Kebabonomics
A good friend of mine teased me about the extra mural activity at the notorious West Ham v Millwall game last week, and included a quote from an eye witness to the unfortunate events.
‘A 29-year-old owner of a kebab shop said he closed his premises in nearby Green Street for two hours. He said: “All hell broke loose – it was very frightening.”’
Now, in my new book I have created the term ‘kebabonomics’ to describe commercial enterprises which seemed to flourish, or at least surface and survive, in the least attractive of social environments.
So you can have a sink estate, or run down inner city area, and yet the one new enterprise which might succeed is the kebab shop.
The reason for this I put down to emergence factors: it requires low cost, easy-to- get-out-of short-term leases, using an unskilled workforce, with limited capital investment, where either a relative, or someone you know, has had direct experience of this type of business, and provides an established need for quick, available food.
This growing up from the bottom development is called ‘emergence’, where patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.
So, even when all hell is let loose – surrounded with rampaging fans, a break down in civic and social order, the net impact was the shop near the est ham ground was closed just for two hours, presumably re-opening to satiate the hunger of late night hooligans (you can build up quite an appetite trying to emulate the movie ‘Green Street’) and other passers-by.
What amazing resilience, and determination to survive – being shut just for 2 hours –demonstrating the quality of being created from the bottom up, rather than as a result of top down planning. (I suppose it no doubt helps as well to be extremely impoverished and desperate for any available income.)
Nonetheless, we should all practise ‘kebabonomics’ in any new creative product we seek to create and nurture: your beautiful questions should be: ‘What emergence factors are there we need to incorporate in our plans? What small steps do we need to harness or allow for in our creation?’
Is your latest creative idea as robust as the kebab shop near West Ham’s ground?
