Shy of Retiring

A few years back I found oceanographer Mirjam Gleesmer’s blog ‘Wave Watching’: https://mirjamglessmer.com/wave-watching/ which is just what it says: a fascinating and insightful blog about watching waves – and what we can learn from doing so, not only about waves but about what they traversed, reflected off, diffracted around, broke over… It spoke to me particularly because I was then watching waves almost obsessively: ripples on puddles, waves on our local lake, splashes from moorhens and coots and ducks on the canal; sea waves, coastal waves, every kind of wave. I wouldn’t quite say it risked losing me friends but people certainly got used to walking on and eventually looking back surprised to see me stopped staring at some interesting wave phenomenon. Although I became interested in those sorts of waves they weren’t the source of my interest: radio wave were. I’ve studied and worked with waves a lot: it’s a foundation topic in physics and electronics, and I’ve worked on soun...

 A few decades back, when Sarah and I set up our own company, I read a book by Regis McKenna called "Relationship Marketing". It's no longer in print and I don't still have a copy but its basic message remains with me and was quite simple: business is built on relationships - real, genuine, sincere relationships. It isn't always true, of course: some businesses have to be based on the standard "price, performance" calculation and some are based on other factors - but the route we chose, and that worked for us and for our customers, was relationships. Our business was then - and is now, though in a slightly different but related (!) field - a niche, and a highly technical one: people needed to talk, and to trust, and what we were selling wasn't a simple commodity in a well-supplied and established market. Not everybody needed what we were offering - in fact most people either didn't or didn't know they did - so in those days even though I adop...