Job v. Career v. Hobby

I'm in Edinburgh for a few days to check out the 2010 Festival and catch up with some people who are performing up here. Unless I run into someone on the street who makes me an offer I can't refuse this will be the first Fringe I've been to since 2001 as a non-performer. I'm in need of inspiration not experience.

One interpretation of the festival is that this is when you focus on comedy as your career rather than just as your job. This is the month you perform your amazing, personal, funny-yet-poignant show that'll take you away from the Mirth Control / Jongleurs grind forever. That nice woman from the BBC is going to fall in love with you and change your life forever. Otherwise on Friday week you're back at your job: trying to get the attention of a hundred-strong mass of stag parties in Bristol.

That's the theory anyway. In practice there are too many excruciatingly revelatory hours with too few jokes and a legion of clever-not-funny double-acts and sketch troupes. 2,400 different shows. The aggregate amount of time devoted to writing and rehearsing all of these carefully crafted masterpieces over the last eleven months is mind-blowing. And many of them will be starting the whole process again in a week.

Because that's the third option: performing at the Edinburgh Fringe is your hobby. It's the thing you do that defined you as different from your (non-performing) workmates.

The shortlist for the Fosters Comedy Award (aka 'the Perrier') is published tomorrow. Making that list is genuinely life-changing. Everyone else is going back to a job of some sort on the 31st.

TVland

Apropos of Friday's lament about the TV pitching process: I came across the wonderfully named In the Meeja, Darling.

In the linked post the writer describes a networking event where Jay Hunt, Controller of BBC One (and thus the most powerful woman in British television according the Guardian) spoke about pitching: -

Slightly depressingly, this boiled down to "BBC One aren't going to commission anything that doesn't have a celebrity attached to it already". The example of Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds was used as an example of a TV format that had been kicking around for ages, but apparently "only worked" once it was tested with someone with Hammond's enthusiasm.

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.

Experiences 2

Thinking further about yesterday's post on new experiences, it's worth pointing out that many TV pitch meetings occur under the aegis of an unspoken but totally understood fiction: -

What is proposed in the meeting has been designed purely to get us all through that first meeting.  Most likely it will bear little resemblance to the end result of any collaboration

Really what is being pitched is the people around the table and everything else is an acceptable lie.  As ever there are wider parallels, I've come to see that part of my job as a consultant is to 'trick' my participants into trying genuinely new things.  That requires a relationship strong enough for the ultimate two word pitch:

"Trust me."

The best exponent of this that I know is an Australian events organiser named David Grant.  David has staged the 'must attend' parties for the IOC and major sponsors at eight Olympics - summer and winter - since Atlanta in 1996.  When you hire DG3 all you know is that you won't get what you expect and certainly not what you got last time.  And you won't be disappointed.

My old company, Instant Theatre, worked with David Grant Special Events (as was) in the early nineties and it was the most fun I've ever had in corporate.  My all-time favourite experience was being invited to a meeting and shown a mocked-up film poster entitled 'The Greatest Story Ever Sold' with the text surrounded by a pastiche of every 'Golden Age of Hollywood' cliche; Roman soldiers, vikings, Biblical prophet, a low-flying plane and so on.  He told me the name of the client (a hotel chain) and the conversation went like this:

Me: Great poster, do you need me to write up something for the pitch?
DG: Pitch was this morning.  We won. We start a 4-city roadshow in Brisbane in a fortnight.
Me: Okay.  How's the show going to run?
DG: No idea.  That's why you're here.

After all we were called 'Instant Theatre'.  We spent two weeks in and out of planes and hotels staging original and funny shows for enthusiastic audiences of usually cynical travel agents.  We ate and drank well and it was genuinely sad when it ended.  There are very few corporate experiences that I can say that about.

David had such an amazing reputation that most of the time "Trust me" was all it took for him to get the gig.  He also moved so fast that he had no choice but to spread that trust amongst his suppliers.  You felt privileged to be part of it and you brought your A-game.

The coolest thing about David Grant was that when he came to sell his company in 2009 he didn't go for the juicy buy-out from someone like WPP where he would be paid handsomely for his company, paid more in consultancy fees and more again for sitting on a global board.  Instead he asked two of his long-serving team-members to become partners (hence 'DG3').

He's never sold out.  Literally.

Experiences

Improvisers are taught that there is a moment in every scene when the 'routine' that has worked so far must be broken so that the narrative can progress. Timing is everything; do this too soon (before you've properly established the routine) and you confuse the audience. Leave it too late and you bore them.

'Breaking the routine' is a useful way to think about larger things like business, career and life. In life if you're trying to break a routine you really only have two options: -

1. Repeat an experience that had the desired effect in the past, or,
2. Try something for the first time.

It amazes me the lengths to which we'll go to avoid 'option 2'.  I'm in the process of pitching a TV show at the moment and the hardest task so far has been writing the 'X meets Y' paragraph of the proposal*.  The network has said that they want something genuinely new and different and we reckon that our idea is that.  Experience has taught my creative partner that because we don't have an existing relationship with them the pitch must be framed in the context of a repeat experience.

As much as they say they're looking for 'something new', most people (in televisionland at least) don't want these new experiences to come from new people.  Which is presumably why we see old faces in new formats; we've already been asked if the idea can be altered to make it 'a bit of a celebrity vehicle'.

I feel dirty and all I've done is written three pages of A4.

* The most famous (and best) of these being of course Ridley Scott's three line pitch: 'Jaws in Space', aka Alien

Some of my best friends are...

I've just read John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No On Can Pay; his diagnosis of the global financial crisis.  Lucid, funny and intelligently constructed for the interested non-expert, it is further evidence in favour of the argument that a good writer should be read regardless of his choice of topic.

He makes a distinction between 'industry' and 'business' at a cultural level: -

An industry is an entity which as its primary purpose makes or does something, and makes money as a byproduct.  The car industry makes cars, the television makes TV programmes, the publishing industry makes books, and with a bit of luck they all make money too, but for the most part the people engaged in them don't regard money as the ultimate purpose and justification of what they do...  Most human enterprises, especially the most meaningful and worthwhile ones, are in that sense industries, focused primarily on doing what they do: healthcare and education are both, from this anthropological perspective, industries.

Or at least that's what they are from the point of view of the people who work in them.  But many of these enterprises are increasingly owned by people who view them not as industries but as businesses: and the purpose of a business is, purely and simply, to make money.

p169-170

The sense of personal definition is hard to overstate as anyone who has watched a merchant banker try and explain what he does for a living to a six year old can attest.

The expensive boarding school where I studied was founded in the early years of the last century by Sydney's merchant class.  Corporate law, banking, stockbroking and commodities trading were promoted as desirable, laudable careers and some of my oldest friends have achieved immense success in these fields. My first degree was a Bachelor of Business and my high school essentially programmed me for some sort of financial career yet for some hitherto inarticulated reason I've always shied away.  Lanchester nails a social phenomenon under which I have long suffered that acts as an explanation of sorts: -

I have people I count as friends who work in the City.  We get on in all the ways in which people get on, but there is sometimes a moment in talking to them when you hit a kind of wall.  It's usually to do with fundamental assumptions based on the primacy of money, and the non-reality of other schemes of value.

p174

I work in two 'industries' (entertainment and pharmaceuticals) that I believe make the world a better place, albeit in vastly different ways.  I have always considered myself to be an unashamed capitalist so I expect to be paid well for my efforts.

But I am wary of a life where achievements are best expressed in dollar terms.

Seniority v Talent

Last night I caught up with David Shore, an amazingly talented Canadian improviser who's relocated to London.  He is an alumnus of the mainstage shows at The Second City, Toronto and Improv Olympic (IO) West in LA and his move here is great news for the UK scene.

Both Second City and IO have well established highly formalised improv training schemes that produce some of North America's best comedic talents and generate massive sums of money along the way.  London has nothing like it.  People get into improv in the UK either through the traditional drama schools such as RADA and Guildhall, through university troupes like the Oxford Imps or via a myriad of classes being run in school halls and dance studios all over London every weekend.  Potentially there's a gap in the market for a London equivalent to these great American institutions.

Certainly there's money to be made and therein lies the rub: that money will be made not in ticket sales but rather through the classes: -

More students = more money

Only a small percentage of those who sign up for improv classes should ever be put on a stage in front of a paying audience.  Certainly there are many corollary benefits to such classes in terms of creativity, life skills and so on but there is a clear need to manage the expectations of each student.  There are plenty of people who will pay good money to lock into a system where seniority supposedly trumps talent.  The North American schools are generally pretty good at selling the classes without an implicit promise of 'stage time' because unless they maintain the quality of their mainstage shows then sooner or later it all falls apart.

Bad mainstage shows = fewer famous alumni = less students = less money

Sydney Theatresports, where I was trained, went into precisely this sort of downward spiral about ten years ago and it's never quite recovered.  Some of our senior people began to see the classes as an income stream rather than a way to reinvigorate our performing company with fresh talent.

An interesting metric might be this: -

The total amount a student pays from first class to first performance

In 1990 I took my first class.  It cost me $3 (three dollars).  After five classes I was onstage at the legendary Belvoir Street Theatre.  My intake included lots of writers, comics, cabaret performers as well as the usual teachers, plumbers and lawyers.

Ten years later my equivalent was paying as much as $1500 before playing to a paying audience.  That 9900% increase drove out everyone but the lawyers and teachers.  Not only were the classes drawing from a smaller pool of potential students but the sheer enormity of the fees led to increased pressure on the system to cast every graduating student in a mainstage show regardless of actual talent.  We ended up with overpopulated casts full of people who only loved the idea of performing.  Even at a distance it was obvious that they weren't having any fun on stage.  No one pays to watch that and our audiences fell further.

So does David start by staging the best possible shows with performers already on London scene in order to attract more talented students or does he start from scratch, relying on his considerable reputation to fill classes and then launch his style of improv with performers made in his own image?

Shadow play

This week I 'shadowed' a pharma rep around London for a day. We wandered in and out of various hospitals and doctors' private rooms, discussing a pretty important product that isn't doing as well as it should. As such, the experience was a string of frustrating discussions interspersed with lots of waiting room time.

I've known the rep in question for about ten years. He's knowledgeable, personable and tenacious. These are the qualities you look for in a salesperson.  He's had a very successful career but on a year-by-year basis that success depends almost entirely on the actual drug he's selling (a career representative will work on as many as ten products over his or her working life).  I've never believed that even the most exemplary rep can compensate for a second-rate drug; in medicine there's simply too much at stake for salesmanship to be an integral factor.

As good as this guy is at his job every day he fails more than he succeeds.

If he was younger he'd jump to a company with a newer, more promising pipeline but as he's in sight of a very generous final salary pension no one can afford him. Instead he spends his working days chasing down doctors he's known for years, trying to sell a drug that's underwhelmed the market since launch and planning his retirement. He does an unremarkable job incredibly well.

I know many 'creative' people who would adjudge this as all too depressing to contemplate. With all that potential how come he never Produced Something of Genuine Importance?  In the follow-your-dreams-and-the-money-will-follow-you industries such life choices are tantamount to a betrayal.

Instead he's a well paid and enthusiastic consumer of the creative output of others. His is the money that follows you following your dreams. If you play it right he's one of your Thousand True Fans

If he wasn't happy to have his job then I certainly wouldn't have mine.

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.

Enjoy your own company

Life has been slow in consultingland.

When I left for Australia for holidays in April I was expecting a biliously full diary throughout May, June and July but instead I spent that time contacting those same clients with carefully timed, gingerly oblique emails.  Now the diary is starting to fill up again and despite my blacker moments it seems that the last few months were an hiatus not an endgame.  The experience has been isolating; a common complaint amongst those of us who choose a Headcount:1 mode of work.

Advice for anyone thinking of starting their own business: -

If you want to enjoy your own company then you're got to learn to enjoy your own company.

Creating conversations

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

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

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

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

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

The gods of cyberspace help those who help themselves.

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

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

Writing is a team sport

It may be that The Wire's David Simon doesn't have a funny bone in his body but...

Thoughts on Big Pharma

It was a full ten minutes before I remembered why I never go to networking events.

The first person I met asked me what I did.  I said I ran a small consulting business that helps drug companies sell their drugs better.  She stepped back and using her index fingers formed a cross in a mock warding-off-Satan gesture.

It had been a while.

Let's leave aside that I was at a corporate networking event intended to allow small players like me to exchange ideas about how to better supply products and services to larger organisations.  Maybe the woman's revulsion was no more than a baseline response of someone who had yet to embrace the pretty obvious idea that if you want to make money you have to find people or entities who are happy to exchange theirs for whatever it is you do.  It was no surprise that she was setting up a quasi-charity that would subcontract services usually provided by the government.

It's somehow better for your soul to work with the public sector and being around me was killing her buzz.

For the last twenty years I've divided my time between small-scale performance (improv and stand-up) and marketing consulting to Big Pharma.  I would routinely encounter actors and writers who had the networking woman's knee-jerk reaction to my other life.  The thinking was usually something like: Big Pharma is evil.  It's evil because it exploits science or because it exploits the environment or because it profits from illness or because it makes extraordinary returns or because it exploits the developing world or because it ignore that world altogether or simply because it's big and corporate.

Certainly the industry doesn't get a lot of good press.  It misses out on the sexy medical breakthough story, which is usually attributed to the university where the research was done.  Instead Big Pharma gets the nasty side-effect story, the extraordinary profits story and the callous disregard of Africa story.  Not that the industry seems to care much.  Mostly it gets on with the business of commercialising that sexy medical breakthrough via years of additional research and hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope of making those extraordinary returns.

Still, the industry has developed a structural flaw that in the coming years will not only make it harder to defend but also hurt all of us who rely on its products.  The pipelines are slowing down and fewer new drugs are making it to market.  Megan McArdle sets out the issue in The Atlantic Magazine: -

In 1996—arguably the peak of pharmaceutical productivity in the past two decades—the FDA approved 53 NMEs (new molecular entities). These days, breaking the 20 mark is rare; last year 19 were approved, plus six “biologics,” substances such as vaccines and antibodies that are based on proteins made by living cells. Most analysts seem to think that U.S. companies just aren’t turning out as many valuable new drugs as they used to. 

The article describes a growing culture of risk aversion amongst the industry and the US Food & Drug Administration.  This is brought about by the drastic consequences of American class action litigation and a global 'merger mania' that dates back at least fifteen years.  Of the two issues, I think that the mergers are the more serious and the problem here is organisational rather than scientific.  Consider this: -

Regardless of size few institutions can competently complete more than one big task at a time.  Successfully launching a drug is a huge task.

My clients expect to launch one product a year.  So whenever two pharma companies merge we should reasonably expect the annual number of new products to drop by one.  It's the bigness of Big Pharma that hurts us*.

There are a few encouraging signs.  A few smaller companies, not operating under the pressure of Pfizer's overheads and Wall Street expectations, are now actively marketing orphan drugs.  This is good news for sufferers of certain rare but remediable diseases and a clear example of the industry doing what it should: transforming those scientific breakthroughs into a tangible improvement in the human condition.

The diseases in question are incredibly rare.  I helped launch a product that cured a very nasty disease that only affects 14 people in every million; that's less than 900 possible patients across the UK.  The drug is breathtakingly expensive and most of us would shy away from our taxes being spent on it.  Unless of course we knew someone with the disease who will die if untreated.  Insisting that the drug be made available at a cheaper price is an incomplete and naive response to the problem.  The compound sat undeveloped in a larger company's pipeline for years, these things are called 'orphans' for a reason.  Even so, the start-up that bought the rights was taking a massive risk and only did so in expectation of a decent return on investment.  Reduce that ROI and everyone loses, especially the guy with the disease.

The networking woman had flitted on before I got to explain any of this to her.  She'd found someone who knew someone at the Department of Work & Pensions with an unspent budget.

*  It especially hurts me as my business specialises in getting these product launches right

Seven ± Two

A recent article in Wired about the possible long-term effect of the internet on our brains reminded me of the concept of cognitive load: -

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time.

Most of us know cognitive load theory as 'Seven ± Two'; the idea that we can really only hold between five and nine chunks of information in our short-term memory at one time, that our RAM is limited to that many memory slots.

So how might Seven ± Two relate to creativity and performance?

Every improviser knows the discipline of 'clearing the mind' ahead of a show.  If two or three of your seven memory slots are occupied before you hit the stage then you are, by definition, 'preoccupied'.  I would say that all acts of creativity require a similar understanding.  If writing comedy is all about jamming together seemingly dissonant ideas then a preoccupied mind is always going to inhibit the process.  Whatever it takes for you to clear your mind is what you need to do.

But sometime our cognitive load can't be cleared by a mere act of will or a routine of breathing exercises.  Sometimes those 7±2 memory slots are preoccupied by something bigger than ourselves.  Something like grief or dread or hope or joy.

In which case all we can do is recognise that this is the case and try again later.

A correction

Watts emailed to say that his last post confused Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hynter and I repeated this mistake without checking.

However, his argument remains unchanged.  As does my response.

More thoughts on collaboration

It was a sure bet that Andrew Watts would take exception to my entry on the lack of collaboration in the stand-up milieu: -

It's different from other art forms because your collaborator will have a different function - Alan Bennett talks about how productive his relationship with Richard Eyre is - but there it's because Eyre is, as a director, coming at each script from a different angle to the writer.  But in stand-up, there is a direct relationship between you and the audience; and any collaborator will feel like a third party in a marriage.

Andrew is wrong-headed here (knowing him, perhaps deliberately so); he confuses the roles within a collaborative arrangement with its overall intent and he knows that a raving* of comics riffing off each others' bon mots in the pub is not the actual work of writing

I think that the real reason that so few stand-up comics can effectively write for another is a lack of personal vision (or 'voice').  No writer can collaborate with a performer who lacks the discipline to reject a joke, no matter how good, on the grounds that it isn't right for his or her act.  Occasionally I've been asked to direct a comic who hasn't yet got this voice / vision thing right and the project has quickly fallen apart.  Conversely the few times I've been lucky enough to direct comics who have artistic certainty the resulting shows have been great.

Interestingly, it's about the time that a good comic finds a voice that he or she begins to attract a fan base.  There is a consistency to Stewart Lee's left-of-centre political material that sets him apart from Tim Vine's manic punnery.  Fans will pay more and travel further to get what they want from either act than for a night of 'voiceless' acts no matter how funny.

Sadly, my own set is still a mishmash of personal anecdotes, cleverish observations, puns and so on.  Charitably you'd say that I'm still finding my voice.  Until then collaboration would be counterproductive so my ideas won't coming around Devizes to beat Watts' at sport any time soon.

***

I can't resist mentioning the comparison that has been made between the Bennett / Ayres collaboration with that of the playwright Anton Chekov and the director Constantin Stanislavsky.  Until he joined the Moscow Art Theatre Chekov was convinced that The Seagull was a comedy

* My suggestion for the collective noun

Idea sex

"What I need," said Andrew Watts, "is a gang."

One of the obvious challenges of stand-up comedy is its single-handedness.  You write alone, perform alone, succeed alone and die alone.  This fosters a natural tendency for solipsism.  Stand-up comics are far more likely to see others as rivals than do improvisers or comic actors working in, say, sketch comedy.  I wonder how much this strange individualism hurts stand-up as a form.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal Matt Ridley posits that human development accelerated not because of any physiological change in our bodies (Neanderthals had physcially larger brains than we do now) but because of trade.  The exchange of ideas that happened synchronously with the exchange of goods and services created the collective brain that has taken us from the Serengeti to cyberspace.  Ridley sees 'ideas having sex' as the basis for innovation: -

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange. 

The life of a stand-up comic stands in direct opposition to this idea.

Much of this isolationism is self-inflicted (the circuit is overpopulated by socially dysfunctional loners) but there is a cultural insistence in operation as well; one of the few absolute taboos in the industry is joke theft.   Recently Freakonomics ran a terrific piece on this: -

More often than not, however, the norms deviate from copyright: for example, copyright protects expression but not ideas, but comedians’ norms protect expression as well as ideas. Or authorship: under copyright law, two individuals who cooperate in creating a work are considered joint owners of the work. In contrast, if one comedian comes up with a joke’s premise and another thinks up the punchline, under comedians’ norms of ownership the first owns the joke and the latter has nothing.

The essay goes on to say: -

The law is not always necessary to foster creativity. Using informal group norms and sanctions, comedians are able to control joke-stealing. Without the intervention of copyright law, comedians are able to assert ownership of jokes, regulate their use and transfer, impose sanctions on joke-thieves, and maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material.

I'm not sure that I agree with this.  Gaining a reputation for stealing someone else's material (and it is considered theft) can kill a career so many comics deliberately avoid exposure to other comedy forms for fear that any exposure could contaminate their material.  The only defense against an accusation of joke thievery is "I came up with it independently" and this is partially effective at best.  In no way am I condoning joke theft; simply observing that this enforced isolationism that is a reaction to this fear has a downside.

Comedians, playwrights and novelists still live with a romanticised creator-as-auteur notion that is outdated as it excludes the possibility for collaboration and therefore stymies innovation.  The accusation of collaboration or worse hangs permanently over Shakespeare.  Yet collaboration has been de rigueur  in other comedy forms since long before the writers' room on Sid Caesar's show and the Second City technique of writing down and refining sketches that were originally improvised.

The rest of the world collaborates.  The idea of the scientist as solo genius died with the Manhattan Project.  Creative conferences like MaxFunCon and SWSX abound and multiply. yet when stand-up comedians gather there is a miasma of jealousy, envy and paranoia.  A common criticism of stand-ups when they join writers' rooms is that they don't play nicely with others.  In Ridley's terms they don't like their ideas having sex with other people's ideas.

Strange, as this is the only sex many comics are likely to get.

Cutting what?

The world's press is full of dark forebodings about the scale of the reductions to be made by every responsible economy in public service spending.  Here in Britain the broadsheets and tabloids alike are gleefully full of hyperventilating predictions of 'swingeing cuts'.

The UK has to find something like £170,000,000,000 in savings in the coming years. The rhetorical game for the politicians is to frame a 'cut' as an abstract necessity rather than as the loss of someone's job, which is what it usually amounts to.

On a long drive over the Bank Holiday weekend I listened to a Merlin Mann podcast which had a topic like 'Finding More Creative Time', a perennial favourite with the GTD crowd.  Part of Mann's argument was the need to combat the pernicious nature of a 'meetings culture'.  We're all aware of the effect that meetings, especially the compulsory yet unagendaed, standing (ie automatically recurring) kind have on morale and also productivity.  He rightfully points out that the most effective, most creative teams tend to have the fewest formal meetings.

How much time do public servants spend in meetings?  The excellent blogs of Winston Smith  (assisted housing), Frank Chalk (teaching) and David Copperfield (policing) each critique the British public service environment from the vantage point of front-line services.  Time 'wasted' in meetings is a consistent complaint in all three.  Meetings mean that less gets done.  That front-line staff hate meetings as much as bureaucrats and consultants thrive on them is all you need to know.

So consider this: -

Every untaken team building away day, additional-yet compulsory-diversity training session or off-site OH&S refresher represents a potential cost saving, perhaps even a retrenchment avoided

If we're having to do more with less then surely we can start by getting more from the people we currently hire*.  A crackdown on useless meetings would have the same fiscal effect as a freeze on new hires. 

My business is based on face-to-face delivery so a total ban on meetings would kill me.  What Mann is really stressing is ensuring that meeting time is seen as a scarce resource.  I work on a rule of thumb that the opportunity cost of putting one salesperson in a room with me for a day is  £900 per representative.  I doubt that too many public servants have the same reason to pause before blocking out colleagues' diary-time via MS-Outlook.

* The flaw in the argument might be that there is less incentive to reward productivity in the public sector.  If less meetings in a hospital = more productive nurses = less nurses.  That the hospital saves money is cold comfort to the staff deemed surplus to requirement

A bullet dodged

Recently I endured one of the strangest meetings of my consultancy career.

It began with an email from an ex-client who was now an account manager with one of the most successful pharmaceutical advertising agencies in Europe.  She had a client whose product was facing some specific strategic challenges that she felt I could help resolve.  Given our history I was confident she had a realistic idea of what my company does and specific thoughts as to how I might be able to help her help her client.  Could I come in for a pitch meeting?

When an agency this big calls you take the meeting.

It was scheduled for 930am a few Friday's ago at the agency’s lovely Home Counties offices and to run for ‘ninety minutes, two hours at the outside’.  As requested I customised my basic credentials presentation to hone in on the product’s current needs by highlighting some successful work with other products facing similar challenges.

In a pre-meeting she’d stressed that Charlie, the client in question, was sometimes a bit unpredictable and hard to handle.  That she’d insisted on a formal pre-meeting should have been red flag enough.

I arrived my usual fifteen minutes early to be told that Charlie, also travelling out from London, would be about thirty minutes late.  I chatted with my ex-client and her colleague when a few minutes after 10am a secretary announced that Charlie had arrived but was outside having a smoke.  The other account manager was describing a long overdue beach holiday she is taking next month when he appeared,

Holiday?  Who said that you could take a holiday?  I never signed off on that.

 Charlie wore a golf shirt, jeans and ancient trainers.  Without shaking hands or acknowledging me he threw himself in a chair and announced that he was late because he’d been up all night watching the General Election.  We got a short yet impassioned lecture about the inequities of the first-past-the-post electoral system and then turned on me, 

What’s he doing in a suit?

Before I could respond he waved his own comment away.  I handed over a business card which he tossed unread on the table next to his BlackBerry and cigarettes.  My contact said a few words and handed the meeting over to me.  I began to begin when he interrupted, 

Is he going to stand the whole time?

I was. 

I’d really prefer it if you’d sit down.

I declined.

I’d be using flipcharts and so on and he’d get a far better idea about what my company offered far more easily if he just let me do what I normally do.  He snorted but let me get on with the presentation.

I made it as far as Slide 2 before he interrupted again.  This time he wasn’t objecting per se but rather commenting on the way I was constructing my argument, 

I can see what you’re trying to do here.  It’s not going to work.

He lasted two more slides before declaring that he ‘got’ what I was trying to do but what was I going to do for him?  I negotiated my way through another six or so slides to the point where I move from what my company offers to hone in specifically on the client’s challenges.  And I really do mean ‘negotiate’; after each slide Charlie had to be told to hold his question as the issue raised was addressed always on the next slide.  Finally I picked up a marker pen, turned to the flipchart and asked my usual question, 

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

Charlie immediately left the room for a cigarette.  When he returned ten minutes later I repeated my question,

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

There isn't one.

All I'm trying to understand is where the product should be positioned and define that in terms of the patient that the product will help.”

My next slide outlined a few parameters to help the discussion. 

You don’t understand.  No one knows where to position the product.  I've been in pharma for twenty-five years and I’ve never see anything like this.  It’s impossible.

I’d read the research and it didn’t seem impossible to me.  The product was currently getting low-level usage in one major European market but not in the right type of patient to sustain long-term growth.  I told Charlie I wasn’t talking about how to position the product; we’d get to that later, but simply where it should be positioned.  That is, for which sort of patient.

 That’s the problem.  It’s a extremely complicated area of medicine and no one can say where it should be positioned.

What does the clinical data say?

It says we can be used anywhere in the disease area.”

Okay let’s start with this; how many prescriptions do you need a year to make budget?

He named a figure (which I knew already). 

Then as I understand the disease area, that means we have to avoid pigeonholing the product for last line use because the epidemiology shows us that there aren’t enough eligible patients in that ‘last line cohort’?  Coincidentally this is the only place you’re currently getting sales.

I see what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to say where we should tell the market where the product should be used.

That’s what positioning is, Charlie, that’s exactly what I was trying to do. 

There’s no point.  The sales team isn't smart enough to follow a strategy as complicated as that.

Let’s leave the sales team out of the mix for the moment and start with the customer; where do the doctors want the product used?

I obviously didn’t understand enough about the product.  That was certainly true; at the start of the meeting I’d given myself permission to ask naïve questions.

Charlie responded by likening the challenges he faced in his market to the launch of the blockbuster antidepressant Prozac.  I told him I found analogies to be of limited benefit.  Why didn’t he instead walk me through the actual issues facing his own product in a way that I could understand and we’d take it from there? 

I find it easier to use this analogy when explaining to people about my product as it keeps things simple.  It’s not just you.  I do this all the time with our sales team.

The point of his Prozac analogy was that the drug represented a game-changing technological advance that created a multibillion-dollar market overnight.  He felt strongly that his product should do the same.  Prozac hadn’t been niched, which was why it was so successful.  And wasn’t that what positioning was?  Niching by another name?  He suggested that we dwell on this wisdom whilst he stepped out for another cigarette.

Need I say that his product was no Prozac?

Around we went.  Every time I proposed a positioning Charlie rebutted it with either another ridiculous analogy, by ‘reminding’ me of a piece of data that he’d hitherto neglected to mention or just by leaving to smoke.

At 1230pm I said I was mindful that it was now Friday afternoon and that I had enough information to put together a costed proposal which he’d get by the middle of next week.  I started to pack up my things, as did the account managers. 

Wait a minute.  What's going on here? I didn’t say that anyone could leave.

I said that had a teleconference scheduled with another client. He demanded that I postpone it, which I duly managed to do (thank god for sane clients).

I don’t have anything else on this afternoon so I want us all to stay here and keep going until we work this thing out.

After we went around the analogy/previously unmentioned data/cigarette loop another time I’d had enough, 

Charlie, I think that three hours is more than long enough for a pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting?  Who said anything about this being a pitch meeting?

It said so on my first slide.

(One of only seven you saw you boor.) 

No, you should know that I don’t waste my time with pitch meetings.  If the girls here say that you’re the right guy for the job then that’s good enough to work for me.

Well, we haven't agreed terms yet and I'm not prepared to share any more of my IP until we get that sorted.  Anyway I still have to make that other call.

I said my goodbyes and left.  My ex-client walked me out, apologising the entire way to the car, 

He knew damn well it was only a pitch.  I told him a dozen times.

The following week I fired off a brief proposal that included a ballpark budget that ignored his request for a discount ‘because we’d never worked together before’.

And that, of course, was the end of the matter.

***

Charlie was a walking Petri dish of insecurity.  Everything he said or did amounted to an ironclad guarantee that he would be a nightmare to work with.  Except that in Charlieworld I wouldn’t be working with him, I’d be working for him.

The ways in which Charlie would be a poor client fall into three broad categories: (a) his inability to engage in Marketing 101; (b) his total lack of respect for anyone inside his business, but most of all (c) the aggressive status games presumably played to mask the first two shortcomings.  The specific behaviours that bother me fell under one of those three headings: - 

Deficit in Marketing

• Hypnotised by the complexity of the product and unwilling (unable?) to see that the marketing still needs to be simple


• Overuse of banal analogies to avoid engagement in the actualities of his own market


• Opting to make a show of positioning the product ambitiously if unrealistically but without any real plans to assist the sales team in establishing this in the field 

Lack of Respect

• Seeing the sales team as stupid


• Antagonistic towards the rest of his organisation.  I got a sense that Charlie’s vociferous support for a project would immediately damn it in the eyes of everyone else.  What good would that do my long-term prospects within his organisation?


• Wanting the whole project to be prohibitively difficult as that might excuse the ambiguous positioning and correspondingly poor sales results to follow 

Status Games

• The relationship with the two (female) agency account managers totally ignored their expertise


• Withholding information from a potential supplier (me).  Of course I didn’t know the data as well as he did, but I resented the implication that I was incompetent rather than newer to the project


• Leaving the room to smoke every time the discussion put him under any sort of pressure


• Dressed so casually as to be dismissive of everyone else in the room


• Actually lying about his understanding of the nature of the meeting

***

So like the title says, a bullet dodged.  If there was an upside it was that I got to bond with the account managers over the experience and that just might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Synthesis v Analysis

Synthesis (n) The combination of ideas to form a theory or system: the synthesis of intellect and emotion in his work, the ideology represented a synthesis of certain ideas.  Often contrasted with analysis 

Analysis (n) detailed examination of the elements of structure of something, typically as a basis for discussion or interpretation: statistical analysis / an analysis of popular culture.  The process of separating something into its constituent elements

In sales/marketing synthesis is an ad hoc project whereas analysis tends to be an ongoing process.

It's fine to use a consultancy for synthesis because it's ad hoc and a decision needs to be made before the project begins.  It is defined and therefore manageable.  But any organisation that automatically outsources all of its analysis work is abdicating responsibility for anything like realtime decision-making.

When budgets are tight and analysis budgets are cut back then decisions are either made too late or without sufficient information or not at all.  Consultants like me need to be in the synthesis game.