Holidays

 One way to get to grips with the opening premise of Friday’s post is to consider our attitudes to holidays.

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

Holidays are an annual ritual in paying real money to calibrate our ambitions with the pace of the world.  If you want a week of sleeping, eating and reading you buy a ‘fly’n’flop’ at a child free resort somewhere sunny.  To reconnect with your preteen kids choose Euro Disney.  Because our own scarce resources (time and money) are at stake any dissonance aggravates us so much more on holidays than in usual life; “It wasn't like this in the brochure” is a near-universal lament.

 

For eight years my family ran a 3½-star hotel on Mission Beach in Far North Queensland. I looked after the marketing on a part-time basis, which was a pretty cool job.  How could it not be when this is your workplace?

In our day Castaways on the Beach was a pretty modest operation whose prime selling point was the location.   The property had a longstanding reputation for being ‘family friendly’, offering easy access to a vast waveless beach, lots of suites with in-room cooking facilities and a short walk to a town centre that featured lots of relatively inexpensive dining options and a small supermarket.  Our in-house restaurant also offered an extensive children’s menu.  As everyone knows (or should know), ‘family friendly’ is code for “There will be screaming kids everywhere.  If this is not want you want on your holiday then best you go someplace else.” Families with younger children were consistently our most satisfied customers, not least because our business plan didn't rely on corralling our guests into the dining room three times a day.  What parent doesn't find it galling paying for a full breakfast buffet when all the kid wants is a bowl of cereal?

 

Our least satisfied customers were always honeymooners who had locked onto the picture on the website and the 3½-star tariffs but (often willfully) ignored the ‘family friendly’ signals.  Signals that included the literal words ‘family friendly’ on all our brochures, billboards, website, etc.  We accepted that our offering couldn't match the ambitions of most loved-up newlyweds and instructed the booking staff to gently warn off such customers.  Over the years we invested quite heavily in improvements to the property but intentionally stuck to the 3½-star bracket.  We were happy with our positioning at the ‘family friendly’ end of the market.

 

I have no children and a relatively high disposable income but we never attempted to build an offering that would appeal to people like me and in 2007 my family sold a thriving business.  The new owners, who have far more access to far more capital than we did, spent an actual fortune taking the place ‘upmarket’.  They refurbished the public areas, reduced the pool size to increase the bar area, added a day spa, removed most of the in-room cooking facilities and upped the tariffs by about 60%.

 

I was back in Mission Beach last July and to my childless eyes the place looks amazing.  But to a family on a budget with a brood of young kids the whole package screams “Stay Away!”  The word around town is that Castaways Resort & Spa is for up sale again.

 

The need to purchase a world that temporarily matches our ambitions is the reason why we expend so much energy researching our holidays.  We only get to spend this time and money a few times a year and it's personal.  This is why holidaying with any but the closest of friends is rarely a good idea ("It’s my holiday too, y’know") and why most of us revisit those trusted holiday places again and again and again.

White coats in far flung lands

No reader of this site would be unaware of the placebo effect (aka the 'white coat effect') which is usually defined as something like: -

The measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered

Your attitude to placebos is probably driven by your overall attitude to health care.  One side of the argument is that that anything that offers a sick person a respite from the effects of his disease has value.  People holding this view are renaming the phenomenon the placebo response; whatever it is that's going on is broadly on our side.  The opposing view is that what's being peddled is fraud and false hope; we're tricking the patient into believing that something substantial is being done and the fact that the patient's own brain is in on the ruse doesn't excuse anyone.

The placebo effect / response is the bete noir of pharmaceutical research.  If you've sunk upwards of half a billion dollars into developing a drug then 'no better than placebo' is not want you want to hear at the end of Phase III trials.  The brutal logic is that there's no point in subjecting the patient to an expensive treatment that is undoubtedly accompanied by a raft of side-effects when with a little encouragement the patient's own body can achieve the same response on its own.

And apparently we're seeing a strange increase in the placebo effect.  A few years ago Wired Magazine ran a great Steve Silbermen article entitled Placebos Are Getting More Effective.  Drugmakers Are Desperate To Know Why.  It tracks the work done by Dr William Potter, a researcher at Eli Lilly, who observed that new antidepressant and antianxiety medications were actually being overtaken by placebos in as many as nine out of ten trials.  Potter questioned two assumptions that are pivotal to clinical trials: -

1. If a trial is managed correctly, a medication will perform as well or badly anywhere in the world
2. The standard tests used to gauge volunteers' improvement in trials yield consistent results

It turns out that part of the problem stems from (surprise, surprise) the pharma industry's habit of scouring the globe for the cheapest option to undertake any necessary work; more and more clinical trials are using centres in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India and Africa.  Something that's of great concern to the hand-wringing lefties of this week's Guardian: -

Places such as South Africa – where mostly vulnerable poor with low literacy levels are recruited and the culture is to accept authority without question – are fertile land for ethical misconduct

I accept that ethical misconduct of every kind is more likely in the less developed world (viz. Nestle infant formula) but I reject the knee-jerk implication that such exploitation is inevitable.  The irony is that the problem of the spreading placebo effect may be a result of exploitation in the opposite direction: -

A patient's hope of getting better and expectation of expert care—the primary placebo triggers in the brain—are particularly acute in societies where volunteers are clamoring to gain access to the most basic forms of medicine. "The quality of care that placebo patients get in trials is far superior to the best insurance you get in America," says psychiatrist Arif Khan, principal investigator in hundreds of trials for companies like Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb. "It's basically luxury care."

Wired, ibid

When a Big Pharma company grandly states that its mission is to 'improve the lives of people across the world', I strongly doubt that the promotion of the placebo effect is what it has in mind.

Personalised medicine v. National debt

Another day, another expensive cancer treatment gets rejected on cost grounds.  This time it's the turn of Novartis' renal cancer drug Afinitor: -

Despite appeals from Novartis and Kidney Cancer UK against the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence's decision, the watchdog maintains that Afinitor (everolimus) simply does not provide enough benefit to justify its high cost...

The overall treatment cost (is) about £34,235 per patient per year, or around £205,000 for a full course of treatment.

Pharma Times Online, April 19

These stories are commonplace across the Western World and for the moment, they are seen as part of the everyday argy-bargy of Big Pharma's negotiations with the national governments that are their ultimate customers.

But note the complete alignment between the pharma company and Kidney Cancer UK, a patient advocacy group that most likely receives funding from Novartis.  As stated previously, I have no problem with pharma companies pushing the patient to the centre of the treatment discussion.  There are neither cloaks nor daggers here and Kidney Cancer UK would exist even without the support of the various purveyors of renal cancer therapies.

As cancer is a quasi-chronic condition (i.e. one you see coming and so fight on your own behalf), sufferers and their families tend to be highly motivated people with an automatic tendency towards political agitation.  Cancer is hitting the baby boomers hard and they're unlikely to accept the withholding of any therapies whatsoever.  They will place inordinate pressure on a health system, which often leads to politicians creating release mechanisms: -

If doctors feel that any of these individual patients would benefit from the drug then they can still apply for exceptional funding from their primary care trust or the Cancer Drugs Fund, the Institute noted.

Ibid

All of which is fine if you live in the UK (and have a doctor sufficiently motivated to fight the good fight on your behalf).

But what if you're a Greek, Portuguese or Irish national?  As sad as your story undoubtedly is, given its current financial predicament, can your government honestly justify spending €38,500 on one citizen when that amounts to a year's wages for a senior nurse?

Watch the Greek, Portuguese and (especially) Irish baby boomers heap increasing political pressure on their governments; directly via advocacy groups and indirectly by turning up in person at British, German and French cancer centres.  Then watch for renewed pressure on the cost of the drugs themselves.

Identifying the scarce resource

Most definitions of economics stick pretty close to that of Lionel Robbins: -

The science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses

The debate over how to best allocate finite resources amongst infinite demands is a commonplace and nowhere more so than in in the health care arena.  We're all going to die of something so the expense of sickness will always outstrip funds available for cure.

Successful pharmaceutical marketing is the process of ensuring that the condition treated by your drug enjoys as high a priority as possible in the system in question; be it the WHO, the NHS, a Strategic Health Authority (SHA), a Hospital Trust or the patient cohort seen by the individual GP.  The truth is that resources (time, money, beds) given over to HIV is a potential denial of diabetes treatment.  HIV wins so diabetes loses.  Or vice versa.

At an intellectual level we generally accept that quasi-objective measures like the QALY (quality adjusted life year) are necessary yet they seem wholly callous when applied to the treatment of people we love.  Tabloid papers thrive on stories condemning the cruelty of the 'postcard lottery' which is just the shorthand for the situation whereby different parts of a country have different health priorities.  For example, it is far better to get cancer in the southeast of England than west Scotland because Glasgow's cardiovascular issues are (still) a higher priority than cancer.

Doctors are trained to react subjectively (i.e. in the best interest of the individual patient) which often puts them in opposition to the objective needs of the system (NHS, SHA, Trust).  Pharma selling exists in part to exploit this gap.  This is not unethical per se; the representative is trying to promote the interests of the patient whose health needs will be best met by her drug.  Win-win.

The scarce resource most important to the pharma company is not the drug budget (although this is of course vital), but rather the motivation of the individual doctor to fight for the individual patient / drug.  Every day almost every doctor in Britain is faced with the prospect of having to fight for access to a treatment for a particular patient.  Not every doctor takes up every patient's cause as it would be impossibly exhausting to do so.

Identifying which customer has the energy to take the fight to the system on your behalf is a vital task for any salesperson selling into a complex system, especially when that system uses inertia as a cost control mechanism.

Why China is hard on trainers

I do some consultancy in China and like every businessperson in the Western world I'd like to do more. 

An interview in Bloomberg sets out one key reason why I won't hold my breath when it comes to a huge uptick in work in developing markets.  Abbas Hussain is GlaxoSmithKline's president of emerging markets on his teams in China and India: -

Every year, about 20 percent of GSK's sales force quits to take jobs at rival firms, Abbas Hussain says.  And that's about average for the pharma industry in those markets, meaning that most if not all drugmakers share the turnover problem

Even in good times this is a key difference between established and emerging markets.  In Europe, North America and Australia the most common reason given by a salesperson voluntarily leaving is 'Lack of development' whereas in China and India companies are in a straight-out bidding war.

My stuff certainly enhances a team's professional (and personal) development which is why I work mostly in stable pharma markets like Europe.  Unfortunately it's still hard for a Chinese COO to justify flying in a London-based consultant to deliver in Beijing or Shanghai if he knows for a fact that 1 in 5 team-members are on the verge of quitting. 

A grim game of pass the parcel

For me a consulting project is typically built on a bilateral relationship: there's just me and the customer. This is not to say that I don't expect to have a number of contacts within the client organisation, only that there's usually a clear vision and a single, one-way financial flow (them to me).

I've been spoilt. For years I've been spared the ongoing, low-level, zero-sum-game aggravation of multilateral relationships that a complex, event-driven project entails.

Next year a piece of my work is the centrepiece of a large meeting that apparently also requires an advertising agency, a graphic design firm and a special events supplier. On the far side of this triumvirate is a necessary array of translators, printers, airlines, hotels and so on. A complex situation is thus made even more complicated by flagrant jockeying for position over interminable teleconferences.  I like to think I play nicely with others (despite years of sole tradership submitted as evidence to the contrary). No, the conflict hasn't arisen over personality but due to billing mechanisms.

I have long charged a high day-rate that acts as a sort of whole-of-project fee. Once we agree on a number I'm committing myself to everything necessary to drag the project over the line. This is works very well for my standard project-driven bilateral relationship.

Contrast this with the more typical agency relationship where fees are generated based on hourly billing but where there's a ceiling to the total fee. This means that the agency's agenda is to eagerly volunteer for all work on offer up until the fee ceiling is reached and then either negotiate an elevation of that ceiling or be compelled to decline any excess tasks. The ability to negotiate this elevation without displeasing the client is the mark of a good account service person.

What happens in a situation like the present; a large, multi-player project where there is a substantial but very finite budget? Fee structures drive behaviours in evermore obvious ways. The early days were a gold rush; everyone magnanimously volunteered to take on each new task without regard for the actual competency of the volunteering company. Agencies were organising travel and graphic design firms were commissioning translation services.  This is when strong clients are invaluable; they see what's going on and put a stop to at least the most flagrant overreaching.

Why aren't there more strong clients?

Now the seam is tapping out and there's a growing list of fiddly, unpleasant tasks are being shifted from supplier to supplier, in danger of not being done at all. We've suddenly gone from gold rush to a grim game of pass the parcel and the project is beginning to suffer.

My fee structure (and personal philosophy) leaves me especially exposed; my inclination is say, "Oh for goodness' sake just let me do it." which, is of course what everyone else is waiting for.  It's all horribly demotivating but what can I do?

When the big day comes I'll be the one standing up and speaking whilst everyone else is already back at the office drafting their invoices.

Thick & thin

A couple of London's longer-running comedy rooms closed recently. Nothing especially unusual about this as there's a natural rate of turnover in the industry.

A couple of the promoters (anyone who cajoles a pub landlord into giving over his upstairs room for comedy is a 'promoter') have mourned the passing of their nights on the Chortle website. There's a consistency in their moanings that has been picked up elsewhere.  Somehow London's comedy-going audiences are simultaneously too thin to be profitably shared amongst all the clubs and too thick to be relied upon to find their way to the 'quality' nights (i.e. the ones run by the writers).

As in Edinburgh, bizarre forebodings of a form of Gresham's Law prevail. The hand-wringing prediction that cheaper, low quality nights will somehow drive out the better gigs that pay their acts is pathetic. If you think so little of your audience before they enter the room what chance that they'll be treated well once the show starts?

Understanding expectations, then meeting them

Max Dickens has a great essay on the Chortle website that presents a refreshing take on the hackneyed debate about the merits or otherwise of 'mainstream comedy'.  The essence of the piece seems to be: -

1. Understand the expectations of your audience even if these are unstated or even unrecognised
2. Please your audience by meeting those expectations
3. Don't worry about anything else

In other words: -

Don't pretend to be someone you're not and don't pretend that your audience is something that it isn't

Creating conversations

This week I enjoyed a very interesting conversation with an up'n'coming comic en route to a far flung gig.

When not doing comedy he 'creates and maintains an online presence for bands'. Meaning that he uses Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and blog posts to create a conversation between artists and consumers (aka 'the fans').

If cliches like 'unlocking the power of new media' have meaning then presumably my friend would be seen to be at the forefront of this new way of doing marketing. But often he's just an old-fashioned ghostwriter and happily admits as much.

The Holy Grail of his craft is the 'high involvement response'; the fan who, of her own volition, remixes a bands' latest song or creates a mash-up or cuts together a new video and posts it on YouTube and then Tweets the link to her fifty followers who each re-Tweet it to fifty more. The payoff comes when the band emails the new music guy at BBC1 saying that their Facebook group has 2,000 UK fans and the YouTube link of the song (MP3 attached) has been hit 3,000 times in the last month. A quantifiable number of fans, presumably your listeners, have endorsed us already so get on board.

But it all begins with an authentic act of homage and my friend sees his job as to create an online environment where that might occur. The operative word is 'authentic'; something a ghostwriter can never be. He admits that he's only ever achieved this 'high involvement response' with acts that got personally involved ("they touched the keyboard"). Those clients who leave everything to my friend get mediocre results. No Facebook, no fans, no buzz.

The gods of cyberspace help those who help themselves.

I asked him who were the most successful acts to follow this marketing model and he rattled off a dozen names that of course I'd never heard of,

"But why would you? You're 43 and you're never going to pay to see them play live so you're no good to them anyway."

Ideas, opportunity, time & capital

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

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

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

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

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

Necessity & sufficiency

The only thing I remember from Logic classes in first year Philosophy was 'necessity' and 'sufficiency' in conditional statements.  Of course in the years since then I've somewhat purposefully mutated the terms, adapting them to marketing consulting.  For example: -

For a product launch to be successful it is necessary to have a good product but that alone is not sufficient

This is more than a rhetorical device.  It helps keep a client discussion focused on those factors that have to be in place before starting a project; the genuine deal-breakers.

This is easily applied to staging of comedy night: -

For a comedy night to be successful it is necessary to have a functioning microphone and a decently lit performing space and whilst these alone are not sufficient, without them you're just another guy standing, yelling in the middle of the pub 

 What?  Quit showbiz?

Pricing in

Recently a banker friend was evaluating the performances of the major players in the UK's upcoming election.  On the subject of Gordon Brown's bullying he declared that the reason why this news had so little effect on opinion polling was that the electorate had already 'priced in' this sort of information.

'Priced in' is a bankerish way of saying that news is unsurprising.  I like phrase as it implies that an intelligent assessment has been made of the offer in question with a degree of tolerance included in the face of an uncertain world.

Buried somewhere in my pricing must be the fact that I don't work continuously otherwise my business is unsustainable.  This is where the trouble begins for the dilettante who looks at that first week's fee and immediately multiplies it by fifty-two.

1,000 fans

Last night's gig involved a six-hour round trip to Lincolnshire on roads that were less trecherous than the British media had warned / wished. Happily I shared the trip with another comic, a newly arrived recruit to the legion of Australian stand-ups based here.

We spent much of the time puzzling over his big challenge: -

What is the quickest means for him to create sufficient demand for his stand-up such that he can provide for his wife and newborn daughter?

His parameters are simple: he sees himself primarily as a storyteller and really isn't interested in TV except to further his live performing. He is a terrific writer and fine comic with a long track record of great shows in Australia. What piqued my interest was his mention of 1000 Fans. This is a new sort of business model ascribed to Kevin Kelly, the logic of which is as follows: -

An artist can make a living from a thousand fans willing to part with a hundred dollars a year

So as well as creating cool stuff we have to usurp the means of distribution (promotion) of our work. The idea also raises something interesting about ambition: -

Is $100,000 p.a. enough?

This is a fascinating question to ask young comics. $100,000 is more money than most comics will ever earn in a year but far less than what they dream of. Like every kid footballer who believes he's the next Christiano Ronaldo, young comics seem to want Russell Brand's life or bust. My new Australian friend is mature enough to see that $100K a year doing the thing he loves as amounts to a successful life. Now all he has to do is find those thousand fans.

Kelly chose his two numbers carefully; 1,0000 is more people than you can possibly know well but not so many that they can't feel that they have a relationship with you, which speaks to the asymmetric (but not didactic) nature of 'fandom'. And $100 a year is neither a throwaway amount nor does imply an obsession.

Cultivating a thousand-strong fanbase means putting the effort into avenues of ongoing two-way dialogues. So setting up your own fan page on Facebook is a wholly illusory step in the right direction. For a stand-up comic the real gain is more likely to come from chatting to the punter who buys you a drink; this is someone showing that they want to give you more, that they want a relationship.

I am a huge fan of The Bugle, the free weekly podcast made by Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver (of The Daily Show). I have no idea how many subscribers they have but right now I'm listening to a 'Best Of' episode featuring 20 minutes of fans' unsolicited remixes of old shows. Because the podcast is free its fans have found other ways to create the dialogue.

So Kelly's metric presents a stark question for a live performer: how many of your Facebook 'fans' would pay $20 a show to see you perform five times a year? You're welcome to include family and friends in that number.

Five lessons (large & small) from 2010

Theatre in London is hard, hard, hard

Achieving decent houses over a long run means attracting a mix of price-sensitive local regulars and brand-sensitive one-off tourists

Confusing art and craft is deadly for anyone involved in a creative pursuit

Comics beware: craft is more about application than inspiration. You may know what you want to say right now but do you know how to say that thing in a way that works for the paying audience who only turned up to laugh?

Improv is a pastime

Treat it as a sideline project and you're free to fly. Treat it like a job and you'll never get a mortgage

Away from the world of finance, business hasn't changed all that much

Clients have much the same needs as two years ago, they're just a little more cost-sensitive and a lot more time-sensitive. They're also more risk-averse so having a prominent and trusted brand helps

Collaborations are fantastic, partnerships are dangerous

This year I've worked with wonderful and creative people on projects that have made me truly proud. At the end of each it's been great to part without making open-ended promises

Institutionalised freelancing

Pretty much everything written about self-employment and freelancing (including these notes) operates on an implicit assumption that working for oneself is a brave and noble calling: to strike out on one's own is to reject the status quo and follow in the footsteps of giants like Henry Ford, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Last night I caught up with a very successful London barrister. By definition he is self-employed, albeit in a partnership within his chambers. There's nothing remarkable about this as every barrister in Great Britain is a freelancer and yet his working world is governed by the same unstated laws as mine: -

The client needs the job done more than she needs you to do it. To be unavailable for whatever reason is to elevate a competitor at your own expense

This is how the British Bar has operated for hundreds of years. There is nothing brave or noble about it, it's just what the world looks like if you want to be a barrister.

Don Lane (1933-2009). A lesson in globalisation

A few weeks ago Don Lane, an American-born Australian television personality, died from Alzheimer's Disease. He was 75.

When I was growing up in Australia Lane was a fixture on late-night commercial TV. With Bert Newton, Ernie Sigley and Graham Kennedy he formed a cadre that made numerous attempts to create a local version of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. They were successful I suppose but there was always that taint of provincialism, that this was 'only Australia'. This was especially true of Lane because he was so identifiably American. We got him because he hadn't made it in New York, LA or Las Vegas.

Lane arrived in Australia in 1965, about the time that world-class local talents like Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes were leaving. The contrast is stark. Where you go when you leave home speaks volumes about your level of ambition.

Or it used to.

James has written at length about how his was the last generation compelled to leave Australia to 'make it' and perhaps he's right. Nowadays the truism is that so long as you don't mind airplane food where you live doesn't matter. Ben Folds can base himself in Adelaide or Ross Noble in rural Victoria.

The likes of Don Lane rarely succeed in modern Australia. The country is just too globalised to accept mediocre foreign talent; an unambiguously good thing as excellence at home means that Australians go overseas ready to participate.

It's only a matter of time until the Asian filth* phenomenon goes the same way.

* Failed In London, Try Honkers

The price insensitivity of bored lawyers

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a lawyer in possession of a good career must be in want of a creative sideline*

Why is it that lawyers envy actors and writers so much? Rare is the successful lawyer who does not have a not-so-secret desire for artistic credibility of some sort. You don't get this with other professions; doctors, architects and engineers don't seem to openly rue the fact they could've been on the stage or NYT bestseller list.

There is a lot of overlap of the essential qualities for success in both law and the linguistic arts. Julia Cameron of The Artist's Way describes the law as 'a talky, wordy profession' and it's hard to imagine a successful barrister who cannot summon a sense of theatre when required. Moreover, many people who go on to make a name in the creative industries actually studied Law at university. The partner in the law firm went to the same lectures as the award-winning director. Guess which one shines over the dinner table.

Beginners' classes in stand-up comedy and improv everywhere are overrun with bored lawyers wanting something new to talk about on Monday morning. It would be interesting to know the concentration of lawyers participating in this month's NaNoWriMo.

So what's the issue? It's seemingly wrong to deny anyone, even a lawyer, the chance to follow their dream. The problem arises over ability to pay: a bored lawyer is a price insensitive creature.

This is great news for the providers of 'how to' classes in fields like drama, comedy and creative writing as they can increase their asking price. It's extremely bad news for younger and poorer part-timers trying to break into the same creative field if they're priced out of the classroom.

* With apologies

Debriefing Edinburgh

I'm processing my commercial / marketing learnings from Edinburgh.

So much of a project's marketing success comes down to proper focusing of finite resources. This is something that I got at least partly wrong this year. A disciplined mix of resources including time, manpower, passion and money is required. Every year too many impecunious acts convince themselves that an abundance of the first three removes the need for the fourth.

I agree with a recent Seth Godin post about 'bootstrappers' (one of his favourite terms).

Second guessing

The Festival is a marathon not a sprint. Already I've met bruised and beaten acts who are questioning why they're in Edinburgh.

In a 2006 interview for a Fringe podcast, veteran comic and The Now Show regular Mitch Benn identifies the three separate audiences at the festival and describes the frustration of trying to please them simultaneously.

The audiences in question are of course: -

1. Critics and reviewers; who need to seem decisive and knowledgeable
2. Agents and producers of TV and radio; who are looking for the Next Big Thing
3. Punters; who just want to be entertained

Obviously these needs run in parallel and the only possible response to this supposed dilemma is to follow the advice of that old fool Polonius. Do what you came up here to do.

On the road again

I've just noticed that of late my posts have focused more on my comedy than my consultancy.

Given the state of the world economy I must say how nice it is to work in pharma, a sector that is proving to be better than recession-proof. Not only are my clients still launching products with the same regularity as ever but because of the GFC even more is riding on the success of those launches.

This week I'm in Zurich and Copenhagen working with separate clients who gave me identical briefs: -

This time we can't afford to not 'get it right the first time'*

Higher internal stakes are always welcome news for external consultants like me.

* Apologies for the mangling double-negative but that's essentially what each client said in the meeting