Intermission is how business stories should be told
7 hours. One company. By The Ken.
One of the reasons we attempted The Daily Brief, In The Money, The Chatter, Aftermarket report and other initiatives, as a bunch of nerds with no “media” experience of any sort, was how little we saw businesses studied with real care. A business is a thing of beauty. It is a terribly improbable formation — a tangle of buildings, machines, workers, raw materials, paperwork, bank accounts, and more — all held together only because it is the life’s work of many people.
Good business storytelling needs to understand this. It may express whatever opinion on the subject it covers, but it must hold reverence for enterprise at large.
Which is why we’re being absolutely serious when we tell you that you have to check out The Ken’s new podcast, called Intermission.
Intermission isn’t a breezy listen. The first episode is a seven-hour long deep dive on Asian Paints. But it’s a show made with love and care. An entire month of research sits behind every hour you finally hear. That’s a rare thing in a time where a single prompt can create an unending waterfall of “content”. This, we assure you, isn’t content, it is craftsmanship. You’re probably sick of all the synthetic word-material we’re drawing in, but this is to slop what an Hermes bag is to the plastic output of a Chinese factory.
That care shows in little things.
Take it from us: when you’re really trying to tell the story of a business, you find yourself falling a little in love with its product — even when it looks mundane from the outside. That’s one of the first things you realise when listening to Intermission. It takes something as plain as paint, and marvels at it in a way that fills you with wonder too. Paint, as The Ken tells it, is at once a marvel of chemistry, history, texture, and so on. They spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about teflon. They throw in little nuggets, like how, in the middle ages, mixing colours was against the natural order of things. As they go through their many rabbitholes, paint becomes a little magical.
Part of that magic, though, comes from process. Paint is fascinating, in great part, because of the labours that go into the business of paint. They help you see the thin coating on your wall for what it is: a chain that begins in a distant chemistry lab, and then flows all the way through to your home; via factories and stockists and dealers and humble painters. You learn to appreciate the industry’s marvels, like how dealers can offer ten thousand shades of paint with just 500 litres of stock. You realise just how brutal the competition for painters’ loyalties can be. You learn to respect the complexity involved in painting a single wall. You see the entire machine, one gear at a time.
Meanwhile, The Ken also gives you a sense of the wider world in which Asian Paints’ story unfurls. The podcast gives you a glimpse of why this company had to begin in Mumbai; or why it was only a Gujarati businessman that could have run this company. It tells you just how important a single date — in this case, June 30, 1997 — can be to the life of a company. For brief periods, this becomes a history podcast rather than a business one. But that only makes you see the company as a living thing.
Above all, this is a well-told story. It is told with patience, and with detail, and with a sort of confidence you don’t always see in India. It respects you, dear reader, trusting that you will stay with it for seven hours because the story deserves that sort of time.
This is the kind of work we’re proud to support, in whatever little way, here at Zerodha.
Watch the first part here:
You can also listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.