Parallels

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

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

Hunting v. Farming

It intrigues me how a quickly potential job that I first file under 'nice to get' becomes a 'must have'; an off-hand remark from a client that gets blithely entered onto my contacts database as a 'maybe' is transformed into a Great White Whale, the capturing of which my livelihood depends.

This is a consequence of my high-cost low-incidence business model; I price aggressively but don't expect to work every day. I didn't purposely adopt this approach, it just aligns with an industry where demand for my stuff is really driven by R&D pipelines, sales team 'time off road' and so on. A parallel might be made with salespeople in an industry like real estate or high-end high tech where a lot of energy is spent pursuing a smallish number of leads in the expectation of a large commission. NBD is thus a matter of hunting (whales) not cultivating a larger number of lower yielding clients.

Fitting then that I've just landed some work in Norway in February.

A feeling of belonging

When I checked into the hotel in Singapore on Tuesday night the first person I saw was a Filipino sales manager due to attend this week's training session. I asked how he was doing and he replied, "Pretty well, considering."

Considering?

Ah, yes.

At dinner he described the grim chaos that had swept through Manila on Saturday, September 26. In passing he mentioned that he'd been rescued off the roof of his house ignoring the blithe corollary that everything he owned was lost in the flood.

The real point of the story was that he had spent all of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday driving his 4WD around the city to collect every member of his sales team he could find and depositing them and their families at the company's offices, situated on the upper floors of a relatively unaffected building. He showed us a text message sent by a rep who didn't know if he'd survive the night. He told us how one employee's 15-year-old daughter had been caught at home alone and had to swim a few hundred metres through swirling water to a neighbour's rooftop. He joked about having to console a new team member who felt personally responsible for the destruction of her company car.

He spoke with tearful pride at the way the boss had ordered him to do anything and unquestioningly pay anything until everyone employed by the company was accounted for and how food, water, blankets and medical care were waiting at the offices for each influx of refugees.

It wasn't work, he said, it was tribal.

The franchise begins...

Sydney

London

The why before the how

Next Monday I'm in Switzerland pitching on a whole-of-region sales training project for a very successful small pharma company. I've done the research and crunched the numbers and written the next-to-last draft of the pitch document yet a single question nags me: -

Why do they want the project?

They're already successful and in no small part this has been driven by a strong if informal HR policy of recruiting experienced salespeople. I could even argue that by taking a successful team off the road they're losing money.

Yesterday I found an article in the latest edition of Monocle (a magazine that keeps surprising me) on European military conscription. Contrary to the 'tough love' blather of the right-wing commentariat, no sane person now sees conscription as a good thing. It is an expensive and dangerous way to staff your military and soldiers have better things to do than play some sort of stern uncle role for a generation of lost youth. One of the few European countries with a coherent justification for universal conscription is in fact Switzerland where the army acts as a transcendent and therefore unifying experience for men who might otherwise identify themselves as 'Swiss-German', 'Swiss-French' or 'Swiss-Italian' instead of simply 'Swiss'.

Maybe this is what's going on with my client.

Although they wouldn't admit it, or possibly even be able to voice it as such, perhaps the key motivator is less about upskilling the sales team and more about creating a transcendent / unifying experience. I could be overthinking things as usual but unless I resolve this in my own mind before Monday the trip is already wasted.

Vision v. expediency

We're chasing print deadlines for the Sydney show. This was the week that we hit the place on the timeline where our hitherto irresistible uncompromising artistic vision crashed into an immovable fact: -

no artwork = no poster = no audience

Losing 'week one' of an eight-week project line is still a week lost. We've been kidding ourselves that we'll make it up somehow but this week's compromise is as inevitable as it was predictable.

Every time a supplier or client or collaborator or whoever tells me to stop quibbling and just be happy with the latest draft I feel a little less like the guy with the artistic vision and a little more like everyone else.

World class

Recently I was asked to run a session for a smallish sales team of mostly older representatives that was experiencing some morale issues. The root cause of these issues was historical and mostly external but they were issues nonetheless so Marketing brought me in do my shtick, which went pretty well.

I had the group for an afternoon and by the time we finished at 5pm it had been a long day, especially for those who’d been up before dawn to catch flights from Belfast or Edinburgh. There was a clear sense that I was the last speaker of the day and after my thank-you-and-good-luck speech everyone got up to leave.

Not so fast.

The product manager hurriedly announced that there was one final item of business: the agency wanted to make a presentation. That this was greeted with no more than the usual level of passive contempt that salespeople have for advertising agencies was a gesture of remarkable restraint given the fatigue level.

The guy in the nicest suit in the room took the stage and announced that he was excited. Furthermore, in a moment absolutely everyone else in the room was going to be excited too: -

Okay, so who here's on Facebook? Or Twitter? Or maybe MySpace?

Misreading silent disdain for embarrassed ignorance he broke it down: -

What we're talking about is something called 'online networking'. It's the fun and cool way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues.

In a display of spurious ‘adding value’ that rendered me awestruck, the agency had convinced the brand team to invest in their own exclusive version of Facebook. Leaving aside the conceptual flaw in constructing a closed social network in the first place, the dumbness of the idea was apparent even before he’d started taking questions from the floor: -

The use of the site would be 100% voluntary...

You wouldn’t have to go on it at all if you didn’t want to!

Except that information vital to everyone’s job would be posted there...

Marketing can update you without all those boring teleconferences!

It would be a problem-solving forum that would be ‘reps only'...

A great way for you to highlight any problems you’re having so that the rest of the team can weigh in!

Apart from the fact that pretty much anyone in Head Office can log in...

So we can get an up-to-date temperature check of the mood of the team!

And watch you admit that you're no good at your job in real time. As a way of hoovering some extra cash out of a client it was a work of genius. As a way of annoying a sales team of forty- and fifty-somethings it was truly world class.

The List

We all love lists apparently. There are few things in life more satisfying than pulling out The List and crossing off a particularly onerous chore recently completed. The busier I am the more childish the satisfaction that this gives me.

Merlin Mann of the fantastic 43 Folders describes the danger that comes with not having 'ubiquitous capture' when you rely on To Do lists. The more you depend on The List, especially an electronic one, the greater the need for all tasks to appear on said List.

If The List is unreliable then sooner or later you will get blindsided. Then you stop trusting The List. Then why have one at all?

Like I said, I'm frantic right now and yet according to my List I'm on schedule with projects in at least six time zones. Do I trust it (ie 'me')? Or do I revert to that old producers' maxim: -

Total paranoia is total awareness

Boarding a moving train

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

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

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

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

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

On the road again

This week I'm running a consultancy workshop in Reading. Next week I'm in Coventry, Helsinki and Wokingham. The week after that I'm Zurich, Singapore, Sydney and Dubbo. Hopefully some of it will be as glamorous as it sounds.

Probably not Wokingham or Dubbo.

Debriefing Edinburgh

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

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

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

Unsolicited approaches

Here's a quick tip for anyone starting out in the field of personal banking: if you insist upon an appointment with a new client have a better opening question than: -

Are you busy at the moment?

And best you don't follow that inanity with: -

I've asked for this meeting so that I can give you my business card.

Breaking up is hard to do

An old uni friend from Australia came to see the show last night. Afterwards we spent a few hours catching up on friends and acquaintances. Naturally her husband, who I was at school with (Sydney can seem ridiculously small), came up in conversation. He's been self-employed for years now, mostly in a partnership with a guy that he's now trying to shed.

The stress of decoupling a two-man band is something I went through a few years ago. The guy I call my 'partner' is really no more than the co-developer of our IP all those years ago. Going from Headcount = 2 to two solo operations with an explicit understanding regarding geographical territories was one of the smartest things we ever did.

Ah, the glamour

The stand-up comic's "all expenses paid" hotel room...

The management consultant's version of the same.

A fully clad emperor

Last night was my first stand-up gig since Edinburgh. I was booked to open (ie do a 20-minute set) at a bar in Plymouth. The headliner was the excellent Steve Hall of 'We Are Klang' fame. On top of our fees we were both put up in a (cheap) local hotel for the night.

All for the entertainment of eleven punters.

It was patently obvious this was the way it was the moment I stepped into the bar. The sound of the clinking glassware being cleaned by the three barmen. The musty smell of a bar that was busier the night before. The eagerness with which our free drinks were provided.

Staff and acts conferred and immediately agreed on a catalogue of reasons for the lack of trade: people had been out in the sun all day, the England-Croatia match, the fact that the uni wasn't back for another few weeks. It would've been impolite to point out facts like the bar being tucked away from any foot trade or that the single sign advertising the comedy was in the Gents toilet upstairs in the bar itself. No, it was easier to brainstorm a bunch of external factors and blame them.

Why be the guy who denies the next couple of comics the chance of a paid gig and the glamour of a night away from home on the Devonshire Riviera?

Competitive pitches

I've been asked to pitch on a whole-of-Europe roll-out of a new selling system at the end of the month.

It looks to be a huge project and possibly one at the outer limits of my capacity as a smaller supplier. On closer examination something isn't right; the briefing document is suspiciously short and reading it leaves me with more questions than answers. I'm left wondering one of two things: -

• The client doesn't know what they want from the project so allowing me to read between the lines and interpret the brief in a way that I think will best serve the client's long-term needs;

• The brief was written with an existing supplier in mind (who already knows how to read between those lines) and I'm just making up the numbers on the day of the pitch

The first interpretation is highly motivational whereas the second leaves me sulking. I'm giving myself until next Tuesday to get a better sense of the politics before diving into draft project design, building the presentation, booking flights, organising print design and all the rest.

I am also alive to the possibility that being so used to having my reputation precede me has left me short of match fitness where competitive pitches are concerned and I'm already looking for excuses.

Back in the saddle

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

It felt like coming home.

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

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

Praising with faint damnation

The cricket show finally got reviewed, albeit on the very last day of the Festival when it could do us no good (or harm I suppose). The reviewer wasn't really much of a fan, ending her piece thusly: -

"This show will only appeal to die hard cricket fans. Or Australians."

In a month of trying Andrew Watts and I could not have written a better Mission Statement for the show.

In violent agreement

Coming to the end of a stupidly brief visit to work with a Canadian team that has been a client since 2002. In the intervening years their thinking about our processes had ossified, different parts of the organisation had come to believe that they and they alone were the true adherents to our original thinking. Sometimes our stuff generates a quasi-religious excitement that whilst gratifying in the short term is a little hard to manage over time.

My brief was to 'reboot' the process without leaving anyone feeling that the efforts of the last seven years had been misspent. We got through the messy he-said-she-said phase quickly enough and re-established a sense of common purpose.

Observing that people are 'in violent agreement with each other' is a useful phrase and I recommend it to all.

I'd forgotten it was summer...

23C in London today. A month in Scotland has made such a thing seem unnatural.