29 July 2011 — I am off for my 4-week summer holiday, heading home to Naxos for sailing-sun-sand.  Each summer I take a large chunk of time and “disengage”, from late July through early September, fleeing my work-base in Brussels and heading home to Greece.  It is my time, where I read a bit, write a bit, sail a bit, and just plain veg a bit.  I follow the advice given to me long ago by Dominique Senequier (she now heads Axa Private Equity in France) who once told me the trick to happiness and personal success is to be committed to all aspects of your life and disengage from the daily noise and make time for them.

I will add that as a serial entrepreneur it also helps to have an infrastructure and crackerjack staff that is well trained and that you can empower to make decisions on your behalf.  In the end, it’s about what you want to create and be, not what you want to have that makes you a successful entrepreneur. 

So you need to disengage, escape the noise, focus on themes and trends.  As the scholar Thomas Cahill is fond of noting we tend to learn history and our world in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past (shards, ostraca, palimpsests, crumbling codices with missing pages) and even the present (news clips, Twitter/Facebook/”name-that-snip” barrages).

So how do we encompass the whole reality even of the times in which we live?  True, we may never know more than part, as “through a glass darkly”; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces.  But if we take a break — force ourselves to take that break from the deafening cacophony of daily noise – we can take the pieces and set them next to one another, examine, contrast and compare, till one attains an overview.  

Otherwise we are like fish who do not know they swim in water, are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move.

And time to do a bit of history, too.   My wife and are history buffs and the impact of Venice (for some 500 years until the early 16th century this a global superpower) can still be seen throughout the Greek islands.  In fact its possessions stretched from the home waters of the Adriatic across the Mediterranean into the Black Sea and beyond.  There are a series of programs throughout Europe this summer on Venice (many as a result of Roger Crowley’s excellent book City of Fortune) with a common theme:  Venice’s success is that it was not so much a state as a company. From the start, La Serenissima was a corporate enterprise: the lion of St Mark was its brand logo; its workplace was the sea; the doge was its chief executive; the 2,000 noble families registered in the Golden Book were its board members; the populace provided the shop-floor workers and all were shareholders. Citizens, however far-flung they might be, remained first and foremost Venetians, “flesh of our flesh, bones of our bones”.  Should be great fun.

I also have my iPad loaded with technology related files plus a reading list suggested by that media polymatch Greg Satell of Digital Tonto.   I listened to the recent Apple analyst teleconference and picked up on the cryptic comments about a “future product transition” in the current quarter, suggesting an iPhone 5 could appear by September.  I am wrapping my mind around the “patent wars” and the battle over the smartphone market (Apple just revealed that it is putting up $2.6bn of the $4.5bn that the winning consortium of tech companies agreed to pay for the Nortel patents) and this unusual imbalance that exists in this market relative to the intellectual property held by Apple, Google and others. 

And it’s fun watching this slugfest between Apple and Google and the others.  Google and Microsoft seem to love massive acquisitions,  Apple has historically bought smaller companies with intellectual property and strong talent in areas of growing importance for the company. Modest deals in the past have resulted in the iPod – which grew out of contracts with software engineer Tony Fadell and outside design firm PortalPlayer – as well as the software behind the popular GarageBand music composition and Final Cut video editing programmes, which appear on its computers.

And the battle for a stake of the digital music market is just heating up among cloud vendors.  I recently attended a music media industry presentation in London where industry analysts said we have seen only the beginning of the next wave of cloud-based commercial media services where the focus will shift to include video.  Music is already a battleground for cloud and consumers are more open to cloud-based delivery models for music than they are for other media types, and the number of connected mobile devices capable of streaming music is growing rapidly.   The three tech bellwethers–Amazon, Google and Apple–all unveiled their respective music cloud services within months of each other.  The trend?  People love having access to their own music, especially easy, organized, multi-device access. 

Plus all the Zuckerberg “wannabes”.  Facebook’s rise has inspired entrepreneurs to pursue unrealistic start-ups instead of viable companies.  Although I tend to blame winners such as Google and Amazon who distorted the financial world by demonstrating that enormous amounts of money could be made even though there appeared to be no proven business model.  But they did not really change the rules: they were the exceptions.  My experience is that companies generally take from five to 10 years to break through.

Meanwhile, the amount of intellectual property litigation has skyrocketed.  The globalization of smartphone patent disputes has simply pointed out that the most aggressive corporate asset these days is IP.  This litigation crosses multiple countries and languages.  It is all about the convergence of technology markets — most clearly, the clash of mobile communications and personal computing in the smartphone — which has greatly added to the complexity as well as the potential for conflict as the prime battle for market share.  And it affects all my companies, not just EAM Capital.  The myriad issues affecting the digital media/IP world have impacted Project Counsel (which has a special IP team that works on numerous IP projects in Europe) plus Project Counsel Media. 

I also want to take some time and study two different but interrelated subjects that have come to dominate modern societies: postmodernity and consumerism.  It is a shift that began in the latter half of the 20th century as we became a society of producers to a society of consumers. It’s a reversal of Freud’s “modern life” trade-off: this time security was given up in order to enjoy increased freedom, freedom to purchase, to consume, and to enjoy life.

One of the best “explainers” of all this is the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman whose seminal book Culture in a Liquid Modern World is finally available in English.   I have read translations of his numerous essays but this book is the best place to start.

His work on modern consumerism and the tectonic changes in technology and social life contrasts the “solid” modernity that preceded it with the “liquid” modernity we are now in.  According to Bauman, the passage from “solid” to “liquid” modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organize their lives. And the screeching pace of technology has forced individuals to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like “career” and “progress” and “life” could be meaningfully applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

Which (kinda) brings me to Black Sabbath. 

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I had the opportunity to meet Sandy Pearlman who was an important figure in the development of both American and British rock rock music.  He has been described as the “Hunter Thompson of rock” and among his many roles he was full-time artist manager, managing the careers of Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath.   He pioneered the mega-tour stadium format of several bands traveling together, sharing promotional costs and production and travel costs, a format persisting today.

He is a very cool guy and we shared an affinity for music (my mother was very artistic and I learned to play piano and guitar as a kid), the mysterious  effect of music on the psyche.  He really has a searing intellect and vision of music.  In later years he introduced me to Daniel Levitin, an American cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist … and a record producer and musician (working with Blue Öyster Cult, Chris Isaak, Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder, The Grateful Dead, etc.) … who has written extensively on music cognition and neuroscience.  Levitin’s story is the co-evolution of music and of the human brain, how each one influenced the development of the other over tens of thousands of years.  It changed the way we think about how music gets in our heads.  His work does a masterful weave of human evolution, music, anthropology, psychology and biology.

And Pearlman is keenly attuned to the affect technology has had on the music industry and our enjoyment of music.  He recognized very early on how new information technology (especially in the music industry) would emerge first in the consumer market and then spread into business organizations, one of the “new new” things the pundits address: the convergence of the IT and consumer electronics industries.  The good old days: the microprocessor flourished, and PCs, calculators, VCRs, facsimile machines, and other devices were all consumerized.  But today:  CD-ROMs, DVDs, video games, and instant messaging all had their roots in consumer markets.  Pervasive societal usage eventually created vast economies of scale that businesses alone could never have achieved, supported by interoperable standards, ever-improving quality, and self-service operation.  And as always with technological change, an option has turned into a requirement.

And it started with music technology and the musical arts.  It involved all kinds of electronic gadgets and computer software to assist live performances, recordings, composition, and storage.   As a beginning IP lawyer in the 1980s I remember working on the first sequencer software (used to create an arrangement) and song identification software well before it was staple on iTunes.   I worked with musicians as they built their own “iPods” and video players long before they became a music staple.  Ken Olmstead, a childhood friend (he played bass in our jazz group), built the first ”surround sound” speaker system I had ever seen.  

My blending of music and technology continues today.  My wife and I are members of a restaurant syndicate (holding various levels of ownership interests in restaurants throughout Europe).  Our syndicate is working with Apple, IBM and two university departments of psychology to install iPods on diners’ tables with music keyed to the food they are eating.  Several studies have examined the relationship of listening to music while eating in a natural, relaxed environment.  The studies show that the presence of selected music is associated with a longer and more enjoyable meal duration.

And so the holiday begins.  Rest and renewal are counterintuitive for most of us, and countercultural in most organizations. Rewards seem to go to those who do just the opposite in the face of demand.  But the costs should seem self-evident. In a workday world devoid of real breaks, we just don’t think as clearly, logically or creatively.  That’s my goal: to renew the creativity.