Stewart McCure

Writer, performer, management consultant

An Australian living in London.  A self-employed training consultant to the global health care industry.  A producer, director and performer of improv comedy.  A trustee of an adult education charity in West London.  A writer and occaisional blogger

 

 

The peculiar pressure on farmers

I'm on my way back to London after ten days in Australia, most of which was spent on the farm where I grew up in central NSW.  The focus of the business is mostly cattle and I spent the week lending a hand as it's weaning season.  I'd like to think that I haven't forgotten everything I knew about working in cattle yards and I don't think I totally embarrassed myself.

Farming, or more specifically what is called 'grazing' in Australia (ie producing food from livestock not crops) is a strange business because the only thing that you can definitely count on is that something will go wrong.  The scale of the setback can range from minor inconvenience of, say, a cow barrelling through a fence and away from the herd, to existential crises such as bushfire or an outbreak of foot and mouth.  Last week it was the cumulative effect of the minor things that struck me most.

You make your livelihood working with massive animals which, if they could be said to have any sort of agenda, have no earthly reason to make life easy for you.  Why should they?  At some stage they or their offspring will be sold as meat.  Of course whatever sentience a cow has stops along way short of this but they instinct tells them that humans are to be feared.  Luckily this means that mostly they run away from you.  Mostly but not always.

On a good day the things that go wrong are minor irritants.  Locating the newborn calf that was separated from its mother during the move is a annoying but rewarding part of the job.  It's sort of the rural parallel of the document that didn't get backed up.  Time and energy will be needed to rectify the situation.  The difference is in the timeliness.  The longer the document us left the more times and energy will be required to rectify the problem.  Still, not much truly suffers if it isn't until Monday that the document is rewritten and resent.  If the newborn calf is left that long it will die cruelly.

On a good day the entire herd runs through the gates and into yards in a smooth and orderly way.  Nothing jumps a fence or barrels past you as you're drafting.  The drenching or marking or whatever you're doing goes well and you get home yourself at a reasonable time.  There aren't that many good days.  Something always cocks up and yet again you're finishing work in the dark.  This is why no one working with livestock is ever consistently on time.  It isn't because they haven't organised their worklives as well as office workers but rather because the environment is that much more haphazard.

The management consultant who declares that human beings to be 'the most unpredictable of all animals' has never had to anticipate exactly how a distraught cow will act when she hears her calf bellowing from two paddocks over.

Germans with Suntans

I'm on a flying visit to Australia and much as I love the country of my birth the oh-so-negative national mood can be a bit much. Sure, the national political scene is a cruel joke and the misallocated bounty accruing from the decades-long mining boom is distorting the wider economy but, jeez, can't you all just lighten?

The once healthy scepticism of politicians is now an outright contempt that has seemingly bled over into every sphere of life. Just as all achievements are the consequence of unearned luck all setbacks are deserved. Australians don't save enough. Don't pay enough taxes. Don't do enough for the poor or the sick. Don't care enough about the marginal lives of the original inhabitants. Don't feature on the world stage for any worthwhile purpose. Except that they do. They do all of these things and more.

As I've said before in these pages, the national psyche we resemble most in Europe is the Germans; law-abiding, sober and with a wary eye on the future. But try telling that to an Aussie without creating offence. So there's obviously something (bad) going on here that I'm missing.

That's the problem with flying visits - by the time you've sorted through the distortions you're already on the flight out. Then again, on Sunday night I did see a guy sleeping rough outside the Salvation Army passing the time by watching a film on his MacBook Air...

A crumble rather than a collapse

As mentioned in my first post-hiatus piece, I've been traveling constantly for months now. The European countries where I've spent the most time are Spain and Germany, who are surely the large-economy yin and yang of the Euro crisis. Strangely the mood was better in Spain (but that might just have been the weather) but in both cases the sense was of business-as-usual in a regrettably tough economy.

Then again, my clients are multinational pharmaceutical companies who will almost always reduce a sales target and taken a global P&L hit rather than sack an entire sales team. This same option just doesn't exist for a local business that lives or dies by whatever revenues can be extricated from the economy in question. The Spanish employees of my clients know themselves to be very, very lucky people.

But as Europe shrinks it will be harder and harder for multinationals to give economic shelter to their staff, even in Germany. The name of the game is prescription pharmaceuticals, which in Europe means that all revenues come from the taxpayer. Theoretically this means that there'll always be a customer because there'll always be a Ministry of Health looking out for the needs of its citizens.

But at the moment Europe feels as if it's being hollowed out. The outward forms of government remain but less of the stuff that actually matters. In Greece you'll most likely still get into an oncology ward but access to those smart, low-side effect, 'tumour activated' cancer drugs is now C.O.D. The German government has a new policy whereby they'll demand a refund if a new medication fails to meet the expectations set by the pharma company (this one is really smart).

My friends working for my clients are safe for the moment and perhaps forever. It's not as if Big Pharma is diverting supplies from some other richer part of the world as a favour to Europe. Back at Global HQ they're sweating over missed targets and year-on-year declines but the governing fact is still patent expiry. Short of mothballing a promising drug until this mess is all over, my clients have no choice but to launch well in order to maximise the returns regardless of any other factors.

And 'launching well' is where I come in.

Strange days indeed

The last six or so weeks have taken me to Israel, Germany (three times), Spain (twice), Italy, Switzerland, St Lucia and Egypt. Not all for work of course. Tomorrow I'm working in Basel for the day then on Friday I'm off to Australia to visit family and friends. For personal reasons it's been a very tough few months and all that time in the air has afforded me, if not a sense of catharsis, then at least one of momentum.

I've done my best to keep up my various habitual 'inputs' (news mags, blogs, podcasts) and that's been hard enough. All of those ambitious 'outputs' (producing, directing or performing comedy, other creative projects, this blog) have been on hold - no point in demanding an audience's attention if there's nothing that you feel like saying. Time is taking a long time healing these wounds.

I hope to be on these pages more often over the summer. The consulting job is busier than ever yet every day for the last week or so I've woken up with just a little additional surplus attention, which is a good sign. I will start blogging more and watch the unfolding of friends' Edinburgh projects with interest, albeit from afar.

 

The Marketers' Dilemma

(what follows is an essay written for my consultancy business)
 
There is a tendency for marketers to see their roles as all-seeing strategists who, because they cannot direct the field force to specific action, abdicate responsibility for the nature of sales activity.  There is a direct correlation between the distance between the ‘flipchart and the field’ and the likelihood of such an abdication.  The negative consequences of this attitude range from the relatively trivial (e.g. time wasted on internal politicking) to the profound (e.g. a failed global product launch).  However, this is not all the fault of the marketers.  Many (most) pharma companies have imposed strict intra-company communications codes to govern the quality, quantity and access of marketing to sales.  The marketer who seeks to take more responsibility is often explicitly forbidden from doing so.
 
Marketers aren't respected because they have a not entirely unfair reputation for wasting salespeople’s time.  Organising time in front of a field force is very expensive prospect.  Getting a team off the road and into a room takes actual money from someone’s budget but this is dwarfed by the opportunity cost of time-off-road.
So why don't marketers always get the respect they should?
  • It is perceived that they change their minds too often, both at a departmental and individual level
  • A one-size-fits-all dictates of strategy do not gel with the quick-fire think-on-your-feet, at-the-coalface world of selling, especially when global strategy is soon to contradict local selling challenges
  • From a field force perspective, marketers choose not to see the whole picture (e.g. P1 / P2 detailing) and tend to speak as if they're the only conversation going on in the room, wilfully ignoring the fact that theirs is only one of many voices that salespeople listen to
  • They are sometimes accused of being victims of ‘agency capture’; being too enthusiastic about adopting the slick, overly clever marketing tricks that make doctors immediately suspicious
Furthermore, the context of the actual communication with the sales team is often wilfully ignored.  Sales teams are expensive, local resources (financed out of national budgets) that must first of all answer to local management priorities.  And Marketing is a multi-layered beast that rarely speaks with a single voice.  At every level (local, regional, global) it is staffed by clever, but not necessarily wise or smart, ambitious people looking to make a splash.  Such people aren't great at taking direction: who got into marketing to be a messenger for the regional / global office?
 
Marketing-sales communications are thus reduced to a few highly regulated interactions per year: the sales conference.  Even here every brand initiative is competing for ‘share of mind’ with other brands, marketing projects, training needs, team-building exercises, regulatory presentations, award ceremonies and so on.  The project is also competing with the pet project of the local marketer, which may or may not align with the global or regional initiative, and which may not be at all worthwhile anyway.
 
Global and regional marketers will always be accused of ‘not understanding the local situation’.  There is always a level of specificity you're accused of misreading.  If a local marketer based in Reading can be accused of ‘not getting it’ by a representative in Scotland then what chance the global marketer sitting in Japan or Switzerland?  And the challenges don't stop once marketing is in the room with the sales team.  Most of the more common objections given by salespeople for not following a marketing strategy can grouped under headings of ‘credibility’ and ‘practicality.

Objections over Credibility Issues

  • Not relevant to my doctors
  • Too complicated (I don't understand it and I'll lose credibility if I stumble)
  • Obnoxiously simplistic (I will lose credibility if I take this approach)
  • Too aggressive to the competitor (offends those doctors happy with the competitor product)

Objections over Practicality Issues

  • The team doesn't the strategy as we’re successful enough (i.e. making budget) without it
  • Conflicts with the ongoing expectations that the company has of the salesperson (complying with the sales model, call rate, strategies for other brands)
  • Unrealistic in my selling environment (we work primarily in group selling / time-sensitive environments)
 
Similarly, there are a parallel set of objections that local marketers raise for not following a regional / global marketing strategy.  These include, but are not limited to the strategy not being 100% relevant in this market, being too complicated for ‘our reps’, clashing with a local initiative, been tried already, clashes with sales model, regulatory issues, translation issues, being unrealistic in our selling environment (groups, time sensitive), the imagery is racially wrong and insufficient time at sales meetings to explain it properly.
 
The Dramatic Change process can assist global, regional and local marketers in a number of ways…
  1. At the very beginning of the process we co-opt sales training.  This removes all objections around sales models
  2. Before meeting the sales representatives we co-opt sales management down to first-line level.  This allows issues around sales team priorities, time-off-road for meetings to be highlighted and positively resolved
  3. Our baseline philosophy overcomes ‘credibility’ issues by fully aligning marketing strategy with doctor needs via Single Patient Focus®
  4. We offer solutions for all selling environments including group and time sensitive selling
  5. We set up a cogent and workable relationship between overarching strategy and local / individual sales tactics via Pre-Call Planning exercises.  A Dramatic Change programme can meet mulitple needs in a sales meeting context
  6. We never focus on the competition
  7. We don't require globally consistent sales materials to give the appearance that a recognisable global strategy is being enacted
  8. Our programmes are fun.  Team-building is a given
For more information visit the company website: www.dramaticchange.com

Erasmus

As I was driving out to visit a brand new client last Thursday I was listening to Melvin Bragg's In Our Time programme on BBC Radio 4.  The topic of the day was the northern Rennaiscance philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) and much was made of the itinerant nature of his early career: -

"(Erasmus) is all over Europe, city after city...  He's always to be found around courts.  He's a great one for collecting patronage..."

And: -

"A lot of the writing is to please people because they are paying for his career..."

Perhaps it was because that morning's meeting was with a roomful of total strangers that the description so resonated.  Is there a better description of a consultant, or of any successful seller of financial services, than someone on and off airplanes, city after city, collecting the patronage of those who can pay for our careers?  Like Erasmus I am paid by the modern princes of Europe to be clever.  Nothing gives me greater confidence than knowing that the big boss wants the project to go ahead with my involvement.

But let's not stretch the comparison too far.  Erasmus fought a vicious, losing war of words with Martin Luther over the soul of the Catholic church and the fate of Europe whereas I help drug companies sell their drugs better.

Still, about halfway through that meeting someone described me as a 'thought leader', which was a nice thing for him to say.

Gross Südland

"What you have to understand," I told an old friend as we sat in a waterside cafe in Sydney drinking wine, "is that the Greeks just don't pay their taxes."

"You mean they don't like paying tax.  Who does?"

"No.  They just don't pay them.  Anyone who pays tax is stupid.  At a barbecue you'd boast about how little the government got from you last year."

"But, but you have to pay tax.  You just have to.  I don't understand.  If you don't pay them then nothing works."

When back in Australia a few months ago I had this exact conversation - my take on the Euro crisis - again and again.  Whenever the discussion got to the Greek's diffidence to tax the reaction of my family and friends was the same: disbelief and barely suppressed outrage at a nation blithely refusing to pay its own way.

In Europe only my German friends react this way.  It occurred to me that this is no coincidence because: -

Of all the countries in Europe, including Britain, the country with which Australia most shares an outlook is modern Germany.

We may speak the same language, play the same sport and share a similar sense of humour to the Brits but our wider attitudes are increasingly Germanic.  We work hard and expect other to do likewise.  Driving on either the autobahn or its Australian equivalent there is an understanding that if the law is sensible it will be obeyed.  In a world of Keynesian pump-primers, both countries are run by deficit hawks who are paranoid about inflation above all other economic woes, although Australia's scars from the 1980's are nothing next to the rise of Nazism.

Although we play English sports we approach them with a German attitude.  Cricket is a game to be won not merely played.  Ditto rugby.  Our reaction to the Olympic team returning gold-less from the 1976 games (for the only time in our history) was to found the oh-so scientific Australian Institute of Sport.  We then staffed it with German coaches.  The backhanded English compliment "the Australian approach to sport" is essentially analogous with "the German approach to business": methodical, hard-working and intolerant of failure. 

Australia and Germany each struggle to reconcile the sensibilities of the dominant culture with the needed changes brought about by Islamic immigration.  The word 'genocide' appears in both histories, albeit unfairly in Australia's case.  The merest whiff of racism is rightfully exposed and condemned from all sides.  We are the only G20 nations where the Green movement has serious traction.  We see ourselves as the 'grown-up' country in our region so of course each pay our taxes, grudgingly perhaps but always in full.

We each drink lots of beer.  Not as much as Ireland or the Czech Republic but we both make the Top Five per capita consumption.  Then again, it's only beer, surely the most benign of alcoholic beverages.

I find working with Germans a far easier proposition than with the French, who intellectualise everything, or even the English, where every comment needs to be run through a decoder.  And Germans do have a sense of humour, however, it only appears after you've proven that you're not going to waste anyone's time.

When the comparison first occurred to me I was horrified and this theory still horrifies my Australian friends.  But if we have to resemble anyone then why not a country embarked on an ongoing project of national reinvention built on hard work and innovation without resorting to callous American inequality?  So sing it with me: -

Australien uber alles...

Corporate karma

Tuesday of the first full week of the New Year is apparently the busiest day for job-hunting.  You've given yourself at least a day to get your feet back under the desk but not left it so long that the resolution to work someplace else has been forgotten.

This is also the week that old clients are most likely to get that Happy New Year! email from a consultant like me.  I send these out in waves to ensure that I properly personalise each one.  After all, these are all people with whom I have a history that must be reflected (leveraged) otherwise I might as well be cold calling. And like anyone embarking on that January job search I wait until Tuesday before starting.  That way maybe I'm less likely to be caught up in the First Great Inbox Purge of 2012.
 
With an augur’s intensity I watch my own inbox for replies.  There’s a hierarchy of outcomes from the exercise:-
  1. The quick note proposing a call or meeting in the coming weeks is absolutely the most I can hope for
  2. The longer note with specific feedback on last year’s results and the plans for the next twelve months isn't awful.  At least my contact took a few minutes to setout the issues that affect me personally
  3. The email saying that there's been a change of roles but also giving me the name of the new contact (cc’d) isn't bad.  Managing a baton-change in a client organisation is part of my job
  4. It’s hard not to read a quick note announcing a change of roles without any further information as ‘goodbye and good luck’
  5. The cursory Happy New Year reply is the email equivalent of a stilted exchange of pleasantries whilst waiting for an elevator

Optimist that I am, getting no response at all is still reason for hope.  Maybe my contact isn't back at her desk for another week.  Maybe she’s gone straight into a procession of heavy-duty meetings.  Or maybe she’s surreptitiously on the job hunt herself, in which case there's no point me being on her radar until she either gets settled in a new position or resigns herself to the current role and refocuses on her 2012 To Do List.  I make a note to try again in mid-March.

I've long believed that no genuine marketing effort goes ultimately unrewarded.  Those efforts must be genuine, an ongoing part of the day-to-day job and not just the occasional paroxysm of activity intended to refill an otherwise empty calendar. And don't be surprised when that reward arrives from an unexpected direction.  Yesterday I got an unsolicited email requesting a meeting in Italy as soon as is convenient.  Not so much attributable cause-and-effect as ‘corporate karma’.
 
Approach the low-yield tasks with the right attitude and trust that the cosmos is taking note

Holidays

 One way to get to grips with the opening premise of Friday’s post is to consider our attitudes to holidays.

Sometimes your ambitions move faster than the world.  Sometimes the world moves faster than you.
Holidays are an annual ritual in paying real money to calibrate our ambitions with the pace of the world.  If you want a week of sleeping, eating and reading you buy a ‘fly’n’flop’ at a child free resort somewhere sunny.  To reconnect with your preteen kids choose Euro Disney.  Because our own scarce resources (time and money) are at stake any dissonance aggravates us so much more on holidays than in usual life; “It wasn't like this in the brochure” is a near-universal lament.
 
For eight years my family ran a 3½-star hotel on Mission Beach in Far North Queensland. I looked after the marketing on a part-time basis, which was a pretty cool job.  How could it not be when this is your workplace?
In our day Castaways on the Beach was a pretty modest operation whose prime selling point was the location.   The property had a longstanding reputation for being ‘family friendly’, offering easy access to a vast waveless beach, lots of suites with in-room cooking facilities and a short walk to a town centre that featured lots of relatively inexpensive dining options and a small supermarket.  Our in-house restaurant also offered an extensive children’s menu.  As everyone knows (or should know), ‘family friendly’ is code for “There will be screaming kids everywhere.  If this is not want you want on your holiday then best you go someplace else.” Families with younger children were consistently our most satisfied customers, not least because our business plan didn't rely on corralling our guests into the dining room three times a day.  What parent doesn't find it galling paying for a full breakfast buffet when all the kid wants is a bowl of cereal?
 
Our least satisfied customers were always honeymooners who had locked onto the picture on the website and the 3½-star tariffs but (often willfully) ignored the ‘family friendly’ signals.  Signals that included the literal words ‘family friendly’ on all our brochures, billboards, website, etc.  We accepted that our offering couldn't match the ambitions of most loved-up newlyweds and instructed the booking staff to gently warn off such customers.  Over the years we invested quite heavily in improvements to the property but intentionally stuck to the 3½-star bracket.  We were happy with our positioning at the ‘family friendly’ end of the market.
 
I have no children and a relatively high disposable income but we never attempted to build an offering that would appeal to people like me and in 2007 my family sold a thriving business.  The new owners, who have far more access to far more capital than we did, spent an actual fortune taking the place ‘upmarket’.  They refurbished the public areas, reduced the pool size to increase the bar area, added a day spa, removed most of the in-room cooking facilities and upped the tariffs by about 60%.
 
I was back in Mission Beach last July and to my childless eyes the place looks amazing.  But to a family on a budget with a brood of young kids the whole package screams “Stay Away!”  The word around town is that Castaways Resort & Spa is for up sale again.
 
The need to purchase a world that temporarily matches our ambitions is the reason why we expend so much energy researching our holidays.  We only get to spend this time and money a few times a year and it's personal.  This is why holidaying with any but the closest of friends is rarely a good idea ("It’s my holiday too, y’know") and why most of us revisit those trusted holiday places again and again and again.

Advice for the self-employed (January edition)

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

I finished my last job of last year the week of Christmas.  I never have paid consulting work that late in the year.  The preceding months are a blurred pastiche of meetings, telecons, airports and familiar hotel rooms in cities I'd never visited before.  Back in August my business accelerated and by December I was tumbling down the chute that opens with exhilaration then descends through fatigue, helplessness and exhaustion before bottoming out in tangible, physical illness.  Be careful what you wish for.
 
Sixteen days later I'm in a more familiar state of mind: my ambitions moving faster than my world.  I'm back to wanting more than what's on offer.  I'm impatient and paranoid.  Am I being deliberately excluded?  Are potential clients buying my old book instead of hiring the new me? The glass between me and a shining future is smudged with my greasy noseprints.  I read the Euro crisis stories and fret that last year was my financial high water mark. Then I worry that a smarter, savvier me would look at the state of the world and see where there's a quid to be made from all this chaos.  A fortnight is a long time in self-employment.
 
I've been at this Headcount:1 game a long time now (viz. my previous post.) so here’s my advice to those underemployed self-employed folks out there who spent the Christmas-New Year interregnum drinking too much and ignoring the gnawing knowledge that you don't have guaranteed work lined up for January already.  Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’ is always a good place to start: -
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
Self-employment means that is that there's no boss to impress, no underling to browbeat and no rivalrous colleague to outmanoeuvre.  The brutal truth is that only thing you get to change is you.
 
January 6 is just too soon to start badgering clients so you're tempted to run headlong at all those clichéd resolutions: diet & exercise,better sleep patterns and commendable reading habits.  This impulse is prophylactic at best; racking up cosmic credits for the next time the spiralling chute opens beneath you.  Except that there is no godly ledger balancing a January spent at the gym against a May-time diet of airport pizza and beer.  At worst these resolutions are symptomatic of the very mismatch between ambition and action that you're looking to escape.  Even as you sweat over The Economist some part of you knows that you're just waiting for the phone call that will fill your days.  Diet and exercise might be change but not the sort you can really believe in. 
 
Devoting all this excess time to your actual business can be more damaging still. Parkinson’s Law assumes at least some sort of deadline.
 
My advice to my time-rich client-poor comrades is as follows: -
Find some small, new, discrete thing and do it well.
Not some rambling yearlong project.  You have one of those already: building your business.  Rather that small thing that is affordable in terms of both your time and money but that doesn't require you waiting on anyone else.  A one-off class.  A lecture. A walk to a place you've never been before.  An afternoon taking photos.  A blog post. Don't reorganise your life but somehow extend it.  A measure might be this to complete some thing that allows you to greet your life partner at the door with, “Guess what I did today?” Achievement, no matter how minor, is not risible.
 
Create small ambitions that are under your control and sit them alongside those larger ones that are not. But do this small thing for its own sake, not with one eye fastened on the far side of the smudgy glass.
And don't worry too much about 2012.  My reading of the news is that we all, those with bosses and offices and those without, are going to hell in a handbasket of soon-to-be resurrected European currencies anyway.
 
Happy New Year.

Life changing experience

 

One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney.  I can point to exactly where I was sitting that night because the show changed my life.
I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for Unilever.  It was my first ‘real’ job after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private schools.  My girlfriend wasn’t part of that gang.  She didn’t really like any of my friends and she hated the drinking.  I'm still hazy as to why she liked me at all.
I’d resisted seeing the show for months.  Not out of any objection to the theatre but becauseSunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel.  They were a terrifically fun cover band with a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music.  When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer.  Monday morning consequences be damned.
One Sunday she prevailed.  She booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition.  Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University team that night with Daniel Cordeaux.  Also on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton.  It was intoxicating.  The audience cheered the teams and booed the judges just as Keith Johnston intended.  It was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous.  It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music.  By the time we stood to reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high.  We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia and Daniel and it dawned on me: -
These people are my age.  If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?
I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated  consumer of cultural production.  Straight away I enrolled in workshops that started in January. I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February.  In March I founded Instant Theatre,the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run today.  I left full-time employment in June 1991.  In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world.  I told myself that we only took the corporate gigs to fund the general public shows.  I dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for otherpeople’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own.  After a few years the corporate theatre briefs got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus.  By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.
Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing content and back towards simply consuming it. I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise a stage, column inches or even bandwidth. Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well follow.  I've decided that having the capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs saying.
A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote apiece in early November that argued against the need for more American students to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that America has enough of these for now. Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -
I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.
The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated.  As my second degree is in English and Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities.  One of the few defensible rationales for studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required to pass the course.  Art is the key word here. Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog).  The only cost of entry to getting on stage ata stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London.  But it is unlikely it will be Art.  At best it is someone learning a craft and finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations.  The early stages of an artist’s career involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling and intellectually rigorous.
Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test.  Both shows were hugely compelling but as there was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely disposable.  With improv comedy, the one form where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent.  For all the skill it takes to do it well, the engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion.  How can it? It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already.  As Keith says: -
Don’t be original be obvious.
Could there be a more blatant directive away from Art?  It is as fatuous and limiting a statement as, “The customer is always right.” Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering what I've done with my life.  The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up comedy pursues me still.  I've hated the last few improv shows I've done.  It’s no longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir opening to a made-up faerie tale.  If I have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?
I will continue to write and perform whenever I have something to say.  The rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather than a producer of tat.

 

Not saying 'no'

I'm sitting in Prague airport after yesterday's 1-dayer for a new client.  It will the last of 47 flights in 2011.

The job, a sort of six hour pitch to a pan-European mix of marketing and medical people, went well enough.  It was one of those situations where whilst the people who need to approve the project weren't in the room, there were plenty there who could kill it.  That gave me a very clear and not especially ambitious goal: to not have anyone say 'no'.

I had my usual mid-morning moment when it occurred to me that this may the last job I ever do; at the very least with this client and possibly ever.  This is my subconscience telling to relax, stop worrying about the next job and to simply concentrate on the people in front me.

By the time we decamped to the bar for too much Czech beer there was sufficient agreement that the project should go forward.  The clarity of a business model where you only attempt to be as good as your last job can be very liberating at times.

Natural, complicated, simple

The cricket writer Peter Roebuck committed suicide a few weeks ago in South Africa.  His death is rightly mourned by the legion fans of his astute and erudite writing.  As he taught English at my school and lived in the boarding house, despite being an especially mediocre cricketer I had quite a bit to do with him.

Of all the tributes that have been written my favourite is by Ed Smith, the former Kent and England player who writes for the times.  In it he recounts some advice Roebuck had written to him years before: -

A player goes through three stages - natural, complicated, simple - not many reach that last stage but the journey cannot be avoided
As ever cricket acts as a mirror to all of life.  As a consultant my job is to usher people and organisations to that final state and I've learned not to trust anyone who declares with relish that some process or situation is necessarily complicated.

I especially like the idea of an unavoidable journey to simplicity.

Identity Economics

I've just finished reading Akerlof & Kranton's Identity Economics, a pretty lightweight exploration of the obvious idea that there is a quasi-quantifiable cost to pursuing financial gain at the expense of one's personal identity.  Much of the book is driven by the idea that 'insider' behaviours, the conformist ones that further the goals of the organisation (but also lead to personal advancement), must outweigh the social cost of being seen to conform by one's sneering peers.  There's nothing much here that wasn't explored more eloquently in John Hughes' 1985 opus The Breakfast Club.

When discussing the effect that identity economics has on education the authors focus on ways in which well-run schools (such as the Core Knowledge group run out of Colorado) create a compelling 'insider' culture: -

Because identity is closely linked to dress and self-presentation, we consider it no coincidence that a Core Knowledge school might prescribe even the nature of a student's socks. 
Identity Economics. p. 73
The premise is that how we dress acts as a constant reinforcement of who we are: conformist 'insider' versus rebellious 'outsider'; and that this internalised effect is arguably more important than how others perceive us.

I'm interested in how this idea relates to how a consultant dresses when meeting a client, especially for the first time.  If Akerlof & Kranton's idea holds true then ahead of any other considerations we need to dress for ourselves.  If I don't feel that what I'm wearing reinforces a positive self-image then that dissonance will somehow out itself during the meeting.

When starting out in life this is in no way trivial.  You didn't make it at IBM in its pomp if you didn't aspire to dress like these guys.  Reductio ad absurdum: -

Before choosing a career you need to ask yourself if you like how the successful people in that field dress
When you're paying your dues in any profession you will need to wear clothes that don't distract from the perception of your work.  You will have to wait until you're game-changingly good at what you do before you can dress in a way that draws attention to who you are as opposed to what you do.  Of course this only applies if you're serious about your career (i.e. want to be one of Akerlof & Kranton's 'insiders').  Dress in a way that says 'fuck off to the man' and sooner or later the man will get fucked off.  With you.

I like how I dress for meetings.  By this I mean I genuinely enjoy wearing those clothes because they make me feel how I need to feel when meeting a new client: established, intelligent, perceptive and 'undistracted'.  It's taken me a while to understand this and I do my best to address the myriad shifts in how I feel about a certain suit or shirt when I walk out the door in the morning.

That I never achieved the same comfort in the clothes I wore as a stand-up speaks volumes: dressing like my audience made me feel like an impostor whereas dressing like me just made me feel old.  And Andrew Watts had already cornered the market in disheveled suits.

Funny. And good in bed

My wife and I are back in Australia. We're staying with her mother and family in Sydney for a week or so. Almost everyone in the household is either self-employed or working for a start-up, which offers up some really interesting compare-and-contrast breakfast table conversations.

Hal has had several successful careers but now works from home as a foreign exchange trader. The arrangement is that he trades for himself but as part of a global cohort whose aggregate efforts are on behalf of an investment fund.  The business follows a sort of league table approach whereby as he proves his abilities the organisation allows him to trade larger amounts and so earn more.

After a year or so he's developed a keen sense of the market and is highly aware of the the combination of volume and volatility (driven by planned and unplanned news events) he needs to thrive and has climbed several rungs on the ladder already.  To do so he's adopted all the necessary professional behaviours that I would say are actually more important when working from home than anywhere else.  He'd no more trade with a hangover than I'd walk into a training room naked.

As I looked at the procession of charts and numbers flickering across the three screens on his desk I thought, "I could do that."

Of course I did. Men of my age and education all reckon we're the funniest guy at the party, a porn star in the bedroom, a Navy SEAL in a bar fight and a 'big swinging dick' in front of the trading screens

The peak of everything

Jean-Claude Carriere is possibly the most famous scriptwriter you've never heard of.  Since the 1960's he's lived a sort of Zelig-like existence, collaborating with some of the best and more interesting film and theatre directors of the last fifty years; Milos Forman, Luis Bunuel, Philip Kaufmann, Peter Brook and Jean-Luc Goddard.

I recently came across in old NYT love-piece from 1988 that describes Carriere driving across the Seine with the photographer Robert Doisneau (y'know, this guy): -

Carrière gazes through the windshield at the soft outlines of the fog-shrouded buildings. “J’aime bien ça,” he says contentedly. 

“That’s because you’re starting to get old,” Doisneau replies. “When you’re young you see only the details. When you grow up, you see both the details and the whole. That’s the peak of everything, it’s what you’ve lived for. When you get old, you forget about the details and see only the whole.”
Nice to think I feel that I might be at an age when I can see the details and the whole at once.

The last frontier

For my business the United States is the last frontier.  After almost seven years working out of London I'm relatively pleased as to how my presence has grown in Europe.  I am a known quantity here now and my clients seek me out as much as I seek out them.  In December I'm starting a new project with an old client.  Our third in ten years.  Every time he changes jobs I get a call.

I wonder if the experience would have been as successful if my wife and I had chosen instead to live in the US when we left Australia in 2005.  The challenge of getting visas notwithstanding the choice was ours to make as no company forced our hand by funding the relocation.  I suppose we just liked the idea of Europe more.

I've never felt as confident walking into an American Head Office as an Australian, British, Swiss or Asian one. Nowhere else in the world are foreign accents such a source of undisguised bemusement.  I don't respond especially well to the blank-eyed apathy that seems to say: -

Buddy, we're the richest pharmaceutical market in the world.  There are over 300 million of us here.  If your idea was that good don't you think we'd have thought of it by now already?
The only genuine traction I've had on American projects has been with European owned companies.  My theory is that there's a sense that ideas should be assessed on value not provenance.  Yet America beckons and yesterday I spent an hour on the phone with a Boston consultancy whose task would be to get me into the meeting where my ideas are heard louder than my accent.

One of the problems we discussed was that most Americans in bourgeois industries like pharma are just too damn polite.  Offering a London-based consultant a project in the Midwest might be asking a bit too much of him, what with all that inconvenient travel and time away from his family and whatnot.

Convincing a client that I'll travel anywhere on the planet for the right fee can be a surprisingly high hurdle when landing an overseas gig. This is why consultants never complain about jetlag.  Convincing my potential American clients that transatlantic travel is still just travel may be a step too far and I suspect the consultancy will recommend I relocate the business to somewhere in the corridor between Boston and Philadelphia.  Hopefully he'll also suggest less extreme alternatives but I've yet to see any evidence that you can succeed in America with anything less than a display of total commitment.

Pesky verbs

Further to yesterday's thoughts on the descriptive noun (art v. science) this week I've been dealing with an even slipperier conundrum, the verb. To whit: -

What is an appropriate euphemism for 'selling'?

For some quite understandable reasons the client has decided that the guys on the road wot talk to doctors are hereon out to be referred to as 'health solutions managers'. Because nobody likes being 'sold to' right? But there sure as hell are plenty of health solutions out there that need managing: -

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts and solutions in search of problems.

I accept that in much of the world 'salesman' is a tainted word; derisively associated with sharp practices (double glazing in the UK, used cars elsewhere) but excising it from the corporate vocab leaves an glaring absence. Accountants account, researchers research and receptionists receive. Managers either run a team of people or have responsibility for a project or process or else they do... what?

We spent much of the week exploring what it might mean to manage a health solution when the behaviours we want to see exhibited in front of the customer looked consistently salesy.

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then why are we struggling so hard to name the damn thing?

As I said, the client has understandable reasons for wanting this rebrand but as the behaviours (the verbs) aren't changing then was it any wonder that we spent the week wading through euphemisms?