MIPIM 2012: The next time round I'd...

Travel lighter. The smart delegates were one-bag only. Clothes were smart-casual and therefore multi-purpose, while laptops have been comprehensively killed-off by iPads. It’s not that laptops are necessarily technically inferior (though they’re slower to fire up than anything Apple), it’s that when you have to take them out of a laptop case when they go through the airport scanners they are a real faff.
Take an iPad. They are single-handedly killing off laptops and netbooks because they are easy to carry, fire up immediately, run graphics brilliantly and act like a portable office while looking both stylish and professional. The Russians may have sprayed millions at their stands, but the wow factor for me came from Manchester Airport Group’s Stephanie Mullenger, who clipped a laser-cut 3D model of a development on to the screen of her iPad and ran a movie which lit up different parts of the model from underneath while giving a detailed commentary. That’s ‘Think Different’ in action.
Drink more water. Unless you are jetset, corporate or from a Russian republic, you will be chasing meetings morning, noon and night. Breakfast is grabbed, late-night dinner devoured. In between, it’s a desert where you might just be able to grab a table at Café Roma if you’re willing to fight off the foreign hordes.
Walk nonchalantly across pedestrian crossings. English diffidence meant I hesitated when a blacked-out Bentley came at me when I was halfway across. If I’d displayed Gallic indifference the turbo-nutter batard would have stopped sooner. I resorted to a traditional salute to stop him.
Hire a park bench. Yacht for the week - £80-£100k; Stand in the Palais des Festival - £40-50k if you want room for a table; park bench – you could pay someone to hold it for you for a lot less. Alternatively, you could do what the Germans did and live up to your cultural cliché. They took over part of the beach…
Forget to tell people who I was meeting. Because they blag their way in and hog the person you need to talk to.
Get in training for Morrisons. The Irish bar a couple of streets back from the seafront may not be the last word in clubland, but its combination of 80s disco and Guinness is still enough to finish you of after a day pounding pavements.
Bug the Derby dinner. There was a frank exchange of views, I’m told.
Take ear plugs. You know who you are...

Nottingham's Growth Plan: The race is on

If Nottingham’s Economic Growth Plan is going to work it will have to break new ground and do it quickly.
Those were the key messages to come out of the launch of this draft plan at The Council House this morning.
It was encouraging to see some of the most high-profile figures from across the city turn out for its launch – a measure, perhaps, that there is recognition across the board that we are at a critical point in the city’s future.
Prof David Greenaway, the economist who leads the University of Nottingham, gave a beautifully succinct vision of where the world economy is at and where it leaves a place like Nottingham. Miatta Fahnbulleh, who is head of the Cities Unit in the Cabinet Office in London, told the room that Government was ready and willing to help cities which could show they had a vision for growth and knew how to deliver it.
But it was Sir John Peace, the chairman and co-founder of Experian, who made possibly the most thought-provoking contribution. His speech was about the need for Nottingham to fully comprehend the late Steve Jobs’ guiding principle: Think Different. But it was book-ended by two films, one which delivered a machine-gun barrage of statistics about the connected world’s change-at-the-speed-of-light, the other a portrayal of the corrosive impact of youth unemployment.
It consisted of a series of young people talking frankly about the difficulties they faced trying to find work, several of them delivering a judgement that many people in business should find pretty shocking: that the more doors they knock on, the more they got the feeling that business is turning its back on the young unemployed.
Sir John’s view is that youth unemployment is a potentially poisonous problem which has now reached levels which dictate that all responsible businesses should step up to the bar and do everything they can to help tackle it – whether that is going into schools to directly address the skills/attitude problems employers complain about, or offering young, unemployed people work experience or apprenticeships.
Sir John, who is also chairman of Standard Chartered Bank, moves in some very well-connected circles and I suspect his view also reflects the significant political pressure bearing down on corporate Britain to show that it needs to act less selfishly and more responsibly.
There is much to commend in the draft Nottingham Economic Growth Plan, and the City Council is already hard at work on some of its key features (notably a serious bid to secure crucial funding for investment in digital infrastructure).
Beyond council leader Jon Collins and chief executive Jane Todd, it is being steered by Councillor Nick McDonald, executive assistant for economic development, and John Yarham, the officer who heads economic development.
Nick McDonald repeatedly emphasised that the council did not want the plan to be seen as a council document, and the challenge now is to get Nottingham’s business community involved in its development before it is finalised in April.
I was sitting next to Adam Bird, the chief operating officer of the technology company Esendex during the presentation and he made a couple of interesting points afterwards: that the council has got to overcome the natural tendency of most businesses to simply ask ‘What’s in it for me?’, and that the plan will work best if it focuses on creating an environment that allows business to get on with the job.
For all sorts of reasons, time is short. Outside the barely believable myopia of the Eurozone and away from our own obsessions with recession and regulation of banking, the Asian economies are accelerating at a meteoric pace and the American economy is waking from its slumbers.
The Nottingham Economic Growth Plan needs real vision and some clearly identifiable targets. But it also needs to be short, sharp and deliverable.
The race is on…