In Digital Transformation, we all need to be a little bit Maverick. And we all need somebody on our wing!

It will have been a tough week for many men of a certain age.

We will of course have acted as if everything is OK.

Our wives or partners will be unaware of the inner sadness lurking below a seemingly content surface.?Some of them may have caught us, out of their peripheral vision, as we sit wistfully apart on different sofas, staring together at an oblique angle and oblique perspectives at the screen a few meters away.?They will of course think we are slowly but surely emotionally disintegrating after scrolling through Netflix, then Amazon, then Disney for forty five minutes, a simmering tension of televisual selection building before an agreement is reached to watch King Gary for the hundredth time on the BBC, agreeing with a nod it is one of the UK’s finest situational comedies of all time.

We now live in a dystopian digital entertainment world that has created so much to watch and not enough time to argue over it. ?Sunday evening used to be a harmonious childhood of second to use bath water, the joy of being a second not third child, Vosene shampoo or washing up liquid and semi blindness.?Then into warm pyjamas and a ninja like invisibility cloak to make it through the evening without being noticed on the hope of watching That’s Life without being sent to bed.?This after Esther Rantzen the host of this jocular and then nerve jangling consumer affairs light entertainment show had ruined barbeques forever, putting the fear of god into a 9-year old boy to the dangers of his father being engulfed in flames by lighting a barbecue by spraying lighter fuel like a garden hose in wanton abandon over a lit flame.?I still have flashbacks when considering cooking a cacophony of charcoal charred cured cuts for my carnivorous children. ?Yeah try say that Prince the Dog. Sausages!! ??Now we spend more time flicking through what we aren’t going to watch than watching what we agree we want to.

After King Gary we will retire to bed, the same routine every night, as if by clockwork checking doors and windows, turning off appliances, eating a golden nugget of cheese after making sure the light was off in the fridge, a safety measure one does more of as one gets older, and of course a kiss goodnight for the kids now young adults, falling in love once again for the thousandth time, followed by a visit to the bathroom to brush ones teeth.

Most years, most weeks, most days, for the last few decades this has all been achieved without the pain of an emotional dagger being pushed slowly into my our fragile male hearts. ??We have gone to bed possibly worrying about the day just gone or the day ahead.?We may have fondly remembered a distant holiday memory or smiled at the thought of more to come.?But one day this week, many of us will have laid our heads down on our pillows and sighed the sigh of a man who may have made his way well through life but who has just, in a single moment realised that his best days are long behind him.?We will close our eyes and chastise ourselves for our foolish action, our hearts a little sadder, our lives a little emptier, our hopes a little less bright.

Because, while brushing our teeth, a hurried need to visit the loo leaving our flannel pyjama top still waiting for us on the bed, we will have stood to attention, turn ourselves at right angles to the bathroom mirror, sucked in our stomachs to varying degrees of overhang, tensed our visceral fat covered muscles, turned our heads and strained our chins and necks and stared ourselves out for a few seconds in the mirror, put our rigid flat hands to our heads and saluted ourselves downwards in silence, and said aloud in our heads, not aloud from our mouths for people who love us may hear, “You can be my wingman anytime.”

Yes, my friends and followers, Top Gun is back, and we will have in that moment like never before in our lives realised we will never ever be Maverick.

So, while I am overjoyed at the prospect of visiting our local Vue Cinema with my wife, I will be her third visit after she has watched it with two different group of female friends, I know I will sit there, large nachos weighing heavy on my knees, laden with jalapenos and salsa but also with the heft of sadness of a middle aged man, and will look around at other, younger men, nay boys, now the same age as I when I first saw the first Top Gun and know they will be thinking to themselves now, as I did then, if I could only find some Dog Tags and a white t-shirt and half a litre of Hawaiian Tropic sun oil, I could look like Tom Cruise.?And they will turn around and look at me and simply feel pity.?When the first film came out my skin and skeleton where just centimetres apart, as taught as the leather clad VIP seating rows in the VUE.?Now my skin and bones have parted friendship and symmetry and that Top Gun glance in the mirror showed a picture of a worn leather sofa in a 1980s taxi office with a head on top.

Top Gun was of course a seminal film of our time, of our journey from youth to adulthood.

I remember watching the first one with a group of late teen male friends in The Hippodrome Cinema in Wrexham.?Please do not think Hippodrome Wrexham was an affiliate of The London Hippodrome.?Wrexham, proudly named a City today in the Queens Diamond Jubilee [Up the Wrexham] had its own version, owned by a tyrant proprietor who would stop the film if anybody as much as dared make a noise, the ruffling of a crisp packet acceptable but nothing more.?I was once part of a 7-year olds rebellion when a few hundred of us stormed the stage when he stopped our Saturday Morning film show due to the unruly behaviour of laughing during a comedy. Kia-Ora Orange cartoons were used in anger, and pushed the citrus soaked cinema entrepreneur to the edge of a full cancellation of the morning 25pence entertainment.?Wild Horses wouldn’t have stopped us.

Anyway, we left Top Gun feeling unstoppable.?I had worked in my father’s Fishmongers Shop as a youth on a Saturday, soon realising that becoming a junior technologist was a more likely route to finding love than still smelling of Haddock during night’s out in one of Wrexham’s 1980s nightclubs. But that night, did I imagine my future being spent behind a keyboard or at the controls of an Grumman F-14 Tomcat.??I loved my Dragon 32 more than life itself but it was never going to fly upside down above an enemy aircraft with me holding a polaroid camera.

But Maverick was just all that, and more.

He flew and loved by the seat of his pants.?He played beach volley ball in the blazing sun, dog tags resplendent on his toned torso. He didn’t ask a lady if she wanted a drink, he grabbed a microphone and sang her a song, a song so sweet that the whole US Navy joined in en masse behind him.?Oh we tried that so many times in the weeks to come, culminating in us being banned from the Nags Head for a week for annoyance of other drinkers.

Like our other hero’s at the time, Crocket and Tubbs, from Miami Vice fame, Maverick didn’t follow the rules, he made them, even the laws of gravity.??Of course we copied Crocket and Tubbs as well.?Not buying a white Lamborghini Countach of course, but buying a tight suit, matching shirt and tie combo, and tie pin on a chain from Burton’s and spending the evening with shirt and suit sleeves rolled up to just under our miniature biceps in the Golden Lion, looking, may I say, as hot as the exhaust of an Italian supercar.?Crocket and Tubs wore linen in the Miami heat. We wore thick mixed nylon and wool numbers.?Crocket and Tubs circulated at speed around the streets of their home city bringing down the bad guys.?After six hours of a Burtons tourniquet around our arms we lost the circulation in our hands and were taken home in a taxi and told off by our mums.

And of course, seeing the trailer this week, and watching the diminutive if ageless Tom Cruise land on a helicopter on the USS Midway in San Diego [I have been on it with Simon Daykin and we both had our own Top Gun moments.?Well he was working out the launch velocity of a jet fighter and the need to reach a take-off speed in less than 500 meters of runway.?I stood behind the exhausts of an F-16 and saw the sign saying don’t stand here you will be incinerated and thought, I would stand there by accident] I was transported back in time to a feeling of sheer and utter joy as Maverick jumped down from his fighter after routing the bogies and he and the Ice Man confronted each other. The Ice Man, as cool as a cucumber whose taken a holiday in Norway in November looks sternly at his arch rival and says, yes you know it, ‘Hey Maverick, you can be my wingman anytime.’

And of course, all of this got me thinking about Digital Transformation and the Mavericks I have met and worked with and become friends with over so many years, and I realised that in our industry, everybody has a little bit of the Maverick inside them, because our job is to always keep pushing the limits and boundaries of what is possible.?We know our plane's limitations of course, we know that gravity exists in our digital world, and we are always focussed on our mission of delivering outcomes to our customer, but, we always strive to just go a little bit further than we are all comfortable because without that little streak of Maverick we won’t move forward ourselves, our companies, or the world forward.

It won’t always be flying upside down.?But it could be pushing that thought around a value proposition a little further and turning it upside down and seeing if it still fly’s and makes it more compelling to the audience its intended for.?It could be challenging the perceptions of a customer into just pulling a little harder on the stick to grab a few more G’s into the turn of their function or business. Even if it's simply being the person who proves that intelligently automating an AP process is not only possible when others thought it was gravity defying, and they help a business become faster, leaner, and more streamlined in our turbulent economy. But, we should always be focussed on that 1% of Maverick to ensure we never lose sight that in our industry we aren't waiting for the future to happen, we are flying into it at speed.

And of course we all need somebody on our wing. Because we have to fly as a team and watch for each other as we do some things we don't feel comfortable with or we haven't done before. If we never take a risk we simply stand still.

So, I shall wait my turn to go see Top Gun Maverick, and I will maybe even wear a white t-shirt and buy some dog tags and not care that everybody thinks I look like I have Tom Cruise smuggled inside it trying to get out.?I will go and still hope to show that however unlikely it looks, I do have a bit of Maverick inside me.

And yes I will know the line is coming at some point, but I will revel in it, and cry a little like a did the first time they said it, because doing brilliant things with and for other people and pushing all of us forward, and being somebodies wingman is a bloody brilliant feeling.