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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Germans with Suntans

I'm on a flying visit to Australia and much as I love the country of my birth the oh-so-negative national mood can be a bit much. Sure, the national political scene is a cruel joke and the misallocated bounty accruing from the decades-long mining boom is distorting the wider economy but, jeez, can't you all just lighten?

The once healthy scepticism of politicians is now an outright contempt that has seemingly bled over into every sphere of life. Just as all achievements are the consequence of unearned luck all setbacks are deserved. Australians don't save enough. Don't pay enough taxes. Don't do enough for the poor or the sick. Don't care enough about the marginal lives of the original inhabitants. Don't feature on the world stage for any worthwhile purpose. Except that they do. They do all of these things and more.

As I've said before in these pages, the national psyche we resemble most in Europe is the Germans; law-abiding, sober and with a wary eye on the future. But try telling that to an Aussie without creating offence. So there's obviously something (bad) going on here that I'm missing.

That's the problem with flying visits - by the time you've sorted through the distortions you're already on the flight out. Then again, on Sunday night I did see a guy sleeping rough outside the Salvation Army passing the time by watching a film on his MacBook Air...

Corporate karma

Tuesday of the first full week of the New Year is apparently the busiest day for job-hunting.  You've given yourself at least a day to get your feet back under the desk but not left it so long that the resolution to work someplace else has been forgotten.

This is also the week that old clients are most likely to get that Happy New Year! email from a consultant like me.  I send these out in waves to ensure that I properly personalise each one.  After all, these are all people with whom I have a history that must be reflected (leveraged) otherwise I might as well be cold calling. And like anyone embarking on that January job search I wait until Tuesday before starting.  That way maybe I'm less likely to be caught up in the First Great Inbox Purge of 2012.

 

With an augur’s intensity I watch my own inbox for replies.  There’s a hierarchy of outcomes from the exercise:-

1. The quick note proposing a call or meeting in the coming weeks is absolutely the most I can hope for
2. The longer note with specific feedback on last year’s results and the plans for the next twelve months isn't awful.  At least my contact took a few minutes to setout the issues that affect me personally
3. The email saying that there's been a change of roles but also giving me the name of the new contact (cc’d) isn't bad.  Managing a baton-change in a client organisation is part of my job
4. It’s hard not to read a quick note announcing a change of roles without any further information as ‘goodbye and good luck’
5. The cursory Happy New Year reply is the email equivalent of a stilted exchange of pleasantries whilst waiting for an elevator

Optimist that I am, getting no response at all is still reason for hope.  Maybe my contact isn't back at her desk for another week.  Maybe she’s gone straight into a procession of heavy-duty meetings.  Or maybe she’s surreptitiously on the job hunt herself, in which case there's no point me being on her radar until she either gets settled in a new position or resigns herself to the current role and refocuses on her 2012 To Do List.  I make a note to try again in mid-March.

I've long believed that no genuine marketing effort goes ultimately unrewarded.  Those efforts must be genuine, an ongoing part of the day-to-day job and not just the occasional paroxysm of activity intended to refill an otherwise empty calendar. And don't be surprised when that reward arrives from an unexpected direction.  Yesterday I got an unsolicited email requesting a meeting in Italy as soon as is convenient.  Not so much attributable cause-and-effect as ‘corporate karma’.

 

Approach the low-yield tasks with the right attitude and trust that the cosmos is taking note

Advice for the self-employed (January edition)

Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world.  Sometimes the world moves faster than you.

I finished my last job of last year the week of Christmas.  I never have paid consulting work that late in the year.  The preceding months are a blurred pastiche of meetings, telecons, airports and familiar hotel rooms in cities I'd never visited before.  Back in August my business accelerated and by December I was tumbling down the chute that opens with exhilaration then descends through fatigue, helplessness and exhaustion before bottoming out in tangible, physical illness.  Be careful what you wish for.

 

Sixteen days later I'm in a more familiar state of mind: my ambitions moving faster than my world.  I'm back to wanting more than what's on offer.  I'm impatient and paranoid.  Am I being deliberately excluded?  Are potential clients buying my old book instead of hiring the new me? The glass between me and a shining future is smudged with my greasy noseprints.  I read the Euro crisis stories and fret that last year was my financial high water mark. Then I worry that a smarter, savvier me would look at the state of the world and see where there's a quid to be made from all this chaos.  A fortnight is a long time in self-employment.

 

I've been at this Headcount:1 game a long time now (viz. my previous post.) so here’s my advice to those underemployed self-employed folks out there who spent the Christmas-New Year interregnum drinking too much and ignoring the gnawing knowledge that you don't have guaranteed work lined up for January already.  Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’ is always a good place to start: -

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Self-employment means that is that there's no boss to impress, no underling to browbeat and no rivalrous colleague to outmanoeuvre.  The brutal truth is that only thing you get to change is you.

 

January 6 is just too soon to start badgering clients so you're tempted to run headlong at all those clichéd resolutions: diet & exercise,better sleep patterns and commendable reading habits.  This impulse is prophylactic at best; racking up cosmic credits for the next time the spiralling chute opens beneath you.  Except that there is no godly ledger balancing a January spent at the gym against a May-time diet of airport pizza and beer.  At worst these resolutions are symptomatic of the very mismatch between ambition and action that you're looking to escape.  Even as you sweat over The Economist some part of you knows that you're just waiting for the phone call that will fill your days.  Diet and exercise might be change but not the sort you can really believe in. 

 

Devoting all this excess time to your actual business can be more damaging still. Parkinson’s Law assumes at least some sort of deadline.

 

My advice to my time-rich client-poor comrades is as follows: -

Find some small, new, discrete thing and do it well.

Not some rambling yearlong project.  You have one of those already: building your business.  Rather that small thing that is affordable in terms of both your time and money but that doesn't require you waiting on anyone else.  A one-off class.  A lecture. A walk to a place you've never been before.  An afternoon taking photos.  A blog post. Don't reorganise your life but somehow extend it.  A measure might be this to complete some thing that allows you to greet your life partner at the door with, “Guess what I did today?” Achievement, no matter how minor, is not risible.

 

Create small ambitions that are under your control and sit them alongside those larger ones that are not. But do this small thing for its own sake, not with one eye fastened on the far side of the smudgy glass.

And don't worry too much about 2012.  My reading of the news is that we all, those with bosses and offices and those without, are going to hell in a handbasket of soon-to-be resurrected European currencies anyway.

 

Happy New Year.

Life changing experience

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.

I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.

I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.

One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -

These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?

I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.

Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.

A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -

I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.

Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -

Don’t be original be obvious.

Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?

I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

Not saying 'no'

I'm sitting in Prague airport after yesterday's 1-dayer for a new client.  It will the last of 47 flights in 2011.

The job, a sort of six hour pitch to a pan-European mix of marketing and medical people, went well enough.  It was one of those situations where whilst the people who need to approve the project weren't in the room, there were plenty there who could kill it.  That gave me a very clear and not especially ambitious goal: to not have anyone say 'no'.

I had my usual mid-morning moment when it occurred to me that this may the last job I ever do; at the very least with this client and possibly ever.  This is my subconscience telling to relax, stop worrying about the next job and to simply concentrate on the people in front me.

By the time we decamped to the bar for too much Czech beer there was sufficient agreement that the project should go forward.  The clarity of a business model where you only attempt to be as good as your last job can be very liberating at times.

Natural, complicated, simple

The cricket writer Peter Roebuck committed suicide a few weeks ago in South Africa.  His death is rightly mourned by the legion fans of his astute and erudite writing.  As he taught English at my school and lived in the boarding house, despite being an especially mediocre cricketer I had quite a bit to do with him.

Of all the tributes that have been written my favourite is by Ed Smith, the former Kent and England player who writes for the times.  In it he recounts some advice Roebuck had written to him years before: -

A player goes through three stages - natural, complicated, simple - not many reach that last stage but the journey cannot be avoided

As ever cricket acts as a mirror to all of life.  As a consultant my job is to usher people and organisations to that final state and I've learned not to trust anyone who declares with relish that some process or situation is necessarily complicated.

I especially like the idea of an unavoidable journey to simplicity.

Identity Economics

I've just finished reading Akerlof & Kranton's Identity Economics, a pretty lightweight exploration of the obvious idea that there is a quasi-quantifiable cost to pursuing financial gain at the expense of one's personal identity.  Much of the book is driven by the idea that 'insider' behaviours, the conformist ones that further the goals of the organisation (but also lead to personal advancement), must outweigh the social cost of being seen to conform by one's sneering peers.  There's nothing much here that wasn't explored more eloquently in John Hughes' 1985 opus The Breakfast Club.

When discussing the effect that identity economics has on education the authors focus on ways in which well-run schools (such as the Core Knowledge group run out of Colorado) create a compelling 'insider' culture: -

Because identity is closely linked to dress and self-presentation, we consider it no coincidence that a Core Knowledge school might prescribe even the nature of a student's socks. 

Identity Economics. p. 73

The premise is that how we dress acts as a constant reinforcement of who we are: conformist 'insider' versus rebellious 'outsider'; and that this internalised effect is arguably more important than how others perceive us.

I'm interested in how this idea relates to how a consultant dresses when meeting a client, especially for the first time.  If Akerlof & Kranton's idea holds true then ahead of any other considerations we need to dress for ourselves.  If I don't feel that what I'm wearing reinforces a positive self-image then that dissonance will somehow out itself during the meeting.

When starting out in life this is in no way trivial.  You didn't make it at IBM in its pomp if you didn't aspire to dress like these guys.  Reductio ad absurdum: -

Before choosing a career you need to ask yourself if you like how the successful people in that field dress

When you're paying your dues in any profession you will need to wear clothes that don't distract from the perception of your work.  You will have to wait until you're game-changingly good at what you do before you can dress in a way that draws attention to who you are as opposed to what you do.  Of course this only applies if you're serious about your career (i.e. want to be one of Akerlof & Kranton's 'insiders').  Dress in a way that says 'fuck off to the man' and sooner or later the man will get fucked off.  With you.

I like how I dress for meetings.  By this I mean I genuinely enjoy wearing those clothes because they make me feel how I need to feel when meeting a new client: established, intelligent, perceptive and 'undistracted'.  It's taken me a while to understand this and I do my best to address the myriad shifts in how I feel about a certain suit or shirt when I walk out the door in the morning.

That I never achieved the same comfort in the clothes I wore as a stand-up speaks volumes: dressing like my audience made me feel like an impostor whereas dressing like me just made me feel old.  And Andrew Watts had already cornered the market in disheveled suits.

The last frontier

For my business the United States is the last frontier.  After almost seven years working out of London I'm relatively pleased as to how my presence has grown in Europe.  I am a known quantity here now and my clients seek me out as much as I seek out them.  In December I'm starting a new project with an old client.  Our third in ten years.  Every time he changes jobs I get a call.

I wonder if the experience would have been as successful if my wife and I had chosen instead to live in the US when we left Australia in 2005.  The challenge of getting visas notwithstanding the choice was ours to make as no company forced our hand by funding the relocation.  I suppose we just liked the idea of Europe more.

I've never felt as confident walking into an American Head Office as an Australian, British, Swiss or Asian one. Nowhere else in the world are foreign accents such a source of undisguised bemusement.  I don't respond especially well to the blank-eyed apathy that seems to say: -

Buddy, we're the richest pharmaceutical market in the world.  There are over 300 million of us here.  If your idea was that good don't you think we'd have thought of it by now already?

The only genuine traction I've had on American projects has been with European owned companies.  My theory is that there's a sense that ideas should be assessed on value not provenance.  Yet America beckons and yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with a Boston consultancy whose task would be to get me into the meeting where my ideas are heard louder than my accent.

One of the problems we discussed was that most Americans in bourgeois industries like pharma are just too damn polite.  Offering a London-based consultant a project in the Midwest might be asking a bit too much of him, what with all that inconvenient travel and time away from his family and whatnot.

Convincing a client that I'll travel anywhere on the planet for the right fee can be a surprisingly high hurdle when landing an overseas gig. This is why consultants never complain about jetlag.  Convincing my potential American clients that transatlantic travel is still just travel may be a step too far and I suspect the consultancy will recommend I relocate the business to somewhere in the corridor between Boston and Philadelphia.  Hopefully he'll also suggest less extreme alternatives but I've yet to see any evidence that you can succeed in America with anything less than a display of total commitment.

Getting good at the new thing

Kevin Kelly recently posted a great essay entitled What You Don't Have To Do.  He sets out hierarchy of ascending levels of 'working smart': -

1. Doing what is required
2. Doing more than is required
3. Trying as many roles as you can in order to discover what you are smart at
4. Making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective or that need to be done at all
5. Do only jobs (that really need to be done) that you are good at doing
6. Doing that work that no one else could do

This is a profoundly elegant understanding of what success looks like.  It's how a good careers have always unfolded: apprentice then journeyman then master.

When I think about those around me in unhappy careers (which is not the same as being in an unhappy workplace) oftentimes there's a disconnect between where someone believes he sits on this ladder and what the employer believes.  You won't be paid a premium to do something only you can do until you prove you can do the things anyone else can do*.   A clear sign that you've gotten this wrong is when your veiled threats about quitting are met with bemusement.  Or relief.  You will only extract a greater cost from your employer if you're operating at Level 6.  The leading lady can shut down production by staying in her trailer.  The extra playing Nervous Inmate #3 cannot.

Having a relatively new career in stand-up comedy to compare with longer ones in pharma consultancy and improv provides me with a natural experiment in this.  As a consultant I'd like to think I operate at Level 5 and occasionally 6; I deliver good work and many clients reckon that only I can do that work.  As a stand-up comic I strive to stay at Level 2 where success on any given night is measured in doing more than simply surviving the show.  But perhaps the bitterest pill to swallow is that even though I'm a 20-year improv veteran (i.e. I started this before consultancy) I'm no more than a solid Level 4.  Whilst I can be relied on to deliver a solid performance, I've never been indispensable to the long-term success of a show.

My proof that this is more than an unusually piquant blend of my standard brew of self-pity and smugness is that whereas I often get unsolicited approaches to do consulting work that is interesting, specialised (and therefore lucrative) in the comedy world I'm just another name on a list.  Without a constant effort keeping my name in front of promoters I don't get gigs.

Nevertheless though hard work and luck I have one aspect of my working life, consulting, where I'm seen as a bit special.   Regardless of what the motivational bloggers say, not everyone has or will ever have that.  The brutal fact is that even sweat and ego-free dedication do not guarantee progression in an adult life.  This is why a late-life career change scares us so: what if we run out of time to actually get good at the new thing?

* Freelancers: replace the phrase 'the employer' with 'the market'.

Not an elephant. Not in the room

I finished up in Seoul on Friday afternoon and will be back in London for dinner with friends on Saturday night. The programme, a 'how to coach' session for a sales team's first line managers (FLM's), went better than I dared expect.  The translation on slides and workbook wasn't risible and whilst interpreters unavoidably lessen my impact this one, despite an unedifying pre-game battle of wills, wasn't too bad.

The long-term efficacy of the session won't be determined by the guys in the room but by the one who wasn't.  The newly appointed National Sales Manager (NSM) didn't grace us with his presence for more than a few minutes over the two days.  The subliminal damage to the supposedly high priority given to my project is potentially fatal.  As engaged as the actual attendees were, some corner of their collective brain registered the absence as commentary of sorts.  When I ran into him in the corridor (the session was staged in the client's offices) he didn't look especially busy and his English was certainly on par with anyone's in the room.  He declined the offer to close the session on Friday afternoon even before the General Manager, a far more assured character, jumped on the opportunity.

I'd say that he's either totally contemptuous of my project or shit-scared of his FLM's.  Manipulating your new boss such that he's wary of you is a necessary skill in many organisations and low-ranking sales managers often hunt as a pack in this regard.  Korean sales teams have an uber-masculine sensibility and the NSM missed the perfect opportunity to assert the necessary alpha male status by either: -

1. Taking total ownership of my ideas, which is of course fine by me; or, 
2. Openly challenging the foreign 'expert' over how little he understood the local market. This would have been less fine but nothing I'm not paid to deal with

Instead he stayed in his office down the hall whilst his subordinates challenged me anyway.  He stayed away, seemingly unnoticed, as his boss loped in and claimed the last word.  To be fair, his is a lovely office.  He should enjoy it while he can.

Full of bile and venom

Last night's sleeplessness, Manila traffic and the ambient chaos of Niño Aquino International Airport had me arrive at the departure gate chock full of bile and venom.

Of the myriad vestigial rituals clinging to 'luxury' travel the procession of interruptions that are supposedly the hallmark of good service pisses me off the most.  As pointless as airline safety demonstrations may be I accept that a legal logic is in play.  But tell me why I must hear from multiple crew members on other topics?  Why is the captain as well as the purser compelled to make an announcement before take-off then again 'once we're airborne'? Why interrupt the inflight entertainment (wishfully claimed as a USP) to tell me that you're going to interrupt me again later?

Am I alone in measuring good service in terms of the least number of staff intrusions? Who was the last person actually pleased by hotel turndown service?  I don't understand the logic: if I'm out I most likely won't notice the alteration in bedlinen when I return.  If I'm in then whatever I'm doing is interrupted whilst I answer the door and say, "No thanks".  Not all porn channels have a pause function you know.

The threat of a hovering proprietor is the main reason I shun the English Bed & Breakfast.  Once you price in the energy expended gushing over the farm fresh eggs and the wasted ten minutes being shown the frankly troubling collection of objets d'art on the mantlepiece that country house hotel down the road looks like a bargain.

But whereas creepy B&B's can be avoided air travel is inevitable.  Scripted platitudes droned out in multiple languages (I've been on Korean Air lately) and of course the seatbelt sign is illuminated before it starts so we can't even bury our ears in headphones.  Any airline that starts from the assumption that I don't need to know by name the captain, first officer, whoever else is assisting them on the flight deck, the person heading up 'my' cabin service team and the rest of the crew will get my business.

Wow. One solitary solid week of travel and I'm whining like Tyler Brûlée.

Pricing jetlag into the fee

1am in Ortigas City, the affluent precinct of Manila where I've been staying since I arrived in the Philippines exactly 72 hours ago.  I'm wide awake and out of Stilnox (aka Ambien).  I've only eaten lightly, used the hotel gym and self-medicating with red wine will only make the waking hours harder.  I'm 50% through the project.  Tomorrow I fly to Seoul to repeat what I've just delivered only this time via a (client-sourced) interpreter who claims, but only when chased, that she still hasn't received my slide presentation.  Interpreters are often hard to deal with and this augers poorly for the rest of the week.

I tell myself to suck it up.  Self-employment means that in the end every problem belongs only to you.  The only sane response is to price interpreter angst and the inevitability of jetlag into the fee.

Being present. In Manila

It's 5am in Manila.

This is the time I usually wake up but jetlag has had me in its throes for about 90 minutes already.  I've doing the calculations: two hours until breakfast with the client, three and a half hours until we start the session and at least 12 hours until we wrap up Day One of this two-dayer.

'Twas always going to be thus.  I got to the Philippines at midnight Saturday and spent all Sunday sleeping and searching out the least sweetened food the hotel had to offer.   I went to the gym and I reviewed the programme.  I gave the project my complete attention.  I was the epitome of professionalism.

This is what business travel is: an exercise in discipline.  And the rules are as obvious as they are simple: don't go crazy at the starch'n'sugar-laden buffet breakfast, say no to (at least some of) the free alcohol, decline those Sunday night drinks with ex-pat pals, don't kid yourself that you can get away with being a tourist for a day.  And never complain about the horrors of the flight or its attendant jetlag.  The job can only really begin once  you've made a connection with your audience.  Why would go out of your way to remind them that you live on the other side of the world?

I have been brought here because I am the best person to communicate certain specific ideas to their people.  If they believe they could achieve the same thing with a local or even Asia-based speaker then I wouldn't be here.  So my goal is simple: minimise all the factors competing for my attention and concentrate all available energy on being present.

Harder than it sounds.  I'll let you know how I get on.

Waiting for a life-changing event

"A lot of farmers," said my brother-in-law, "won't move from their unsustainable farming practices until they have some sort of 'life-changing' event."

We were on a tour of the farm where I grew up in the 70's and 80's that he now runs with my sister and he was lamenting the unenlightened habits of many Australian farmers.  As I've mentioned before, he's an enthusiastic (evangelical) proponent of holistic farming.

I suppose the 'life-changing event' he imagines is some not-quite-fatal event like a heart attack or having the bank seriously question whether the farm's debt should be allowed to roll over.   But as any doctor will tell you non-fatal heart attacks are rarely life-changing.  We're humans and we hold our habits, good and bad, far closer than we'd like to admit.

It is useless to try and reason a man out of something he wasn't reasoned into.

Jonathan Swift

My brother-in-law has it wrong.  The 'life-changing event' he's seeking isn't for the farmer but the farm.  The best hope for changing practices on a given bit of dirt comes with change of ownership through inheritance or sale; and new ideas are far more likely to be trialled under totally new ownership of the asset.

The land we drove over was first used for grazing cattle in 1819 by a man named William Lee who helped build the very earliest road over the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney.  Lee was granted title to something like 60,000 acres in 1832.  Over the years that holding was broken up into smaller properties although the Lee family are still prominent in the district.  My father bought our farm (4300 acres) from the Lees in the early 1960's.  The land has been owned by only two families in the almost 200 years since white settlement reached that part of Australia. Not a lot of scope for 'life-changing events' in that timeline.

It's a great modern example of the most persistent economic unit in history: the family owned and operated farm, reports of whose demise have been greatly exaggerated.  That persistence is borne of an old fashioned mindset; farmers who create a life that serves an asset that will outlive them.  This is at odds with the way that almost everyone in the rich world lives; we build a life that serves the personal needs of our families and ourselves.  We build unremarkable bourgeois lives instead of creating then stewarding some good thing that will outlive us.

As much as we freelancers believe that we're different from the wage slaves we used to be, in this respect we're exactly the same.  Seriously expecting your son to one day take over your web design business is as weird as assuming that he'll ascend to your regional sales manager role.

We have to admit that we're not building assets, just lives, and the best we can hope for is that most bourgeois of aspirations: leaving enough cash in the kitty for our kids to have their choice of futures.

The wages of frustration

I am still in rural NSW at the farm where I grew up.  The weekend was a reunion of sorts for my three sisters, their manifold children and me.  It's taken me a while to adjust to sleeping in the deafening silence of the Australian bush after inner London but that absence of noise is one of the things that I am here to rediscover.

On Saturday my brother-in-law gave me the tour of his cattle-raising business.  He's made a number of quite radical changes to the farm since my father has stepped back.  He and my sister are enthusiastic adherents to a more holistic approach to agriculture that is quite close to hard-core environmentalism in terms of protecting  pastures and (especially) soil quality*.  To this layman's eyes it seems as if they're on the right track but they'll only know for sure after a few hard years of poor rainfall and depressed cattle prices.

It's easy to look good in the good times.

And this is something that I'm not sure that my brother-in-law, a smart, hard-working man, quite gets yet.  An understanding of the meaning of prosperity is hard to come by.  If you take the long view of a business in any established industry (and none are more established than food production) then a trendline will emerge; a sense of what a good operator can reasonably achieve with his particular assets can be established.  I say 'established' because it takes time for these trendlines to solidify; no one knows what the DNA sequencing industry will look like yet.

Many companies and most Headcount: 1 / freelancer types misinterpret prosperity.  If you treat the good things (it rained, my client got a big promotion, I got the part in the hot new movie) as luck or even as 'just rewards for all my hard work' then that prosperity is mispriced: -

The good years must compensate you for the emotional damage wrought by the bad ones

None of us gets to relive those bad years but with more money in our pockets.  We don't get that time back.  Our health and the wellbeing of our relationships with family will inevitably have been damaged by both the frustration of not having succeeded yet and the quiet terror of not knowing if you're actually going to succeed at all.  When you hear that someone's eventual success 'feels hollow' it means that the bad years were 'not worth it' (or mispriced).

Hopefully my brother-in-law has it right.  Like many smart farmers of his generation he is adamant about carving out time for his other passions: his family and campdrafting, a very difficult, peculiarly Australian rodeo event.  But the proof will be in whether or not he manages to keep up these other aspects of his life when beef prices tank and the rain refuses to fall.

The current good season will have to pay for some future time of heartbreak and frustration whether he knows it or not.

* This is not to say that my father didn't have a keen appreciation of the relationship between his agricultural practices and his land.  He did.  However, to an outsider it does seem that the thinking has moved even in the last ten years.  Even though he doesn't use that language, my father was a custodian of his land, which is more than you can say for most farmers in most parts of the world.