Stewart McCure

Writer, performer, management consultant

England

An Australian living in London.  A self-employed training consultant to the global health care industry.  A producer, director and performer of improv comedy.  A trustee of an adult education charity in West London.  A writer and occaisional blogger

 

 

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

July 30, 2012  /  Stewart McCure

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...

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tags / Attention, Big Pharma, Collaboration, Global work, Play the cards they deal you