Gong Xi Fa Cai

This week we took a family holiday in Phuket, Thailand where I managed to finish my friend Jeanne-Marie Gescher's epic, lyrical, wondrous history of China, All Under Heaven: China's Dreams of Order.   I recommend this book not just to anyone interested in China, but to anyone interested in the human journey.

Jeanne-Marie's key theme is the relationship between the individual and the state.  Chinese leaders have always been conscious of the size of the task of holding together what has consistently been the world's largest population at any period in history.  From the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) onwards personal freedoms have usually been cast as secondary to the need to order and organise such so many people.  Time and again this topdown approach has led to bureaucratisation, stagnation and corruption, with the Communist Party (1949-now) no more immune than any of its predecessors.

The book takes us right up to 2014.  She uses the metaphor of a speeding train, with many classes of carriage to describe the astounding growth of modern China; those at the front accumulating unimaginable riches with diminishing levels of comfort as we move towards the rear.  The least fortunate of all, the old peasant class, the victims of environmental degradation, contaminated food and water and systemic exploitation, are not so much at the back of this train as under it.

Chinese New Year is this week and as we were leaving our 'kid-friendly' resort it was filling up with Mainland Chinese who were using the extended holiday to escape the Northern cold.  At face value they were pleasant, middle-class couples no different from my wife and me (right down to the one precious child).  Yet I couldn't help but wonder how close each was to the front of Jeanne-Marie's train.  And how many lives were blighted in order for this prosperity to be enjoyed by these few?

Of course the exact same accusation can and should be levelled at me.  How many lead poorer lives so that I can lead one of such comfort?  The book speaks to humanity, not just to China.

Protection against my dumber future self

I'm at the end of an absolutely brutal week of travel.  In the office all day Monday.  Night flight to the US to make a pitch presentation on Tuesday.  It went well enough. Night flight back for a full day of work on Wednesday.  Day trip to Switzerland yesterday.  Be careful what you wish for and all that.

No complaints.  As I've said in these pages many times, 'If I'm not on planes I'm probably not getting paid'.  The real challenge is how to keep functioning in amongst these waves of fatigue.  A partial answer may be this: -

Be aware that sometimes you are smarter than usual and sometimes you are dumber.  The job of your smarter self is to protect you against your dumber self for the foreseeable future.

My dumber self forgets things.  He fires off emails with spelling and grammatical errors or worse.  He packs badly and eats poorly. He mis-prioritises and has overly emotional reactions to simple setbacks.  Whether because he's tired, jetlagged or just hungover he is an idiot.

He is an idiot and my smarter, I'd like to say 'normal', self has to mitigate against him.  We all know this.  We've all stood in the middle of a supermarket feeling like an idiot for not writing up a shopping list.  We curse our would-be smarter selves for not thinking this one through.

My smarter self writes lists and sets alarms.  He allocates tasks commensurate with my fluctuating IQ to various times of the day and week.  Aren't we all that much are smarter on Monday morning than on Friday afternoon?  My smarter self is mindful of my tendency to react emotionally when fatigued and plans accordingly.  My smarter self works hard so that the dumber me can lean against a wall in the sunshine with a pint of beer in hand.

It is Friday and the UK Met Office is predicting 26C and sunny.

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. 

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.

Running to stand still

Predictable as ever I've fallen for one of the classic blogging blunders; I decided to live an unjournaled life for a time and fell out of the habit of writing.  Not that I've had much of a choice as a proliferation of projects has had me working at a barely sustainable level for over six months now.  My passport has new stamps from all the usual places plus Lebanon, Hungary, Egypt and next week Japan.

I have to monitor my mental energy levels and devote the hours where my concentration is highest to the least forgiving tasks (and clients).  I live in a near-constant state of paranoia that some day soon I'll turn up in Madrid for a meeting with Client A but my slides will be for a German-speaking subsidiary of Client B.

Diet and exercise are more important than ever but not as important as sleep.  I find myself daydreaming about a holiday where all I do is sleep during the day.  In the mean time I do my best to exercise every day I'm at home and every other day when I'm traveling.  In the fortnight when a head cold kept me away from the gym my weight drifted up a disturbing three or four kilos.  When that happens I move slower and fatigue more easily and lose concentration right when I need it most.

I need my accountant, my lawyer and my travel agent to ask all the smart questions the first time we discuss the job.  I'm on the lookout for a new graphic designer and one guy failed the audition the moment he told me that he wasn't a mindreader.

Over Christmas in Australia I ploughed through the last draft of the book I've writing on and off for years.  At best it'll need more time than I can give it but at least it's off the 2013 'To Do list'.  At worst it was a flawed idea badly executed but, hey, at least it's done.  This year I'll be hard pressed to read a complete book, let alone write or edit one.

I have a new business idea.  Something really cool that might just be a scalable add-on to my (decidedly unscalable) consultancy.  The only problem is that Phase 1 of a six or seven step project requires 30-40 quality hours of my time.  The earliest I reckon I can offer that up is July.  So of course I worry that opportunity's window might be closed by then.  I tell myself that this isn't a case of the urgent crowding out the important but I worry that I'll look back in five years and think that taking on that one extra client in February 2013 was a dumb play, regardless of the cash it put in the bank.  And let's be thankful that at least there's cash in the bank.

So much as I'd like to write on these pages more (and more often) I'm not going to make that promise to myself. I'll check in from time to time, especially as my world seems to be changing faster than ever but I doubt that there'll be a discernable pattern.

Until next time...

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.

The soul eroding mess that is LHR

In the last month I've flown passed through Heathrow nine times (and Gatwick once) on my to Australia, Italy, Egypt, Switzerland, the US and Germany. Without exception Border Control at Heathrow has been consistently the most unpleasant experience - more since the iris recognition facility ('IRIS') has been put into an apparently deliberate programme of slow abandonment.

I've long joked that one loses a little bit of one's soul with every pass through that benighted place and I've more than once been caught in the notorious hourlong queues at immigration. Is it wrong to be this happy about this news?

The quality of Mursi

Calling an early finish to a training day so that 'people can go and be with their families' was a new experience. Everyone I've spoken to on this trip to Cairo knew that today was going to be historic. Before the session and at the breaks no one spoke of anything but politics and the room included supporters of both Shafiq (ex-Air Force general, strongly associated with old Mubarak regime) and Mursi (Muslim Brotherhood) and as the 3pm announcement got closer there was a growing shrillness of tone without actual disagreement.

At the appointed time I sat in the hotel lobby alongside those programme participants living outside Cairo. The experience was not dissimilar to being in a Madrid hotel a few months ago when Real lost the Champions League semifinal to Bayern Munich. Such is the life of a consultant: even if you're in the city where the amazing thing is happening, chances are you're watching it on CNN like everyone else.

Plenty of noise outside from Mursi supporters but I've been somewhat humourlessly assured that as this (Heliopolis) hotel is owned by the army there will be no incidents.

A crumble rather than a collapse

As mentioned in my first post-hiatus piece, I've been traveling constantly for months now. The European countries where I've spent the most time are Spain and Germany, who are surely the large-economy yin and yang of the Euro crisis. Strangely the mood was better in Spain (but that might just have been the weather) but in both cases the sense was of business-as-usual in a regrettably tough economy.

Then again, my clients are multinational pharmaceutical companies who will almost always reduce a sales target and taken a global P&L hit rather than sack an entire sales team. This same option just doesn't exist for a local business that lives or dies by whatever revenues can be extricated from the economy in question. The Spanish employees of my clients know themselves to be very, very lucky people.

But as Europe shrinks it will be harder and harder for multinationals to give economic shelter to their staff, even in Germany. The name of the game is prescription pharmaceuticals, which in Europe means that all revenues come from the taxpayer. Theoretically this means that there'll always be a customer because there'll always be a Ministry of Health looking out for the needs of its citizens.

But at the moment Europe feels as if it's being hollowed out. The outward forms of government remain but less of the stuff that actually matters. In Greece you'll most likely still get into an oncology ward but access to those smart, low-side effect, 'tumour activated' cancer drugs is now C.O.D. The German government has a new policy whereby they'll demand a refund if a new medication fails to meet the expectations set by the pharma company (this one is really smart).

My friends working for my clients are safe for the moment and perhaps forever. It's not as if Big Pharma is diverting supplies from some other richer part of the world as a favour to Europe. Back at Global HQ they're sweating over missed targets and year-on-year declines but the governing fact is still patent expiry. Short of mothballing a promising drug until this mess is all over, my clients have no choice but to launch well in order to maximise the returns regardless of any other factors.

And 'launching well' is where I come in.

Strange days indeed

The last six or so weeks have taken me to Israel, Germany (three times), Spain (twice), Italy, Switzerland, St Lucia and Egypt. Not all for work of course. Tomorrow I'm working in Basel for the day then on Friday I'm off to Australia to visit family and friends. For personal reasons it's been a very tough few months and all that time in the air has afforded me, if not a sense of catharsis, then at least one of momentum.

I've done my best to keep up my various habitual 'inputs' (news mags, blogs, podcasts) and that's been hard enough. All of those ambitious 'outputs' (producing, directing or performing comedy, other creative projects, this blog) have been on hold - no point in demanding an audience's attention if there's nothing that you feel like saying. Time is taking a long time healing these wounds.

I hope to be on these pages more often over the summer. The consulting job is busier than ever yet every day for the last week or so I've woken up with just a little additional surplus attention, which is a good sign. I will start blogging more and watch the unfolding of friends' Edinburgh projects with interest, albeit from afar.

The Marketers' Dilemma

(what follows is an essay written for my consultancy business)

 

There is a tendency for marketers to see their roles as all-seeing strategists who, because they cannot direct the field force to specific action, abdicate responsibility for the nature of sales activity.  There is a direct correlation between the distance between the ‘flipchart and the field’ and the likelihood of such an abdication.  The negative consequences of this attitude range from the relatively trivial (e.g. time wasted on internal politicking) to the profound (e.g. a failed global product launch).  However, this is not all the fault of the marketers.  Many (most) pharma companies have imposed strict intra-company communications codes to govern the quality, quantity and access of marketing to sales.  The marketer who seeks to take more responsibility is often explicitly forbidden from doing so.

 

Marketers aren't respected because they have a not entirely unfair reputation for wasting salespeople’s time.  Organising time in front of a field force is very expensive prospect.  Getting a team off the road and into a room takes actual money from someone’s budget but this is dwarfed by the opportunity cost of time-off-road.

So why don't marketers always get the respect they should?

• It is perceived that they change their minds too often, both at a departmental and individual level
• A one-size-fits-all dictates of strategy do not gel with the quick-fire think-on-your-feet, at-the-coalface world of selling, especially when global strategy is soon to contradict local selling challenges
• From a field force perspective, marketers choose not to see the whole picture (e.g. P1 / P2 detailing) and tend to speak as if they're the only conversation going on in the room, wilfully ignoring the fact that theirs is only one of many voices that salespeople listen to
• They are sometimes accused of being victims of ‘agency capture’; being too enthusiastic about adopting the slick, overly clever marketing tricks that make doctors immediately suspicious

Furthermore, the context of the actual communication with the sales team is often wilfully ignored.  Sales teams are expensive, local resources (financed out of national budgets) that must first of all answer to local management priorities.  And Marketing is a multi-layered beast that rarely speaks with a single voice.  At every level (local, regional, global) it is staffed by clever, but not necessarily wise or smart, ambitious people looking to make a splash.  Such people aren't great at taking direction: who got into marketing to be a messenger for the regional / global office?

 

Marketing-sales communications are thus reduced to a few highly regulated interactions per year: the sales conference.  Even here every brand initiative is competing for ‘share of mind’ with other brands, marketing projects, training needs, team-building exercises, regulatory presentations, award ceremonies and so on.  The project is also competing with the pet project of the local marketer, which may or may not align with the global or regional initiative, and which may not be at all worthwhile anyway.

 

Global and regional marketers will always be accused of ‘not understanding the local situation’.  There is always a level of specificity you're accused of misreading.  If a local marketer based in Reading can be accused of ‘not getting it’ by a representative in Scotland then what chance the global marketer sitting in Japan or Switzerland?  And the challenges don't stop once marketing is in the room with the sales team.  Most of the more common objections given by salespeople for not following a marketing strategy can grouped under headings of ‘credibility’ and ‘practicality.

Objections over Credibility Issues

• Not relevant to my doctors
• Too complicated (I don't understand it and I'll lose credibility if I stumble)
• Obnoxiously simplistic (I will lose credibility if I take this approach)
• Too aggressive to the competitor (offends those doctors happy with the competitor product)

Objections over Practicality Issues

• The team doesn't the strategy as we’re successful enough (i.e. making budget) without it
• Conflicts with the ongoing expectations that the company has of the salesperson (complying with the sales model, call rate, strategies for other brands)
• Unrealistic in my selling environment (we work primarily in group selling / time-sensitive environments)

 

Similarly, there are a parallel set of objections that local marketers raise for not following a regional / global marketing strategy.  These include, but are not limited to the strategy not being 100% relevant in this market, being too complicated for ‘our reps’, clashing with a local initiative, been tried already, clashes with sales model, regulatory issues, translation issues, being unrealistic in our selling environment (groups, time sensitive), the imagery is racially wrong and insufficient time at sales meetings to explain it properly.

 

The Dramatic Change process can assist global, regional and local marketers in a number of ways…

1. At the very beginning of the process we co-opt sales training.  This removes all objections around sales models
2. Before meeting the sales representatives we co-opt sales management down to first-line level.  This allows issues around sales team priorities, time-off-road for meetings to be highlighted and positively resolved
3. Our baseline philosophy overcomes ‘credibility’ issues by fully aligning marketing strategy with doctor needs via Single Patient Focus®
4. We offer solutions for all selling environments including group and time sensitive selling
5. We set up a cogent and workable relationship between overarching strategy and local / individual sales tactics via Pre-Call Planning exercises.  A Dramatic Change programme can meet mulitple needs in a sales meeting context
6. We never focus on the competition
7. We don't require globally consistent sales materials to give the appearance that a recognisable global strategy is being enacted
8. Our programmes are fun.  Team-building is a given

For more information visit the company website: www.dramaticchange.com

Erasmus

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

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

And: -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gross Südland

"What you have to understand," I told an old friend as we sat in a waterside cafe in Sydney drinking wine, "is that the Greeks just don't pay their taxes."

"You mean they don't like paying tax.  Who does?"

"No.  They just don't pay them.  Anyone who pays tax is stupid.  At a barbecue you'd boast about how little the government got from you last year."

"But, but you have to pay tax.  You just have to.  I don't understand.  If you don't pay them then nothing works."

When back in Australia a few months ago I had this exact conversation - my take on the Euro crisis - again and again.  Whenever the discussion got to the Greek's diffidence to tax the reaction of my family and friends was the same: disbelief and barely suppressed outrage at a nation blithely refusing to pay its own way.

In Europe only my German friends react this way.  It occurred to me that this is no coincidence because: -

Of all the countries in Europe, including Britain, the country with which Australia most shares an outlook is modern Germany.

We may speak the same language, play the same sport and share a similar sense of humour to the Brits but our wider attitudes are increasingly Germanic.  We work hard and expect other to do likewise.  Driving on either the autobahn or its Australian equivalent there is an understanding that if the law is sensible it will be obeyed.  In a world of Keynesian pump-primers, both countries are run by deficit hawks who are paranoid about inflation above all other economic woes, although Australia's scars from the 1980's are nothing next to the rise of Nazism.

Although we play English sports we approach them with a German attitude.  Cricket is a game to be won not merely played.  Ditto rugby.  Our reaction to the Olympic team returning gold-less from the 1976 games (for the only time in our history) was to found the oh-so scientific Australian Institute of Sport.  We then staffed it with German coaches.  The backhanded English compliment "the Australian approach to sport" is essentially analogous with "the German approach to business": methodical, hard-working and intolerant of failure. 

Australia and Germany each struggle to reconcile the sensibilities of the dominant culture with the needed changes brought about by Islamic immigration.  The word 'genocide' appears in both histories, albeit unfairly in Australia's case.  The merest whiff of racism is rightfully exposed and condemned from all sides.  We are the only G20 nations where the Green movement has serious traction.  We see ourselves as the 'grown-up' country in our region so of course each pay our taxes, grudgingly perhaps but always in full.

We each drink lots of beer.  Not as much as Ireland or the Czech Republic but we both make the Top Five per capita consumption.  Then again, it's only beer, surely the most benign of alcoholic beverages.

I find working with Germans a far easier proposition than with the French, who intellectualise everything, or even the English, where every comment needs to be run through a decoder.  And Germans do have a sense of humour, however, it only appears after you've proven that you're not going to waste anyone's time.

When the comparison first occurred to me I was horrified and this theory still horrifies my Australian friends.  But if we have to resemble anyone then why not a country embarked on an ongoing project of national reinvention built on hard work and innovation without resorting to callous American inequality?  So sing it with me: -

Australien uber alles...

Not saying 'no'

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

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

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

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

Funny. And good in bed

My wife and I are back in Australia. We're staying with her mother and family in Sydney for a week or so. Almost everyone in the household is either self-employed or working for a start-up, which offers up some really interesting compare-and-contrast breakfast table conversations.

Hal has had several successful careers but now works from home as a foreign exchange trader. The arrangement is that he trades for himself but as part of a global cohort whose aggregate efforts are on behalf of an investment fund.  The business follows a sort of league table approach whereby as he proves his abilities the organisation allows him to trade larger amounts and so earn more.

After a year or so he's developed a keen sense of the market and is highly aware of the the combination of volume and volatility (driven by planned and unplanned news events) he needs to thrive and has climbed several rungs on the ladder already.  To do so he's adopted all the necessary professional behaviours that I would say are actually more important when working from home than anywhere else.  He'd no more trade with a hangover than I'd walk into a training room naked.

As I looked at the procession of charts and numbers flickering across the three screens on his desk I thought, "I could do that."

Of course I did. Men of my age and education all reckon we're the funniest guy at the party, a porn star in the bedroom, a Navy SEAL in a bar fight and a 'big swinging dick' in front of the trading screens

The last frontier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chien noir. Perro negro. Cane nero...

At a dinner at a European pharma meeting last night the conversation couldn't escape the financial crisis. Budgets slashed. Health ministries paralysed by the turmoil. Every hospital, therapy area, patient group and drug company desperately seeking an ever-larger share of a shrinking pie just to keep up.

"My dog's blacker than yours" in twelve European languages

Part of me

Part of me wants to stress over flight connections and the like. For the amount of emotional energy I expend in this way it's the only viable explanation.

Air travel: a procession of small humiliations.

Heathrow Express: your air travel experience starts here