Bandwidth & the BCG

As has been mentioned before, I am no longer a n=1 business.  One of my proudest achievements of the last 12-18 months is the emergence of a team of focused, committed, high-performing associates who deliver my stuff at least as well as me.  Not only do my colleagues treat the work as seriously as I ever did, their fresh eyes see innovations and opportunities that have been passing pass me by.

I deliberately hand over interesting projects and not only when I can’t be in two places at once.  In the medium term this should expand our active client base but for the moment I am embracing personal financial pain in order to radically change my working life.

I am freeing up bandwidth to chase opportunities in an entirely new domain; by this time next year I plan to describe myself as the CMO of a tech start-up.  I will still own and operate a pharma consulting company but it will no longer be the first line of my LinkedIn profile.  In BCG matrix terms I am relegating my old business to ‘cash cow’ status in order to make room for a ‘star’.

I’m excited at the prospect of solving brand new problems in an unfamiliar commercial space.  I’m looking forward to being ‘inexperienced’.

I’m reminded of advice given to me by an improviser in 1991, the year I quit working for other people...

Enjoy not knowing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

This is not a complaint

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Advice for the self-employed (January edition)

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

I finished my last job of last year the week of Christmas.  I never have paid consulting work that late in the year.  The preceding months are a blurred pastiche of meetings, telecons, airports and familiar hotel rooms in cities I'd never visited before.  Back in August my business accelerated and by December I was tumbling down the chute that opens with exhilaration then descends through fatigue, helplessness and exhaustion before bottoming out in tangible, physical illness.  Be careful what you wish for.

 

Sixteen days later I'm in a more familiar state of mind: my ambitions moving faster than my world.  I'm back to wanting more than what's on offer.  I'm impatient and paranoid.  Am I being deliberately excluded?  Are potential clients buying my old book instead of hiring the new me? The glass between me and a shining future is smudged with my greasy noseprints.  I read the Euro crisis stories and fret that last year was my financial high water mark. Then I worry that a smarter, savvier me would look at the state of the world and see where there's a quid to be made from all this chaos.  A fortnight is a long time in self-employment.

 

I've been at this Headcount:1 game a long time now (viz. my previous post.) so here’s my advice to those underemployed self-employed folks out there who spent the Christmas-New Year interregnum drinking too much and ignoring the gnawing knowledge that you don't have guaranteed work lined up for January already.  Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’ is always a good place to start: -

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

Self-employment means that is that there's no boss to impress, no underling to browbeat and no rivalrous colleague to outmanoeuvre.  The brutal truth is that only thing you get to change is you.

 

January 6 is just too soon to start badgering clients so you're tempted to run headlong at all those clichéd resolutions: diet & exercise,better sleep patterns and commendable reading habits.  This impulse is prophylactic at best; racking up cosmic credits for the next time the spiralling chute opens beneath you.  Except that there is no godly ledger balancing a January spent at the gym against a May-time diet of airport pizza and beer.  At worst these resolutions are symptomatic of the very mismatch between ambition and action that you're looking to escape.  Even as you sweat over The Economist some part of you knows that you're just waiting for the phone call that will fill your days.  Diet and exercise might be change but not the sort you can really believe in. 

 

Devoting all this excess time to your actual business can be more damaging still. Parkinson’s Law assumes at least some sort of deadline.

 

My advice to my time-rich client-poor comrades is as follows: -

Find some small, new, discrete thing and do it well.

Not some rambling yearlong project.  You have one of those already: building your business.  Rather that small thing that is affordable in terms of both your time and money but that doesn't require you waiting on anyone else.  A one-off class.  A lecture. A walk to a place you've never been before.  An afternoon taking photos.  A blog post. Don't reorganise your life but somehow extend it.  A measure might be this to complete some thing that allows you to greet your life partner at the door with, “Guess what I did today?” Achievement, no matter how minor, is not risible.

 

Create small ambitions that are under your control and sit them alongside those larger ones that are not. But do this small thing for its own sake, not with one eye fastened on the far side of the smudgy glass.

And don't worry too much about 2012.  My reading of the news is that we all, those with bosses and offices and those without, are going to hell in a handbasket of soon-to-be resurrected European currencies anyway.

 

Happy New Year.

Life changing experience

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.

I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.

I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.

One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -

These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?

I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.

Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.

A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -

I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.

The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.

Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -

Don’t be original be obvious.

Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?

I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

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

London. Dawn. An uneasy peace prevails

Got back to London yesterday after three weeks away. Mostly I was catching up with family in Australia in Far North Queensland and western New South Wales but I also managed the best part of a week seeing friends in Sydney and Wellington (NZ). With all the bad behaviour in England this week I found it harder and harder to 'sell' the UK as a sensible place to live when Oz is an option.

I like Great Britain and I love London but the ambient anger we've seen this week isn't going to dissipate until the city / country regains some sense of shared opportunity. I'm still trying to work out where I want to grow old but I'm not sure I'd stay in the UK if I were still young.

Something bigger than a career

A few years ago in the context of showbiz careers I mused as follows: -

Isn't a successful career just one where you do what you love until you don't have to do it any more?

As I get ready to leave the farm I how this thought might apply to owner-operator agriculture.  Farmers' bodies wear out quicker than most and yet as in Australia 50% will die within five years of retirement, quitting doesn't seem to be much of an option.  If you stay you wear out.  If you leave you die anyway.

'Secession planning' is a growing industry in the bush as smart farmers look to 'step back' and hand the business over to the next generation whilst still retaining some small role for themselves instead of selling the business outright before heading to the coast to die.  Done properly this is a way to extend the enterprise past 40-50 years but done badly it turns into a defensive exercise in personal survival that mortgages the prospects of the next generation.

The critical issue is in the word 'career'.  Your career terminates when you do.  Whereas a successful business is a bigger thing that can (should) outlast you.  Headcount: 1 enterprises are careers that die with us; they can no more be handed on to the next generation than an actor can bequeath her role in a sitcom to her daughter.

The difference is in the asset mix.  Farms must be 'asset-heavy' to flourish whereas any career based on personal talent can function 'asset-light'.  Successful consultants, actors, writers and the like take the fruits of their labours and buy real estate whereas ambitious farmers buy more land, stock and equipment.

This is probably obvious to anyone except a farmer's son who chose to use his brains to make his way in the world rather than stay at home and build a life based on his brains, physical effort and the farm where he grew up.

The wages of frustration

I am still in rural NSW at the farm where I grew up.  The weekend was a reunion of sorts for my three sisters, their manifold children and me.  It's taken me a while to adjust to sleeping in the deafening silence of the Australian bush after inner London but that absence of noise is one of the things that I am here to rediscover.

On Saturday my brother-in-law gave me the tour of his cattle-raising business.  He's made a number of quite radical changes to the farm since my father has stepped back.  He and my sister are enthusiastic adherents to a more holistic approach to agriculture that is quite close to hard-core environmentalism in terms of protecting  pastures and (especially) soil quality*.  To this layman's eyes it seems as if they're on the right track but they'll only know for sure after a few hard years of poor rainfall and depressed cattle prices.

It's easy to look good in the good times.

And this is something that I'm not sure that my brother-in-law, a smart, hard-working man, quite gets yet.  An understanding of the meaning of prosperity is hard to come by.  If you take the long view of a business in any established industry (and none are more established than food production) then a trendline will emerge; a sense of what a good operator can reasonably achieve with his particular assets can be established.  I say 'established' because it takes time for these trendlines to solidify; no one knows what the DNA sequencing industry will look like yet.

Many companies and most Headcount: 1 / freelancer types misinterpret prosperity.  If you treat the good things (it rained, my client got a big promotion, I got the part in the hot new movie) as luck or even as 'just rewards for all my hard work' then that prosperity is mispriced: -

The good years must compensate you for the emotional damage wrought by the bad ones

None of us gets to relive those bad years but with more money in our pockets.  We don't get that time back.  Our health and the wellbeing of our relationships with family will inevitably have been damaged by both the frustration of not having succeeded yet and the quiet terror of not knowing if you're actually going to succeed at all.  When you hear that someone's eventual success 'feels hollow' it means that the bad years were 'not worth it' (or mispriced).

Hopefully my brother-in-law has it right.  Like many smart farmers of his generation he is adamant about carving out time for his other passions: his family and campdrafting, a very difficult, peculiarly Australian rodeo event.  But the proof will be in whether or not he manages to keep up these other aspects of his life when beef prices tank and the rain refuses to fall.

The current good season will have to pay for some future time of heartbreak and frustration whether he knows it or not.

* This is not to say that my father didn't have a keen appreciation of the relationship between his agricultural practices and his land.  He did.  However, to an outsider it does seem that the thinking has moved even in the last ten years.  Even though he doesn't use that language, my father was a custodian of his land, which is more than you can say for most farmers in most parts of the world.

Form versus function

I am in Australia visiting family and friends for the first time in fifteen months.

I've lived in the UK for over six years now and the trips home get harder not easier.  Life moves on and because there are always new nieces and nephews to meet as well as old friends to catch up with, time becomes absurdly, depressingly precious.  Anyone who's lived away from their home for any length of time can testify to the horrible push-me-pull-you feeling that overwhelms the visitor the minute he gets off the plane.

I have about three weeks on the ground in Australia and my time is divided between family and friends on a 2:1 ratio; with my parents in beautiful Far North Queensland (I'm writing this from Mission Beach), with my sisters and their families on the farm where we grew up in country New South Wales and then with seemingly innumerable old mates in Sydney.

It's seeing the mates that creates the stress.  As time is so short at every turn I'm confronted with a simple choice: -

Do I opt for the form of the relaxed rhythms and banter of the old friendship but by so doing risk not getting a real sense of my friend's life or do I sacrifice some of the familiarity that made us friends in the first place on the functional altar of information expediently exchanged?

One feels too superficial yet the other can be brutally businesslike.  Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Yet like many of the problems in my life, there are far worse ones to have than how to get on when seeing old friends.  I'm reminded of my favourite Christopher Hitchens quotation: -

"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends." 

Ideas obvious but unrealised

Yesterday I listened to a podcast about Helsinki, which Monocle magazine named as its 'World's Most Livable City'. 

One of the many great things about Helsinki is its small size.  The entire population of Finland is only 5.5 million and I was especially taken with an interview with a young Finnish architect named Tuomas Toivonen* who expressed a very specific sentiment that you only get from small countries: -

If you don't do it probably no one else will

This is such a change from the breathless urgency with which most of the world approaches a project: -

Do it now before someone beats you to it

I've long been plagued by this sense that life is a kind of zero-sum gold rush.  The sense that whilst there's certainly success to be had, there isn't enough to go around.  More than that, if I don't capitalise immediately on that cool idea I had this morning then it'll just float back into the ether and settle on some more deserving soul.

The idea that the muses are both jealous and capricious is as old as literature.  The trouble these days is that thanks to the internet I get to watch in real time as Calliope favours some other creative type who followed through on the very same concept I had six months ago but parked on a To Do List.  As the modern marketplace of ideas only really rewards the first, then the best, of any sort of offering it's easy to beat myself up over dropped opportunities.  It feels very much like plagiarism but of course I'm the victim of nothing more than my own inertia.

There's no solution to this.  You can't follow through on every idle thought that occurs in the morning shower, that way madness lies.  The best anyone can do is choose the project that interests you the most and execute it in a way that only you can.  Then it becomes the thing that only you can do; if you don't do it no one else will.

The best ideas are obvious but unrealised.  The ones sitting right on the cusp of the adjacent possible.  What they crave is time, money and (especially) attention and they're just going to keep floating around out there until someone gives them what they want.

* And there's nothing Tyler Brûlé's team loves more than a young Nordic architect / designer...

Non-financial overinvestment

If you've ever bought a residential property you're familiar with the principle of overinvestment.  It's the moment during the inspection when you start wondering about the state of mind of the people who are selling.  You look at your partner and whisper,

"Really?  They must've spent another thousand pounds on that?  I mean we like the place well enough but they're kidding themselves if they think they're getting their money back on whatever they spent on that skylight / fireplace / waterfall / bedroom spa unit..."

I'm not thinking about the feature that was obviously installed because the vendors thought that they'd enjoy the use of it but rather that addition they made because of a transparent thought that it would increase the resale value*.  By definition this incremental spend as an investment: something that will return them more money than they laid out.  If they don't get that additional return then they've overinvested.

There's a parallel with my sort of knowledge work.  When I have too much time on my hands I'm in danger of devoting more attention to a project than it warrants.  Sometimes I'm guilty of devoting more attention to a project than it can bear.  In either case I'm guilty of overinvestment,

"Really?  He must've spent another couple of extra days on that?  I mean we like the concept well enough but he's kidding himself if he thinks we're going to pay extra for however long he spent on those new graphics / additional background research..."

If my time is worth something when I'm busy then it's worth something when I'm not.  Allowing that figure to shift is crazy.  If I have spare time on my hands then it shouldn't be devoted to my client's goals but rather my own.

* A good rule to remember when selling a house or flat is that you're never going to guess the shade of blue the buyer wants so either paint the wall white or leave it as is

We’re not into high science R&D; we’re into making money

My recent thinking on Pfizer may be a slight case of jumping the gun.  Pfizer isn't shedding 100% of its R&D, although it is reducing its spend from around $9.4 billion last year to perhaps as little as $6.0 billion in 2012.  A massive decrease but still a huge investment (second only to Roche).

My argument is better made by Valeant, a Toronto-based company run by a J Michael Pearson,  ex-McKinsey consultant.  Instead of the usual combination of medics, pharmacists and scientists, Valeant has assembled a group of very smart venture capitalists as its board of directors.  Everyone's favourite Pearson quotes come from a recent Bloomberg profile: -

We’re not into high science R&D; we’re into making money.

We’re looking for companies that have products in them that we could grow and maybe do a slightly better job than current owners.

The thinking is that there's room for one or two of these in the market but no more than that.  An entire industry that thinks in this way will become increasingly risk averse, giving less leeway to researchers to follow that 100-to-1 hunch that leads to the Next Big Thing.

And let's not forget that because this is pharma, that Next Big Thing is almost by definition a further alleviation of human suffering.

What is it that you do again?

Recently Pfizer announced that is shedding European jobs in R&D in order to expand its sales/marketing operations in China.  Leaving aside the basic business motivations for this, the existential implications are worth exploring: -

Remind me again, what does Pfizer do?

For well over a hundred years the raison d'etre of every pharma company has been the scientific development of medicines that assist in mankind's fight against disease.  As obnoxiously as the pharmaceutical industry has behaved over the last few decades (although certainly less so than, say, finance), it has been broadly tolerated because the fruits of its labour have to led to us all living longer, more pleasant lives.

Pfizer's move is a hard-headed reaction to the bleak news that the salad days of the 1990's and 2000's are past and unlikely to return.  But is it the right reaction?  Sure, the industry believes itself to be in trouble: at the front end, ever-deepening legal exposure and a pickier FDA have massively increased the cost of getting a drug to market whereas the enthusiastic championing of generic manufacturers by insurers and governments has severely curtailed ROI at a minute past midnight on the day of patent expiry.

All of which may mean that the profitability of a sector which has historically outperformed the wider economy will come back to the pack somewhat.  Individual companies will perform better or worse but pharma as an overall sector won't be so profitable nor its stocks be seen as such a safe bet.  Yet this unpleasant fact isn't reason enough to toss all the toys out of your pram.

Pfizer, once rid of all but the safest prospects in its pipeline, will join the evermore frantic hunt for the next small, sexy biotech with decent clinical trial results, pull out its chequebook and pick up ownership of a product that's ready to launch.  This is not an entirely negative outcome because Pfizer does global product launches better than most, many people will gain access to important drugs.

The long-term consequence is that Pfizer may be seen to have opted out of the (noble) pursuit of science in favour of the (unseemly) business of marketing.  And what is marketing if not the shaping of how you are seen by the customer: -

You used to be one of the good guys, beavering away in lab in the hope of one day cracking the code, using science to help relieve the suffering of millions.  Now you're just a big company with a lot of cash to spend.

You don't innovate any more

You're Dell not Apple.  You're Disney not Pixar.  You're GM not VW.

Which is fine for now but the only genuine advantage the West maintains over the developing world is a superior genius for innovation.  Throw that away and what are you left with?

2B or not 2 B2C

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commerce is Plan B.

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

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

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

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

When is a hobby not a hobby?

If in your heart-of-hearts you believe that your hobby is a potential portal to something else then it isn't a really hobby is it?  If you kinda-sorta think this thing you do on the side might one day make you wealthy enough or famous enough to supplant your 'real' job then you'd do well to treat it with the seriousness of an actual job.

Anything less and you'll always feel a little bit short-changed.