Portfolio. February 2016

The business of life & living

Are they losing their appeal? London’s biggest ever robbery

The online habits of a generation How Sweden is leading the way GROWING UP MOBILECASHLESS SOCIETY

HEDGE FUNDS JEWEL THIEVES

ISSUE122

THE FUTURE OF EMPLOYMENTAlmost half of all jobs could be done by robots... should you be worried?

PF_022016.P01_Cover.indd 1 1/20/16 9:46 AM

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

glashutte (LHP).pdf 1 1/21/16 3:05 PM

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

glashutte (RHP).pdf 1 1/21/16 3:06 PM

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

bvlgari (LHP).pdf 1 12/16/15 3:33 PM

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

bvlgari (RHP).pdf 1 12/16/15 3:34 PM

february

issue 122

Portfolio.

12

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid al Tayer

MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR ian Fairservice

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Gina JOHnsOn

GROUP EDITOR mark evans [email protected]

EDITOR maTTHew POmrOy [email protected]

sENIOR ART DIRECTOR sara raFaGHellO [email protected]

sENIOR DEsIGNER rOui FranciscO [email protected]

sUb-EDITOR salil kumar [email protected]

EDITORIAL AssIsTANT lOndresa FlOres [email protected]

GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION sunil kumar [email protected]

PRODUCTION MANAGER r. murali krisHnan [email protected]

PRODUCTION sUPERvIsOR veniTa PinTO [email protected]

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER anTHOny milne [email protected] GROUP sALEs DIRECTOR craiG waGsTaFF [email protected]

INTERNATIONAL sALEs MANAGER marTin balmer [email protected]

GROUP sALEs MANAGER Jaya balakrisHnan [email protected]

sENIOR sALEs MANAGER micHael underdOwn [email protected]

Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact the editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

Published for Emirates by

All dollar prices throughout the magazine refer to US dollars.

THE TRAIL OF CUbAN CIGARs72The Cuban cigar is arguably the finest in the world, but while they export millions around the world every year, can the experience really be replicated outside of the country itself?

The business of life & living

Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class

Head Office Media One Tower, Dubai Media City, PO Box 2331, Dubai, UAE Tel +971 4 427 3000 Fax +971 4 428 2270 Dubai Media City Office 508, 5th Floor, Building 8, Dubai, UAE Tel: +971 4 390 3550 Fax: +971 4 390 4845 Abu Dhabi PO Box 43072, UAE Tel: +971 2 677 2005 Fax: +971 2 677 0124 London Acre House, 11/15 William Road, London NW1 3ER, UK

Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai

PF_022016.P08-16_Intro_Contents.indd 12 1/20/16 11:24 AM

designa n d technology.

luminor 1950 8 days gmt (ref. 233)

pa n e r a i . c o m

PANERAI BOUTIQUESUAE: Abu Dhabi - Avenue at Etihad Towers, +971 2 681 8660 - The Galleria at Sowwah Square, Al Maryah Island, + 971 2 491 9748

Dubai - The Dubai Mall, +971 4 339 8444 • QATAR: Doha - Villaggio Mall, + 974 4451 9866 • LEBANON: Beirut - Beirut Souks, Weygand St. +961 1 999939KSA: Riyadh - Mohamed Bin Abdul Aziz Street (Tahlia), C Center Building, +966 11 462 6558, Jeddah - Jameel Square

Tahlia St., +966 12 284 0529, Al Khobar - Al Rashid Mall, +966 13 889 4187 • KUWAIT: Al Hamra Luxury Center, +965 2 227 0218OMAN: MUSCAT - Royal Opera Galleria, +968 2200 9993 • BAHRAIN: Manama - Moda Mall, +973 1743 1166

PanArab_Portfolio_066549-Tecnico-SP-PAM233_265x205_EN.indd 1 12/01/2016 16:08

Where will you fi nd a new avenue to grow your wealth?At Emirates NBD Private Banking, we help open your portfolio to unique investment opportunities that can help grow your wealth.

With years of expertise across markets, we can bring you investment solutions and opportunities, as well as expert advice and insights. Your dedicated Relationship Team will work closely with you to understand your requirements and help you meet your investment goals.

Emirates NBD Private Banking. Opportunities to Inspire.

Abu Dhabi – Dubai – London – Riyadh – Singapore

800 456 (within UAE) | emiratesnbd.com | [email protected]

PRIVATE BANKING

Investment Opportunities

Private Banking_InvOpp_Portfolio_270x206_E.indd 1 1/14/16 4:10 PM

FEBRUARY

ISSUE 122

PORTFOLIO.

15

UPFRONT

LIVING

18INFORMATIONThe map of extinct animals

22MOST WANTEDDigital turntables and bespoke book collections

24THE CLOUDWhen you store things in ‘the cloud’ where does it go?

26CASHLESSThe move towards and increasingly cashless society

30PRIVATE EYEThe man behind the great British satirical magazine

34HER LAST YAHOOWhy have things gone wrong for Marissa Mayer at Yahoo?

CONTENTS

76HOTEL RESORTFive-star island on the Great Barrier Reef

82INVESTMENT PIECEThe Alden 405 boot

85TOP TABLELondon’s latest must-try restaurant

88HOTELThe Lanesborough, post-$100 million refurbishment

90COLUMNWhat this year’s Pantone colours mean for design

31,041 copies January - June 2015

PF_022016.P08-16_Intro_Contents.indd 15 1/20/16 11:25 AM

FEBRUARY

ISSUE 122

PORTFOLIO.

16

FEATURES38GROWING UP MOBILEHow a survey app illuminates the habits of a generation

44JEWEL THIEVESThe Hatton Garden heist and the elderly thieves who pulled off the biggest job

48TRUNK ARCHIVEThe man behind the defining image collection and where he plans to go next

52SKULLS AND BONESChina’s dinosaur museum may not be all that we first thought

56HEDGE FUNDERSIs Hollywood right and has working in a hedge fund lost its appeal?

60FIVE WAYS WORKING WILL CHANGEHow your working life is set to dramatically change in the near future

CONTENTS

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA REPRESENTATIVESAUSTRALIA/NEW ZEALAND Okeeffe Media; Tel + 61 894 472 734, [email protected] BELGIUM AND LUXEMBOURG M.P.S. Benelux;

Tel +322 720 9799, [email protected] CHINA Publicitas Advertising; Tel +86 10 5879 5885 GERMANY IMV Internationale Medien Vermarktung GmbH; Tel +49 8151 550 8959, [email protected] HONG KONG/THAILAND Sonney Media Networks; Tel +852 2151 2351, [email protected]

INDIA Media Star; Tel +91 22 4220 2103, [email protected] SWITZERLAND, FRANCE/ITALY & SPAIN IMM International; Tel +331 40 1300 30, [email protected] JAPAN Tandem Inc.; Tel + 81 3 3541 4166, [email protected] NETHERLANDS giO media; Tel +31 (0)6 22238420, [email protected]

TURKEY Media Ltd.; Tel +90 212 275 51 52, [email protected] UK Spafax Inflight Media; Tel +44 207 906 2001, [email protected] USA Totem Brand Stories; Tel +1 4168475100, [email protected]

PF_022016.P08-16_Intro_Contents.indd 16 1/20/16 2:04 PM

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

SASS cafe.pdf 1 1/18/16 3:10 PM

UPFRONT

PORTFOLIO.

18

UP

FR

ON

TPO

RTF

OLI

O.

Map of extinct animals

PF_022016.P18-19_Upfront_Opener.indd 18 1/20/16 11:21 AM

FEBRUARY

ISSUE 122/INFOGRAPHIC

PORTFOLIO.

19

Extracted from Vargic’s Miscellany Of Curious Maps by Martin Vargic. Published 2015 by Harper Design, imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.Map of extinct animals

PF_022016.P18-19_Upfront_Opener.indd 19 1/20/16 11:21 AM

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

el corte ingles.pdf 1 9/16/15 2:47 PM

Portfolio.

february

21

issue 122upfront / livingsocial

21

A brief cautionary tale for today’s unicorns. Words: Mike Isaac and Katie Benner

LivingSocialT

he first thing you see when walking into the headquarters of LivingSocial is row

upon row of mostly empty desks, broken up by small street signs that employees once needed to find one another when the office teemed with people.

One row, BYFAD Lane, was named after a startup, BuyYourFriendADrink, which LivingSocial acquired to get into the daily deals business. Other signs, such as Sky Diving Street, were named for some of the hottest discount coupons the company once provided. On a recent visit, some desks were piled high with boxes of employee belongings, the detritus left behind after a round of layoffs that eliminated one-fifth of the workforce. In one refrigerator, the milk was six months old.

The street signs are “anecdotes from our past”, said Mike Santore, who was director of content strategy at LivingSocial, referring to a time when it was nearly impossible to find a quiet desk to work. Now, he said, the signs “don’t mean

anything, really”. Santore left the company last November.

The tech industry’s recent boom has been defined by the rise of “unicorns”, companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more. Before the term came into vogue, LivingSocial was among the biggest, but now offers a glimpse of what some of today’s unicorns might look like in the future.

Four years ago, LivingSocial and its larger rival Groupon grew rapidly on a simple pitch: the companies would match customers to local businesses with a daily deal in users’ inboxes, like half off at a local deli or a two-for-one massage promotion. LivingSocial and Groupon would take a cut of each transaction.

Venture capitalists anointed daily deals as the way the internet would invade local business, and by late 2011, LivingSocial had raised more than $800 million and reached a valuation of $4.5 billion. The company counted Amazon and the mutual fund giant T Rowe Price among its investors. It spent heavily, blanketing the airwaves with TV ad campaigns. Riding a wave of

momentum, the company explored going public.

Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an IPO and consumer fervour for daily deals has cooled. T Rowe Price has written down its stake in LivingSocial to nearly zero, data from Morningstar shows. The company’s workforce has shrunk to around 800 employees from 4,500 at its peak in 2011. Groupon, which did go public, is trading at more than 85 per cent below its IPO price.

Gautam Thakar (pictured), LivigSocial’s chief, says the company will rely less on daily deals in its next act, by focusing on “new experiences”, such as a coupon-free programme that puts cash back on customers’ credit cards when they dine at certain restaurants. The company is grappling with employee retention. It has also been selling nearly all of the foreign companies it bought and closing offices.

“It’s hard to change a business at scale overnight,” said Jim Bramson, general counsel for LivingSocial. “We’re in a little bit of an Act II.”

They may soon have more company. There are 142 unicorns that are together valued at around $500 billion and some are starting to show some cracks.

Snapchat, the messaging company, and Dropbox, the online storage business, were marked down in value by mutual fund investors. Zenefits, a human resources startup, has said it missed sales targets and that it is slowing its hiring. Recently, the payments company Square (valued at $6 billion last year) priced its public offering at $2.9 billion. Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital have warned that a unicorn shakeout is coming. Venky Ganesan is a venture capitalist in Menlo Ventures and just as LivingSocial’s valuation set expectations that were too high for the company to meet, he said, “Today’s unicorns will face the same problems.”

PF_022016.P21_Upfront_LivingSocial.indd 21 1/20/16 9:54 AM

PORTFOLIO.

FEBRUARY

ISSUE 122

22

UPFRONT / MOST WANTED

MOST WANTED

1

SONY PS-HX500 DIGITAL TURNTABLE With vinyl making a huge comeback, but mobile digital players (such as your phone) still ubiquitous, this really makes sense. Sony’s new turntable has a built-in 24-bit analog-to-digital converter that allows audiophiles to transfer vinyl collections to high-quality digital formats. $TBA, sony.com

2

PAUL SMITH TYPE75 LAMPThe distinct form and function of a classic Anglepoise lamp, but with added splashes of colour from one of Britain’s foremost designers, Paul Smith. $257, paulsmith.co.uk

3

TEFORIA While some traditionalists prefer the china teapot, this infuser combines the knowledge of a tea master with the best in modern technology. It knows the exact time, temperature and water needed to brew the perfect cup. $749, teforia.com

5

CUSTOM BOOK COLLECTIONS Juniper Books will customise your books to create visual collections. Either visual spines that create an image (above), colour-coded to match your decor, or even bound in antique leather so you can fancy-up your Jodi Picoult novels. They also have pre-made sets to buy, from Hemingway and Austen to Game Of Thrones and Harry Potter. From $85, juniperbooks.com

4

MOVI LIVE STREAMING CAMERAAs live-streaming becomes commonplace, this camera and app lets you direct and edit live from your phone. The camera has a 150° all glass lens, 4K sensor, built -in stereo microphones and professional quality HD video, while the app has enough features to ensure your next Periscope/broadcast/film looks near-professional. $200+, getmovi.com

PF_022016.P22_Upfront_MostWanted.indd 22 1/20/16 9:58 AM

London’s most prestigious riverside location featuring 2 and 3 bedroom apartments with an array of exclusive leisure and entertainment facilities.

Prices from £1,229,950*

Fulham Reach Riverside Show Apartments and Marketing Suite, Distillery Road, London W6 9RU+44 (0)20 8003 6770 | [email protected] | www.fulhamreach.co.uk

Computer generated image is indicative only. *Price correct at time of going to press. Proud to be a member of the Berkeley Group of companies

STC_FR_Portfolio_Mag_265x205_Feb16.indd 1 05/01/2016 14:08

UPFRONT

PORTFOLIO.

24

Strangely, the exact location of all your data is unknown. Words: Yehia Elkhatib

Where is ‘the cloud’ and who owns it?

They also realised that these infrastructures could be leased out to external companies for them to use as and when they wish. This significantly lowers the amount of capital expenditure required by these businesses to build server set-ups and also allows them to scale this up and down as dictated by their needs.

This was the birth of cloud computing, so called because computer specialists commonly use a cloud cartoon in schematic diagrams to refer to parts in the system that are opaque. But while we know that it works – the global cloud computing market is forecast to reach $127 billion in the next two years – we are less sure exactly how it works.

For example, we know that cloud providers typically store your data in different locations for reliability, but we don’t know where exactly or how many copies of it they keep. In fact, identifying the exact location of all your data in the cloud is a near impossible feat. Only a few cloud providers

Why invest in purchasing, housing and maintaining

a set of computers when you can outsource all that worry to someone else? This has been the oft-used marketing slogan of cloud computing. And it works. It is much easier to offload the data hassle and focus your resources (especially if they’re limited) on your core operations.

During their astounding growth in the middle of the last decade, technology companies such as Amazon and Google built huge infrastructures to power their ever-growing needs. It is estimated that Amazon, for example, has more than two million servers around the world, while Google is estimated to have 10 exabytes of data storage space. That’s 10 million terabytes, or 10 billion gigabytes.

Over time, they learned how to manage all their software and hardware assets in these infrastructures without significantly increasing costs.

PF_022016.P24-25_Upfront_TheCloud.indd 24 1/20/16 11:20 AM

FEBRUARY

ISSUE 122

PORTFOLIO.

25

/THE CLOUD

allow users to choose which countries their data is stored in, although more providers are slowly catering to such needs. We do know that the highest density of cloud servers are located in the United States and Ireland.

This means that it is subject to various changing national and international laws. Data held in the EU, for example, is subject to the EU Data Protection Directive, to which companies transferring data in and out of the EU must conform. Until recently, the EU-US “safe harbour” agreement made this straightforward, but Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding US surveillance led to it being invalidated by the European Court Of Justice.

The matter of who actually owns your data is also quite complicated. The short answer is that you own the data you create, but the cloud service provider has ultimate control over it.

This is reflected in many providers’ terms of service, which state that they can hold on to the data to comply with legal regulations. They can also pass on the data to government organisations if requested (for example, DropBox). On the

upside, providers are responsible for securing the data they hold on your behalf against misuse, especially if it relates to credit card information – although there have been a number of large-scale data breaches.

Moreover, many service providers, such as Facebook and DropBox, say that there may be a delay before your data is deleted upon your request, but they do not specify how long this delay would be. A lot of this is likely to change, though. The European Commission is in the process of updating its regulations to provide more transparent control of personal data in the cloud. Expanding the cloud model beyond massive data centres and integrating it within the fabric of residential and business buildings can present great opportunities. Some refer to this as fog computing. Battery-operated micro-clouds would also act as important hubs to post and relay information within and between communities that have been cut off due to natural disasters (floods and earthquakes, for example) and security crises (terrorist attacks and riots). But how big the cloud will become and how we will all navigate our way around it remains a murky topic.

THE WORLD’S LARGEST PHYSICAL DATA CENTRE

Lakeside Technology Center, Chicago ‒ The 1.1 million square foot multi-tenant data centre hub is owned by Digital Realty Trust. Perhaps fittingly, it was once the home of the RR Donnelley Printing Plant and was where the famous Sears

Roebuck & Co catalogue was printed. In 1993 the plant was closed after the Sears mail-order catalogue was discontinued, and in 1999 it became the home of a vast date centre, full or servers for Chicago’s commodity markets, housing data centres for financial firms.

PF_022016.P24-25_Upfront_TheCloud.indd 25 1/20/16 11:20 AM

upfront

Portfolio.

26

Where even banks don’t accept bills. Words: Liz Alderman

Cash-free Swedenfinance | sweden

Parishioners text tithes to their churches. Homeless street vendors carry mobile credit-card

readers. Even the Abba Museum, despite being a shrine to the 1970s pop group that wrote Money, Money, Money, considers cash so last-century that it does not accept bills and coins.

Few places are tilting toward a cashless future as quickly as Sweden, which has become hooked on the convenience of paying by app and plastic.

This tech-forward country, home to the music streaming service Spotify and the maker of the Candy Crush mobile games, has been lured by the innovations that make digital payments easier. It is also a practical matter, as many of the country’s banks no longer accept or dispense cash.

At the Abba Museum, “we don’t want to be behind the times by taking cash while cash is dying out”, said Bjorn Ulvaeus, a former Abba member who has leveraged the band’s legacy into a sprawling business empire, including the museum.

Not everyone is cheering. Sweden’s embrace of electronic payments has alarmed consumer organisations and critics who warn of a rising threat to privacy and increased vulnerability to sophisticated internet crimes. In 2014, the number of electronic fraud cases surged to 140,000, more than double the number a decade ago, according to Sweden’s Ministry Of Justice.

Older adults and refugees in Sweden who use cash may be

marginalised, critics say. And young people who use apps to pay for everything or take out loans via their mobile phones risk falling into debt.

“It might be trendy,” said Bjorn Eriksson, a former director of the Swedish police force and former president of Interpol. “But there are all sorts of risks when a society starts to go cashless.”

But advocates like Ulvaeus cite personal safety as a reason that countries should go cash-free. He switched to using only card and electronic payments after his son’s Stockholm apartment was burglarised twice several years ago.

“There was such a feeling of insecurity,” said Ulvaeus, who carries no cash at all. “It made me think: what would happen if this was a cashless society and the robbers couldn’t sell what they stole?”

Bills and coins now represent just two per cent of Sweden’s economy, compared with 7.7 per cent in the United States and 10 per cent in the euro area. In 2015, only a fifth of all consumer payments in Sweden were made in cash, compared with an average of 75 per cent in the rest of the world, according to Euromonitor International.

Cards are still king in Sweden – with nearly 2.4 billion credit and debit transactions in 2013, compared with 213 million 15 years earlier. But even plastic is facing competition, as a rising number of Swedes use apps for everyday commerce.

At more than half of the branches of the country’s biggest banks, including SEB, Swedbank, Nordea Bank and others, no cash

8% of the world’s

money is physical cash, the

rest is electronic

is kept on hand, nor are cash deposits accepted. They say they are saving a significant amount on security by removing the incentive for bank robberies.

In 2014, Swedish bank vaults held around 3.6 billion kronor ($422 million) in notes and coins, down from 8.7 billion ($1.01 billion) in 2010, according to the Bank For International Settlements. Cash machines, which are controlled by a Swedish bank consortium, are being dismantled by the hundreds, especially in rural areas.

Eriksson, who now heads the Association Of Swedish Private Security Companies, a lobbying group for firms providing security for cash transfers, accuses banks and credit card companies of trying to “price cash out of the market” to make way for cards and electronic payments, which generate fee income.

“I don’t think that’s something they should decide on their own,” he said. “Should they really be able to use their market force to turn Sweden into a cashless society?”

The government has not sought to stem the cashless tide. If anything, it has benefited from more efficient tax collection, because electronic transactions leave a trail; in countries like Greece and Italy, where cash is still heavily used, tax evasion remains a big problem.

Leif Trogen, an official at the Swedish Bankers’ Association, acknowledged that banks are earning substantial fee income from the cashless revolution. But because it costs money for banks and businesses to conduct

PF_022016.P26-28_Upfront_SwedenMoney.indd 26 1/20/16 10:00 AM

february

issue 122

Portfolio.

/cashless

Portfolio.

2727


Portfolio.

february

issue 122

28

upfront / cashless

commerce in cash, reducing its use makes financial sense, he said.

The shift has rippled through even the most unlikely corners of the Swedish economy.

Stefan Wikberg, 65, was homeless for four years after losing his job as an information technology technician. He has a place to live now and sells magazines for Situation Stockholm, a charitable organisation, and began using a mobile card reader to take payments, after noticing that almost no one carried cash.

“Now people can’t get away,” said Wikberg, who carries a sign saying he accepts Visa, MasterCard and American Express. “When they say, ‘I don’t have change,’ I tell them they can pay with card or even by SMS,” he said, referring to text messages. His sales have grown by 30 per cent since he adopted the card reader two years ago.

At the Filadelfia Stockholm church, so few of the 1,000 parishioners now carry cash that the church had to adapt, said Soren Eskilsson, the executive pastor.

During a recent service, the church’s bank account number was projected onto a large screen. Worshippers pulled out cellphones and tithed through an app called Swish, a payment system set up by Sweden’s biggest banks. Other

congregants lined up at a special “Kollektomat” card machine, where they could transfer funds to various church operations. In 2014, out of 20 million kronor ($2.3 million) in tithes collected, more than 85 per cent came in by card or digital payment.

Despite the convenience, even some who stand to gain from a cashless society see drawbacks.

“Sweden has always been at the forefront of technology, so it’s easy to embrace this,” said Jacob de Geer, a founder of iZettle, which makes a mobile-powered card reader.20

16 c

ou

ld b

e t

he

ye

ar

fo

r y

ou

r d

igit

al

wa

lle

t N

ear

field

co

mm

unic

atio

n (N

FC) c

hip

s in

mo

bile

pho

nes

are

wha

t m

akes

tap

-and

-go

ser

vice

s lik

e A

pp

le P

ay a

nd G

oo

gle

Wal

let

po

ssib

le. N

FC c

hip

s in

cre

dit

card

s ar

e no

t ne

w, b

ut r

ecen

t p

hone

s no

w a

lso

hav

e th

em –

iPho

ne 5

s d

oes

n’t,

but

iPho

ne 6

do

es, f

or

exam

ple

. But

as

peo

ple

up

gra

de

thei

r p

hone

s, s

o u

sing

a m

ob

ile d

evic

e as

a d

igita

l wal

let

will

bec

om

e co

mm

onp

lace

. And

co

uple

d

with

the

incr

ease

in p

aym

ent

app

s, o

ur p

hone

s w

ill in

crea

sing

ly b

eco

me

the

ever

ythi

ng d

evic

e in

our

incr

easi

ngly

pap

erle

ss w

orld

.

“everything speaks in favour of a cashless society – it’s a utopian thought, but we’re now very close to it”

“But Big Brother can watch exactly what you’re doing if you purchase things only electronically.”

But for Ulvaeus, the music magnate, such concerns are overblown. “Everything speaks in favour of a cashless society,” he said as he strolled past the Abba Museum to retrieve his car. “It’s a utopian thought, but we’re now very close to it.”

He paused at a hot-dog stand for a snack. But when he was ready to pay, the card reader was broken.

“Sorry,” the vendor said. “You’ll have to use cash.”


upfront

Portfolio.

30

Britain’s enduring and erudite court jester. Words: Steven Erlanger

Ian HislopI

an Hislop looks mild and soft, rather like a pudding, with a nascent double-chin and not much hair. He is

polite, soft-spoken and was, appropriately enough, born in the district of Swansea, Wales, called Mumbles.

Appearances aside, Hislop is the much-feared czar of Private Eye, Britain’s clubby satirical and investigative magazine, and probably wields as much power, if he chooses, as any media boss in Britain.

The whole thing astounds him, of course. Like a good British man of a certain educated class, Hislop,

55, is absurdly self-deprecating, treating his accomplishments as some happy and wholly undeserved accident arranged as yet another joke by a self-amused deity.

He joined Private Eye directly from Oxford, where he read English literature, edited a student magazine called Passing Wind and wrote comedy revues. He became editor of Private Eye nearly 30 years ago, taking over from Richard Ingrams, who shaped the magazine as the place where the British elite told tales

on one another, often getting sued in the process, and poked fun at everyone else.

“I just knew I wanted to do what I’d been getting away with at university – which was reading, writing about it, putting on stupid revues and working for student magazines,” Hislop said. “And I thought, ‘This is great. Will someone pay me in the real world to do this?’ And for about 30 years I’ve got away with it.”

Early on, he gave a speech about how he would remain editor for a few years, fix the magazine and move on. “Which is hysterical,

because I obviously did nothing of the sort,” he said. “I’m 55 and my 26-year-old self would have had a fit, someone so elderly hanging on to this job. But I can’t think of what else would be more fun.”

The magazine is private but highly profitable, with a paid circulation of about 230,000 copies, and it gives very little away online. Like the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, it is printed on cheap paper and looks like a comic book. “The world is changing a lot, but we are now

“We are now selling more copies than 20 years ago, and have largely bucked the digital trend by not going digital”

publishing | england

selling more copies than we were 20 years ago, and we have largely bucked the digital trend by not going digital,” Hislop said.

“My only idea has been, ‘Don’t give away content for free,’” he added. “That’s been my single contribution, and it’s worked for us. And also I’m just very old-fashioned about paying people.”

Like its French counterpart, Private Eye combines jokes, many of them unashamedly adolescent, with serious investigative journalism of the kind most British papers no longer do. The trick, Hislop says, involves the readers, who provide leaks about what they know and love to settle scores.

“Professional gossip is really what drives this magazine,” he said. “It’s an insider job, Private Eye. People say, ‘Well, why do you get such good stories?’ and I always say, ‘Well, look who’s reading it.’ These are the people who know, and they tell us. So if you want to find out what’s going on in the Health Service, there are plenty of disgruntled doctors who will tell you. We’ve got people there who know, and MPs, and you know how leaky journalism is, so that’s not a problem. Lots of scores to settle.”

The magazine is also a good antidote to the British news media. “In the old days, Private Eye was

PF_022016.P30-32_Upfront_PrivateEye.indd 30 1/20/16 10:16 AM

february

issue 122

Portfolio.

31

/private eye


Portfolio.

february

issue 122

32

upfront / private eye

there to break stories,” Hislop said. “Nowadays, we’re there to explain why stories are irrelevant or wrong and what the real story is.” Hislop does the same on the long-running BBC satirical television show, Have I Got News For You.

But he knows the magazine really sells because of the jokes. “It’s expanded in terms of numbers of columns, numbers of areas we look at, but the essential mix is still the same,” he said. “Jokes, journalism. That’s it.” In that order? “Yeah.”

A recent cover proclaimed, “Cameron to bomb ISIS heartland,” with a fighter pilot saying, “Belgium, here we come!” Another piece mocked the rhetoric around the airstrikes in Syria,

saying that the British Parliament had taken “the most important decision since the country went to war with Hitler in 1939”, as “Britain is now fully committed to continuing to bomb from the air a bit but not, of course, doing anything silly like putting troops on the ground where they might win or get killed.”

Satire, he said, has always been about exposing “vice, folly and humbug”, but vice seems to bore him, and he quickly got rid of the magazine’s gossip columns. “Do you really care who the duke of Devonshire’s niece is sleeping with? I never did.” His decision was aided, he concedes, when those columnists tried to block him as editor, so he fired them.

Hislop is the country’s court jester, but concedes he wants to be taken as an homme sérieux, having done documentaries and books on weightier topics.

Asked what he finds most ludicrous about Britain, Hislop thought for a moment, then cited author Alan Bennett, now 81. “He was sitting writing and he heard the bands rehearsing for the Trooping The Colour,” the parade that marks the official birthday of the monarch. “And he looked out of his window and said, ‘I was just thinking how utterly ridiculous this pompous nonsense is,’ and then he said, ‘I realised I had a lump in my throat.’ And being British,” Hislop said, “that is sort of what it’s like.”

“Satire has always been about exposing vice, folly and humbug”


C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

zorlu.pdf 1 1/18/16 6:24 PM

upfront

Portfolio.

34

A leader foiled by her inability to bet the farm. Words: Farhad Manjoo

Marissa Mayer’s last Yahoo?

It’s not a big surprise that Marissa Mayer has failed to resurrect Yahoo. When the celebrated Google executive took over the web’s most iconic nervous wreck in 2012, the odds were stacked

against her. Turning around any company is difficult; turning around a tech company is nearly unheard-of. There’s just one example everyone can think of – Apple – but that effort took nearly a decade to show results, and anyway, if your requirement for success is to be like Steve Jobs, good luck to you.

What is genuinely surprising is how boring Mayer’s tenure has been.

Three years ago, when Mayer first took over, she sparked excitement about the future of a company that had, by then, put everyone to sleep. Finally, Yahoo was getting an executive who seemed to understand the web, who was infectiously excited about the possibilities of new technologies and who had a pretty good track record of ushering in new things.

PF_022016.P34-35_Upfront_Yahoo.indd 34 1/20/16 10:16 AM

february

issue 122

Portfolio.

35

/yahoo

At the time, Yahoo was desperately in need of a new identity. The era of the web portal – a single website to serve all your online needs – had long passed, and Mayer seemed courageous enough to shed that legacy business and start something new. Few were betting that she would succeed, but just about everyone inside and outside the company thought it would be fun to watch her try.

What has happened is more pedestrian. Mayer has focused Yahoo’s resources on creating better mobile apps and a better video-viewing experience and building an advertising business that does away with old-fashioned banner ads. Nearly a year ago, I argued that some of these efforts were bearing fruit and that investors should give Mayer more time. Since then, progress has stalled, and Yahoo’s recent earnings reports have been dismal.

Yet the initial success followed by recent sluggishness is beside the point. The larger story of Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo is one of a transformation so modest it borders on stasis. Overall, Yahoo remains much the same business it was three years ago. It is a far-flung collection of news, entertainment and communications destinations supported by ads. Mayer was hired to build something novel. Instead, at best, she appears to be building a better Yahoo – with debatable results.

What is the different company that Mayer might have built? One idea was to ditch the web portal and plunge into television.

“One transformational thing that she could have done was buy Netflix,” said Robert Peck, an analyst who follows Yahoo for SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.

The timing was perfect: in 2012, a visionary might have guessed that cable bundles would soon be on the wane, that people would increasingly favour on-demand entertainment and that there was an appetite for new business models in an ageing part of the media. At the time, the stock market doubted Netflix’s streaming future, and the company’s shares were less than a tenth of their current price – in the ballpark of what Yahoo would have been able to afford. Or if Netflix wouldn’t sell, Yahoo could have built its own subscription-based original programming business, an in-house competitor to Netflix.

Since then Netflix, which has poured money into creating a series of hit TV shows, has soared, and its subscription-based model for television has been widely hailed as the future of the industry. Mayer, on the other hand, bought the blogging platform Tumblr and a few other properties, “but for whatever reason, a lot of those just haven’t paid off”, Peck said.

A defender might point out that Mayer eventually jumped into Netflix-like original programming and that the project failed. In 2014, Yahoo announced two new half-hour comedies and saved Community, the cult-hit NBC show, from cancellation. In October, it scrapped the whole project, citing a dearth of viewers and advertisers, and took a $42 million charge on the deal.

But Yahoo’s fumbled foray into TV only highlights Mayer’s strategic failure. Instead of making a single big bet that might have focused the company on something completely different and potentially groundbreaking, Mayer staked out a lot of small and medium-size positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference. For Mayer, original programming was

just one of dozens of products in a portfolio that remains too complex to understand.

So, too, were other projects that could have been at the centre of Yahoo’s new mission. In the time that Mayer has been at the helm, Facebook has invested heavily in messaging apps that could define the future of communication. Google and Apple, anticipating the eventual decline of text-based search queries, have tried to create predictive, voice-based search engines that also catalogue all the content inside apps. Pinterest

is pioneering a new kind of online commerce, while Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are working on new ways to tell collective narratives through video.

Under Mayer, Yahoo has had a hand in many similar initiatives, but it hasn’t led in any of these areas. If Mayer had picked a single project on which to hang the future of Yahoo – or some new thing no other company was working on – she could have accomplished something transformational, finally giving Yahoo a purpose.

None of it would have been easy. Mayer’s tenure has been consumed by confrontations with investors over the continuing complexity of spinning off Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Any big, expensive bet-the-farm decision to focus Yahoo on a single product would have been likely to anger investors even more and would probably have lowered morale among sidelined employees. The plan that Mayer pursued instead – to do a little bit of everything slightly better than Yahoo was doing it before – was by comparison pretty safe.

But that’s the trouble: Marissa Mayer wasn’t hired to do the safe thing. She was picked to be bold, and so far, she has failed.

“Mayer staked out a lot of small and medium-size positions, rarely committing to anything early enough to make a difference”

Key moments under Melissa Mayer

Jul 2012Becomes the seventh CEO of Yahoo in less than five years

Jul 2013Yahoo traffic tops Google’s for first time since 2011

Jul 2015

Buys the Shopping Site Polyvore

oct 2013

Oversees the unpopular redesign of Yahoo Mail

nov 2013

Hires Katie Couric to be the “global anchor” for Yahoo

may 2013

Yahoo buys Tumblr for $1.1 billion

mar 2013

Buys Summly, a news-reading app, from a 17-year-old student for $30 million

feb 2013Abolishes Yahoo’s work-at-home policy

PF_022016.P34-35_Upfront_Yahoo.indd 35 1/20/16 10:16 AM

upfront

Portfolio.

36

How to counter online complaints. Words: Constance Gustke

A bad review is forever

For restaurateur Andrew Gruel, poor online reviews demand rapid responses. One of his

new Slapfish restaurants, serving sustainable seafood, was hit in 2015 with dozens of bad reviews that complained about its prices (too high) and portions (too small).

So Gruel pulled out all the stops. He sent e-mails to customers begging them to come back. And he rejiggered menu prices, increased portion size and even introduced combo meal deals. Quickly, those one-star reviews shifted into five stars.

“You can get buried by bad reviews,” said Gruel, whose fast-casual restaurants serve food like fish tacos and lobster burgers. “So it’s a race to stop the bleeding.” The payoff, he added, can be tremendous. Turning around one-star reviews creates lifetime customers – and better reviews draw in more.

Gruel’s extreme approach to bad reviews may sound like overkill. But studies show that consumers overwhelmingly choose businesses based mainly on star ratings. Even a decline of

one star, on a scale from one to five, can hurt revenue and send a business into a slide. So tracking a business’ online reputation is a critical part of building a thriving company, experts said.

“Star ratings persist forever,” said Daniel Lemin, author of ManipuRated: How Business Owners Can Fight Fraudulent Online Ratings And Reviews. “Meanwhile, actual reviews can fall off the first pages of review sites. And consumers rarely read reviews older than three months.” After problems are addressed and solved, he added, there’s a high chance that disgruntled customers can become avid advocates.

So small businesses have nothing to lose by engaging

their critics, Lemin said. The recipe is simply apologising and asking for another chance. The criticism may hurt, he added, but the way a business responds matters.

Yelp is, of course, the powerhouse review site that is most watched. According to a Nielsen survey, 44 per cent of consumers use Yelp to search for local businesses. TripAdvisor and Angie’s List have much smaller followings.

This has prompted the growth of reputation management companies such as ReviewTrackers, Reputation.com, and Status Labs. They typically use data-analysis tools or software to find online reviews and rapidly respond to them.

PF_022016.P36-37_Upfront_OnlineReviews.indd 36 1/20/16 10:16 AM

february

issue 122

Portfolio.

37

/online review

ReviewTrackers tracks over 70 review sites, said Chris Campbell, chief executive and founder. “That number grows every quarter,” he said. Free tools like Google Alerts do not always pick up every review site, he added.

“Your customers are already talking about you. So you can’t just ignore them. Anyway, businesses

that engage with their customers are growing.”

Studies show, he said, that the quality of a restaurant’s online reviews can even predict how fast it will close.

Gruel, a trained chef who started his business in a food truck, prefers to respond to reviews himself. He fears using “canned responses that aren’t personal”. If he cannot respond quickly, he asks an employee to do it for him.

Armed with two smartphones and an iPad, Gruel already responds to about 50 online reviews a day, regardless of whether they are positive or negative.

“Dining experiences live on in the computer,” he said. “And they

power to the people

“Dining experiences live on in the computer and they reach thousands of people. But you can only manage a fraction of that experience”

tripAdvisor ‒ The largest travel site in the world, with more than 225 million reviews, opinions, and photos taken by travellers

Yelp ‒ With 135 million visitors every month and 90 million peer reviews of local businesses from dentists to restaurants and more

Amazon ‒ Not just books but everything they sell. It’s a hugely influential site, with 1.2 million reviews of tech gear alone

reach thousands of people. But you can only manage a fraction of that experience inside the restaurant.” He added that he also checks Yelp statistics, which analyse things like how many people visit a review page, that are e-mailed to him.

Checking online reviews every few days is now a business necessity, many experts said. Barbara Findlay Schenck, author of Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies, recommends finding out which three sites customers use most and then setting up online alerts to monitor them. “Be strong where your customers are looking,” she advised.

“The minute you see a bad review, look for a shard of truth,” she said. “Is this something you can improve? Look for what you can fix.” But don’t fight fire with fire by getting into an argument with a reviewer, she added.

Positive reviews are good marketing fodder. “You can blast them out by putting Yelp badges with the number of five-star reviews on your website,” said Darnell Holloway, director of local business outreach at Yelp. Now it’s all about relational capital, he said, and you don’t need a big marketing budget.

Gruel also enlists Yelp’s Elite Squad, which reveals emerging hot spots. “About 70 per cent of our business has grown through Yelp and Instagram,” he said. One study even found that a 3.5-star rating that gets bumped up to four stars can result in a 19 per cent increase in peak-hour bookings.

Gruel said he aimed for four- or five-star reviews. “They will make my business sustainable,” he said.

PF_022016.P36-37_Upfront_OnlineReviews.indd 37 1/20/16 10:16 AM

portfolio.

38

fe

at

ur

es

por

tfo

lio.

PF_022016.P38-43_Feature_GrowingupMobile.indd 38 1/20/16 10:17 AM

growing up mobile

portfolio.

39

The effort by Wishbone, a social networking application full of breezy polls about pop culture, to understand its teenage audience illuminates the habits of a generation. Words: Conor Dougherty

GroWinG Up Mobile


portfolio.

40

Over the past decade, advertisers have spent untold millions trying to turn Talia Kocar and her peers in the millennial generation into loyal customers. But on a recent

afternoon in Santa Monica, California, in a kind of consumer torch-passing, Kocar, 25, watched a focus group of teenagers drink free Snapple and suck Doritos powder off their thumbs while answering questions about their smartphones.

Kocar works on Wishbone, a social networking application full of breezy polls about pop culture, prom dresses and other fixtures of teenage life. Users – most of them girls – post side-by-side pictures that compare rappers, celebrities and the like.

Kocar said her first attempts at market research began with trips to Starbucks stores and nail salons, where she would find Wishbone users and ask them what they did and did not like about the app. She got lots of information but wanted more. Hence the focus group.

Teenagers being teenagers, the room was full of angst and contradictions. They love Instagram, the photo-sharing app, but are terrified their posts will be ignored or mocked. They feel less pressure on Snapchat, the disappearing-message service, but say Snapchat can be annoying because disappearing messages make it hard to follow a continuing con-versation. They do not like advertisements but also do not like to pay for things.

At one point a questioner asked the group when they were least likely to be online. “When I’m in the shower,” a girl responded.

Nobody laughed, because it was barely an exag-geration. About three-quarters of US teenagers have access to a mobile phone, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Centre. Most go online daily, and about a quarter of them use the internet “almost constantly”.

Those numbers have created a growing adver-tising market and fortunes for apps like Snapchat and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. This year companies are projected to spend $30 billion on in-app advertising in the United States alone, roughly double what they spent in 2014, according to eMarketer, a research company.

But even though these services all have the same core functions – find friends, post pictures, send messages – teenagers juggle them constantly, developing arcane customs for what to post where and ditching one app for another the moment it becomes uncool.

That churn leaves an opening for upstarts like Wishbone, which is about a year old and has about three million monthly users. Since July it has ranked among the top 30 most-downloaded social

media apps in Apple’s App Store, according to App Annie, a data and analytics company. But staying there will be tough. Mobile apps are a hit or miss business in which a handful of top players get most of the users and money.

Hoping to get their app in that elite few, people like Kocar pore through data and turn to focus groups for insight on how to get new users to sign up and old users to stay. Their efforts are a window into how teenage lives are documented on mobile screens.

“They have immediate social validation or lack of validation at the touch of a button,” said Michael Jones, chief executive of Science Inc, which owns Wishbone. “So if you thought that the immediate gratification generation was two generations ago, you haven’t even seen what immediate gratification looks like until you start spending time with a teen on a phone.”


growing up mobile

portfolio.

41

One afternoon last summer, Leila Khan and Lucy Nemerov, two eighth-graders from Palo Alto, California, cruised their local mall, scoring free samples at See’s Candies and dropping into Brandy Melville to look at clothes but not buy. Lucy is an avid Wishbone user, but the app is just one among several she and her friends rotate through each day.

To manage their identities in and obligations to this world in their pockets, they adhere to rules that have somehow been absorbed and adopted by their peers. For instance, that afternoon, since nothing particularly special happened, Lucy posted a few videos to Snapchat – including a clip of me inter-viewing her – but nothing on Instagram.

Why the distinction? Because Instagram is spe-cial, Leila explained. On Snapchat, where messages disappear, you can be less selective because there is a lower bar for quality. On Instagram, you have to be careful not to clog your friends’ feeds with a

barrage of low-quality pictures that might annoy them. Neither girl had any such rules for Facebook, because they hardly use it.

App makers fear this kind of juggling the way TV networks fear DVRs. Each time someone leaves one app for another, there is a chance that user will never come back. And since apps make money only when users are plugged in and absorbing ads, the number of monthly users is less important than how many users they get each day – and how long they stay.

For now, big advertisers remain focused on the millennial generation. But an early wave is starting to think about the next group, said Erna Alfred Liousas, an analyst at Forrester Research, who said the firm had a number of financial ser-vices and media companies ask for studies on the under-17 group.

As with coffee and newspapers, the key to a suc-cessful app is to make it a daily habit. Which is why, in early September, Jones of Science sat in a cinder block room staring at a computer screen full of data. He was with Benoit Vatere, head of Science’s mobile group, and Peter Pham, the company’s chief busi-ness officer, discussing the best time to send push notifications alerting Wishbone users to new polls.

Push notifications – those incessant reminders that make your phone light up and ding – are the infantry of app warfare, cracking the attention span to remind users that someone on the internet might be talking about them. All summer Wishbone had been sending out alerts four times a day, but the three men were thinking about adding more and, now that students were back in class, trying to rec-alibrate around the school day.

“Can we have a friends feed at noon?” Jones asked Vatere. “It would be great to do ‘Your friends have updated.’”

They have immediate social validation or lack of validation at the touch of a button

Rajada Victor uses the Wishbone app, at home


portfolio.

42

“And you talk about it while you’re at school,” Pham added.

Every generation has its thing, and the last two have been marked by digital technology. One of the big dividing lines between Generation X and millennials was that millennials grew up with the internet. A big difference between millennials and the next group – the post-millennials – has been smartphones.

Economic and cultural changes have an even larger influence, argues Neil Howe, an author and historian who is credited with coining the term “millennial generation”. The Great Recession and its aftermath are likely to make the post-millennial generation more risk-averse, he said. At the same time, today’s kids have absorbed lots of parental advice about online safety and bullying.

In surveys, his consulting company, LifeCourse Associates, has found that teenagers are extremely anxious about being criticised on social media and are more conscious than their parents of when an app makes them feel bad – or at least aren’t bashful about saying so.

During the recent focus group at Science, one girl said she showed Instagram ideas to at least three people before posting. Another said she delet-ed any post that did not garner enough likes. “I post and I just delete, because I don’t want to have, like, never mind,” she said, too ashamed to announce the precise number of likes out loud.

Wishbone sees those anxieties as an opportu-nity. The app doesn’t ask users to take pictures in which they look “sooo beautiful!!!!” nor does it require having parents who holiday in Instagram-perfect locales. Users just make funny polls to talk about celebrities, makeup and bands. It is about your tastes, not your identity. Rajada Victor, a 14-year-old ninth-grader who lives in Los Angeles, was seated near the girl who was ashamed of her paltry likes. In a follow-up interview, she said she had grown exhausted by the frenzy for online status but was a regular on Wishbone, which she checks all the time: in class, while walking to school, on weekends.

As with coffee and papers, the key to a successful app is to make it a daily habit

Michael Jones, chief executive of Science Inc, which owns Wishbone


growing up mobile

portfolio.

43


the unusual suspects

portfolio.

44

PF_022016.P44-47_Feature_Thieves.indd 44 1/20/16 11:01 AM

portfolio.

45

Graying thieves and record heist undone in London.Words: Dan Bilefsky

PF_022016.P44-47_Feature_Thieves.indd 45 1/20/16 11:01 AM

portfolio.

46

n Friday nights for three years, they met over drinks at The Castle, a pub in Islington, in North London. The four men were getting on in years, but they were not there just to talk about retire-ment plans or the aches and pains of ageing.

Experienced thieves with long criminal records, they had something far more pressing in mind: an audacious, career-topping heist they boasted the world would never forget.

The operation, meticulously plotted – with the help, police would later find out, of the book Forensics For Dummies – was finally set in motion the Thursday before Easter in 2015, as Brian Reader, the ruddy-faced ringleader whom the oth-ers called “the Master”, boarded the No 96 bus near his home in Dartford, Kent.

Reader, 76, swiped his free travel pass for sen-iors and began the 80-minute journey to Hatton Garden, for centuries the centre of London’s jewel-lery trade. By early evening, Reader reached an inconspicuous, seven-floor building. A large plaque outside read: Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd.

The rest of his crew was there, dressed as build-ing workers: John Collins, also known as Kenny, 75; Daniel Jones, 60; and Terrence Perkins, 67. Reader wore a yellow hard hat and a fluorescent jacket with the word “Gas” on the back.

In a case that prosecutors have called the larg-est burglary ever in England, the four men have pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal as much as $30 million in gold, jewellery and gems. Prosecutors say they used high-powered, diamond-tipped drills over the long Easter weekend to bore an 18-inch hole through a concrete wall in a basement vault at the safe deposit com-pany and then made off with the loot.

As details of the burglary have emerged, many have been left wondering how four ageing and sometimes bungling robbers managed to break into a high-security vault in the centre of London – protected by reinforced concrete, two iron gates and a motion-triggered alarm system – and get away with loot-filled wheeled plastic rub-bish bins. Had they not violated one of the first laws

in the criminal handbook and boasted about the caper, they might never have been caught.

“This offense was to be the largest burglary in English legal history,” prosecu-tor Philip Evans told Woolwich Crown Court. “These four ringleaders and organisers of this conspiracy, although sen-ior in years, brought with them a great deal of experience.”

On the evening of April 2, Reader and the rest of the gang were greeted at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit by a

red-haired man known as “Basil” who, investiga-tors say, apparently opened the fire escape door and let the others in.

Several men got out of a white van and unloaded bags, tools and two rubbish bins, taking them in on the fire escape and down the stairs, Evans told

The four pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal as much as $30 million in gold and jewellery

PF_022016.P44-47_Feature_Thieves.indd 46 1/20/16 3:04 PM

jewel thieves

portfolio.

47

The men ransacked 73 safe deposit boxes, quickly filling several bags and two large trash bins with jewels, gold, precious stones and cash. Prosecutors said the men struggled to carry all the loot up the stairs to a fire escape. Collins, the lookout, was waiting nearby in the van.

At 6.40am, exhausted and out of breath, they sped away.

Another two days went by before the theft was discovered. Pictures of the gaping holes drilled through the wall were soon splashed in Britain’s papers. Angry safe deposit box owners, some of them uninsured, lashed out at police and at the safety deposit company for their perceived incompetence. Mirza Baig, a jewellery dealer, said he had lost everything.

“I don’t have a penny’s worth of stones left with me because they were all in the safe deposit – the safest place you can imagine,” he told ITV News.

For several days, the men revelled in the heist, but police were closing in. The men had been identified at and near the scene from hours of sur-veillance footage, and electronic bugs, which had been placed in two of their cars, picked up their boasts in a cockney rhyming slang.

“The biggest cash robbery in history,” Jones can be heard crowing, lacing his words with expletives, in recordings played in court, “that’s what they are saying.” Perkins said he wished he had taken a selfie at the vault.

The men continued to meet at The Castle, a traditional pub. Police filmed them with hidden cameras and used lip readers to figure out what they were saying. After the robbery, they argued over how to split the proceeds and launder the jewels, prosecutors say. Perkins was overheard saying he planned to melt down some of his gold. “That could be my pension,” he said.

The men stashed some of the gold and jewels in their homes, behind baseboards and kitchen cabinets. On May 19 – 45 days after the burglary – 200 police officers swept in as Jones and Collins were transferring some of the jewels to the home of Perkins’ daughter. Police raided 12 addresses in North London and a total of eight men have been charged with conspiracy to burgle.

Many millions of pounds worth of the stolen loot still has not been found, prosecutors say, and at least some had probably been melted down, laundered or hidden before the arrests.

At the time of writing, three of the gang have been found guilty, with sentencing to take place on March 7, while the robbery itself is report-edly going to become the basis for a forthcoming feature film.

the jury. The men communicated by walkie-talkie.

Once inside the building, they dis-abled the elevator, leaving an “out of order” sign next to it, sent the eleva-tor to the second floor, and shim-mied down the elevator shaft to the basement, busting through a metal barrier. They cut a telephone cable jutting out of an alarm box, as well as the wires of an electrical box, disa-bling an iron gate protecting the vault, prosecutors say.

Then they began the long and arduous task of drilling through the vault’s wall, reinforced with con-crete – a skill they had perfected by watching clips on YouTube. Shortly after 12.21am on April 3, Alok Bavishi, whose family owns the safety deposit company, received a call that the intruder alarm had been triggered. He testified that his concerns were initially tempered by

the fact that a previous alarm had been triggered by an insect.

Kelvin Stockwell, a longtime security guard at the building, arrived nearly an hour later. After examining the front door and peering through the letter box of the fire escape door, he told the jury he decided that the building was secure and left without going inside.

Police were also notified of the alarm, but no response was deemed necessary. All the while, the thieves were in the basement, breaking into the vault. Police later apologised, saying the “call handling system and procedures for working with the alarm monitoring companies were not followed”.

Even so, the gang’s luck proved short-lived. When they finally breached the wall against which the metal cabinet holding the safe deposit boxes was standing, they were stopped in their tracks because the cabinet was bolted to the ceiling and floor, and they were unable to dislodge it.

They eventually left around 8am, empty-handed. But they were undeterred, returning two days later, on Perkins’ 67th birthday. The burglary may have gone unnoticed because the security deposit’s neigh-bouring businesses were closed for the Easter week-end. But the ease with which the thieves left and then returned, undetected, has led some to speculate that the crime was an inside job.

On their second attempt, after a trip to the hardware store, the men managed to dislodge the cabinet on the night of April 4, although Reader was not there to enjoy the moment, having appar-ently lost his nerve.

Previous page, from left: Terrence Perkins, John Collins, Daniel Jones and Brian Reader.

This page, from top: The hole bored in the vault wall; the Hatton Garden safe deposit; The Castle pub; Escape route.

PF_022016.P44-47_Feature_Thieves.indd 47 1/20/16 3:04 PM

trunk

portfolio.

48

The Man Who Would Make The World a PreTTier Place

PF_022016.P48-51_Feature_TrunkOwner.indd 48 1/20/16 10:07 AM

The Man Who Would Make The World a PreTTier Place

Words: Matthew Schneier

trunk

portfolio.

49


trunk

portfolio.

50

M atthew Moneypenny (his real name) is Hollywood hand-some, with a dressed-

down wardrobe of Saint Laurent and an easy patter somewhere between pitchman and showman.

He laughs loudly and has a favour-ite table at Sant Ambroeus in New York City, as well as a preferred room at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, California. He looks like what industry types call “talent”, but Moneypenny, 46, isn’t talent (though talented). In the congested little world of fashion image-making, he is talent’s agent, the bargaining power behind the throne.

Moneypenny’s job is to secure high-revenue deals for top-tier images and image-makers. In effect, he said with a practiced twinkle over cookies at a Sant Ambroeus corner table, “to make the world a prettier place”.

Moneypenny is the president and chief executive of Trunk Archive, a photography licens-ing agency, whose back catalogue of images run in magazines and

product packaging, are loaded as smartphone backdrops and hang on hotel walls. In Trunk’s trunk are images by hundreds of photogra-phers, including many of fashion’s marquee names: Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, Arthur Elgort and Patrick Demarchelier.

Moneypenny has built Trunk into a digital, long-tail boutique of styl-ish imagery, making the photogra-phers (and the company) significant amounts of money in the process. They are high-end images for high-end prices.

“If Corbis and Getty are Kmart and Wal-Mart,” Moneypenny said, ticking off two of the larger stock-photo agen-cies, “we’re Bergdorf Goodman.”

Having made a success of resell-ing existing images, Moneypenny is now getting into the business of creating new ones.

Fuelled by investment capital from Waddell & Reed, which has taken positions in companies like Richemont and LVMH, Moneypenny has spent the last two years quietly buying creative agencies. The result

is Great Bowery, a group that will include Trunk Archive and 11 other assignment and licensing agencies under its umbrella.

Great Bowery is a mega-agency, one whose ambition is to rebalance the scales, empowering those who make fashion’s imagery – photog-raphers, fashion stylists, hair and makeup artists and set designers – and checking, implicitly, the pow-erful and increasingly integrated luxury companies and media con-glomerates that have traditionally commissioned their work.

He sees it as nothing less than the fashion analogue of the rise of the agency system in Hollywood, which unseated the film studios as the sole kingmakers and deal-brokers.

“If one can say three pillars were originally music, television and film, I would argue that fashion is now the fourth pillar,” Moneypenny said. “Twenty years ago, it was the socialite on the Upper East Side (in the New York City borough of Manhattan) or the resident of Mayfair or Beverly Hills that was aware of what was coming down the Chanel or Dior runway. There’s so much more inter-est about the creativity that comes out of this world.”

M oneypenny is far from the only observer to make this connec-

tion, but he is better positioned than most to connect the dots. He is, by his own estimation, the only fashion agent with a background in Hollywood repre-sentation and management. He began his career at ICM, the Hollywood agency, talking his way from the mail-room to the desk of Nancy Josephson, the co-president.

“He would call up Gucci at the time Tom Ford was designing and say, ‘My boss has no time to shop, send over the entire line,’” said Josephson, now a partner at WME. “I have a lot of chutzpah, but I would not have thought to do that. And he got me a discount!”

The Hollywood model was an explicit reference for Great Bowery. “So many of the systems I learned

”If

Co

rb

Is a

nd

Ge

tty

ar

e K

Ma

rt

an

d

Wa

l-M

ar

t W

e’r

e b

er

Gd

or

f G

oo

dM

an

”


From UAE: 800 Cartier (800-227 8437) Outside UAE: +971 4 425 3001

CLÉ DE CARTIER

New Year’s Blessing from the Red Box

New Collection

cart

ier.

com

UAE_Portfolio_PUWA1704_COOP_265x205_GB.indd 1 12/01/2016 16:48

阿拉伯联合酋长国请致电 800-227 8437, 海外请致电 +971 4 425 3001

CLÉ DE CARTIER

cart

ier.

com

UAE_Portfolio_PUWA1704_COOP_265x205_CH.indd 1 12/01/2016 16:48

trunk

portfolio.

51

during my time at ICM, I still employ today,” Moneypenny said.

Fabien Baron, editorial director of Interview Magazine, has seen what the corporatisation of the industry has wrought: the move to be more things to more people, with static budgets and increased demands. Baron, who is considering a handful of projects with Moneypenny, expressed admira-tion for his strategy.

“The idea of turning this into the CAA of fashion is interesting,” he said, referring to the Hollywood agency. “It makes a lot of sense to me.”

Most of the agencies now under the aegis of Great Bowery, like CLM, M.A.P, Management & Artists and Streeters, are unfamiliar to the public. So, too, are many of the artists they represent.

Their work is not. You have seen it in the glossy spreads of fashion magazines, the ad campaigns that precede them, the billboards and bus shelters luxury companies comman-deer, and the videos that run on their Instagram accounts and websites.

If they are not, on the whole, house-hold names the way CAA clients like Julia Roberts, George Clooney and Madonna are, Moneypenny is bet-ting that they can be. Their rates can already run Hollywood stratospheric, and their visibility is rising to match. Is

media, branded content, endorse-ments and collaborations for artists companywide, and the agency plans to act as a producer of its artists’ projects, rather than merely a con-duit to them.

“We would all like to see the agency operate as a studio,” Moneypenny said, “packaging” projects (in Hollywood parlance) and marketing them itself.

“That package doesn’t necessar-ily have to be fashion,” he added. “It could be a line of products for an electronics maker. It really could be almost anything.”

Moneypenny’s hope is that every qualified artist in the stable can become an expert.

He held up photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, whose archive Trunk licences, as an example: they are in-demand photographers, working for Vogue and W, Chloé and Calvin Klein. They also design jewellery and a collection of jeans, recently pub-lished a career-spanning retrospec-tive with Taschen, and shot a music video with Paul McCartney, Rihanna and Kanye West.

In his version of the future, deals such as those may be worked through Great Bowery with a com-mission on each.

“th

re

e p

illa

rs

we

re

mu

sic

, tV

an

d

film

... f

ash

ion

is n

ow

th

e f

ou

rth

”

Pat McGrath, the most in-demand of the runway makeup artists, say, primed to become a name-brand megastar?

“Some designers are big, famous stars,” Baron said. “Also photogra-phers are, and stylists are, and mod-els are. Everybody’s kind of impor-tant. It’s become popular culture.”

w ith importance comes oppor-tunity. Moneypenny envisages

product lines, brand extensions, exhibi-tions and endorsements even if the jobs these artists now do didn’t exist a generation or two earlier.

Many of the changes Great Bowery hopes to affect are of the unsexy, busi-ness-efficiency type. By combining agencies into one organisation it hopes to consolidate back-end services like legal, accounting, human resources and operations, and share them across the entire company. Moneypenny said that individual agencies would be left to conduct business as they see fit, and artists would not be asked to sign new contracts.

But even if Moneypenny does not aim to hijack the fashion world, as he told Fantastic Man magazine, he is looking to disrupt it. Great Bowery is making new hires who will focus on developing social


china

Jurassic

The murky origins of the largest

dinosaur museum in the world.

Words: Dan Levin

Larks

portfolio.

52

PF_022016.P52-55_Feature_ChinaFossils.indd 52 1/20/16 2:50 PM

china

H

portfolio.

53

ere are a few quirky and little-known facts about Pingyi, an industrial back-water in China: locals have a fond-ness for fried cicadas, and the city, a major processor of fruits and nuts, bills itself as the “China Foodstuff Canned City”.

All the same, Pingyi is often over-looked for what should probably be its greatest claim to fame: palaeon-tologists say it is home to the world’s largest collection of complete dinosaur fossils, many of which show evidence of feathers that have in recent years radically transformed scientific under-standing of the evolutionary transition from dinosaur to bird.

Housed in the Tianyu Museum Of Nature – the biggest dinosaur muse-um on Earth, according to Guinness World Records – are more than 1,100 fossilised dinosaurs, 2,300 early bird specimens and thousands of other pet-rified remains (including a 38-metre-long fossilised tree trunk, another record-holder) that draw palaeontolo-gists from around the globe.

“It’s an incredible museum like no other,” Jingmai O’Connor, 32, an American palaeontologist specialising in the origins of birds, said during a recent visit. “We can test a hypoth-esis here and the great thing is we can double-check it because they’ve got so many specimens.”

The sprawling collection is a testa-ment to China’s growing importance as a font of paleontological discoveries that are advancing the understanding of the Earth’s prehistoric eras.

How so many of those discoveries ended up in the museum, which was founded in 2003 and stocked over just five years by the eccentric former head of a state-owned gold mining company, casts light on the murky

A 100-million-year-old fossil of a Psittacosaurus with its offspring on display at the Tianyu Museum Of Nature in Pingyi, China

complexities of the Chinese boom in fossils, which critics bemoan has been tainted with a glut of counterfeits fab-ricated by unscrupulous sellers.

Around 120 million years ago, most of what is now China was largely dry land. But in the northeast, a lush terrain of lakes and volcanoes proved ideal for fossil preservation. For thousands of years, people here revered the so-called dragon bones they found while tilling the soil. Under Mao Zedong, fossils were taken note of during searches for oil and gas but were not studied.

“You don’t need to do too much to dig up fossils in China,” said Wang Xiaoli, a local palaeontology profes-sor who had come to examine the museum collection. “When the wind blows, they reveal themselves.”

As market economics took hold in China in the 1980s and ’90s, farmers realised they could earn a small fortune selling their finds to government offi-cials, museums and foreign palaeon-tologists, particularly if they could offer complete specimens. Forgeries became rife, as did altered fossils, with a dif-ferent species’ bone glued here, a rib augmented with clay there.

In 1999, a Chinese fossil acclaimed by National Geographic as a “true missing link” between dinosaurs and birds was proved to be a hoax. More recently, a Chinese palaeontologist estimated that more than 80 per cent of marine reptile specimens dis-played in China’s museums “have been altered or artificially combined to varying degrees”, according to a 2012 article in the state-owned China Daily newspaper.

Although China has issued regu-lations aimed at protecting its pre-historic patrimony, fossil trafficking is not considered a serious smuggling

more tHan 80 per cent of marine reptile specimens displayed in cHina’s museums Have been altered or artificially combined to varying degrees


portfolio.

54

offense, a loophole that has con-tributed to a rise in illegal excava-tions and thefts. In July, police in southern China seized 213 fossilised dinosaur eggs from a house after vil-lagers looted a local construction site where eggs had been unearthed, state news media reported. Authorities also found the complete skeleton of a Psittacosaurus, a dinosaur that roamed the Earth around 100 mil-lion years ago.

Yet despite the rampant greed and fraud, authentic Chinese fossils con-tinue to reveal fascinating clues about dinosaurs, early avians and primi-tive mammals. Many discoveries have been made from studies of the Tianyu collection, including a small batlike dinosaur that may have been able to fly or glide without feathers, known as Yi qi, or “strange wing” in Mandarin, the journal Nature reported in April.

All of which makes Zheng Xiaoting, the museum’s director and founder, extremely proud. “I love them all,” he said of the fossils.

Modern China is increasingly populated with men like Zheng, self-made enthusiasts who suddenly have the money to fund their obsessions. A wiry 62-year-old with a military-style flattop, he dropped out of school at 16 to find work in textile factories.

It was in the early ’90s, while man-aging a government-run gold mine, that he discovered his love for dino-saurs. The part-time hobby eventu-ally became the museum. He said the institution, consisting of three build-ings with 28 display halls, was state-owned and required an investment of $61 million, but he would not say where the money came from. He sim-

small “rewards”.Zheng says that less than three per

cent of the specimens he acquired before 2008 were altered and that most of those were returned to their owners.

“There are almost no fake ones in our museum anymore,” he said.

ply said, “I felt I had an obligation to protect the fossils for science.”

Zheng waved away suggestions by some palaeontologists that his acqui-sitions were purchased, a practice that was banned in 2008. “People gave us fossils voluntarily,” he said, describing the payments the donors received as

despite the rampant fraud, authentic chinese fossils continue to reveal clues about dinosaurs, early avians and primitive mammals

Right: A fossilised Xiaotingia zhengi, a feathered dinosaur named after Zheng Xiaoting, the founder of the Tianyu Museum

Top: Zheng Xiaoting, director and founder of the Tianyu Museum Of Nature, in a hall adorned with photos of visiting government officials


Computer generated image is indicat ive only.*Price correct at t ime of going to press.

50 Kensington Gardens Square is an inspiring

example of heritage and contemporary combined,

situated in Bayswater, just moments away from the

roll ing green spaces of Hyde Park and behind the planned

Whiteleys regeneration project.

Each elegant apartment features an impeccable

level of design, seamlessly combined with high

specif ications to create a f irst-class l iving experience

in one of London’s most sought after areas.

P R I C E S F R O M £ 6 3 5 , 0 0 0 *

For all enquiries, please contact:

+44 (0)20 7647 7163

[email protected]

www.50kensingtongardenssquare.com

Sell ing Agent:

INSPIRED LUXURY LIVING IN LONDON W2S T U D I O , 1 , 2 A N D 3 B E D R O O M A P A R T M E N T S

A N D P E N T H O U S E S N O W L A U N C H E D

KGS_Portfolio_Mag_265x205_Feb16.indd 1 18/01/2016 17:27

portfolio.

56

A once envied industry may be losing some of its glitter.

Words: Steven Kurutz

fundersare hedge

losing cultural

capital?

PF_022016.P56-59_Feature_HedgeFund.indd 56 1/20/16 10:11 AM

hedge funds

Christian Bale as Dr Michael Burry in The Big Short

portfolio.

57


portfolio.

58

Last decade, Turney Duff lived in a $9,300-a-month triplex in the New York City neighbourhood of Tribeca. He wore jeans to work and was able to do his job largely free of the red tape that could entangle

those who worked in other parts of the financial sector. As a hedge fund guy, he had the sexiest job on Wall Street.

“You were part of the coolest fraternity on cam-pus,” said Duff, who no longer works in finance.

In the go-go days before the financial col-lapse, he and his colleagues made annual salaries in the low seven figures, and they had a shot at bringing in loads more, perhaps $1 billion a year, as top managers.

“All of a sudden the word ‘billion’ became commonplace,” said Duff, 46, who chronicled his highs (and lows) in a memoir published two years ago, The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale Of Spectacular Excess.

That fizzy number is being thrown around a little less these days, as a once-enviable job has seemingly lost some of its cultural cachet. In October, hedge funds suffered their worst month-ly loss since the 2008 crisis. Several well-known funds closed their doors in 2015 as big bets on oil went bust and returns sank.

Increased regulation has made the work “too cumbersome”, hedge fund manager Gideon King wrote to his investors, before bowing out and remaking his business as a so-called family office investment firm, following the lead of George Soros and Stanley F Druckenmiller.

More hedge funds have opened in 2015 than have closed (656 to 599), according to Preqin,

a firm that tracks the industry. But the estimated $24 billion in asset liquidation means that the ambitious young person with a head for business is looking into other fields.

Consider the post-graduation jobs of Harvard Business School students. The number who said they would like to work for a hedge fund is five per cent, a figure that has stayed flat for half a decade, said Timothy Butler, the school’s senior adviser to career and professional development. The number of graduates accepting positions in the technology sector has risen to 20 per cent, a level not seen since the late-’90s tech bubble.

“The media is full of stories about startups and the big companies that are changing the world,” Butler said. “It seems tremendously exciting.”

Anthony Scaramucci, who runs SkyBridge Capital, an investment firm, has noticed the trend. “What is more fashionable now is to work at an internet or social media company, more so than a hedge fund,” he said.

Hedgies aren’t getting a public image boost from Hollywood, either. The Big Short, the new film based on writer Michael Lewis’ 2010 best-seller, tells of a few brilliant investors, including two hedge fund managers, who recognise the housing bubble before anyone else.

Played by Steve Carell and Christian Bale, they rake in billions before the credits roll, but their victory is bittersweet. Their success depends on the US economy’s failure, and the film’s director, Adam McKay, offsets their triumph with images of laid-off workers, empty McMansions and a working-class family drummed out of its home.

The socially awkward men played by Carell and Bale lack the charisma of Gordon Gekko, the

“What is more fashionable now is to work at an internet or social media company, more so than a hedge fund”

Turney Duff, author of the memoir The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader’s Tale Of Spectacular Excess, at home in Dix Hills, New York


hedge funds

slick-haired protagonist played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street. Gekko may have been intended as a villain, but he seemed to be having more fun than those who played by the rules, and he served as a role model to the young people of that era who had dollar signs in their eyes.

Damian Lewis plays a rich, handsome hedge fund titan on the forthcoming Showtime series Billions. But he is hounded by Paul Giamatti as a rabid-dog district attorney – a fate that may cau-tion those who consider entering the field.

It’s telling that the coolest character in The Big Short, the one with the sharp one-liners and sharper suits (played by Ryan Gosling), is not a hedge funder but an investment banker.

Although the numbers-crunching hedgies may see themselves as the finance world’s avant-garde, the public, and Hollywood, has always had a sneaking fondness for Wall Street wolves.

“When you saw Michael Douglas saying ‘Greed is good,’ people could understand that,” said Bryan Burrough, a Vanity Fair correspondent and a co-author of Barbarians At The Gate while a reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Hedge funds, by contrast, “are phenomenally opaque”, Burrough said. He discovered as much

firsthand when reporting, with Bethany McLean, an article for the magazine about Steven A Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital Advisors – “The hedge-fund billionaire,” as the piece described him.

Cohen no longer runs SAC Capital. The fund pleaded guilty to insider trading charges in 2013.

Even at their peak, the main hedge fund players drew media attention not so much for how they lived but for how much they earned. The million-dollar Wall Street bonuses of yore morphed little by little into the $175 million end-of-year thank-you that Paolo Pellegrini, a former analyst for Paulson & Co, is said to have received in 2007.

Figures of that kind were like a blinking neon sign for would-be titans like Duff, who had his fun before washing out after two rehab stints. He is now a consultant on Billions.

These days, when he talks to friends at hedge funds, he hears a lot of grousing about the newly empowered compliance people. It’s not like it used to be. “I could go out every night and not pay a thing for it,” Duff said. “Turney wants a private helicopter to the Hamptons? Done. Turney wants to go to surf camp? Done.” The job, he added, has “definitely become a little less sexy”.

“I could go out every night and not pay a thing for it”

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

Mariahilferstrasse.pdf 1 10/11/15 4:03 PM

PF_022016.P56-59_Feature_HedgeFund.indd 59 1/20/16 3:07 PM

future work

change in the futurefive ways work will

portfolio.

60

PF_022016.P60-71_Feature_FutureWork.indd 60 1/20/16 11:03 AM

future work

The workplace is changing. We take a look into a world where your boss is tracking you, your neighbour is a robot, and it’s cool to be old. Employment, but not as we know it.

Words: Killian Fox and Joanne O’Connor

Change in the FutureFive Ways WOrK Will

portfolio.

61


future work

portfolio.portfolio.

62


future work

portfolio.

switching teams. Not only do employees respond well to this style of working, but corporations benefit too as it better equips them to compete with the startups that are disrupting their business.

“Large organisations have a huge challenge in attracting the millennial generation to come and work for them. Those people expect much more entrepreneurial environments – more freedom to operate, less control,” says Philippe De Ridder, co-founder of the Board Of Innovation, a consultancy firm whose mission statement is to “help corporates innovate like start-ups”. One of the ways they do this is through a series of “intrapreneurship” programmes that encourage employees to think and act like entre-preneurs within the confines of their company. What this means in practical terms is individuals having the freedom to take full own-ership of particular domains or projects, with minimal supervision or bureaucracy, and to be able to pitch directly to the CEO without having to go through several layers of management.

The principles of intrapreneurship can apply at every level of an organisation, not just management or creative roles. De Ridder gives the example of online shoe shop Zappos.com, which abolished scripts from its call centre a year ago and gave cus-tomer service staff the freedom to deal with complaints however they saw fit. He says they are now outperforming most of their competitors in terms of customer satisfaction ratings.

“It’s a common assumption that this level of freedom only works for managers or people who work remotely,” says De Ridder. “But there are plenty of real-life examples that [show] people are more motivated if they themselves make a decision rather than having a decision forced on them.”

Forget the rigid corporate ladder – now the corporate lattice allows free-flowing ideas and career paths

Browse the business section of any bookshop and you’ll find dozens of titles promising to share the secret to climbing the corporate ladder. But the day is not far off when such books will seem as quaint and outmoded as a housekeeping manual from the 1950s.

One of the key workplace trends of the 21st century has been the collapse of the corporate ladder, whereby loyal employees climbed towards the higher echelons of management one pro-motion at a time. Cathy Benko, vice-chairman of Deloitte in San Francisco and co-author of The Corporate Lattice, says that the ladder model dates back to the Industrial Revolution, when successful businesses were built on economies of scale, standardi-sation and a strict hierarchy. “But we don’t live in an industrial age, we live in a digital age. And if you look at all the shifts taking place, one [of the biggest] is the composition of the workforce, which is far more diverse in every way,” she says.

This new diversity, combined with technological advances, has fed demand for a more collaborative and flexible working environment. Benko estimates that companies have “flattened out” by about 25 per cent over the past 25 years, losing several layers of management in favour of a more grid-like structure, where ideas flow along horizontal, vertical and diagonal paths.

Career paths are becoming similarly fluid, with many fol-lowing a zigzag rather than a straight path. “I would argue that [the lattice model] provides more opportunity and more pos-sibilities to be successful,” says Benko. “In the ladder model, you’re looking in one direction, which is up. In the lattice organisation you can find growth by doing different roles, so you have new experiences, you acquire new skills, you tap into new networks. The world is less predictable than it was in the industrial age, so you stay relevant by acquiring a portfolio of transferable skills.”

A recent report, The Future Workplace, commissioned by financial protection specialist Unum and authored by The Future Laboratory, reveals how the workplace is evolving and what employers need to do successfully to manage employee wellbe-ing over the next 15 years. One of the key findings of the survey was that in order to attract and retain high-calibre employees, companies need to foster a more collaborative environment. This might involve hot-desking, ideas workshops and regularly

1 Workplace structures

63

Companies have “flattened out”, losing layers of management in favour of a grid-like structure, where ideas flow along horizontal, vertical and diagonal paths


future work

portfolio.

64


future work

portfolio.

The robots are coming – and if the forecasts are correct, they could sound the death knell for millions of jobs

In recent years, automation has become increasingly preva-lent. We think nothing of paying for groceries at a scanner or transferring money on a screen without going into a bank. We’ve grown accustomed to the idea of self-driving cars and computers that can talk to us.

As marvellous as these innovations may seem, they can also be destructive, rendering entire professions obsolete even as they boost productivity and convenience. And now, if widespread predictions are correct, automation in the workplace is set to increase at an unprecedented rate.

“There’s going to be a huge change, comparable to the Industrial Revolution,” says Jerry Kaplan, a Silicon Valley entre-preneur who teaches a class in artificial intelligence at Stanford. Robots and intelligent computer systems “are going to have a far more dramatic impact on the workplace than the internet has”.

Kaplan isn’t alone in this belief. A 2013 study by the Oxford Martin School estimated that 47 per cent of jobs in the US could be susceptible to computerisation over the next two decades. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute said that, by 2025, robots could jeopardise between 40 million and 75 million jobs worldwide.

“There have been two major developments over the past 10 years,” says Kaplan. “The first relates to advances in machine learning – the ability to organise large volumes of data so you can get actionable intelligence. The second is the availability of data of all kinds, coming from smartphones and other low-cost sensors out there in the environment. When you add those two things up – the availability of the data along with the ability to interpret it – it enables a whole lot of things that you couldn’t do before.”

Many areas of manual work are being affected. Robots in factories and warehouses are becoming more mobile, versatile and affordable. A US-designed robot called Baxter, which can handle a wide variety of tasks from loading to packaging, currently costs £19,000. “If you’re digging a ditch or painting a house, laying pipes or setting bricks – anything that involves basic hand-eye co-ordination – there will be low-cost, efficient mechanical devices that can do that work,” says Kaplan.

It’s not just manual labour that’s ripe for automation: white-collar jobs are also at risk as software becomes more sophisti-cated. One example is Quill, a program developed by US company Narrative Science that crunches data and generates reports in a journalistic style.

Data analysis work in areas such as advertising and finance is being outsourced to computers and even the authority of medical

2 ArtificiAl intelligence

65

experts is being challenged: IBM’s Watson computer, which won the American TV quiz Jeopardy in 2011, is being used to diagnose cancer patients in the US.

Watson can sift through symptoms, medical histories and the latest research to deliver diagnoses and suggest potential treatments, but there are limits to its diagnostic abilities and, unlike a human doctor, it cannot treat patients with empathy and understanding.

By absorbing the most routine aspects of our jobs, optimists argue, machines are freeing us up to concentrate on more creative, thoughtful activities. This may be true for some, but, as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Martin Ford says: “The reality is that a very large fraction of our workforce is engaged in activities that are, on some level routine, repetitive and predictable.” If this is the case, retraining a large portion of the workforce to engage in more creative activity beyond the reach of automation will pose an enormous challenge.

Not all jobs are at risk. “A lot of work involving personal inter-action won’t be affected,” says Kaplan. “Nobody wants to go to a robotic undertaker who says, ‘I’m sorry for your loss’; it’s just not meaningful. But it depends on the activity – the more transactional it is, the more likely it is to be automated. If you go to a fancy restaurant, you don’t want a robotic waiter. On the other hand if you go to McDonald’s, you won’t have a problem with punching buttons and having a burger come out of a chute somewhere.”

One issue that will loom ever larger as the incidence of automa-tion increases, according to Kaplan, is inequality. “Automation is fundamentally the substitution of capital for labour.

The problem is that the people who already have the capital are the ones who will benefit most, because they’re the ones who will invest in the new automation.” In other words, the rich will get richer and the rest will suffer.

A study by the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that, By 2025, robots could jeopardise between 40 million and 75 million jobs


future work

portfolio.

66


future work

portfolio.

67

Websites that match employers with freelancers are growing fast – and so is the potential for lower wages and inequality.

In the past decade cloud computing has radically altered the way we work, but it’s the growth of the “human cloud” – a vast global pool of freelancers who are available to work on demand from remote locations on a mind-boggling array of digital tasks – which is really set to shake up the world of work.

The past five years have seen a proliferation of online platforms that match employers (known in cloud-speak as “requesters”) with freelancers (often referred to as “taskers”), inviting them to bid for each task. Two of the biggest sites are Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, which lays claim to 500,000 “turkers” from 190 countries at any given time, and Upwork, which estimates that it has 10 million freelancers from 180 countries on its database. They compete for approximately three million tasks or projects each year, which can range from tagging photos to writing code. The market is evolving so quickly that it’s hard to pin down exactly how many people are using these sites worldwide, but management consultants McKinsey estimate that by 2025 some 540 million workers will have used one of these platforms to find work.

The benefits for companies using these sites are obvious: instant access to a pool of cheap, willing talent, without having to go through lengthy recruitment processes. And no need to pay

3 The human cloud

overheads and holiday or sick pay. For the “taskers” the benefits are less clear cut. Champions of the crowdsourcing model claim that it’s a powerful force for the redistribution of wealth, bringing a fresh stream of income and flexible work into emerging economies such as India and the Philippines (two of the biggest markets for these platforms). But herein lies the problem, as far as critics are concerned. By inviting people to bid for work, sites such as Upwork inevitably trigger a “race to the bottom”, with workers in Mumbai or Manila able to undercut their peers in Geneva or London thanks to their lower living costs.

“It’s a factor in driving down real wages and increasing inequality,” says Guy Standing, professor of economics at SOAS, University Of London. He has written two books on the “pre-cariat”, which he defines as an emerging global class with no financial security, job stability or prospect of career progression. He argues that falling wages in this sector, with workers often willing to complete tasks for as little as $1 an hour, will eventu-ally have a knock-on effect on the wages of traditional employees and contribute to the growth of the precariat. “And it’s not just unskilled labour that’s being done online,” says Standing. “It goes all the way up: legal services, medical diagnosis, architectural services, accounting – it’s affecting the whole spectrum.”

Love it or loathe it, the human cloud is here to stay. “People don’t necessarily want to work from 9am to 5pm in an office any more. They want more flexible work, both in terms of the hours and the location,” says Vassili van der Mersch, founder of Sevendays, a new platform which specialises in matching estab-lished freelancers with startups and digital agencies. Unlike the auction model favoured by sites like Upwork, Sevendays invites a carefully selected number of jobseekers to apply for each job and does not take a cut of their earnings. Freelancers can also specify the minimum rate they are prepared to work for.

Van der Mersch argues that there are career development opportunities for cloud workers, with many startups using the site as a way of testing out freelancers to see if they’re a good cultural fit before offering them a permanent job – and vice versa. “Typically these remote freelancers are very entrepreneurial, which is one of the mindsets that startups are looking for,” he says. “They are self-starters and they don’t need someone look-ing over their shoulder.”

For now this sector of the labour market is largely unregulated but Standing says there is urgent need for an industry code of ethics and low-cost means of redress to protect vulnerable work-ers. “It’s going to become a very big, explosive issue. In some sectors the use of cloud labour is doubling each year and so far the policymakers haven’t addressed it.”

By inviting people to bid for work, sites such as Upwork inevitably trigger a “race to the bottom”, with workers in Mumbai or Manila able to undercut their peers in Geneva or London thanks to their lower living costs


future work

portfolio.

68


future work

portfolio.

Bosses apparently worry about the health of their staff and are asking them to wear trackers. Nothing sinister about that…

It is becoming easier than ever for employers to keep an eye on their staff. With emerging technologies, companies can monitor where employees are and what they’re up to but also how they’re feeling – whether they’re stressed, tired or not getting enough exercise outside work.

Some workplace tracking technologies are already widely used. Low-cost GPS systems are used to record the progress of delivery drivers. Earpieces relay orders to warehouse employees and can also track their performance and downtime. At Amazon, work-ers are encouraged to report on each other’s performance via an online feedback tool.

Monitoring more intimate details about personal health and wellbeing is less commonplace, though that’s expected to change with the spread of wearable technology. Last year, sales of devices such as the Fitbit and Jawbone, which track exercise, food intake, sleep patterns and other health-related informa-tion, totalled 26.4 million; that number is expected to rise to 72.1 million by the end of this year. According to the technology research company Gartner, around 10,000 companies world-

4 Workplace monitoring

wide offered their staff fitness trackers in 2014 and the firm predicts that next year most companies with more than 500 employees will offer them.

Why would your employer want to know how much you exer-cise or how well you’re sleeping at night? “Really, it’s a manage-ment diagnostic tool,” says Chris Brauer, director of innovations at Goldsmiths, University of London. “What impacts on your perfor-mance at work is not just what you do at work. In our early stage studies, we find strong, clear correlations between sleep patterns and concentration, between levels of anxiety and stress outside the workplace and performance inside the workplace.”

He draws an analogy with sports science: “If you have athletes performing at a high level on the pitch these days, they’re almost uniformly supported by data and analytics insight. Nobody would field a team in the Premier League and not use analytics.” At work, it’s also a question of competition, he says, and for companies with global ambitions “these kind of technologies are uniquely placed to provide significant competitive advantages”.

Some big companies are taking this idea seriously. BP gives out Fitbit fitness trackers to its North American staff as part of an incentive programme to reduce healthcare costs. If you can prove you’ve increased your fitness – by hitting a steps-per-day target, for example – you can reduce your health-insurance premium. In the UK and Ireland, Tesco distribution centre staff, wear smart armbands “as a working aid”.

Among various objections to such initiatives, perhaps the strong-est has to do with invasion of privacy. Many employees object to being monitored. Even if the stated goal is to improve their health, the awareness of scrutiny and the pressure to meet targets at all times can cause anxiety, offsetting any increases in wellbeing.

Further opportunities for anxiety arise. Will your employer use your data against you? Will it share it with third parties? “You’re right to be very wary and demand higher levels of transparency, especially when it comes to wearables that are much more personal than other devices,” says Brauer. “If someone’s going to exploit your data for value, you need to be comfortable that the value you’re receiving back is a reasonable exchange. If you haven’t got that sense, then I don’t think many employers with that kind of strategy will survive very long.”

69

BP gives out Fitbit fit-ness trackers to its North American staff as part of an incentive programme to reduce healthcare costs


future work

portfolio.

70

Illus

trat

ions

: Rou

i Fra

ncis

co


future work

portfolio.

Forget quitting at 65 – everyone is going to have to stay on for longer, but we should exploit older people’s experience

As people live longer – life expectancy at birth has increased globally by six years since 1990, according to the World Health Organisation – they are expected to work longer. This pressure comes from governments, which struggle to afford pensions for a longer-living population, and also from indi-viduals themselves, who find it harder to make their retirement savings stretch as the average life expectancy, which is currently above 81 in the UK, rises.

These trends have led to speculation that we are approaching the end of retirement or at least entering a period in which older workers will stop working gradually rather than abruptly upon reaching retirement age, which currently stands at 65 for men and 62 for women in the UK but will rise to 67 for both by 2028.

For many older workers, however, remaining in employment beyond 65 is an unsettling prospect. “A certain type of older worker with sought-after skills can manage transitions from one job to another easily enough,” says Matt Flynn, the director of the Centre For Research Into The Older Workforce at Newcastle University Business School. “For them, a cliff-edge approach to retirement is probably going to be a thing of the past.”

“But,” he adds, “for a lot of people, not only those in low-skill, physically demanding jobs, but also those who don’t have that much experience making job transitions, they are going to feel a real sense of loss in job security and economic secu-rity if that cliff-edge approach is taken away. Even if it’s on a more phased retirement basis, having to work longer than you planned can be quite scary.”

Even for workers some way shy of retirement age, holding on to your job isn’t always easy. According to one UK survey, redun-dancy rates by age group in 2011 rose steeply from 5 per cent for under-30s, to 26 per cent for the 45-49 age group, to 37 per cent for those over 50. Even though legislation such as the Equality Act in the UK aims to prevent employers from discriminating on the basis of age, the odds are often stacked against older people applying for jobs. “Sometimes, when an employer has a choice between two candidates, one with up-to-date skills and another with experience and a qualification from 40 years ago, there might be some logic for a risk-averse employer to choose the first candidate,” says Flynn. “But it might also be because employers assume that younger people are more adaptable, cheaper, more tech-savvy and are going to stay with the organisation longer.”

5 The end of reTiremenT

Flynn believes it’s unfair to assume that older workers are less adaptable. “One of the big reasons why people aren’t able to make very effective transitions from one job to another is that their skills aren’t up to date and a major contributor to that is not having the opportunity to train.” Individuals have to take ownership of their careers, he says, but there is also an onus on the government and employers to provide work programmes and apprenticeships to maintain a skilled older workforce.

He gives the example of the Silver Human Resource Centre in Japan, which provides part-time, paid employment for people over 60; government investment in older workers that has yielded positive results. “This idea could easily be applied to a UK or US context and given a modest investment by government, making better use of skills and knowledge of older workers, could benefit the entire economy.”

His assertion is backed up by a 2014 report from the International Longevity Centre-UK thinktank, which estimated that, assuming continued high migration, Britain’s GDP could increase by 12 per cent by 2037 if the number of people over 65 in work continued to rise. Perhaps it’s time we started taking the senior members of our workforce more seriously.

71

We are entering a period in which older workers will stop working gradually, rather than abruptly upon reaching retirement age

Illus

trat

ions

: Rou

i Fra

ncis

co


feature name

In Cuba,

In searCh

of a CIgar

portfolio.

72

PF_022016.P72-75_Feature_CubanCigars.indd 72 1/20/16 10:18 AM

portfolio.

73

cigars

Cuba’s international trade relations are improving, but cigar culture can’t really be exported

Words: Ron Stodghill

W alking along the gritty, darkening streets of Havana, I felt a sense of foreboding wash over me. A few paces ahead was a stranger. Jorge,

he called himself, a young street hustler I had just met at a taxi stand outside the Hotel Capri.

Jorge was dressed decidedly urban: an oversize San Diego Padres jersey, baggy denim shorts and adidas shell-toe sneakers. Jorge was also charming, and through broken English he had enticed me from the touristy environs of downtown into what was eerily morphing into a barren, crumbling neighbourhood of sagging rowhouses. The object of seduction: a box of Habanos, or hand-rolled cigars.

It was my first night in Havana, a trip prompted by thawing relations between the United States and Cuba. A few months before, in late December, President Barack Obama had ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations, setting in motion plans to open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century.

Soon we reached a dilapidated brick building in the central neighbourhood of Vedado. “Here, my

In Cuba,

In searCh

of a CIgarfriend,” Jorge said. “Good price here on Montecristo, and Cohiba, too.”

Jorge rang a doorbell. A window two flights up opened, and keys dropped to the ground. He led me up a dim stairwell to an open apartment door, where we were greeted by a shirtless guy and an elderly woman who spirited me into a back room. And there it was on a wooden table, its lid majestically open: a box of Cuban Montecristo No 2s.

“Gracias,” I told the woman, who shot me a weary smile as she wrapped my bounty in newspaper. I knew the price, 80 CUC (convertible Cuban pesos, priced to the US dollar), would spark envy in buddies back home accustomed to paying upward of $350 on the black market for a box of these gems. “You happy, my friend?” Jorge asked. I shook his hand, then hugged him as if he were family.

For the average American cigar lover, Cuban smokes have remained mostly the rare indulgence; a celebratory spoil procured through mysterious back channels and offered when babies or businesses are born. Yet suddenly, the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba last July brought with it the


portfolio.

74

prospect of a cigar renaissance, opening a path for ordinary Americans to visit and bring back, for now at least, $100 worth of Cuban cigars from tobacco’s Holy Grail.

The eased sanctions put me in the mood to explore Cuba’s cigar culture, including the Alejandro Robaina Tobacco Plantation, arguably the most famous tobacco farm in the world. The home of the late farmer Alejandro Robaina, known as the face of the Cuban cigar, Robaina is tucked away in the town of San Luis in the Pinar del Río province, the most western section of Cuba. Founded in 1845, the farm is known for its robust yields of high-quality wrapper leaves; so impressive, in fact, that in the early 1980s, Fidel Castro – a cigar-smoking Cohiba man himself – branded these cigars with the Robaina family name, the only Habanos to boast such a distinction.

Cigar nostalgia abounds in Cuba, and I encoun-tered few more eager to share it than Michael Phillips, a Briton who moved to Havana some 25

The Montecristo #2 is arguably the best cigar in the world. It is medium to full

body with the perfect balance of spice and a smooth creamy taste.

Invest in a box of these if you get the chance

one to buy years ago to teach English. He is a devoted member of the city’s Cigar Aficionado Club, whose mem-bers – foreign diplomats and businessmen – meet monthly for dinner, cigars and conversation. Sitting in the spacious living room of his apartment in the upscale Miramar neighbourhood, where most of the city’s top government officials reside, Phillips poured cognac and held out a tray of unbanded cigars, from short coronas to lengthier Churchills, tan Habanos to darker Maduros. He grinned at my selection, pyramid-shaped and walnut in colour.

“Don’t ask me where it came from,” he said mis-chievously, “because I cannot tell you.”

After some prodding, Phillips explained his sus-piciously bandless cigar menu: “The rollers in the factory have a quota, but many of the women find a way to sneak a few extras out. So they roll for eight hours in the factory, and then come home and roll for another two hours.”

He lit up, drew from his cigar, and watched the


portfolio.

75

to sell under the Cohiba brand. As one senior man-ager at TabaCuba, the state agency that runs Cuba’s tobacco production and research, told me: “A Cuban cigar must be made with Cuban sun, Cuban soil, with Cuban hands. If not, there are no properties that make it what it claims to be.”

It’s estimated that some five million to eight mil-lion Cuban cigars reach Americans each year by way of countries like Canada, Switzerland, Australia and Mexico. Most experts agree that eased trade sanctions are far from opening a retail gateway between the United States and Cuba. It will take years, they say, for sellers to clear the Byzantine network of international politics, trademark restrictions and FDA regulations. When Cuban cigars finally do arrive abundantly – and legally – on US soil, most experts figure it will be through the Casa del Habano, Cuba’s state-owned chain of cigar boutiques, which already has some 130 stores worldwide.

Cigar culture, of course, can’t be exported.

plume rise. “There was one girl who worked at the Romeo y Julieta factory; she was pregnant for three years!” he chuckled. “But yes, these are as good as the ones from the factory.”

Serious cigar smokers wax poetic with the lan-guage of wine aficionados, referring to a cigar’s flavour as spicy or creamy with hints of honey, cocoa and cinnamon. Cuba’s tobacco farmers take fierce pride in producing the most flavourful cigars in the world. Their nemesis is the expanding market not only for Cuban knockoffs but also for iconic Cuban brands whose leaves and labour are actually from other parts of the world, partly as a result of fleeing growers restarting their businesses elsewhere.

For instance, the premium brand Cohiba, created exclusively in the mid-1960s for Castro and other senior government officials, has been embroiled in litigation for years as Habanos SA has contested the right of a US firm, the General Cigar Co, which manufactures Cohibas in the Dominican Republic,

“The rollers in The facTory have a quoTa, buT many of The women find a way To sneak a few exTras ouT”

cigars


Portfolio.

76

por

tfo

lio.

Great barrier reef, australia

Price from $800

rooms 160

oneandonlyresorts.com

bNe

Hayman Island is located on the northernmost tip of the pristine Whitsunday Islands, surrounded by the Great Barrier Reef. Its sole resort, a fixture since the 1950s, was overhauled

to the tune of $80 million by new managers One&Only Resorts. And the location is what makes this special. As well as everything you'd expect from a One&Only resort – high-end spas, restaurants, infinity pools, deluxe beach villas and so on – you get the island and surroundings. The waters are among the most spectacular on Earth for diving and snorkeling, while the walking tracks up over the island put you in contact with stunning natural environment, including kingfishers, kookaburras, painted lorikeets, white cockatoos and wallabies. A lovely mix of luxury, nature and seclusion.

One&Only Hayman IslandFive-star luxury on a private island resort

liv

ing

PF_022016.P76-77_Living_Opener.indd 76 1/20/16 10:20 AM

issue 122

february

Portfolio.

77

PF_022016.P76-77_Living_Opener.indd 77 1/20/16 10:21 AM

Portfolio.

living / style

78

ho

ng

ko

ng

fe

bru

ary

Average temp

18°c

Shar

m E

l She

ikh

19 °

C

Dub

ai

22 °

C

Los

Ang

eles

20

°C

Sy

dne

y

23 °

C

What to pack

street foodIn the 2016 Michelin guide for Hong Kong there has been added, for the first time, a section for street food. It lists 23 places worthy of your attention including Butcher’s Club (largely known for burgers), Canaan Thai Snack (hole-in-the-wall place

selling pad Thai) and Hop Yik Tai, which is famous for smooth rice rolls. It appears that Michelin is coming down off their lofty perch and walking the street and Hong Kong is a fine place to start. If you want a recommendation with a star, however, T’ang Court has just received it’s coveted third.

additional info

...for warm weather in Hong Kong, and beyond

Avg hours of sun: four

W

als

o W

ear

in...

PF_022016.P78-81_Living_Style.indd 78 1/20/16 10:23 AM

issue 122

Portfolio.

february

79

2

1. Sasquatchfabrix collarless shirt $290 2. CH Carolina Herrera tie $155 3. Marvy Jamoke jacket $550 4. Berluti leather bag $3,300 5. Loro Piana Piqué Polo Shirt $625 6. Fred Perry trousers $138

ac

ces

sori

es

Paul Smith shades $218

TODs loafers $626

Thom Browne leather card holder $338

Salvatore Ferragamo silver pendant $1,500

1

3

4

65

citylook


Portfolio.

living / style

80

One of Italy’s top spas for relaxation after a hectic time in the centre of the Eternal City

the Victoria regeneration SpaA 45-minute drive from the centre of Rome on the coastal suburb of Ostia, this day spa (overlooking the sea) offers a full range of modern treatments to help you relax and forget

the three times you were almost run over by someone on a Vespa scooter. From massages and facials to treatments designed for couples and full packages designed to promote total relaxation of the five senses. Victoriaspa.it

als

o w

ear

in...

r

om

e

feb

rua

ry

Average temp

9°c

Lond

on

7 °C

Pa

ris

6 °C

Ve

nice

5

°C

Mad

rid

7 °C

what to pack

additional info

...for Rome and beyond

citylook

Daily hours of sunshine: eight


issue 122

Portfolio.

february

81

Bulgari earrings in white gold with emeralds, shaped sapphires, rubies and pavé

diamonds $451,133

Jennifer Meyer letter 18-karat gold

diamond ring $2,150

Stella McCartneycrystal-embellished silicone

iPhone 6 case $125

2

4

1. The Kooples dress with lace inserts $280 2. Saint Laurent leather-trimmed rabbit-felt fedora $1,990 3. Saint Laurent wool-crepe blazer $3,190 4. Longchamp St. Valentine bag $128 5. Jimmy Choo black mix suede with hotfix crystals $1,992 6. Alexander McQueen cat-eye acetate sunglasses $345

accessories

Kate Spade ‘Born To Fly’ bracelet

$78

1

citylook

6

5

3


issue 122

Portfolio.

february

82

living / investment

Alden 405 Indy boots

3

Heavy, full grain waxhide with a heavy 100 per cent cotton duck lining

They became the boots that Indiana Jones wears in Raiders Of The Lost Ark simply because Harrison Ford already had a pair from his days as a carpenter and just brought them to the set with him. They went on to become iconic. Regardless, every man should own a decent, well-made pair of boots and these are among the best, from one of the finest bootmakers in the world. The Alden boot company has been in business since 1884 and are true craftsmen – these aren’t fashion items. In a disposable age, these boots stand against that ethos and will mould to your foot and improve with time. They should serve you well and retail at a weighty $522, but will last you as long as you need them, whether you have to face Nazis or not. Visit aldenshop.com for more.

As worn by Indiana Jones, and stylish adventurers of all type

1

Robust upper is made of

Chromexcel leather from

Horween

investment piece

6

Constructed on a TruBalance Last

for a wider, more comfortable fit

2

Full glove leather lining

5 Mock stitch toe

8

Stacked leather sole with bottom made from a mixture of neoprene and cork

PF_022016.P82_Living_InvestmentPiece.indd 82 1/20/16 10:25 AM

VINTAGE 2006

The Power of CreationEN

JOY

RE

SP

ON

SIB

LY

- D

OM

PE

RIG

NO

N.C

OM

SP_EOY15_BOTTLE_Business support executive 205x265_UAE.indd 1 04/01/2016 10:25

C

M

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

VIP Room.pdf 1 1/17/16 1:36 PM

ISSUE 122

PORTFOLIO.

FEBRUARY

85

LIVING / FOOD

Top tableAsian fusion at London’s new must-try restaurant

Chef Tim Hughes has worked with Marco Pierre White, Mark

Hix and Gordon Ramsay and first became a head chef at just 24 years of age. For the last decade he's overseen all the new openings for the ever-reliable Caprice group.

We point this out because what you’ve probably heard about Sexy Fish is that the likes of Kate Moss eat there and it’s a current celebrity favourite, and there are Damien Hirst and Frank Gehry artworks on display and it can be hard to get a table at a reasonable time. The latter is true, but it’s not because of who eats there, it’s because of who cooks there.

The Asian-fusion menu is modern, light, fresh, inventive and everything that’s good about modern Japanese-influenced cuisine. And as with all the best places, the real stars are to be found in the kitchen. If you're in London, we highly recommend this place.

Berkley Square, London W1

sexyfish.com

LHR

SEX

Y F

ISH

, LO

ND

ON

OCTOPUS CARPACCIO

1 SEARED YELLOWFIN TUNA

3

Deserts in Asian-fusion restaurants are often lacking but this matcha and ginger marble cake with gingerbread ice cream and caramel sauce is a fine, decadent ending to a meal.

MARBLE CAKE

Lightly seared tuna

Wood sorrel

CHEF’S RECOMMENDATION | TIM HUGHES' PICK OF THREE RESTAURANTS TO TRY1. Kaia Kaipe (San Sebastian) A small provincial restaurant, overlooking the Bay of Biscay – serves exceptionally fresh fish straight from the sea, prepared by a host of Spanish women in the kitchen. Can’t fault it.2. Gramercy Tavern (New York) What Danny Meyers manages to execute here never fails to amaze me. They manage to produce an extraordinarily high volume of covers, with produce second to none and consistent quality. 3. Barrafina (London) A concept I really enjoy, and similar to what we’ve built at Caprice Holdings; small plates, sharing and using exceptionally fresh seafood, by one of the best female cooks (Nieves Barragan Mohacho ) I’ve ever come across.

2

Their octopus carpaccio comes with a lime and ginger vinaigrette and pickled shallots. In one of the most no-carb restaurants in the capital, this is a stand-out dish.

Pickled sea cucumber

Dried Miso

PF_022016.P85_Living_TopTable.indd 85 1/20/16 11:13 AM

Portfolio.

living / book

86

C hristo and Jeanne-Claude conceived the idea of wrapping the Berlin Reichstag back in 1971, but it took until the summer of

1995, when for two weeks the German capital seemed the very centre of the art world, for the scheme to come to fruition.

More than five million visitors witnessed the final making of one of the most famous acts of art that has been performed, one that took 24 years to set up and cost around $10 million to do.

This book tells the story of how this feat was developed and designed by the artists and their project co-ordinator Wolfgang Volz. It includes sketches, preliminary drawings, documents, and photos on 700 pages how a vision to do something that would be as much a political statement as an art stunt. This is the story of how two artists, with 100,000 square metres of thick woven polypropylene fabric and 15.6 kilometres of blue polypropylene rope, pulled off one of the most memorable art events of all time.

So what did wrapping the 101-year-old German parliament building in aluminium-coloured fabric symbolise? “All our work is about freedom,” the artist said, but like much art, it’s up to you.

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95, published by Taschen, is out now for $40

Wrapped Reichstag

PF_022016.P86-87_Living_Book.indd 86 1/20/16 10:28 AM

issue 122

Portfolio.

february

87

PF_022016.P86-87_Living_Book.indd 87 1/20/16 10:28 AM

Portfolio.

88

living / stay

Formerly home to England’s Second Viscount Lanesborough and later a fully-functioning hospital, the site that houses

The Lanesborough, originally opened in all its Regency-style glory in 1991, has a storied past to say the least.

Last year, a new chapter of its tale commenced with the hotel’s reopening as part of the acclaimed Oetker Collection. This followed an extravagant 18-month refurbishment that saw the hotel stripped to its shell, and is rumoured to have cost its owners the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority upwards of $100 million. The result, as you can imagine, is none too shabby.

At the helm of the renovation was globally celebrated interior designer Alberto Pinto, who sadly passed away in 2012, shortly after completing the renderings. His sister Linda Pinto was tasked with bringing his vision to life, and maintaining the hotel’s signature Regency style and private residence feel, while incorporating the latest in contemporary luxury and technological innovations, with new designs in all of its public areas, and 93 guest rooms, suites and bathrooms.

A team of over 300 artisans using age-old techniques, often used in decorating palaces, were entrusted to deliver the new look, from embroiderers, crystal

Hyde Park Corner, London SW1X 7TA

Price From $1,050 per

night

Lanesborough.com

LHR

the

lan

esb

or

ou

gh

Where to

stay

specialists and bronzers, to lacquerers, gilders and (probably) candlestick makers. With made to measure trimmings and finishings, the meticulous attention to detail, achieved only in part due to 2,000 hours of stencilling, 16,000 metres of fabric and 2,100 books of 23¼ carat gold leaf, is staggeringly tangible. Using largely British materials, the look and feel is so wonderfully pretty and quintessentially British, you expect a rendition of God Save The Queen to ring out as you enter the lobby.

Of course it doesn’t, and instead you are welcomed to your room or suite, of which no two are the same, by one of 23 private butlers; the only London hotel to offer such a service for every guest. The Royal Suite is The Lanesborough’s largest, offering seven bedrooms and bathrooms, two living rooms and a dining room.

You are welcomed to your room by a private butler, it’s the only london hotel to offer this for every guest

Wor

ds:

Han

nah

Geo

rge

PF_022016.P88-89_Living_Hotel.indd 88 1/20/16 1:24 PM

Portfolio.

february

89

issue 122

The new restaurant, Céleste, marks a new culinary era for the hotel under executive chef Florian Favario, who hails from The Lanesborough’s sister hotel, Le Bristol, Paris’ three-Michelin starred restaurant, Epicure, and is the protégé of chef patron Eric Frechon, who oversees the French-inspired cuisine, made using the best of British ingredients. Dining here is a formal affair under the glint of a 200kg English crystal chandelier, complemented by the more relaxed, yet equally as ceremonious afternoon tea, with a tea sommelier on hand to guide you through the menu.

The eccentrically named ‘Withdrawing Room’ and the adjacent Library Bar maintain the grandeur, the latter with hues of dark green, gold and mahogany, dimmed lighting and an evening pianist providing a private members’ club ambience; and an exclusive one at that. Like all the best hotels, you don’t feel like a customer, but rather an old friend from the host’s Oxbridge days who’s visiting.

And as with all illustrious residencies, one of the best-kept secrets lies in the basement. The Garden Room is a den-like cigar lounge, boasting a sizable selection of Cuban cigars in its walk-in humidor, and a partially opened roof provides a literal breath of fresh air from the Knightsbridge streets above.

If the best of British heritage, design, luxury and service are your thing, The Lanesborough is everything you could imagine and more.

eat

The Alfred Tennyson is a friendly, rustic gastro-pub where the focus is on high-quality British produce.

Located a stone’s throw from the hotel on the quiet, cobbled Motcomb Street, it serves as a

welcome refuge from the hustle and bustle of Knightsbridge.

drink

Beneath 56 Walton Street is Jeroboam’s Wine Cellar, an

intimate, atmospheric space that hosts an entertaining programme of wine tastings throughout the

year, alongside an award-winning wine list and a roaring open fire

in winter.

Bar

The Library Bar once hosted Stevie Wonder, who asked a former barman to craft him a bespoke cocktail – in return providing an impromptu 30-minute set on the bar’s piano. The Champagne Wonder is on the menu today.

Bath

Placed in every guest bathroom, where each slab of marble was individually handpicked, are bespoke fragrances and amenities, created by world-renowned British perfumer Roja Dove.

Five colour schemes adorn the rooms and suites, with rich jewel colours of greens, blues, reds and yellows to create warmth, harmony and comfort. Bedtime is a regal affair with 14 canopies hanging over each bed, with more than three million hand stitches piecing together the fabrics.

extratouch

shop

Moda Operandi offers a more personalised experience than the

neighbourhood’s famous department stores. The luxurious showroom

provides a bespoke shopping service with access to the premier fashion

houses and emerging labels within a relaxed ambience, alongside advice

from personal stylists.

culture

Marvel at the glittering interiors of Apsley House, located at the grandest address once known as

‘Number 1 London’. The Georgian building was the London home of the first Duke Of Wellington and now hosts one of the finest art

collections as well as an impressive array of silver and porcelain.

in the hotel

places of interest in the area

PF_022016.P88-89_Living_Hotel.indd 89 1/20/16 1:24 PM

issue 122

Portfolio.

february

90

living / column

Pantone, the global authority on colour standards for the design industries, recently announced its colours of the year for 2016: Rose Quartz and Serenity.

It’s the first time Pantone has chosen the blending of two shades instead of one (past choices include Marsala, Radiant Orchid and Emerald). According to the company, by breaking from tradition, it hopes to “transcend cultural and gender norms”.

In its choice, Pantone seems to be suggesting doing away with the practice of associating colours with gender – something that’s actually a relatively recent phenomenon, and can restrict the colours designers use. For decades, pink has been associated with girls and blue with boys. Could Pantone’s decision to focus on gender influence the designs of everything, from clothing to house paints?

There is nothing intrinsically female about the colour pink, nor is there anything intrinsically male about the colour blue. Rather, popular culture – and buckets of advertising dollars – have largely dictated how we perceive the colour-gender relationship.

At various points in history, these gender-colour connections have actually had opposite roles. The colour pink has historically been a masculine colour. Blue, a colour that is associated with the Virgin Mary, was historically considered feminine – and still is in many parts of the world.

The colour order that we’ve become accustomed to wasn’t established until the 1940s, when gender-specific clothing began being dictated by manufacturers and retailers. Eventually, boys and girls required different clothes, different toys – even different interior designs in their rooms and nurseries. Popular products like Barbie (primarily marketed to young females) would end up playing a role in shaping our colour stereotypes.

With the arrival of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, fashion shifted away from gender-specific clothing as girls embraced more

masculine styles. A decade later, fashion moved toward a more neutral palette. There was even a two-year stretch in the 1970s when no pink clothing appeared in the Sears, Roebuck and Co catalogue.

In the 1980s, we witnessed a shift towards gender-specific colour purchases, especially for children. With the advent of prenatal testing, families could now plan farther in advance in preparation for the expected baby girl or boy. Even disposable diapers were sold in pink and blue.

Today we’re more connected than ever – and more sceptical about the advertising we’re exposed to. Consumers have become increasingly sensitive to the methods used to

reinforce these social conventions in order to bolster profits.

We’re also in the midst of a movement to narrow the gender divide, particularly in fashion. The burgeoning trend of genderless fashion is being dictated by a new generation of individuals who accept styles without the traditional boundaries. They recognise that their role as a consumer is not just about the product, but rather about being a

part of a larger movement.The combination of Serenity and Rose

Quartz was featured on the runways for both men and women and highlighted in the Pantone Fashion Colour Report Spring 2016. This will inevitably bleed into other areas of design, from interiors to products. When conveying meaning and purpose to consumers, products and packages may abandon the use of traditional gender-colour associations.

As we’ve seen, the colour-gender link isn’t concrete. The boundaries built by generations before us could soon be knocked down. With this year’s selection, Pantone is among a select few wielding a hammer. By recognising the cultural and “societal movements towards gender equality and fluidity”, Pantone is paving the way for future generations to be less concerned about being typecast or judged for embracing unexpected and unique colours.

“The colour order that

we’ve become accustomed

to wasn’t established

until the 1940s”

What Pantone’s colours of 2016 mean for designBy Ryan Russell

Ryan Russell is the associate professor of graphic design, Pennsylvania State University

PF_022016.P90_Living_Column.indd 90 1/20/16 5:53 PM

EMBRACEI m a g i n a t i o n

#DJWEOFFICIAL

DOHA JEWELLERY & WATCHES EXHIBITION

DOHA EXHIBITION & CONVENTION CENTER (DECC)

23 - 27 FEBRUARY 2016

www.djwe.qa

Official HotelOfficial AirlineOfficial SponsorBrought to you by Laboratory & Education PartnerOrganized by Host venue

Haute Joaillerie, place Vendôme since 1906

Idyllic Pont des AmoureuxPoetic Complications watch, white gold, diamonds, “contre-jour” enamel, mechanical movement with retrograde hours and minutes.

DUBAI: The Dubai Mall - Mall of the Emirates ABU DHABI: The Galleria, Al Maryah Island+971 4 425 2740

ABU DHABI: Etihad Towers +971 2 681 1919 www.vancleefarpels.com

Documents

Portfolio. February 2016