We are at a time when it would be good if I knew clearly what my plans are for the future. Maybe that’s the wrong way round – maybe I need to find out what the future has planned for me 🙂
I know that I’m loving my work at NixonMcInnes and am very excited about being part of taking it on to the next stage of its journey. There’s a good amount of work to keep me busy for the next few years! I feel like what we are doing there is preparing to embark on the next 3- 5 year phase.
But yeah, the longer term vision is less clear.
The things I do know are more like threads, themes, hallucinations or sketches. Small pieces, loosely joined 🙂
These are some of the things I enjoy:
- Nurturing and realising talent – in people around me and in myself
- Having meaning and purpose
- New-ness – harnessing the near-future and right-here-now
- Creativity
- Humanity – being ourselves, caring
- Proving a new kind of organisational DNA is not only do-able but actually *better*
- Starting initiatives, maybe movements
- Brighton
- Adventures in foreign lands (current wishlist: USA, India, China)
- Doing things differently
- Fear and being stretched and challenged
- Engaging with groups of people – from the training room to standing on a stages
- Helping people
- Learning
- Sharing the journey – working with partners like Tom, Pete, Lasy and Jenni (so far)
The family
One fairly known thing is I think I would enjoy creating some kind of family of organisations. NixonMcInnes is the motherlode – the founding partner if you will. I think it would be cool to apply some of the practices we’ve developed and lessons learnt to other endeavours to see how that’d work.
This would also be tremendous given the immense and at times overwhelming potential of the people in our team. They can and already are seeding ideas that become projects that can become independent things. See Datacopter, NMStereo, Tellyflux, CityCampBrighton, Happy Buckets and more.
From a selfish point of view, to see them running their own gigs would be hugely gratifying (inside or outside the family – but inside would be extra cool 😉 ). Just an amazing idea that makes my tummy fizz.
So why – in the future – can’t we create our own kind of Y Combinator or Idealab?
And then there are more concrete possibilities or things I’m attracted to…
…ideas of shapes of things in this future
- Maybe a product company – more of a traditional ‘startup’.
- Something to do with food! Maybe local, specialty, healthy, tasty, high quality?
- Maybe something social enterprisey – better let Tom go first though!
- A progressive business school – a new form for this new world
- Some academic research or collaboration
- Something in Music or TV or Film
- Publishing interests me
- Schools interest me
So yeah. Funny how when I write it down it all seems clearer. That’s better.
Will McInnes 
Great to see a business leader put their head over the parapet and dream of the future.. we should all do it!
The long term future always remains murky. Who would have thought that useful the brick that I used to have a lorry cab to make expensive calls would now be palm sized and have more computing power than the factory I used to work? Or that interesting fringe communities like The Well would have morphed into the social calendar leviathan that is Facebook? Or that a form for discussing manga and sharing nudie pictures would become the anarcho-political movement that is Anonymous?
The trick is to stay curious, remember the very human needs for simplicity and social closeness.