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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a very long time between drinks

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

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

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

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

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

This is not a complaint

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

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

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

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

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

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.

House of Lies

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

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

The peculiar pressure on farmers

I'm on my way back to London after ten days in Australia, most of which was spent on the farm where I grew up in central NSW.  The focus of the business is mostly cattle and I spent the week lending a hand as it's weaning season.  I'd like to think that I haven't forgotten everything I knew about working in cattle yards and I don't think I totally embarrassed myself.

Farming, or more specifically what is called 'grazing' in Australia (ie producing food from livestock not crops) is a strange business because the only thing that you can definitely count on is that something will go wrong.  The scale of the setback can range from minor inconvenience of, say, a cow barrelling through a fence and away from the herd, to existential crises such as bushfire or an outbreak of foot and mouth.  Last week it was the cumulative effect of the minor things that struck me most.

You make your livelihood working with massive animals which, if they could be said to have any sort of agenda, have no earthly reason to make life easy for you.  Why should they?  At some stage they or their offspring will be sold as meat.  Of course whatever sentience a cow has stops along way short of this but they instinct tells them that humans are to be feared.  Luckily this means that mostly they run away from you.  Mostly but not always.

On a good day the things that go wrong are minor irritants.  Locating the newborn calf that was separated from its mother during the move is a annoying but rewarding part of the job.  It's sort of the rural parallel of the document that didn't get backed up.  Time and energy will be needed to rectify the situation.  The difference is in the timeliness.  The longer the document us left the more times and energy will be required to rectify the problem.  Still, not much truly suffers if it isn't until Monday that the document is rewritten and resent.  If the newborn calf is left that long it will die cruelly.

On a good day the entire herd runs through the gates and into yards in a smooth and orderly way.  Nothing jumps a fence or barrels past you as you're drafting.  The drenching or marking or whatever you're doing goes well and you get home yourself at a reasonable time.  There aren't that many good days.  Something always cocks up and yet again you're finishing work in the dark.  This is why no one working with livestock is ever consistently on time.  It isn't because they haven't organised their worklives as well as office workers but rather because the environment is that much more haphazard.

The management consultant who declares that human beings to be 'the most unpredictable of all animals' has never had to anticipate exactly how a distraught cow will act when she hears her calf bellowing from two paddocks over.

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 peak of everything

Jean-Claude Carriere is possibly the most famous scriptwriter you've never heard of.  Since the 1960's he's lived a sort of Zelig-like existence, collaborating with some of the best and more interesting film and theatre directors of the last fifty years; Milos Forman, Luis Bunuel, Philip Kaufmann, Peter Brook and Jean-Luc Goddard.

I recently came across in old NYT love-piece from 1988 that describes Carriere driving across the Seine with the photographer Robert Doisneau (y'know, this guy): -

Carrière gazes through the windshield at the soft outlines of the fog-shrouded buildings. “J’aime bien ça,” he says contentedly. 

“That’s because you’re starting to get old,” Doisneau replies. “When you’re young you see only the details. When you grow up, you see both the details and the whole. That’s the peak of everything, it’s what you’ve lived for. When you get old, you forget about the details and see only the whole.”

Nice to think I feel that I might be at an age when I can see the details and the whole at once.

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.

Desperate times, desperate measures

The question of whether American drug reps are salespeople or robots is back to the Supreme Court.  If the suit is successful then the pharmaceutical industry will owe its (former) employees many millions of dollars in unpaid overtime.

This is a natural consequence of Big Pharma viciously downsizing its sales teams at the end of the blockbuster era.  The companies have no choice but to shed all these jobs but as the entire industry is contracting their laid-off employees can pursue this overtime claim with impunity.  There aren't enough new jobs emerging in the industry so there's no reward for not being labelled a troublemaker who went after this additional cash.  If you're not going to get another gig anyway you might as well try for whatever you can get?

Structural change.  Boy, I don't know...*

* With apologies to Aaron Sorkin

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.

Do unto others...

Over the years and around the world I've worked with many of the major pharmaceutical companies but for whatever reason I haven't often crossed paths with Pfizer.  As such my impressions of the world's largest pharma company has usually been that of their competitors.

For over twenty years Pfizer has been the most ruthlessly single-minded marketing outfit in the industry.  By flooding doctors' offices with legions of undertrained reps, often as many as eight per territory for a single product, it sold good drugs (Lipitor, Viagra) in a bad way.  This successful focus on 'share of voice' triggered an arms race wherein every company selling a product in Primary Care had to proliferate sales reps or else be elbowed out of the doctor's mind.  This deluge of drug reps selling poorly differentiated products by parroting two or three key messages with scant regard for a prescriber's clinical needs has destroyed the industry's claim to be a partner in the fight against disease.  Most doctors now see the industry not as a partner but as an enemy and Pfizer's 'share of voice' strategy is a major cause of this shift.

As I said, I've not done much work for Pfizer but I've often been brought in to help prepare a defensive response to an upcoming Pfizer launch into a given market.  Even in specialty care fields like oncology there's a perception that Pfizer will enter the fray with a massive sales/marketing investment dispatched with a discipline that feels like violence.  All of those barroom laments at sales conferences about the underhanded things done by 'the other guy' are usually about the Pfizer rep.

This ruthlessness goes way beyond the hurly-burly of a couple of reps scrambling after a prescription in a suburban clinic somewhere in America.  Pfizer has effectively declared war on the government of New Zealand by demanding that Pharmac, the highly effective regulatory body charged with controlling the country's drug costs, be neutered in the name of an impending Free Trade Agreement.  Admittedly Pfizer isn't acting alone here and so far the NZ government has stood its ground but this story has a way to run yet.

You could argue that Pfizer really isn't any different from any of the other players (i.e. my clients); just a little more focused on the bottom line and a little more eager to adopt practices that will hurt the entire industry in the long term.

I disagree.  Lipitor, the largest selling drug of all time, is now off patent and in pursuit of this bottom line Pfizer is devouring the very people who drove that success.  I can just about stomach the job cuts because we could all see those coming; although this is cold comfort to the 16,300 employees losing their jobs in the coming weeks.  What I wasn't aware of was Pfizer's longer-term move to cap (American) retiree health benefits at $11,700 p.a. despite the cost of the policy being over $22,000 and rising.  The ex-employee pays the rest.  According to the Placebo Effect blog this will save the company about $534 million a year.  When Pfizer's sucked you dry it really does just discard the husk and move on.

The only justifiable stance the pharma industry has ever been able to take was set out by George Merck in 1950: -

We try never to forget that medicine is for the people.  It is not for the profits.  The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear.  The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been. 

In pursuit of profits Pfizer has thrown so much under the bus; the one-to-one relationship with the doctor, the collegiate nature of the industry, its world class research centres in Kent and Michigan and its own employees, past and present.  Its decline from industry dominance is not to be lamented.

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.

Cold-calling a falling man

In these straitened times every client of mine is under pressure all the time.  The cultures of every pharma company pulse with implicit threat: -

Do more with less.  Do it sooner.  Do it right the first time or else...

Some days all of this makes self-employment feel a little better.  It feels as though I have more control over my destiny.  Arrant nonsense, of course, as there's nothing like a job scare to encourage a sales team to attempt a little DIY training.

This pressure on expenses is doubly felt by the pharmaceutical industry; not only is the sector going through the same GFC as everyone else but it faces a systemic threat in the number of hugely popular products that are coming off patent.  A branded medication can expect to lose as much as 80% of its sales within six months of patent expiry and by some calculations the big research companies (aka 'my clients') will lose a further $100 billion in sales to generic manufacturers in the next three years.

This is old news and the industry is responding.  Pfizer is closing research facilities in the UK and invest in sales teams in China.  Novartis has been positioning itself in the generics game with Sandoz since 2002.  Roche completed a takeover of Genentech in 2009 to try and dominate the biologics market.  This year Sanofi-Aventis has bought Genzyme and Takeda has bought Nycomed.  The M&A industry has plenty of reasons to love pharma.

This can make life a little tricky for a Headcount: 1 consultant trying a few cold calls but with one eye on his summer holidays.  Here's an ex-client's response to my friendly hi-how's-it-going email: -

Yes i do remember you.  It is probably not the right time to come in -- we have just been taken over by XXXX so things are a little unsettled at the moment.  Sorry can't help at this time

 Not my finest moment as a salesman.

The job of not working

Just back from ten lovely days in Greece.  After about twenty years of self-employment I may just have mastered the art of taking a holiday.  I've long been plagued by freelancer’s paranoia: that horrible suspicion that you only get the work because you're the first supplier the client calls so if you don’t answer the phone then she'll just go to whomever is next on the list.  Never give your understudy a break and all that.

Absurd of course: the only like-for-like substitute I have is my business partner and he’s busy with clients in Asia-Pac.  So why has my mindset has always been to behave as if I have dozens of direct competitors across Europe?

Partly, I suspect, it’s my attitude to work itself.  One of the books I read on the beach* described two conflicting attitudes to work and leisure: the ‘income’ effect and the ‘substitution’ effect: -

Income effect: the old school economists’ assumption that once a man has earned sufficient for his needs then devote the remaining time to leisure 

Substitution effect: the phenomenon that as a man’s time becomes more valuable he is less and less likely to substitute high-paid work for another activity that pays less (i.e. any other activity, including leisure)

Supposedly we're all looking for a life informed by the income effect but of course it’s the substitution effect that describes most modern lives. This is especially so for anyone working in corporate services and especially for anyone self-employed in that sector. We work every hour that God, or the client, gives us.

Contrast this with a farmer or other seasonal worker: when the time is right you work as hard as you can as efficiently as you can then you rest.  Only a fool harvests an unripe crop.  Still, it's rare for a truly successful freelancer to be continually snowed under.  If you are then you're probably either on the way to taking on staff (good) or becoming an employee of your biggest client in all but name (bad).

So I persist with comedy, blogging and sundry other projects out of a need to create a substitution effect: there’s only so much time and attention I can pour onto a consulting project before it becomes counterproductive.

I work hard for good money when the opportunity demands it.  My real problem is that I actually like working hard all the time.  Idleness has never become me.  So for the last week I've been hanging out in the Greek islands forcing myself to not work.  I had to convince myself that proper relaxation was a right and proper substitute for thinking about something I’ll be working on in a month’s time. 

Only I could create a job out of not working.

* Yep, that’s me on holiday – reading economic theory for shits’n’giggles…

Narcissism of small differences

No surprises in these articles from Pharmalot and Reuters outlining the shift in balance between Primary Care (GP) sales teams and their hospital colleagues.  For years to come the biggest selling drugs in the world will be prescribed by oncologists and other specialists so that's where the reps will be pointed.

From the inside there might be seem to be a disctinction between these two branches of pharma selling: -

Hospital or specialty sales jobs require more intellectual horsepower than the primary care rep has.  That’s why they’re paid more and get more face time with the doctors

'Industry Insider' commenting on the Pharmalot article

In my experience the jobs are essentially the same.  Okay, the science might be more complex and illnesses more serious but the marketing is very simple in both cases; Freud's 'narcissism of small differences' comes to mind.

2B or not 2 B2C

On Thursday I did what I suspect was one of my last ever stand-up gigs.  I'm not sure when the absolute last one will be but it's fair to say that I have many more gigs behind me than ahead.  It was a pleasant enough show run by an old comedy friend in a country pub.  My set went well but it's a long time since a gig felt like a portal to anywhere special and in the five years I've been learning this craft my life, especially my business life, has moved on.

This was crystalised for me by a throwaway line in a podcast about the 90's Dotcom boom.  The discussion centred on the two basic business models operating at that time:-

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) versus Business-to-Business (B2B)

A distinction that perfectly illustrates the divide between my comedy and my consulting.  It is the divide between Art and Commerce.  As much as I like to think I have something to say to other individuals (B2C, Art), I have twenty plus years evidence that what the cosmos wants to reward me for are my insights into how companies operate and how they could do so better (B2B, Commerce).

Set out in print it's obvious.  I am a journeyman comic who's happy to pick up a few quid for a twenty minute set in the back room of a pub in rural Wiltshire but I am also one of the highest paid consultants in my field with clients all over the globe.  My ability to make a few punters laugh on a Saturday night is passable whereas the effect I will have on your pharmaceutical sales/marketing operation is unsurpassed.

From an early age it seems as if we're programmed to aim first for Art.  My parents stumped up for lessons in music and drama and art.  They spend their weekends ferrying me and my sisters to performances on stage and sporting fields across rural NSW.  Yes, I know that a child's participation in sport or art is its own reward but buried in there somewhere in there was the message that if I had the talent then Art (including sport) was the direction my life should take.  How many conversations have we each endured with disillusioned friends and colleagues revealing that they were actually 'quite good' at some Art or other, lamenting the day they threw it over in favour of the financially secure embrace of Commerce?

Commerce is Plan B.

In generations past Art was something that you did on the side.  Few people could afford to give up their day jobs.  Nowadays new media's appetite for 'content' has led to rampant inflation in the earnings of our top sportsmen (but not sportswomen), actors, comics and the like.  Papers and magazines responded by overpaying snarky columnists to retain readers.  Needing something or someone evermore 'outrageous' to write about they in turn opened the door for the BritArt master branders like Tracey Emin and especially Damien Hirst to parlay scarcely deserved notoriety into massive financial windfalls.  For a chosen few Art now pays like never before.  The rest of us stand, necks craned, on the far side of the velvet rope.

I've suffered ferocious writers block with my comedy for almost two years.  It's gotten so bad that in the cause of generating interesting and unique material I've contemplated taking on some strange, arduous new experience like the Three Peaks challenge, the Alpha Course or fatherhood.  This is what middling comics do when they've extracted all available humour from their upbringing and neighbourhood.  Yet my experiences as a stand-up have helped take my consulting to another level.  Not only has my ability to command attention in a room been strengthened but my arduous experiences in comedy have also afforded any number of interesting and unique angles as a consultant.  Oh, the irony.

I am a quite exceptional marketing consultant and an entirely unexceptional stand-up comic.  My talents obviously lie in B2B.  Why is it so hard to admit this fact?  When I meet someone at a party why do I want to describe myself as a performer and writer rather than as 'a marketing consultant who helps drug companies sell their drugs better'?

What isn't to be just isn't to be.  I think I'm sufficiently free of self-delusion to know that I'm not just one more stand-up gig away from fame and fortune.  The fortune is more or less covered.  It's the fame I'm denied.