The Arrow of Time

After two hundred and forty years, Debenhams finally shuts its doors today. It seems pretty poignant - it has tracked, more or less, the arc of the industrial era from its start, through its peak, into decline, and now it's ending from being a bastion of the High St to its final days as an unloved cash cow. Everything has a cycle. The arrow of time is pretty unforgiving. We build new layers of existence on top of the old.

Not that long ago, it used to be that the span of a business and the span of a career were relatively aligned and complementary. Qualifications and compliance enabled a comfortable one of two company working life, a decent company pension, and relative certainty, whether we were miners or merchant bankers. That has disappeared within my working lifetime, and as yet, no pattern has emerged to replace it. We find ourselves in a place of complexity and what often feels like chaos.

It's a sobering realisation that we have no control over the arrow of time. We are at a poin…