Transcriber: Dorota Naumienko Reviewer: Krystian Aparta
(Applause)
Good afternoon.
Cast your minds back to Warsaw in 1945.
Nice place to live?
Not really, no.
Ghastly place, we won't point the finger blame at anybody
but what was one of the first things the people of Warsaw did?
They started to rebuild.
They didn't build a brave new world.
You know, the sort of cities the London was producing
square boxes, prefabricated buildings.
No, they rebuilt the Old Town.
They went on to build the [Royal Castle],
one of the great achievements of Poland, I think,
which in Kraków you probably don't think of it in that sort of way,
but believe me, it is a marvelous place.
Why did they do it?
They did it for their identity, to prove who they were.
And that heritage continues today.
We know Warsaw, some of you may not like it.
I live there, out of choice, after Rome.
One of the things I do as an impecunious musician
is to train mainly corporate people to make presentation skills.
You know, things like: don't pick your nose when you're presenting,
hands off your balls, no one is going to kick you.
Breathe, breathe deeply.
Can you be heard?
Mark the key words, all that sort of stuff.
Absolutely great.
But now times are little bit tough,
and I'm waking up to the idea that you can't impose skills on people,
that all has to come form inside.
And what I'm now being asked to do is to help people
be interesting.
So what I usually do is I say, well,
First, why do you want to be interesting?
"You see, I have a terrible problem communicating with the clients."
"Clients, you see. We have to sell now."
And this is indeed true.
Even the great consultancy firms, which don't actually sell
inside their own departments.
So in fact, if you go for an audit and say,
"Actually, what I need is a good lawyer."
The auditor will say, "Why don't you go down to the road to Joe Bloggs?"
"Because, he's jolly much better than the champ we have."
Cross-selling, they don't do it.
Or they're just beginning to.
So how can they go into your company and tell you what to do?
Anyway, now they are saying to everybody who's got to the top,
"You must sell the company."
But, sorry I've spent my whole life going through a process.
I've done my auditing, legal work, accounting,
or my consultancy even.
I've never thought about the client before in my life
How do I talk to them?
Well, the first thing you have to do is to learn to empathize.
And how do we learn to empathize?
We learn to empathize by reading books.
Have you read a book? No.
Have you been to a museum, to see how people used to be?
No, no, was in school.
Do you go to concerts? Oh, no.
(Laughter)
So...
(Groans with indecision)
What are you going to talk about?
Oh, the firm.
Well, no. That's not really the way to get into peoples minds, is it?
Because what I think we have to do, and I think is a problem we have here,
I won't say Eastern Europe, but in Poland,
is how to actually communicate
in a rather empathetic way.
Go to parties, people tend to look down at the ground.
Do they shake your hand? No. Do they ask who you are?
They tend not to,
unless you're someone very important.
What happened in Poland in 1660?
The Swedish Deluge.
The protestants came from the west
and they marched on Poznań, Warsaw.
Cracow fell.
Not much resistance here, was there?
And poor old Jan Kazimierz
cardinal and Jesuit, and later king of Poland,
was holed up in Lviv.
He thought it was the end,
because the Russians were getting restless too; the usual enemies.
(Laughter)
What happened?
Miracle of miracles.
The nobility got together,
and said, "We've got to make a go of it. We've got to beat these Protestants."
And miraculously, after a prayer or two, or some holy water, they did.
And what happened?
Poland changed forever.
It turned its face to Rome.
Roman Catholicism.
And if you go out here into Cracow,
you will see churches that are identical to churches you'll see in Rome.
You will see palaces in Warsaw identical to palaces in Rome. Why?
Because they used Roman-trained architects.
My belief is that this profoundly influenced
the Polish character.
My father was Polish.
He was born not very far away from here,
and he spent most of his early years in what you would call a "palace."
It didn't have much plumbing, but it was a big house.
And he told me that what used to happen on the Sunday afternoon
was the local villagers, for us, the peasantry, you know,
would come along and his relation would go out in front of the house,
in front of the columns, and say, "And now, tell me your problems."
So, it could be an unfaithful wife,
it could be a problem with a cow, it could be "how to invest my savings."
And he gave his advice.
The only drawback, according to my father, was that he was an idiot.
(Laughter)
And he really didn't know what he was talking about.
And one night, the peasantry got its own back.
It came along and burned the house down.
Fortunately, we had somewhere else to go, so I gather.
We are at a turning point.
In 1975, professor Roy Strong in London,
director of the Victoria and Albert Museum,
put on an exhibition called "The Destruction of the Country House."
And he shared photographs of not all, but 2000 great historic houses
that had been destroyed in Britain in the last 100 years.
The effect of this was astronomical, extraordinary.
Everybody woke up.
"Our heritage is being lost!"
And something was done about it.
People found new ways to use old buildings.
Now, a little while ago, I saw a Minister at the Ministry of Culture.
And I said, "Look, what we need to do is to have a living record
of these houses, before it's too late."
There are still great grandparents alive of school children today
who could be interviewing, making films about the house,
either to save it, or at least to preserve the memory,
because memory is what would give my consultancy chap
the ability to empathize.
Now, the Minister said to me, "Oh, dear boy, really."
We have photographs of every house in danger in Poland.
Where? In the archive. Safely under lock and key.
(Laughter)
Who can see it? "Only if you if you have a pass."
You know, only special people.
But that's not the way history should be.
Because history is a living thing, isn't it?
Go out of here, you are in a Baroque or Renaissance city.
But you are living real lives,
in a real space.
Now, before it's too late,
while the older, who remember how the things were, are still alive,
we should record their memories.
We should put all this into a virtual museum,
which is open for everybody, access for all.
To add to, we should have photographs,
we should have competitions for how to save the house,
what to do with it,
how to make a house that is in a village of a very little character,
I expect some of you come from those villages
where is very little apart form a church,
and maybe a house falling down in the woods somewhere.
But that all could be reversed.
And we could create a center of culture,
a center of activity,
an economic advantage for the city,
for the village.
If we act now.
Now, I know what you're going to say: teachers won't do it.
Polish teachers are underpaid, aren't motivated,
they're lazy, don't want to teach, don't want to be here.
But our point is this.
This is a brave new world.
It's about time we motivated your skills, your interest,
your awareness that the past matters.
to create a historical archive
which will point not only to the past,
but as the people of Warsaw understood in 1945,
to the future.
Thank you.
(Applause)