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.

Joke

Over dinner with a supplier last night in Barcelona we talked about the way Australians are perceived in London.   I'd like to think that generally we're respected but there's also the cliche of us being ex-colonial chancers blagging our way across Europe.

He told me a lovely Spanish joke: -

Q: Why is Aerolinas Argentinas the world's best film school?

A: Because a cable runner who gets on a flight in Buenos Aires is a director by the time he reaches Spain

And here I was thinking that it was just us Aussies.

A good meeting

Had a meeting yesterday with a consulting client to follow up on a session I ran in August.

As part of that programme I'd introduced a couple of new terms to help them get to grips with a specific strategic issue.  Yesterday my terminology was used acutely and properly yet in an entirely unselfconscious manner.

Happily, someone else reminded the group of the provenance of the terms.

We're happier when busy

Like most self-employed people I enjoy being busy.

Recently I came across a really interesting study in the Psychological Science journal that says that human beings are happier when busy even though we're usually more inclined towards idleness.  I'm especially intrigued by new thinking in airport design whereby the distance you need to travel to get to baggage reclaim is increased so less time is spent standing around waiting.

Thick & thin

A couple of London's longer-running comedy rooms closed recently. Nothing especially unusual about this as there's a natural rate of turnover in the industry.

A couple of the promoters (anyone who cajoles a pub landlord into giving over his upstairs room for comedy is a 'promoter') have mourned the passing of their nights on the Chortle website. There's a consistency in their moanings that has been picked up elsewhere.  Somehow London's comedy-going audiences are simultaneously too thin to be profitably shared amongst all the clubs and too thick to be relied upon to find their way to the 'quality' nights (i.e. the ones run by the writers).

As in Edinburgh, bizarre forebodings of a form of Gresham's Law prevail. The hand-wringing prediction that cheaper, low quality nights will somehow drive out the better gigs that pay their acts is pathetic. If you think so little of your audience before they enter the room what chance that they'll be treated well once the show starts?

Improv history

Way back when.

An eighth of a second

Kevin Kelly is republishing his wonderfully prescient New Rules for the New Economy, first written in 1998.  I wasn't all that aware of Kelly ten years ago so it's all new to me.

In a post entitled From Places to Spaces he turns on its head an old Tom Peters maxim that cheaper products made in the developing world, American manufacturing's worst nightmare, are now just an eighth of a second away; this being the time that it takes to communicate an order from one side of the globe to the other.  But as Kelly points out: -

The good news is that those geographically far away competitors will never be any closer than an eighth of a second.  And for many things in life, that is too far away 

The trainer in me really likes this idea.  So does the comedian.  Both jobs happen in real time and I thrive on the intimacy that comes of standing at the front of a room and changing the way the audience thinks or what it feels.  By Kelly's logic the feedback loop between speaker and listener has a margin for error of less than an eighth of a second.  This is why I travel for work.

Enough of life thrives on subtle instantaneous responses that one-eighth of a second kills intimacy and spontaneity

If the secret of comedy is 'timing' then an eighth of a second is more than long enough to be the difference between success and failure, between laughter and silence.

Beginners' mind

I'm on my way to Zurich for a kick-off meeting for a new project. It's a new client, new product and new therapy area so I've spent the last few days immersed in the detail.

For me this periodic requirement to start from scratch and quickly learn the intricacies of a new field is one of the chief joys of consultancy work. I enjoy the sense that I've gone from zero knowledge about an area to maybe 85% comprehension in a matter of days.

I think that much of this pleasure comes from what Zen philosophy calls 'the beginners' mind': -

Having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject

I trust in my ability to quickly learn enough to ask intelligent if somewhat naive questions. In fact it's the quality of these questions that dictate my worth as a consultant.

Being paid to be a constant beginner can be liberating but of course it comes with a caveat: 85% comprehension is a very long way from mastery; tomorrow I need to know just enough to help my clients see their world through fresh eyes.

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

Longform

Many improvisers divide the craft into 'longform' and 'shortform'.  Longform is certainly harder to master and therefore see as a sort of holy grail by many. 

LONGFORM – An extended improvisational format.  Sometimes used by improv teams who find that the break between the short sketches they present gives audience members a chance to leave.

Jerry Schaeffer's Devils Dictionary for Improvisational Theatre

A fool and his time are easily parted

Over 50% of all American teens see themselves as 'content providers'.  Seth Godin exhorts his acolytes to above all else 'ship' (i.e. focus on the act of completing a project rather than its quality).  500 shows at the Edinburgh were free.  Prosumer technology abounds.  This August Twitter had 96 million unique users.

We are all producers now.  The financial cost of entry to a vast array of creative endeavours is approaching zero which means every moment we're not at work we're on the horns of a dilemma: -

Do I spend the next hour consuming someone else's creativity or producing my own?

But if you're serious about being self-employed in a creative field then this zero sum game should haunt your every waking moment.

Unless you're actively working on a sitcom script then watching Arrested Development reruns isn't 'research' its 'leisure'.  This is fine provided you label it as such.  Same with reading your favourite Blogs instead of writing your own or slipping into the back of a gig when you told yourself you'd be writing new material.  A stand-up comic on the UK circuit can even convince himself that time spent on Facebook is a bit like work.  Time spent reading this Blog is time you're not creating something worthwhile.

Likewise time spent writing it.  There's a hierarchy of creative activities:-

- a Tweet is not that Blog post
- a Blog post is not that new joke
- a new joke is not that sitcom pitch
- a sitcom pitch is not that novel or short story or screenplay or business plan

A fool and his time, etc.

Who has your back?

Performance improv is an innately social art form.  Improvisers from the Loose Moose in Calgary have a pre-show ritual they insist on following wherever they perform.  Immediately before taking the stage each improviser approaches every other improviser, pats them on the back and simply says: -

I've got your back

On a good night improv feels effortless and the audience will know it's in the presence of genius but these aren't the nights you have to worry about.  It's the bad nights (we all have them) when you feel inadequate and exposed.  It's as if the audience can see what you're thinking in real time as you fruitlessly try different approaches to turn your performance around over the course of a show.  Instead of starting the next scene you hang back hoping that someone else will shoulder the load.  You start blundering onto the stage when you're not needed and staying off when you are.  Paranoia creeps in as you sit in the wings wondering if you were ever any good at this nonsense.

The truth is that you can't think your way out of a hole like this.  You have to switch off that calculating brain and feel your way forward.  In the mean time you must trust that your fellow performers will give you time and space for this to happen.  You need to hear: -

I've got your back

About ten days ago I had that bad night in London.  Happily the format of the show and the quality of the rest of the cast meant that the overall night was unaffected.  My horrible sense of exposed inadequacy was mine alone.  On the night someone had my back.

The reason that stand-up terrifies most improvisers is that no one has your back.  The main reason that sole trading terrifies most people, even those self-employed in partnerships, is that no one has your back.  When you're self-employed you accept this and develop techniques to create the time and space to feel your way out of that hole.

I work early in the morning and late at night to give my underperforming brain the additional time to complete tasks that would be simple in better times.  I keep a private journal that gives me a historical record of what I'm feeling as much as what I'm thinking.  Most importantly I stay close to smart people who I trust despite most of them living in Australia.

It's counterintuitive but I think that misanthropes are the people least equipped for a Headcount: 1 life.

Michael McIntyre

Bruce Dessau's piece about comedian Michael McIntyre in the Guardian raises a familiar point in an interesting way.

Criticisms of McIntyre, the biggest act in the UK at the moment, are a commonplace amongst the trolls lower down on the comedy food chain.  He is branded as 'mainstream' and 'lowest common denominator'; the ultimate pejoratives in comedy circles.

Yet these terms are both accurate and embraceable; McIntyre operates at the 'head' of the Long Tail* phenomenon.

'Mainstream' is what he does.  'Lowest common denominator' is what his massive audience wants.  The market compels him to be these things just as success at the 'tail' requires a comic to build a following that explicitly rejects 'mainstream'; viz Stewart Lee, Doug Stanhope and others.

I've never met McIntyre but he is universally described as a terrific guy.  His act is polished and well written and I laughed at some but not all of it.  As Dessau's article states he is introducing more people to comedy in general and to specific comedians like my mate Imran Yusuf: -

There must be a percentage of McIntyre's 5 million viewers who started their comedy education with him and are now buying tickets for more adventurous acts

What could be more self-destructive than decrying a successful performer merely for appealing to an audience that your own act doesn't reach?

* Obviously we're reading 'Acts' for 'Products' in this graphic

Trent Reznor: comedy prophet?

Big thanks to Bob Slayer for his comment on my Doug Stanhope entry.  He directed me to an excellent piece by Trent Reznor (aka Nine Inch Nails) that offers advice to the 'new / unknown artist' looking to get into the music industry.  The piece takes the broad Kevin Kelly / Chris Anderson ideas around what technology now forces you to give away: -

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site 

And what you can do about it: -

what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan

All of which is Kelly / Anderson / Godin gospel with the added impact that it's coming from the guy who gave us Closer.

Of course I'm unlikely to agree with Bob that I don't understand Stanhope.  I get what he does as comedian and I'm happy to believe that on his day he does it unbelievably well.  But he didn't bring his A-Game the night I saw him in London.  And it's a really dumb gig to drag your wife along to.

I think that Bob's real point was that Doug Stanhope is also interesting because he's a comedian who's gained control of his marketing in a way analogous to Reznor's advice above.  This is something that we all really need to understand.  If you'd asked me a year ago I would have said that the comedy business is different enough from the music industry that Reznor's rules don't apply then along comes Bo Burnham and it seems that comedy is just like music only more so.  This is a guy who can generate 12 million You Tube hits and then storm it at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.  Apart from anything else, Burnham looks like he's having more fun than everyone else out there still jumping through competition hoops*.

The only way to get ahead on any stand-up scene is to give your stuff away.  Unpaid gigs are the only way new comics get stage time and they resent the hell out of the fact.  Career nirvana for a comic is the day you do your last unpaid (non-charity) gig.

Maybe we've got it all wrong.  Maybe the problem with most comedians' careers is not that they've given away too much free comedy but too little.

* A happy byproduct of competitions like FHM is that they attract genuinely funny friends of mine like Andrew Watts and Catie Wilkins both of whom blog hilariously well about the experience.

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.

Further thoughts on Doug Stanhope

Content aside, my lasting impression of Doug Stanhope's gig is that it was lazy and incomplete.  This wasn't helped by me seeing so many polished performances in Edinburgh last week; including such modern greats as Brendan Burns, Paul Foot, and Richard Herring.

The audience can sense the difference between the comic checking his watch to see if he can squeeze in that one last bit of material and the one visibly calculating the minimum amount of stage-time he has to endure before reasonably exiting.

Kevin Kelly vs. Doug Stanhope

As a performer / creator I have long been intrigued by Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans idea.  The logic is pretty simple; first you find your fans: -

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

Then you monetise: -

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

A growing number of the smarter comics I know are thinking seriously about this.  The most commonly cited example of such a comedy career is Doug Stanhope.  Apparently Stanhope has built up such an enthusiastic following over the last twenty years that he can book and fill a theatre in any American city without the involvement of a local promoter.  He negotiates directly with the venue, sets his own ticket prices and owns 100% of the merchandising rights.  Better still, his online following is so strong he hardly need bother with local advertising; by the time you've heard Doug Stanhope is playing your town chances are his fans have already snapped up every ticket.

He's currently doing a run at the Leicester Square Theatre and I went along last night.  I wanted to see a genuine American shock comic and get a look at some of those Kellyesque True Fans.  The audience was 80% male twentysomethings few of whom, in the words of my wife, 'had ever known the touch of a woman'.  I found the show horribly misogynistic, needlessly abrasive and deeply, deeply cynical but I can't say I wasn't warned. 

I'm never going to be one of Doug Stanhope's True Fans.  I'm too old and insufficiently scared of women.  Last night I was happy to be in the minority who didn't adore the show (one punter delivered a Jagermeister to him on stage) before queueing to buy his CD's, DVD's and T-Shirts.  These guys would defend him as one of those comics that you either get or you don't.  You have to buy into his lazy libertarianism to see his act in the right light (4 stars from the Guardian?  Really?)

No one can argue with the fact that Stanhope has made a very successful career out of telling truly appalling jokes very well.  The lesson is that if you want those 1,000 True Fans (and he has many more than that) then you probably have to position yourself at the margin.  True Fandom is exclusionary as well as self-selecting.  If the plan is to create an act that would sustain you with 1,000 fans but that would-doubtless-appeal-to-many-more-if-they-only-knew-about-you then you're actually playing a different game.

Stanhope's entire professional career depends on him wanting to spend his nights with audiences like last night.  He seems perfectly happy to be owned by them.  He has to be.  True Fans crave authenticity above all else.

Image-making vs. Rent-paying

Sir Paul Smith is unarguably the most successful post-war British men's fashion designer.  He started out as a one-man-operation in the 70's in the back streets of Nottingham before being discovered by the likes of Led Zeppelin.  Last year his global sales were around £350M and he seems to be surviving the financial downturn better than most.

Last Monday The Independent ran a profile piece that gave me much food for thought.  His thoughts on the right attitude for starting your own business struck a chord: -

"I meet a lot of young designers now and they're so talented but they lack the life skills you need to make money.  When I started my clothes were quite particular and I knew I wouldn't sell a lot, so I only opened on Fridays and Saturdays. For the rest of the week I rolled up my sleeves and did shitty jobs – styling, or just borrowing a mate's Transit van to go selling suits – so I could keep the shop pure. So many people today only want the purity and wonder why they go bankrupt. You've got to have a balance between image-making and rent-paying."

I love his dichotomy between image-making and rent-paying and his blueprint for surviving tough times is wonderfully simple: -

Graft, honesty, humility – and good manners.

This applies as much to management consultants, bankers and corporate lawyers as it does to fashion designers and stand-up comics.

Working from home

Both awesome and horrible.

A trade show? A university? A holiday?

I'm on the flight home from three nights, two-and-a-half days at the Edinburgh Festival. Time enough to catch up with lots of friendly, albeit pallid faces and to see a selection of shows. I went up looking for inspiration. I'm not sure yet whether I found any.

I've just finished Joshua Ferris' wonderful novel about life in Chicago advertising, Then We Came to the End. He has a phrase that sums up the Edinburgh experience beautifully: -

Amnesty was a gift, but oblivion was terror.

I'm obviously still trying to understand the entire Festival palaver, hence this procession of strange multiple choice titles.

The only way that Edinburgh ever made sense to me as a participant was as a trade show. Regardless of the industry a successful trade show requires an epic list of necessary factors that still aren't sufficient without the luck you need to meet the buyer you need in amongst the 2400 other sellers.

Wherever you are on the comedy food chain the person who can get you to the next level is undoubtedly somewhere in the city right now. All you have to do is get them to see your show and nail the gig the night they do. This is far harder than you'd think: posters, fliers, reviewers, even audiences all need to align to achieve this. The late night bars echo with acts lamenting that they haven't been reviewed, or that the agent was one of only three punters who turned up that night, or that all of the externals were in place but due to fatigue or illness or whatever the performer just didn't find the funny on stage.

Not everyone agrees with my Trade Show definition. Plenty of acts see the Festival more as a Comedy University ('CU Jummy'?). A chance to perform in as many as a hundred shows and to watch and drink with other comics. These people wear fatigue like a badge of honour. For a month you can make your mistakes openly. Hide in plain sight. For the last few years I was happy taking this 'university' approach but if you never intend to graduate then after a while you're just the kinda creepy older guy still hanging around campus.

The final option is to treat it as a holiday. Band camp for adults. Drop a few thousand quid on a month in Scotland instead of the Seychelles and good luck to you.

Whatever the motivation Edinburgh is wet, cold, tiring, entirely indifferent to your suffering and thus perversely addictive. I'd like to think I've another show in me.

2011 anyone?