Gong Xi Fa Cai

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

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

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

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

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

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.

18 hours in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not a complaint

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

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

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

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

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

The quality of Mursi

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

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

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

The job of not working

Just back from ten lovely days in Greece.  After about twenty years of self-employment I may just have mastered the art of taking a holiday.  I've long been plagued by freelancer’s paranoia: that horrible suspicion that you only get the work because you're the first supplier the client calls so if you don’t answer the phone then she'll just go to whomever is next on the list.  Never give your understudy a break and all that.

Absurd of course: the only like-for-like substitute I have is my business partner and he’s busy with clients in Asia-Pac.  So why has my mindset has always been to behave as if I have dozens of direct competitors across Europe?

Partly, I suspect, it’s my attitude to work itself.  One of the books I read on the beach* described two conflicting attitudes to work and leisure: the ‘income’ effect and the ‘substitution’ effect: -

Income effect: the old school economists’ assumption that once a man has earned sufficient for his needs then devote the remaining time to leisure 

Substitution effect: the phenomenon that as a man’s time becomes more valuable he is less and less likely to substitute high-paid work for another activity that pays less (i.e. any other activity, including leisure)

Supposedly we're all looking for a life informed by the income effect but of course it’s the substitution effect that describes most modern lives. This is especially so for anyone working in corporate services and especially for anyone self-employed in that sector. We work every hour that God, or the client, gives us.

Contrast this with a farmer or other seasonal worker: when the time is right you work as hard as you can as efficiently as you can then you rest.  Only a fool harvests an unripe crop.  Still, it's rare for a truly successful freelancer to be continually snowed under.  If you are then you're probably either on the way to taking on staff (good) or becoming an employee of your biggest client in all but name (bad).

So I persist with comedy, blogging and sundry other projects out of a need to create a substitution effect: there’s only so much time and attention I can pour onto a consulting project before it becomes counterproductive.

I work hard for good money when the opportunity demands it.  My real problem is that I actually like working hard all the time.  Idleness has never become me.  So for the last week I've been hanging out in the Greek islands forcing myself to not work.  I had to convince myself that proper relaxation was a right and proper substitute for thinking about something I’ll be working on in a month’s time. 

Only I could create a job out of not working.

* Yep, that’s me on holiday – reading economic theory for shits’n’giggles…

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'

Why consultants aren't popular

I spent much of the week working with a team of experienced and largely successful salespeople.  As my job was to change them in some way they rightly resented me from the off.  Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, said it best: -

People hate change and with good reason.  Change makes us stupider, relatively speaking.  Change adds new information to the universe; information that we don’t know.  Our knowledge – as a percentage of all the things that can be known – goes down a tick every time something changes.

And frankly, if we’re talking about a percentage of the total knowledge in the universe, most of us aren't that many basis points superior to our furniture to begin with.  I hate to wake up in the morning only to find that the intellectual gap between me and my credenza has narrowed.  That’s no way to start the day.

On the other hand, change is good for the people who are causing the change.  They understand the new information that is being added to the universe.  They grow smarter in comparison to the rest of us.  This is reason enough to sabotage their efforts.  I recommend sarcasm with a faint suggestion of threat.

The Dilbert Principle (1996)

The cliches imply that unless you 'embrace change' and 'face the fear' and 'seek out new experiences' and so on then you're some sort of loserish Luddite.  This is offensive towards anyone who aspires to be good enough at her job to get paid fairly so that she can channel her enthusiasms elsewhere.  Like raising a family.  As a friend of my father's used to say: -

You can't argue with decency

Every time I walk into a new room my first task is to overcome the natural, rightful resentment of the decent people whose behaviour I've been paid to change.

A bird in the hand is worth...

This post may be a bit dry for some.  I'm going to try and set out the new way of forecasting that I'm applying to my consulting business.  The more I think about it the more I'm sure that these principles apply to most freelancers including stand-up comics, graphic designers and the like.

Every successful freelancer struggles with the 'feast or famine' phenomenon whereby you're either too busy to scratch yourself or else you're sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.  The problem stems from failing to generate future work whilst you're preoccupied with the challenges of the present.  Most of us fall into the dreadful habit of not worrying about the blank page in the diary until that actual day.  The oh-so-astute Kate Smurfwaite nailed this with an observation that you often go through periods of always gigging with the same few comics because they emailed with the same promoters s you on the same day three months previously.

I can't remove the need to constantly be prospecting for new business but there are ways to be smart about it.  Firstly, focus on the money, not the diary.  For fear of an empty diary it's easy to fall into the trap of selling your at a discount.  The logic is that it's better to be busy but underpaid than, I dunno, going to the gym and then reading a book.

This diary / money nexus has to be inverted.  The question you need to ask is: how much do I want to earn in a year?  Work out how much do you need to pay the bills, to add to your savings and still have a little left over to splash around to prove to yourself and the world that this self-employment malarkey is working out.

Let's call that 'annual earnings' figure A

Have a good hard look at it.  If it doesn't look a little daunting then you probably haven't got the maths right.  Once you're happy, divide it by four as we're going to work in quarters.

Let's call that 'quarterly earnings' figure Q

Now rather than one big problem (A) you've got four smaller problems but they won't seem to be problems of equal size.  If we say we're going to start this new regimen on April Fools Day then the challenge of earning Q for April-May-June probably seems much more daunting than for January-February-March.  Or maybe your diary's looking good up until summer and you've got less of a handle on July-August-September.  Either way, the psychological challenges represented by Q fluctuate over time.

From here in on you'll need pen and paper or (better still) a spreadsheet.  Create four columns, one for each quarter with three rows.  Write Q at the bottom of the first row as per below

Now get your diary and enter every definite job in the appropriate quarter.  Only include those where you are 100% sure that your services will be needed and that you will be paid.

Let's call these 'definite earnings' D

List the details of D in the top row of appropriate quarter and subtract that from Q.  Call that new figure Qa

This example roughly follows the pattern that my business follows: few clients book me a long way in advance so I have to be comfortable with a 3-6 month horizon.  I know I should be worried that the end of the year and early 2012 are looking thin but I also need to know what to do with that worry.

Go back to your diary.  Now list every probable job by quarter.  Define 'probable' as anything where there's a better than 2 in 3 chance of your services will be needed and that you will be paid.

Let's call these 'probable earnings' P

List the details of P in the top row of appropriate quarter.  Now divide P by 1.5 and subtract that from Qa to get Qb

Why 1.5?  Because we think there's about a 2 in 3 chance of the job coming off.  And look what I've learned; I'm probably going to miss my budget (Q) for April-May-June by 17 but I'm more than fine for July-August-September.  More importantly for the period between October and March I still have a lot of work to do.  Even though I might bill another 360 in October-December, which would get me to 510, the jobs aren't booked yet so I'd be a fool to bank on them.  And I still have plenty of work to do for the start of 2012.

We have to make up the difference in the bottom row.  This is where the diary is of less use than the old the contact list, that stack of business cards and the guy who said to give him a call some time.  We're deep in maybeland.

So let's call these 'maybe earnings' M

There are only two places that these earnings can conceivably come from:-

1. Finding new clients (Mnc), or
2. Selling new products (Mnp) to old clients

I've had my UK business for almost six years, so I have enough data to know that my average time from first meeting with a client to actually delivering a project is 8.67 months.  I've never been able to reduce this.  I now accept it as a fact of my working life.  So even if I met a potential client today I can't realistically bank on anything (Mnc) before January.

Another problem is I'm not especially good at putting time aside for new product development (Mnp).  Almost all of my innovations have emerged as solutions to problems articulated by clients and I'm actually quite crap at building the thing that meets the unrecognised need.  But I do have a few ideas that have worked in one market but have yet to be taken up in others so there's hope for me yet.

I guess we'd better input M into our spreadsheet

This bottom row always has a fantasy element about it, however, the rule is you must keep the Qc fantasy to the right hand side of the page.  If I could realistically anticipate any new business in the next six months then it should appear in the middle row (Qb).  If I need it to happen later in the year it's a task, needing it tomorrow makes it a prayer.

In keeping with my 8.67 month average I've assumed I'll get no new clients (Mnc) before next January.  This means that all of my October-December earnings have to come from existing clients (Mnp).

To temper the fantasy just a little you'll notice that I reckon there's only about a 1 in 3 chance of any Qc earnings actually coming off; remember that we're selling either something that doesn't yet exist or to someone we haven't met.  So we have to be able to identify three times as many Qc opportunities.

Summary
My imaginary business might just survive the next twelve months.  Well done me.  But for that to happen I've got to find new things to sell to my existing clients as well as speaking to new ones.  I knew that already.  The nasty truth I've was avoiding was that both these tasks have to happen now.

Variations
There are a few obvious variations to this basic model that will make it more applicable.  For example, I've assumed that the demand for my stuff is constant throughout the year (500 / quarter).  If your business dries up in the summer then you the initial Q figure for that quarter and compensate with higher targets over the rest of the year.  Anyone contemplating the Edinburgh Fringe may well have a negative figure for July-August-September. 

I've also gone for conversion rates (1.5 and 3) that are a realistic reflection of the way my industry operates but may be questionable elsewhere. 

In Conclusion
As I said at the beginning this is a new technique for me and I apologise if in my excitement I've overcomplicated it.  Like many good ideas it seems to clarify something that I've long known but never articulated.  I like knowing where I need to focus my attention.  I like that it shines a harsh light on the naive expectation that 'somewhere, someone unknown to me is about to come to my rescue'.

I like that if I can see a feast on the horizon then I can decide that next week isn't a famine but a chance to finish that book.

Subcontractors II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might be a bad client if...

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

You might be a bad client if you...

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

Glad to have that off my chest.

It begins

I'm sitting at St Pancras station waiting for a train to Paris. My working year begins in earnest this afternoon with that fiddly, unnecessarily complicated, multiplayer project that drew down so much of my emotional reserves at the end of last year.

There are a myriad of little decisions still to be made, none of which are singularly vital but which nonetheless have the potential to run into one another and thus damage the overall project. The danger is that as there's no clear sense of who makes what decision we end up with yet more turf wars. My kingdom for a strong client, etc.

The time to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is nigh.

In Warsaw

No city is so boring that it cannot amuse for two days. No airport is so amazing that it does not begin to pall after two hours.

My wife and I have been stuck in Warsaw for 48 additional hours and counting. We're now a long way past both the two-day and two-hour marks.  It's the shortest day of the year and it's back out to Frederic Chopin airport to sit at a gate or perhaps even on the plane itself hoping that Heathrow deigns to allow us entry.  Time will doubtless crawl; not a great way to spend the longest night of the year.  And across the world passengers just like us will be doing exactly the same thing.  No longer in Miami or Barcelona or Oslo we're reduced to generic tubes of people, 100% interchangeable in the eyes of air traffic control.

Last night we sat around the airport bar with a crowd of twentysomething fellow passengers waiting for the flight to finally cancel and cooking up crazy schemes to hire a minibus and drive round the clock for Calais.  Aren't all the best long-distance driving plans are made whilst drinking heavily with perfect strangers?  We snuck out through immigration and back to our hotel.

Just down the street from where we slept is a nondescript plaque, one of hundreds around the city. It commemorates the fact that nine Poles were summarily executed on that spot by 'Hitlerite' troops on August 1, 1944.

Horrible as this memorial is I find something optimistic and forward looking about the fact that the troops are identified historically as 'Hitlerite' rather than racially as German.  And I love the fact that Poland's national airport is named not for a monarch or a president or a general or an explorer but rather for an artist.

A gathering storm

This week saw a nasty escalation of the mid-project blues that often hits me during an extended and complicated job. I fully accept that a client has a right to feel nervous, especially if we haven't worked together before. No small part of my job is to ease those concerns.

Alas, the escalation came from another, albeit not entirely unexpected, quarter. As part of the task of integrating my ideas with existing elements of the client's culture I was emailed a 'background' PowerPoint presentation, which I opened at 5am last Thursday. There, in all its barely adulterated glory was a sequence of my slides.

My ideas are a big part of my livelihood and they'd been lifted without a hint of acknowledgement or attribution. Seemingly this has been going on for about three years.  The prospect of the coming fight exhausts me. Try as I might I cannot figure a way to resolve this mess without the plagiarist losing face.

The sad irony is that the client is a pharmaceutical company; one industry that exists only on account of vigorous intellectual property law.

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

A letter to Messrs Hagel III, Seely Brown & Davison

Sirs,

Last Friday I finished reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (italics yours).

Okay, I was in a foul mood as British Midlands had waited until the very last minute before canceling my connecting flight from Brussels to Edinburgh and I was in danger of missing a wedding in Scotland the next day.  But, hell, your book came recommended by The Economist so I figured that there must be some sort of big idea in there.

I was intrigued (as intended) when you cited a group of big wave surfers from Maui as an example of 'Pull' in the Introduction.  It was nice that you followed up with Li & Fung, the hundred year old, Hong Kong-based fashion outsourcing business in Chapter 1.  And I admit that I was drawn in by the breathless description of the global effort to re-encrypt Twitter so that Iranian dissidents could keep on communicating after the fraudulent elections in June last year in Chapter 2.  Well done for using the SAP Developer Network and PortalPlayer to bring us readers back to the realities of the commercial world before moving onto Chapter 3.

But that was pretty much it.

These weren't just a few quirky examples, drawn from many, of vastly different but equally successful enterprises that had mastered this new 'Pull' thing.  They were pretty much the only examples (italics mine).

By the time we got to p. 167 we were at the banal heart of your argument.  The magic that attracts the people your life needs to you is your 'passion'.  The good news is anyone can have it provided they want it enough: -

The truth is that virtually any type of work can become the focus for passion.  Many auto-repair mechanics are passionate about cars and knowing what makes them run.  Carpenters can take great delight in building things that are beautiful and enduring.

Really?  Mechanics and carpenters?  That's it?  Your hat-tip to all those drones who don't have jobs as interesting as yours is, "Jesus.  Oh, and the guy who fixes my Prius"?

Maybe this would have gone down easier if I hadn't finished the amazing NYT piece from 2000 about work in a North Carolina slaughterhouse on the plane from Vienna to Brussels: -

Up to 16 million shoulders a year come down that line here at the Smithfield Packing Co., the largest pork production plant in the world. That works out to about 32,000 a shift, 63 a minute, one every 17 seconds for each worker for eight and a half hours a day. The first time you stare down at that belt you know your body is going to give in way before the machine ever will.

Not sure that there's much room for passion in that workplace.  Perhaps things have improved in the ten years since the Times article but I doubt it.  I'd bet that the same mix of racial competition, implied violence and race-to-the-bottom working conditions keeps Smithfield Packing profitable at the expense of their employees.

That's not to say that you don't know your readership.  We're all afflicted by 'illusory superiority', that cognitive bias better known as the Lake Woebegone effect ("where all the children are above average").  It's what keeps us upgrading to the latest version of prosumer software like FinalCut Pro and promising ourselves that next year we'll make it to SWSX and buying books like yours as soon as we read about them in The Economist.  But we're not everyone.  We're not even close.

To my mind many of those farmers and food processors and street sweepers and nurses and cops whose job it is to meet the first two layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (ie 'physiological' and 'safety') will struggle to consistently inject passion into their working days.  On a good day, sure, but not every day.  As my father told me when I complained that my first paid job was boring: -

If it was always fun they wouldn't pay you to do it.

By all means write your book and, caveat emptor, market it any way you want.  Just don't pretend that you've hit upon some ground-breaking reevaluation of all work.  Better technology leading to greater interconnectivity does mean that many 'knowledge worker' jobs will be done better by passionate people working in a more connected way.  Spare me the conceit that every workplace can be rendered artisanal.

Seth Godin, I'm looking at you too.

Don't have the skill? Then you'd better have the will

By any measure Friday night's gig was a tough one.  The stage was in the corner of the pub with no room for the rows of chairs to denote 'audience'.  It was a 'free' gig so the punters there for the comedy were mixed in with a majority who were simply out for a drink and a meal at the end of the working week.  The bar, about eight feet from the stage, didn't stop (noisily) serving the entire time we were on stage.

Readers of this Blog will recognise this as a pretty familiar workplace for someone on my step of the comedy ladder.  Every night of the week across the UK there are stand-ups battling away in rooms that are no more set up for comedy than they are for polo.  Implicit in accepting the booking is an understanding the acts will somehow compensate for all these negatives and create a night of great comedy.

How has this been allowed to happen?  Why is it that we comedians turn up to work when the odds of success are so severely stacked against us?  Much can be explained by the attitude of the agencies that are paid to book the acts for these pubs.   Oftentimes the bookers take zero responsibility for the show aside from ensuring that four or five warm bodies are ready to go onstage at about 845pm.  No demands are put on the venue in terms of technical (Is there a stage?  A microphone, even?), logistical (Will you stop serving drinks at the bar whilst the acts are performing?) or marketing (Is this going to be a paying audience? How much are tickets?).  As a performer you literally have no idea how hard your job will be until you arrive at the venue.

Understandably this gives rise to a high degree of cynicism amongst acts on the circuit.  For me this has lately tipped over into a dangerous sort of out-and-out negativity.

Last Friday's gig wasn't an agency booking.  It was booked by the night's compeer; a highly talented comic who is starting a small circuit of regular shows near his home town.  As I said, it was a tough crowd but the opening act won them over.  Okay, he pulled out every trick in his 20+ years on the circuit including ventriloquism and getting the audience to clap along to Beethoven's Ninth ('Ode to Joy') played on a banjo but he got there.

I went on next and lost the room.  The audience traveled that mortifying arc from amusement to bemusement through polite silence and onto unsurreptitious chatting amongst themselves. 

The interval was scheduled for immediately after my set but the compeer did something interesting.  Instead of simply getting a round of applause for me and telling the crowd to get a drink, have a smoke and be back in twenty minutes he stayed on stage and got the audience back where he wanted them before the break.  It took him another quarter of an hour but he stayed up there to recalibrate the room so the punters were more likely to stick around for the rest of the show (remember that the audience hadn't paid to watch us and so had far less stake in seeing the night out).

These two acts stood in stark contrast to my performance.  I've gotten into the dreadful habit of walking into rooms and declaring them 'unplayable'.  Put it down to too many long car journeys with acts who make the same declaration on the way to the gig and who make a show of checking the watch on stage before asking aloud "That was about twenty minutes wasn't it?"

In his new book Linchpin: Are you indispensable? Seth Godin makes the distinction between 'the art' and 'the job'.  He uses 'art' in an especially broad sense: -

The job is what you do when you are told what to do.  The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.

Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.

The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it.  Your art is taking personal responsibility, changing the status quo, and changing people.

I call the process of doing your art "the work".  It's possible to have a job and do the work too.  In fact, that's how you become a linchpin.

The job is not the work.

pp 96-97

What annoys me most about learning this lesson is that I've never needed it with my consulting business.  I've walked into badly designed, badly laid out rooms overfilled with recalcitrant audiences all over the world but I've never declared them 'unplayable'.  The thought has never even occurred to me.  I've reflexively taken a deep breath, smiled broadly and launched into the day-long training room equivalent to 'Ode to Joy' on a banjo.

If you don't have the skill to do your job when things get tough then you'd better have the will.  Last Friday I brought neither and got found out.

The leading edge of the bell curve

I woke up to bad news.  A mate from uni days died of a heart attack leaving behind a wife and two small daughters.  He was 43.  My age.

I hadn't seen Nick in ten years and we were never close; a mate rather than a friend: -

Faces come and faces go in the ragged life you lead.
You just file them all away, to recall them when you need.
When a face just disappears you record it as a crime,
Against yourself,
Against the world.

"For a Short Time", Mick Thomas (Weddings Parties Anything)

In my 20's I lost a few of my generation to suicide and to motor accidents (a too common occurrence in rural Australia where alcohol and fatigue make for poor driving companions).  Freakishly I also lost three in plane crashes (two pilots, one passenger) and one who was my country's most famous AIDS death.

In my 30's I really lost no one of my own age.

Of course I won't be so lucky in my 40's.  This morning's text message was the leading edge of the bell curve; the first of an inevitable, increasing incidence of normal deaths.

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.

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.