Reflections on 2021

Perhaps it’s inflation, but years don’t seem to last as long as they used to. This one has flown by, I’m deeply grateful to it, and want to acknowledge it. On the other side of the shadows it has cast, and continues to cast for many, is a year full of energy that has asked important questions of us.

Ones we need to answer in the year ahead of us.

I don’t plan what I write, I write about what I see, and it has been an interesting exercise to review my year of writing here to see if there are any underlying themes. There are.

Craft.

I started off 2020 by writing about the year of the artisan, and that theme has stayed with me. The businesses I see fall broadly into three categories – established businesses, trying to stay relevant as the world around them changes; entrepreneurial businesses who identify and feed off those changes, often with an aspiration to scale and cash out to established businesses looking to stay relevant, and artisans. Artisans are those for whom the beauty of the wor…