Damien Mulley

The line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels, is often attributed to Rogers. It actually came from a 1982 Frank and Ernest cartoon by Bob Thaves. But it is a useful way to think about organisations. Most have a Fred Astaire: the founder, chief executive or leader with the ideas, the profile and the freedom to point at the horizon and say, “We should go there.” And most successful organisations also have a Ginger Rogers.

The Ginger may be a COO, chief of staff, co-founder, executive assistant, head of operations or someone with no obvious title at all. They take the idea and work out how to make it happen. They translate between the person at the top and everyone else. They know who needs to do what, what will get in the way and what has been tried before. They make decisions executable. This is not simply support work. Fred and Ginger are doing different jobs, and the performance depends on both.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are a good example. When they started Loudcloud, Andreessen did not want to be chief executive. He said he could contribute more if he was free to be inconsistent, impatient and full of new ideas. He wanted Horowitz, whom he regarded as an exceptional manager, to run the company. There is something recognisable in that division of labour: one person pushes, provokes and imagines; the other builds the organisation capable of acting on it.

We tend to tell company stories through the Freds because they are easier stories to tell. There is a protagonist, an idea and a name. But organisations also need people who can turn ambition into action without necessarily owning the spotlight. There are different kinds of organisational talent, and the visible person cannot do the dance alone. Who is the Fred Astaire in your organisation? Who is the Ginger Rogers? And do you value both?

The Pitch

Definition: School Night
School Night is a night out for people who still want to go out and still want to function the next morning.

It has the things people actually enjoy about a pub night: food, music, pool, darts, karaoke, drinks, conversation and some dancing. It leaves out the assumption that a good night must end late or involve getting drunk.

It starts early and gets going early. The music is loud enough to create an atmosphere, but not so loud that people have to shout. Alcohol-free beer and mocktails are part of the drinks menu, not an apology at the bottom of it. There is room to sit, talk, play pool, sing badly and dance if the mood takes you.

Then, at a sensible hour, it ends.

This is not a sober night, a wellness event or disguised networking. People can drink alcohol if they want to. Drinking simply is not the main event.

The evening might begin with food, then move into pool, darts, karaoke and music chosen for the crowd. Later, the music picks up and there is room to dance. But you can still hear the person beside you.

School Night is for people who like going out but have become less willing to surrender the next day for it. They have work, children, a commute, an early start or simply better things to do than spend the morning recovering.

“It’s a school night” is usually the excuse for staying home.

Here, it is the reason to go.

It’s a school night. That’s the point.
Go out tonight. Still have tomorrow.

While AI is scraping the internet and stealing everything it can find to give us sometimes very suck-up answers to ChatGPT or Gemini queries, I keep wondering about all the knowledge, skills and expertise still sitting in people’s heads.

Particularly people of retirement age.

There were nearly 658,000 retired people in Ireland in Census 2022**, up 21% in six years. People don’t suddenly lose decades of knowledge because they’ve retired.

If you want a shelf put up, something repaired, a garden sorted or a few jobs done around the house, there’s probably somebody nearby with the expertise, the toolkit and the drill to do it.

And it goes far beyond DIY. I told my mother recently I’d paid €40 to get two pairs of pants taken up and she freaked out. She has a sewing machine. “You should have come to me. Why did you do that?”

There are people everywhere who can alter clothes, repair furniture, paint, garden, fix bicycles or do hundreds of other things, often with decades of experience.

So why isn’t there an easy way of finding them?

A website, WhatsApp number or simple service could connect people who need small jobs done with retired or semi-retired people who know how to do them. Send a photo or a voice note and find somebody nearby.

There is already an Irish service called **Silver Skills** pursuing something similar, although its website still appears to be at an early recruitment stage.

The bigger idea for me is the knowledge itself.

AI can scrape what we’ve put on the internet.

It can’t scrape what’s still in people’s heads.

There are hundreds of thousands of retired people carrying decades of knowledge around with them. There has to be a better way of putting some of that knowledge back to work.

People retire. Their knowledge doesn’t.

I went for a walk today and saw some nettles on the pathway. Maybe it was the sun or the breeze or whatever it was, but I got the smell of nettles as well.

Can ye recall the smell of nettles? There’s a certain smell to them. And the moment I smelled it, I remembered walking through bushes or fields, seeing those nettle patches and almost feeling my skin react to the stings before I’d even touched them.

I certainly remember walking through long grass or fields where there were nettles and completely avoiding them, almost like some kind of Indiana Jones segment in one of the movies. So dangerous. Don’t want to get stung.

It was interesting how just that smell brought all of that back. Not just the memory of nettles, but the feeling of them too: spotting them, steering around them and almost being able to feel the sting on your skin again.

**Here’s the science bit.**

That green, slightly sharp, grassy smell isn’t just in my head. Sensory research on nettle leaves describes grassy and other distinctive “green” aromas.

When green leaves are damaged or stressed, they can rapidly release chemicals called **green leaf volatiles** — the same broad family of compounds behind that familiar smell of freshly cut grass. They can act as part of a plant’s defence system, including discouraging some herbivores and signalling that the plant has been damaged.

So the smell probably isn’t the nettle specifically telling humans to stay away. The sting is fairly good at doing that already. But it is part of the plant’s chemistry — and apparently part of mine now too.

Are you, or have you ever been, a Metaverse Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Facebook Live Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Clubhouse Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Web3 Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, an NFT Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Blockchain Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Crypto Expert?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Virtual Reality Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, an Augmented Reality Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Second Life Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Gamification Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Social Media Guru?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Twitter Growth Expert?

Are you, or have you ever been, a TikTok Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, an Influencer Marketing Expert?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Growth Hacker?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Digital Transformation Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Disruption Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Future of Work Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Personal Branding Expert?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Thought Leader?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Creator Economy Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Community Building Consultant?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Prompt Engineer?

Are you, or have you ever been, a Prompt Engineering Consultant?

And are you currently an AI Consultant?
An AI Transformation Consultant?
An AI Strategy Consultant?
An AI Readiness Consultant?
An AI Productivity Expert?
An AI Agent Consultant?
An Agentic AI Consultant?
A Claude Code Consultant?
A Multi-Agent Systems Expert?

Or whatever we’re all supposed to be experts in by next Tuesday?

Mr Rogers famously talked about looking for the helpers when something bad happens. I think when something new happens, you should also look for the scammers. AI is full of them at the moment. People who weren’t AI experts yesterday are suddenly experts today, happily giving advice, selling courses and offering to transform your business.

But there’s another scam going on too: you’re scamming yourself. You can convince yourself that chasing AI, the latest platform, the latest tool or whatever shiny thing has just arrived is the same as improving your business. It isn’t.

AI is not going to help your business if you have no fucking idea what your business is. What’s your product? What’s your service? Who are your customers? Tell me about your customers. Tell me about their daily lives. What do they do in work? What annoys them? What do they need? How are you making their lives easier or better? Build something that does that. Sell it to them. Make money from it.

If you’re constantly chasing the new thing, maybe you’re avoiding the harder questions about the business you already have. Maybe the shiny new thing feels like progress. Maybe buying the course feels like progress. Maybe trying another AI tool feels like progress. But sometimes you’re just distracting yourself.

You’re a scammer for chasing the new too. Stop scamming yourself.

Focus on people. Know your customers better. Understand their world. Understand what they need. Be useful to them. Make their lives better while, yes, also making money.

The technology will keep changing. Knowing who you’re helping, what you’re helping them with, and why they’ll pay you for it matters a lot more.

I’m going to go play now.

I’m reading Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch, and there’s a character in it who’s a kind of tree spirit. She’s chatting to a cop and then, at one point, she just says, “I’m going to go play now,” and off she goes.

And I thought: yeah.

Maybe we should do more of that in life.

Just decide: I need to go play.

Everything else can be put aside. Put on pause. It’ll still be there afterwards.

I’m going to go play now.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? We eat rocks.
Pretty much everyone on this planet eats rocks in some form. They’re refined rocks, but they’re rocks, and we need them to keep us going. Think about it. We need magnesium, calcium, manganese. Potassium keeps our systems balanced and is really important in the body. All these things, derived from the rocks around us, we need.

We’re an interesting biological entity, aren’t we? We need the environment. We are part of the environment. I know there’s that whole thing about how we’re all made of stars, but we also need components of stars.

There’s a thought for you.
Primal Scream – Rocks

My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, —the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
The Windhover – Gerard Manley Hopkins

I was at a classical music concert this weekend in Triskel Church. What amazed me was they took a composition From maybe a hundred plus years ago and they played it for us. If you think about just the science around this: Brain chemicals moved in certain ways. Somebody had a thought. Those chemicals then created electrical signals, those signals got muscles to move in a certain way and a composer wrote things down. A musical composition on a piece of paper, that paper might have been copied numerous times, it went into records and 100 plus, 150 years later in an old deconsecrated church, musicians took that music, that composition, and turned it into music.

Again the science of this is light waves bounced off this piece of paper, the human beings, the players, took the information that was on that piece of paper, electrical signals, etc. etc. brain chemicals and those artists played this music. This music vibrated the air. It vibrated the ears of the people listening to it. Those physical vibrations turned into electrical signals. Electrical signals went into the brain and it caused for possibly many people, including myself, a chemical reaction in the the brain where I enjoyed this music.

The power of all this, rather the wonder of all. All these chemical to physical to electrical reactions and back again, all these changes that happened over an hour. Somebody that’s dead maybe centuries did something after chemical reactions in their brain and electrical stimuli, and it has now influenced me in front of my computer, typing this up and putting it onto a website.

Fuck yeah science

Definition: Condolence Maxxing (noun)
Trawling RIP.ie to count condolences, compare totals, and identify who left the most elaborate message. Source.