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Back to the future? Chris Anderson Returns to Bath

Did you come to hear our keynote speaker last month? The Little Cinema Theatre was the venue as we hosted an incredible speech by Chris Anderson – founder of Future who now runs the TED Conference.

If you missed it, then take a look at the talk in the video below.

Chris Anderson Talk from Suited and Booted Studios on Vimeo.

And here are the Q&As that followed...

Chris Anderson Q&A from Suited and Booted Studios on Vimeo.

And you can also read all about it. Our chair, Greg Ingham, brings you the highlight below, or you can download the pdf, completed with pics, here....

Beat this for a story. Out of work journalist Chris Anderson gets £15k bank loan to launch a magazine in 1985; rapidly builds the Future publishing empire, doubling turnover, profits and people employed in each of first seven years; sells to Pearson barely ten years later for £52.5m; goes to US in ’94 to build another publishing business; backs local team to help rescue Future from the clutches of IPC via a Management Buy Out in ‘98; merges Future with his US business and floats on Stock Exchange in ‘99; dotcom hero (2000) then dotcom, well, zero (2001); sells off largest magazine for $68m to stabilise business; and then exits Future leaving legacy of Bath’s biggest creative business and one of the world’s most successful media companies of the 90s.

Enough?

Not quite. There was also the small matter of founding a dotcom business along the way which was sold to Murdoch for $650m in 2003 (Anderson’s ownership heavily diluted, but still useful). And then, perhaps the most remarkable of all: the TED Conference – a gathering of many of the world’s most interesting and influential speakers: Clinton, Gates, Gabriel, Rosling, Jobs, Bono, Hawking... From a single niche conference to a free global education service with 320 million downloads of its talks and many, many hundreds of independent Tedx events each year around the world.

So it was with some delight that Creative Bath welcomed Anderson to deliver its Keynote speech.

How does he view this narrative of his business life?

“I love that narrative. But look... I'm here home in beautiful Bath among friends. This is a time for truth-telling. And the truth is I screwed up. Repeatedly. Launched numerous magazines that were duds. I over-reached. I believed my own hype. I was naive. I trusted in VCs. I took a company public when I didn't really have to. My final year at Future 2001 was torture. We fired hundreds of people that year. Nearly half the company. In fact the whole thing came within a whisker of imploding.   The fact that I escaped  from it into what may well be the world's most enjoyable jobs is frankly outrageous.  

“So truly, the only single thing you can say with any real confidence when you look at my life is that I've been astonishingly lucky.”

He’s nothing if not surprising. That old line about being a self-made man in love with his creator couldn’t be further from the truth with Anderson. He knows the painful reality that the line between success and failure is thin and not durable – that success is borne of ability, opportunity, vision, desire, passion but also strange serendipity and feeble lack of foresight in competitors. Also that you live your life forwards but understand it backwards. At Future, he always had a restlessness and curiosity – there was never a sense of taking stock, let alone of complacency.

“People would ask me, “Did you plan this? Did you have a roadmap?” No. I've never had a map. I happen to believe maps of the future are a waste of paper. The future hasn't been mapped. Can't be mapped with any degree of confidence. I've always used a compass. I suggest you do the same. The only thing you need to figure out is what force it responds to.  That will determine the direction you head. In my case it was simple. It tracked passion. Not mine other people's.

“As media people, we're obsessed with measuring quantity of attention.  Circulation, ratings, page views, eyeball hours.  We're also obsessed with whose attention it is we're measuring.  Rich 29 year-olds good. Poor 70-year-olds - never mind.  These measurements are important. But, neither of them is nearly as significant as the third axis of attention. The quality of attention. Its intensity.  

“That's because it's hard to measure. And yet, the difference in value between high-attention media and low-attention media, isn't just 10 or 20%. It's orders of magnitude. When attention reaches an intense level, we call it passion.

“And media built on passion is what I've been interested in all my life.”

The event itself sold out, of course. Sponsored by Withy King, Target Accountants and Business Link, it was an extraordinary event. Proof positive that in a digital, highly-but-lightly-connected age, there is nothing to supplant the authenticity of an individual speaker.

The Little Theatre was packed with Bath’s creative people – including Peter Gabriel (“one of my heroes”) and Glastonbury’s Michael Eavis, both of whom are understood to be earmarked for future Creative Bath events.

“At a time of deep worry, economic failure, national and global doubt, alienation, cynicism, fear, here are people doing something as simple as meeting, listening, learning, and letting the power of ideas work their magic.  

“The philosopher Dan Dennett says that the secret of happiness is finding an idea bigger than you are, and devoting your life to it. There's deep truth in that, and you look at these faces, and these people at TED and this event and you can feel it.  

“And what about the Creative Bath audience? You're the most creative, brilliant people in one of the most creative brilliant cities in Britain. There's enough fire power here to play a massive part in what's to come.  Because there's never been a better time for imagination, for invention, and re-invention. Maybe if I'd been able to connect with groups like this 20 years ago, I'd never have left Bath...”

 

Posted by:

Emma Chappel

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Other

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Chris_Anderson, Creative_Bath, events, TED