Choose your wheels

I could smell the smoke from the tyres and see it billowing behind us — but still the racing driver in the passenger seat shouted in the headset for me to throw the brand new Jaguar XK8 into each corner faster and faster.

An army driving instructor promised the Bandvagn 206 (an articulated ALL-terrain military vehicle they were about to use for a winter training exercise in Norway) would be perfectly fine if I just drove it off the edge of the cliff, down the 1 in 1 slope (on which I felt its caterpillar tracks jumping and shuddering) and into the lake below. Once in the lake, it doesn't float like a Bond-car but drives along the bottom with the water lapping at the windows.

These adventures were some of the benefits of being a journalist at the start of my rather random career. But they're stories that have stuck with me, even as I ended up running agencies.

We want to be sleek and fast.

But when the terrain gets rough — however rough! — it doesn't need to make the journey impossible. We can still carry on, and it can even still be fun.

It just means we need to choose different wheels (or even caterpillar tracks), design our vehicle accordingly, and go slow and steady.

Sometimes your agency needs to be the Jaguar, sometimes it needs to be the Bandvagn.

It can be both, if you design it to be. Adapting to the terrain.

Then you can travel a long, long way, and enjoy the ride.