Bandwidth & the BCG

As has been mentioned before, I am no longer a n=1 business.  One of my proudest achievements of the last 12-18 months is the emergence of a team of focused, committed, high-performing associates who deliver my stuff at least as well as me.  Not only do my colleagues treat the work as seriously as I ever did, their fresh eyes see innovations and opportunities that have been passing pass me by.

I deliberately hand over interesting projects and not only when I can’t be in two places at once.  In the medium term this should expand our active client base but for the moment I am embracing personal financial pain in order to radically change my working life.

I am freeing up bandwidth to chase opportunities in an entirely new domain; by this time next year I plan to describe myself as the CMO of a tech start-up.  I will still own and operate a pharma consulting company but it will no longer be the first line of my LinkedIn profile.  In BCG matrix terms I am relegating my old business to ‘cash cow’ status in order to make room for a ‘star’.

I’m excited at the prospect of solving brand new problems in an unfamiliar commercial space.  I’m looking forward to being ‘inexperienced’.

I’m reminded of advice given to me by an improviser in 1991, the year I quit working for other people...

Enjoy not knowing

Gong Xi Fa Cai

This week we took a family holiday in Phuket, Thailand where I managed to finish my friend Jeanne-Marie Gescher's epic, lyrical, wondrous history of China, All Under Heaven: China's Dreams of Order.   I recommend this book not just to anyone interested in China, but to anyone interested in the human journey.

Jeanne-Marie's key theme is the relationship between the individual and the state.  Chinese leaders have always been conscious of the size of the task of holding together what has consistently been the world's largest population at any period in history.  From the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) onwards personal freedoms have usually been cast as secondary to the need to order and organise such so many people.  Time and again this topdown approach has led to bureaucratisation, stagnation and corruption, with the Communist Party (1949-now) no more immune than any of its predecessors.

The book takes us right up to 2014.  She uses the metaphor of a speeding train, with many classes of carriage to describe the astounding growth of modern China; those at the front accumulating unimaginable riches with diminishing levels of comfort as we move towards the rear.  The least fortunate of all, the old peasant class, the victims of environmental degradation, contaminated food and water and systemic exploitation, are not so much at the back of this train as under it.

Chinese New Year is this week and as we were leaving our 'kid-friendly' resort it was filling up with Mainland Chinese who were using the extended holiday to escape the Northern cold.  At face value they were pleasant, middle-class couples no different from my wife and me (right down to the one precious child).  Yet I couldn't help but wonder how close each was to the front of Jeanne-Marie's train.  And how many lives were blighted in order for this prosperity to be enjoyed by these few?

Of course the exact same accusation can and should be levelled at me.  How many lead poorer lives so that I can lead one of such comfort?  The book speaks to humanity, not just to China.

The drug works. End of story

Of late I've witnessed plenty of angst amongst pharma marketers trying to discern the 'narrative' behind the product they sell.  

I've sat in too many workshops, the purpose of each is to apply The Hero's Journey to the fact that Drug A has an effect on Tumour Type B.  Invariably, inevitably the analogy collapses under the weight of the exercise.  Is it the drug that's the hero or is it the doctor?  If the drug is the hero then doesn't that relegate the doctor to the role of squire to some tumour-fighting knight-errant? Easier to agree that the doctor is hero, which makes our drug Excalibur.  But what about the competition?  Aren't they the ones we're really fighting against, even though it's poor form to describe them as the enemy?  Or is it the patient?  People with cancer can be pretty damn heroic y'know.  After a while the only thing that we can agree upon is that the tumour is the bad guy.

It's around this time that someone jokes that this exact exercise is probably being attempted by a dozen groups somewhere around the world at this exact moment.  So we take lunch.

Afterwards we agree that The Hero's Journey is a bit cliché and we cast around for other narratives and so arrive at Journey From Darkness to Light.  But the medical team shuts that one down immediately because it implies a promise that our trial data won't support.  We are talking about cancer after all.

There is only one successful narrative for pharma products: it works.  If you're lucky you might be able to say it works in a surprising way.  Say this in the right way and let the doctor see for himself (in the right patient).  After which we pretty much lose control of the situation.  The doctor either believes that it works or she doesn't.

Energy spent trying to reframe the customer's relationship with the disease in question is energy wasted.  Doctors know the condition better than we ever will because they live with it every day.  The more poetic amongst them will describe their jobs in terms of warfare ('battle') or travel ('journey') or vigilance ('watch'n'wait') or strategy ('chess game') or problem solving ('cracking the code', 'solving the puzzle') but that's them using metaphor to describe their world to us.  Medicine is all those things and many more and we do well to listen to the words used by the individual.

But it is a mistake for us to gather around a flipchart to concoct some grand narrative that suits our purpose.  In the sales situation it will add a layer of complexity, as metaphor often does, or oversimplify or distort our message in some other way.  Instead, speak plainly and let the facts do the rest.

Trust

(Another long time between drinks but we won't labour that point today)

My business is built on a fundamental lack of trust.  My clients' reflexive mistrust of their own people is the main reason they pay me handsomely to fly around the planet telling the same stories, often to the same people more than once in the same year. The bosses trust my consistency as much as they fear any impulse for initiative amongst their local leadership. 

My presentations are (almost) always well received. After every workshop one or more participants approach me to tell me so but...

(and we all know well enough to ignore everything the other guy says before 'the but')

 ... would I mind especially if there was some adaptation of the content from here on in? Whilst my ideas make sense in general they lack some of the nuance needed for the local environment. The tone of this request, inevitably polite, is either pleading or defiant but it is always emphatic: we know what we're doing and you just need to trust us.

No problem.

I'd like to think that this would be my response even if I was held accountable for the performance of the team in question.  Then again my clients, all smart people, should be smart enough to recognise talent when they see it and at this they consistently fail.  Would I be any different?

Next year I hope to find out.  I intend for 2015 to be a radically different year for my business .  New family and new opportunities mean I have to travel less but I can't afford to kill my consulting business altogether.  So someone other than me is going to have to get on a lot of those planes and I need to get better at accepting that there's more than one way to tell those stories.

I decided to start by paying everyone who works for me considerably more than they've ever requested.  This is intended to tell them that I trust them.  Equally I hope that it acts as a way to tell myself that I trust them too.

That Man Parkinson

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

'Parkinson's Law' in The Economist, November 19, 1955

For the last fortnight I have been on Jury Service, an almost unavoidable duty for anyone on the British Electoral Rolls. Potential jurors are chosen entirely at random and, unlike times past, if your name comes up you're well advised to clear your diary for the prescribed fortnight but also be prepared in case you're co-opted into a much longer commitment. It is the stuff of nightmares for the self-employed. 

The Monday before last I presented myself to the London Central Criminal Court, aka the 'Old Bailey', a place name familiar to every Australian schoolchild thanks to the convict era song Botany Bay. 

The process is simple: I was part of a weekly intake of about 120 Londoners. From time to time sixteen or so of us, selected at random, were told to go to one of the courtrooms whereat twelve of our number, again chosen at random from the sixteen, were empaneled onto trials lasting anywhere from a few hours to many months. The unchosen were sent back to the holding pen to await the next call. 

This was how I spent the week before last: working in the waiting area, trooping down to courtrooms and then trooping back up again. Then last Friday they sent a bunch of us home for good, the seeming rationale being that a new cohort of 120 would be arriving on Monday and we were somehow surplus to requirement. 

The British Criminal Justice system gifted me a week but how not to squander it?

I worked through the important-but-not-urgent box of the Eisenhower matrix.  I gave myself early starts, but not too early so as to catch the indescribable joy of being in the room when my daughter wakes.  I tried for sober evenings, except that the sun shone all week and any guy who can resist the temptation of a pint with mates in summery London is a stronger man than me.  

So I got stuff done but not enough.  Being successfully self-employed means that there's always stuff to be done.  A clear corollary of Parkinson's Law is that a short To Do List is wasteful. If you're going to spend the time at your desk and away from friends and family then you might as well get as much done as possible.

Babies. Making idiots of us all since, well, forever

We have a baby.  Our daughter born six months ago is a happy, smiley constant source of joy to my wife and me. The story of her provenance is a long and tortuous one but no matter, this is not that tale.  She is here now and is exactly as she should be. 

Today's thought is a follow-on from last week's idea that one of the roles played by my smarter self is to remain vigilant in the face of the dumber version.  There are recognisable patterns: fatigue levels differ on Tuesday morning as against Thursday night and I try to allocate tasks appropriately.

One definition of 'experience' might be to identify, and to operate within, the rhythms of one's working life.

But babies are arrhythmic.  The edicts of Gina Ford notwithstanding, they only know what they want when they want it.  We do our best to anticipate and shape our daughter's rotating need for food, clean clothes, attention, distraction and sleep.  'Shaping' being a euphemism for ignoring her demands for food and attention for at least a little while.  

Thus my carefully calibrated plans to get the tough work done whilst the house is quiet are more often stymied than realised.  My daughter doesn't care whether she's being fed by the smarter or dumber version of her father.  She just wants the food.  

(cue: hollow laughter from my wife whose entire life is presently subsumed by the feeding-changing-cleaning-bathing-washing-feeding cycle)

One partial solution will be the creation of a discrete workspace, either on our property or elsewhere.  This is a work in progress.  Another is to (further) improve my smart-me:dumb-me ratio by staying fit, rested and out of the pub.  A third has been to hire someone to help out with the myriad tasks that are usually entrusted to my dumber self.  The beginning of the end of Headcount: 1?

But mostly my response must be attitudinal.  Our daughter was so longed for for so long and I am blessed with a career that lets me stay close to home for more of the time than most breadwinners.  So I count that blessing.

A final thought: I have nothing but respect for single parents.  The sense of grinding isolation must be close to overwhelming almost all the time, especially if the child is too young to be anything other than demanding.

Protection against my dumber future self

I'm at the end of an absolutely brutal week of travel.  In the office all day Monday.  Night flight to the US to make a pitch presentation on Tuesday.  It went well enough. Night flight back for a full day of work on Wednesday.  Day trip to Switzerland yesterday.  Be careful what you wish for and all that.

No complaints.  As I've said in these pages many times, 'If I'm not on planes I'm probably not getting paid'.  The real challenge is how to keep functioning in amongst these waves of fatigue.  A partial answer may be this: -

Be aware that sometimes you are smarter than usual and sometimes you are dumber.  The job of your smarter self is to protect you against your dumber self for the foreseeable future.

My dumber self forgets things.  He fires off emails with spelling and grammatical errors or worse.  He packs badly and eats poorly. He mis-prioritises and has overly emotional reactions to simple setbacks.  Whether because he's tired, jetlagged or just hungover he is an idiot.

He is an idiot and my smarter, I'd like to say 'normal', self has to mitigate against him.  We all know this.  We've all stood in the middle of a supermarket feeling like an idiot for not writing up a shopping list.  We curse our would-be smarter selves for not thinking this one through.

My smarter self writes lists and sets alarms.  He allocates tasks commensurate with my fluctuating IQ to various times of the day and week.  Aren't we all that much are smarter on Monday morning than on Friday afternoon?  My smarter self is mindful of my tendency to react emotionally when fatigued and plans accordingly.  My smarter self works hard so that the dumber me can lean against a wall in the sunshine with a pint of beer in hand.

It is Friday and the UK Met Office is predicting 26C and sunny.

18 hours in America

I am en route to the East Coast of the US to deliver a pitch presentation. All told I'll be on the ground about 18 hours. 

There are a number of strange things about this trip; firstly it's a competitive pitch, which is an unfamiliar situation for me as I'm usually in the room because of the unique nature of my offering.  The client doesn't quite know what it wants, except to say that the approach must be different, innovative and never tried in the sector before. 

Secondly, I'm presenting on behalf of a consortium that I was invited to join after the initial round of presentations so it isn't just my reputation on the line. Actually, given that almost all my business is 'non-US' I have less to lose reputationally than my would-be partners. However, that also means I'm presenting content not my own with the other partners joining down the phone line. This is never ideal. I have a long flight to internalise as much as I can and my ability to think on my feet will have to do the rest. 

Thirdly, (but related to the above) I have no prior relationship with anyone in tomorrow's room. I'm only there because the consortium reckons I can somehow add value. It will unusual for me to be so bereft of fans. 

I can't help thinking about the last time I flew the Atlantic to pitch at an American HQ. Years ago now it still stands alone as the least pleasant day of my professional career. I walked into an environment so immediately toxic that I found myself looking at the clock at 945am expecting it to say 11. The charitable explanation was that the company, long since taken over, was experiencing an intense bout of 'not invented here syndrome'. The truth was probably closer to being that I walked into a vicious turf war wherein being nasty to me was a handy surrogate for being nasty to someone else in the room. Never before or since have I been treated so rudely in a professional setting; and let's not forget that I work with the Germans, Austrians and Swiss. We called the daylong workshop off at lunchtime and I limped home to London. 

I suppose I'm about to find out what I've learned since then. 

When is quitting not 'quitting'?

"I found myself on stage in the middle of a scene about 'FPS games', which I found out later meant 'first-person shooter' video games, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on.  I thought to myself, I love Mozart and Shakespeare and I don't have the time or the energy to fill my mind with this shit."

This is what it sounds like when a great improviser quits the stage.

I turn 45 this year and I'm coming to grips with the oh-so obvious truth that there's a growing list of activities that I'm used to doing that in the future I will have no business persisting with.  I will have to quit.  I was lucky to see out an enthusiastically mediocre rugby career aged 30 without any lasting injuries (I wasn't good enough to warrant any special attention from the opposition) but that's it.  There's nothing I was doing at 24 or 34 that presently I cannot do at 44 but that cannot continue.

There seem to be four justifiable reasons for quitting something: -

1. You've succeeded
2. The world no longer wants what you do
3. You'd be an old fool to persist
4. Demonstrable hardship to your family

 The other reason is of course: -

It was too hard

Manichaeanism of the most feeble sort

When a consultant is sifting through his client's problems in real time there is an impulse towards diagnosis that is hard to resist.  After all, we are paid to be smart, which really means that we're paid to be smarter than everyone who has already looked at the issue.  The easiest way to appear smart is to think quickly: Even if I arrive at the same conclusion that you guys did, I got there in a fraction of the time and all on my own.  Impressive, huh?  Except that we've still only arrived at the same conclusion, which means that nothing whatsoever has been achieved.

The next trick that most consultants pull is some sort of reorganisation of the facts.  The SWOT analysis is a great way of restating everything we already know but feeling smart about it because we've identified some polar opposites: strengths v. weaknesses and opportunities v. threats.  It all feels very honest and important and forthright: We are strong and decisive people!  We aren't afraid to name our weaknesses!  We face down our threats and categorise them!  Except that in order for a SWOT properly to work every relevant issue needs to end up in a quadrant and only one quadrant at that.  Remember that dirty feeling everyone got when we finally agreed that the sales team was both a strength and a weakness?

Outside of the IT department binary categorisation is rarely your friend.  Polarities feel cool because they remind us of all those epic, Manichaean stories of childhood where good triumphs over evil and where you're either with us or agin us.  But sooner or later every binary analysis collapses under the weight of its own metaphor.  Sure, internal staff and external customers are kind of opposites as are debtors and creditors but seeking meaningful alignment between these four ideas is insane.  Which is not to say that I haven't seen someone attempt this very feat.  Right before a long overdue coffee break it was.

There is a point in any meeting where we start looking for a way of arranging things: Jim Halpert's failed attempt to lead the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin is mired in an endless list of pros and cons.  Oftentimes the consultant's job starts by putting a stop to the oversimplification: we live in a complex world and as adults we should maybe use that fact as a starting point.

Such a very long time between drinks

I see that I last wrote in these pages on February 11.  Seven months and God knows how many miles ago.  The reputation that I've assiduously built over the eight or so years in the UK now precedes me around the world.  I find myself in all sorts of priviledged positions.  I am an insider.  People who are new to a client company are told to make contact with me to learn what's going on.  I'm asked to give feedback to other agencies.  I have become, in some circles at least, a 'trusted advisor'.  This is the holy grail of consultancy.

It's doubtful that I gain anything by even stating as much in these pages.  Discretion is a big part of trust and even writing as I write right now feels like an impulse to self-sabotage.  Except that the internet is such a wonderful place to make huge mistakes in plain sight.  Better even than the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

I am a consultant now and not much else.  No time for producing theatre or performing comedy.  No time even to consume it.  I wake up early and work online or I fly somewhere to do my thing in person.  A week without passing through an airport feels strange these days.

But soon I am to be something else besides.  After nearly ten years of trying I am to be a father.  A baby girl will enter our lives on Christmas Day, if not before.  And then everything must change.  Part of the reason that I've embraced the Global Loman lifestyle is that it's nice to be wanted and especially nice to be wanted in far-flung parts.  But soon I'll be wanted more at home than anywhere else on the planet.

I have no idea what that wll be like but I can't wait to find out.

Running to stand still

Predictable as ever I've fallen for one of the classic blogging blunders; I decided to live an unjournaled life for a time and fell out of the habit of writing.  Not that I've had much of a choice as a proliferation of projects has had me working at a barely sustainable level for over six months now.  My passport has new stamps from all the usual places plus Lebanon, Hungary, Egypt and next week Japan.

I have to monitor my mental energy levels and devote the hours where my concentration is highest to the least forgiving tasks (and clients).  I live in a near-constant state of paranoia that some day soon I'll turn up in Madrid for a meeting with Client A but my slides will be for a German-speaking subsidiary of Client B.

Diet and exercise are more important than ever but not as important as sleep.  I find myself daydreaming about a holiday where all I do is sleep during the day.  In the mean time I do my best to exercise every day I'm at home and every other day when I'm traveling.  In the fortnight when a head cold kept me away from the gym my weight drifted up a disturbing three or four kilos.  When that happens I move slower and fatigue more easily and lose concentration right when I need it most.

I need my accountant, my lawyer and my travel agent to ask all the smart questions the first time we discuss the job.  I'm on the lookout for a new graphic designer and one guy failed the audition the moment he told me that he wasn't a mindreader.

Over Christmas in Australia I ploughed through the last draft of the book I've writing on and off for years.  At best it'll need more time than I can give it but at least it's off the 2013 'To Do list'.  At worst it was a flawed idea badly executed but, hey, at least it's done.  This year I'll be hard pressed to read a complete book, let alone write or edit one.

I have a new business idea.  Something really cool that might just be a scalable add-on to my (decidedly unscalable) consultancy.  The only problem is that Phase 1 of a six or seven step project requires 30-40 quality hours of my time.  The earliest I reckon I can offer that up is July.  So of course I worry that opportunity's window might be closed by then.  I tell myself that this isn't a case of the urgent crowding out the important but I worry that I'll look back in five years and think that taking on that one extra client in February 2013 was a dumb play, regardless of the cash it put in the bank.  And let's be thankful that at least there's cash in the bank.

So much as I'd like to write on these pages more (and more often) I'm not going to make that promise to myself. I'll check in from time to time, especially as my world seems to be changing faster than ever but I doubt that there'll be a discernable pattern.

Until next time...

This is not a complaint

My working life began in 1989 when I finished my Business degree and became a ‘Trade Marketing Associate’ for Unilever Australia.  I have been self-employed since 1992.  I have been operating on a Headcount: 1 model since 2003.  I have never been as busy as these last four months.  The last time I got to the bottom of my ‘To Do’ list was June.  My working day begins with an new iteration of the urgent doing battle with the important.  Client demands have crowded my every personal project, including, obviously, this blog.

But this is not a complaint.  What very bliss it is to have built a thing, business, and find that it is in demand.  My diary is full and my mind is entirely focused on doing this one next task as well as I can.  The operational part of my business has no choice but to operate under the assumption that the fundamentals are in place.

Even so, I wonder about the longer-term sustainability of it all.  The next round of plane flights need to be booked tonight whether I'm fatigued or not.  I am busy because I have a reputation for high standards.  In such a world there is no such thing as a small mistake: any slip-up costs me with time, money or kudos.  This is self-employment at its least forgiving.

The obvious solution is to take on staff, at least someone to deal with the more bone-headed stuff like collating expenses and organising hotels but to do so would be to shift away from a business model that has served me so well for almost ten years.  I hesitate because I question my ability to forgive.  Of late I've started snapping at my suppliers for (often imagined) inefficiencies.  God knows what I'd be like to share an office with 40 hours a week.  If I'm going to go back to being a boss then I have to improve my communication and get better at setting expectations and rediscovering the knack of cutting a bit of slack.  I'm unconvinced that I'm up to the task.  

Right now I'm approaching this new phase suspicious that if I take on staff then they will let me down.  In the space of 400 words I've gone from not complaining about being busy to actually complaining about imaginary staff.  Even so, I suspect that 2013 will be the year they stop being imaginary.

Confidence = space

In business I come across as a confident person. I've been doing what I do for a long time now so when I'm brought in to think about an issue I've got a pretty good idea of what the unspoken issues are likely to be and what solutions might fit.

I do everything I can to ensure that my clients have confidence in me because it lessens my workload. A worried client costs me time on additional phone calls or face-to-face meetings that are quite hard to monetise. I need my contacts to exude confidence in me when they're discussing the project at all those internal meetings that I neither get, nor want, to be invited to. When that goes missing I get the dreaded phone call asking for an early look at a draft and my timeline is shot, which can be disastrous for the overall project.

Generally I am paid to design and deliver training programmes. A large part of what 'design' entails is making intelligent decisions in the right order. My favourite example of this is deciding on the PowerPoint template design before anyone knows how much text needs to be displayed on the screen.  It creates unnecessary conflict and heartache every time. The motivation behind this rookie error is usually as simple as someone senior in the organisation asking to 'see something' as assurance that the project is on track and the slide template looks like an easy and uncontroversial thing to show the bosses.  A better response to the political pressure is to have a meeting and run through the development timeline, explaining what decisions will be made in what sequence and why

I see my clients' confidence in me as a tangible asset that allows me to run projects at the pace that best serves that project. As with any asset it needs to be protected: good communications, dressing well and face-to-face meetings early in the process.

Possibility v. Limitation

We are deep in the dark process of buying a London flat (apartment). Inevitably this oh-so-time-consuming process is happening as I'm busier than I've ever been.  Happily, my time poverty has forced me to identify a simple heuristic that has probably been there all along...

When I look at a potential place to live, do I first see possibilities or limitations?

Unless my initial, immediate reaction is 'possibility' I thank the estate agent for his time, turn on my heel and head back to the office.  If I experience no moment of excitement whatsoever when contemplating one of the biggest purchases I'll ever make then I'm in the wrong flat.   Life will force compromises aplenty on me before the sale goes through so I need to start with as much enthusiasm as I can manage.

I can look at other parts of my life through the same possibility / limitation heuristic.  I've pulled back from directing or performing improv comedy because where other, younger actors see infinite possibility in the form jaded old me sees only limitation.  Hopefully one day that'll revert and I can reimmerse myself in a craft I love but until then I stay away. Who wants to be cornered at the bar at the after show party with Captain Buzzkill?

It's important not to overthink the heuristic.  Perhaps in Daniel Kahneman's terms it would be System 1 (fast) thinking.  If the 'possibility' in a given project is that there's much money to be made then so be it.  But if any sense of possibility is overwhelmed in the very first instance by thoughts of 'limitation', be they artistic, social, moral, whatever, then the heuristic has spoken: the project ain't for you.

I am paid well to remain sanguine as my ideas are diluted

I am deep in the planning and design process for a truly massive conference that will be held in Europe in a few months' time.  600 people will fly in from all over the world for a two day meeting.  When the idea was formed there seemed to be a burning commercial need: our product's market is changing and we need to energise ourselves against complacency in the face of new competition.  Six weeks later the whole thing is bogged down in a morrass of prohibitive deadlines (getting translations done over the European summer), rival agendas (India's needs are unsurprisingly different from Germany's) and sheer exhaustion.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the client is wasting a hell of a lot of money and making many people unhappy for little or no commercial return.  The product in question will continue to grow, albeit with a reduced market share but in a rapidly expanding market.

I've been here before.  Part of my role as an external vendor is to be unflappable, responsive and unfailingly upbeat, to play nicely with others and to do just a little bit more than is required because that's what is meant by 'exceeding expectations'.  I go into projects like these with no more than a faint hope that my work will shine because as the deadline gets closer absolutely every good idea and laudable intenton mutates, often twisting until the effect on the conference delegate is the exact opposite of what was planned.  By taking on the role of sage consultant and pointing this out, in the past I've been accused of prima donna-ish behaviour.  This is easy to level at an external supplier with a creative brief, which is not to say such accusations have been entirely unfounded in the past.

If I'm going to keep working on projects like this I have to let go of cleverness and adopt a new but unspoken standard for my work: -

Try not to add to the sum total of unhappiness in the world

I will try to do no more than have the delegates participate in simple yet creative tasks that have an immediately obvious commerical benefit.  No deep analogies that require decoding.  No fun for fun's sake.  And no endless PowerPoint plenaries where the one commands the time and attention of the many.

Be part of the solution not part of the problem and all that...

Death by TC

Sometimes my consulting work has me working with different parts of the same very large organisation.  At the moment I am simultaneously engaged on national, European and global projects for the one company. These projects are not linked but have come about because individual clients in different roles have each seen a need for what I do.

National projects are easy. Client identifies a need.  Client calls.  We meet.  I draft a proposal.  We set a date.  I deliver.  I get paid.  At some later time the client identifies another need and we start again.

European projects are more complicated, not least because of my pathetic Australian monolinguality.  These projects are by definition more ambitious with a greater number of moving parts and thus requiring better political skills.  My client can sit in the European office and identify a need but rarely can he act on it without first persuading the local offices.  For the project to get off the ground a mix of personal entreaties, subtle bribery and naked threats is deployed to manoeuvre the one or two dominant markets to adopt a 'pilot' version of my programme.  Once this is deemed positive the rest of Europe will fall in line.  The short list of these dominant markets always includes Germany and usually Spain but never the UK and rarely France.  Success in Britain is routinely ignored in Europe and the French predeliction for agonisingly long planning processes is a sure fire momentum-killer of wider projects.  So I spend much of my time in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart in the company of my German-speaking facilitator.  The best operators working at a European level do this politicking face-to-face, but once a pilot programme has been agreed the national pattern kicks in: we meet.  I draft a proposal.  We set a date.  I deliver.  I get paid.  Often, at some later time the national client identifies a local need, finds money in her own budget, and we start again.

Genuinely global initiatives inhabit an entirely different world.  There is a huge and varied constituency that must be convinced of the worth of a project and this cannot often be done face-to-face.  Yesterday I spent five hours on a series of teleconferences (TC's) helping a global client sell a programme that is to be deployed on five continents.  Anonomised, often heavily accented voices dialing in from cars, homes and offices spent the day jockeying for the last word in an effort to make a valid critique of our offering, to promote a national cause or just to sound sage.

I'm not used to this way of working and being unable to put faces or even countries to the voices makes it doubly hard.  For me this is just another project, albeit a very important one, but for anyone in a global role this is a way of life.  Even doing the sensible thing by doing as much business face-to-face as possible doesn't solve the problem because the global TC's never stop.  Being at a meeting in Japan just means that you dial in from your hotel room in Tokyo instead of your office in London, stifle a yawn and start by thanking everyone else for taking time out of their busy schedules.  A quality much overlooked in good global marketing people is the patience to chair these endless phone calls.  This requires an ability to distinguish between those unhelpful comments which are born of miscommunication and those which are deliberately aimed at derailing a project.  The second category demands a response of 'taking the discussion off-line', which of course means setting up another TC.

The soul eroding mess that is LHR

In the last month I've flown passed through Heathrow nine times (and Gatwick once) on my to Australia, Italy, Egypt, Switzerland, the US and Germany. Without exception Border Control at Heathrow has been consistently the most unpleasant experience - more since the iris recognition facility ('IRIS') has been put into an apparently deliberate programme of slow abandonment.

I've long joked that one loses a little bit of one's soul with every pass through that benighted place and I've more than once been caught in the notorious hourlong queues at immigration. Is it wrong to be this happy about this news?

The quality of Mursi

Calling an early finish to a training day so that 'people can go and be with their families' was a new experience. Everyone I've spoken to on this trip to Cairo knew that today was going to be historic. Before the session and at the breaks no one spoke of anything but politics and the room included supporters of both Shafiq (ex-Air Force general, strongly associated with old Mubarak regime) and Mursi (Muslim Brotherhood) and as the 3pm announcement got closer there was a growing shrillness of tone without actual disagreement.

At the appointed time I sat in the hotel lobby alongside those programme participants living outside Cairo. The experience was not dissimilar to being in a Madrid hotel a few months ago when Real lost the Champions League semifinal to Bayern Munich. Such is the life of a consultant: even if you're in the city where the amazing thing is happening, chances are you're watching it on CNN like everyone else.

Plenty of noise outside from Mursi supporters but I've been somewhat humourlessly assured that as this (Heliopolis) hotel is owned by the army there will be no incidents.

House of Lies

Just finished watching the Showtime series House of Lies, which is based on a far duller book of the same name by Martin Kihn, formerly of Booz Allen Hamilton.  My guess is that it was pitched to the network as 'Mad Men-meets-Californication', which is okay by me as they're two of my favourite shows.

Some of it resonates: certainly the travel and also the sense that you're always getting money for old rope as you (successfully) apply the same solutions to client after client.  But working for the Hollywood approximation of large consultancy looks waaaay more fun than running a one-man shop in the real world.