Rebuild: What I Thought Of Mary Portas’ New Book
Mary Portas’ The Kindness Economy podcast is regular listening so when I heard she was to publish Rebuild: How to thrive in the new Kindness Economy, I was thrilled. You probably know Mary as a retail expert, famous for transforming Harvey Nichols into a global fashion destination, for her TV career, for revolutionising charity shops through the creation of twenty-six Mary's Living & Giving shops for Save The Children and her role as David Cameron’s high street tsar.
Mary also runs Portas, a creative agency with a mission to transform businesses into brands, places and spaces people want in their lives. Her client list ranges from Mercedes to Sainsburys. What you may not know about Mary is that, over the past few years, she’s been on a personal journey from the tough alpha figure who transformed the fortunes of Harvey Nichols, encouraging people to buy things they didn't need, to thinking about how to make businesses more ethical and socially aware.
Rebuild, by Mary Portas
Mary wrote Rebuild during the pandemic as a means of developing her thinking about the Kindness Economy, an idea she’d been exploring since she wrote Work Like A Woman in 2019. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, the Kindness Economy is about making people and the planet as important as profit and bringing values like empathy into business culture.
What’s important to understand is that while Mary had embraced more purposeful, empathetic behaviours in her own company before the pandemic struck, she’d been reticent about talking too much about these, out of concern this might be professional suicide.
Rebuild starts with the revelation that Mary was completely and utterly floored by the pandemic - with the early months bringing constant bad news about contracts being paused and cancelled. The guiding light of Mary’s career had, up to that point, been her strong instincts for what was going to be “the next thing.” She’d always been a fixer, but for the first time, Mary found herself not knowing what to say or how to respond.
Once the shock of the pandemic had subsided, Mary and her CEO, Caireen, started musing about the concepts underpinning the Kindness Economy and realised that this thinking – which Mary has evolved into a philosophy – is the only way forward in a post-pandemic world.
After a hefty dose of mea culpa in Chapter 1, Mary sets out to explore how businesses can reset post-pandemic and build back better by becoming more socially and ethically responsible. She argues that over the past thirty years, decisions about what we buy have been dominated by the biggest, fastest and cheapest, rather than what would traditionally have been called “good value.”
Mary explains how she, along with so many of us, has come to realise that more doesn’t mean better, and cheap doesn’t mean “good value.” The values of biggest, fastest and cheapest no longer resonate in the same way with public opinion, and people are becoming increasingly considerate of the true cost of consumerism.
Mary explores how the seeds of these changed attitudes were sown by the women of #MeToo, the Black Lives Matter movement and the climate change activists. She explains how change happens gradually and then suddenly. And she examines what she calls the Covid conscience: how we’ve undergone a radical re-evaluation of what we know and care about in the wake of the pandemic.
This leads to an exploration of how we as business owners can find our voices in this new way of doing business. Each chapter of Rebuild concludes with a set of questions to open the path of self-discovery and lead the reader to finding their voice and speaking up in support of the values of the Kindness Economy.
Why I Recommend You Read Rebuild
If you’re one of the chorus of voices who want to put people, planet and purpose at the heart of your values system, you will love Rebuild. It’s a vital and supportive guide about how to reset post-pandemic and build back better. It will help you create a brand that people want to buy into, not simply buy from.
A word of caution though. If you’ve read extensively about people, planet and purpose, you may feel that something is missing from Rebuild. I think it’s important to understand that Mary is on a journey and Rebuild is the next step in her evolution of the Kindness Economy, not the destination.
That said, if you’re interested in people, planet, purpose and profit, Rebuild is one of the must-read books of 2021!
Is Rebuild by Mary Portas on your to-read list? Have you read it? Do leave your thoughts in the comments box below.