Paradoxes for the New Year
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Franco Cologni
President of the FHH Cultural Council
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The 5th Forum de la Haute Horlogerie, held in November at the IMD in Lausanne, prompted us to focus our thoughts on paradox. Speakers enlightened us as to the abundance of apparently illogical yet very real situations in the world today. Situations which can help us better understand changes in the markets and social contexts. In the hope that I have taken this lesson onboard, it’s now my turn to suggest paradoxes which may warrant further reflection in 2014.
Urgent and important
Managers are constantly submerged by urgent matters. Their days are an endless succession of emails, phone calls, business trips and development projects of all kinds. Yet faced with this deluge of urgent affairs, there is a very real risk that we lose sight of the real priority, namely what is important and will remain so for a long time to come. Truly important business is rarely urgent: driving forward action that will support a brand’s DNA should be a question of method and organisation, not a race against time. Regrettably, this isn’t how it works. The paradox being that constant bombardment by minor emergencies often distracts us from what is important in the long term.
Remember and forget
The world of luxury is about legacy. Established brands patiently cultivate their heritage, showcase their archives, and rediscover the traces they have already left in history. But memory isn’t a sarcophagus. Rather it is a mine from which the wise guardian, as the Gospel reminds us, will extract both ancient and modern, nova ac vetera. It is, from time to time, permitted and even judicious to forget: forget procedures that no longer make sense, forget territorial or geographic prejudice, forget ambitions that are not sufficiently rooted in foresight. When we lighten our mental burden, we free our memory and allow it to concentrate on authentic, efficient, noble concerns. That we cannot give full expression to our historic memory because we are stifled by pointless routines is a paradox.
Rich and poor
We hear that the world is becoming a place of less violence and more equality. Perhaps. What we see is the migration of wealth and a disparate spread of riches. In certain contexts, possibly we are moving towards greater access to freedom and democracy, but elsewhere we witness the gradual impoverishment of the middle class, a multiplication of astronomically large fortunes, a hoarding of riches that will never bear fruit, and beneath all this a dangerous tendency towards inequality. That’s the way of the world, some might say. In reality it is a paradox: while we strive to provide a growing number of people with food, healthcare and education, and luxury brands are important contributors to this, elsewhere we see rampant pauperisation against a backdrop of unprecedented concentration of wealth. The Bible teaches us that the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Let us hope he gives to those in need and rids us of the opportunists who get rich at the expense of others who work. This must be our common cause.
