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.

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...

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.

Music to a freelancer's ears

Is there any sweeter sound than a client saying: -

"I know this is short notice but..."

We have an issue that needs resolving and we want input from someone that we already trust.  And we need that input now.

Earning attention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manufactured urgency

My projects fall into two broad categories: -

1. Product launches
2. Institutional / cultural change

Implemented correctly, my IP has value in both scenarios, however, it needs to be positioned  differently in each case to achieve the desired outcome.  Any project that seeks both endpoints (i.e. successfully launch a product + change a sales culture) will almost certainly fail.

I prefer working on launches.  The heady combination of defined timelines and clearly understood success criteria brings out my best.  Who doesn't enjoy the challenge of 'getting it right the first time'?*

Institutional change is different.  These projects are too often plagued by a poorly manufactured sense of urgency driven by soft deadlines and project teams who are easily distracted by higher priority tasks (like product launches).  This is not to say that such projects aren't vital, just that the organisational benefits are often subtle to the point of immeasurability.

This is not solely, or even primarily, an external consultant's perspective; being invited to work on a product launch is an unambiguously gilt-edged opportunity whereas a cultural change project is often perceived as a poisoned chalice.

None of this is especially noteworthy.  Neither is, I suppose, my conclusion: that smaller consultancies are better at finite, high octane projects like product launches.  We don't have the manpower or the willpower for the endless meetings that come with cultural change projects.  We tire of writing 'reminder' emails to follow up on proposals written in good faith and great urgency in response to artificial deadlines.  And unlike the likes of McKinsey, we rarely have the stomach to bill by the hour for work that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

Perhaps it's my performing background but I do interventions better than processes.  I find it easier to enact change in people than systems.  In fact the first thing I'll do if you offer me process work is convert the project into a series of face-to-face events so that I can focus the system's attention and demonstrate value.  Which is, of course, just another way of manufacturing urgency.

* A long-standing joke of mine is that launch is the only marketing activity that pharma knows how to do well; its instinctive response to any other scenario is 'relaunch'

David Heinemeier-Hansson

Yesterday I went along to the Regent Street Apple Store to listen to David Heinemeier-Hansson speak.  I'm not a programmer so until yesterday he was someone who existed only on the edge of my radar.  This was the descriptor for the talk: -

David is the developer behind the hugely successful software Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. Join him as he discusses 37signals’ business manifesto, co-written with Jason Fried, Rework: Change the Way You Work Forever.

It was a free talk so that he could spruik his GTD book so what was there to lose?  As with any other free event nothing but my time.

Even an hardened stand-up would label the lecture theatre at the back of the Apple Store 'a tough room'; substandard acoustics and an audience full of nerds accessing the free WiFi but that doesn't begin to explain the underwhelming non-event that followed.  A profound inability to engage with the audience, an absence of stagecraft and a monotony of delivery all gave the impression that the speaker was focused on nothing more than his final PowerPoint slide and the customary yet desultory round of applause.

Leaving aside the props that Heinemeier-Hansson gets for being sickeningly fluent in English, he wasted my time.  The content of the talk was not so much 'how to improve my personal productivity' but rather 'how to behave if I worked at 37signals'.  I was less likely to buy the book at the end of the talk that at the beginning.

When will people realise that all public speaking is performing?

The end of the arc

Lately my stand-up has been underwhelming.  Whilst I haven't actually been 'dying' on stage neither have I left my audience clamouring for more.  Sure, I've only done two gigs since the month-long ash-cloud-extended sojourn in Asia and Australia but there's a deeper problem than lack of stage-time, which is my usual diagnosis for a malaise like this.

Instead it just feels like the end of the arc.

In late 2006 I kept a long-standing personal promise to try stand-up comedy.  I was 39 and rather than aiming for fame'n'fortune I gave myself the more realistic goal of attaining what I called 'journeyman status'.  In 2010 I get paid pretty well.  I get asked back.  I have bit of a reputation as a solid, reliable comic for either 'Opening 20's' or compeering.  If I stopped today I'd leave the industry if not a success then certainly not a failure.

Job done.

The end of an arc like this is a time of extraordinary vulnerability.  When our business began to take off in multiple markets around the world my then partner's enthusiasm demonstrably waned.  The minute the market wanted him he lost interest.

He explained the paradox by describing a dinner party with old friends from medical school.  Because their services are always in demand very few of the doctors he trained with were in any way entrepreneurial; why start your own institution when there are plenty who will bend over backwards to make sure you're happy?  Around the dinner table my partner's decision to start a pharmaceutical consulting firm was regarded as either brave, laughable or contemptible.  Yet within a few years he was a founding partner of a growing business  with strong prospects and an already impressive record in markets as different as the US, Spain, Singapore, India, Taiwan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

Job done.

By then no one was laughing behind their hands at dinner.  But once he reached the end of that narrative arc from risk to assurance he lost enthusiasm.  I was driven by less easily sated demons.  It was this misalignment of motivation more than any disparity in contribution that led to the decoupling of the business a few years later.

If I cannot construct a realistic and satisfying narrative of my future stand-up career then every gig from now on will feel like an unsatisfying postscript because that's all it will be.  The storyteller in me has some work to do.

Eighty percent

Eighty percent of being successful in life is showing up.

I've quoted this Woody Allen line (from Annie Hall) before but in the shadow of Eyjafjallajoekull it's worth revisiting.

I've long held the Sydney Morning Herald to be the worst broadsheet in the world so this smug and sneering article was no surprise whatsoever: -

All those people on TV, frantically rushing from departure gate to train station to hire car vendor, remind me of a quote from a novel I once read (Margaret Atwood, perhaps?): “People will do anything rather than admit their lives have no meaning.” It turns out they’re even willing to sleep in airports.

Of course there's nothing a SMH journo enjoys more than sneering at the wage slaves.  If they're those nasty, Gaia-killing corporate traveler types then so much the better.  It doesn't occur to the writer that for many of the people she's mocking travel is as much an end as a means.  Showing up - being present at the meeting - is not a downside of the job, it is the job.  Airily declaring the meeting to be pointless doesn't change this.  Making fun of someone trying to do their job well; i.e. doing everything in their power to make the meeting, is a cheap shot.

A freelance writer who hires a taxi to get her copy to the editor when the fax and email goes down is the ultimate professional; the legend who went above and beyond to get the job done.  The habitual Business Class flier who opts to travel overnight in a 3rd Class rail carriage is an exact analogue.

Looking back I bet we'll be saying that this was the week when the understudy got her big break.  Like when the up-and-coming act got to close out the main stage.  Critics will put it down to the luck of being in the right place at the right time but in our hearts we know there's more to it than that.

No one is going to get sacked this week for missing the meeting but being the guy who did show up will count.

Eyjafjallajoekull

I suppose everyone is stuck somewhere this week.  I just happen to be stuck in Singapore.

It's hard to grasp the extent of the shutdown of European air traffic from this distance but doubtless there won't be a full roll call at Wednesday's pan-European pitch meeting in Milan.  My worry is not that I'll be somehow marked down for failing to anticipate the eruption of a volcano in Iceland but simply that the moment presented by the pitch will be lost.  In most workplaces an Act of God is the ultimate 'Get Out Of Jail' card.  Missing that meeting in Milan is consequence-free for everyone but me.

Most people live lives with very few totally unforgiving days; the time your train got delayed on the way to the interview and the job went to the other guy.  Self-employment is accepting that there are going to many more of these totally unforgiving days.

No one owes me a second chance regardless of why the first one went awry.

An Australian in a European winter

The comedian in me should be happy; in the last week I've amused onlookers in Zurich and Oslo.

Leather soles + icy ground = indignity.

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.

Parallels

Last night I sat in on a rehearsal for the Sydney iteration of Scenes from Communal Living. It was only the third rehearsal but the parallels between their work and my London cast at the same point on the production timeline were uncanny. There was the same early reticence to work with unfamiliar people, the same two-steps-forward-one-step-back development of actors who absolutely nailed the audition but also the same wonderful commitment to break new ground.

The portents for the show itself couldn't be better.

Boarding a moving train

One of the first things I posted on this Blog was on 'momentum'.

At the time my struggle was with my own ego; the petulant child in me who wanted to 'punish' a recalcitrant client who took days to reply to my emails by responding in kind. A suicidally immature approach to business that draws more from The Rules than from any sane business text.

One of the few things that we suppliers can control is our speed of response to a request. This is something that really gets noticed, especially when clients are under internal pressure. It's a cheap and essentially painless way to exceed expectations.

Right now every client I have is operating at warp speed. Marketing departments seem to be on perpetual fast forward. Needs are identified in the morning and the supplier decision is sorted by close of business on the same day.

In the coming months the guy who answers his phone and checks his emails is going to be busy.

Back in the saddle

Last night we restarted Scenes from Communal Living at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. A small house saw a terrific show performed by a cast of three 'veterans' of the Edinburgh and previous Camden runs and three 'Scenes virgins'. Everyone surprised each other and so everyone shone.

It felt like coming home.

On the other side of the world Marko is halfway through casting the Australian run (opening at the Fusebox Theatre in Marrickville on November 3). We spoke at length this morning so far his experiences parallel mine from February and March. This consistency means that once I take the learnings from Edinburgh into account I may yet have something replicable.

This week I have to be in Plymouth for a stand-up comedy gig and Zurich for pharmaceutical consulting work 24 hours later. Only in my world would this be considered normal.

A better day

Every review of an improv highlights the variability of the artform. In the better (kinder?) ones it's mentioned towards the end, in harsher ones it's called 'inconsistency' and raised in the opening sentence. This is the nature of improv and has to be embraced.

I'm doing my damndest to free my cast from the pattern of following every great show with a weak one. This means focusing on the consistency deficit within each show. So every moment with the cast is precious.

Today was a strange show in that we went on 20 minutes late (unheard of at a Festival) because of an issue with a punter in a wheelchair. The actors might have been thrown but weren't.

I'm still too pessimistic to declare the pattern broken but the signs are good.

Stress

Arrived in Edinburgh yesterday to be greeted by a very happy cast, an extremely focused stage manager and a total absence of promotional material. 24 hours later and I'm predicting that the continuing lack of promotional material will result in a decrease in the overall happiness of the cast.

I am assured that everyone is doing his or her best.

Collaboration + Leverage = Momentum

Two truisms: -

• A project is just a sequence of tasks that have to be done by someone
  

• Projects crave momentum yet collaboration means that real progress occurs at the pace of the slowest contributor
  

When working as a supplier in a purely commercial context (ie consulting) I happily take on as many tasks as I can. By so doing I take implicit responsibility for the momentum of the project thus giving me a greater chance of seeing the thing through to completion.

Theatre is a collaborative process and that's generally agreed to be one of its intrinsic rewards. But if you're an impatient type like me it's also a primary shortcoming. This week I've been reminded of a valuable lesson: -

It is hard to remain responsible for a collaborative project if you offload all contingent tasks to others

A successful project manager allocates at least a few tasks to herself. That way she maintains at least a little leverage when the inevitable 'deadline looming' conversations emerge. It's the difference between emailing or calling a colleague and saying: -

You said you'd have completed Task A by Date C. Where is it?

And: -

We agreed that you'd do Task A and I'd do Task B by Date C. Now, I've completed Task B...

The latter has at least a chance of sounding reasonable whereas the former just sounds like you're ordering the staff about. And that doesn't even work with the staff.

Come on board!

This week I was invited to work on two new projects that at first glance could not be more different.

One is to design a highly scientific four-week 'new hire' training programme for pharma sales reps from nine smaller European markets. The other to direct a one-woman theatre show to be staged in London then Brighton then finally at the Edinburgh Fringe.

However, because both projects predate my involvement I'm discovering many parallels. For example, having to accept that cogent lessons have been learned away from my direct experience. Or that a poorly articulated vision is different from the absence of one. Or that I have to take as much responsibility here as I would for a project where I've been involved since conception.

In other words, playing nicely with others.

The seriousness of work

Scenes from Communal Living closed on Sunday night.

Was the show a success? How would it measure up against a straight consulting project (my 'seriousness of work' measure)?

Upsides: -

• We made a lot of people laugh
  
• We had pretty good houses throughout the run and full ones for all of the last week
  
• The show has been accepted for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August (more on that another time)
• Cast members have had invitations to audition for, or perform in, other projects
• I've already picked up a (paid) directing gig on the strength of the show

Downsides: -

• I lost money
• I spent a few hundred pounds more than I'd budgeted
• Our reviews were okay-to-good rather than good-to-great

But the ultimate upside is this: -

The Scenes from Communal Living brand is established and now has momentum

It was brought into the world. It didn't exist and now it does.The future is about managing those downsides for the show's next incarnation and the one after that.