Slow Business. A favour. Starlings

We are getting close to the manufacture of our second style of jacket. I am really excited about this; every single detail is right. Thanks to a generous factory, we can make a small run and so we are producing it in two fabrics.

I’ll write more about it soon.

Caroline and I went on a long walk this morning with one of our granddaughters (she was being pushed) and it gave us plenty of time to mull over this jacket. It has taken Sarah ages to get it right and that is an entirely good thing because it chimes with our notion of Slow Business.

Slow Business as a term generally refers, I think, to declining or stagnant revenue.

But I have coined a phrase that’s capitalized.

Slow Business.

Well, I probably didn’t coin it, but I am using it.

Slow Business is a clear and deliberate way of doing things. It runs counter to my normal way of approaching work; I am incredibly impatient, very driven and quite energetic and I have always believed that you should do today what you could do tomorrow. This has been an asset in many ways and has helped me get stuff done and to concentrate on a lot of different projects.

But it also has clear disadvantages, which I won’t outline here as you can probably guess them.

In my book, Do/Team. How to Get the Best from Everyone, I write that ‘impatience is a virtue, it gets things done’ and a central tenet of that mantra is that procrastination is the enemy of progress, and that inertia is slow death. I stand by that.

But with Gladstone / Hellen we have decided to try to work in the opposite way, for two reasons.

First, because we are all super-busy with our day jobs. I think that each of us works for a least a bit of every single day of the year (perhaps except Christmas), because we have a lot to do, and we are passionate about our work. So, we are busy with other stuff and need to find time for Gladstone / Hellen in the gaps. That makes it Slow Business.

Second, and perhaps a little more abstract, is the idea that we want to create a business that is considered, gentle, meandering, quiet….slow. I am going to try to develop our Manifesto for Slow Business over the course of the next few weeks and I’ll show you that when I have it. But the general idea is that we do things differently to most businesses and that the daily modus operandi of Gladstone / Hellen is just a little slower.

We are super-serious about the business, we just want to create something a bit different. Dare I say it, a bit better?

More soon.

I also have a small favour to ask. If you like these newsletters, we would be immensely grateful if you could forward one of them to someone that you think might like what we do and ask them to subscribe. This will really help us to grow our community.

Finally, a word on starlings.

We have been lucky enough to enjoy murmurations every evening this summer. The group gets bigger and more thrilling by the day.

No one seems to quite know why starlings murmurate, but many experts agree that it’s partly for safety, which is logical. Last week someone told me that it is also quite widely considered that they do it for fun, which I hadn’t heard before, and which I love. I investigated this further and what he said may well be true. Isn’t that great?