The College of public speaking holds an annual speaking competition in the UK. I was lucky enough to reach the final and this was my contribution on their topic, of light at the end of the tunnel. From the video and the transcript below we are arguing that collaborative venture is the future model for business- rising from the ashes of a recession that's broken the property owning, investment led, democratised society that preceded it.
Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Light at the end of the tunnel.
84 months; it’s the longest recession in America, 8 years. It’s a long time. 6 months their shortest, the average 21 months, and here we are 25 months into our recession, so it’s longer than average already.
I want to show you that recessions end when the paradigm that created them is broken, and I’m going to do that with three examples.
In 1914 in Yugoslavia, a man was shot and started a war. A war that ended up in 1919 on November 11th at the 11th hour with millions of people dead. A war to end wars. A paradigm that gave people security, a feeling that it was over, that we would never do that again. And the impact of that paradigm over the next decade or so was to give people the opportunity to relax.
Think back to what you’ve seen of the 1920s; it was a fun time, it was never going to be as bad as before, and we took an industrial society that we had before 1914, industrialised war on the Somme and left the industrial paradigm behind over the next 10 or 15 years or so and created a socialised paradigm: very different. But it wasn’t the war to end all wars.
The recession of the 1930s set the seeds for the war of the 1940s, it was a long recession and the light at the end of the tunnel was a long way down the tunnel. In 1939 we went to war again, five years later more lives lost, the socialised paradigm of society seemingly broken forever and two bombs dropped in the Far East to end that war that created a new paradigm. A paradigm that the next war could be the war that ends it all, and a very different world was created. One in which, in the 1960s, we saw the younger generation of that era reacting and living in a way that was as if each day was going to be their last because tomorrow they could be right. CND marches, Aldermaston, for those of you who are old enough to remember those days, they were quite scary. And a recession ended that, too. But it wasn’t a recession like this one that was co-ordinated across the globe. It was a recession that rippled round from country to country. First in the West but then in the East, and it broke the socialised society of the Communist and Soviet states. We moved from a socialised paradigm to a democratised one. The British Empire on which the sun never set was getting round to the point where in the winter it barely rose. It was left as a shadow of its former self, but as a democratising force Britain was even stronger than before.
And then this recession… What happened this time? Democratised – yes – Margaret Thatcher called us the first property-owning democracy that the world had ever known. We created a paradigm in that democratic property-owning world where the value of things could go up as well as up. Where there was certainty that if you invested in property you’d be okay. And in the end, the banks got so sure of that that they lost sight of the link between the economy and the properties they were lending money on. They even got so sure of it that they separated the loans from the property, bundled them up, wrapped them in other instruments and called them securitised mortgages and sold them all around the world to other people who hadn’t got a clue what they were secured on. And what that did was it co-ordinated the collapse, so we didn’t have a recession starting in America and impacting Europe and then impacting the East. It happened everywhere all at once, but that paradigm too has been broken.
So we’ve broken a paradigm that was a war to end all wars, of certainty of a good future, we’ve replaced it with a paradigm that said that the next war could end everything, a rather uncertain future, and we replaced that with another certain future that if you bought property you would be made for life, and we’ve broken that.
Now, I believe, the next paradigm is where we come together as individuals in our society and collaborate for a better future. I see it happening in small businesses all the time. I see it happening more and more often, and I will put it to you tonight that that is out future; it’s us.
Thank you very much.
This speech was given at Sy Mary-le-Bow church in the City of London on September 27th 2009 by William Buist.
