Catalyst Strategic Consultants

It’s over. Well, they’re both over. The Hornby Festival and the Hornby Film Festival. Both exciting events to go out for. Both Curated by exceptionally “in the know” folks.
The main Festival is 10 days of performance all over the island. Really excellent musicians and vocalists appear. Many of whom we don’t know. How could we? They are not mainstream pop stars blasted at us by the machine. Someone always chooses the music we hear. Most comes through a vast commercial machine – bent on moneymaking. So those we get in mainstream media are those who’ve played the game. Not to say that much of that “content” is not okay. It’s just that THERE’S much MORE.
So hearing Rose Cousins or Andre LaPlante would be difficult if you were looking in the mainstream. In fact it would be strained here, were people not prepared to act on the faith of Diedre Atkinson’s good judgment as director of the Festival. Audiences accept that Dierdre has done her good works: relied on her extensive network, researched and scoured the folk, dance and classical stream to find that rare combination of artist who is strong enough to move the discerning Hornby audience, can be induced to come to our paradisical island in mid-summer and is affordable. She is the curator, the scout who sorts through the mosaic of information and opinion to cull the best from the herd and get them here. Those tyros make for a higher quality life for us by streaming and sorting out wheat from chaff in a domain in which we can’t possibly know as much as they do.
And we can’t know, not by counting on hearing from friends or random cruising the internet. Using resources with inside knowledge, who are themselves sampling
from an array of possibilities, reading broadly in the insider press, rejecting duds, exploring access – Gabe, who brings us the film festival – does all that so we don’t have to! All we do is show up at the Hall and drink the new water he has tapped. And how else would you find a film like Bethlehem. When you emerge into the starry dark after that one, you are now alive to the knife edge situation, the extreme cat and mouse, life and death game being played just under the surface in Palestine and Israel. So it was with films ranging from The Railway Man [Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman] of some notice, to Wrinkles [an unfunny animated Spanish movie about consignment of dementia affected elderly to homes], to Fading Gigolo [a heartening tale starring Woody Allen, just acting for once]. Penetrating, disturbing, insightful – the whole weeks worth took us many exciting places never to be found ourselves.

But you have to go! You can’t know what these films are all about beforehand. So concerned about “wasting time”, folks don’t emerge from their lairs unless a false guarantee can be made: that I will know everything about what will happen before I’ll appear and it will be good – in the way I want it to be good. Read that. How can you possibly fulfill that promise? And how will those confined by it ever find something new?

Curating: that’s much of what we do in TEC. You can’t possibly be exposed to the quality and pertinent extent of the information we bring to our members. And they devote time on the basis that they will be exposed to what they need for the growth of their companies, pulled from the mass of material that they could perhaps find on their own, if only they had infinite time and nothing else to do.
To get a [major] shot of this heady brew, company leaders can come hear TEC’s presentation by Allen Beaulieu of ITR http://itreconomics.com on October 8. Allen is one of true stars unearthed by TEC – one of many economists prognosticating on future direction. His distinction: being right! He called the 2008 recession on the screws. We were haranguing our members to get ready a good 2/3 of a year before the disaster hit based on Allen’s prediction. One of my members at the time lost 75% of his revenue. And made a profit that year.
Allen’s record? Way over 90%. You can come share and sample the benefit of our curation. And have 94.5% confidence that you know what’s coming…

Sincerely,
Doug Bouey
Catalyst Strategic Consultants Ltd.