REVIEW: Atholl Duncan — Leaders in Lockdown (BOOK)

At first, experienced Black Isle Group chairman Atholl Duncan’s new book Leaders in Lockdown: Inside Stories of Covid-19 and The New World seems like an exceptional read for an exclusionary audience. However flipping through the pages, particularly the personalized chapters in the first segment of the book proves it is anything but. Duncan generously writes for a wide audience, while never shying away from the presumption of said audience being informed.

BLACK ISLE GROUP: https://blackislegroup.com/

The prose is dispensed in a manner antithetical to the typical non-fiction book specializing in business transaction, Duncan having as much time for uncanny detail and evocative world-building as he does for the specifics of transaction that multiple cutting-edge entrepreneurs, CEOs, and company presidents have been utilizing in the wake of Covid-19. Referentially the writing style feels reminiscent of a David McCullough meets Michael Lewis. There’s a sense of self-awareness and wry irony in how Duncan writes, however with respect to the Lewis reference he replaces the latter’s penchant for outright humor with a grim, darkly comic sardonicism in stereotypical British tradition. The result is something that reads like a novel while being anything but, communicating concepts inherently fascinating, even groundbreaking into something succinct and universally comprehensible. Often said concepts get lost in aforementioned translation, their coming across as dry or something for a specific audience less due to their appeal and more to their representation. However Duncan allows himself too much style for any such lack of investment to happen.

Part of Duncan’s smartest aesthetical choice is his highlighting of all featured professionals’ reverence for humility. It was a growing trend prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but in the face of remote sessions and transactional enterprises rendered obsolete in-person today is as moral for the employee as it is pragmatic for the CEO himself. Corporate psychology is undergoing a facelift of sorts, due to the myriad of technical, sociopolitical, and geopolitical issues currently facing the country and the world abroad. The old tenet of Fear equals Respect is all but on ice in most professional circles, fairness and equality taking its place. The philosophy that the many must be psychologically and emotionally invested in the sole goal of the enterprise, from the very top to the furthest parts of house down. The Roger Ailes scandal at Fox News, the Times Up Movement, and #MeToo may have laid the groundwork for a fundamental reckoning with workplace stereotypes, but it’s Covid — however ironically — that has shaken everything up in a lasting, if utilized properly potentially positive manner.

AMAZON: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leaders-Lockdown-stories-Covid-19-business/dp/1911671014

In the spirit of this, Duncan argues the universal tenets shared by the corporate leaders he interviewed over a hundred day period are a win-win on concurrent, multiple levels. If nothing else, the current pandemic situation has forced the hand of industry into a radical form of evolution. One built around the concepts of synergy and modernization. The book is most hopeful in its highlighting of this new form, it states such leadership forms the grail that opens up doors tomorrow previously unimaginable.

Colin Jordan