Jon Collins moving on

It is with mixed feelings that I have to announce that Jon Collins will shortly be moving on from his role at Freeform Dynamics, which may come as a surprise to some, but not to others.

Those of you who know Jon well will be aware that he has led a double life for quite a few years now – part analyst, part music biographer and author. His debut book on the band Marillion was first published in 2004, and was quickly followed in 2005 by a biography of one of my own favourite bands from university days, Rush. He then went on to assist another major artist, Mike Oldfield, with his autobiography, and was building quite a reputation in music industry circles.

Then Helen and I came along and disrupted all that, by appealing to ‘analyst’ Jon and inviting him to help us take the then one year old Freeform Dynamics to the next level. We had both worked with Jon before and obviously needed someone with his skills and IT industry insights, but as important as all that, Jon was a trusted friend who we knew shared the same core values as we did, both personally and professionally.

The Freeform role needed a lot of focus and dedication, so Jon agreed to join us on the basis that he would not write any more books for a least a year – two at the most, then have the option of going back to redeveloping his music and other writing interests at some point thereafter.

Well it’s now been four years, which from our point of view has been a bit of a result, but it was inevitable that a time would come when Jon would want to pick up those deferred interests again and move on – and that time is now.

In terms of specifics, as part of the transition, Jon has already stepped down as CEO and handed the reins back to me from a leadership perspective, with Helen picking up the general management part of his role. To be honest, given that the three of us have always worked quite closely as a management team, this has been a fairly natural and straightforward process, though we will of course miss Jon’s unique perspective on the world as we move forward.

Speaking of management and leadership, I’ll take the opportunity now to say that I am particularly grateful to Jon for stepping into the CEO slot when I was unable to continue in it myself for medical reasons a couple of years ago. Again those of you who know Jon will be aware that he mostly fulfilled this role out of necessity rather than desire, and I’m sure he won’t miss the drudgery that often comes with running a company.

But he’s not getting away that easily. Jon will remain full time with Freeform Dynamics until the end of this month, and will then continue as a Freeform affiliate. While he has decided to leave the analyst role behind, he will be available to help us out as a consultant on projects. We are also exploring some collaborative work around the intersection of IT with the media industry, which is an area in which Freeform has conducted some initial consumer studies recently. Indeed Jon already has some meetings lined up to socialise the results of one of the studies into consumer media procurement and consumption with some interesting music industry figures. Not sure what will come out of all that, but lots of possibilities.

In any event, I think we’ll look back on the ‘Jonno years’ with some affection in the future – a time of mini-books, cloud hype busting, and some great debates.

So why the mixed feelings on my part?

Well there is no denying that Helen and I are going to miss working with Jon as closely as we have done over the past few years, and I think the same can be said of the rest of the Freeform team. But at the same time, I am also excited to see a close personal friend pursue some of his other passions, and wish Jon every success in the future.