This morning I am heading off to Grosvenor House in Mayfair, suited and booted, to spend the day at the annual Confederation of British Industry conference. It feels part networking opportunity, part education and part social anthropology experiment for me… twenty years ago, if someone had told my student self that I’d be doing this, I’d have laughed and then calmly explained that they had meant the “TUC”, not the “CBI”.
The subject of the day is “accelerating growth”, a topic that seems both highly aspirational and yet oddly unambitious. I was chatting to someone at the end of last week about how illustrating acceleration in a set of poor statistics was a cheap way to get a steeper curve on a graph for influential impact. 100% acceleration in growth in our economic times is sadly no where near enough to allow us to climb out of the financial doo doo we appear to be in.
Anyway, an curious day ahead,one way or another. I’m particularly interested in the extent to which technology is discussed (there is a fear that it will be but a foot note to discussion), and also how much is in use and on display by these captains of British industry.
mmitII 