Fix You, or Fix Your LinkedIn Bio?

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who go to Coldplay concerts, and those who wake up the next morning wishing they hadn’t. [ I belong to a near-extinct tribe that doesn’t do concerts, doesn’t do mosh pits— I do playlists, at home, with tea or any other beverage and full WiFi.]

July 16, Levi’s Stadium, California. The kind of night where 65,000 people hum Fix You in unison, and one CEO fixes himself firmly in the annals of HR history.

The scene: the Kiss Cam. The players:

Andy Byron, CEO of Astronomer, married, father, boardroom evangelist. Kristin Cabot, Chief People Officer, architect of “award-winning cultures,” LinkedIn priestess of psychological safety. They don’t kiss. But they don’t not kiss either. They squirm, huddle, recoil, and try not to look like what they clearly are.

From the stage, Chris Martin pauses mid-ballad like he’s spotted an ethical breach in 4K. “Either they’re having an affair… or they’re just very shy.”

Mic. Dropped.

It’s unclear whether Chris Martin meant to become an ethics officer that night. But somewhere between Viva La Vida and The Scientist, he accidentally launched a corporate compliance movement. He didn’t just stop at the quip.

“We don’t want to ruin a marriage… unless it’s already ruined.”

Which is the kind of emotional fine print you’d expect from a band that once made millions cry over a yellow balloon. A culture-building exercise in front of 65,000 strangers

You can spend months crafting a people strategy. Designing DEI training modules. Organising trust falls and “courageous conversations.” Or you can just speed-run the whole process with one unfortunate cuddle on a stadium jumbotron and let Twitter decide.

Kristin Cabot’s LinkedIn—still live as of this writing—reads like a satirical masterclass in misplaced irony: “I lead by example and win trust with employees of all levels, from CEOs to managers to assistants.” Ma’am, no one doubted that part.

Astronomer hired her barely nine months ago to scale culture. Well, she scaled something. Meanwhile, Andy Byron’s wife—an educator—quietly dropped Byron from her social handles and presumably began her own training module titled “Detecting Red Flags at 200 Yards.”

The Meme-ification of HR

The internet responded with the tenderness of a performance review gone wrong.

“Mistress? No, Head of Internal Affairs.”

“Trust-building offsite. Location: Row 12, Seat C.”

“KPI = Kiss Performance Index.”

One fan posted: “CEO is married. This is not his wife. Four rows in front of me.”

No drama. No thread. Just the kind of deadpan mic drop that makes HR recoil harder than Andy did when the camera zoomed in. And while the world dissected this, something else happened

Enter: The Other Andy Byron

2,000 miles away, another Andy Byron—a graphic designer from Dublin—woke up to a digital storm he did not order. His LinkedIn was buzzing. Comments piling up. People assuming he was that Andy Byron. The Kiss Cam guy.

He responded not with panic, but performance: “NOT THE GUY FROM THE COLDPLAY GIG!!”

And then, the pièce de résistance: “I wouldn’t be caught dead at a Coldplay concert. I make videos for big screens, not the guy who gets caught on them.”

If LinkedIn had an Oscar for Best Crisis Pivot, we’d be polishing his trophy. He even updated his headline: “Helping your brand go viral (for the right reasons).” Somewhere, the real Andy Byron was deleting his account. This Andy? Picking up clients. Soon he’ll be giving a TEDTalk on ‘How to trend on LinkedIn without cheating on your wife’

The Post-Script Summary

What we witnessed wasn’t just a PR disaster. It was a generational parable.

• One Andy Byron got exposed.
• The other got endorsed.
• One HR head became a meme.
• Chris Martin went from frontman to HR compliance officer.
• And the rest of us learnt that in the age of Kiss Cams and cached bios, personal branding is both shield and sword.

TL;DR:

• Be careful what you kiss at a concert.
• Be clearer about who you are on LinkedIn.
• And if Chris Martin ever pauses to comment on your body language mid-Fix You, your quarterly review’s already gone off the rails.

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