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The Honeybee Effect

  
  
  
planeLike the paperless office, we once imagined that technology would obviate the need for travel. If anything, the opposite seems true. We travel more than ever - although, perhaps because of technology, its nature and purpose is changing. In my own journeys I increasingly meet a new kind of traveller. Urbane, connected, and possessed of an almost romantically optimistic mindset about global opportunity. Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, once described his target market as ‘global metropolitan adults’. But I think its more than that. There is a new generation of ‘Borderless’ executives, whose nomadicism is less a case of carbon insensitive escapism, but rather - like honey bees - a crucial component in the pollination of global innovation. 

You have met the Borderless before. They manage the key customer relationships for an emerging market, they are the creative directors of an edgy youth consumer brand, they are entrepreneurs launching a global technology start-up, freelance graphic designers with an international client base, trend scouts for an upscale fashion retailer, and the odd rapacious private equity cowboy. For the Borderless, residency is a tax rather than a lifestyle question. Multiple passports, offshore banking, and an intimate understanding of the hubs and spokes of international connections - the Borderless are like packets of data hurtling through the global network. Their creed is best expressed by Ryan Bingham in ‘Up In The Air’, when he declared: “The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living”. So now you know who they are, the real question is what motivates a lifestyle of perpetual motion?

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