What Travels Well

Something Lost

I used to book hotels through Mr & Mrs Smith.

No, they’re not a couple. It’s a website that curated genuinely distinctive boutique hotels. The kind where the owner might pour you a drink of local spirits, where the bathroom products were slightly weird, where no two rooms were quite the same.

But then Hyatt acquired the site. I still get the emails. I just don’t open them anymore.

This is what frictionless globalisation does quietly and well. It delivers consistency (same pillow menu, same app, same loyalty points) and in doing so, sands off exactly the thing I came for. The local flavour remains, but its been turned into décor rather than DNA.

This is the logic of scale.

It works quietly and convincingly. Each decision makes sense: affiliate, merge, adopt a shared services model, build the whole-sector template. In this logic, nobody sets out to become generic. It’s just that distinctiveness gets administered away, one sensible decision at a time.

A practical case study on this: I’m working right now with an aged care organisation. Their economics demand they scale up; there’s no viable alternative. But what makes them worth scaling is a particular quality of human, relational care that their residents and families feel immediately. Patchy in places, yes. But irreplaceable in character.

The question we keep returning to isn’t whether to scale. It’s what to scale. The Mr & Mrs Smith mistake (and Hyatt made it with the best intentions) was assuming the economics and the experience were separable. They’re not.

Question: What are you (consciously) giving up as you scale?

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Something Gained

And yet. I’ve been to Buenos Aires, Lisbon and Paris in recent years, where I’ve absolutely loved stumbling across independent bookshops. Not because of my non-existent Spanish, Portuguese or French.

But because these places are full.

Buzzing.

In an era when Amazon will deliver anything overnight, people were queuing to pay more for something they could get cheaper elsewhere.

The reason isn’t nostalgia. It’s scarcity.

Genuine local distinctiveness has become rare enough to be sought out, travelled to, paid a premium for. The homogenisation that erased so much has, paradoxically, made what remains more valuable.

So this is the strategic opportunity most ‘common good’ organisations are sitting on without knowing it. Your specific history, your particular community rootedness, your irreplicable relationships. These are your true competitive advantages in a world that’s run out of texture.

Question: What makes your organisation genuinely unreplicable and are you protecting it or accidentally administering it away?

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A Missing Third

I’m writing this heading to London (where I’m hoping to find independent bookstores with books I can actually read!). And, with their sixth PM deposed within 10 years, it’s got me thinking about why political movements fail.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari has one answer, which I like very much.

He goes back as far as the French Revolution and argues that every major ideology has been an experiment in combining three things. You know them well: liberty, equality and fraternity.

And, more tellingly, every movement that neglected one of the three eventually collapsed. Fascism’s logic was fraternity, then equality, then liberty. Communism’s logic was equality, then fraternity, with liberty a distant third. Our own current ideology, liberalism, puts liberty first, over equality. And, Harari argues, fraternity is the ‘forgotten third’ in our world.

I think the same meta-politics plays out in organisations that look to combine forces. I often advise on the feasibility of mergers, before any due diligence occurs, and recently I told two intending mergees that they simply shouldn’t.

Why?

Because on paper, they each had “liberty” (high individualised motivation) and “equality” (accountability) in good shape. What neither could manufacture, even to convince themselves that this was a merger of equals, was “fraternity”: the felt sense of “we’re the same mob now.” Staff from each institution differentiated themselves, and even dismissed the other party: “How we do it is X. Their version of that isn’t as effective, but that’s why they’ll value us”.

Hmm. My recommendation: “Don’t proceed”.

Harari’s point, translated to strategy: two out of three isn’t a partial success. It’s a slow failure.

Question: Which of the three does your organisation quietly neglect — and what’s it costing you?

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There’s nothing like writing from the air. I do love being between places, between contexts. I honestly think travelling gives us the best vantage point for seeing things clearly.

Whether you’re in the air — or more grounded — as you read this, please click the heart (it means a lot) and even drop me a line.

I’ll report back to you my strategic observations of London and the UK, next Friday.

Andrew