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Introducing the Hippy In A Suit
I’m told that, at a dinner party that I couldn’t attend, a friend was struggling to think of a way to describe me to another guest. After scratching his head for a while he settled on “Stephen is like a hippy in a suit”. Apparently the other guests agreed that he had it about right.
So, how did I earn that title?
The suit part is easy. I do like a nice suit. I have a job that allows me to wear one when I choose. And I have inappropriately strong opinions on how they should be buttoned (ask if you really want to know).
But, hippy, really? Where on earth does that come from? I mean, look at me. Do I look like a hippy to you?
I laughed when I heard it, but over the following months I checked with some colleagues and they all seemed to agree that it was fair description of me as a person. So I decided to own it, to embrace it and to reflect on it. It’s an unusual combination of attributes don’t you think?
It was only when I wrote this article for the Corporate Rebels website that I finally understood where it comes from.
In my career I have been fortunate to learn from some wonderful experiences and I have been moderately successful. I worked for Hewlett-Packard in France when Bill Hewlett still ran the firm. I worked in a startup in London in the dot-com boom and, after the crash, I had to work my way back up from a temporary job filing paperwork in the NHS.
More recently I have had the opportunity to learn from some prestigious organizations. I have studied improvement with Warwick University Business School, leadership with Ashridge Executive Education and Innovation with INSEAD Business School (Paris). This last programme (completed in 2019) allowed me to learn directly from some of the best educators in the world, studying techniques from the most innovative (Amazon, Spotify, ING Bank) and progressive (Buurtzorg, Patagonia, Handelsbanken) organizations in the world.
But before all of that lovely education, I was changing things anyway. I seem to have been born with a sense that things could be better, a restless streak that made me challenge the status quo and a confidence to give new things a go even if my peers thought I was weird. I didn’t learn my craft through business schools or…
