An object at rest stays at rest
The corporate world's movement class is now stuck at home like the rest of us. It'll take a lot to get them back on the road.
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In last week’s letter, we looked at the stuff economy.
The pandemic has forced us all to pivot away from the experiences meme of the 2010s and towards a sort of retro conception of what the American consumer experience really is.
Everything old is new again, they say, and if the ‘80s and ‘90s were all about how exciting it was to buy cheap shit on credit, then the pandemic might send the 2020s back to the future. In the midst of a stressful week inside a cramped apartment occupied by two media professionals, several boxes of Christmas tchotchkes arrived from Target on Thursday and Friday. Stuff stuff everywhere.
And so the stuff economy ushers in a new cycle of goods accumulation in the face of unsafe health conditions for services spending. And the more stuff we acquire, the less we feel inclined to leave our stuff and do things.
The experiences economy was foisted upon a generation without the resources to buy the American Dream[2], so their spending was funneled away from buying any one thing. And around this dynamic emerged the Kondo’ing of what we did have — accumulation became immoral unless you’re selling organization, in which case here is a tray for $68.
I’ve always imagined the brain as something like a record player, except the record is blank and the stylus creates fresh grooves every time you read something, see something, hear something, do something. Every thought and sight and emotion is recorded into a running ledger of our total experience. The ledger is extremely mutable, crypto folks.
Most of what we think we know and remember doing is eventually copied over or pushed down the stack, buried into a place we lose access to as more information comes rushing in the front door. It is only our habits, our strongest convictions, the truths we take to be self-evident that remain accessible, stored in our mind’s RAM and ready for application to any novel situation.
And as the pandemic’s shadow grows longer over what we think is real and true, our most American of identities is getting reshaped in real time. And that is our identity as earners and spenders, as cogs in a professional consumer machine.
The record turns, the grooves deepen, and each week that goes by we forget what about the past made it all true in that specific way. When the pandemic began, it seemed fleeting, then temporary, then permanent, and now eternal. It will probably land somewhere between steps two and three.[1]
On the professional side of the experiences economy emerged the movement class, a rung of business leaders defined by their impermanence in any one place.
Consultants, bankers, speakers, thinkers, fundraisers, and politicos planed and trained across countries and continents to Do Business. But the longer the movement class stays home, the harder it will be to get them back out on the road. The movement class’ perpetual motion has stopped. And new truths about what it means to be a business leader are writing themselves over the top of whatever importance the movement class’ frenetic pace was meant to convey.
On a different timeline, a rejection of non-stop globetrotting might’ve been replaced by a newfound enthusiasm for local town centers where a consistent, familiar socialization offers more sustenance than the fleeting and novel variety found in the global experiences framework. Indeed, shop local became a rallying cry of how to consume in the experiences economy.
But now the movement class, like the rest of us, has retreated to wherever they call home, millions suddenly confronted with answering the question: is this where I want to be all the time?
Downstream from this movement class came a move towards hip offices and the coworking boom. Companies ported their desk jockey creative workers into West Elm catalogs with a pulse, offering snacks and beer on tap in exchange for pay that wouldn’t make a roommate-free existence realistic but could definitely get you an international flight in coach and a few nights in an Airbnb.
The experience of work became a conduit for the experience of culture. Both were veneers.
And early returns suggest many answers to questions about whether one wants to be where they are all the time involve versions of no. The pattern is so distressing to those with vested interests in a return to the Before Times that the benefit of offices is now being pitched as fundamental to the human condition. Literally.
Back in July we cited Charlie Songhurst’s framework for the future of remote work which said you either need to be all-in or all-out.
I think one of the things that's going to be very interesting is I do think there's a sort of U-shape curve where, for companies, you either have to be remote or you have to be centralized. The bit that's going to be absolutely nightmarish is if you have a hybrid mix.
Because what that'll lead to is everyone at headquarters will have a political advantage over everyone that works remotely, and so you'll end up promoting people who chose to move to headquarters rather than work remotely.
So you'll end up promoting the more politically aware, which is probably the most toxic criteria you could have for long-term productivity of the firm.
No wonder Vornado is so upset.
Because the habit we’re learning now is how to be where we are, all the time. We’re learning how to work and live in the same place, how to shapeshift our spaces to be more than either/or.
For decades now, remote work has slowly gained share as a part of the working population’s preferred office arrangement. In the decade ahead this will shift dramatically higher. Few good businesses will have a firm requirement on where their employees are based. Most demands to the contrary will be seen as an obvious sign of strategic weakness.
And so the cliche about working to live and not living to work remains true, but inverted. Working to live means we get to stay put, not accumulate enough resources to one day move on. Because the FIRE movement — Financial Independence, Retire Early — wasn’t really about retiring, but about having the freedom to explore the world the experiences economy made consumable. Now you can actually have both.
In the experiences economy, the movement class was asked to come together and meet in order to do their best work. In the stuff economy, we’re asked to stay apart and thrive alone, intermittently Zooming to see how it’s going.
In the Airport Business Book version, we begin with an anecdote about a businessperson.
They travel three times a month, possess a deep knowledge of the food and beverage options in each terminal of the world’s major airports, and have a strong preference for Essentia bottled water. Client meetings run into clients dinners run into makeshift hotel workouts ending with harried scrambles to get to youth soccer games and piano recitals on time.
For the businessperson, the roundness of the Earth, its certain rotation through the cosmos, our absolute conquering of space and time through air travel and global internet connectivity are clear, vivid concepts. Unassailable in their truth about what the apex of a modern human existence can really be. They are certain the world is getting smaller, flatter, that the planet is a good to be experienced and democratized, marveled at and enjoyed while capitalism leads the way forward.
And so when the COVID-19 pandemic hits, our main character is suddenly working from the dining room or the kitchen or a makeshift office in the corner of a playroom turned education and business center. Travel is canceled indefinitely. Dry cleaning bills go to $0. Shoes aren’t shined, bags aren’t packed, TSA Pre-Check lines are replaced by mid-afternoon Whole Foods queues.
The window of an Airbus 320 on the final leg of a four-day, six-city Midwestern tour is now the window of a home you’d been in no more than 25 weeks a year since your promotion in 2014. A conviction that reflection is for saps and socialists is replaced by a nervous download of Calm that turns into a nightly ritual of deliberate breathing and intentional centering. The suburbs are no longer a pox on civilized modern living.
There are thousands of men and women who can be made real through the Airport Business Book, offering names and dates and places and firms to our stylized narrative outlined above. The exercise of framing the pandemic’s impacts on global business through a dozen or so careful anecdotes is almost a rote exercise. One of last year’s big business books had even fewer micro-made-macro examples than that.
The point all of our Airport Business Book is that certain things are happening now that will not un-happen. When the pandemic ends there will be no going back, but simply going forward. Being the member of any future movement class won’t be a badge of honor but an anachronistic curiosity.
And while the Airport Business Book is layered with genre conventions that get the page count up to the desired 325 or so, the book sells well because it’s lessons are basically true.
Everything actually has changed forever.
1: There’s a weird strain of strawman tweeting happening right now from people who seem to actually believe there are other people who actually believe the pandemic is now over because Joe Biden, not Donald Trump, will be the president come mid-January. Except this is just another contrarian view from nowhere — everyone who thinks the pandemic is real thinks the pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon. Those who decided they don’t care about the pandemic moved on months ago.
2: This generation actually levered up to get an education that was supposed to provide access to the material side of the American Dream — read: homeownership — and so to fall short is to get hit twice.