Picture the scene. I am standing in front of Harvey Nichols’s Christmas windows: metre upon metre of glass frontage used to lure shoppers into the store. It is early November and the windows have just been unveiled – the most critical of the whole trading year. They are the jewel in any department store’s crown, the most intricate, colourful and expensive displays of the year.
Harrods, our closest competitor, is strung with so many lights it looks like a space ship about to take off. Elsewhere, I know without even seeing them that the windows of other big stores will contain everything from a scene from The Nutcracker to Santa’s present-filled Arctic lodge.
It’s the same thing year in, year out.
So what have I decided to do with the Harvey Nichols windows this year?
Well, there are certainly no elves, fairies or Christmas stockings. In fact, there’s not really much of anything.
The only thing in our windows is a solitary light bulb hanging in the centre, surrounded by a gaping black – and very empty – hole.
What I’ve done is radical. Some might even call it reckless. As vehicles for selling stuff, these windows are not exactly fit for purpose.
The only other prop in each one is a small sign telling shoppers what charitable cause the money that would have been spent on creating the Christmas displays has gone to support: someone sleeping rough or a child in need, for instance.
Harvey Nichols shoppers won’t get expensive fantastical snapshots of Christmas. Instead, they’ll know we’re supporting those who can’t afford to celebrate in the way our customers can.
So how did the idea go down with my colleagues when I first came up with it?
I’d say it was a dead heat between a cup of cold sick and a lead balloon.
‘We can’t do that!’ they cried. ‘We’re a luxury business! Those windows will make our customers feel guilty!’
But I was nothing if not determined. And maybe a touch headstrong.
‘We need to make Harvey Nichols unique, a destination,’ I replied. ‘We need to be innovating and doing things first. Imagine what people will say. We help charity and also get people talking.’
By garnering support person by person, I got the decision voted through at board level, and the empty Christmas windows were installed.
But although it was risky, I somehow felt sure it would work. Call it gut feeling or instinct, but my job was about influencing behaviours and getting people into the store through display, marketing and publicity. And if Christmas was the busiest, glitziest time of year then surely the most effective way of getting noticed was not to mimic what others were doing but to create something completely new. A talking point.
I was right. By Christmas Eve I could breathe a sigh of relief: the windows had got us noticed, we’d done good business and people very much in need were supported by the money we donated.
But what I realize now was that what made me so successful at Harvey Nichols – my intuition – flew in the face of alpha culture’s devotion to logic. Because however fully paid up I was as a member of the alpha tribe, there were certain parts of me that couldn’t be filtered out. And I drew on my intuition again and again to create windows that pushed the boundaries and helped revitalize the store’s reputation.
I’d always been interested in art and culture but now melded it with shop display to create something new. To showcase the ‘new neutral’ grey and cream collections, I recreated ‘Carhenge’ – an installation of old cars spray-painted grey and stacked to look like Stonehenge in Nebraska – as a backdrop to the new season’s fashions.
How I smiled as Pete the scrap-metal man and his crew wheeled beaten-up old bangers on pallets across the luxury floors of Harvey Nichols to install them.
‘All right, ducks?’ Pete said, to some old duchess who was buying a Fendi scarf.
When the now famous designer Thomas Heatherwick was just out of college, I commissioned him to create a wooden seascape installation that was laid over the windows – externally as well as inside. Admittedly, it somewhat flew in the face of the rule that all the action takes place behind the glass, and the pen-pushers at Westminster Council almost blew a gasket. They even threatened to close us down as they worried about the health-and-safety risk. What if a piece of the installation tripped up a Knightsbridge gent? It didn’t.
Those windows were nothing to do with fashion. They were almost anarchic. But they got us noticed.
Renowned critic Brian Sewell wrote that the best installation art was to be found in the windows of Harvey Nichols. And shoppers, who back then had largely forgotten department stores in favour of the big bling designer shops on Bond Street, started to talk about Harvey Nichols again.
The early 1990s was also an era defined by money and ostentatious display, and I instinctively felt people would respond to something that played with this. Taking culture out of galleries and putting it into shop windows was one way to do it, poking fun at consumerism another. That was why I decided to position Harvey Nichols – best known as a luxury designer fashion store – in a TV programme that ruthlessly satirized luxury designer fashion.
When the designer Betty Jackson told me about a friend who had just written a new TV comedy that was going to be a send-up of the fashion industry, I knew it was an opportunity not to be missed. ‘Will you introduce me to her?’ I asked.
It felt like the right moment. As much as I loved – and still love – fashion, I’d also learned by this stage of my career just how deathly seriously some in the industry take themselves. And if the endless obsessing about fashion perplexed me – and I worked in it – then it would surely perplex others.
I decided to do what I’d done with the windows: play against type, make a counterintuitive move. I was intrigued by the show and arranged to meet the writer and make her an offer. I’d give her whatever she needed, from using the store for filming to having clothes on loan for costumes.
The woman was Jennifer Saunders. The series was Absolutely Fabulous.
Of course I had no idea what Ab Fab would come to mean, how it would capture the zeitgeist. But what I did know was that getting involved seemed like a way to have some fun, play with received attitudes to fashion and position Harvey Nichols in a different way.
Absolutely Fabulous was not just a hit but a phenomenon. It captured a moment of excess – and a fair whack of pretension – and made ‘Harvey Nicks’ as famous as ‘Bolly’. Patsy and Eddie shopped with us, got clamped outside our doors, appeared in a fashion show in store and created a match made in Heaven between us and them.
And the decision to be part of a show that made a joke of fashion ironically turned us into a global destination.
But it was then that the clash between my instinct and alpha culture’s logic started to make itself felt.
My strategies, along with the work others were doing in buying and sales, had raised Harvey Nichols’s profile and revenues. And the moment that happened, the financial people were trying to pin down in numbers what was making us successful.
Financial acumen, as we all know, is certainly crucial to any business. There is no business without it. But although it’s critical, it’s just one part of a whole and, in my opinion, the people responsible for numbers often wield too much power – particularly when they not only want to understand what is happening by using numbers but, even more crucially, base most business decisions on them.
Again and again since then, I’ve seen the same thing: businesses run by such a ruthless commitment to the figures – with decisions based solely on statistics. In too many instances, it is fearful financial guardianship that has killed the soul and uniqueness of so many businesses.
But whether you’re running a corner shop or a global enterprise, you can plan a huge amount based on what you know as fact: your market, profit margins, staffing costs and all the rest. After that comes intuition. Or instinct. Or whatever you want to call it. Sometimes you just know a decision is right even if you can’t prove it – and the skill of trusting your instinct is often highly underrated in business.
Far greater minds than mine have talked about intuition’s power in many areas of work. When a former head of GCHQ was interviewed about putting more women at the top of the intelligence services, he commented on the effect they have: ‘it’s radically different with two women on the Board rather than one,’ he said. ‘[…] I find that the Board operates in a different way and I find that the discussions are deeper, I think they are more emotionally intelligent, and, if you like, I think there is more intuition in the room.’40
Li Edelkoort, arguably the world’s most influential trend forecaster, upon whose every word cosmetic, fashion and design companies across the globe hang, also says it’s key to what she does: ‘I listen like a slave to intuition,’ Edelkoort says. ‘I train it like an athlete, thank it like an individual, and now I’ve come to believe that it’s not even my intuition – it’s the way the human body is linked to a bigger experience and context.’41
Oh, Li. Why aren’t there more like you running businesses? People who see that tapping into something bigger than you, me or the calculator is crucial to success.
Intuition is not a female thing: it’s a human thing. And it has served some of our most iconic male leaders well. Steve Jobs said that ‘everything else is secondary’ and Bill Gates also attests to its power.
In my small way, I also know that I have made my biggest mistakes when I have not listened to my intuition. It isn’t quantifiable. You can’t pin it down in figures or strategize it. It just is.
And that clash between intuition and logic would become a key reason why I started to fall out of love with alpha culture.
The other was ambition.
Let’s start with debunking one important ambition myth. Women, we’re often told, aren’t as ambitious as men.
What a load of cobblers.
Women are ambitious. Incredibly so. I can even prove it using the kind of data that those financial friends of mine love.
Project 28-40, the UK’s largest ever survey of women in work, found that 70 per cent have the desire to lead.42 Another massive piece of research by global professional services giant KPMG found that we also share the same ambitions as men in many key areas.43
Achieving organizational prestige? Tick. Being well rewarded financially? Tick. Doing something that is intrinsically interesting? Tick. Add in contributing to something that matters and working on something innovative.
Using data collected from FTSE companies that together employed more than 680,000 people, KPMG discovered that men and women share all these key professional ambitions.44
That’s a lot of data.
But however much we have in common, there are also often differences in what men and women want from work. Women, for instance, value personal growth, positive relationships and good life balance. We want to be successful in a way that’s about more than money and status.
KPMG didn’t seem to see this as a problem: ‘Women are more demanding and wide-ranging in their definition of success than men,’ said their 2014 report, produced with global business psychologist firm YSC and the campaigning group 30% Club.45
The desire to integrate professional and personal growth has been called circular ambition, as opposed to the vertical ambition typical of the male career trajectory. And it’s an incendiary topic. Just ask Kevin Roberts, former chairman of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi and head coach at its parent company, Publicis Groupe.
Sitting down for an interview with Business Insider UK in the summer of 2016, Roberts said he didn’t spend ‘any time’ on gender issues in his agencies.46 He also dismissed sexual discrimination in the advertising industry as a non-problem – and the lack of women in leadership roles. Which is something he should tell all the women aspiring to be creative directors in ad land. They hold just 12 per cent of these roles in the UK and 29 per cent in the US.47, 48
But he also made, inadvertently, I think, some very key statements about alpha culture – and why it must change. I want to look really carefully at what he said because it made headlines and Roberts resigned. (He’s now the chairman of Beattie Communications.)
‘We have a bunch of talented, creative females,’ he said. ‘But they reach a certain point in their careers … ten years of experience, when we are ready to make them a creative director of a big piece of business, and I think we failed in two out of three of those choices because the executive involved said: “I don’t want to manage a piece of business and people, I want to keep doing the work.”’49
So, clearly, the linear ladder of power isn’t working for them.
But surely if that’s the case, and Roberts and his peers really want to harness all this talent, they’d listen to what their women executives are saying and find a way to work that allows them to lead in the way they want to.
Instead, they seem to be hearing what the women say and ignoring it because it doesn’t fit with their perception of what leadership is. For them, it means desk time, managing intricate power relationships and often lonely autonomy.
Radical thought, but is there a different way to do it?
Roberts also talked about Millennials – both male and female: ‘If you think about those Darwinian urges of wealth, power and fame, they are not terribly effective in today’s world for a Millennial because they want connectivity and collaboration. They feel like they can get that without managing and leading, so maybe we have got the definition wrong.’
He went on: ‘So we are trying to impose our antiquated shit on them, and they are going: “Actually, guys, you’re missing the point, you don’t understand: I’m way happier than you.”
‘Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic circular ambition to be happy. So they say: “We are not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by.”’
Bingo, Mr Roberts. You came at it from the wrong angle and dismissed very real issues of discrimination and women’s desire to lead. But you also – again inadvertently, it seems – hit the nail on the head when you talked about the anachronism of today’s working culture and the way it views ambition and leadership.
Women – and many men – are circularly ambitious. But it’s not a deficit of ambition. It’s an excess. It’s an ambition for a fulfilled life – both inside and outside work.
We aspire to leadership and professional excellence on our own terms. We want to collaborate and lead by doing great work with our team instead of slowly being distanced from our core skills and the people we work with as we push the lonely path up the linear power ladder.
We also want to be happy in terms of connecting with the world at large, family, friends and interests. I’d say this would probably make us better at our jobs and more productive too.
Who wants their account to be worked on by a knackered copywriter with no notion of life outside the job? Wouldn’t you prefer an engaged, creative copywriter, who is contented in all areas of their life – including work?
Roberts’s comments caused a furore but something was lost amid the backlash: the interview revealed the struggle many of those at the top face to adapt themselves to the realities of today’s working world.
Half of the employees at Publicis, Roberts’s former company, were women, yet he admitted that the issue of circular ambition was something the organization couldn’t ‘figure out’.
So, while I do not agree with his dismissal of very relevant gender issues in the advertising industry, at least Roberts acknowledged an important one: circular ambition. Many will rail against the idea that women might want different things from men but the truth is that we often do.
It’s time we were honest about it.
‘Circular ambition’ is not a dirty phrase. It’s a highly desirable reality. It means we’re people, in the fullest sense of the word, who bring all that passion and knowledge to the workplace.
And here is the reality: women and Millennials (two pretty significant groups) are saying, ‘No,’ to our current ways of working.
So, I think it’s time to rebrand the concept. Instead of calling it ‘circular ambition’, let’s name this desire for personal and professional success ‘life ambition’. In that way we might start to refine the current narrow definition of ambition.
All this was lost on me, though, during my first years at Harvey Nichols. (Bear with me here. At this point in my career, I was too elbow deep in the alpha mindset to think very deeply about all of this. And, culturally, at the time women generally were just trying to make their mark and pretty much had to do that in whatever way was possible: the male way.)
Driving forward, I did not even consider that I might want to devote myself to something other than work. I socialized with my husband, family and friends but that was it. I didn’t have time for hobbies, interests or more downtime. And I thought that was just the way it had to be.
Until, that is, I hit the tipping point so many of us do, the non-negotiable that forces many of us to confront the limits of alpha culture.
I had a child.