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.