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

Erasmus

As I was driving out to visit a brand new client last Thursday I was listening to Melvin Bragg's In Our Time programme on BBC Radio 4.  The topic of the day was the northern Rennaiscance philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) and much was made of the itinerant nature of his early career: -

"(Erasmus) is all over Europe, city after city...  He's always to be found around courts.  He's a great one for collecting patronage..."

And: -

"A lot of the writing is to please people because they are paying for his career..."

Perhaps it was because that morning's meeting was with a roomful of total strangers that the description so resonated.  Is there a better description of a consultant, or of any successful seller of financial services, than someone on and off airplanes, city after city, collecting the patronage of those who can pay for our careers?  Like Erasmus I am paid by the modern princes of Europe to be clever.  Nothing gives me greater confidence than knowing that the big boss wants the project to go ahead with my involvement.

But let's not stretch the comparison too far.  Erasmus fought a vicious, losing war of words with Martin Luther over the soul of the Catholic church and the fate of Europe whereas I help drug companies sell their drugs better.

Still, about halfway through that meeting someone described me as a 'thought leader', which was a nice thing for him to say.

Update on 2012-02-19 05:47 by Stewart

During the week a learned friend questioned the parallel with Erasmus and rightfully so.  With barely suppressed bemusement he pointed out that there aren't a great many points of comparison between the career of one of the foundation thinkers of Western thought and that of a jobbing management consultant circa 2012.

What I was trying to explore was that for those who think for a living the importance of patronage hasn't changed much in 500 years.  There's a stark difference in getting work out of an organisation where the big boss likes my way of thinking and one where he or she is indifferent.  For any project to proceed the very least we external suppliers need is the absence of a veto.  If the big boss dislikes what you do then any additional time and energy spent trying to change that is most likely a sunk cost.

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.

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'.

Earning attention

At his non-rambling best Merlin Mann is one of my favourite contemporary online writer-thinkers.  Lately he's been energetically promoting the idea that what counts in life is not so much where we spend our time or money but rather where we focus our attention.

Every professional performer has endured the experience of a paying audience getting bored and talking through your act: -

Even after they've given you their time and money you still have to earn your audience's attention

The signals that you've yet to earn that attention are pretty blatant if you know what you're looking for.  My first corporate theatre gig, which was also my first paid work after I quit the marketing department of Coca-Cola, was a morning of team building for some long since subsumed Sydney freight company.  The maiden outing of Alternative Corporate Training Services (aka 'ACTS')* was in mid-December 1991 and the job had been a long time coming.  Our show used improv techniques to teach teamwork to corporate types but we'd really just been hired to make the group laugh for an hour whilst they set up for Christmas lunch in the room next door.  I have three distinct memories of that afternoon: -

1. There was no air conditioning so it was stifling.  It was Sydney in December and our hour was the only thing between the group and a fridge full of icy beer
2. We took the 'stage' (read: walked to the space at the front) to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer version of Fanfare to the Common Man.  The idea was the entrance would be epic but as the venue had no sound desk we'd brought along an old boom-box, which I had to clunk on then hold above my head from the back of the room
3. As we started the MD, who hadn't signed off on our appearance, sat at the foremost table took out a massive mobile phone and ostentatiously placed it in front of him

The signal was as clear as day: you have my attention but only for as long as no one (anyone) from the outside world wants it.  The amateurishness of our entrance, our visible lack of self-belief and even our dumb company name meant we hadn't earned the right to ask him to switch off his phone.  Everyone in the room knew it and our gig went downhill from there.

There's a moment with every audience when you have to 'get them'.  If that point in time passes without you earning the room's attention you will struggle thereafter.  The same rule applies with absolutely every kind of audience; a target market of prescribing doctors, an electorate or an online community.

That day in 1991 we stumbled through the hour by dropping the team building message and playing for laughs, which is all they wanted anyway.  They paid us in cash and we went directly to the Chinese restaurant up the road and spent the entire fee on our own boozy Christmas lunch.  Late that afternoon our pager beeped (we shared the one between us) and a booking agent offered us a gig at a January kick-off event.  At that second, boom-boxless, gig we earned the attention of the room and ACTS-CORPRO-Instant Theatre-Dramatic Change went on from there.

* Because we were a theatre group.  Geddit?  No?  Anyone? This was the first of our dumb company names.  After that we went for CORPRO Productions ('Corporate Impro') before getting to Instant Theatre then Dramatic Change

Something bigger than a career

A few years ago in the context of showbiz careers I mused as follows: -

Isn't a successful career just one where you do what you love until you don't have to do it any more?

As I get ready to leave the farm I how this thought might apply to owner-operator agriculture.  Farmers' bodies wear out quicker than most and yet as in Australia 50% will die within five years of retirement, quitting doesn't seem to be much of an option.  If you stay you wear out.  If you leave you die anyway.

'Secession planning' is a growing industry in the bush as smart farmers look to 'step back' and hand the business over to the next generation whilst still retaining some small role for themselves instead of selling the business outright before heading to the coast to die.  Done properly this is a way to extend the enterprise past 40-50 years but done badly it turns into a defensive exercise in personal survival that mortgages the prospects of the next generation.

The critical issue is in the word 'career'.  Your career terminates when you do.  Whereas a successful business is a bigger thing that can (should) outlast you.  Headcount: 1 enterprises are careers that die with us; they can no more be handed on to the next generation than an actor can bequeath her role in a sitcom to her daughter.

The difference is in the asset mix.  Farms must be 'asset-heavy' to flourish whereas any career based on personal talent can function 'asset-light'.  Successful consultants, actors, writers and the like take the fruits of their labours and buy real estate whereas ambitious farmers buy more land, stock and equipment.

This is probably obvious to anyone except a farmer's son who chose to use his brains to make his way in the world rather than stay at home and build a life based on his brains, physical effort and the farm where he grew up.

35 & unhappy at work?

How long does it take to get good at something? I mean genuinely properly world-class good? Good enough for the world to beat a path to your door. Good enough for you to consistently exceed the expectations of that world when it does.

The answer sort of depends on your chosen field but usually the answer is: -

Longer than you'd like

And certainly longer than every Internet self-help guru who says that whatever your age, all you've got to do is want something badly enough and put enough time aside for your ascent to be automatic. Even if you go buy some shiny Apple products to help you along the way.

Can we be honest? There are few fields of endeavour that you can enter for the first time at 35 years of age and make it to the very top. Even fewer at 40.

The obvious example is anything that requires extreme physical performance; only the deluded expect to become professional athletes after about 25.

But there are barriers even in seemingly non-ageist careers like Law when you do the maths. If you're going to start studying Law at 35 you're about five years away from actually practising and, unless you're truly exceptional, your chances of making partner at a Magic Circle firm are zero. At 40 you won't have the stamina to put in the hours required of an Associate. Of course you may still end up with a job that you love but can you honestly clock up the hours to get genuinely good?

Besides which, does the world really need another lawyer?

I've long envied those contemporaries who just knew what they were going to do in life. It gave them an internal consistency that translates into a massive career advantage. Early on they got called unimaginative and dull but as the years go by their ascents have come to be seen as inexorable.

I am not that person. Never was. I was the clever kid who, when told that he can achieve anything he wanted in life, believes it a little too much. Intoxicated by the possibility of everything led to years of focusing on nothing. Only in the past few years have I reconciled myself to the fact that I will never ascend to the top of any organisation because I've never shown the slightest loyalty to one.

People like me are plagued by the F Scott Fitzgerald observation that 'American lives have no Second Acts'. So plagued that often we never getting around to having a First Act.

So here's my tip: -

If you reach 35 unsuccessful and unhappy then you need to think very hard before cutting all ties with everything that's gone before in order to invent yourself anew. No matter how much you pretend to be a twentysomething just starting out it'll be clear to the world that you're older (but not wiser)

Any choice you make from now until retirement has to be informed by what you've done before, no matter how unsuccessful or unsatisfying it was. A change of direction is okay. As is a change of emphasis or company or country. All of these can be made to fit a narrative. What makes most sense is tracking down the coolest company in the world that does what you do now and taking a paycut to be there. Relocate at your own expense if you have to.

But that Brand New Thing that you've always liked the idea of doing? Well, sooner or later you need to accept that there's a real reason why it remains undone. 35 is about that time.

If my comedy was going to put me on TV it would have done so by now. But I would've had to have been monomaniacal in that pursuit from about 23 onwards and I wasn't. Now I'm 43.

I'm 43 and I'm writing this on a plane to Vienna where I have to make a lunchtime presentation before flying to Stockholm for a dinner with a different client. Neither company is the slightest bit surprised by my workload or my promiscuity. They value me and accept that others value me also. After all, I've been doing this gig (consulting to the health care industry) for fifteen years. I've earned the right to charge what I charge. Every day I set out to re-earn that right.

I acknowledge that I left it pretty damn late in starting my First Act. I also acknowledge that whatever I do next must be an extension on those last fifteen years, an elaboration at best. A complete departure would be a negation of all of that and be like diving back into a poolful of hungry twentysomething sharks.

I have accepted that in every other endeavour I will be no more than an enthusiastic, if perhaps gifted, amateur.

If you want to successfully change your life at 35 try re-reading your resume before burning it.

Strong ties

Last October Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker about the strengths and limitations of Twitter and other forms social media. He compares the (successful) American civil rights movement of the 1960's with the (generally unsuccessful) colour revolutions of the last few years.

Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist

Gladwell's argument is that Facebook and Twitter are all very well for establishing the 'weak ties' that are great for disseminating information but no replacement for the 'strong tie' relationships needed to ferment political change. Tweeting your dislike of the government is not the same as occupying Tahrir Square. Friends are only of use to you if they're by your side. You need to bear witness to each others' commitment.

High-risk activism... is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

So what we know can be expanded by 'weak ties' whereas what we do is rarely influenced in that way.

Last week I was in Birmingham helping a client refine their strategy for a new breast cancer treatment. The sales team has successfully established almost universal awareness of the product but the number of actual sales (prescriptions) has been disappointing. Cancer is a grim business and oncologists are thus quite conservative. Whilst no one wants to be the last person to start using a new therapy neither does anyone want to be first. This leads to chicken-and-egg scenarios, which is where my client finds itself.

The sales team is frustrated by doctors' reticence to make what they see is a very low-risk change to prescribing. Every rep I spoke to believes passionately in the product but that's just what they're paid for. They don't have any 'skin in the game'; no pharma rep will ever get the 3am call saying that a terminally ill woman has been admitted to hospital with an unexpected side effect that no one on staff has any experience of handling yet.

So what can my client do to get this group to act differently (ie start prescribing the drug)? By discovering and cultivating any 'strong tie' relationships that exist between the less conservative members of the population. The sales team has to act on the answers to two questions...

1. Which doctors out there believe in our product?
2. How do we connect them; first to each other and then to everyone else?

This is a well-established path in pharma marketing. The client will stage a series of educational meetings where less believing customers are given the chance to bear witness to the testimony of their peers. As non-peers, the sales team's role in all of this is peripheral; they have no real role in these 'strong tie' relationships. Frequently they get in the way at the worst possible time.

On the flipside of my life Andrew Watts is starting up a comedy club in the wilds of Wiltshire. He's been musing over best way of promoting what will undoubtedly be a consistently high quality night. Hopefully he'll dodge the all-too-common reliance on facilities like Facebook and Twitter to drag in the punters.

It's no Tahrir Square but many people find the idea of a night of going to live comedy stressful. The most cited reason for this is a terror of being singled out / picked on. I suspect that this is a polite misplacement; the larger, usually unspoken fear is that the acts will just suck. A night spent in deep sympathy for an audibly sweating twentysomething comic dying in an otherwise silent room is a highly unpalatable prospect.

One of the hallmarks of a (newly) successful comedy night in a rural or even provincial setting is a large number of group bookings. In Gladwell's parlance this is a 'strong tie' phenomenon in action; punters are less likely to view the night as stressful and so more likely to attend if encouraged to go as a group.

My advice to Watts is to offer a heavy discount for larger group bookings, at least in the early days. Once punters have come to the opinion that it's a quality night their stress level will dissipate and they're much more likely to return in twos and threes.

Of course it'll also help if he doesn't book comics whose acts rely on picking on the more unfortunate looking individuals in the crowd. That sort of behaviour's the height of rudeness down Devizes way.

The patron saint of Australian expats

This is a bittersweet time of year for expats, especially those of us from the Southern Hemisphere and if we have a patron saint it is Clive James.  I was given his wonderful Unreliable Memoirs for Christmas years ago and its influence is obvious.

The second volume covers James' relocation to England and it ends thusly: - 

As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the City of London.  Down there in the street I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other.  In Sydney Harbour, twelve thousand miles away and ten hours from now, the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires.  It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back.  All in, the whippy's taken.  Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection.  It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home. 

Next year in Sydney?*

*With apologies to the Seder

The attractions of improv

A new American online literary magazine called The Point has a piece about the improv scene in New York.  The type of show that it describes ('The Harold') is an established 'Chicago-style' format that is well-known in North America but rarely done well in other places.

For the last month I've been taking 'Harold' classes with David Shore, a highly credentialed Canadian teacher-performer.  There are enough genuine variations in what the format demands from what I know already to warrant some formal teaching on the matter.  I've enjoyed myself.  Whether there's a place for the Harold in the crowded London comedy-theatre market is the bigger question.

There are between 12 and 15 of us at any given class and quite a range in experience, ambition and accomplishment.  With twenty-plus years of performing under my belt I'm one of the two 'oldest' in both improv and planetary terms.  The make-up of the group is almost identical to that of the first Theatresports class I took with Lyn Pierse.  Looking around the room is like looking at a mirror image of my younger self.  Even more so than other forms of comedy, improv are overwhelmingly white, middle class and degree educated, although there is now less of a bias against female performers, especially when compared to stand-up.

It's the motivations that haven't changed.  They're the same in New York and London in 2010 as they were for me in Sydney in 1990: -

They came to the city after college to discover themselves, to become individuals. At some point in those first few months they needed work and they got their first gig as a caterer or their first glimpse of real-life corporate culture.  Do you remember that moment?  The surprise at seeing actual cubicles?  The dronelike aspect of people just a few years older than you?  The humiliation of eating at your own desk?  It’s a culture of boredom.  Everyone seems to be wearing a false face.  Spontaneity is almost actively discouraged.  You realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy it is to be meaningless— even to be successful and meaningless.  It is a world most of us want to backpedal away from, but don’t know how.  And then somehow the unicycle of improv comes wobbling by.  Is it any wonder we leap on it?

I can still show you the exact seat I sat in Belvoir St Theatre the first time I went to a Sunday night Theatresports show.  I can tell you exactly who was in the cast and even the content of some of the scenes.  On Monday morning I got up and went off to my marketing job at Unilever but nothing was ever the same again.

A fool and his time are easily parted

Over 50% of all American teens see themselves as 'content providers'.  Seth Godin exhorts his acolytes to above all else 'ship' (i.e. focus on the act of completing a project rather than its quality).  500 shows at the Edinburgh were free.  Prosumer technology abounds.  This August Twitter had 96 million unique users.

We are all producers now.  The financial cost of entry to a vast array of creative endeavours is approaching zero which means every moment we're not at work we're on the horns of a dilemma: -

Do I spend the next hour consuming someone else's creativity or producing my own?

But if you're serious about being self-employed in a creative field then this zero sum game should haunt your every waking moment.

Unless you're actively working on a sitcom script then watching Arrested Development reruns isn't 'research' its 'leisure'.  This is fine provided you label it as such.  Same with reading your favourite Blogs instead of writing your own or slipping into the back of a gig when you told yourself you'd be writing new material.  A stand-up comic on the UK circuit can even convince himself that time spent on Facebook is a bit like work.  Time spent reading this Blog is time you're not creating something worthwhile.

Likewise time spent writing it.  There's a hierarchy of creative activities:-

- a Tweet is not that Blog post
- a Blog post is not that new joke
- a new joke is not that sitcom pitch
- a sitcom pitch is not that novel or short story or screenplay or business plan

A fool and his time, etc.

Trent Reznor: comedy prophet?

Big thanks to Bob Slayer for his comment on my Doug Stanhope entry.  He directed me to an excellent piece by Trent Reznor (aka Nine Inch Nails) that offers advice to the 'new / unknown artist' looking to get into the music industry.  The piece takes the broad Kevin Kelly / Chris Anderson ideas around what technology now forces you to give away: -

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site 

And what you can do about it: -

what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan

All of which is Kelly / Anderson / Godin gospel with the added impact that it's coming from the guy who gave us Closer.

Of course I'm unlikely to agree with Bob that I don't understand Stanhope.  I get what he does as comedian and I'm happy to believe that on his day he does it unbelievably well.  But he didn't bring his A-Game the night I saw him in London.  And it's a really dumb gig to drag your wife along to.

I think that Bob's real point was that Doug Stanhope is also interesting because he's a comedian who's gained control of his marketing in a way analogous to Reznor's advice above.  This is something that we all really need to understand.  If you'd asked me a year ago I would have said that the comedy business is different enough from the music industry that Reznor's rules don't apply then along comes Bo Burnham and it seems that comedy is just like music only more so.  This is a guy who can generate 12 million You Tube hits and then storm it at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.  Apart from anything else, Burnham looks like he's having more fun than everyone else out there still jumping through competition hoops*.

The only way to get ahead on any stand-up scene is to give your stuff away.  Unpaid gigs are the only way new comics get stage time and they resent the hell out of the fact.  Career nirvana for a comic is the day you do your last unpaid (non-charity) gig.

Maybe we've got it all wrong.  Maybe the problem with most comedians' careers is not that they've given away too much free comedy but too little.

* A happy byproduct of competitions like FHM is that they attract genuinely funny friends of mine like Andrew Watts and Catie Wilkins both of whom blog hilariously well about the experience.

Image-making vs. Rent-paying

Sir Paul Smith is unarguably the most successful post-war British men's fashion designer.  He started out as a one-man-operation in the 70's in the back streets of Nottingham before being discovered by the likes of Led Zeppelin.  Last year his global sales were around £350M and he seems to be surviving the financial downturn better than most.

Last Monday The Independent ran a profile piece that gave me much food for thought.  His thoughts on the right attitude for starting your own business struck a chord: -

"I meet a lot of young designers now and they're so talented but they lack the life skills you need to make money.  When I started my clothes were quite particular and I knew I wouldn't sell a lot, so I only opened on Fridays and Saturdays. For the rest of the week I rolled up my sleeves and did shitty jobs – styling, or just borrowing a mate's Transit van to go selling suits – so I could keep the shop pure. So many people today only want the purity and wonder why they go bankrupt. You've got to have a balance between image-making and rent-paying."

I love his dichotomy between image-making and rent-paying and his blueprint for surviving tough times is wonderfully simple: -

Graft, honesty, humility – and good manners.

This applies as much to management consultants, bankers and corporate lawyers as it does to fashion designers and stand-up comics.

Seniority v Talent

Last night I caught up with David Shore, an amazingly talented Canadian improviser who's relocated to London.  He is an alumnus of the mainstage shows at The Second City, Toronto and Improv Olympic (IO) West in LA and his move here is great news for the UK scene.

Both Second City and IO have well established highly formalised improv training schemes that produce some of North America's best comedic talents and generate massive sums of money along the way.  London has nothing like it.  People get into improv in the UK either through the traditional drama schools such as RADA and Guildhall, through university troupes like the Oxford Imps or via a myriad of classes being run in school halls and dance studios all over London every weekend.  Potentially there's a gap in the market for a London equivalent to these great American institutions.

Certainly there's money to be made and therein lies the rub: that money will be made not in ticket sales but rather through the classes: -

More students = more money

Only a small percentage of those who sign up for improv classes should ever be put on a stage in front of a paying audience.  Certainly there are many corollary benefits to such classes in terms of creativity, life skills and so on but there is a clear need to manage the expectations of each student.  There are plenty of people who will pay good money to lock into a system where seniority supposedly trumps talent.  The North American schools are generally pretty good at selling the classes without an implicit promise of 'stage time' because unless they maintain the quality of their mainstage shows then sooner or later it all falls apart.

Bad mainstage shows = fewer famous alumni = less students = less money

Sydney Theatresports, where I was trained, went into precisely this sort of downward spiral about ten years ago and it's never quite recovered.  Some of our senior people began to see the classes as an income stream rather than a way to reinvigorate our performing company with fresh talent.

An interesting metric might be this: -

The total amount a student pays from first class to first performance

In 1990 I took my first class.  It cost me $3 (three dollars).  After five classes I was onstage at the legendary Belvoir Street Theatre.  My intake included lots of writers, comics, cabaret performers as well as the usual teachers, plumbers and lawyers.

Ten years later my equivalent was paying as much as $1500 before playing to a paying audience.  That 9900% increase drove out everyone but the lawyers and teachers.  Not only were the classes drawing from a smaller pool of potential students but the sheer enormity of the fees led to increased pressure on the system to cast every graduating student in a mainstage show regardless of actual talent.  We ended up with overpopulated casts full of people who only loved the idea of performing.  Even at a distance it was obvious that they weren't having any fun on stage.  No one pays to watch that and our audiences fell further.

So does David start by staging the best possible shows with performers already on London scene in order to attract more talented students or does he start from scratch, relying on his considerable reputation to fill classes and then launch his style of improv with performers made in his own image?

A bullet dodged

Recently I endured one of the strangest meetings of my consultancy career.

It began with an email from an ex-client who was now an account manager with one of the most successful pharmaceutical advertising agencies in Europe.  She had a client whose product was facing some specific strategic challenges that she felt I could help resolve.  Given our history I was confident she had a realistic idea of what my company does and specific thoughts as to how I might be able to help her help her client.  Could I come in for a pitch meeting?

When an agency this big calls you take the meeting.

It was scheduled for 930am a few Friday's ago at the agency’s lovely Home Counties offices and to run for ‘ninety minutes, two hours at the outside’.  As requested I customised my basic credentials presentation to hone in on the product’s current needs by highlighting some successful work with other products facing similar challenges.

In a pre-meeting she’d stressed that Charlie, the client in question, was sometimes a bit unpredictable and hard to handle.  That she’d insisted on a formal pre-meeting should have been red flag enough.

I arrived my usual fifteen minutes early to be told that Charlie, also travelling out from London, would be about thirty minutes late.  I chatted with my ex-client and her colleague when a few minutes after 10am a secretary announced that Charlie had arrived but was outside having a smoke.  The other account manager was describing a long overdue beach holiday she is taking next month when he appeared,

Holiday?  Who said that you could take a holiday?  I never signed off on that.

 Charlie wore a golf shirt, jeans and ancient trainers.  Without shaking hands or acknowledging me he threw himself in a chair and announced that he was late because he’d been up all night watching the General Election.  We got a short yet impassioned lecture about the inequities of the first-past-the-post electoral system and then turned on me, 

What’s he doing in a suit?

Before I could respond he waved his own comment away.  I handed over a business card which he tossed unread on the table next to his BlackBerry and cigarettes.  My contact said a few words and handed the meeting over to me.  I began to begin when he interrupted, 

Is he going to stand the whole time?

I was. 

I’d really prefer it if you’d sit down.

I declined.

I’d be using flipcharts and so on and he’d get a far better idea about what my company offered far more easily if he just let me do what I normally do.  He snorted but let me get on with the presentation.

I made it as far as Slide 2 before he interrupted again.  This time he wasn’t objecting per se but rather commenting on the way I was constructing my argument, 

I can see what you’re trying to do here.  It’s not going to work.

He lasted two more slides before declaring that he ‘got’ what I was trying to do but what was I going to do for him?  I negotiated my way through another six or so slides to the point where I move from what my company offers to hone in specifically on the client’s challenges.  And I really do mean ‘negotiate’; after each slide Charlie had to be told to hold his question as the issue raised was addressed always on the next slide.  Finally I picked up a marker pen, turned to the flipchart and asked my usual question, 

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

Charlie immediately left the room for a cigarette.  When he returned ten minutes later I repeated my question,

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

There isn't one.

All I'm trying to understand is where the product should be positioned and define that in terms of the patient that the product will help.”

My next slide outlined a few parameters to help the discussion. 

You don’t understand.  No one knows where to position the product.  I've been in pharma for twenty-five years and I’ve never see anything like this.  It’s impossible.

I’d read the research and it didn’t seem impossible to me.  The product was currently getting low-level usage in one major European market but not in the right type of patient to sustain long-term growth.  I told Charlie I wasn’t talking about how to position the product; we’d get to that later, but simply where it should be positioned.  That is, for which sort of patient.

 That’s the problem.  It’s a extremely complicated area of medicine and no one can say where it should be positioned.

What does the clinical data say?

It says we can be used anywhere in the disease area.”

Okay let’s start with this; how many prescriptions do you need a year to make budget?

He named a figure (which I knew already). 

Then as I understand the disease area, that means we have to avoid pigeonholing the product for last line use because the epidemiology shows us that there aren’t enough eligible patients in that ‘last line cohort’?  Coincidentally this is the only place you’re currently getting sales.

I see what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to say where we should tell the market where the product should be used.

That’s what positioning is, Charlie, that’s exactly what I was trying to do. 

There’s no point.  The sales team isn't smart enough to follow a strategy as complicated as that.

Let’s leave the sales team out of the mix for the moment and start with the customer; where do the doctors want the product used?

I obviously didn’t understand enough about the product.  That was certainly true; at the start of the meeting I’d given myself permission to ask naïve questions.

Charlie responded by likening the challenges he faced in his market to the launch of the blockbuster antidepressant Prozac.  I told him I found analogies to be of limited benefit.  Why didn’t he instead walk me through the actual issues facing his own product in a way that I could understand and we’d take it from there? 

I find it easier to use this analogy when explaining to people about my product as it keeps things simple.  It’s not just you.  I do this all the time with our sales team.

The point of his Prozac analogy was that the drug represented a game-changing technological advance that created a multibillion-dollar market overnight.  He felt strongly that his product should do the same.  Prozac hadn’t been niched, which was why it was so successful.  And wasn’t that what positioning was?  Niching by another name?  He suggested that we dwell on this wisdom whilst he stepped out for another cigarette.

Need I say that his product was no Prozac?

Around we went.  Every time I proposed a positioning Charlie rebutted it with either another ridiculous analogy, by ‘reminding’ me of a piece of data that he’d hitherto neglected to mention or just by leaving to smoke.

At 1230pm I said I was mindful that it was now Friday afternoon and that I had enough information to put together a costed proposal which he’d get by the middle of next week.  I started to pack up my things, as did the account managers. 

Wait a minute.  What's going on here? I didn’t say that anyone could leave.

I said that had a teleconference scheduled with another client. He demanded that I postpone it, which I duly managed to do (thank god for sane clients).

I don’t have anything else on this afternoon so I want us all to stay here and keep going until we work this thing out.

After we went around the analogy/previously unmentioned data/cigarette loop another time I’d had enough, 

Charlie, I think that three hours is more than long enough for a pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting?  Who said anything about this being a pitch meeting?

It said so on my first slide.

(One of only seven you saw you boor.) 

No, you should know that I don’t waste my time with pitch meetings.  If the girls here say that you’re the right guy for the job then that’s good enough to work for me.

Well, we haven't agreed terms yet and I'm not prepared to share any more of my IP until we get that sorted.  Anyway I still have to make that other call.

I said my goodbyes and left.  My ex-client walked me out, apologising the entire way to the car, 

He knew damn well it was only a pitch.  I told him a dozen times.

The following week I fired off a brief proposal that included a ballpark budget that ignored his request for a discount ‘because we’d never worked together before’.

And that, of course, was the end of the matter.

***

Charlie was a walking Petri dish of insecurity.  Everything he said or did amounted to an ironclad guarantee that he would be a nightmare to work with.  Except that in Charlieworld I wouldn’t be working with him, I’d be working for him.

The ways in which Charlie would be a poor client fall into three broad categories: (a) his inability to engage in Marketing 101; (b) his total lack of respect for anyone inside his business, but most of all (c) the aggressive status games presumably played to mask the first two shortcomings.  The specific behaviours that bother me fell under one of those three headings: - 

Deficit in Marketing

• Hypnotised by the complexity of the product and unwilling (unable?) to see that the marketing still needs to be simple


• Overuse of banal analogies to avoid engagement in the actualities of his own market


• Opting to make a show of positioning the product ambitiously if unrealistically but without any real plans to assist the sales team in establishing this in the field 

Lack of Respect

• Seeing the sales team as stupid


• Antagonistic towards the rest of his organisation.  I got a sense that Charlie’s vociferous support for a project would immediately damn it in the eyes of everyone else.  What good would that do my long-term prospects within his organisation?


• Wanting the whole project to be prohibitively difficult as that might excuse the ambiguous positioning and correspondingly poor sales results to follow 

Status Games

• The relationship with the two (female) agency account managers totally ignored their expertise


• Withholding information from a potential supplier (me).  Of course I didn’t know the data as well as he did, but I resented the implication that I was incompetent rather than newer to the project


• Leaving the room to smoke every time the discussion put him under any sort of pressure


• Dressed so casually as to be dismissive of everyone else in the room


• Actually lying about his understanding of the nature of the meeting

***

So like the title says, a bullet dodged.  If there was an upside it was that I got to bond with the account managers over the experience and that just might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Ideas, opportunity, time & capital

Any new enterprise requires a combination of ideas, opportunity, time and capital.  The absence of one or an unsympathetic proportion between the four and sooner or later the venture will fail.

Last week's travel hassles had me cooling my heels in Singapore, hanging out with old mates and getting a taste of the comfortable expat lifestyle that a career in Asian dealmaking affords.   I found myself thinking, "I could handle this. The great food, warm weather, access to amazing cities and a chance to be situated near the centre of the next economic revolution."

But could I handle it?  Is there a niche in the turbocharged Asian environment for a Headcount: 1 player?  No one of my personal acquaintance is genuinely and successfully playing with his own capital in Asia.  I can name half a dozen people who've fallen in love with this or that island in Thailand or Indonesia and who are the proud (part-) owners of overgrown building sites rapidly receding into the jungle.  The real game in Asia is either resource extraction or building those big things that only governments and huge consortia can afford to pay for.  Tapping into that world is what gets you that cool Singapore lifestyle.

I doubt that a market yet exists in Asia for my sort of sales/marketing insights.  I've delivered a couple of projects a year across the region over the last five years but in every case the client was the Western-run global or regional office.  I've never had a local manager contact me for unsolicited follow-up work. This lack of bottom-up demand speaks volumes; I don't mind taking occasional money in the name of global harmonisation but to be successfully based in Asia I'd need demand directly from Asian offices.  No amount of time, capital or great ideas will compensate for the lack of on-the-ground opportunity.

As I write I'm sitting in Zurich en route from Singapore to Germany.  I bet that there are at least a dozen men and women just like me in this airport right now; self-employed, small-shop consultants specialising in semi-soft skills. Each of us happily making a living without needing to conquer all of Europe to do so.