I spent a very busy weekend out in the snow that has covered much of Britain over the past couple of weeks.

After some serious sledging (one of the benefits of living in the Pennine Hills ) and a great deal of shoveling snow so as to be able to get my car out for work on Monday morning (a downside of living in the Pennines) I slumped exhausted in front of the t.v.

Nothing much caught my attention so I settled into a re run of Casino Royale (the latest version). I am a Bond fan and I love this film. It is amusing to think how much of a success this new version of the the Bond franchise has been; the two Daniel Craig films have each out performed in relative terms all the films that have gone before them. We have all come to accept the new Bond and the new style of film making.

Yet lets not forget the resistance that was generated in the media and on the internet when Craig was announced as the new Bond . Websites such as Craignotbond.com and Noblondebond.com attracted much attention. Debates on the fan sites and in the media were intense. Putting Daniel Craig in the role made no sense. He was blonde and everyone knows that Bond has dark hair, he was not as well known as some other rivals for the role, and he did not seem particularly good looking. (certainly by comparison to his predecessor) How could he possibly play Bond.

What the customers/fans did not appreciate was the new direction that the franchise was taking. In the tech savvy and occasionally dangerous world that we live in we struggle to believe in master criminals intent on taking over the world or in invisible cars. We do however understand how brutal the world can be and  post 9/11 how brutal things can happen to ordinary people. Jason Bourne and Jack Baur had also changed our expectations of what secret agents do.

If the producers of Casino Royale had listened too closely to the fans they would have hired a Brosnan /Connery look a like.  They would have created an evil genius baddie, brought Q out of retirement and hey presto the faithful would be happy. However the “faithful” do not make a film profitable, its the rest of us those who enjoy a good thriller,but who don’t feel the need to spend our time on the fansites ,that really matter.

Leadership is about taking note of what your most loyal customers say but not being in thrall to it. It is being able to see the wider forces shaping your landscape and having the courage to strike out in a different direction when the situation demands it. It is also about having the confidence to sell your vision of the world to others.

The new Bond team are to be commended for their insight and their courage and in time someone will have to reinvent he character once again. I predict that when that time comes the faithful will stand against any radical changes to the hero they have come to know, the websites will be launched to campaign for more of the same, but if the film makers do as good a job as they have with the latest Bond they will fade away and we will all settle in to the new era refreshed and excited by the prospect of something different.

Leadership is about making the right decision over the popular one.

Personally though I still miss Moneypenny!

To be somewhat Polly-anna about our current economic situation, I have always believed that we tend to do our most interesting and exciting work when our backs are ,so to speak, to the wall. I set up my last company in the early 90’s during what was a puny little recession in comparison to our current (mighty and global)credit crunch.A friend of mine who was in banking at the time tried to persuade me to stay put in my job arguing that the first two things to disappear in a recession were advertising and training, and with a grave nod and a headmasterly stare he reminded me that we were about to start a business training people in advertising. In truth I think that business was all the better for being a “bootstraps” venture. We couldn’t buy any training content so we wrote our own, we couldn’t hire a sales team so we went out and pitched for every scrap of work. As we grew the knowledge that we could survive and thrive in a credit restricted world gave us huge confidence even when he banks were throwing money around.

Design guru and retailer Terence Conran in a recent Guardian Magazine talked about the Habitat experience in the UK in the 1970’s. Habitat an up market furniture and interiors store responded to the 3 Day week, the energy crisis and the collapse of the UK economy by launching an affordable range called Basics, this was subsequently franchised to a Japanese company called Seibu who subsequently opened stores called Basics which eventually changed it’s name to ………………………Muji.

Just think if you have an idea to save your customers money in the short term, you could end up with a brilliant product or service in a few short years.

Be brave, but don’t be stupid, real innovation comes from resourcefulness and playfulness, when you haven’t got enough to do what you’ve always done do something better.