Reflections 30th January

On my mind this week

Abstraction.

Origin: Abstrahere. Latin. To drag away, detach, pull away, divert.

I’m not quite sure what triggered it, but as I reflected on what is happening around us to our businesses, communities and politics, the idea of abstraction kept surfacing. The sense that we are continually deconstructing things in order to focus on their parts, often in to make them more efficient.

I think the trigger may have been the purchase of Raleigh, an iconic local bike brand, by KKR, of “Barbarians at the Gate” fame. Raleigh was founded by Woodhead and Angois in Nottingham in 1885, and is one of the oldest bicycle companies in the world. After being acquired by Frank Bowden in December 1888, it became The Raleigh Cycle Company, which was registered as a limited liability company in January 1889. By 1913, it was the largest bicycle manufacturing company in the world.

Abstraction has seen it pass through many hands, most recently Dutch company Accell, until finding its way into the …