This past week, amongst people in business, there’s been a huge amount of discussion about the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, writes Steve Whiting.
I’ve yet to come across anyone who didn’t think it was memorable for all the right reasons.
It would appear that, as he enjoys his well-earned moment in the sun, Danny Boyle may consider the launch of the Olympics to be a job very well-done.
There’s simply not enough room in this column to recount and share with you the sheer number of individual ‘moments’ contained in the ceremony so let me choose just the one that still resonates loudly with me.
The ceremony addressed our hard-working, Empire-building industrial past and accelerated through time to the present day.
This richest of tapestries reflected our own experience here in Luton through the loss of manufacturing and offered us a reassuring glimpse of our future; what the ceremony made clear was that our industrial past has been replaced by our digital present.
Our nation’s music industry was placed centre-stage and the ceremony culminated with Tim Berners-Lee, the Brit who created the web, live-tweeting to the entire world. The message I took from the event is that we operate in a digital e-conomy yet, if we’re not careful, we might just overlook its significance.
If we look upon it as having been a mere cultural spectacle, we’ll run the risk forget Friday’s achievements all too quickly.
When Gordon Brown became PM he said, upon entering Downing Street, that he wanted to “set down the values, founded in liberty, which define our citizenship and help to define our country”.
Not that this examination ever got going but, even if it had, none of its conclusions or output could, in my opinion, have come anywhere close to making the kind of impact that Danny Boyle’s own vision achieved.
There is an undercurrent of worry amongst some in business that a move towards the service industry means we’ll evolve into a “nation of door-openers”.
Friday truly shone a light upon our digital e-conomy and any door-opening fears may now be offset with the assurance that comes with the realisation that our digital interactions actually propel us into the knowledge economy.