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Two people enter a ring, a mat or a patch of open ground. A crowd gathers. There is a contest of strength, balance, technique and endurance, but what the spectators are watching depends enormously on where they are. In an American arena, the wrestlers may be performing an elaborate rivalry whose outcome has been planned in advance. In Senegal, a wrestling contest can bring together sporting ambition, traditional ritual, sponsorship and neighbourhood pride. In a Japanese sumo

The mobile phone was once a remarkably straightforward proposition. Somebody needed to speak to somebody else, and a small device made that possible without either person being tied to a particular place. The phone liberated communication from the home, the office and the public telephone box. Over time, however, that same device became something much more complicated. It absorbed the camera, the diary, the map, the music player, the bank branch, the travel ticket, the newspa

An event begins long before anybody arrives. Somewhere a contract is signed, a ballroom is booked, a field is measured, a road closure is discussed, a caterer is asked whether 800 meals can become 950, and somebody opens a spreadsheet containing timings that will eventually determine when hundreds of other people move. Then, on the appointed morning, the doors open and the machinery is expected to disappear. The guest should see the wedding, conference, basketball game, music

Walk into a physical shop and almost everything you see has fought for the right to be there. A bottle of shampoo occupies space that could have held another brand. A pair of shoes in size nine requires somewhere to store the size eight and ten. A supermarket deciding to stock another variety of pasta may have to remove something else. Even the largest department store eventually encounters a wall, a ceiling or the back of a stockroom. For most of retail history, selling has

There is a peculiar moment in the life of a large Lego set when the instructions end. The final brick clicks into place, the builder steps back and something that may have occupied several evenings, weekends or considerably longer is finished. For a child, that might once have been the beginning of play. For a growing number of adult enthusiasts, it creates a different problem altogether. What do you do with it now? A model containing thousands of pieces cannot simply remain

Somewhere this morning, a hotel manager opened a spreadsheet to check occupancy. A football analyst added another row of match data. A small manufacturer updated an order forecast. A finance team reconciled numbers before somebody senior saw them. A school administrator worked through unpaid fees. A researcher cleaned observations collected in the field. Somewhere else, a business owner opened a file called something like FINAL_BUDGET_v7_UPDATED.xlsx, changed three cells and

In Kampala, a parent might be working out whether this month’s school fees can wait until salary day while still finding money for the school van, lunch and a new pair of shoes. In Lagos, another family may be spreading education costs across several children and several schools. In Dubai, an employer’s education allowance can influence which school an expatriate family considers affordable. In England, the conversation may instead involve independent-school fees, extras, tra

Every morning, in schools around the world, somebody takes a register. A name is called, a box is ticked, a child is present or absent. It is one of the most ordinary administrative acts imaginable. Yet that tiny piece of information can matter to several different people for completely different reasons. A teacher needs to know who is in the classroom. A parent may need to know that their child arrived safely. An administrator may be watching attendance patterns. School lead

Once a year, millions of British motorists hand over their car keys to somebody they may barely know and wait for a verdict. Pass. Fail. Advisory. Dangerous defect. Perhaps a tyre is approaching its limit, a suspension component has deteriorated or something underneath the car has been quietly rusting while its owner remained completely unaware. For most British drivers, the MOT is simply another date on the calendar and another cost attached to owning a car. But viewed diffe

There are cities whose importance is easy to see on a map. They sit on a coast, command a harbour, house a government or grow so large that their economic gravity becomes difficult to ignore. Memphis is different. It sits on the Mississippi River in Tennessee, hundreds of miles from the sea, and is far smaller than America’s great global cities. Yet remarkably often, when something has needed to move through the United States — cotton, people, parcels, music, ideas — Memphis

Blues music is often told as a story of sound: the bent note, the repeated line, the guitar answering the voice, the twelve-bar structure that became one of the foundations of modern popular music. But follow the blues beyond the music itself and another story appears. It is a story about labour, migration, technology, cities, consumer markets and ownership. People moved and carried music with them. Businesses found ways to record and distribute it. New technologies changed w

A visitor standing outside a hotel in Bali can open a phone, request a car and watch the machinery of a modern transport platform spring into life. A driver appears on the screen. A price is agreed. The route exists. The technology has done everything it was designed to do. Then a message arrives from the driver: *I can't pick you up there. Walk and meet me somewhere else.* The strange thing is that nothing on the digital map necessarily explains why. In parts of Bali, app-ba

There is an interesting consequence to building a business around purity: eventually, some of your customers may become very good at checking what purity means. We noticed this while looking through customer conversations around 100% PURE, a cosmetics brand whose German business sells skincare and makeup built heavily around natural ingredients and fruit pigments. What caught our attention wasn't whether one particular foundation, eye cream or lipstick was better than another

A psychic reading is an unusual product. Most businesses sell something whose value can eventually be tested against something outside the transaction. The taxi gets you to the airport or it does not. The plumber stops the leak or the floor remains wet. The restaurant serves the meal. Even businesses selling experiences generally provide something recognisable: a concert, a massage, a holiday, an afternoon at a theme park. A psychic appears to sell something much stranger — i

There is something slightly strange about the way we talk about teenage entrepreneurs. A young person starts selling clothes online and we ask how much they are making. They launch an app and we want to know how many users it has. They start a podcast and the numbers quickly enter the conversation. Downloads. Followers. Revenue. Growth. Perhaps even investment. We reach remarkably quickly for the same measurements we would use to judge a business run by somebody who has been

We were looking through furniture reviews when something caught our attention. Customers kept mentioning people by name. Not designers. Not salespeople. Not the people who made the furniture. Delivery drivers. There is nothing particularly remarkable about a customer commenting on a delivery. Furniture has to arrive somehow. But the more interesting question was why the person delivering it seemed capable of occupying so much space in the customer's memory of the purchase. Pe

There was a time when remembering a telephone number was useful. Numbers appeared on shop fronts, business cards, newspaper advertisements, delivery vans and television screens. People wrote them down, repeated them to each other and occasionally committed particularly important ones to memory. Businesses discovered that a sequence of numbers that could be turned into a word, phrase or simple pattern had an obvious advantage: people might actually remember it. Then technology

Children have an inconvenient relationship with clothes. They grow. A jumper can still fit perfectly into family life while quietly becoming too small for the child wearing it. A coat can survive winter in excellent condition and still be effectively finished with its first owner by spring. Shoes, dresses, trousers and T-shirts can leave a child's wardrobe not because they have reached the end of their useful lives, but because the person they were bought for has changed size

There are thousands of ways to analyse a hotel. Occupancy, room rates, reviews, satisfaction scores, location, amenities and complaints can all tell us something useful. But for a recent Stories of Business exploration, we tried something different. We collected 100 naturally occurring observations surrounding Manhattan hotel stays. We weren't trying to calculate what percentage of guests liked breakfast or how many complained about room size. We were looking for something el

A comment on YouTube recently made us look differently at a bottle of beer. The discussion concerned Lidl’s Perlenbacher Gold XXL, a beer that can be found in large plastic bottles rather than the glass more commonly associated with the category. Among the comments was an observation from someone who did not own a car. Their reason for appreciating the plastic bottle was wonderfully practical: it was lighter and easier to carry home. There was nothing particularly scientific