and David Beckham, for whom these homely little bruisers seem to make the perfect foil. The message seems to be: “Do not hate me because I am beautiful, since my dog is not.” Because of their associations with the queen and the British Empire, however, both corgis and bulldogs seem out of step with the current vogue for rescue dogs and less rarefied breeds. These days, pointedly aristocratic breeds tend not to pop on social media as much as dogs with quirky features

or compelling back stories, said Elias Weiss Friedman, a New York photographer who spends his days snapping pictures for The Dogist, a dog-centric street photography site that has a rabid Instagram following.

“I’ve found that people prefer the more real, natural dogs,” Friedman said. “Poodles seem to give off a pretentious vibe, especially if they have the classic poodle haircut. The older generations love them, but I think

Many of the younger generation see poodles as “undogly”

the younger generation sees that style as fake, undogly.”

His two most popular posts have been a mixed breed puppy with funny ears named Larry and a 12-year-old labrador with vitiligo named Rowdy. “People crave relatability, and see dogs as individuals with similar life challenges to themselves,” he said.

The right kinds of mixed breeds – they were once called mutts – play well on social

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media, particularly if their features are camera worthy. A huskymalamute-wolf mix called @loki_the_wolfdog has become one of the 10 most popular pets on Instagram, thanks in part to his rugged Call of the Wild aura and head-turning looks (including mismatched eye colours and a silky coat that changes colour with the seasons) that his owner, Kelly Lund, uses to poetic effect in his shots of Loki in the snow-dusted Colorado wilderness.

Many dog owners interviewed also said they see mutts, rescues and disabled dogs as a more ethical choice. “I think the most difficult question posed to us is always ‘Where did you get that dog? I want to get one exactly like it,’” said Francis Bott, who owns Agador with his partner, Monteron. “It is simple enough to

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3.2

Number of followers in millions that Doug, a pug, has on Instagram

provide the breeder’s name, but we are big proponents of adopting rescues whenever possible.” (They opted to buy a hypoallergenic poodle mix from a breeder, Bott said, because their previous dog, a rescue shih tzu-bichon mix, aggravated their allergies.) Rescue organisations like the North Shore Animal League and the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition blanket social media with heart-rending photos of doe-eyed animals looking for a home.

Such social media efforts to raise awareness have led to a demand for differently abled dogs and “tripods”, or those missing a limb, said Jennifer Nosek, the editor of Modern Dog magazine. One such unlikely Instagram star was Smiley, a golden retriever born without eyes, and with a form of dwarfism, in a puppy mill, who became a service

dog in nursing homes and hospitals.

(Smiley’s death last year, after a battle with cancer, was covered by the news media.)

“Perhaps it’s an antidote to all the bad news we’re so often bombarded with,” Nosek said.

“These accounts remind us that there are people, and dogs, out there doing good.” Either that, or such dogs just provide a break from the pressure that the rest of us feel trying to look too perfect for Instagram.

Take @chloekardoggian, a 13-year-old rescue chihuahua in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with huge eyes and 153,000 followers. “Her ears go up, her nose goes right, her tongue goes left, and her eyes each go in different directions,” said Dorie Herman, her owner.

“Everyone has felt like Chloe looks at some point in their lives.”

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MARCH ISSUE 147

UPFRONT / SPEND

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NORMAN CHERNER CHAIR This stunning piece of mid-century design from 1958 has been reproduced for the modern market.

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VC-BACKED FIRM ENTERS CHINA’S LUXURY RETAIL SECTOR Le Tote, a San Francisco-based tech company focused on the fashion rental service, is about to enter the Chinese luxury market. The online luxury fashion rental retailer, backed by a number of high-profile VC firms, is the first US subscription service of its kind to enter China. During its beta program, Le Tote China will rely on word-of-mouth with an initial 3,000 “founding members”, according to the company.

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UPFRONT

On your bike Richard Orange discovers a design-driven Copenhagen bike company aiming to change the way we live

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he most bicycledominated city in the world seems an odd place to launch a campaign to push cars out of the city: somewhere between “selling coals to Newcastle” and “preaching to the converted”. But that is what the Danish design-driven bicycle brand Biomega is doing in Copenhagen. Its flagship store sits discreetly amid the brightly coloured merchant houses of the

city’s medieval centre, sandwiched between a tall red-brick house with a hook once used to haul up goods, and a shop selling artisanal stained glass.

“There’s the one that started it all, nearly 20 years ago – the Marc Newson,” says Nicholas Woolf, the store-manager, pointing to a chipped and worn frame hanging on a clean white wall. “He’s the Apple Watch designer, and also the most famous Australian

product designer.” Woolf, who is himself a product designer from Australia, was drawn to Denmark by its design ethos, and he acts more like a gallery owner than a bicycle salesman.

“The fat wheel, it’s a concept bike by Ros Lovegrove,” he says pointing to a bike hanging in front of the window, mentioning how unusually non-organic it is for the designer best known for the Apple iMac and the Sony Walkman. “This one is in a design museum in New York. It’s pretty quirky: an oversized BMX for grown men.” But it’s the new AMS E-low parked by the counter that Biomega is betting on to lure the city’s last holdouts out of their cars. The battery is integrated into

MARCH / THE BUSINESS

“We want cars out of cities and the only way to do that is to make something that competes with a car” the frame, giving it a much cleaner form than competing e-bikes. It’s a beautiful bike.

“The first customer will get hers tomorrow,” Woolf says.

“She’s a private individual who works on the east side of the city and lives on the west side, one of the commuter people who live and work in the wrong places for public transport.”

The AMS E-low and its predecessor the OKO mark a strategic shift for Biomega, the company’s chief executive, Kenneth Dalsgaard, explains.

“We have chosen to focus our development and marketing on electric bikes, because we’ve see a gap in the market that isn’t currently being targeted,” he says.

Biomega’s founder Jens Martin Skibsted – who also co-founded the design consultancy KiBiSi with the star architect Bjarke Ingels – made

the case strongly in a recent article for the World Economic Forum, arguing that electric cars were being overhyped when “in terms of sheer numbers, the real game changer is the electric bicycle”.

Dalsgaard, more of a manager than a designer, expands on Skibsted’s vision. “We want to get cars out of cities and the only way to do that is to make something that competes with a car.”

Dalsgaard claims his competitors are not other bicycle companies, or even other companies making e-bikes, as the first serve customers who are already cyclists and the second make products that are too ugly and clunky for Biomega’s more refined target customers.

“There is still a group of people who do not have a bike already and they would not buy an e-bike, because they look

ISSUE 147

terrible, with wires everywhere,” he says. “We are targeting the people who have a car, and commute to work every day.

That’s our sole focus right now.”

The first Copenhagen customer for the AMS E-low is a case in point. She lives in the east of the city and works in the west. “She’s one of the commuter people who live and work in the wrong places for public transport,” Woolf says.

The other key customer group is consultants or other executives who spend their day travelling between clients. “The only alternative is to drive, which is actually quite slow, so it’s the fastest way to get around without getting sweaty,” he says, adding that arriving at a meeting on a Biomega works as an “image booster”, showing that you are a modern company that cares about green design.

One of their most evangelical consultant clients is Mogens Nørgaard, founder and CEO of the Danish big data consultancy CIMA, who tours the city on his OKO convincing companies to let him work with their data.

Woolf estimates that between five and seven other CEOs have moved to an OKO following his example. Dalsgaard argues that to compete with car brands, Biomega needs to brand its bicycles like car brands do. “Cars express something about who you are; not that many bicycle brands do that,” he says. Biomega bikes aim to be recognisable by their silhouette alone, with little need for other branding, much like the Audis or BMWs its target customers drive.

They also aim to be reliable in a way bikes seldom are. “If you really want to get cars out of the city, then you have to design something that’s better than a car,” Dalsgaard says. “It has to be something that you don’t think have to think about, it needs to be something that is no maintenance or low maintenance.”

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UPFRONT / THE BUSINESS

Next year will see the company launch something completely new: an electric vehicle

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Traditional bikes with their greasy chains and punctures are too risky for high-end executives.

“That’s why there’s so many bike dealers out there, because you go there all the time.” In Denmark, the company has taken some bold steps towards this market.

It plans to open a new flagship store in the north of the city, right on the road used by well-heeled commuters who drive their cars from the upmarket beach suburb of Hellerup. And it has a partnership with a Danish car dealership, which sells the bicycles alongside

Volvos and other brands. But Biomega’s tight new focus on electric bicycles isn’t just about the original anti-car mission of its founder Jens Martin Skibsted.

In 2012, Skibsted sold a majority stake in the company to a Hong Kong-based electronics company that manufactures electric motors and batteries.

As well as pushing the company into electric bicycles, the new owners are pushing an expansion plan far more ambitious than anything Skibsted dreamt up.

“They make millions of tablets

Top: The company’s Copenhagen showroom Above: Biomega’s CEO, Kenneth Dalsgaard

and all kinds of other consumer electronics products. They’re very ambitious, so just being a niche company in Denmark and selling a few thousand bicycles a year is not something they want to be a part of,” Nørgaard says. “$40 million-$50 million is not something they’re interested in, because then you’re too small.”

The idea is to build a premium e-bicycle brand in Denmark, and then expand into Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands and Belgium. After that, the next target market will be China. “The idea is to set up this niche entirely and then expand globally horizontally from that, to design long-range bicycles and lower priced e-bikes aimed at specific markets, to develop the brand and then move it into China.”

Skibsted is still heavily involved, Nørgaard says, personally designing the AMS, and designing the OKO through his KiBiSi consultancy.

“We are using all of his creativity to design new bicycles,” he says.

“Biomega has a huge asset in Jens Martin. His design partners and network is something other companies will never have.”

According to Nørgaard, the next year will see something “completely new. It’s an electric vehicle, that’s all I can say”.

After that, the company dedicated to ridding cities of the car aims to do perhaps the last thing you’d expect: launch one of its own. But if Skibsted’s bicycles are anything to go by, it will be a car unlike any other.

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MARCH ISSUE 147

UPFRONT / CLASSIC READ

Permission Marketing Seth Godin’s book is still a must-read for marketers around the world

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eth Godin is something of a superstar in the marketing community. His prolific book writing (17 bestsellers so far) and his blog, filled with sharp insights, have seen him evolve into one of the most sought after marketers in history. While some criticise his insights as trite, Godin understands how companies need to act in order to get their message across. This book is one of the best at doing just that.

Godin talks about the privilege that marketers have, that of having permission to communicate with customers. Modern customers have the power to ignore marketing, so by treating those customers with respect, brands can earn – and keep – their attention. It is, Godin writes, vital that brands listen to their customers first, that way they can understand what type of communication their customers want to receive.

That’s the key point of the book: in order to ‘get permission’ you must know the type of communication each customer wants. This is where it gets tricky, as the cost of running an ad that gets seen or renting out a billboard is expensive. Even with the rise of targeted ads on Google and Facebook, click-through rates are often tiny. So, Godin writes, you need to get your friends and customers to help you reach new audiences. Godin defines ‘friends’ as prospects you have earned permission to talk to, even

though they are not customers yet.

While marketers talk a lot about the ‘funnel’, Godin tells you to flip the funnel and turn it into a megaphone. At the time of writing social media was not where it is now, but with the likes of Twitter and Instagram, it’s easier than ever before to put Godin’s ideas into practice. He wants brands to allow customers to talk about the service and, crucially, to get out of the way.

Part of Godin’s charm lies in his ability as a writer: he’s very good.

He manages to give real-world examples of marketing problems and figure out solutions on the page, without ever lapsing into jargon or MBA-speak. Take this about how marketers get it wrong: “The Interruption Marketer buys

an expensive suit. New shoes. Then, working with the best databases and marketing strategists, selects the ideal singles bar. Walking into the bar, the Interruption Marketer marches up to the nearest person and proposes marriage. If turned down, the Marketer repeats this process on every person in the bar.

If the Marketer comes up emptyhanded, it is obvious that the blame should be placed on the suit and the shoes. The tailor is fired. The strategy expert who picked the bar is fired. And the Interruption Marketer tries again at a different singles bar.

If this sounds familiar, it should.

Brands should allow customers to talk about the service, and get out of the way It’s the way most large marketers look at the world. They hire an agency. They build fancy ads. They ‘research’ the ideal place to run the ads. They interrupt people and hope that one in a hundred will go ahead and buy something. And then, when they fail, they fire their agency.

“The other way to get married is a lot more fun, and a lot more successful. It’s called dating. A Permission Marketer goes on a date. If it goes well, the two of them go on another date. And then another, until both sides can really communicate with each other about their needs. After 20 dates, they meet each other’s families. And finally, after three or four months of dating, the Permission Marketer proposes marriage. Permission Marketing is just like dating. It turns strangers into friends and friends into lifetime customers.”

Godin has gained a huge following in recent years and it’s not hard to see why. For those involved in the business of persuasion, there’s very few better marketers.

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UPFRONT

Boutique bonanza The big brands are getting in on the boutique hotel market, writes CJ Hannon

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f you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

That seems to be the attitude of the big hotel brands when it comes to the boutique hotel market. Once the preserve of small, independent outlets, the boutique hotel has been embraced by the big hotel brands, in a bid to attract the younger generation of travellers and to stay relevant in the Instagram age. It was all very different a few years ago: many bemoaned the legions of independent hotels that valued style over substance and suffered from poor service and F&B options. The boutique industry has matured, however, and many independent hotels do just as good a job as the bigger chain hotels.

Part of their growing strength can be seen in the number of alliances that now cater to independent hotels. Some of these aren’t new: Leading Hotels of the Word (LHW) was set up in 1928.

The big chain hotels are not taking this lying down. Hyatt launched Andaz, Hilton has Canopy, and Marriott invested big into the market with Autograph Collection, Moxy, Edition and AC Hotels. Internationally, Melia’s ME brand, Carlson Rezidor’s Quorvus and Radisson Red initiatives, and Shangri-La’s new

Hotel Jen are just a few more examples. The reasons for this trend are many, including demand from a younger, well-educated and well-travelled consumer who eschews a traditional, generic travel experience. Less than 20 years ago, hotel brands marketed themselves on consistency; if you booked with, say, the Hilton, you knew you were getting a certain level of service. Since then, however, brand consistency has become a negative, equated with the likes of Starbucks, and hotels will do anything to broadcast they are different, unique. Part of this change is due to digital media. People are less afraid of the unknown as they once were, and even emerging destinations are far more saturated with content than before. Also, social media has promoted the value of authentic, local, experiential travel. Destinations – and hotels – are now viewed in terms of their ‘Instagramability’, which is tied to a level of authenticity, often contrived, but valued by many travellers.

Of course, the success of many boutique brands means they are no longer unique – witness W, the first successful boutique spin-off brand. There are now more than 52 W hotels around the world;

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it is hard to claim any of them offer a ‘unique’ experience or are any less cookie cutter than a more traditional hotel chain.

That doesn’t stop this new breed of boutiques from trying: witness the text on Marriot’s Edition hotel website. “Edition Hotels are stunning microcosms of the world’s top cities featuring the best in service, food, beverage (sic) and entertainment. Located in gateway cities throughout the world, these are hotels where you’ll find guests rubbing elbows with locals because there’s no better place to be in the moment.

Hotels that feel different because they make you feel something.

Hotels that don’t act like hotels.”

Hotels are viewed in terms of their authenticity, which is often contrived, but still valued by younger travellers Except, of course, they do act like hotels, however much they want to pretend they are special. For true independent hotels, joining a group is nothing new. LHW currently consists of 375 properties, all of which are independent. Ted Teng, the company’s president and CEO, is emphatic in stating “there is zero impact on The Leading Hotels of the World in terms of soft brands. They do not target the same hotel owners as we do. Our solution is geared towards family owners, many who have built their business over generations, where soft brands are a good

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UPFRONT

“Loyalty programmes can be a negative, if guests are redeeming points at smaller hotels but not accumulating them there”

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solution for institutional owners.”

Jeffrey Sirota, vice president, worldwide sales and Americas region for Small Luxury Hotels (SLH), agrees. “Most SLH hotels are individually owned, versus investor owned. These owners are deeply involved and they want to call the shots,” he told Skift, a media company that provides news, research and marketing services for the travel industry. “The hotels are

passion projects and the owners want to remain in control and not have to deal with red tape brands may present.” SLH is a collection of 500 hotels with, on average, 48 rooms per property.

For the independent hotels, the cost of joining Leading Hotels of the World or Small Luxury Hotels is a fraction of what it would cost to be part of a franchise or a soft brand. If an independent hotel wants to join

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Average number of rooms in a Small Luxury Hotels property

Marriott’s Autograph collection, they need to abide by a strict set of brand guidelines. On the Autograph website it says: “Autograph Collection stands for individuality and against one-size-fits-all travel experiences. We find, review and select hotels, each exactly like nothing else, offering experiences informed by unique perspectives on design, craft and hospitality.”

For the independent hotels, belonging to the likes of Autograph can offer security, as well as generate income. As Sirota told Skift, the benefits mainly come from the parent company’s loyalty programme. “The loyalty programmes of the big brands can be a negative, however. Properties belonging to soft brands are required to free up a certain amount of inventory for a percentage of the best available rate for those who want to redeem points. Members may be redeeming their points at these independent properties, but not necessarily accumulating them there. So, these hotels aren’t getting new business as a result of membership.” For Robert Van Ness, executive vice president, Americas, Preferred Hotels & Resorts, new hotels may look at belonging to one of the bigger brands as a big draw. “Franchise collections have increased the competition” when it comes to wooing owners of newbuild properties”, he says. “That’s

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BOUTIQUE BRANDS EDITION The brand has hotels in London, Miami and New York with new openings in Barcelona, Abu Dhabi and Bangkok later this year.

CANOPY Set up by Hilton in 2014 and with 20 hotels slated for development, Canopy is Hilton’s 12th subsidiary brand.

often because affiliation with a bigger brand may be perceived to be beneficial for developers when seeking financing.”

For the consumer, the choice can be overwhelming, and it’s often hard to know which hotels are independent, and which just look like they are. With 50 per cent of hotel guests predicted to

W HOTELS Opened in 1998, W was the first foray by a major hotel group into the boutique sector.

W now has 52 hotels around the world.

HOTEL JEN A four-star spinoff from the ShangriLa, the first property opened in Singapore in 2014.

be millennials by 2020, hotels are finding it more and more important to be authentic. While some millennials will only want to stay at true boutique hotels, others will be happy to stay at chains that cater to them, such as Marriot’s Moxy brand, which offers craft cocktails, quality coffee and hi-speed Wi-Fi. For the consumer, the increased

ANDAZ Owned by Hyatt and founded in 2007, Andaz currently has 12 hotels around the world.

competition can only be a good thing. Visit any decent sized city and you will have the option of staying at a chain hotel, a boutique hotel or an Airbnb. Choice drives the prices down and increases the level of service. And with the battle for the travellers’ wallet showing no signs of abating, for the picky business traveller, the future is bright.

WALDORF ASTORIA MAKES AFRICA DEBUT Hilton is making a big push into Africa this year with both the Hilton Cairo Heliopolis and the Waldorf Astoria, Cairo, opening later this year. The Hilton Cairo Heliopolis will be the sixth Hilton hotel in the Egyptian capital, and will feature 593 rooms. Then the Waldorf Astoria will open with 247 rooms. This is only the beginning for Hilton’s Egypt plans with seven more hotels set to open in Africa’s most populous country in the next five years. Hilton currently has 5,100 hotels across the world. The openings suggest western confidence in the Egyptian economy and the country’s tourism sector.

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THE FIGHTBACK Lauren Razavi examines the rise of antibiotic resistance and how we can safeguard our future health

THE FIGHTBACK

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acterial infections like pneumonia and diar rhoea were once the primar y cause of death in the developed world, but today more people than ever have access to life-saving medications thanks to the prevalence of low-cost antibiotics. In fact, over the past 100 years, human medicine has become incredibly dependent on antibiotics to deal with day-to-day ailments and help people stay healthy. But this phenomenon comes with some significant drawbacks. The world is on the verge of a widespread health crisis.

While the use of antibiotics has undoubtedly improved the lives and prospects of many across the globe, it’s become clear in recent years that modern medicine is over-reliant on antibiotics and that, on the advice of our doctors, we’ve all been irresponsible about using them. As a result, antibiotic-resistant superbugs are emerging – fast.

This fierce form of bacteria are resistant to all known forms of antibiotics and have the ability to turn something as simple as a cough into a serious and deadly condition.

“Resistant bugs are flowing around everywhere.

It seems like wherever you look, you find them – in the wild, in the ocean, in the soil,” says Dr Clare Chandler, medical anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“They’re around mainly because of natural evolution. Bacteria, like all life forms, continue to evolve into new forms. Some of those forms will be resistant to antibiotics and we drive that resistance when we use a lot of antibiotics.”

But this is more than just a problem in nature.

In hospitals, superbugs spread like wildfire among patients and some of the ‘last resort’ antibiotics that doctors turn to in these situations are now becoming antibiotic resistant too. Perhaps even more worryingly, research by The Lancet Planetary Health last year showed that restricting the use of antibiotics on farms could reduce the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals bred for meat production by 39 per cent. The results of this study prompted the World Health Organization to recommend that farmers across the globe stop using antibiotics to treat their animals to avoid serious risks to human health as a result of antibiotic resistance.

“The theory is that we’re driving antibiotic resistance in the guts of animals, so resistant bacteria might be in the meat you eat and, in turn, transfer resistance to you. Or the antibiotic itself will still be in the meat, so then you’re consuming the antibiotics. Or the antibiotics and resistant bugs go out through the manure into the soil and

into waterways and then come back round to other parts of our ecosystem. So they’re kind of flowing between people, animals, crops and waterways all the time,” Chandler explains.

If this flow between people, animals, crops and waterways is happening constantly, is it really possible to fight antibiotic resistance? For patients, antibiotic resistance can leave precious few treatment options – even fewer in developing countries where sophisticated drugs may be unaffordable or simply not available.

“Many people will then have genes in their gut that are resistant to a whole range of different antibiotics. When that person then gets sick, taking a regular drug may not work, so they try taking the next drug and that doesn’t work either,” Chandler says. “The only hope becomes a very expensive drug or there simply aren’t any more

The WHO has recommended that farmers stop using antibiotics on their animals to prevent drug resistance

THE FIGHTBACK

drugs available. That’s the situation that people are really scared about. The idea that we won’t be able to save ourselves from a cut on the knee.”

In the search for new antibiotics, researchers have found themselves exploring some rather interesting and unexpected possibilities. A study by the University of Exeter set out to examine whether surfers – who swallow around 10 times more seawater than sea swimmers on average – are more vulnerable to the bacteria that pollute seawater. The scientists found that nine per cent of the surfers they tested were colonised by resistant bacteria, compared to just three per cent of non-surfers. They found that bacteria would continue to grow even if treated with an antibiotic, in this case cefotaxime, indicating that it was extremely resistant.

Last year, a study led by Birkbeck College at the University of London and University College London found that a particular type of onion – the Persian shallot – could be helpful in the fight against antibiotic resistance for those diagnosed

A micrograph of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria

Researchers discovered that a type of onion can help fight against resistance to TB drugs

with tuberculosis (TB). The team of scientists conducted tests on four different molecules from the shallots and found that all of them could inhibit the growth of isolated TB cells by more than 99.9 per cent. They concluded that the Persian shallot could increase the effects of existing antibiotic treatments to combat strains of TB that have developed resistance to antibacterial drugs.

“We think that mother nature has the intrinsic ability to produce a number of amazing molecules that are often very difficult for a really world-class chemist to synthesise in a lab,” explains Dr Sanjib Bhakta, one of the study’s authors and a reader in molecular microbiology and biochemistry at Birkbeck. “With that knowledge, the ecological information, and quite a lot of ancient history around natural products, we started our search for new anti-infective molecules. We were able to extract the clue from the Persian shallots, or more generally, family plants that include onion, garlic, leeks and shallots.”

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THE FIGHTBACK

Right: Greenpeace protest against the excessive use of antibiotics in livestock farming outside a Berlin branch of Lidl Below: Surgery could become impossible if patients become resitant to antibiotics

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Over the past 30 years, there has been a sharp decline in the number of new antibiotics being discovered in the world, making this type of discovery a landmark moment for the medical community. But why has there been such a downturn in the number of new antibiotic discoveries since the 1980s? Coilin Nunan is a scientific advisor to campaign groups the Alliance to Save our Antibiotics and the Soil Association. He believes that a combination of factors has led to a shortage of new antibiotics being discovered. In particular, though, he highlights the economic considerations at play.

“Essentially, an antibiotic tends to cure you, which means only a relatively short course of antibiotics is ever necessary if the treatment is working,” Nunan says. “You might be on them for a week or a bit longer, then that’s it. In contrast, you might be on other medicines like statins or multiple sclerosis medication for life. So, there’s an economic factor here: pharmaceutical companies don’t get very large sales from antibiotics. If you do increase your antibiotics sales, that means using more antibiotics. The more you increase your sales, the more resistance increases and the less effective the medicine is.”

He adds: “Any new antibiotics that might be discovered will have to be used in very small

quantities if we want to keep them, and that’s just not a very good economic model.”

Essentially, antibiotics are a natural resource and it appears there might only be so many of them out there for humans to find. Of course, other antibiotics do exist, but even when we find them, they need to be non-toxic for use in human medicine and able to spread in the body to reach the infected zones successfully. “These sorts of things mean that even when we find an antibiotic, it very often turns out it’s unsuitable,” Nunan explains. “So there may not be that many suitable antibiotics left out there. We’ve already been looking for decades and may have found most of the best ones already.”

THE FIGHTBACK

“We need a cultural change so society as a whole can live without antibiotics, but that shift is about us as a social group rather than individuals taking responsibility themselves”

If we truly have already found the best antibiotics that nature has to offer, then decreasing the impact of antibiotic resistance should be at the top of the global health agenda and a key concern for national governments everywhere. But what can normal people like you and me do to help in the fight against antibiotic resistance? Would us doing our part as individuals make any significant difference?

“If you liken it to climate change, what we’ve learned is that when we ask individuals to make their own choices and turn off the lights, it can make some difference. If their entire country can do that, it makes a real difference,” Chandler says. “But the only way a

whole country can do that is if they’ve got other ways of living and seeing and so on. That means introducing alternative technologies like energy saving light bulbs and pushing through regulation that means only these are available.”

She adds: “In practice, that means that those choices are made for us. If you need a whole nation to do something, you’ve got to do something at the top. You can’t expect individuals to take the responsibility of something that essentially wasn’t their responsibility in the first place. They went to the doctor and were given an antibiotic – they’re just doing what they’ve been told to do. We

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THE FIGHTBACK

As we unlock the key to more and more diseases, its inconceivable we won’t be able to solve the antibiotics issue in the coming years

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need a cultural change towards being able to live without antibiotics, but that shift is about us as a social group rather than about individuals taking responsibility themselves.”

Media outlets across many countries have been quick to report on antibiotic resistance, with tabloid newspapers indulging in a selection of doomsday headlines every time new information comes to light. So, do journalists and broadcasters have a tendency to overemphasise the dangers of the issue – or is antibiotic resistance becoming increasingly urgent and more concerning over time?

“The danger is there – it’s a genuine threat that antibiotic resistance could be very serious.

I think it already is for many people around the world. There are an enormous number of deaths from [the bacterial infection] sepsis, for example, among little babies just after they’re born. In places like India, doctors can’t treat sepsis because the bacteria are already antibioticresistant. That is a really serious problem,” Chandler explains. “I think it’s right that the media draws attention to it as a serious problem, but when we start to paint it in apocalyptic terms, that can bring other kinds of problems that we don’t necessarily anticipate. The language we choose to talk about this is very important.”

So, does antibiotic resistance mean we’re all doomed? If medical science was standing still, perhaps that would be the case, but scientists are discovering fresh healthcare solutions all the time – whether they be antibiotics or totally new innovations. Science keeps improving and the healthcare we have access to now would be considered miraculous even 50 years ago. As we unlock the key to more and more diseases, it’s inconceivable that we won’t be able to solve the antibiotics issue in the coming years.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTIBIOTICS Although their widespread application in modern medicine has been a recent phenomenon, antibiotics themselves are nothing new. Humans have used antibiotics to treat infections for millions of years, although it was only in the 20th century that people realised how many of them were caused by bacteria. Moulds and plant extracts were used as treatments by some of the earliest civilisations. The ancient Egyptians, for example, used mouldy bread to treat infected wounds.

One of the most significant modern antibiotic discoveries was by the Scottish physician, microbiologist and pharmacologist Alexander Fleming in 1928. Being an eccentric and a rather disorganised man of science, Fleming left a petri dish of bacteria uncovered while he was on holiday in the English county of Suffolk. When he returned, a fungus had formed on the plate and created bacteria-free zones wherever it grew. His absentminded error led him to discover the powerful antibiotic penicillin. This discovery led to many of the antibiotic treatments doctors use for a wide variety of infections today, as well as the discovery of an enormous range of other antibiotics.

LESSONS FROM A UK BANKRUPTCY Jesse Onslow Norton examines whether public-private partnerships are losing their attraction following the collapse of Carillion

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n Ja n u a r y 1 5 , t h e U K ’s second-largest construction fir m notified the London Stock Exchange that it would be going into compulsor y liquidation with immediate effect. On the morning that its operations were forcibly stopped by the most drastic procedure in UK insolvency law, it employed more than 43,000 staff, had accrued more $1.7 billion in unpayable debts, and a further $1.4 billion pension deficit.

Over its 19 year lifespan, Carillion had grown to become one of the largest construction firms in the world and claimed to be one of the world’s leading experts in public-private partnerships (PPPs). It worked with governments on completing projects as diverse as the award-winning Copenhagen Metro system, the Grand Mosque in Oman and a $640 million reconstruction of Toronto’s iconic Union Station. But following a string of failed construction projects across the Middle East, the company’s market capitalisation plummeted from $2.8 billion in 2016 down to just $85 million and its dependency on government contracts began to be called into question by investors.

Nowhere was this close relationship with national gover nments closer than in the company’s own home – the UK. At the time of going into liquidation, Carillion was committed to completing 450 contracts on behalf of the UK government, including major infrastructure projects, the construction of several hospitals and the provision of meals in 900 public schools.

With the collapse of the construction firm, those projects were left to uncertain fates and thousands of subcontractors were suddenly left without work.

The trouble the firm was in first came to light in July 2017. On the day that Carillion issued the first of four profit warnings to shareholders, the chief executive resigned and it suffered an $1.2

billion writedown. Despite the clear warning signs, it didn’t stop the UK government from awarding the firm with even larger contracts. Carillion announced that net debt had doubled and firsthalf losses of $1.6 billion, but it was still able to secure lucrative government contracts to complete the construction of a $77 billion high-speed rail network, a new football stadium for Liverpool FC, and an international airport in Manchester.

“The problem with all contractor firms is that they tend to underbid, so they’re not very profitable. When margins are low, all it takes is some small accident like a ceiling falling in a hospital to put them off balance. Then they have to figure out how to make up the revenue elsewhere,” says Brian Scott-Quinn, non-executive chairman of the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA) Centre at Henley Business School.

“Carillion kept bidding on new contracts in the hope that cash coming in could pay off previously unprofitable contracts”

“What Carillion were doing was to keep bidding on new contracts in the hope that cash coming in could be used to pay off previously unprofitable contracts. They were playing a game of catch up, hoping they could supply it with revenue from new contracts. It’s a very stupid game to play.”

Britain was once a global pioneer for the privatisation of state assets, but the downfall of Carillion has caused a crisis of confidence in how governments manages infrastructure projects and provides public services. The 20th century was a period of rapid expansion for the public sector as nations everywhere introduced national health services, housing initiatives, pension schemes, and public education. By the end of the century, however, it had become increasingly clear that civil servants aren’t always the most suitable people to manage these projects.

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In the 1980s, the UK government recognised that decades of mismanagement had resulted in deteriorating services, rapidly increasing debt and rising costs for consumers. This prompted the government to modernise the country’s national infrastructure with a new form of partnership called a private finance initiative (PFI).

“When PFIs were developed, they were essentially just an accounting trick. The idea was to take the cost of infrastructure projects off the government books so they didn’t count as public debt,” explains Julian Jessop, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Affairs. “When borrowing money, the private sector always starts at a disadvantage because the cost of capital is much higher than for the public sector. The

UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond speaks to troops during the London Olympics, after the army had to step in to provide security

government is big, it can tax people, it’s not going to go bankrupt, so the risk is much lower. There is almost no real economic benefit to PFIs.” Under PFIs, private firms are financed by governments to complete and manage projects on behalf of the public. A project such as a school, a bridge or a hospital is proposed by the government and firms bid on the contracts. The winner of the bid is committed to fronting the initial outlay of the project, but in return they are rewarded with indexed loan payments from public money that can span for decades. While this sounded great in principle, not everybody was convinced by the idea.

“It’s absolutely a false economy. First, the government ends up paying more because the cost of borrowing is higher for private sector

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companies,” says Jessop. “The second problem is that risk isn’t really taken off the public sector books. Often, the government has to step in to fund the project, or to bail out the private sector provider. Not only is it more costly, but it doesn’t protect taxpayers from the risk.”

Once Britain had established the model for public-private partnerships they began to appear all over the world. Australia, Canada and Spain each adopted the PFI model as a convenient way of financing public infrastructure projects without increasing public sector borrowing. PPPs have spread even further, with most governments around the world using the mechanism to outsource at least some public services. But over the three decades since their inception, high-

Nearly half of all UK government spending is spent on outsourcing, more than $140 billion

profile failures and scandals have gradually eroded their reputation.

In 2012, when London hosted the Summer Olympics, the UK government contracted out security provisions to G4S. Initially, the global security firm agreed to provide a 10,000-strong security workforce to the City of London, but with six months to go until the opening ceremony the scope of the project changed. The government decided to double the required number of personnel for the event, and in response G4S raised its management fee from $10 million to $83 million.

As the Olympic got closer and closer, costs continued to snowball and communications broke down completely between the organisers of the games and the security firm. At the last

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minute military personnel and local police officers had to be drafted in to provide security as G4S had failed to fulfill its obligations.

Fo l l o w i n g a p u b l i c i n q u i r y i n t o t h e mismanagement of the contract, Theresa May, who was home secretary at the time, made a public statement of support for PPPs and urged the government to not lose faith in them. Now that she is prime minister, her unwavering support for the model has been criticised by her opponents as out of touch. A poll by the Legatum Institute found that 83 per cent of the British public now favour the nationalisation of water utilities. For energy, the figure was only slightly lower at 77 per cent.

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he leader of the UK’s opposition party, Jeremy Corbyn, has used the Carillion scandal to rally his supporters around policies of renationalisation. Nearly half of all UK government spending on goods and services is spent on outsourcing, with more than $140 billion spent each year. It remains unclear whether fulfilling these obligations publicly would leave the taxpayer better or worse off. The Labour Party has pledged, should it win the next election, to reverse the three decades of privatisation and bring national utilities and infrastructure back under public control.

“There are two types of public-private relationship and people tend to get them confused.

One part of it is the financing of activity, and another is the provision of goods and services,” explains Jessop. “What’s happening is that Labour aren’t being clear about which type they are referring to and they’re using the opportunity to push for projects to be entirely managed by the public sector.

There’s no real reason for it other than ideology.”

If the next British government does decide to scrap PPPs it won’t be alone. In Europe, the model has generally been to separate asset ownership

Firms that specialise in government contracts are under pressure to demonstrate how they can provide value for money

from ser vice provision and to grant private companies the right to operate concessions. With the onset of the global financial crisis in the 2008, however, the EU has scaled back its commitment to PPPs almost entirely.

From 1990 to 2009, the EU signed nearly 1,400 PPP deals, representing a capital value of approximately €260 billion. But since 2010, estimates suggest that the number of PPP deals closed has fallen more than 40 per cent. With EU debt spiralling out of control, the European Commission decided that shuffling money between books wasn’t the sanest solution to its infrastructure problems.

In America, President Obama spent his two terms in office planning and failing to instigate massive PPPs to fund infrastructure across

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“When borrowing money, the private sector always starts at a disadvantage because the cost of capital is much higher than for the public sector”

the United States, but was constantly battling criticisms that the policies were too socialist.

Whereas the UK’s National Audit Office reports over $ 5.8 billion a year on average in capital investment from PPPs, in the US, where the economy is more than six times larger, only five PPP deals worth a total of $2.4 billion were closed in 2015. Now with Donald Trump in office, the relationship couldn’t be any less clear.

During his election campaign, Trump pledged to rebuild America’s infrastructure by channelling $1 trillion through PPPs. But since entering office, he has expressed doubt that PPPs represent value for money to the taxpayer. Trump has made no concrete announcements about alternatives mechanisms to finance US infrastructure projects such as building a wall on the Mexican border.

Trump had promised to spend $1 trillion on PPPs, but has since expressed doubt they are good value for money

In China, where national debt is skyrocketing, PPPs are rapidly becoming the Communist Party’s preferred method of doing business. The world’s most populated country has an urgent need for infrastructure investment on an unprecedented scale. In total, $ 2.8 trillion of investment was channelled through Chinese PPPs in 2016 alone.

While European countries have always used PPPs as a means to separate risk between both the public and private sector, in China 74 per cent of all private sector contractors are actually stateowned enterprises. Genuinely private companies are not attracted by the low margins involved in most government infrastructure projects and instead focusing on the country’s booming tech and consumer industries. This leaves the job to state-sponsored firms who have little doubt the government will be obliged to bail them out should their contracts not work out.

The Chinese government has acknowledged the inherent r isks in pur suing such large investments through PPPs. Shi Yaobin, the vice minister of finance, has said that they risk increasing both local and national levels of debt, and has called for China’s National Development and Reform Council to introduce new regulations governing PPPs. Until government safeguards are introduced, risk will continue to pile up for both the government and the state-owned contractors.

Governments have always depended upon private firms to build infrastructure and to provide services. Firms that specialise in government contracts are under increasing pressure to demonstrate how they can provide value for money to customers, and this is undercutting margins and making projects unmanageable. PPPs may have emerged in the late 20th century as the dominant model for government procurement, but if they are to survive long in the 21st century they need to learn lessons from the collapse of Carillion.

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David Whelan examines the viral phenomenon that was Cat Person and what it means for the future of publishing

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n December 11, 2017, a story went viral. It featured everything you would expect from shareable content: a compelling narrator, a vibrant style and gut-chur ningly familiar story of a relationship gone bad. The funny thing was, as it blew up across social media platforms with millions of people sharing it, accompanied by sympathetic comments and shared moments of inter-relationship queasiness, it slowly dawned on the wider readership that Cat Person was not real: it was a piece of expertly crafted fiction, by writer Kristen Roupenian. In the contemporary zeitgeist of distraction and social movements, a short story becoming a viral sensation was a strange, almost novel concept. It felt bizarre. Here, among the bric-a-brac of real life exposés on such men as Harvey Weinstein, was a piece of fiction that scaled similar cliffs and resonated with a generation that supposedly did not care for stories.

A 7,201 word short story became the biggest hit of December – becoming The New Yorker’s second most read article throughout the whole of 2017, with only a month to spare. This is, by all accounts, utterly unprecedented.

Short stories, of all of a sudden, became a valuable commodity. Just nine days after the story hit the web, it was leaked that author Roupenian had signed a seven-figure book deal with Scout Press – for her collection You Know You Want This.

As Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, said: “We have not seen anything like that with fiction.” Roupenian joins the rarefied ranks of actors Tom Hanks and BJ Novak for receiving such a high figure for a collection, though she stands almost entirely alone in the fact that she wasn’t famous before selling her book. There is a wider trend occurring, however, in the publishing world with three authors – Laura Sims, Kathy Wang and

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Smartphonedriven readership and big business has resulted in a new horizon for publishers

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Chip Cheek – each receiving at least half a million for their debuts in 2017. Their work is unified by a variety of things: they are modern, relationship-focused stories of love (and heartbreak).

The combination of smar tphone dr iven reader ship and big business has resulted in a new horizon for debut authors and publishers alike: shareability of writing is now commodified.

In recent times, book deals have been getting bigger and bigger. In 2016, Random House bought Emma Cline’s The Girls for $2 million, after reading only the first couple of pages.

There are always motives beyond just simply good writing – Cynthia d’Aprix Sweeney’s novel, The Nest, went for over a million, in a small part because she knew Amy Poehler well enough to blurb her. It was a boon that she had a connection to fame. Appearances are also important, as are who you know and who knows you. It’s not an industry entirely separated from the superficial mechanisms of the every day.

The Girls and The Nest were sold for $2 million and $1 million respectively

Cat Person, if you happen to have not read it, is the simple story of Margot and Robert. Margot, an undergraduate, falls for Robert, certainly older and potentially creepy, and they date. Texts are exchanged. Flutters of heart felt. Moments of intimacy exchanged. They learn of their different levels of age and experience. This is the first wedge between them or, at the least, the most overt to Margot. Regardless, the eventual interaction turn out to be particularly underwhelming for Margot, partially due to Robert’s animalistic tendencies and partly due to Margot’s awareness of her own doubts. Margot decides to end it with Robert.

Ghosting – where one person ignores the other’s messages – occurs. Margot moves on, until one day she sees Robert at her favourite dive bar and her friends Roman-phalanx her out. Robert then texts her a series of expletives. The end.

There is no doubt that social media and smartphones pushed this story to the tip of ever yone’s tongue – for good and bad. As Constance Grady wrote in Vox: “Short stories are read comparatively less often than book-length fiction, which suggests that many of the readers who commented publicly on Cat Person weren’t people who read lots of short stories. Yet they were discussing Cat Person as though it were the only story in the world capable of granting subjectivity to young women.” Unpacking Grady’s statement

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reveals an untapped market: the casual reader who fell in love with Cat Person does not read short stories. This could be the genre’s Black Mirror moment – when an otherwise niche form becomes a worldwide hit.

Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti (out on April 19, 2018) and winner of the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writers’ award, sold her novel for six figures to Picador. Her opinion on Cat Person’s success is interesting. “It is a very well-written story,” she says, “lucidly told, full of painful details. I think the context of a short story makes it easier to discuss issues with these fictional characters framing reallife archetypes. The short story form also means that people can read the whole thing quickly and form their think pieces/opinions.”

Quickly is exactly right – it spread like a fire across trees from phone to phone. #CatPerson trended on both Twitter and Instagram – musicians such as Lorde dipped in with their opinion.

Jonathan Lee, award winning author of Who Is Mr Satoshi?, Joy and High Dive, thinks there’s an obvious reason for this: “The success of Cat Person shows that high quality fiction (indeed short fiction – the stuff publishers often say there isn’t a market for) can reach a wide and appreciative readership if it is edited and published with care.”

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iterar y agent Imogen Pelham, of Marjacq in London’s fashionably literary Holborn, has a slightly more tempered opinion. “There has been a lot of anxiety around the ‘health’ of the short story as a form,” says Imogen, reflecting on the great commercial success of Cat Person and whether it will result in more publishers trialling stories on social media before making offers for the author’s large work. “I say this with a heavy heart, but, I think publishers would be wrong to read into this a huge resurgence of interest in the short story and particularly in short story collections. I hope it will lead to more magazines, journals and papers providing space for short stories in their pages, however.”

Pelham then moves on to touch on something not necessarily discussed in regards to its success – the narrator. “I think that the huge success of Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations With Friends shows that emotional relationships of younger adults – and young women in particular – are just as worthy of publishers’ notice and literary acclaim as the now more old fashioned authors usually associated with literary fiction.”

Rooney’s novel, like Cat Person, deals with the nature of social media as a relationship tool, and

“Technology is making it easier for publishers to experiment with alternative revenue models”

similarly became a shareable commodity within it.

As with all good stories, the pleasure is not in the plot, but in the slow evolution of these characters.

But Cat Person is not your average ‘good story’ – it has a tone and pace more similar to reportage than fiction, and it tackles a topic that felt, to many, extremely news-worthy: #MeToo. Here we navigate difficult territory, for fiction is not meant to be a photograph of reality. And, yet, Cat Person neatly entered into the discussion we were already having – toxic masculinity encountering anodyne femininity in magazines, coffee shops and dining tables around the world.

“We have been talking about consent and toxic masculinity for a while,” adds Pelham. “But another reason for their commercial success is how the stories are told using the familiar politics of texting – both in terms of trying to be impressive to someone new, and then how to text your way out of the fledgling situation.”

Great fiction reverberates within the liminal spaces of right and wrong. By sparking debate, Cat Person was a huge success – it described a moment that resonated with a wider political and social discourse. However, it didn’t really push beyond that – resulting in a vast amount of its readers

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Imogen Pelham

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to believe it was true. This is worrying for a few reasons. One, that these sort of experiences are so widespread that a fictional story feels so real; two, that Cat Person didn’t push away from the norm enough to differentiate itself. “I’m currently savouring Ruth Franklin’s brilliant biography of Shirley Jackson – A Rather Haunted Life,” explains Teo, “and found some great parallels between the viral success of Cat Person and Jackson’s The Lottery when it appeared in 1948. I quote: ‘[Jackson] would receive letters about The Lottery for the rest of her life. But though there were some cancelled subscriptions and a fair share of namecalling, the vast majority of the letter writers were not hostile, simply confused. More than anything else, they wanted to understand what the story meant.’ Sound familiar?”

Lee is keen to point out a different trend in the publishing industry – one that encompasses a wider spread of tastes across a longer timespan.

For a few years now, certain authors have become celebrities by writing a curious (and, inherently, popular) form of fiction. “There does seem to be a trend at the moment towards fiction that feels like memoir,” says Lee. “People forget, when they read Knausgård or Ferrante, that they’re reading novels – and I think they enjoy that feeling of forgetting, that sense that they’re in a liminal space. There’s something exhilarating, as a reader, about taking a vacation in that gap between fiction and fact. I felt that thrill recently when reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline, for example.

And I’ve felt that thrill as a writer, too.”

Lee found his own success in the world’s hunger for memoir-style fiction with his novel High Dive. “When I was writing High Dive, my

“The success of Cat Person shows short fiction can reach a wide readership if it’s edited with care”

novel about the Brighton bombing – the very nearly successful attempt by the IRA to assassinate Margaret Thatcher in 1984 – I felt that no-one else was interested in revisiting this topic,” adds Lee. “But to see the book do so well all over the world has been, genuinely, a shock. The success of High Dive has convinced me that you can’t ever guess what other people want.”

Despite Lee’s reservations, evidence suggests that you can, in fact, guess: Knausgård, Ferrant and, now, Roupenian have all made over a million dollars for their work and each seem to specialise in a certain style of fiction that feels inherently real.

What is forgotten is that Cat Person is not a moralistic story and never claimed to be. A story told from a close third person of Margot, we do not get a multiplicity of sympathies or voices – what we are told is what Margot sees and feels.

It sets up a classic plotline, plays it out and

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“There is a trend at the moment towards fiction that feels like memoir. I think they enjoy the feeling of forgetting”

provides the reader with precisely the ending they expected – in bad juju. Margot is young, indecisive and superficial; Robert is old, creepy and toxic.

Neither character is meant to be the framework of the reader or the author herself. This can result in difficult conversations for female authors in the industry. “Miranda July said this best,” adds Teo. “Women writers are often conflated with their narrators – as if we can’t consciously construct fictional worlds from the ground up and can only write diary entries.”

Despite this, for the first time in our lifetime, people we knew were messag ing about a short story. Texting. Posting online. Tweeting.

Instagramming. They wanted to know what other people thought. If they had read it. If they found it problematic. If they sympathised with one character or the other. If they were jealous of the writer for her success. On January 29, 2018, it was announced something we’d been expecting: digital publishing had seen a 6.7 per cent increase in revenue in Q3 in 2017.

“These things are never just about timing,” says Lee. “One fact that’s been overlooked in the last few weeks is that Cat Person is, quite simply, a really good story. None of us – as readers, as people – ever tire of hearing stories about relationships or dates gone wrong. These are the stories we lean in to listen to when we’re out at a bar, even if (especially if?) they’re being told at another table.”

Lee is a great example of an author utilising the success of his latest novel, High Dive, to diversify into other mediums – a relatively recent trend within the publishing world, to turn their talented authors toward similar, but different, mediums.

“I’m creating a new TV drama series with Richard Brown, the producer of HBO’s True Detective. It’s exciting,” says Lee. The shareability of Roupenian’s stor y is a fascinating quirk in our connected world.

Jeanne DeWitt recently wrote in MediaShift that, “for the first time in a while, technology isn’t disrupting publishers; it’s making it easier for them to experiment with alternative revenue models and deliver content in new, creative ways”. Cat Person may be the very first of this wave – with thousands of short story publishers online, and a variety of self-publishing avenues such as Medium, there is every chance another story will hit the sweet spot soon.

Recently, Facebook announced it would be changing the algorithms that dictate what stories are promoted and shared, but Pelham is not concerned about these changes. “I think Cat Person showed both sides of that a powerful, New Yorker-worthy, short story could deal with the complex personal politics of the everyday, and become immensely popular,” she says.

Whatever the future holds for the publishing industry and short stories, it’s clear that good writing will always be valued – and even more so if it’s shareable. Will there be another Cat Person this year? We can only hope.

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ETHICS 2.0 Iain Akerman examines the ethical dilemmas surrounding the new technological revolution

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We sit on the edge of a new age in which inorganic systems will begin to do things that far exceed our human capacity,” says Jonathan Oliver, global chief creative officer at adtech startup Unlockd. “We are moving to what I describe as the shift from the ‘age of do’ to the ‘age of think’. Inorganic thinking systems that don’t need millions of lines of code written by humans but learn and discover for themselves.”

Oliver is discussing future technology and the fears and ethics that surround its use. Is it ethical, for example, to create a designer baby? Should advancements in science and technology allow for enhancements in human performance? Should robots be allowed to kill? How scared should we be of artificial intelligence?

“It is quite easy for people to fall into a dystopian world of mechanised overlords and Matrix-style human farming but I don’t believe we will get to that,” continues Oliver. “However, at such important junctures in history we have always excelled at thinking, discussing, ruminating and pontificating the what, the why and the how.

“It would be remiss of us as species not to consider the consequences of these exponential advances and what it means to us. We must discuss the moral and ethical implications and set out the how and why in preparation of this inevitable progression. We must help craft our thinking today and not aimlessly walk into a world where we could potentially lose control.”

It is this potential loss of control that frightens people. The Fourth Industrial Revolution may have unleashed unprecedented technological advancement but it has brought with it moral complexity. The ability to create intelligent robots, to edit genes and enhance the quality of life may go hand-in-hand with universal concepts of progress, but they also come with serious questions attached.

At the heart of many of these questions lies artificial intelligence (AI). It is central to much that socially, ethically and morally concerns the world of science and technology. So much so that late last year Googleowned DeepMind announced the formation of a new AI research unit to scrutinise the ethical and societal impacts of the technologies it creates.

DeepMind Ethics & Society will not only fund external research into areas such as AI morality and values,

but address algorithmic bias, the future of work and lethal autonomous weapons.

AI scares people. People such as Elon Musk, the billionaire technology entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX, and the physicist Stephen Hawking, who has said its emergence could be the “worst event in the history of our civilisation”.

Unless, that is, society finds a way to control its development. Musk too has referred to AI as humanity’s “biggest existential threat”, with the key concern being that we are creating the means for our own destruction.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai last February, Musk noted that “sometimes what will happen is a scientist will get so engrossed in their work that they don’t really realise the ramifications of what they’re doing”. Those ramifications being the production of something capable of doing great harm.

“One of the greatest challenges we face as a society is that we don’t really know what artificial intelligence actually means,” asserts Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at The Envisioners. “Our pop culture in particular paints a really dystopian picture. I only have to say the word ‘robots’ and most people conjure up an image from The Terminator with hordes of menacing armed robots taking over the planet. Equally, if I say the words ‘artificial intelligence’ it’s typically 2001: A Space Odyssey we think of with Hal famously refusing to open Dave’s pod bay doors.

“The media is equally unhelpful. Stories about robotics and AI are usually steeped in these cultural memes and proclaim that the robots will take our jobs while AI will soon overthrow our puny race once the machines realise their superiority. Of course, these images are caricatures, but they are damaging to our society because they prevent people from truly understanding the incredible opportunity to do good that these amazing new technologies will offer all of us in the coming years.”

Coplin argues that we should simply think of AI as a new and

“Stories about AI ignore the incredible opportunity to do good that this tech will offer us all”

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improved way of automating things. Whereas the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries automated the manual processes of work, today’s revolutionary technology offers to automate the cognitive processes of work.

So are the concerns of Hawking and Musk unfounded? Even alarmist?

“Of course not,” replies Coplin. “These individuals know more about the potential of this technology than probably the rest of the global population put together (more or less). However, what often gets left out of the articles that voice their concerns is simply the timescales around when such problems may occur.

“I always find it incredibly arrogant that we as a race think the human brain is so simple that we will have solved its puzzle (an enigma that has been with us since the dawn of time and remains elusive) by some great feat of science (or fluke) within the next few years. In my view it will be decades before machines are able to do anything more than operate within the parameters that they’ve been provided with and even longer before we might be stupid enough to yield to their control.”

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he moral dilemmas facing AI are best personified by autonomous selfdriving vehicles. They are instructive because the ethical permutations are so varied. For example, how should such a vehicle be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimise the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random?

“For all the goodness of these technological advances there is the ultimate ethical consideration of what potentially happens when we put autonomous cars into the wild,” admits Oliver.

“We’ve already seen crashes in testing and with the myriad permutations of journeys people will take there is no doubt we will have accidents. And at this point we have to ask who is responsible when a human is no longer in control. Is it the car company who developed the algorithm or will the purchaser of these machines take on the sole responsibility? These are questions that the car companies, their lawyers and insurers are no doubt poring over today.

“The fundamental question we must ask every technological leap forward is does the progression of having significantly less accidents on the road outweigh the cost of having a few bumps along the way? The answer is clearly yes but we must hope, indeed demand, that the accidents that do occur are to the cars and not to fellow humans.”

“The real challenge for us as a society is how we understand and retain accountability for our actions in a world where those actions are increasingly

Elon Musk has been very vocal about the threat he believes AI poses to the future of humanity

ETHICS 2.0

informed by calculations that are increasingly impenetrable for any mere human to understand,” adds Coplin. “What makes the problem worse is the fact that in the past we would have been using the output from algorithms to make simple trivial decisions such as which restaurant to go to or which car should I buy, but increasingly the decisions we will be making (or indeed those that will be made on our behalf) will have greater and greater impact on every aspect of our lives.

“Perhaps what is most curious about this dilemma is the fact that it revolves around the use of ‘fuzzy’, subjective factors that are much harder to measure and monitor than the cold hard logic of the data that the algorithms thrive upon.

“So how then can we solve such intractable problems? The only real solution surrounds two key areas – understanding and diversity.

The first problem to solve is to make sure that everyone has a reasonable understanding of how the technology works and, specifically, an understanding that goes beyond the algorithm to look also at the data that fuels it. Secondly, it is absolutely crucial that the algorithms being developed are created, managed and controlled by a group of people that are as diverse as possible, as this can go a long way to reduce the potential risk of bias. Ultimately, we need to remember that, as always, the technology itself can never be held accountable, only the humans that create and use it can.”

Bias is important. It is one of the fundamental challenges facing the digital age: the question of whether technology is neutral. Despite the wellmeaning platitudes of Silicon Valley, technology, if not born with bias, can be used with bias.

“The tech itself can never be held accountable, only the humans that create and use it can”

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ETHICS 2.0

Oliver uses Bitcoin as an example. The underlying technology that supports cryptocurrency is blockchain, which in essence creates an immutable distributed ledger of everything you do, from the movies you watch to the pills you take.

“Using blockchain allows the movie studio to determine if the film you’re watching is bogus or allows pharma companies to ensure that the medicine you receive is bona fide,” explains Oliver.

“However, whilst we can essentially now track anything, if you begin to design with bias then all blockchain does is reinforce an immutable ledger of that very bias, not eradicate it. Humans are an ingenious species and we will always find ways around how to disintermediate the use of technology for its ultimate purpose. If we build algorithms with bias then logic would suggest that bias will seep into the algorithms themselves.

“We have seen this with AI assistant programs that help judges prosecute criminals in the US. One may have hoped to have seen a decrease in the high prosecution of black men. If anything, the machine algorithms have only reinforced what many believe to be an unfair level of black prosecutions and jail sentencing.”

Coplin ag rees. “One of the challenges being faced by Silicon Valley, and indeed many

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“If we build algorithms with bias, then logic would suggest that bias will seep into the algorithms themselves

HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey is a famous example of AI on the screen. Below: A UN peacekeeper on duty in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

technology companies around the world, is that they inevitably attract the same sort of people to work with them,” he says. “Silicon Valley’s problem is white, middle-aged men, and the biases they inherently share, but this problem is universal.

Every technology company around the world faces the challenge of recruiting the same type of skills from people with the same kinds of background.

Only when we find a way of increasing the diversity of our teams and the pool from which such people can be recruited can we hope to reduce the inevitable bias that can be found as a by product of our work.

“But we have to do more than just minimise the bias that’s embedded into the algorithms we use every day; we also need to educate people about the fact that it exists. If nothing else, this understanding needs to be a part of any decision you may take as a result of engaging with any algorithm. It’s also why it’s crucial for us to teach ourselves and our children about concepts like critical thinking, whereby we use many different signals along with the output from algorithms to help choose the correct course of human action.”

Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has described the new world created by such technological breakthroughs as

ETHICS 2.0

one built around “cyber-physical systems”. That is, a world where the physical, digital and biological spheres are blurred. This includes genetic editing, reproductive technologies, neuroscience and synthetic biology.

We can now play with nature. Brain-computer interfaces are helping improve the way we think, while mapping of the genome and affordable gene editing techniques mean humanity is only a couple of steps away from 3D printing body parts and the creation of designer babies. As such, and as time progresses, the moral and ethical questions we will face as a species will only increase.

“We are setting wheels in motion but we don’t have a very clear view of where they will take us,” says Elda Choucair, chief executive of media agency PHD MENA. It was at PHD’s BrainScape, which looked at the closing gap between technology and humanity, that Choucair, Coplin and Oliver first came together to discuss the issues surrounding the relentless advance of technology.

“There are many potential futures ahead and we need a moral compass to avoid going down dangerous paths. Engineers and technicians alone can’t be put in charge, while entrepreneurs risk being blinded by commercial gains. They need to be balanced with thinkers and philosophers to consider all implications, both moral and ethical.”

Should governments be allowed to intervene and possibly impede innovation? Will new laws and even new moral codes be required? Can international co-operation alone provide the answers we require?

Will national or international regulation – an anathema to Silicon Valley – be necessary?

“We must develop a series of codes of conduct, laws and protocols that allows innovation to flourish but within the paradigm that we set before the velocity exceeds our understanding,” replies Oliver. “As a species we must take an

Should governments be allowed to intervene and possibly impede innovation? Will new moral codes be needed?

evolutionary breath and truly consider the future that we will invent before technology invents it for us. We must create a universal set of rules and regulations that help us determine the pace of progress, especially when it comes to altering the very fabric of who we are.”

Achieving any form of consensus, however, will not be easy. Coplin uses suicide as an example of the quandary involved.

“Artificial intelligence can help identify and help those most at risk of suicide based on analysing their interactions online, but who should decide on such an intervention?” he asks. “Should it be down to individual technology companies such as Facebook, Google, Twitter and others? Should it be down to government and/or relevant NGOs? What about the privacy implications of such technology? Does the fact it might save lives mean we can be more intrusive than we might usually be?

“These are all open questions but one thing is certain, the answers to questions like these can only be provided if a group of people who can understand the entirety of the situation, not just one individual aspect of it, are brought together to help form new policy. Government cannot do this alone, tech companies cannot do this alone and citizens cannot do this alone. It is only through their unity that we can make a difference.”

Top: Professor Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum Above: AI is already commonplace in supermarkets

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VIETNAM RISING Michael Tatarski explores the burgeoning Vietnamese tech industry

VIETNAM RISING

T

hough Vietnam may still conjure images of rice paddies and jungleclad mountains for some, the country is today home to rapidly modernising cities and a growing tech industry. More than 50 per cent of Vietnam’s 93 million people are online, and it is also home to one of the largest Facebook user bases in the world. Global electronics giants such as Samsung, LG and Intel have invested billions in massive manufacturing facilities outside of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the two largest urban areas. Remarkably, 40 per cent of all of Samsung’s mobile devices sold globally are manufactured in Vietnam.

Large-scale government-backed projects are underway as well, with a development called Saigon Silicon City under construction east of Ho Chi Minh City. Set for completion in 2020 and modelled after California’s Silicon Valley, this 52-hectare area will host tech manufacturing companies, particularly those in the semiconductor and integrated circuit fields. Advanced tech hardware has been produced in Vietnam for several years now, but the country’s startups and other tech firms are also receiving ample attention.

Adrian Tan, programme director at the Vietnam Innovative Startup Accelerator (VIISA), aims to help some of these startups get off the ground.

“We are an accelerator first, and we are also a seed investment fund,” he says. “An accelerator is a three-month programme where we accept applicants from all over. We fund $30,000 worth of investment, of which half is cash and the other half is in training facilities and office space.”

Since launching in September 2016, VIISA has taken in two batches of 18 companies, with some of the most successful being Wisepass, a membershipbased lifestyle app; WeFit, a platform that connects users to fitness centres; and Saigoneer, a Ho Chi Minh City-based news and culture website.

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Vietnam’s cities have seen huge growth in the past 20 years with the tech sector in particular growing fast

Ho Chi Minh City

VIETNAM RISING

Hanoi

VIISA is funded by FPT, the largest information technology service company in Vietnam; Dragon Capital, the country’s oldest independent asset manager; and Hanwha, the South Korean construction and engineering conglomerate.

Tan believes Vietnam has distinct advantages in two areas when it comes to tech: education, and the large population of overseas Vietnamese, or Viet Kieu, who make up about three million people around the world.

“Coming from Singapore, the difficulty is that there is always a lack of talent,” he says. “Vietnam has both things going for it in the long term – a reasonably sized young population, and also a very technically skilled population. In maths and science they are very well-educated and punching above their weight in terms of education.

“It’s also a diaspora with a unique history. You have people that left as refugees, went to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and are looking at opportunities in Vietnam and coming back. Besides Israel, you may not find a country with that much of a diaspora.”

Dang Van Tran, country technical director for Vietnam at Grab, the Singapore-based ridesharing platform that is currently outperforming Uber in Southeast Asia (and is the most valuable tech startup in the region), is one such returnee.

He graduated from MIT and worked in Japan for seven years, followed by a 10-year stint at Samsung in South Korea.

Up until two years ago, he never had any interest in returning to Vietnam. “I’m conscious about Asia and had the opportunity to lead a lab in Vietnam when Samsung opened a new one in Hanoi six or seven years ago,” he says. “I didn’t want to go back because I hated Vietnam. I didn’t know its value, I didn’t know what I could do, and I didn’t know how you could add value, to be honest.”

Dang then visited in 2016 on what was supposed to be a one-month trip with a group of MIT alumni, and he hasn’t left since. He wants to see what happens here over the next few years, but also cautions that systemic challenges remain.

“We are recruiting now and it’s really hard to find people with a core tech love,” he says, explaining that many people jump from sector to sector in search of money. “Last year they were an AI expert, this year it’s blockchain, next year it could be something else. They rejig their resume every year to maximise their salary.”

Dang also believes that Vietnam needs to be wary of IT outsourcing, as this industry does not

Vietnam has two large advantages: its education sector and the three million overseas diaspora

value human capital, while many of the country’s best and brightest are already working overseas.

“I think Vietnam is still stuck in the situation that good talent is being valued elsewhere, meaning that if I know some skills and then I learn English, generally my pay gets doubled because now I can move to another country,” Dang says.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. Dr Hoi Nguyen is the co-founder of Fablab Da Nang, a startup space for entrepreneurs. He returned to Vietnam three years ago after studying in the United States. He found that there was a shortage of hands-on tech hardware training for Vietnamese students, and he, along with his team, set out to change that.

Fablab, which now has a presence in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang, Vietnam’s thirdlargest city, allows students and trainees to use equipment such as 3D printing and laser

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Toong in Ho Chi Minh City

VIETNAM RISING

cutters to create products. Based at the University of Da Nang, students “have a chance to come in every day and work on prototypes to showcase to the industry or companies and also other sponsors and see how they can make it better”, Dr Hoi says.

Dr Hoi’s decision to base himself in Da Nang is an interesting one, as the city’s talent pool and tech ecosystem are both far smaller than in the booming larger cities to its north and south.

“In terms of environmental pollution and traffic I think it is better here,” he says. “Quality of life in Da Nang is OK, but for jobs it’s still slow compared to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, though if you can work anywhere, Da Nang is great.”

As for Fablab, “it’s where you have people coming in and working with mentors to try and get their hands dirty, to get to do something real and repeat it again until they have something that makes sense”, Dr Hoi explains.

For tech-focused companies and individuals operating in Vietnam, one big question is whether their work can be scaled or applied internationally.

“We will create a culture where you’re not just building for Vietnam. If you’re good at what you do, you build for the world”

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VIISA’s Tan wants to see companies look beyond Vietnam. “We like to think that we want companies to have a regional focus; right now we are seeing a mix of companies here,” he says. “What we really want is to create a culture where you’re not just building for Vietnam. If you are good at what you do, you should be building for the world.”

However, sometimes it is necessar y for companies to focus on Vietnam, and Tan provides two examples of these differing strategies.

“Wisepass joined us and they only had venues in Ho Chi Minh City, then they scaled to Hanoi, and now they are in Bangkok,” he explains. “Another company would be WeFit, they scaled quite quickly as well, but they are digging deep in Vietnam.”

Dr Hoi, for one, is looking to compete overseas.

“For us in Da Nang, as a group we are trying to enter the international level, and that is under my leadership,” he says. Three teams from Fablab presented product demonstrations to President Barack Obama when he visited Vietnam in early 2016, a sign that Dr Hoi is making progress towards this goal.

Dang, meanwhile, believes Vietnam’s tech boom wouldn’t be possible without international expertise and experience. “Vietnam and most of East Asia are doing well because of outside influences such as foreign investment, training, things like that,” he states. “Without the influx of foreign investment, how would that work? The challenges are still there.”

Fablab is one example of a space that allows individuals to experiment and learn. Another area where this is possible is a coworking space.

Unheard of in Vietnam until fairly recently, these less formal workspaces now dot major cities.

Toong is a pioneer in this field here. Founded

by Duong Do in the fall of 2015, Toong now has six locations nationwide: three in Hanoi, two in Ho Chi Minh City and one in Da Nang.

Top: Toong founder Do Son Duong Above: Vietnamese leader Tran Dai Quang

VIETNAM RISING

While tech companies make up less than 50 per cent of Toong’s client base, there is little doubt that Vietnam’s startup growth has helped fuel subsequent coworking growth. “The reason why we expanded quickly is because what we are seeing is that every company needs working space,” Duong says. “We are providing them with a higher-quality working environment with cheaper costs, and we save them a lot of headaches.”

Duong recalls that when he planned to open the first Toong space, many people thought he would go bankrupt within six months. They didn’t understand the changing needs of startups and younger generations in Vietnam.

“According to the latest research from CBRE Vietnam, 91 per cent of young entrepreneurs in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City prefer to work at a coworking space, rather than a traditional office,” Duong says.

He doesn’t want to rely solely on tech companies since it is such a turbulent industry, and he shares some of the same concerns that Dang explained above.

“What we have now is a lot of startup founders who are young and highly ambitious, they have good ideas, but when they start to launch their own product they’re not prepared to compete on the market yet,” Duong says. “The way they do business is to try and do everything by themselves and not collaborate with each other.”

In the near future, Tan and Duong plan to expand. “We’re broad-based at the moment, we just go fishing and we won’t know what we’re going to catch,” Tan says. “We kind of know that the companies need to have a tech enablement focus. We don’t want to invest in coffee shops, but if you are building a platform to manage coffee beans more efficiently, we’ll take a look at that.”

Tan adds that although the Vietnamese government is working hard to support the country’s tech industry, sometimes it doesn’t move fast enough.

“We want great companies now, and we can’t wait for other people,” he says. “We are doing what we can with the abilities we have now to help these companies move.”

In some cases this may mean looking to Singapore, Tan’s home country, as most of the funds looking to invest in Southeast Asia are based there.

Duong, meanwhile, wants to add further Toong locations, including in the northern port city of Hai Phong, and potentially outside of Vietnam. He also hopes to change the way people look at their workplace.

“In the next level we are trying to educate people that coworking spaces are not only about real estate, it’s about culture,” he says. “When you

Tradition and modernity sit side by side in Vietnam

choose to work in a coworking space, it’s a sharing economy… it’s about the way you work and the way you mind others working around you.”

On the private end of the spectrum, last year Grab, Dang’s employer, received a $ 2 billion investment from Didi Chuxing, the Chinese company that beat Uber in China; and SoftBank, the Japanese telecommunications group. Grab Bike drivers and Grab cars are everywhere in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, a constant reminder of the presence of this regional behemoth.

Dang believes this makes for an exciting time to be in Vietnam. “There is a big play for Southeast Asia over the next decade,” he says. “I don’t know what that means, but I think it’s worth hanging around to find out.”

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Fit for a king The George V remains one of Europe’s great hotels

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LIVING / HOTEL

FOUR SEASONS HOTEL GEORGE V

WHERE TO STAY

Paris

PRICE From $1,500 per night

fourseasons.com/paris

ďƒą CDG

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T

he Four Seasons Hotel George V is housed in a stunning Art Deco building in the heart of Paris. In a city filled with world-class hotels, it stands out, both for its history and the level of service on offer. The rooms are, as you might expect, exquisite: classic French furniture, chandeliers and reproductions of Renaissance art. There are stunning flower arrangements dotted throughout the hotel, and the greys, creams and off-whites that dominate the public spaces give the hotel a relaxed charm.

Is there a hotel in the world with a more impressive list of restaurants?

Le Cinq, Le George and L’Orangerie boast five Michelin stars between them and offer the best in French cuisine.

Add to that an incredible 50,000-bottle cellar, and your gastronomic needs will be well catered to.

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FROM THE CONCIERGE

GO

Le Merais is one of the coolest areas of Paris, packed with boutiques, hole-in-the wall bars and cool restaurants. There’s also a huge number of galleries and museums such as the Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou.

SEE

Les Catacombes is a huge network of tunnels spanning 3,000km, the catacombs are filled with burial pits and the bones of six million people. Eerie but fascinating, this is the city’s most unusual tourist attraction.

EAT

Le Jules Verne, located 400 feet up the Eiffel Tower, has food to match the views, with its modern take on French classics. A huge wine list and some incredible desserts make this a must visit.

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MARCH LIVING / INVESTMENT

ISSUE 147

Classic film posters Choose the right film and you could make some serious money

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Value is determined by the title of the film, the quality of the design, the condition of the poster and the rarity.

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Buyers should beware of online fakes, particularly with the newer posters.

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Purchase what you want to look at – don’t treat it as an investment to store away out of sight.

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Collectors want posters produced in the same country the film was made in. So, a British-made James Bond poster will always be worth more than an American made one.

he price of film posters has soared in recent years with auction houses such as Christie’s and Bonhams putting them under the hammer. Part of their lure comes from the fact that classic posters in good condition are genuinely rare – they were never meant to be kept. This helps explain the huge prices some can fetch: a poster for the 1927 film Metropolis sold for $690,000 in 2005. Posters for horror and sci-fi tend to make the most money, as there are more collectors for those genres. While later sci-fi films such as Star Wars have a litany of merchandise, films such as King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein only have the posters to remember them by. Like all investments, do your research, but make sure you buy what you like – even if it doesn’t appreciate in value, you will have a beautiful piece of art for your wall.

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LIVING / STYLE

What to pack ...for spring weather in Oslo and beyond

Average temp

4°c

Stockholm Copenhagen Warsaw Hamburg

ALSO WEAR IN...

5°C 4°C 3°C 6°C

MARCH

OSLO

Chance of rain: 35%

WHAT TO SEE

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VIKING SHIP MUSEUM The highlight of this museum is the Oseberg ship, which was excavated from the largest ship burial ground in the world. Believed to have been built some time before 800AD, it is made of oak, and is 21 metres long. One of the finest artefacts to have survived from the Viking

era, it’s a testament to the quality of the Viking craftsmanship. The museum also houses sledges, beds, a horse cart and a variety of goods associated with Viking burials. Don’t miss the fascinating animated film that explains the history of the Vikings and their links to presentday Scandinavia.

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ACCESSORIES

Movado 44mm strato chronograph watch $2,147 neimanmarcus.com

2 1

Shinola full-grain leather holdall $1,627 mrporter.com 4

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Aspinal of London large cabin case $1,376 harveynichols.com

81 1. Burberry Hollins reversible weatherproof cotton overcoat $1,950, matchesfashion.com 2. Amiri MX1 skinny-fit leather-panelled distressed stretch-denim jeans $1,151, mrporter.com 3. Brunello Cucinelli buckle-strap leather hiking boot $1,641, neimanmarcus.com 4. Amiri shotgun grey cotton sweatshirt $802, harveynichols.com

LIVING / STYLE

What to pack ...for spring weather in Mauritius and beyond

Average temp

26°c

Maldives Nairobi Colombo Muscat

ALSO WEAR IN...

28°C 24°C 25°C 28°C

MARCH

MAURITIUS

Chance of rain: 35%

WHAT TO SEE

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BLACK RIVER GORGES This national park offers more than 60km of hiking trails through the lush forest. Hikers will be sharing the jungle with the local species, which include the Mauritian flying fox, the pink pigeon and the Mauritius cuckooshrike. There are two visitor information centres,

numerous picnic areas and four field stations where a variety of research and conservation projects take place. It’s a great way to explore the country’s beautiful natural habitat and take a break from the beach for a day. Just make sure to bring plenty of mosquito repellant and sun screen.

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1. Loup Charmant hydra off-the-shoulder organic-cotton dress $635, matchesfashion.com 2. Fendi faux pearl-embellished silk crepe de chine blouse $1,650, net-a-porter.com 3. Maison Rabih Kayrouz off-the-shoulder striped-ruffled top $642, matchesfashion.com 4. Alice + Olivia scarlet striped pleated shorts $374, harveynichols.com 5. Manolo Blahnik doit rosette caged sandal $2,362, neimanmarcus.com

2

3

4

5

ACCESSORIES

1

83 Cartier aviator-style gold-plated and textured-leather sunglasses $967 net-a-porter.com

Gucci Sylvie zip-around leather wallet $830 matchesfashion.com

Atelier Swarovski Cristaux deco large ring $547 harveynichols.com

LIVING / FOOD

No meat please, we’re British James Brennan examines the rise of veganism in the UK

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LONDON, UK

I

n a shipping container in east London, there’s a full English breakfast that’s more than the sum of its parts. Traditionally, we’d be talking body parts – bits of dead animal, processed, cured, sliced and cooked to a crisp – but this particular iteration of a nation’s favourite morning blowout is akin to a revolution.

The sausages come courtesy of Linda McCartney. The ‘eggs’ are scrambled tofu with turmeric and Indian black salt. The tomatoes and mushrooms sit with spinach on a bed of brown rice served in a bowl, Korean style, with lashings of brown sauce.

And it’s all 100 per cent vegan.

“No vegan black pudding,” admits King Cook, chef and owner of Cook Daily vegan restaurant, and creator of the dish. “But I do have crispy coconut bacon, made with dehydrated coconuts, so you get all the flavours and textures there. With the house brown sauce, it’s amazing.”

Cook’s plant-based breakfast is shaking things up in the hipster enclave of Shoreditch. Opened in 2015, his place at the Boxpark container complex is barely big enough to swing an organic cotton fabric cat. But with steady lines of customers streaming through its

 LHR

doors, it’s at the forefront of a fastgrowing movement that’s bringing veganism into the mainstream.

Once upon a time, vegans were unfairly regarded with a mixture of pity and derision. At best they were hempsandal-wearing and harmless, at worst they were animal-rights-preaching and joyless. There was resistance to the perceived sanctimony of vegans by many who simply couldn’t contemplate life without harming or exploiting animals for food or clothing. The term vegan – coined by Donald Watson, co-founder of The Vegan Society in 1944 – became synonymous with austerity. It was inconceivable to most people that they should do away with meat, fish, leather, dairy, honey and wool when humans have been using all of them for thousands of years. And besides all that, vegan food was soulcrushingly dull.

But now it’s 2018, and things have changed. Recently the vegan lifestyle has begun to occupy a more prominent place in the public consciousness.

These days Hollywood has almost as many vegans as facelifts. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt tipped veganism as a “game changing” trend for the future of the planet.

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LIVING / FOOD

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Supermarkets have never been more vegan-friendly, and the trend has spread to other product lines, from vegan skincare, to vegan Dr Martens boots. Vegan junk food has become a thing, and Instagram accounts such as @veganfoodspot and @yesitsallvegan show it off in all its healthy, wholesome, decadent glory. At last, it appears, veganism is becoming cool.

Under its bold ‘No blood, no bones’ banner, Cook Daily has attracted a hip young crowd, including some highprofile fans such as UK grime artist JME and singer-songwriter Emeli Sandé.

So, is vegan food finally getting a bit of much-needed street cred? “I wouldn’t say it’s street, but it’s for everyone,” says King Cook. “Before it was for a certain demographic of people, you know, like white guys with dreadlocks, really hippy.

But now is the rebirth of veganism and I’m flying the flag for it.”

Vegans flock to Cook Daily to try its international menu, from Jamaican jerk ‘chicken’ to soya protein ‘prawn’ pad Thai. But Cook’s creative vegan take on a range of cuisines is also dangling a carrot for non-vegans. “My guests are about 70 per cent non-vegan. They just happen to like the food because it speaks to them. The flavour is great; you get all your veggies, your brown rice. It’s a home-cooked meal, you know?”

And it’s not just for the hipsters of east London. The vegan revolution is sweeping the rest of the UK too.

In Scotland, vegetarian institution Hendersons has been serving vegan food in Edinburgh since 1962, but in 2015 its bistro on Thistle Street went 100 per cent vegan. General manager Barrie Henderson puts the rise of veganism down to a combination of factors: “Firstly, people are more aware of the ethical reasons against eating meat, such as animal cruelty and animal murder, and the hypocrisy of keeping and loving certain animals as pets, whereas consuming others as food. The other important issue is the sustainability of a vegan diet. It is widely agreed that a vegan diet produces much less CO2, uses far less water, and creates far less

King Cook, chef and owner of Cook Daily vegan restaurant

greenhouse gases than the average meat eater’s diet does. The vegan diet is also lower in fat and higher in fibre and has been shown to drastically lower your risk of cancer.”

But even if saving yourself, your planet and its animals doesn’t whet your appetite, Hendersons Vegan Restaurant probably has a dish that does. Unlike many of the new vegan eateries that use plant-based sleight of hand to

produce ‘meaty’ food for non-vegans, Hendersons lets nature speak for itself.

“We try to use as many natural and organic ingredients as possible, so we definitely aren’t the type of vegan restaurant that uses ‘fake’ meat and ‘fake’ cheese – we use real ingredients that are good for your health, and they taste amazing too,” says Henderson.

Recent research undertaken by The Vegan Society revealed that in the last

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In the past decade the number of vegans in the UK has risen three-and-a-half times to 542,000, due to a radical shift in people’s attitudes towards it decade the number of vegans in Great Britain has risen three-and-a-half times to 542,000. According to spokeswoman Dominika Piasecka, a societal shift in attitudes could be the reason why. “The image of veganism is undergoing the most radical change in its history, while shedding some tired old stereotypes,” she says. “People now closely associate it with health, fitness and wellbeing. It’s no longer portrayed as an extreme lifestyle, it’s easy and accessible – you can walk into any supermarket and be greeted by a huge range of dairy-free milks and many more other vegan-friendly products. It’s a great time to be vegan.”

According to Piasecka, wider adoption of vegan products among big brands like Waitrose, Tesco, Boots and Ben & Jerry’s makes clear commercial sense. “It opens up the potential market to not only half a million vegans in Britain, but also to a million more vegetarians, the huge number of meat and dairy reducers, the lactose intolerant, followers of certain religious groups, the health-conscious, and others who simply enjoy vegan food from time to time.”

Business is certainly booming in Shoreditch. King Cook has recently collaborated with Asian restaurant

chain Wagamama, his cookbook is out next year, and he has plans to open a new restaurant in London soon.

“It’s moving forward so much, man.

My friends from America, the Sarno Brothers, have just done a deal with Tesco – ‘Wicked Healthy’ – which is grab and go vegan food in all Tescos in the UK. That’s massive.”

Things are looking peachy for vegans right now, but could all this be just another food fad, like cupcakes or the Atkins diet? “A lot of people do ask me that,” says Cook. “But you’ve got to understand, I started in 2015 and the hype – if you want to call it that – has not died down. It’s on the rise and it’s global. What I’m doing in London is not just creating a vegan restaurant for people to enjoy vegan food, I’m also creating a new culture. This is it. This is the revolution of veganism.”

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LIVING / ART

Van Gogh Alive: The Experience A very modern take on the Dutch master hits Dubai

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he exhibition Van Gogh Alive: The Experience projects the artist’s work onto the gallery’s walls, ceilings and floors, showing them at a larger scale and in stunning detail. The show features 3,000 images set to a soundtrack of classical

musical. Also inside is a life-size, model recreation of Gogh’s bedroom, as painted by the artist himself in his piece Bedroom In Arles in 1888.

The exhibition is described as “multisensory” and uses technology to project images over a series of walls, which

gives new angles and insights into the impressionist’s work. It uses up to 40 high-definition projectors and cinemaquality surround sound to create a fully immersive experience.

The show runs from March 11 until April 23 at Dubai Design District

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Clockwise from opposite: The Cafe Terrace Arles; the exhibition; Starry Night; Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear; Sunflowers

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LIVING / COLUMN

Developing the Leader Within You 2.0

By John C Maxwell

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n a well-led organisation, problems are solved at the lowest level possible. That means that the problems that do rise up to leaders are often the most difficult.

They are “too hot to handle”, so they land on the leader’s desk. There are seldom two consecutive problem-free days in a leader’s life. Most leaders are either entering a crisis, in the middle of a crisis, or just resolving one.

What does it mean to be pragmatic? As my CEO, Mark Cole, recently reminded me, pragmatism allows a person to take things that others would consider problems or distractions and see them as opportunities. Problems don’t have to be problems unless you allow them to be. Why do I say that? Because they do hold potential benefits, which is why problem solving is the quickest way to gain leadership. Problems introduce us to ourselves; problems introduce us to others; and problems introduce us to opportunities.

Years ago I heard that when spacecraft were being developed for the Apollo missions, a rift developed between the scientists and the engineers at Nasa.

Knowing that weight and space were limited, the scientists insisted that every available ounce of weight should be reserved for scientific equipment that could be used to explore and report on the astronauts’ experiences in space. The goal, the scientists proclaimed, should be to design a space vessel that would be free from all defects.

That would leave a large proportion of space and weight for scientific equipment.

The engineers argued that perfection was an impossible goal. They contended the only safe assumption was that something would go wrong, but they argued that they could not predict with certainty where a malfunction would occur. Their solution was to build in a series of backup systems to compensate for every possible malfunction. Unfortunately, that would reduce

the available space for scientific equipment.

Supposedly, the conflict was resolved when the astronauts were asked to weigh in with their opinions. They all voted in favour of the backup systems. Not surprising, since they were the ones who would be stranded in space if something went wrong.

As a leader, the more disconnected you are from your people, the more disconnected you may become from the problems. If that happens, you may lose the human touch in your leadership. As a young leader, I began to understand this and determined to stay close to the people I was leading. Instead of staying in my office, I went to where the people were and walked slowly through the crowd. I wanted what affected them to affect me so I would make good decisions.

There are days when I feel like the guy who had four outof-state client calls scheduled at home before breakfast. Every call revealed a problem, and every client wanted him to get on a plane right away to help them. He skipped breakfast and rushed out of the house, but when he stepped into the garage, his car wouldn’t start. So he called a taxi. While he was waiting for the taxi, he got another call about another problem.

When the taxi finally arrived, he dove into the backseat and said, “Let’s go!” “Where do you want me to take you?” asked the driver.

“It doesn’t matter,” he shouted. “I’ve got problems everywhere.”

Someone said: “If you can smile whenever anything goes wrong, you are either a nitwit or a repairman.” I’d say you’re a leader in the making. That is the life of a leader. Problems are what you deal with every day. Expecting anything other than that is being unrealistic.

If you’re a leader, don’t be surprised when problems arise and it’s your responsibility to solve them.

Pragmatism allows you to take things that others would see as problems and see them as opportunities

90 From Developing the Leader Within You 2.0 by John C Maxwell © 2017. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers