The Times They Are a Changing
He’s still the Tambourine Man, endlessly touring and defiantly unpredictable. Bob Dylan, one of music’s geniuses, is 70 this week but for many he’s forever young. Released in 1964, The Times They Are a-Changing’, became an anthem for the disaffected, and many felt that it captured the spirit of social and political upheaval that characterized the 1960's.
In many respects not much has changed, Dylan still has the ability to anger the establishment, even if these days he does have to travel to Beijing to do it.
Time is in many respects our rarest of resources. Despite the promises of economists in the 70’s and 80’s that technology would create a glut of time, (worrying what to do with all this free time for the masses, was a constant concern for the thinking classes), it seems to me that technology has given us less and less of the thing we treasure most.
A friend of mine was greeted by his Chinese hosts on a business trip to Nanjing, their first question being, “When is your flight back?”. Having told them of the deadline and its impending arrival, he was surprised by their reluctance to engage in anything but the most trivial.
In fact it only became apparent that they wanted to negotiate at all when his flight back loomed. This created an urgency that was unwarranted, had they been more accommodating earlier in the week. It transpired on my further questioning that his time pressure required a start on the project, which the inscrutable Chinese had recognized and used to their advantage.
If they could not agree the terms prior to his departure, a very expensive and potentially embarrassing situation would occur. Being aware of this time frame had created the upper hand in the negotiation.
“What could I do?” he asked. “I was in the right place, but at the wrong time”
“Buy an open ticket