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

18 hours in America

I am en route to the East Coast of the US to deliver a pitch presentation. All told I'll be on the ground about 18 hours. 

There are a number of strange things about this trip; firstly it's a competitive pitch, which is an unfamiliar situation for me as I'm usually in the room because of the unique nature of my offering.  The client doesn't quite know what it wants, except to say that the approach must be different, innovative and never tried in the sector before. 

Secondly, I'm presenting on behalf of a consortium that I was invited to join after the initial round of presentations so it isn't just my reputation on the line. Actually, given that almost all my business is 'non-US' I have less to lose reputationally than my would-be partners. However, that also means I'm presenting content not my own with the other partners joining down the phone line. This is never ideal. I have a long flight to internalise as much as I can and my ability to think on my feet will have to do the rest. 

Thirdly, (but related to the above) I have no prior relationship with anyone in tomorrow's room. I'm only there because the consortium reckons I can somehow add value. It will unusual for me to be so bereft of fans. 

I can't help thinking about the last time I flew the Atlantic to pitch at an American HQ. Years ago now it still stands alone as the least pleasant day of my professional career. I walked into an environment so immediately toxic that I found myself looking at the clock at 945am expecting it to say 11. The charitable explanation was that the company, long since taken over, was experiencing an intense bout of 'not invented here syndrome'. The truth was probably closer to being that I walked into a vicious turf war wherein being nasty to me was a handy surrogate for being nasty to someone else in the room. Never before or since have I been treated so rudely in a professional setting; and let's not forget that I work with the Germans, Austrians and Swiss. We called the daylong workshop off at lunchtime and I limped home to London. 

I suppose I'm about to find out what I've learned since then. 

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.

Confidence = space

In business I come across as a confident person. I've been doing what I do for a long time now so when I'm brought in to think about an issue I've got a pretty good idea of what the unspoken issues are likely to be and what solutions might fit.

I do everything I can to ensure that my clients have confidence in me because it lessens my workload. A worried client costs me time on additional phone calls or face-to-face meetings that are quite hard to monetise. I need my contacts to exude confidence in me when they're discussing the project at all those internal meetings that I neither get, nor want, to be invited to. When that goes missing I get the dreaded phone call asking for an early look at a draft and my timeline is shot, which can be disastrous for the overall project.

Generally I am paid to design and deliver training programmes. A large part of what 'design' entails is making intelligent decisions in the right order. My favourite example of this is deciding on the PowerPoint template design before anyone knows how much text needs to be displayed on the screen.  It creates unnecessary conflict and heartache every time. The motivation behind this rookie error is usually as simple as someone senior in the organisation asking to 'see something' as assurance that the project is on track and the slide template looks like an easy and uncontroversial thing to show the bosses.  A better response to the political pressure is to have a meeting and run through the development timeline, explaining what decisions will be made in what sequence and why

I see my clients' confidence in me as a tangible asset that allows me to run projects at the pace that best serves that project. As with any asset it needs to be protected: good communications, dressing well and face-to-face meetings early in the process.

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

I am deep in the planning and design process for a truly massive conference that will be held in Europe in a few months' time.  600 people will fly in from all over the world for a two day meeting.  When the idea was formed there seemed to be a burning commercial need: our product's market is changing and we need to energise ourselves against complacency in the face of new competition.  Six weeks later the whole thing is bogged down in a morrass of prohibitive deadlines (getting translations done over the European summer), rival agendas (India's needs are unsurprisingly different from Germany's) and sheer exhaustion.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the client is wasting a hell of a lot of money and making many people unhappy for little or no commercial return.  The product in question will continue to grow, albeit with a reduced market share but in a rapidly expanding market.

I've been here before.  Part of my role as an external vendor is to be unflappable, responsive and unfailingly upbeat, to play nicely with others and to do just a little bit more than is required because that's what is meant by 'exceeding expectations'.  I go into projects like these with no more than a faint hope that my work will shine because as the deadline gets closer absolutely every good idea and laudable intenton mutates, often twisting until the effect on the conference delegate is the exact opposite of what was planned.  By taking on the role of sage consultant and pointing this out, in the past I've been accused of prima donna-ish behaviour.  This is easy to level at an external supplier with a creative brief, which is not to say such accusations have been entirely unfounded in the past.

If I'm going to keep working on projects like this I have to let go of cleverness and adopt a new but unspoken standard for my work: -

Try not to add to the sum total of unhappiness in the world

I will try to do no more than have the delegates participate in simple yet creative tasks that have an immediately obvious commerical benefit.  No deep analogies that require decoding.  No fun for fun's sake.  And no endless PowerPoint plenaries where the one commands the time and attention of the many.

Be part of the solution not part of the problem and all that...

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.

Inclination v. Obligation

Work is an obligation. Even if I really like my job (so much of the time of inclined to do it) I'm obliged to do it regardless of any momentary preference.

When our weekends and holidays 'feel like work' it's because we find ourselves obliged to do things during time we'd mentally put aside to pursue our inclinations. We like our friends because they're similarly inclined to us; time spent with them doesn't feel like an obligation.

I'm visiting Australia again in a few weeks and there's nothing like a trip home to focus the mind: which activities and engagements am I obliged to do, which am I inclined to do and which ones sit happily in the centre zone of a simple Venn Diagram?

This trip will be far more complicated because my wife and I are traveling together. As our separate and collective diaries fill up we're negotiating a much more complex Venn Diagram: there are things that are inclinations for one but obligations for the other, things that are obligations for us both and happily a few things that we're each inclined to do.

Travel alone and the trade-offs are purely internal. Travel with someone else and the negotiations need to be overt and honest otherwise we end up dragging the other person to events that we're only attending out of obligation anyway.

Adult life is a lesson in compromise and never more so than when returning to the sites of your childhood.

A week I won't get back

I live in London and mostly work in Europe.  I have a few North American clients and would like more and I have one in Asia.  The rest of the Asia-Pac business is handled by an erstwhile business partner who lives in New Zealand.  I'd like to think I'm pretty good at long-distance collaboration.

This week I've been dealing with two quite different men who want to do me the favour of taking my work to new clients.  One is setting up a consultancy in the Middle East and reckons that he can generate a demand for our IP in the region and the other needs my skills to round out a product offering that he's making (speculatively) to a Canadian company.  Both men are entrepreneurs who have identified potentially lucrative opportunities that would never come across my radar.  But each has inserted himself between me and a client and I'm unsure how I feel about that because like most Headcount: 1 types I'm a control freak.  If anyone's going to be in front of a client or an audience it will be me.

This control freakery has been going on so long that I've learnt to treat it as a strength rather than the flaw it is.  Being unable to delegate means that my business will never, ever be scaleable, ergo it will never be saleable.  And as I've said before on these pages, when I get down about this I feel trapped.  If I can't relinquish control of the marketing interactions with clients in far-flung places that I'd never meet otherwise then when can I?

Isn't this just 20th Century Thinking?  Wasn't one of the key learnings from the life of Saint Steve Jobs that an overweening sense of control is a positive thing?  Merlin Mann recently described success, apropos of Apple, as: -

You get to decide who pays you

I suspect that my erstwhile partner doesn't care who pays us for our residual IP.  He sees this incremental (and essentially unearned) income purely as a bonus, as an undiluted good, and especially in markets like Egypt and Saudi and the Gulf.  I'm not sure I agree.   I want my collaborations to enhance not diminish what I do.  I want to finish a project with a stronger brand, a more interesting product and a new set of experiences.

And before we've even gotten to a proper pitch meeting each relationship has gotten bogged down in a separate legal morass.  I've spent the last week proofing licensing agreements and drafting cautionary emails.  The last seven days' efforts have been about protecting what's mine now instead of creating a better, cooler something for tomorrow.

My business is such that I can't license my way to wealth and I certainly can't sue my way there.  A week spent neither developing new ideas or delivering existing ones is a week wasted

Pricing jetlag into the fee

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

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

Seth Godin on failure

Seth Godin's site still throws up some decent insights from time to time...

Here are six random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside:

1. Whenever possible, take on specific projects
2. Make detailed promises about what success looks like and when it will occur
3. Engage others in your projects. If you fail, they should be involved and know that they will fail with you
4. Be really clear about what the true risks are. Ignore the vivid, unlikely and ultimately non-fatal risks that take so much of our focus away
5. Concentrate your energy and will on the elements of the project that you have influence on, ignore external events that you can't avoid or change 
6. When you fail (and you will) be clear about it, call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won't make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they've never done it

I especially like 3.  Involving others is the first necessary step away from self-employed solipsism.

Appealing to the better angels

A big part of my job is motivating sales/marketing teams; getting everyone to do the right thing for the right reason. Getting a large population to do anything in unison is challenging but the starting point is always cohesive self-image. We have to see ourselves as part of the group before we can develop group values.

In the last few weeks I've been lucky enough to get along to two big international sporting fixtures; England v. France in Six Nations rugby at Twickenham then Chelsea v. Copenhagen in Champions League football at Stamford Bridge. At both occasions the crowd was asked to stand in silence to honour the victims of two horrific earthquakes (Christchurch and Japan respectively).

Getting a crowd to stand in silence is a really interesting challenge; it can only work if absolutely everyone participates. The many are held hostage by the few.

At Twickenham 80,000 people were so quiet, so still, that I could hear traffic noise outside the ground. It lasted two whole minutes and made the hair stand up on the back of your neck.  At no time did Stamford Bridge manage complete silence, even for a few seconds. A few people in the South Stand kept talking and were shushed by others nearby.  They reacted by talking louder. More shushing. Louder talking and so on until some presumably well-meaning soul from the other end of the ground screamed: -

"Shut up you c***ts!"

At which the referee decided enough was enough and blew his whistle to end the ordeal.

Much has been written about the contrasting ethos of football and rugby and here it was writ large. Twickenham had many French supporters just as lots of Danes were at the football so I don't think the differing behaviours can be attributed to a misunderstanding of language.  Rather it seemed to me that the rugby crowd wanted to behave well whereas the football crowd didn't care so much.  Rugby celebrates universalism, football cherishes tribalism so perhaps it will always be easier to appeal to the better angels of a crowd watching rugby than football.

There's no point in trying to influence group behaviour if no self-reflexive sense of the group exists in the first place.

Subcontractors II

More pan-European training projects = more non-English delivery = more hassles with bilingual subcontractors.  Good problems to have but problems nonetheless.

Last week it was a 'pilot' with a German team in Munich.  The rub was that this time the client sourced their own external trainer to deliver my programme.  Nice guy, 20+ years in sales training and pharma industry experience before that.  Was it ever going to be a decent fit?  Not even close.

Why is it that no 3rd-party trainer can stick to the script?  Every one of them is somehow compelled to 'add additional value' with some banal personal touch right at the beginning of my programme.  There appears to be two main reasons for this: -

1. The trainer needs to start with some element of content that he knows and trusts before diving into all this new stuff belonging to the pushy Australian taking notes at the back of the room
2. Putting his own spin on things is the best way for the trainer to make himself irreplaceable

As the guy who has to deliver a product that's replicable in any European context your motivation for dicking around with my stuff is pretty much irrelevant to me but even so reason 1. is more excusable than 2.  There's a case to be made for you getting comfortable in your own skin as you start, whereas trying to make yourself irreplaceable is always going to piss me off.  And I'm always going to have enough influence over the roll-out for you to want to keep me onside.

What really confounds me is the hackneyed nature of the stuff they crowbar into the precious first minutes of my carefully crafted programme.  Lately it's been decades-old vision intended to soften up the participants with some message about how nobody-knows-everything-so-everybody-can-learn-something-from-today or all-the-best-sportspeople-still-practice-the-basics or whatever.  It's a video for Christ's sake; the sort of one-way stimulus that hasn't worked in a high school or university in years.

By introducing himself in this way the trainer is making a performance error so basic that no stand-up comic makes it after even a few months: you're apologising for being there.  Worse, not only are you starting on the defensive by pleading a case for being listened to, you're outsourcing that rationalisation to a fucking video.

At the heart of this rant is a recognition that few trainers see the world as I do.  I doubt that my oh-so-experienced German colleague considers himself a performer.  Which might be why he made so many annoying technical errors such as sitting down whilst speaking and allowing the focus in the room to splinter during group discussions.  To be fair he only lost me completely when he introduced his collection of novelty sound effects (motorbike starting, jet taking off, air raid siren).

I'm guessing that even in German there's a difference between amusing and bemusing your audience.

Subcontractors

Like most Australians I am cheerfully, obnoxiously monolingual.  It's remarkable how infrequently this is an impediment to working in Europe.  Not one of my clients speaks less than 'business English' and most not just fluently but eloquently.  One of the great luxuries of my provenance is that I can travel the world assuming that the other guy has the skills to bridge the language gap.

Only when I'm asked to train a European non-English sales team is my (lack of) language a barrier.  Asian and Middle Eastern sales teams do not insist that suppliers like me are fluent in their language.  Conversely, a salesperson contentedly living and working in Lyon or Nuremberg with no ambition to climb the corporate ladder has no more need for English than her Sydney-based colleague has for French or German.  European delivery is literally the only time when I'm expected to do the heavy lifting in terms of language and on my own I fail miserably.

In consultancy terms, I have a capability problem: I'm forced to subcontract the face-to-face component of such projects to other suppliers.  Readers of this Blog won't be surprised that I find this hard.  The self-reliance, not so say solipsism, of my Headcount: 1 work life means I rarely have to play nicely with others.

Earlier in the month I delivered a programme simultaneously in French, German, Italian and Spanish.  Well, four terrific bilingual trainers did the delivery whilst I shuttled from room to room giving a somewhat adequate impression of being in change.  It all went off as planned and we all left with reputations enhanced.

Drastically short timelines had forced me to recruit the trainers en masse.  Someone I trust at another consultancy gave me a strong recommendation and that trainer brought in three colleagues.  In an instant my capability issue was solved.  However, from the outset the four of them made it abundantly clear that they had a wealth of shared experiences and I was the outsider.  For some reason this bothered me and it took a while for me to pinpoint the reason why.  After all I spend my professional life as an outsider interacting with large groups who share many experiences not the least of which is working for the same company in identical roles.

My disquiet stemmed from the fact that my dealing with them oscillated between that of individual suppliers each requiring my undivided attention and a cartel negotiating en bloc.  And they were a cartel.  There was an awareness, subconscious perhaps, that my ability to replace any or all of them  was practically zero, especially as the project had to be delivered so early in the new year.  The role of shop steward was shared around; at different times each declared that he or she was speaking on behalf of the group.  A picture emerged near constant back-channel communication over my project's shortcomings.

No man likes being talked about behind his back.

Then less than a week before delivery I was forced into an across-the-board financial renegotiation resulting in a fee increase that pushed the project to the verge of unprofitability.  I later discovered that the shop steward in question wasn't actually speaking for the four but the implication that he was improved his bargaining position at the time.  By outsourcing the recruitment of the team I took myself out of the loop.

Perhaps part of the problem was that without an English language component of the project my prominence was lessened.  My main job was running interference for the the trainers in the presence of a less-than-perfect client.  It's not easy to be a coach when you're used to being a player.

One of the major failings of my career has been my inability to develop other trainers to a point where clients see them as interchangeable with me.  My personal brand has always been too strong and I've taken a perverse pleasure in that.  Yet without that facility my company's capacity for growth is limited by my Headcount: 1 diary.  Right now my earnings are entirely tied to what I can charge for my own time.  Learning to work effectively with subcontractors is an obvious first step in moving beyond this limitation.

I'm 43 years old and I cannot do this job in this way forever. 

You might be a bad client if...

Are you a bad client?  Maybe you are but just don't know it yet.   From time to time we all need a little help in recognising our shortcomings.  As the joke goes, everyone thinks they're funny and no one thinks they're bad in bed, so here's a handy spotter's guide.

You might be a bad client if you...

1. Get your advertising agency to write your internal emails for you
2. Insist that the entire project team sit in on four-hour teleconferences that are really just a procession of one-on-one conversations between you and individual suppliers
3. Openly refer to your co-workers as idiots who cannot think for themselves
4. Don't bother printing out materials ahead of teleconferences then complain that you can't open the PDF file on your iPhone and then insist that the tabled multipage documents be read aloud
5. Talk to your legal department before picking up a phone to discuss a problem in person
6. Demand a discounted fee for the privilege of working with you for the first time
7. Refer to internal processes by acronyms and individuals by their first names and get annoyed when asked to explain what you mean
8. Respond to verbal questions via email and emailed questions verbally
9. Schedule daylong meetings  the week before Christmas that start at 9am (and so require people to fly in the night before, thus spending more time away from family) and then fail to produce a daylong agenda
10. Let relationships between suppliers fester to the point where turf wars develop
11. Demand 'world's best practice' proposals where cost, timing and every other conceivable parameter are ignored because you can't be bothered thinking through the inevitable and necessary limitations your company will impose on the project from the outset
12. Insist on having a personal but not necessarily amicable relationship with subcontractors thus disrupting your suppliers' delivery chains
13. Fail to master MS-Outlook and so force everyone around you to second guess whether your hour-long meeting will take fifteen minutes or half a day
14. Identify a non-problem, insist that it be solved and then accuse everyone else of acting like old maids when it doesn't come to pass
15. Can't imagine how salespeople of different nationalities might just get along over drinks and dinner
16. Aren't really sure if you're negotiating in £ or € (seriously)

Glad to have that off my chest.

Experiences 2

Thinking further about yesterday's post on new experiences, it's worth pointing out that many TV pitch meetings occur under the aegis of an unspoken but totally understood fiction: -

What is proposed in the meeting has been designed purely to get us all through that first meeting.  Most likely it will bear little resemblance to the end result of any collaboration

Really what is being pitched is the people around the table and everything else is an acceptable lie.  As ever there are wider parallels, I've come to see that part of my job as a consultant is to 'trick' my participants into trying genuinely new things.  That requires a relationship strong enough for the ultimate two word pitch:

"Trust me."

The best exponent of this that I know is an Australian events organiser named David Grant.  David has staged the 'must attend' parties for the IOC and major sponsors at eight Olympics - summer and winter - since Atlanta in 1996.  When you hire DG3 all you know is that you won't get what you expect and certainly not what you got last time.  And you won't be disappointed.

My old company, Instant Theatre, worked with David Grant Special Events (as was) in the early nineties and it was the most fun I've ever had in corporate.  My all-time favourite experience was being invited to a meeting and shown a mocked-up film poster entitled 'The Greatest Story Ever Sold' with the text surrounded by a pastiche of every 'Golden Age of Hollywood' cliche; Roman soldiers, vikings, Biblical prophet, a low-flying plane and so on.  He told me the name of the client (a hotel chain) and the conversation went like this:

Me: Great poster, do you need me to write up something for the pitch?
DG: Pitch was this morning.  We won. We start a 4-city roadshow in Brisbane in a fortnight.
Me: Okay.  How's the show going to run?
DG: No idea.  That's why you're here.

After all we were called 'Instant Theatre'.  We spent two weeks in and out of planes and hotels staging original and funny shows for enthusiastic audiences of usually cynical travel agents.  We ate and drank well and it was genuinely sad when it ended.  There are very few corporate experiences that I can say that about.

David had such an amazing reputation that most of the time "Trust me" was all it took for him to get the gig.  He also moved so fast that he had no choice but to spread that trust amongst his suppliers.  You felt privileged to be part of it and you brought your A-game.

The coolest thing about David Grant was that when he came to sell his company in 2009 he didn't go for the juicy buy-out from someone like WPP where he would be paid handsomely for his company, paid more in consultancy fees and more again for sitting on a global board.  Instead he asked two of his long-serving team-members to become partners (hence 'DG3').

He's never sold out.  Literally.

Writing is a team sport

It may be that The Wire's David Simon doesn't have a funny bone in his body but...

More thoughts on collaboration

It was a sure bet that Andrew Watts would take exception to my entry on the lack of collaboration in the stand-up milieu: -

It's different from other art forms because your collaborator will have a different function - Alan Bennett talks about how productive his relationship with Richard Eyre is - but there it's because Eyre is, as a director, coming at each script from a different angle to the writer.  But in stand-up, there is a direct relationship between you and the audience; and any collaborator will feel like a third party in a marriage.

Andrew is wrong-headed here (knowing him, perhaps deliberately so); he confuses the roles within a collaborative arrangement with its overall intent and he knows that a raving* of comics riffing off each others' bon mots in the pub is not the actual work of writing

I think that the real reason that so few stand-up comics can effectively write for another is a lack of personal vision (or 'voice').  No writer can collaborate with a performer who lacks the discipline to reject a joke, no matter how good, on the grounds that it isn't right for his or her act.  Occasionally I've been asked to direct a comic who hasn't yet got this voice / vision thing right and the project has quickly fallen apart.  Conversely the few times I've been lucky enough to direct comics who have artistic certainty the resulting shows have been great.

Interestingly, it's about the time that a good comic finds a voice that he or she begins to attract a fan base.  There is a consistency to Stewart Lee's left-of-centre political material that sets him apart from Tim Vine's manic punnery.  Fans will pay more and travel further to get what they want from either act than for a night of 'voiceless' acts no matter how funny.

Sadly, my own set is still a mishmash of personal anecdotes, cleverish observations, puns and so on.  Charitably you'd say that I'm still finding my voice.  Until then collaboration would be counterproductive so my ideas won't coming around Devizes to beat Watts' at sport any time soon.

***

I can't resist mentioning the comparison that has been made between the Bennett / Ayres collaboration with that of the playwright Anton Chekov and the director Constantin Stanislavsky.  Until he joined the Moscow Art Theatre Chekov was convinced that The Seagull was a comedy

* My suggestion for the collective noun

Idea sex

"What I need," said Andrew Watts, "is a gang."

One of the obvious challenges of stand-up comedy is its single-handedness.  You write alone, perform alone, succeed alone and die alone.  This fosters a natural tendency for solipsism.  Stand-up comics are far more likely to see others as rivals than do improvisers or comic actors working in, say, sketch comedy.  I wonder how much this strange individualism hurts stand-up as a form.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal Matt Ridley posits that human development accelerated not because of any physiological change in our bodies (Neanderthals had physcially larger brains than we do now) but because of trade.  The exchange of ideas that happened synchronously with the exchange of goods and services created the collective brain that has taken us from the Serengeti to cyberspace.  Ridley sees 'ideas having sex' as the basis for innovation: -

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange. 

The life of a stand-up comic stands in direct opposition to this idea.

Much of this isolationism is self-inflicted (the circuit is overpopulated by socially dysfunctional loners) but there is a cultural insistence in operation as well; one of the few absolute taboos in the industry is joke theft.   Recently Freakonomics ran a terrific piece on this: -

More often than not, however, the norms deviate from copyright: for example, copyright protects expression but not ideas, but comedians’ norms protect expression as well as ideas. Or authorship: under copyright law, two individuals who cooperate in creating a work are considered joint owners of the work. In contrast, if one comedian comes up with a joke’s premise and another thinks up the punchline, under comedians’ norms of ownership the first owns the joke and the latter has nothing.

The essay goes on to say: -

The law is not always necessary to foster creativity. Using informal group norms and sanctions, comedians are able to control joke-stealing. Without the intervention of copyright law, comedians are able to assert ownership of jokes, regulate their use and transfer, impose sanctions on joke-thieves, and maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material.

I'm not sure that I agree with this.  Gaining a reputation for stealing someone else's material (and it is considered theft) can kill a career so many comics deliberately avoid exposure to other comedy forms for fear that any exposure could contaminate their material.  The only defense against an accusation of joke thievery is "I came up with it independently" and this is partially effective at best.  In no way am I condoning joke theft; simply observing that this enforced isolationism that is a reaction to this fear has a downside.

Comedians, playwrights and novelists still live with a romanticised creator-as-auteur notion that is outdated as it excludes the possibility for collaboration and therefore stymies innovation.  The accusation of collaboration or worse hangs permanently over Shakespeare.  Yet collaboration has been de rigueur  in other comedy forms since long before the writers' room on Sid Caesar's show and the Second City technique of writing down and refining sketches that were originally improvised.

The rest of the world collaborates.  The idea of the scientist as solo genius died with the Manhattan Project.  Creative conferences like MaxFunCon and SWSX abound and multiply. yet when stand-up comedians gather there is a miasma of jealousy, envy and paranoia.  A common criticism of stand-ups when they join writers' rooms is that they don't play nicely with others.  In Ridley's terms they don't like their ideas having sex with other people's ideas.

Strange, as this is the only sex many comics are likely to get.

Exceeding expectations

An easy point of differentiation between stand-up comics and improvisers is their attitude to collaboration.  An interesting question to ask a performer on a long car journey is this: -

Would you rather be recognised as the best act on a mediocre night of comedy or a good contributor without being the stand-out act on a great one?

Every decent improviser opts for the former; the audience experience (aka 'the night') is all that matters.  Far too many stand-ups measure their performance comparatively against the rest of the bill rather than in the absolute terms of audience appreciation.  When I'm going through a bad patch I fall into the same relativist trap and my post-gig analysis starts sounding like the ravings of a paranoiac: -

Was I the weakest on the bill?  Was there a sense of palpable relief when I said goodnight?  The audience only talked during my set and listening intently to everyone else didn't they?  The other acts were all backslapping each other but did anyone say anything complimentary to me?  In fact when I came off stage I don't think that anyone even looked me in the eye...

And so on.  As such schadenfreude is the default setting for most stand-up comics.  This is why a commonplace on the English scene that Michael McIntyre is a poor comic, hardly better than Jimmy Carr really but at least he's no Joe Pasquale.  This mindset is self-destructive in the most obvious yet insidious way and we each need to guard against it.

Conversely, in consultingland it's been years since I've watched another external consultant or trainer work.  I often share a stage with internal speakers but it's very rare for direct competitors to speak to the same audience on the same day*.  The only indicators I have that I'm any good are that (a) my clients pay me on time and (b) keep asking me back.  I find that it's actually pretty easy to 'exceed expectations' when a client has paid thousands in travel, accommodation and fees and effectively gambled tens of thousands more in taking the sales team off the road for a few days because I'm given a brutally clear sense of what those expectations are.

Part of the frustration in performing comedy on most nights is that the audience has no more than a shaky idea why they're there in the first place.  Expectations usually range from the depressingly downbeat (I just hope no one embarrasses themselves, I couldn't bear to watch that) to the ludicrously optimistic (What do you mean a tenner in a room above a pub doesn't get me Eddie Izzard?) making it hard to judge your performance on anything other than your fellow acts.

None of this improves the mental health of your average stand-up comedian, who was unlikely to be especially sane before he took up the craft.

* The exception to this rule are those showcase events where speakers are allotted stage time in front of an audience of would-be buyers.  It's been years since I've attended one.  My business is totally driven by word-of-mouth recommendation amongst a small number of potential clients so the effort needed to make a showcase work has never justified the return.

The 1% doctrine

There is some logic to the idea that it is better to overreact to a situation than to underreact. However, overreaction is not an incontestable virtue per se. Action often feels better than passivity but that misses the point; if you're trying to solve my problem then what I need is an appropriate response. There can be as much downside in doing too much as too little.

Much of the world is wired to overreaction. US tort law is an obvious driver here. American politics has long been skewed by lawyers and their lobbyists forcing the view that overreaction is a necessary virtue on the commercial culture of that country (and thence the world). I once sat in a meeting in a US corporate HQ where the in-house lawyer demanded that the company avoid recommending a specific course of action to a customer (aka 'sales') as that amounted to exposure to law suits. The VP of Sales blithely responded that if that were the case then 900 people just lost their jobs.

The most destructive iteration of this was Dick Cheney's 1% Doctrine that justified US adventurism in the Middle East because a threat to American lives assessed at a liklihood of 1% was to be treated with the same seriousness of a 99% threat. This flawed logic led to the Iraq War amongst other policy disasters.

Risk should be avoided but not at any cost.