Andrew Christophers has written Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business, as he steps back from Brand Genetics, the marketing consultancy he co-founded 25 years ago.  He is essentially sharing his tips for success, rooted in the direct experience of growing a business from his kitchen table to one with a £6.1m turnover (December 2021).

Having read his book, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brand Genetics will flourish without him in a hands-on role – and that’s the greatest compliment.

Andrew claims that Brand Genetics has achieved success through being a “human-first” organisation. His book unpacks what this means, using photographs, real-life stories and a nice big font with summaries of key take-outs at the end of each chapter.  (It is a marketing consultancy after all.)

It’s distinctly lacking in pomposity and, with the slight exception of the section on Mutant Marketing, jargon-free. The book follows an A-to-Z structure, with insights appearing in alphabetical, rather logical, order. It essentially makes the book a selection of anecdotes, like pearls on a necklace. To me, this is a human-first, approach – presenting the nuggets as insights from a well-lived life rather than a thesis. Andrew says that Michael, one of his members of staff, used to joke about some of Brand Genetics work, saying: “that’s all very well in practice, but what’s the theory?” Scrap the theory – that’s what I say.

This is a book about scaling up a start-up, but it resonated with my experience of working in charities, medium-sized businesses, and global corporations too. What he says about delegation and trusting younger people to do the work will be appreciated by micro-managed employees in organisations of every size.

I took strength from his JFDI section which was about the importance of making decisions.  “I once read that the best managers don’t make better decisions, they just make more decisions,” he says.  Yes! Absolutely!  I hereby take “Just F***ing Do It” as my modus operandi.

The most surprising tip came from his Never Stop section. I thought it a universal rule of business that you never have someone in the job at the time you need them.  By the time you have identified the need, made the business case, signed off the job description, advertised the post, interviewed and waited for the new employee to hand in their notice, you are so busy doing the work yourself that you don’t have time to induct the new employee into the role. Was it not ever thus? (Or is that just the way it works in the circles where I hang out?)

Brand Genetics has an interesting take on this. They try to hire good people BEFORE they need them, knowing they will need them one day. There’s something I never thought of before… “Never Stop selling, and never stop recruiting either,” says Andrew.

The most touching anecdote came in Y is for You, which was about being your true self at work. From the style of his book, it’s easy to imagine that Andrew is a bit of an operator in business. He admits that he was good at putting on a suit and playing the game. Who’s to say that his business wasn’t just like all the others – where the guys at the top deliver a nice patter about employee-care but are no different from anyone else in reality?

I found myself believing that Brand Genetics really was a human-first business when Andrew admits that putting on a suit and playing the game came at a cost of being true to himself. He says he didn’t want that. And he wanted everyone at Brand Genetics to be their true selves, warts and all. So one of his employees would come to work in shorts and bring his dog with him too – and they loved him for it.

For me, that heart-warming anecdote brought a distinct layer of authenticity to this beautifully presented and easily digestible book. I believe Brand Genetics really is a human-first business – and as such businesses of all sizes need to sit up and listen.

(I don’t suppose you’ve got a job going, have you?)

(Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business by Andrew Christophers is published by Troubador and costs £12.99)

I am delighted to be the producer of Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath, a project in which we are making a beautiful map showing Balsall Heath as a place of trees, bees, and blue and green spaces rather than roads. We have three brilliant artists –Shaheen Ahmed, Rachel Pilkington and Dave Gray – a great project manager in Abbas Shah and a steering group made up of representatives from two mosques and a church.

It was my idea.

For almost ten years I have been fantasising about creating an artists’ map showing the waterways and wildlife of Birmingham, so that, even in the UK’s second city, we can imagine ourselves as people of nature.

Through gathering together project partners in the form of the United Church of St Paul’s, the Hazrat Sultan Bahu Trust and the Al-Abbas Islamic Centre, all in Balsall Heath, we became a Creative City Project generously funded by Birmingham City Council programmed by the Birmingham 2022 Festival.

Now we are forming relationships, praying together under stars, planting fruit trees and planning to make beautiful art.

I didn’t start my professional creative life as a producer. I started out writing books. I was aged 21, straight from university when I wrote Fat is a Spiritual Issue, followed a decade later by Memories of Bliss.

With both books, I remember the point at which I sent them off to their publishers, a point at which nobody else had read them in their entirety apart from me. Writing books was a solitary activity. I discussed the content with others, but nobody read what I had written, commented on it or steered me along the way.

In writing, there was an intimacy between me and the page. It was a place through which I grafted and despaired and became. When I finally got to the point where I could say: “So THAT’s what I needed to write,” it was as much of a surprise to me as it was to anyone else. The great river of creativity had carried me to a place that had been hidden even from me.

Having done that twice, the day came when a publisher said: “What do you want to write next? I don’t mind what it is. Tell us what you want to write and we’ll publish it.” It was an enviable offer by any standards and yet, for reasons that alluded me at the time, I found myself thinking: “Nah…”

Looking back, I can say I stopped writing books.

That brings me to today and Our Garden – Sacred Spaces of Balsall Heath. Unlike my books, which were written entirely by me, this is a project I couldn’t possibly do by myself. And that is the very thing that touches me. I go out of the room to make tea and when I come back the artists are talking about the nature map and making it their own. The project manager is forming relationships in ways that I couldn’t. The Chamberlain Highbury Trust gives us fruit trees. The mosques are inviting us to Iftars I hadn’t imagined. It’s humbling. It fills me with gratitude. It’s where I want to be.

At the same time, I am working on UNBOXED: Creativity in the UK, a celebration of creativity taking place in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales during the summer of 2022.  In the interests of simplicity, it calls itself a celebration of creativity, but it’s actually a particular kind of creativity that it’s celebrating – not personal self-expression but creative collaboration.  It’s about what happens when you bring together people form science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics; what happens when you bring established organisations together with emerging artists. It’s about our creativity and its power to change the world.

I am excited by this because this is the kind of creativity I want to experience in my life right now.

Am I saying that I will never write a book again? Of course not. Anything might happen.  I can only go with the flow of the river of creativity and be surprised at where it takes me. I’m not into goals, aims and predictions.

But I AM saying that, when I was in young, I was very concerned with the question of what I was doing with my life. It was a question that had an urgency that drove me. Today it’s not even a question that interests me. “What are we doing together?” That’s the question that drives me now.

It’s a very simple idea – taking photographs from the same spot through the seasons (and not an original one either). But I have found it more profound than I had anticipated.

It reminds me that life is always changing. To live well is therefore to allow life to flow through you like a river, rather than try to hold onto the good times as though they can last. It teaches me that death and loss are as much a part of life as buds and blossom. It shows me that winter is as beautiful as summer and autumn as lovely as spring. So when I go through my times of grief – as I most surely have and most surely will again – I can welcome them.

Sometimes, I think this is all we need to know, just this – just what the trees through the seasons can tell us. If we understood this deeply, we would be most fully alive.

This is not so much as a review, as 21 reasons why Jessica Hepburn should step onto the stage and take a bow.

Bow 1: Skilful narration

21 Miles is about Jessica’s endeavour to swim the Channel after 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, which she has written about in her previous book, The Pursuit of Motherhood. She gets a skilful narration point for telling the IVF backstory in a way that makes sense to those who don’t already know it but which isn’t repetitive to those who do.

Bow 2: Swimming

It’s an awesome thing that’s hard to describe. Jessica captures it both physically and metaphorically. “I can feel tears in my goggles but here in the pool, no one knows, not even the water, because water only knows tears as itself.”

Bow 3: Nature

It’s not just any old swimming but open water swimming that Jessica’s doing here. So the book is also about our relationship with nature. “Even though I feel small and vulnerable, as I start to swim I also feel something else. The words of a poem my dad used to recite to me when I was a child come unbidden into my mind: ‘And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more’.”

Bow 4: Humour

What can I say? This girl’s hilarious.

Bow 5: Food

As if it wasn’t enough to connect motherhood and swimming, Jessica makes this into a food story too. In so doing she integrates another of those themes that’s BIG for most women. Big love to Jessica for her fully-fledged fest of all things edible.

Bow 6: Skilful narration

She gets another skilful narration point for integrating such diverse themes into a coherent story.

Bow 7: Other women

Jessica invites women, ranging from scientist Baroness Greenfield (childless) to businesswoman Nicola Horlick (mother of six), to have lunch with her and answer the question of whether motherhood makes you happy. This is interesting, as it’s a question we don’t tend to ask. It’s also beautifully expansive as she finds a point of connection in each of the women’s baby stories and thereby binds them (us) together.

Bow 8: Reflections on motherhood

She might have missed the experience of motherhood but she had the meaning (to paraphrase TS Eliot). Through her quest she unveils insights that are fuller and deeper than those of many a literal mother.

Bow 9: Skilful narration

Jessica asks each of the women to give her one word to take with her on her swim and in so doing creates a poem. She deserves a skilful narration point for the very idea. When she has to dig deep in her swim, she recalls those words with each stroke. In so doing takes all the women she has interviewed with her and, by extension, all of womankind too. God bless you, Jessica.

Bow 10: Vulnerability

This vulnerability is all the more powerful because it’s shared before the wound has healed. “Sometimes I think the hardest thing about what I’ve been through – what we’ve been through – is that it makes it difficult to love because you’re so frightened of happiness being taken away.”

Bow 11: Living for the unborn children

A fellow swimmer, Nick, says swimming the Channel is all about the strength of the things deep inside you that are driving you forward. Jessica discovers her motivation. “Mille Gade swam the Channel for her children. I’m swimming it for me and Gertrude Ederle and the children we never had.” I find this both poignant and deeply inspiring.

Bow 12: Uterus-power

Jessica has her doubters, the greatest of which is Chris, who doesn’t think she stands a hope in Hell’s chance because she’s always complaining about the cold. But Jessica unveiled what the competitive sportsman couldn’t see – the gravitational pull of the womb.

Bow 13: Healing of family

It’s not part of the core narrative, but along the way Jessica grows in appreciation for her mum and dad and their own journeys into parenthood. It’s a beautiful reaching back as the stretches forward. After her swim, she goes for a picnic with her mum. “Because although neither of us quite had the family of our dreams, we do have the family of our reality and that will always be something to treasure.”

Bow 14: Control

There are plenty in our culture who make out we can control our destiny through a mix of positive thinking and grim determination. Swimming the Channel and making a baby give the lie to that. This book tells a more truthful story – about the dance between what we can control and what we can’t and is all the more inspiring for it.

Bow 15: Conclusion 1 – sadness

And so Jessica starts to reach her conclusions on her search for the meaning of motherhood. “Every single person in the world seems to have something that makes them terribly sad. And life is about making the best of your sad thing.”

Bow 16: Conclusion 2 – connection

“Connection is vital to human happiness and if you can’t get it ready-made by having your own children you need to create it in different ways.”

Bow 17: Conclusion 3 – something else

Jessica recognises that however much women want to have children, they need to have something else as well. I am sure this is true. There is, at the heart of motherhood, and ambivalence. We want our children, but we also want to get back to our “something else” – our work, our silence, our creativity, whatever it is. If we don’t have a something else, it will be very difficult to let our children go as they grow up. So the something else is at the heart of motherhood as well as the heart of life.

Bow 18: Skilful narration

Jessica manages to keep the story twisting to the end. In almost the last chapter, she reveals she had asked each woman what they would eat for their last supper. When she has finished her swim, she eats that food as a celebration. It’s a surprising detail, all the better for being held back and which celebrates the symbolic power of food as well as nicely concluding the theme.

Bow 19: Climax 3 – relationship

There are three endings to this story, each of which had me in tears. The final (surprising) climax is the last word – love – which Jessica’s partner, Peter, giver her retrospectively as her Channel word. This is a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship. (It’s also NOT a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship and Jessica gets a bonus skilful narration point for the way she manages to tell the story while empathically not telling that story in deference to Peter’s desire for privacy.)

Bow 20: Climax 2 – She did it!

She bloody well did it! Listen to that sound. It’s the sound of all my eggs rushing down my fallopian tubes to stand on the edge of my uterus cheering. Well done Jessica! Bloody, menstrual bloody, well done!

Bow 21: Climax 3 – mother

For me, the most profound part of the book was when Jessica’s mother gave her childless daughter the word “mother” to swim the Channel with. I could have cried her a Channel. I almost did.

I hope you’ve not got backache from all the bowing, Jessica. But you’ve swum the Channel, so you should be OK. What more can I say? Thank you.

It’s arguably the most important job you’re ever going to do and – apart from the twenty-seventh rendition of Thomas the Tank Engine – is utterly fascinating.  And yet the demands of feeding, entertaining, wiping, holding, soothing and life-saving are so relentless it’s impossible to reflect upon what you’re doing as you are actually doing it. (I wrote about this at the time: Can you be a feminist if you can’t think?)

What I didn’t know during my child’s early years is that as your child grows so does the space to pause and consider. When he’s old enough to walk home from school alone, you gain an extra hour each day.  When she can stay in the house on her own, you gain another hour, maybe two.

Now my child is aged 11, I’ve found it’s possible to mine that rich repository of milky, burpy, tired-as-zombie experience in a way that would have been an impossible luxury only a few years ago.

I will be doing that next month at Fertility Fest 2018, at the Bush Theatre, London between Tuesday 8 and Sunday 13 May.

Fertility Fest is the world’s first arts festival dedicated to fertility, infertility,modern families and the science of making babies. I was part of the first Fertility Fest in Birmingham last year so I know it will be a thoughtful, emotional, caring and beautiful occasion. (I can’t tell you how much it made me cry.)

Lots of questions will be being asked:

• How does not being able to make a baby make you feel about your body?
• Are there different pressures and prejudices about infertility depending on the community you come from?
• What makes you angry in the field of fertility, infertility, modern families and the science of making babies?
• Why do we not talk about miscarriage?

The question I’m most looking forward to is one posed by the incredibly engaging and generally awesome Jessica Hepburn: Does motherhood make you happy? Jessica, who co-founded Fertility Fest, asks 21 women that question in her new book: 21 Miles.

I can’t wait to read it, not least because not all of the women said: “Yes”.  I know that motherhood has made me happy; very happy indeed, even when it’s meant I haven’t had time to think.  But I will relish the opportunity to reflect upon why – and do that with other mothers and those who longed to be mothers.  We are woven together with the same golden thread, my sisters.

Other times it was a walk, a scoot, a dwardle and a climb.

In the early days, your eyes would search for me in the playground and light up when I was found. “Mummy!” you would cry and you would sprint into my arms.

More recently my eyes would search for you, bag adrift and tie awry, a giggle down Oxford Road with a gaggle of friends.

Sometimes, I would be distracted and hasty. A call from work. An engrossing thought. A resentment of the 3.30pm curfew that cut across productive afternoons.

Other times I would gaze at you on the road ahead and feel again that first amazement: “Are you really my son? Are you really my boy?”

Each day would bring a different conversation, each day a different mood. But the route was well-trodden and the rituals were clear: hiding in the wasteland, crossing with the lolly-pop man, looking for the ice cream van, climbing along the handrail by the neighbourhood office, walking along the Silver Street wall…

One day, amongst the demands of work and requests to play with friends, we walked home together for the last time. When that day was, I cannot say but today is your last day at primary school so that day has passed, for sure.

And so I grieve. I mourn the interruption: the gazing, the scooting and the dwardling. I feel the loss of the small, repeated acts of ordinariness – the 10p sweets and muddle of bags.

Thank you for the school run, my son. Celebrate. Enjoy. Take pride in growing up. And please also know that whatever your day, someone is waiting for you. Wherever you play, there’s someone who delights in you. However you meander, you’re being brought safely home.

We think we’re talking about the 11+ or goalies or whether it’s better to learn classical piano or bass guitar – but what we’re actually talking about is who with think we are.

One of the great challenges of parenting is the invitation it offers to continually reassess your identity.

Maybe you’re someone who has always considered herself to be a nice person. Taking care of people’s feelings and helping them feel good is what you do and who you are and what you always have been…

…and then you have a daughter whose brain is wired in a way that means empathy does not come naturally to her. She tends to blurt out exactly what she thinks and isn’t able to understand that it’s hurtful, not to say shocking, to be on the receiving end of her comments.

One reason why this situation is difficult for the mum is that it challenges her identity. Can she continue to think of herself as an empathetic person when she has a daughter who isn’t?  How can she have faith and confidence in her daughter, as a mother surely needs to do, when her own sense of self is built on her belief that she doesn’t hurt other people – and that matters?

A father who is passionate about rugby might have a similar difficulty if he has a son who hates sport and who feels – and looks – clumsy in his body. If the dad has developed his own sense of masculinity through being a flanker on the rugby pitch, his son challenges him to recognise there are other ways of being a man.

Time and time again, I find being a parent causes me to question the ideas I have about myself. Did I really take such pride in getting full marks in spelling tests?  Is my identity rooted in something as flimsy as that?  It would seem that is. Why else do I feel uneasy if my child doesn’t do the same?

We all emerge into adulthood with stories that we tell ourselves about who we are – clever, middle-class, well-liked, sporty, funny, musical, whatever….  And these stories are important. They give us confidence and a way of navigating the world of work into which we thrust our adult selves.

But if we have kids who aren’t well-liked or sporty or whatever our particular thing is, it raises a question. How would we have survived without that story from which our identity was formed? It’s a deep question. And it’s what we’re all exploring as we chatter away about whether what school our child is going to, whether our daughter is gifted and talented, whether our son has special needs..

Why is it that “fun” gets colonised by extroverts and people who are entertained by hairy chest contests? I would like to offer an alternative introduction to those who have just boarded a cruise ship. With respect to the charismatic and remarkably engaging Felipe, may I present “Cruising for Introverts”?

Introverts’ cruise director

Hello. My name is Jo Ind and I’m the introverts’ cruise director. I’d like to welcome you on board this vessel for a vacation we hope will be awesome, in the true sense of the word.

The first thing an introvert needs to understand when boarding a ship with more than 3,000 other people, is that there’s always a place where you can be alone. Even while hundreds of passengers are at the Mega Deck Party doing the Cha Cha Slide, you can still find a quiet spot where all you can hear is the hum of the engine and the sounds of the ocean. Wander around the ship and find yours.

Arrivals and sailaways

Secondly, take note of the information that can be found in small print on the front of the daily news sheet – the times of the ship’s expected arrival in port and its sailaway. If the ship is due to arrive at 7am, set your alarm for 6am and head for the bow. There you will find a handful of your fellow introverts sharing a moment of exquisite beauty – the ship sliding slowly into harbour just as the sun is rising.

These arrivals are what cruising is for. They are gentle, majestic, silent and different with each new morning and each new port. Please don’t miss them.

Kids’ Club

If you have children with you, let them try out the onboard kids’ club. If you do, there’s a good chance they’ll make friends with children their own age from all over the world.  Once that happens you won’t see them between breakfast and one o’clock the following morning. This leaves adults free to do adult things – such as reading.

When you’re visiting a different Caribbean island each day, there’s plenty to read about. Obviously, you can’t get to know another country well in the space of eight hours, but if you read about its history before you visit, you can use the snippet of time well enough to get a good taste.

Onshore

Each island has a different topography and a different response to a colonial past. When you get onshore, walk round, take a taxi, ask questions, chat to people who live there and notice the subtle changes in prosperity, etiquette, language and outlook. Gather literature from museums, cathedrals and fortresses.  Go to your quiet spot when back on board. Sip a pina colada, gaze at the sea and digest what you have learnt about the peoples with whom you have spent your day.

Fun Day at Sea

Travelling in this way is so intense and sensuous, you’ll be glad to have a Fun Day at Sea.  This is a day when the shop doesn’t dock, you are surrounded by water and the extroverts play things like Hit the Jackpot and a Larger than Life Game Show. Go back to your quiet spot and notice the blueness – the ocean, the sky and the nothing in between.  Here the horizon curves, the water rolls and the starless heavens are a bright, bright dome.  Spend time here. Know the circling roundness of it all.  Live this moment. Take it home. Go back at night and be enveloped in darkness.

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you

If you cruise like this, you are likely to become deeply happy.  The depth of the ocean, the slow movement in the sea, the vastness of the sky, the volcanoes, the waterfalls, the sand, the faces, the stories, the welcomes…. They might well put you in the mood for dancing. Go on. Go to where the DJ’s playing:  “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you”.  Dance the night away with the best of them. 

Birmingham Rep will be the venue for Fertility Fest – the first event of its kind in the UK.  Produced by Jessica Hepburn and Gabby Vautier, it will bring together 20 writers, visual artists, theatre-makers, film-directors and composers alongside some of the country’s foremost fertility experts.

We will be talking about, and sharing art around, the diagnosis of infertility, IVF, donation, surrogacy, the male experience, egg freezing, involuntary childlessness and alternative routes to parenthood.

I will be crying

I will be there (speaking at 11.30am).  I think it’s highly unlikely I will manage to be there without crying. (I say that to prepare myself as much as anybody else.)

Other people might want to talk about the effects of fertility science on future generations and how far as a society are we prepared to go in our pursuit of parenthood. I want to be there because I want to stand in the same space as people whose deep longing to have children remains unfulfilled.   Grieving is inevitable.  There is no escaping that. But whatever else we feel, we do not need to feel alone.

• Book tickets for Birmingham’s Fertility Fest, which includes a performance of The Quiet House by Gareth Farr.
• Book tickets for London’s Fertility Fest on Saturday, 11 June 2016.

Day 26

One day I shall look back at this time

At the waiting

And the counting

And the bleeding

And the longing

The trying

And the not-trying

The loving

And forgiving

And I will say that it made sense.

I know the time will come again

When my womb will be holding

The secret hope,

The possibility of miracle;

Origins so awesome

That only God can know.

But today my vulva

Is tender-lipped

Heralding blood.

And today is the day

I have to live

Right now

Learning to embrace

My own body and grieving dreams

With the fierce

Unconditional

Over-whelming

Mother’s love

That is present

That is ready

That is now.

Jo Ind

Loneliness: Accident or Injustice was commissioned by the Diocese of Oxford (Board of Mission) and the Archway Foundation in response to research by the Church of England and Church Urban Fund which found social isolation was the most wide-spread social concern of our time.

I was invited to write a publication that looked at the prevalence of loneliness, what the churches are doing to help build communities and reflect theologically on my findings.

The Church in Action report found social isolation is not restricted to parish size or social class. It’s more often noted in deprived parishes (81 per cent) than affluent ones – but even amongst the well-off, 55 per cent of leaders say loneliness is a significant cause of concern.

It was an absolute delight to be using my journalism skills again as I sat and listened to people talking about their sadness.  At times I felt over-whelmed and needed to go for long walks to take care of myself.

But it was also hopeful and beautiful to see and to celebrate the small, ordinary acts of kindness being done in church halls, between neighbours, on sofas in community centres with knitting and nattering.

To read extracts from Loneliness: Accident or Injustice? click on the following links:

• What does loneliness look like?
• Loneliness and mental health
• Loneliness and older people
• Loneliness and younger people
• Loneliness and new communities
• Loneliness and rural communities

You can also download the whole publication: Loneliness Accident or Injustice by Jo Ind (PDF 536KB)

• Loneliness: Accident or Injustice? will be launched at the Wesley Memorial Methodist Church, Oxford on Tuesday, 19 January 2016.