If this past week has proved anything, it’s that everyone loves a ‘silly season’ story, especially one involving mischief, awkwardness and that peculiarly British emotion: embarrassment.
The now-infamous Coldplay ‘kiss cam’ moment that caught out Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and HR boss Kristin Cabot has already given rise to a deluge of memes. We’ve had Trump cuddling Putin. We’ve had “He’s not my CEO!” T-shirts. We’ve had the inevitable wave of head-slapping quips. (“Have they no shame? Imagine being caught attending a Coldplay concert!”)
So, at the risk of adding more column inches to this already frothy story, I’m going to ask the question I regularly pose to my two-year-old in moments of chaos: what have we learned? Or to put it another way, how can we make a silk purse out of this very public sow’s ear?
Transparency and responsibility are no longer optional extras. They’re central to our professional survival
In many ways, the ‘kiss cam’ is the perfect metaphor for the shifting boundaries of privacy in the 21st century. Or, more accurately, for the illusion of privacy in a world where even the most intimate gestures can be projected to 70,000 screaming fans and then repackaged for the algorithmic gods of social media.
Weirdly, the first thing I thought of when the story broke wasn’t HR policy or crisis comms. It was this immortal exchange from the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels:
Freddy Benson: She caught me with another woman. C’mon. You’re French, you understand that!
Inspector Andre: To be with another woman, that is French. To be caught, that is American.
Morality aside (and ‘dirty rotten scoundrels’ does feel like an apt tag for this pair), there are very real lessons here for the advice sector. Not because we’re all one Coldplay ticket away from a workplace scandal, but because transparency and responsibility are no longer optional extras. They’re central to our professional survival.
There is no meaningful distinction between “professional you” and “weekend you” any more, however fervently we might wish otherwise. If you’re leading a firm, or even just advising clients, your public behaviour sends powerful signals about your judgment, your reliability and the consistency of your values.
Weekend Essay: Is ‘sorry’ really the hardest word?
Put bluntly, clients and regulators now expect your conduct outside the office to align with the ethics you trumpet inside it. You can’t preach integrity at the AGM and then play fast and loose at the afterparty.
Astronomer clearly understood this, at least in retrospect. Within 48 hours of the Coldplay moment hitting the newsfeeds, Byron was suspended. A few days later, the inevitable resignations followed. The company recognised what’s now a basic equation in crisis management: every hour of dithering compounds reputational damage.
In any large organisation, there’s often a knee-jerk temptation to handle things quietly. “Let’s keep this in-house.” “There’s no need to escalate.” But that instinct is becoming increasingly dangerous, particularly in a 24/7 media cycle fuelled by phone cameras, Reddit threads and the forensic gaze of TikTok.
Clients are deeply attuned to transparency. If something has gone wrong, they don’t just want accountability; they expect urgency. And that expectation is amplified for firms that brand themselves as ‘values-led’. If you claim to live your values, you’d better be ready to act on them when things get messy.
The Byron saga also reopens a thorny but important conversation about workplace relationships: how they’re governed and what kind of policies are actually meaningful in a post-pandemic, hybrid-working world.
Former employees are displaying more schadenfreude than sympathy as the company’s leadership unravels in public
As editor of Money Marketing, I’ve seen romance blossom under my own leadership (naming no names), and frankly nothing makes me happier than colleagues finding love. But a married CEO and the head of HR sharing an intimate moment in public? It’s hard to imagine a pairing more fraught with power dynamics and reputational landmines.
Of course, many advice firms pride themselves on flat structures and informal cultures. But that’s no excuse for a lack of clear boundaries. Workplace policies need to be unambiguous, not just about what constitutes acceptable behaviour, but about how relationships are declared, managed and disclosed.
And this isn’t about being puritanical. It’s about fairness. The alternative is a culture where staff feel sidelined, uncomfortable or excluded from key opportunities because they’re not part of the ‘inner circle’ or, worse, not on romantic terms with someone who is.
If the rumours aren’t true about Byron and Cabot, they have a peculiar way of showing it. With grim inevitability, stories are now surfacing about a ‘toxic’ culture at Astronomer, with former employees displaying more schadenfreude than sympathy as the company’s leadership unravels in public.
That’s a cautionary tale for any advice business. If you’ve got cultural issues bubbling beneath the surface, they will come to light. Maybe not via a ‘kiss cam’, but through client attrition, staff churn or the glare of FCA scrutiny.
The deeper question every adviser should be asking is this: if the kiss cam was suddenly turned on you, what would it reveal? Answers on a postcard, please.