Seamless

Epilogue

Imagine that it is now 020XX and on your watch, your company went belly up. What were the trends you missed, the signals you chose to ignore, and the investment decisions you delayed that led to this demise? What change will you make today to prevent this from happening?

When I reflect on my mentor's journey alongside the heroine of this story on her journey of transformation, certain questions appear. I ask myself what I could have done differently. What have I learnt from being a (reverse) mentor to my mum? How might I have approached this in a more psychologically astute fashion? Or was the transformational journey perhaps always destined to lead to this destination? Or was the journey, rather than the end result, the actual destination? At the end of the day, I sought to help with and solve several of my parents' issues, on both a personal and family business front (it's challenging to separate them cleanly). I wanted to help my mum be a hero, to go from being unsung to being truly sung, and to be a vanguard for the renaissance of ‘mom and pop' shops prepared to embrace innovation. I wanted to assist her in understanding that disruption is only disruptive if you are not adaptive, and in developing a digital and analogue toolkit, so she could seamlessly build a brand that captured digital minds and analogue hearts, and which thrived in its second century of operations. A brand — Georg Sörman — which could get beyond the hump and the generational prophecy of ‘three ...