Reflections

Powell, Starkey and the dumbing down of Britain

2011-08-16T12:20:00.001+01:00

The riots in London, Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere last week provoked a huge debate in pubs and Clubs across the land. It is almost impossible these days to keep up with who says what as old media and new media intertwine to create a thicket of commentary that, at times, seems to smother any kind of calm, thoughtful reaction.

For all that the rioters, looters, hooligans have rightly been damned for their actions I have been struck by the way in which the middle-class, the glitterati, the Twitterati, the Islington set, the elite have behaved too. And I have to report that I find this class of people, the opinion formers, the agenda setters, the talking heads and message managers, to be lacking in a kind of intellectual compass. They display a kind of anti-intellectualism that exists close to the surface of British life in general and English life in particular.

I will come on to David Starkey and Enoch Powell in a minute to two but first a couple of comments made to me this week about A levels, for which the latest results come out this week. When talking in some detail to the Head of Examinations for one of the country's leading Grammar Schools I was surprised (ok, shocked!) to learn that the pass mark for an A grade in one subject - a subject I took 30 years ago - was now 55%. Second, over lunch with a dear old friend he told me that his daughter should be ok in her A levels 'because she has, at last, learned how to dumb down her answers'. It's true, you can be too clever. Is it only in England that 'clever' can be used as a term of abuse?

And so to David Starkey. Oh dear, where do I start? With the producer or editor of Newsnight who thought that Starkey was right for that studio discussion? With Emily Maitlis who chaired the discussion using her heart not her head? With the commentators who jumped on the all-to-easy target of a fish-out-of-water Professor whose views would always be peripheral whatever they happened to be? With Starkey who spoke fluently but poorly? It was easy, lazy and unproductive. Everyone should be ashamed of themselves: we should be better than this.

I'll actually start with Enoch Powell whose spirit Starkey invoked, misguidedly, during the discussion. Powell was by all accounts a terrifyingly bright man. How bright? Examples abound but his elevation to Professor of Classics at the age of twenty-five is a good one to be going on with. He was also stubborn and principled beyond reason. His refusal to join the army as an officer but then to work his way up through the ranks from Private to Brigadier, the youngest the army had ever had, was typical of the man. He was however born a hundred years too late.

In a earlier time what has become known as his Rivers of Blood speech would not have been broadcast so widely, the classical allusions - of which ".....the River Tiber foaming with much blood." is the most famous, the most misquoted and the most misunderstood - and his choice of words like pabulum would perhaps have found a more receptive and understanding audience. Sadly, rather than thinking about what Powell was saying his fellow politicians and the media decided to hang him for what they thought he said. It has been thus ever since.

Starkey, a man whose very presence can generate anger in reasonable people, is similarly bright and uncompromising in his analysis. He has risen on the tide of lectures, either to students or television cameras where his arguments, carefully thought through and based on evidence gathered over time, are presented whole, unchallenged and to an eager to learn audience. Sadly, Starkey hasn't learned to dumb down his answers for a soundbite media.

All of this may sound like an apologia for Mssrs Powell and Starkey. It may be but my real point is that a mature society needs to encourage and absorb a variety of views so that it can make decisions with the best possible understanding of issues. We need to consider the perspective from a historical point of view, from eccentric Classicists, from mad professors and lunatic politicians. It does not mean they are right, it does not mean their arguments will win or are representative of the majority but it does help to round out our understanding of circumstance, motivations and outcomes.

A strong society has many voices. I hear too few and am worried by the intolerance, the fear of intellectual engagement that this represents.

News International, Rebekah Brooks and what it tells us about business.

2011-08-03T11:14:00.002+01:00

What a mess!

Ok, let me rewrite that - what a fascinating mess! Isn't it? It's the ultimate story with everyone involved. Politicians, journalists, Buckingham Palace, the police, the CIA, the FBI, celebs and even, praise be indeed, the Church of England managed to get involved through it's investment activities.

And for all the acres of newsprint and megabytes of cyberspace used to cheer, gloat, analyse, dissect, regurgitate and basically wallow in this epic tale of hubris, greed and incompetence there has been little that I have seen that looks at the News of the World saga, Hackgate if we must, from a business perspective.

So, here are three observations.

1) Everything that I have read, heard and watched suggests that Rebekah Brooks' rise through the ranks of News International was a classic case of 'managing upwards' with little care and attention paid to managing teams effectively or businesses prudently.

We all know the type. Self-serving, arrogant, charming and covered in Teflon. They drag themselves up the greasy pole with sycophancy and by ingratiating themselves to all who may help their own advancement. With this style also comes, very often, a bullying capricious management style suffered by peers and subordinates who are deemed to be threats or without value in the continuous quest for progression.

The lesson I would offer is to senior executives who should always make sure they reach beyond their immediate subordinates to form views on how the business is running. This is not a lack of trust, this is running a business properly.

2) The decision to close the News of the World is perhaps the most astonishing brand decision I can remember. Long standing and successful brands have such equity invested in them that to remove one so publically from the market could be seen by shareholders as being a willful abuse of assets.

Lesson: brands live beyond management timescales and should be treated carefully, lovingly and much as one would treat an old house that has been in the family for hundreds of years. Maintain it, extend it, modify it, renovate it but do not, under any circumstances raze it to the ground.

3) Hacking, corruption and being economical with the truth have been rightly condemned as appalling practices that have no place in our society. Except that they do. Their place is to act as a constant reminder that with freedom (of the press) comes responsibility.

The responsibility is not just that of the media moguls and journalists it is the also the responsibility of everyone in this society. We bought the papers, we read the stories, we called radio shows to vent our righteous indignation at the philanderings of C list celebs, we gulped our pizzas in front of the telly as we watched the latest red-top fuelled, gossip driven, reality show. We got the press we deserved and that should make us all hang our heads in shame.

Lesson: fighting for free anything means enshrining an ethic of social responsibility that has disappeared from much of modern 21st century Britain. As our economy has to change in the wake of the Financial Crisis and a reconsideration of 'profits v social good' so our personal choices have to change to keep these institutions to the standards that we, collectively and individually, want to see maintained.

A flight of fancy or a New World Order?

2011-06-25T21:21:00.001+01:00

As usual it was a throw away comment, a jokey aside that prompts this short post. Sitting on the umpteenth floor of a glass palace in The City and talking (seriously) about the future evolution of business a tall, grey haired and rather wonderful Dutchman and I pondered for a moment what would happen if Russia set up an Eastern Capital in Vladivostok.

And being a good geographer I drew a map showing Vladivostok and the capitals of Japan, South Korea and China along with Shanghai, Taipei, Singapore and Mumbai. Of course, it wont happen. But what if it did?

The doomed generation.

2011-06-15T11:01:00.004+01:00

Twitter is seen as a 'what-I-had-for-breakfast' medium by those who dont use it. For those who do use it it's a flexible, powerful platform. I woke this morning to the following tweets from a regular twitter correspondent, a teacher.

The current generation of 40-something's are doomed. You can't afford to save & you're already in debt. Your house is no longer an....

....investment, your kids no longer get a free education, nor will they be better off than you socially or financially, & if your parents..

...have to have professional care, you won't even have an inheritance to look forward to. And you'll be working till you die. Such progress!

My dad had an ordinary public-sector job, but the pension has kept my mum comfortable for over 20 years. The house rocketed in value...

....and she's got cash in the bank. No-one I know will EVER be in that situation unless they win the lottery. Well done, all post-war govts.

Is Twitter limited to 140 character messages? No. Is it just about the trivial? Of course not. Does it allow 'ordinary people' to air and share views that are too hard for the politico-media alliance to address? Absolutely.

Sarah is saying what a large number of people know and probably fear. And those who don't know this will be disappointed (to say the least) when they find out, for then it will be too late.

I've written about this before here but this issue - the changing nature of the social economics of western capitalism is a huge issue.

Tipping Point?

2011-06-11T14:35:00.011+01:00

One of the pleasures of writing my own presentations and scripts is the discovery and development of an idea that, for me, seems to be more than just a notion but actually something to consider deeply.

Last week I talked to a number of bankers from around the world giving an overview of various trends that were affecting their market. As I considered all the evidence that I'd absorbed over several months from reports, journals and papers and a wide range of alternative media sources I came to a tipping-point conclusion that I noted in my guide-script below.

"While banks sort themselves out and customers wait for the dust to settle, the markets are really very interesting indeed.

The North-South divide that I grew up with has now become and East-West divide and a new meridian now runs not through Greenwich in London but along 45 degrees East, through Baghdad.

- To the East we have high growth; to the west we have low growth.

- To the West we have short termism; to the East we have long term perspectives.

- To the East we have new socio-political models; to the West we have old models.

Commodities are doing silly things

- Crude Oil is up 50% on last year.

- Silver is up nearly 100% (Gold only 20%)

- Cotton - 80%

- Coffee - 60%

- Sugar - 60%

- Wheat - 60%

Unemployment is up, real rates of interest are low, and inflation is rising.
The euro is under pressure, the Renminbi is becoming convertible.
The Chinese economy is slowing a little; the US economy is stumbling onwards. There are serious doubts being expressed about the strength of both.
And while the really burning long-term issue facing all countries individually and collectively is an aging and economically imbalanced population……..the G8 met two weeks ago and talked about the interweb…….which is a whole different presentation – one that affects all banks, wholesale, investment, transaction, commercial, retail.
In a nutshell, this is a fragile world. I think this has been more than just a recession. I think this might be seen as the tipping point for something far more important."

If I were an economist or an economic historian I suppose I could offer some theoretical framework for this but instead I have to rely on my gut. And that makes it difficult to convince others - such is my lot.

However I have been looking for a theme for this year, having written about Leadership on and off for a while and I think I might have found a new area of examination: East vs. West.

Watch this space!

Blog as Word Cloud

2011-05-28T07:30:00.003+01:00

Rules of the garage. Still true after all these years.

2011-05-08T18:30:00.002+01:00

Maps, networks and King Lear

2011-04-27T18:48:00.063+01:00

LinkedIn have released a wonderful new application which maps your connections and produces a network diagram of some beauty as a result. For the Geographers, mathematicians and artists among you this should be a source of great joy.

Maps are hugely underestimated in business where the accountants' or engineers' view of the world tends to dominate. We have balance sheets, gant charts and flow diagrams. We rarely have maps. In fact, we never have maps. Like so many things this is usually because we lack the energy and imagination to not only apply this type of representation but also to consume it.

Creative mapping is nothing new. John Ogilby was producing the most wonderful maps for travellers in the latter part of the 17th century.

The Minard map of 1869 showing Napoleon's Russian Campaign remains an exemplary combination of geography, data and narrative that in the words of one commentator "defies the pen of the historian in its brutal eloquence". But I bet the historian got invited to all the best parties!

Michael Kidron, Ronald Segal and then Dan Smith were responsible for reigniting a popular appreciation for geography, data and narrative in their State of the World Atlas, first published in 1981 and now in its' eighth edition. That these atlases are political in every sense is nothing new to Geographers for whom maps and the cartographers that craft them are always political. It is impossible not to draw a line on the earth and for it not to be so and that is for many of us the endless fascination.

The modern trend for infographics is - as with so many things - a repackaging of old techniques in a new visual style. And there is nothing wrong it at all. In fact I'm on record elsewhere in this blog as a huge fan of the modern infographic style which is now enhanced with animation, sound and all sorts of engaging wizardry.

And King Lear? As all good skoolboy kno Lear is a play based on man and land, the division of a kingdom between three children, and starting with the clarion call "Give me the map there".

Give me the map there. Know that we have divided
In three our kingdom: and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age;
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburden'd crawl toward death.

So, all hail Linkedin for reminding us that maps are beautiful and useful and that the tyranny of powerpoint is but short lived aberration in a long history of mapping the world.

Insanity Part 2

2011-04-26T15:42:00.005+01:00

The lesson to be drawn from the experience of George and Trevor (Insanity Part 1) is this: some companies are simply not going to get Marketing, it's not in their make-up - they are sales or production led firms - and like a body in need of a transplant the wrong type of organ will be rejected, even with the drugs. So if you're a marketing manager in this situation stop trying to force your alien ways onto your host and start modifying your behaviours to suit your environment. In short, get real.

The insanity? The insanity is finding marketing departments that waste so much time and energy moaning about the lack of appreciation and understanding of what they do and then seeing them continue with this course of action expecting their hosts to have a damascene conversion and shower them with plaudits and, more importantly, unfettered budget. Repeating the same behaviour expecting different outcomes is insanity.

Marketing grew out of a consumer orientated business world and I see the insanity mainly in the business-to-business world where marketing has never really found a language that connects effectively with the Board. Sorry, that means, a language that the Board understands. You - have - to - explain - it - in - their - words.

So the challenge, long, long overdue is to create a marketing style and language that can operate comfortably inside B2B organisations. A style that works with limited and vulnerable budgets, a style that works with simple and clear objectives, a style that supports the business in ways that are easy to explain by the Board and the junior assistant.

Simple doesn't mean easy. But it does mean different.

Try it. Go on, surprise yourself.

I give up....

2011-04-26T13:34:00.008+01:00

A friend of mine just received an email containing this paragraph. I think this gibberish heralds the end of civilisation as we know it.

"Presently one of the objectives is to move the [Codename] project from a pilot to a 'delivery' proposition i.e. to ‘industralise’ the Phase 1 high level proposition into a more robust, commercially viable offering such that the full revenue generation potential of the target [TLA] and low end [TLA] market can be met by utilising the [TLA] network."

I've had to 'redact' some of the internal jargon and Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) to maintain anonymity for the company but I am sorely tempted to name and shame so the business concerned might possibly start a Clearly Communicate with Colleagues programme or better still just cull the purveyors of this sort of business drivel.

Right ho, the General and I are off to the club for a couple of restoratives and to bemoan the lack of Latin in our schools these days!

The Internet's "Black Holes"

2011-04-15T09:23:00.001+01:00

The new digital divide

2011-04-14T10:04:00.005+01:00

Living with the Firewall

View more presentations from Mike Barnes

These are the slides I used on April 12th 2011 to support a presentation to an audience of young professionals in The City.

This is a massively edited version of the script.

(1) There is a new digital divide that is being created by big corporations which flies in the face of (2) the extraordinary growth in social media. While business leaders may be in two minds (5) about these new channels companies of all types and sizes (6,7,8) are beginning to embrace this new landscape. If you stop, look, listen and think (9,10,11,12) then there are plenty of reasons for the B2B world to take the social media world seriously.

Within that world the development and role of blogging holds particular fascination. It's a form that is both serious and playful and the term was coined by a hairy man (13) in 1997 since when the world hasn't looked back. Professional blogs (14,15,16) allow space to expand on thoughts and debate that traditional print and broadcast media doesn't feel able to afford to mass audiences. And it's a form that is wonderfully meritocratic and borderless. If you blog from your study in Manchester (17) you can have a readership (18) spread across the world.

And despite its official description as a micro-blogging service Twitter is a B2B medium (19) although no-one would know it given its firewall status as a social networking crime against humanity or at least productivity.

So the overall effect of social media on debate? It's improved (20). And yet you wouldn't know this if you live in a glass palace and my fear is that the benefits (22) are lost on business, the very places where these attributes are most needed.

My own blogging is enthusiastic but amateur (23) but it does give me some sense of how all this works. And it's fun. And thinking about the future (24) I really have no idea where its going although the key tensions are the balance of free and paid-for content as well as regulation and control which has been remarkably slow in emerging. As a reactionary Luddite (and contrarian) I see the future in terms of the past. (25) Expert, specialist niche paid-for media for every topic under the sun.

In summary, the future is about collaboration (26) and the knowledge economy is moving to a behaviour economy where curiosity and passion (28) will trump unvarnished intelligence. Always. A digital divide that separates you from this collaboration with your peers, your customers, your stakeholders, your suppliers is just not where you want to be now.

Maslow for today

2011-04-14T09:37:00.001+01:00

Insanity Part 1

2011-04-08T15:05:00.005+01:00

For more years that I care to remember I have worked in and around Marketing Departments in businesses that tolerate rather than embrace this, the newest, of the management disciplines. Marketing is tolerated because there is sense that it is useful to have people to get a few brochures made up and organise a bit of hospitality. Ideally, a PA would do it all but then that would take her away from arranging flowers for the spouses birthday/anniversary.

The Head of Engineering is then moved sideways to become Head of Marketing ("George, how hard can it be?") and is then brainwashed by a flurry of sharp suited types that convince him the only way to improve his stock and that of his company is to Invest In Brand Equity which is a posh way of saying spend money on expensive and often pointless advertising.

George is seen to be spending money and is not able to explain the benefits. He is asked about his Return On Investment and he struggles to give a credible answer when budgets are under pressure from the Board. He's a Good Old Boy and is looked after and was last seen moving on to a position in Operations.

The Board has a commitment to be 'world class' in every aspect of its business so decides to recruit externally and appoints Trevor, a Marketing Director from Acme Retail who knows all about reach, share of voice and uses terms like 'rate card' and 'cognitive dissonance', so he must be good.

Trevor fires the three people in Marketing that knew about the business, he hires half a dozen young hot shots who arrive with blue-tooth earpieces and astonishing self-belief, he brings in all his agencies that served him so well at Acme Retail and produces a plan for a rolling global multi-media campaign that integrates elements of above-, below- and through-the-line activity with a comprehensive yet targeted social media listening post architecture. He tells the Board the need to invest £50m for a 4 point uplift in their media-voice index score which will put them in the upper quartile of their sector on a global and macro-regional basis.

Trevor is not a Good Old Boy and is last seen moving on to a consultancy based in Oxfordshire. George is invited to Keep An Eye On Things For The Time Being from his position in Operations.

George is happy to help, he feels more comfortable in the Marketing world now, he is An Old Hand, and promptly fires two of the ear-pieced, lunch munching, hot shots leaving four members of staff who know what they're doing but don't know much about the business. That's fine. George knows about the business.

They produce brochures, they arrange hospitality. They talk to the business, they begin to plan. They keep their heads down, they keep working hard on getting the basics right and they keep their jobs. They are happy, the Board is happy.

And the lesson?

To be revealed in Insanity Part 2. Coming soon......

Bloody bankers!

2011-03-18T15:45:00.004Z

I must declare interest. I have spent most of my working life in banks. It is impossible for me to divorce myself entirely from this experience and I am happy to stand charged of bias when I say

"People, what the heck do you want?"

Banker-bashing has become the acceptable blood-sport of our time fuelled by an increasingly, smugly, ignorant media machine that forms, with an increasingly ignorant and smug political class, an unholy and self-supporting alliance of mediocrity. Good grief, does no one think any more?

For past sins I have waded through the Independent Commission on Banking's Issues Paper and reviewed the arguments for and against all their points; watched every minute of Bob Diamond's appearance in front of the Treasury Select Committee (a good fight and an honorable draw); seen one of the most appalling pieces of television reporting I can remember (BBC/Panorama/Carry on Banking/20th December 2010); read speeches by Sir John Vickers and Lord Turner, and as a result I am left wondering what on earth the UK really wants?

Do you know? And just as importantly, do you understand the consequences of what you wish for?

Or do you just want the short-term and brief gratification that revenge will bring?

Have you thought it through?

I am open to persuasion. I really am. Honest. But I am confused and I fear for another glorious episode of British myopia that will leave the country and the economy worse off with Banking added to a long list of 'things the Brits were quite good at.....once'

Rant over.

Carlos Slim: Developed nations face 'chronic problem' from ageing population

2011-02-21T10:01:00.001Z

Reproduced in full from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/. This issue is fundamental and so important.

The Mexican businessman, speaking in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, said there is “neither the recognition of the problem nor the solution” and questioned whether countries, such as the UK, France, Germany and the USA, had the “political capacity” to make the necessary changes.

"Principally in the developed nations, it’s a chronic problem. It’s not an accidental crisis. It was the same in 2001, when we were talking about huge deficits. It’s a crisis that needs structural solutions," he said.

Mr Slim is worth more than $50bn (£31bn) after amassing a fortune across banking, telecoms, road-building and restaurants.

He said retirement ages in developed economies were too low as improving technology moved the workforce from manufacturing into the service industry, and that governments must explore how to reduce healthcare costs.

“The excess of the welfare state in developed countries is in being burdened with the offer of early retirement,” he said.

“They base their retirement age on life expectancy 50 years ago. So people are retiring far before the end of their useful working life.

"What is more, men and women retire when they are most useful. Before, it was a society based on physical work, so you had to retire young. Today, we are a knowledge-based society, and people are retiring when they are in their best mental state, when they are most experienced, most trained. This is when the state most needs them."

He added: “The governments are not investing enough in economic investigations to lower the costs of healthcare.

"If they had investigated the economy of healthcare, they could have discovered how to make it more efficient, through vaccinations for example - which is a cheap way of improving health and reducing infant mortality. It also improves the health of the adult population.

"You have to lower the costs, because in some countries the cost is rising to 20pc of the internal product. And that’s even without a universal, good system.

“It’s a crisis that needs structural solutions, and you can see there is neither the recognition of the problem nor the solution. There is not a good diagnosis of the problem, or a plan of how to solve it.

"There is not the political capacity to make these transformations, above all because they are handling it in a disordered fashion, without explaining it to the people and giving reasons."

The Last Post, 2010

2010-12-27T13:36:00.010Z

This has, without a shadow of doubt, been the strangest, hardest year I can remember.

In both my personal and professional life I have hit highs and lows that have been intense beyond words. This is not the place to recap or reveal but it does seem to be the time to take stock and think about how things can change in 2011.

This may well be my last post on this blog. I've experimented with this site for a couple of years now and have thoroughly enjoyed it. It has given me the chance to experience this blogging thing first hand and I've found the experience liberating.

Amazingly others have read what I've written. Who'd have thought?

So, I should sign off with some kind of summary of everything, a Grand Unifying Theory, something that wraps it all up.

Here goes.

a) There is a new digital divide - those who get and use social media and those who don't. Attitudes, perceptions and behaviours of the two groups in real life seem to be different enough to warrant attention. I have no idea where this will end up but we should watch this gap carefully.

b) All information is becoming organised, organically - as well as Google trying to dominate information organisation sites like Flikr, Slideshare and Scribd means that slowly but surely the chaos of the world wide web is gaining a few trusted touch points of control.

c) Disintermediation of 'reporters' by practitioners will increase - professional peer-to-peer commentary and analysis is redefining the speed, range of and depth of reporting by old print and broadcast media. The half-life of lazy journalism is getting shorter and shorter.

d) Leaders: born not made. Leadership = Communication. Everything else is management. That is all.

e) Hard Work, Luck and Talent are the three gods of success. Two of the three need to smile on you.

Good luck to you in 2011.

It's been a lot of fun!

Annual Awards 2010

2010-12-10T12:22:00.015Z

Ladies and Gentlemen, the results of the 7th Annual Madsen-Tallantyre Awards 2010 are:

Market Researcher of the Year
Ray Poynter: I went for youth last year and this year the award goes to someone with the curiosity and energy of youth and wisdom of years of experience. Ray is a tireless, provocative and imaginative champion of good thinking and good behaviours as he promotes, challenges and redfines research for today's connected world.

Agency of the Year
Oxera: Ok, these guys aren't market researchers but they are by a long way the most outstanding firm that I've worked with this year. They describe themselves as "one of Europe’s foremost independent economics consultancies" but all I know is that they are one of the few firms, the very very few firms, that has genuinely added value and new, original, content to a project. Not for them the old trick of stealing your watch to tell you the time. They would much rather point out that you're already wearing a watch and help you build a way of making it more accurate. Classy people. Clever people.

CEO of the Year
Roger Banks: So, yes, talking of golden oldies, Roger wins this comfortably in 2010. His singl e minded vision of what an agency should be doing and how clients should be served has turbocharged Incite since his arrival in 2006. Amongst the top agencies in the UK no-one had a better year than Incite in 09 and with a more benign market this year it wouldn't be a surprise if they were there or thereabouts in 2010. Oh yes, and he's had the foresight to take on last year's winner of Researcher of the Year!

Presentation of the Year
Crispin Beale at BIG 2010, thumping the lectern during a well argued, passionate address that inserted the scalpel, ever so precisely, into some of the more complacent (well, shocking actually) practices that he found alive and well in research fieldwork. Good to hear an MRS Council member be so direct.

Restaurant/Pub/Bar of the Year
Le Reminet, Paris: quite simply the most outstanding meal, service and ambiance of the year. If you get the chance, do go.

Painting, Picture or Image of the Year
iDeath: shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of the annual BP Portrait of the Year exhibition. What doesn't come across on the screen is the size of the piece. It is 2.2m by 1.7m - it's huge. I'll leave you to make up your own mind about any symbolism the painting might hold for 2010.
That's it for this year. Shorter than usual as its been a quiet one.

Good luck to one and all for 2011.

And if you want to see who won last year just click here.

Coefficient of Customer Focus

2010-11-30T21:54:00.003Z

Coefficient of Customer Focus

View more presentations from Mike Barnes.

Sinister?

2010-11-23T15:33:00.008Z

My reverie was broken this morning when I looked up and realised that I was once more the only right-handed person in the meeting. Over the past few months during my most recent engagement this has happened a number of times - the left handed thing not the reverie thing. I seem to be surrounded by lefties.

If 10% - 30% of the population are lefties then my current crop of colleagues are an unusually high concentration of southpaws.

It's not my usual style to bounce off to Wikipedia but their article on the subject is wide ranging and fascinating and for a beginner like me a decent way into this unknown world. I find the ancient and universal language of left-handedness fascinating and slightly disturbing.

"Even the word "ambidexterity" reflects the bias. Its intended meaning is, "skillful on both sides". However, since it keeps the Latin root "dexter", which means "right", it ends up conveying the idea of being "right-handed at both sides". "

I am happy to report that my lefty colleagues are to a man high-performers and lovely people. I guess their revenge for all the sinister jibes that lefties have suffered for centuries is to just get on with it and do better than everyone else.

"Some researchers claim that we are more intelligent and eloquent that our right-handed counterparts. In tests conducted by Dr. Alan Searleman from St Lawrence University in New York, he found that left-handers can be considerably more intellectually gifted.

There were more left-handed people with IQs over 140 than right-handed people - which is the "genius" bracket. This is perhaps why there are more "lefties" in creative professions - such as music, art and writing - and more left-handed astronauts and leaders than would be expected."

I rest my case.

I'm off to take some lessons.

.

Odds and Sods

2010-11-09T13:45:00.006Z

Crikey! I've been away for longer than is good for me. No blogging leads to brain clogging as stuff (well known technical term for the observational flotsam and jetsam of life) just gathers.

So, hoping that I might once more engage with this blog here are a few random observations to serve as a kind of blogging laxative.

1) Working in a Glass Palace (prop. Mammon) for a couple of months has meant being cut off from any social media as the gnomes that run their systems have placed everything useful behind a corporate firewall that is tighter than a fish's bum.

So my Twitter feed, which runs as a news ticker tape off dozens of publications, blogs and commentators, is out of reach. Resources like Scribd and Slideshare are verboten.

Like so many things in banks (oh Lord, yes, sorry, it is a bank) this is something that is going to have to change as the world - that's the real world, you Acolytes of Mammon - is moving, has moved, into this new age of social media and the more you deny it the more you miss out on the pulse of reality.

Just saying.

2) Infographics. Love them. Love them so much. I think the convergence of design and information is one of the most glorious things and although not exactly new it is vibrant and exciting and enjoying a new lease of life.

And isn't the contrast to dull old PowerPoint presentations just terrifying. I think there must be a new job somewhere - Chief Design Officer - to stop people falling asleep in meetings by creating better ways to present information. If newspapers can do it every day then surely a top flight multi-billion $ corp can do it once in a while.

Or don't they realise these things are possible? Oh no. Wait. They don't. "Access Denied. Unsuitable Content...."

3) My enforced separation from social media has been a harsh reminder of Flabby Muscle Syndrome. If you don't use the muscle, it withers. If you don't use social media it moves on without you. As the man Newton said, for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. Engage with it and it will engage you. If you don't engage then you really can't complain (or opine!).

4) Leadership. I've worked for 4 people this year with CEO in their title. I've written more than enough about the role of leadership elsewhere in this blog but I'll return to two fundamentals

a) Leaders are *born* not made

b) Leadership *is* communication.

That is all.

5) Lastly, for now, I've been sorry to see how irrelevant the discipline of market research has been to the two companies I've worked in this year and how little customer focus is truly exerted despite the wonderful words that all CEO's spout in their rather formulaic communications. Ahhh I seem to have returned to familiar territory. Time to go.

I hope to be back soon.

Toodles.

Sinodependency

2010-10-31T14:42:00.003Z

Welcome to the New World Order

Just for fun, a little retro advertising

2010-08-07T09:59:00.003+01:00

The Customer Balance Sheet

2010-08-04T20:32:00.004+01:00

The Customer Balance Sheet

View more presentations from Mike Barnes.

This is my contribution to the eternal market research debate on 'how do we get a voice at the Board. Well, speak their language for a start.

So this is an introduction to an idea which has been rumbling around my head for a while now.

If you want to improve this then please feel free to get in touch. There are rules though.

a) We can only work on one page
b) We cannot have more than 6 attributes
c) Endless methodological theorising is fine but do it on your own time please
d) My decision is final!

Have fun.

Crises of Capitalism

2010-07-12T20:31:00.003+01:00

A letter to The Times

2010-07-05T14:04:00.003+01:00

In the continuing debate about Leadership and the future shape and style of our economy this is an elegant contribution from a surprising quarter.

Sir, I believe that your supplement on the CEO Summit might have contained five alternative commitments by the CEOs.

1. To remember at all times that we too are a public service and to act accordingly.

2. To show integrity, honesty and transparency in our dealings with customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders.

3. To increase the involvement of employees in decision-making and to share rewards accordingly.

4. To explore co-operative models of business, ensure fair trading and respect the long-term future of the planet.

5. To review our products, training and community involvement with a view to the welfare of all.

The Rev A. Graham Hellier
Marden, Herefordshire
5th July 2010

A BIG Challenge

2010-06-19T13:06:00.009+01:00

And so to the delights of Angel, Islington and the offices of ORC for the Business Intelligence Group (BIG) Annual General Meeting followed by a discussion on the state of B2B research. The AGM was not for me but the discussion was worth the trip.

Under the guidance of the priestly Trevor Wilkinson the assembled collection of young, old, agency, freelance and client (your correspondent) pushed around questions of the scale, scope and future of B2B market research.

We reached no firm agreement on the definition of B2B research although describing it in terms of researching the buying of products and services using someone else's money is neat and helpful.

To what extent is B2B like or not like retail? A sector that runs from high volume SME markets to low volume global sectors (how many rolling stock manufacturers are there in Europe?) is not going to have any easy-fit answer. It's something about the style and rhythm of the projects, the nature of buying decisions, the way in which analysis and insight is used afterwards that makes B2B different.

The future shape of B2B work was discussed at some length as the Reverend Wilkinson posited a decline in phone and increase in online methodologies. Much debate about the definition of 'phone' and 'online' but overall the trend seems to feel right.

For your correspondent, the most interesting part of the discussion was the share of wallet discussion and a tangent that I'd love to pursue in more detail.

It goes like this: discussion about the market research wallet tends to be driven by the agency side of the industry which tends to be dominated by the established 'classic' agencies. Essentially the share of wallet is the share of their billings not the share of the client spend. If I think of my client-side budgets (in B2B financial services) the breakdown would be something like

Syndicated research 75%
Ad hoc research 25%

Syndicated research
classic agency - 25% (GfK, IPSOSMORI, TNS/RI etc)
industry specialist agency - 75% (Greenwich Associates, Treasury Strategies, FI Metrix, Z/Yen and so on)

Ad hoc research
classic agency 40%
third party media 25% (The Economist....)
third party media agency 25% (Saatchi's, Mediacom....)
freelance/consulting 10%

If my annual spend was £5m or £500k (and I've had both) then the 'classic agency' share of my wallet is 25% x 40% or 10%. Even if this is 100% inaccurate and the real figure is 20% then the understanding of wallet is in desperate need of an overhaul.

This is a rough and ready calculation but it must surely be worth the effort of getting this type of client perspective on wallet understood far better. Surely...? No really. Wouldn't it just?

BP logo 2010

2010-05-27T16:07:00.004+01:00

A manifesto for our time

2010-04-28T13:59:00.012+01:00

This election campaign has been even more remarkable than usual for the apathy, disbelief even anger that I have come across in people as I go about my unremarkable life.

In discussions with taxi drivers, barbers, bar staff, CEOs, family, friends, some random people in the British Library and a lovely lady walking her dog one cold crisp morning, I have devised and tested a proper manifesto for this election. Something that makes a difference, is easy to understand and remember, can be delivered and will improve our lot.

Here we go -

Point #1 - The working week will be shortened to 4 days, so we have a 3 day weekend.

Point #2 - All MPs will be given 5 years off, until the next election, so they can stop interfering in our lives.

Point #3 - Any decisions required in the absence of MPs will be determined under the Golden Rule of "Don't Be a Prat".

Point #4 - With immediate effect, upon election, all chargers for all electrical equipment will be interchangeable.

These are simple points, easily understood that will give everyone a chance to get on with their lives and work. You know it makes sense.

VOTE FOR A NEW POLITICS

VOTE FOR THE PEOPLE

In a little more detail then

Point #1 - The working week will be shortened to 4 days, so we have a 3 day weekend.

Britain has the longest working hours of any European country and our stress levels are beyond belief. We need to chill. The French take an hour or more, much more, for lunch, the Spanish do their siesta thing. We will have a revised working work so we can spend more time with our families, get those jobs done around the house, go to the cinema, watch cricket.

1st Ammendment - the introduction of a Bank Holiday on October 21st to give us a much needed break between August and Christmas.

Suggested amendment (rejected) - that every day after a Bank holiday is a public holiday to allow recovery time. This is a practice often adopted, informally, by the Irish after St Patricks Day and has much to recommend it but we're English dammit and that sort of shirking just wont do.

Point #2 - All MPs will be given 5 years off, until the next election, so they can stop interfering in our lives.

JUST LEAVE US ALONE.

You lot have buggered things up quite nicely over the past 5 years now you can stop. Just go away. Get a job, join a commune, write a book, sell the Big Issue, emmigrate, build a boat, just do something that connects you again with the real world.

We can get on just fine without you. Honest.

All budgets will be frozen for 5 years to allow everyone to plan sensibly.

All taxes, however unpleasant, will be fixed for 5 years to allow everyone to plan sensibly.

Everyone will have to keep calm and carry on. Is it impossible for the Armed Forces to organise themselves without the MoD? Can't teachers just get on a teach? Surely the NHS needs less or no interference so doctors and nurses can do their doctoring and nursing. And here's the clever thing, you'll love this, if someone needs to make a decision then they can. Just do it. Go on. Be a grown up, a professional, a citizen. Do it.

Point #3 - Any decisions required in the absence of MPs will be determined under the Golden Rule of "Don't Be a Prat".

Someone somewhere is already bleating that this is impossible, surely this deranged loon realises that MPs need to make decisions, to direct spending and legistlate for a better/fairer/greener society? Er, no they dont. They've been trying this for years, decades even, maybe longer but who knows and they've just keep cocking things up.

And if we really really need to make a decision that can't be handled by incredibly experienced, highly paid, experts, that can't be resolved by the Courts, that can't go to the House of Lords or any other arbitration and decision making body up and down the land then you will suffer the ultimate prosecution. You will be hauled up before me and 6 random people, mostly taxi drivers to start with, and a couple of my mates, and tested against the only Golden Rule, "Dont Be A Prat".

Point #4 - With immediate effect, upon election, all chargers for all electrical equipment will be interchangeable.

A vote for me is a vote for an imporvement in your life and there are few more irritating, gratuitously money grabbing aspects to tadays modern life than the lack of universal technology standards. No longer will you hear the cry "Does anyone have a Samsung charger?".

Yes, I know the EU have decreed that this will happen. Just shows I'm ahead of the game. My legsitlation will be immediate, I'm guessing the EU will want something by 2025.

Amendment #2 - all cars to have the windscreen wipers and indicator lights in the same place.

Amendment #3 - wine bars, pubs and restaurants will have pay a PRS premium to play music on their premises, the premium being directly linked to the volume at which the music is played.

Trust & Economics 2.0

2010-01-31T11:24:00.013Z

To deepest darkest Kensington and the latest CIM Finance Group evening hosted by the mighty NS&I. A splendid turnout heard three different but complementary perspectives on the subject of marketing and trust.

First up, Professor Christine Ennew,Professor of Marketing at Nottingham University Business School, who set the scene with some basic definitions e.g trust is a willingness to rely on an exchange partner in whom one has confidence, the identification of mutual self interest as a basic driver in this partnership and a useful three-way split in looking at the business processes in which trust has to be nurtured; procedure, interaction, distribution.

John Prout, Director at NS&I, followed with a practical interpretation of trust as a marketing driver. The sheer scale of the NS&I operation was the evening's best I-never-knew-that moment: 27 million customers, £94 billion in funds under management and 60% of interactions coming direct via post, phone or Internet. Customer relationships are measured in decades. With an operation of this size his iceberg insight was not surprisingly that customer acquisition was 10% of activity and customer servicing the remaining 90%. Guess where the balance of marketing effort needs to be?

And then we heard from Professor Roger Steare who glories in the title "Corporate Philosopher in Residence" and a presenter who, refreshingly, posed questions and didn't offer answers. In true philosophical fashion he accepts that hard questions need debate not dogma.

Two questions are at the core of his platform. Is 3.5% GDP growth a) possible and b) desirable? He tends to think the answer to both is 'no' based on estimates of population growth and sustainability. You can argue the case if you want but the really interesting point is his response, a call for Economics 2.0 in which self-discipline, humility, courage, mutuality and love are the basis of human economic endeavour. It is, to some extent, the Social Capitalism that I wrote about last year.

The words, the ideas behind them, the consequences all require time and effort but that's what the Professor wants: easy is lazy, hard is good.

What does all this mean for the quotidian marketeer? From the floor came a most useful contribution that suggested a redefinition of marketing as 'satisfying customer needs responsibly' and Steare offered 5 questions to guide marketing (indeed all) decision making in the world of Economics 2.0

What are the rules? [is it compliant?]
Are we acting with integrity? [within our own values and those of Economics 2.0]
Who is this good for?
Who could we harm? [#3 & #4, are these fair outcomes?]
What is the truth? [would you have a problem explaining this to The Daily Mail?

These are early days. There was plenty to disagree with, which would surely please the Professor, notably a tendency for post hoc rationalisation, but whatever position you take this has the feeling of a debate that should and will run and run as it seeks to resolve greed vs. need in the 21st century.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

2010-01-21T11:56:00.002Z

The Year of Fear

2010-01-13T10:42:00.010Z

2009 was the Year of Fear.

I've been wondering how the recession would change business this time. A wise old bird told me over dinner, sometime at the end of '08 just as the worst was being revealed, that all recessions have their positive aspects. Acting as a kind of cleanser, a laxative for the economic body, they can help to remove excesses such as labour, inventory, even investment. Economies return to an effective equilibrium chastened, tempered and redesigned. But as he looked into the future of the oncoming recession the wise old bird simply couldn't see where this one would bite.

Let me offer a possible answer, a personal reflection on the past year. This has been a recession that will have a lasting effect on the business mindset. This has been a psychological recession. A recession that will affect attitudes and decision making for many years to come. The first recession bundled with PTSD.

Almost every firm that I've rubbed up against in the past 12 months has been racked by self-doubt, anxiety and confusion. Decisions, when taken, get reversed, and then reversed again. Any kind of planning is simply an exercise in making God laugh as he seems, willfully, to change the rules. Managers worry about securing a job in the face of endless restructurings and random 'downsizing'. Staff are confused by the lack of clear, simple and consistent communication. Executives think that 'strategy' is now any plan that gets them through to the end of the quarter.

Why?

No-one knows. Honestly. This is a storm that came out of nowhere. For most businesses this has been an economic mugging of the first order. Everything was going along quite nicely and then, wham!, credit lines were reduced or removed, budgets were cut, sales dried up, cash flow stuttered and things looked grim.
Yes, we all know that the Banks got into horrendous trouble because they were too willing to lend too much to Mr & Mrs Redneck in the US of A but that was their world not mine. Surely? I mean the real economy, those of us who make things, wouldn't be affected. Would we? No? Wham!

It was this mugging that will have a lasting effect. Like knitting fog, there has been very little to grab on to and make sense of. Who can answer the questions - 'what did I do wrong?' and 'what should I change now?' And that's why business is afraid: we're all scared of the unknown.

So businesses are fearful at worst, cautious at best. Planning is about keeping things steady and not over-committing to anything. It's a rediscovery of simplicity and basics. Cash flow was always king but now it's Lord and Master of everything.

But, but but......

Growth comes from bravery. Entrepreneurs and an entrepreneurial spirit require an element of risk in decision making. Failure has to be an acceptable outcome otherwise little moves forward, and then only slowly. This is the recession that is killing off risk as part of the business mindset.

The present generation of business leaders have been brought up on MBA case studies that sought out and praised the bold, the individual, the gut-decision. The maverick, the iconoclast, the outsider have had their day in the sun. We have a real danger now of being led by committee, by consensus, by suits. By fear.
2009 was the Year of Fear.

Ten Simple but Powerful Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Work

2010-01-05T13:42:00.007Z

From the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious but still useful as a checklist for those super-stressed by these crazy times.

1. Is what I do really worthwhile? In other words: Does my work make a difference to people? Does it help people? Am I adding something of value to the world? Doing something worthwhile makes us feel worthwhile and can compensate for other shortcomings in the position

2. Do I enjoy my job? Do you you get a buzz from what you do?

3. Am I learning? If you are still developing and learning in the job then it is an investment of your time. If you have stopped learning and are repeating experiences then it may be time for a change.

4. Does this job lead to somewhere I want to go? Is this experience useful in preparing you for something else you might want to do?

5. Am I well paid? On an objective assessment are you fairly compensated for what you contribute?

6. Do I get on with my boss? A difficult boss can make your time at work miserable.

7. Do I get on with my colleagues? A good social environment and friendly workmates can make up for many other problems at work.

8. Am I empowered to be creative and do things my way? This is more important for some people than others. Does it matter for you?

9. Is my work/life balance acceptable? Most people would like more time with their families but work is demanding so they accept some kind of balance. Are you getting at least the minimum free time you need to live your life?

10. Is my job title prestigious? This really matters to some people but is irrelevant to others. Do you feel proud when you tell people where you work and what you do?

Picturing the Past 10 Years

2009-12-29T16:40:00.007Z

What a wonderful way to represent a decade!

Annual Awards 2009

2009-12-21T11:22:00.008Z

Everyone else does them so why not me? I used to run annual market research awards at work which gave the team a chance to reflect on the good and bad and celebrate both. No more team and not much market research but why should that stop me?

It should go without saying that this is very personal list. I don't allow anyone or thing onto the list that I haven't met, seen, worked with and so on personally.

Market Researcher of the Year
Claudia Brendel at Freshminds: an astonishingly sharp mind with a fierce commercial pragmatism. Unless she gets snapped up by a consultancy she'll be one to watch over the next five years.

Agency of the Year
So hard to choose but Brainjuicer edges it for having the courage to trade through a downturn with all the enthusiasm and bravado that they rode the upturn.

CEO of the Year
I met so many this year and all were impressive but four stood out in a strong field: Jill Telford at Synovate UK, John Connaughton at Illuminas, John Kearon at Brainjuicer, Alistair Leathwood at Freshminds. Each has astonishing leadership qualities but the rules only allow me to pick one, so step forward

John Connaughton who steers his ship with a firm, possibly ruthless, hand all the while knowing his staff and clients are the only real assets he has to manage. So he does. Very well.

Presentation of the Year
Five stood out for me, the first three satisfy my 'I was there' rule and the last two don't because I came across them on-line but their quality demands that I include them.

Peter Comley talking about Research 2.0 at the MRS Summer School; Sheila Keegan making an excellent case for sanity and balance in the co-creation debate at this years MRS Conference; Faris Yakob blowing everyone's minds at the Brianjuicer Summerfest when he painted a picture of Web 2.0 (not just research 2.0).

And then on-line, am exemplary demonstration of the art of presentation by Ken Miller of Brown University in the US on the creationist/evolution debate; and last and certainly not least a delightful high energy piece by Rory Sutherland at TED on brands. Just delicious.

Faris Yakob edges it because I was there. But only by a short nose from Ken Miller!

And now to the serious stuff

Restaurant/Pub/Bar of the Year
One of the joys of being released from corporate serfdom is the freedom to relax into lunches, dinners and even breakfasts. The following are my pick of the bunch

Roast by Borough Market; Conran's Boundary in Shoreditch; the tiny and ancient Jerusalem Tavern in Farringdon and the funky and almost bohemian Callooh Callay in Shoredicth (again).

The Jerulsalem Tavern wins because it will always win. It's utterly unique and perfectly charming.

Painting of the Year
I can't pick between these three. Each of them drew me back time and again. The prize is shared between The Rokeby Venus , Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart and Hats and Scarves . And I haven't even mentioned the Gerhard Richter exhibition which probably deserves a prize all of it's own.

Enough already.

Happy Christmas one and all.

From the archives: the market research credo

2009-12-17T10:11:00.004Z

A recent piece this time, from a year ago. I jotted this down on the train as I went in to my last day at work and left it with my team. This is, as they say, "it". And you get it or you don't.

From the archives: Walking with Dinosaurs, Rebuilding NatWest

2009-12-04T14:05:00.006Z

I found the following 10 point 'manifesto' that I'd written when I was at NatWest and we were under attack from both Bank of Scotland and RBS. At the time NatWest were under a new management team of David Rowland and Ron Sandler and still had thoughts of independence. Debate raged thoughout the company about what type of organisation we should be going forward. This was my penn'orth. As usual, this is posted in full, unedited, as it was written 10 years ago. It still seems to hold true today.
1) The CEO is the single source of energy and personality for the company. He or she is a visionary, a communicator, and needs to reach out and connect with all parts of the organisation and market. Messages must be regular, relevant, simple and consistent. (For more info see Mike’s golden rules for Iconic Leaders)

2) How do you eat a Dinosaur? Slice by slice. The organisation is too big. Its size mitigates against efficient business management; it encourages complacency and tolerates ignorance. Organise people into smaller units and give them real business management responsibility. Create an ABB paradigm for the service economy.

3) Encourage (that means invest in) experimentation and failure. And balance that with the development of a brand that delivers intergrity and trust. Pull off that trick and staff and customers will be rewarded.

4) Be truly courageous – listen to customers. If they say something is wrong, put it right even if the costs go up !

5) Be revolutionary and put the long-term profitability of customers at the heart of our processes, systems and business. Demand that this guiding principle is followed and see how the Management Information and business decisions change.

6) Concentrate on being a first class bank and not a financial services organisation. Acknowledge what customers want and get the little things right. This is a business based on a thousand moments not a few events. (For more info talk to BT about their clean payphone strategy).

7) Smash the glass ceiling of pay scales which severly restricts the role of management. Rediscover the Art of Management and let your managers manage.

8) Bring the ‘perks’ of the job into the modern world. Either introduce a flexible range of pick’n mix benefits or rebalance the pay scales. If it’s seen to be fair and flexible then staff will respond. At the moment it’s not and they don’t.

9) Demand (and invest in) excellent and consistent business management from your managers. There is far too much flab, far too much woolly thinking that we would not tolerate from our own customers. Our shareholders would be shocked.

10) Get rid of the paper. Concentrate on quality of output not quantity of input. Make things simple. A slimmmer dinosaur is a faster dinosaur.

© Mike Barnes December 1999

AURA, international. Sort of.

2009-12-04T08:46:00.006Z

To the West End and the offices of BBH (Bartle, Bogle, Hegarty in old money) for the last meeting this year of the International special interest group of AURA, the UK's client-side market research body.

Chaired and managed by the redoubtable team of Barbara Mitchell (Royal Mail) and Christina Sami (World Gold Council) this end of year gathering took time out from the usual Cook's Tour of research issues around the world (C'mon, do you have any idea how hard it is to do polling in Baghdad?) to reflect on the ways in which good work gets traction inside the client business.

First up, the culturally confused, very smooth and generally adorable David Ferrabee from Able and How who provided the most clear and effective practical demonstration of the power of McKinsey's infamous 'elevator pitch'. '30 seconds that could change your life' should be the tag line. To be honest it's more likely to be '30 seconds that will save your life' as you don't get tongue tied in front of the CEO when a chance meeting gives you that once-in-a-career opportunity to say something memorable.

What was clear from young Ferrabee's approach is that his structure for personal 'pitch' communication is a brilliant template for corporate Internal Communications too. The professional IC people know this but the challenge is always to convince the Executive that simple, clear, structured comms is actually a pretty good thing. Half an hour with Ferrabee should clear that up.

Next up, the energetic Alex Owens, the latest Head of Research at Capital One, with a tale of market and customer segmentation that hinged on three points. First, this was not a segmentation based exclusively on research results, there was plenty of internal data too. Second, the project was open and not closed: there were business stakeholders identified and informed of progress throughout. Third and most crucially, the segmentation included financial value for every segment. Nice.

Of course, none of this is terribly new, none of this is going to change the world. But in the same way that this short video from Dan Heath tells a familiar story in a concise and engaging way it is always useful to have new light shed on topics that are sometimes overdue a little attention.

Naturally, the real value in AURA meetings is the networking with peers in other firms and industries, the sharing of experiences, the solving of problems. And side discussions on research in the US, rural China and Continental Europe all seemed to be healthy signs of the benefits of old-fashioned, face-to-face, informal, chat. Long may it last.

A prayer for our time

2009-11-16T12:36:00.008Z

Our Lloyd,
Who art in Broad Street,
Blankfein be thy name.

Bonus time has come,
Taxpayers have been done,
In America as they have in Europe.

Give us this day our $100m trading gain,
And forgive us our bailouts,
As we forgave those who shorted our stock

And lead us not into conflicts of interest,
But deliver us from clueless lawmakers.

For thine is a bank holding company,
With strong balance sheet and Warren Buffett

For partners and stockholders,
Getting richer and richer

Goldman

The Sunday Times ran an interview with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs on November 8th. The article contains a lot of good stuff but the comment only partially quoted and almost certainly out of context gave a great headline; one that will haunt Goldmans for a long time.

Leadership secrets from a maestro

2009-11-03T11:05:00.005Z

This piece by Roger Nierenberg appeared in The Washington Post on October 26th. I reprint it here as my last post on Leadership following posts on the 19th July and September 16th.

It's worth following the link to the WP site to read the comments posted by readers. Great fun and often insightful.

Leadership secrets from a maestro

Have you ever wondered what it's like to conduct a word-class professional orchestra?

For the seasoned maestro it can feel like the ultimate dream come true. During the performance the orchestra seems to read your mind, knowing exactly how you'd wish to shape this phrase or pace that crescendo. The musicians' collective skill instantly serves up the very sound you just imagined. They respond with an amazing unity to the subtlest motions of your baton, the slightest movements of your hands, and even to your unconscious facial expressions.

It takes many years, however, to master that complex and delicate relationship between maestro and orchestra. For the inexperienced conductor standing on the podium, it can be a lonely and isolated experience. If he looks to the musicians for any support or encouragement he will find none. They have, after all, spent a lifetime of practicing to play as perfectly as they can. The same perfectionism that served them so well in honing their own skills is inevitably focused on the conductor. The musicians long for a leader as skilled in his craft of conducting as they are in their craft of instrument-playing.

So what does a young conductor need to know as she steps steps up the podium, looking out at all those expectant, demanding faces? What I've learned from years of conducting symphony orchestras and working with business leaders is that a maestro and an executive face very similar challenges. Therefore, what helps on the podium can help in the corner office.

• Have a clear and vibrant vision for your people's success
Leaders who have not yet done the hard work of imagining a best-case scenario for their organizations will inevitably default to leading through correction and criticism. But when your highest priority is developing the right goals and strategy, you will spend most of your time inspiring people about them and guiding them towards successful achievement.

• Listen carefully to your people
A maestro listens "microscopically" to the orchestra. She uses the special perspective of her podium to take in both the big picture and the relevant details. In her imagination she juxtaposes the reality of the orchestra's playing with her best-case vision of how they might sound. Subtracting one from the other shows the crucial gap she needs to narrow or even eliminate. Armed with this knowledge she can focus the organization's attention on those few crucial points.

• Translate your agenda into directions that can easily be understood and executed by the players.
It is a major accomplishment to devise the right goals, but that is no guarantee they will be achieved. Only your workforce can accomplish that, and the leader and the worker will have vastly different understandings of the vision. The leader's understanding is based on the pressing strategic needs, as seen from the podium. The worker's view is shaped by the chair he occupies, where the big-picture view of the organization is very much in the distant background. So the leader needs to translate the vision so that it makes sense from every chair. The workforce cannot act effectively until the leader expresses directions and assignments in the language they understand.

• It's not about you. It's about how the orchestra sounds under your direction.
It's very easy for a conductor to personalize the orchestra's behavior and see it as reflection on him or his abilities. But the orchestra is not nearly so concerned with what a conductor does or says as they are with how they sound. Therefore sharpen your focus on simply getting the best results, and don't get distracted by interpersonal dynamics. Yes, a symphony orchestra is a unique workforce, one more focused on aesthetic perfection than bottom-line profits. But in the harmony of the maestro-orchestra relationship, there are many lessons for leaders who listen.

Culture, Customers and Profit

2009-10-17T10:54:00.006+01:00

To The City for an excellent dinner with buyers and suppliers of market research.

At one point in the evening the conversation turned to the matter of corporate culture, specifically how, if at all possible or indeed desireable, to maintain a certain magic as a firm grows quickly from modest beginings.

Much rumination on the topic alongside our digestion and there emerged two distinct approaches. In honour of an old market research joke I shall describe them even handedly.

On the one hand, the FIDO doctrine which embraced growth and change wholeheartedly and stated that culture evolves naturally as a business grows. Greater numbers and organisational complexity simply do not allow the behaviours of the start-up to be sustained.

On the other hand, the Garage doctrine which stated that any change to company culture would be a change to customer relationships, the reasons for purchase and ultimately the bottom line. In a world where services are rarely differentiated on the 'what' but more on the 'how', purchase decisions are often based on the way in which a firm operates and treats its prospects and customers: how it behaves. And that's culture.

I side with the latter and maintaining company culture - the reason why people buy from you - is perhaps the greatest single test of leadership a CEO can take.

By the time the pudding arrived we realised that any further deliberation was going to fall foul of competing topics and the bar. The nagging thought remains though: how many firms actually understand what part of their 'culture' is an essential component of their sales and relationship success?

Brand Trust: The six drivers of trust

2009-09-23T09:35:00.003+01:00

Brand Trust: The six drivers of trust

View more presentations from Nick Black.

#1 - Stability
#2 - Innovation
#3 - Relationship
#4 - Practical value
#5 - Vision
#6 - Competence

Leadership, this is what I meant to say

2009-09-16T17:02:00.004+01:00

Post of 19th July, below, started with the following points

1) Leadership is to work what Diets are to life. A playground for the peddlers of nonsense, consumed by those who have forgotten common sense.

2) Leadership is * setting an objective * motivating your people * securing the right resources for them to achieve the objective. That is it.

3) Leadership is nature not nurture. You've got it or you don't - and other people will decide this, not you.

And now I read an article from HBR which is actually what I was trying to get across. I reprint it here, without permission but with full attribution to Norm Smallwood and Harvard Business Publishing.

Decoding Leadership
5:55 PM Tuesday September 15, 2009 by Norm Smallwood
The world doesn't need another leadership theory. On Amazon, there are 480,881 books today that have to do with leaders as the topic. If you ask 30 leadership development experts to define leadership, you get 31 different answers. No wonder we're confused.

This is a problem when trying to develop effective leaders- everyone has a different opinion and there's no right answer. Progress can only be made when there's agreement about what we're trying to develop leaders to do.

I was in a meeting recently with a group of senior executives from the same company and started with the question: "What are qualities of effective leaders?" Here's a partial list of their responses:

• Authentic• Transparent• Emotional intelligence• Interpersonal effectiveness• Servant-leader• Humility• Leaders not managers• Know contingency theory by mapping response to situation• Live the 7 Habits• Build a vision • Ensure customer centricity

And so on.

In other words, they had no clue. They could make a list but they did not have a point of view.

Dave Ulrich and I (along with our colleague Kate Sweetman) determined to synthesize this morass of ideas. We turned to recognized experts in the field who had already spent years sifting through the evidence and asked two simple but elusive questions:

1. What percentage of effective leadership traits are basically the same?

2. If there are common rules that all leaders must master, what are they?

Our respondents agreed that 60-70% of leadership is common for any effective leaders - from a bootstrapping entrepreneur to a leader at a large organization. By synthesizing their work we identified five rules to decode leadership:

Rule 1: Shape the future. This rule is embodied in the strategist dimension of the leader. Strategists answer the question "where are we going?" and make sure that those around them understand the direction as well.

Rule 2: Make things happen. Turn what you know into what you do. The Executor dimension of the leader focuses on the question "How will we make sure we get to where we are going?"

Rule 3: Engage today's talent. Leaders who optimize talent today answer the question "Who goes with us on our business journey?" Talent managers know how to identify, build and engage talent to get results now.

Rule 4: Build the next generation. Leaders who develop the next generation answer the question, "who stays and sustains the organization for the next generation?" Talent Managers ensure shorter-term results through people while Next Generation Developers ensure that the organization has the longer-term competencies required for future strategic success.

Rule 5: Invest in yourself. At the heart of this Leadership Code - literally and figuratively - is Personal Proficiency. Effective leaders cannot be reduced to what they know and do. Who they are as human beings has everything to do with how much they can accomplish with and through other people.

This "Leadership Code" allows leadership development people to stop circling the drain by reinventing competency models that are essentially the same. It provides a grounded point of view about the fundamentals. Future time, energy and attention can be applied to figuring out the other 30% about what makes our leaders unique and how to build a deeper bench of qualified leaders at every level.

Norm Smallwood is the cofounder of The RBL Group and coauthor of The Leadership Code

The NHS: beyond business?

2009-09-11T11:02:00.008+01:00

I am grateful to the NHS for so much. It has saved my wife's life and brought my children into the world. My GPs are fantastic. It is accessible, physically and financially. It is a marvel.

And yet.

I was in A&E last week on two occasions last week with my 12 year old who was suffering from suspected (but eventually ruled out) appendicitis. First visit 3hrs, second visit 6 hrs. On the one hand the treatment was fantastic - he was seen, examined, tested and diagnosed by professionals with minimal admin and no fuss. On the other hand we left, both times, feeling as though the patient was somehow not the #1 priority.

I still can't get my head around all of this but I think it comes down to communication.

Looking back on the experience we kept on asking four simple questions -

"What are you doing?"

"Why are you doing it?"

"What happens next?"

"When will it happen?"

The doctors - and it really was the doctors who failed here, from SHOs to Surgeons - seemed to forget that the object of their activity (aka the patient) was worried, nervous, lacking in medical knowledge and jargon and unable to help the process without knowing what was happening. Nurses acted as interpreters but only when they knew what was going on; they often didn't.

These four questions are not hard to remember. The information is not complicated to pass on. The benefit of doing so is immeasurable. Their absence is simply habitual.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The NHS exists in spite of itself. And that's why it seems so alien, so immune to the basics of business that are drummed into those who work in the commercial world.

And yet.

Some commercial practices are anathema to a public service like the NHS. Their internal market and procurement processes are a nightmare. Ill conceived, poorly understood and badly executed. But some commercial practices, particularly those of service and communication really should be looked at very seriously, then adapted and adopted.

Or am I missing something?

Ted Kennedy, a great fly-half

2009-09-02T11:05:00.013+01:00

Ted Kennedy was my Kennedy. Jack and Bobby were just, and only just, before my time. From Chappaquiddick onwards I've seen Ted grow and then grow old. Unlike his three brothers his curse was to live. To live with the burden of expectation, to live through the family dramas, to be tested and taunted by the political gods who said "Will you ever be good enough?".

The HBR posted this piece "Ted Kennedy, Low-Potential Leader" last week and in an email exchange with the inestimable D M Badham I was drawn to an oft remarked sporting truth that every team benefits from having a wise old head on board.

The day before our exchange I'd spent hours and hours pacing up and down a touchline in Hertfordshire, England watching my eldest boy play in his school 2nd XV. It was a classic end-of-summer shake-down. A team thrown together with no preparation and given a run out before term starts, before the season starts in earnest. A chance to get the mind and body focused again on the glorious mudfest that is Rugby Football.

Watching a group of technically excellent, young, fit, energetic boys/young men play very very poor rugby was frustrating beyond words. No organisation, no communication, no plan. It was horrible. Rugby is the sort of team game where leadership matters and a wise old head (or two) really can change a team's performance. The coach and I talked and talked as we watched and watched while they lost game after game. We agreed. The team needed a fat old bloke. We needed Ted Kennedy.

To my knowledge E M Kennedy never played a game of rugger. And if he had as a youth he might have been a liability, a hothead with more energy than sense. In his latter years though he would have been the perfect fly-half. Not the fastest, not the strongest but the one with more vision and experience than anyone else. The one who knew how to get through difficult situations using the people around him best.

I was a scrum half. I loved playing with these guys. Portly, stately, gliding through games doing more talking than running and with a kicking boot that made a ball spiral with sweet relief. They bullied, cajoled, encouraged, shouted, whispered; they pushed and pulled their team mates around the park so their game plan could be executed. They made a huge difference.

In business terms the value of the equivalent role is rarely acknowledged, rarely recruited for but often seen. Not the deadwood salary-man but the well connected, experienced, unflappable, been-there-done-it colleague who can guide, advise and connect. Their reward and pleasure is the hum of a well oiled machine around them and undoubtedly the respect they earn and enhance from their colleagues. Astonishingly, those I've met along the way are not motivated by financial gain.

Stand up for fat old blokes! Celebrate their experience, their ability to get things done. Ask yourself if you need a Ted and if you have one do you value him/her. And remember that youth is all well and good but it can be wasted on the young.

Update

2009-08-17T15:46:00.006+01:00

A quick update to answer the usual questions on my situation while it's quiet and before everyone returns from summer purdah.

Status
Unemployed. Healthier than I've been in years thanks to plenty of sleep, a reasonable diet (no late night rubbish at/on my way home from work) and the daily routine of dog walking - in all weathers. Happier than I've been in ages thanks to a family life that turns out to pretty amazing - why did I spend so long in the office?? Poorer than I've been in ages thanks to the total collapse of the RBS shareprice in particular and the stock market in general. Somehow this last point isn't that bothersome in light of the previous ones!

Prospects
Uncertain. The UK job market is glacial. There are too many people chasing too few positions. So it's a buyers market and the price is going down. In a word - grim. But uncertain is ok. The mantra 'something will turn up' isn't based on naive faith but on experience and a knowledge that optimism and energy do pay off; it's just impossible to predict how and when they'll pay off.

Moves I've made from branch banking to smart cards and biometrics to telecoms services in Barbados to payments systems in Manchester to speech writing in The City to researching the European train leasing market and filming with Jonathan Dimbleby simply don't make any sense if you take a linear view of the world! How can I possibly predict what will happen next? I guess that's the fun of it all.

Stuff I've learned the hard way that everyone else already knows
#1 The only acceptable sin is the sin of enthusiasm. The world needs more positive people. There's a t-shirt that says "Dance like you do at home, love like you've never been hurt, work like you don't need the money". This should be put up in neon lights in Times Square and on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square and be the corporate values for all quoted companies.
#2 Most jobs and opportunities come through informal channels; networking rules, it might even rock!
#3 Most people want to employ people they like; so interviews are not really about ability, they're about 'fit'.
#4 The interweb is a truly scary, extraordinary, liberating thing. But you have to use it, push it, control it. Don't let it boss you.
#5 There is soooooo much bullshit around. The only way to counter it is to use common sense. Trust your gut.

What next?
There is a sense of 'just keep swimming'. Persistence pays off. Frogs and princes and all that. The consensus is that Q4 will be 'better' than the first half of the year in terms of job prospects. Possibly. We'll see.

Whatever happens there'll certainly be more postings from me like the stuff below \/

If I owe you a beer then I'll try and catch you soon.

Done.

2009-08-13T08:03:00.001+01:00

Random #2 - A ramble through some thoughts

2009-07-19T19:20:00.011+01:00

Too many ideas floating around to grab and mould into a single, or even several, pieces. So, to get this lot off my chest, out of my mind, here are some of the thoughts to ponder.

1) Leadership is to work what Diets are to life. A playground for the peddlers of nonsense, consumed by those who have forgotten common sense.

2) Leadership is * setting an objective * motivating your people * securing the right resources for them to achieve the objective. That is it.

3) Leadership is nature not nurture. You've got it or you don't - and other people will decide this, not you.

4) Followership is a skill. Good followers are as valuable as good leaders.

5) Everyone wants innovation but most want someone else to take the risk.

6) Innovation is found everywhere. That few examples are given from 'boring' industries is to our own shame not theirs.

7) Self-interest drives all action. Enlightened self-interest is the best behaviour one can hope for in others.

8) The Ultimate Question, for which the answer was 42, was "what is six times nine?". You need to go to the original text to really understand the lunacy of the world.

9) Education is the single most important factor in business. It is ignored at our peril.

10) Business ignores education.

11) We have developed a (western) society in which an adversarial style to discussion, debate and argument seems to dominate and exclude any possibility of being persuaded.

12) To be persuaded about something is to think, carefully, come to a personal conclusion, possibly changing one's mind. Independent thought and humility; is it so tough?

There's probably an essay in each of these. An essay I'm not equipped to write. But I am happy to field reactions to any of the above.

Another Twitter digression....Engagement

2009-07-13T10:53:00.018+01:00

Another fine mess I've got myself into.

Here we go again - read from the bottom up

Harrisonma1 @mikeyb63 Posted tweet 4 u. I am all 4 cross-media comparability. Time spent not perfect but will do. Interested in what u come up with. :)

Harrisonma1 Time Spent Is The Right Metric To Measure Engagement http://bit.ly/vYX56 (like comparability to trad adv for holistic view)

mikeyb63 @harrisonma1 in fact cathy i'm going to search for an 'engagement intensity' measure, its got to exist somewhere, if not i'll invent and £££

mikeyb63 @Harrisonma1 wow! v tough parents. most v all? message across 50+ depths was consistent. killer stat i'd like is passive v active FB usage.

Harrisonma1 @mikeyb63 I would agree with 'most' but all? :) Would love to see stats on % kids that have parents as friends on fb. Mine BLOCKED me!

mikeyb63...so the gandparents could see the pix of the grandchildren......

mikeyb63 @Harrisonma1 entirely anecdotal evidence from a qual study i completed recently was that all 55+ FB users were set up by their offspring

Harrisonma1 July 2009 Facebook Demographics Report http://bit.ly/zm5on

The report is titled 2009 Facebook Demographics and Statistics Report: 513% Growth in 55+ Year Old Users. College & High School Drop 20%. Have a look at the posting and also the comments, in particular the comments by Philipp Reichart which seem reasonable.

Based on my own recent experience, as Tweeted above, my interest was/is in the difference between FB users that are active and those that are passive. In my simple (simplistic?) view of the world the only active users I've come across are the under 30s and all the over 50s I've spoken to that are on it admit to being a) set up by their children and b) set up so they can enjoy/see/take part in family pictures/events and so on, especially when there are grandchildren involved. An unsurprising number of these relationships are long distance e.g. UK to Spain, UK to Australia which is a dimension that is hardly mentioned in any commentary I've seen.

To label the passive as passive is a bit tough. They're active and certainly engaged but it's limited, uni-directional, uni-functional; they're closed system users - at the moment. Of course we don't know where these silver surfers are going to take their new connectedness. Whatever they do it'll be a surprise to the under 30s!

Back to the Tweets.

I wanted to know about this active/passive thing and called it engagement intensity. Cathy [Harrison] offered the link to Time Spent Is The Right Metric To Measure Engagement and stupidly I said I'd search for an answer or create my own. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Life is too short and this is just not my field. Not an expert, not a newbie, not even got training wheels. Just a passer-by. Damn.

The Time Spent....post is fine. Makes sense. It's a little introverted as so many on-line tools are i.e. only use on-line to measure on-line by referring to on-line behaviours. But its a good fast proxy for so much that I liked it, a lot.

In terms of my own searching then this piece Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement from Forrester is pretty impressive and is my return offering to Cathy in Twitterland. The paper strikes me as being well balanced in both its point of view and it's application and the recognition that we all live in an off-line and on-line world.

And my own contribution to this? In the spirit of Jessica Hagy here's the scribble that has a current value of 2 cups of tea and 3 digestives.

I'll not dwell on this too long but "Techno" is the (ugly) term for the extent to which people will fully utilise functionality on sites and can be extended cross-platform e.g. Twitter into Blog as a v small example. "Echo" is some measure of your reach into your community (on-line and off-line) and would have 'frequency' and 'impact' components. And this is already getting complicated.

Time to leave it to the experts.

B-to-B Marketing Fundamentals Don't Change

2009-07-08T11:03:00.002+01:00

Random #1 - New World Order. Not.

2009-06-20T12:54:00.014+01:00

Can we really blame the failure of the global banking system in 07/08 on greedy, mercenary, unethical, selfish bankers? It has been so tempting hasn't it? It's their fault; look what they've done to us.

Is there another view? One that perhaps acknowledges that the fetishistic obsession with short-term earnings and profits drove banks and other investors to focus on the ends and not the means.

A view that acknowledges that the reason for this obsession was the continuing search for yield by institutional investors facing almost impossible pay-out obligations on pensions and other long-term plans.

A search that was tacitly supported by Governments through policies that outsourced wholly or partly ever increasing amounts of previously state funded social security obligations because their own model of social economics has broken down: too few givers (tax payers), too many takers (old, sick, poor).

Actions taken this past year mean that the banks and the banking system will recover but the political-social-economic model remains and remains broken, the fundamental reasons are not debated and and the problems remain: 'the West' has no idea how to pay for the future.

Democracy and Capitalism may have won the debate of Grand Ideas in the 20th century but unless we address and solve the economics of democracy and reinvent a socially sustainable Capitalism I can't see anything but a return to the world we've just left.

[Post script: after I'd written this I stumbled on the last this year's Reith Lectures given by Michael Sandel. Lectures 1 and 4 are well worth a listen if this topic strikes a chord of curiosity.]

From The Times on 16th September - thoughts from Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, which although directly supporting my point certainly adds weight to a view that wants a deeper broader review of the 'crisis'.

How terrestrial television lost its' grip on our downtime

2009-06-15T19:23:00.002+01:00

Source: The Times, Magazine - 13th June 2009

Something to think about

2009-06-13T17:21:00.004+01:00

1 Don't be afraid to fall in love with something and pursue it with intensity.

2 Know, understand, take pride in, practice, develop, exploit and enjoy your greatest strengths.

3 Learn to free yourself from the expectations of others and to walk away from the games they impose on you. Free yourself to play your own game.

4 Find a great teacher or mentor who will help you.

5 Don't waste energy trying to be well-rounded.

6 Do what you love and can do well.

7 Learn the skills of interdependence.

E. Paul Torrance
(1915 - 2003)

If this is the future then my head hurts

2009-06-06T07:12:00.028+01:00

Can you teach an old dog new tricks? I used to think so but after a splendid day at the Brianjuicer Summerfest, hosted by HSBC at the frankly remarkable Canary Wharf, I'm not so sure.

My head hurts. I'll explain why.

The irrepressible and rather cuddly John Kearon had pulled together a day of presentations, discussion and silly games for about a hundred friends. Ok so they were clients mainly but with a smattering of others that made the networking surprising.

We heard Mark Earls in full trendy vicar mode take us through his currently a la mode views on mass behaviours, JK himself threw in a few thoughts about moving research from 'me' to we'. With a brief break for an HSBC client view courtesy of ex M&S-er Alexander Matthews we were back into the fray with Olaf Willoughby who didn't talk about photography but did talk about storytelling and Faris Yacob who danced through the current/future trends and impacts of social media or the radical democratisation of the means of distribution and consumption of knowledge and information, or something like that.

I fully expect the Juicers to offer up a pukka review of the day (and the slides please ok pix'n vid instead 01/07/09). It's not for me to do a full review but I can share my reactions and explain the current Neurofen popping.

Earls - Looks worryingly like John Jones from Oysterband. That's a good thing btw. Main message seemed to be that marketing with directional messages to a consumer is just wrong and ignores fundamentals of behaviour. Homo Sapiens is a learning machine and operates under the simple command line >See:Copy:Do< Homo Sapiens is brilliant at being 'social', at imitating, at conforming to group norms. So start to plan your marketing as a 'with' exercise not a 'to' exercise. Get people to do, then others will see and copy and achieve what you want to do.

Scary, scary statement comes next - you need to change behaviour before you can effect a change in attitude, not the other way around. Just think about that. Be afraid.

See: Copy: Do, See: Copy: Do, See: Copy: Do. It has a ring to it. Personally I like the biological essence of this. Look at the way DNA replicates and you have a whole world of analogy to play with! It can also help to explain why our behavioural copying can be less than perfect.

There's a deus ex machina question here tho. Who starts? Who does the first thing that is seen and copied? All very philosophical. All very chicken-and-egg.

In the end this only works for me if we are a two headed beast: a brilliant copyist, a team player, a conformist alongside a playful/creative that revels in experimentation, a 'what if' merchant. With that as the blueprint for a single consumer or a collection of people then my head hurts less.

Willoughby - lovely run through the seven basic plots of all narratives. I'd got my head around these when someone from the floor raised the connection to the 12 basic brand archetypes and my head started to hurt again.

And gorgeous as this all was I was left with a question or a fear, depending on the moment, which is - are people fitting (forcing?) their story into the basic narrative structures and components or are they using these structures to illuminate their basic story. My fear is that the former wins out and people will distort their story to fit one of the models.

The point is subtle perhaps but fundamental in terms of honest interpretations.

Yacob - a delightful tumble of clear thinking, iconoclasm and funky phrases of which “phatic communication” was the pick of the bunch. Thank you Faris. Titled “Be Nice or Leave” his illustration of the nature, scale and power of social media (ok ok he hates the phrase but….) was shocking. I mean I was shocked. Jolted. Hit by something unexpected.

Factlets came thick and fast e.g. Wikipedia is the biggest single respository of mankind's knowledge ever built. It would take 100 million man hours to build it from scratch. 14 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Oh good grief.

And buried in there were 6 essential behaviours to survive in the newly democratised cyber-world. And they do look to be essential.

Anyway, an overwhelming thought during and after his prezzo was whether this was a love-in or something more significant. Was this just an uber-cool bleeding-edge-surfer laying it on the line for a like minded bunch of early adopters? In global terms, is this just a niche community or does it indeed change EVERYTHING for everyone? When does the early and late majority kick in? How will they? Does it matter? There’s a whole bunch of ‘yes, but…..’ going on here. Maybe I'm just getting on a bit?
And my head is really hurting now. But in a good way.

Thank you Brainjuicer. Thanks for putting on a show that I’ve waited years for an agency to arrange.

My invoice for the pills is on the way.

Keeping it short....

2009-06-02T07:34:00.003+01:00

Annie

You on twitter > “Real people hate long surveys. And we keep doing it! RT @SueFontaine Just been stopped for the longest market research survey ever. Rubbish.”
Me on twitter > “@LoveStats re your long surveys tweet. We reckoned that 8 minutes is all you need. Contentious natch but helps to focus on important stuff.”
A bit more on this, as requested.

The 8 minutes came from an attempt to focus the mind of our internal clients on what was really important. The danger with most studies was/is that of ’scope-creep’ i.e. the tendency for clients to shoehorn additional and increasingly peripheral questions into a questionnaire/discussion guide.

And trying to nail down the objectives for a Research Brief was always a nightmare so we would get our retaliation in first and tell them up front at the briefing stage that they only had three ‘free questions’ to play with. So, what did they REALLY want to know? What would make a difference to their decision making?

Now they began to focus on their objectives.

The 8 minutes came from an illustration we used – “If you had the chance to walk from Nelson’s Column to Big Ben with a customer by your side do you think thats enough time to find out what you really need?” That’s an 8 minute walk.

Ok, so the reality check here is that my clients 3 free questions dont preclude some profiling questions before and after the core set. Nor does it rule out the right and senisble addition of a 4th or 5th question should they be absolutely necessary in light of Q1, 2 and 3!

And in the end we’d feel good about something that was about 15 mins long. But hopefully a good 15 mins because we’d started with real focus.

In the end my internal clients appreciated the challenge and the rigour becuase it meant their customers were treated with respect, time wasn’t wasted and ultimately they got good value for money.

Remember I was on the client side so these are conversations I could have without fear of ‘losing a deal’. It’s much harder for vendors to challenge like this.

A Twitter digression.....DIY research

2009-05-24T19:59:00.010+01:00

This is a bit unexpected.

I began to play around with Twitter a few weeks ago. Having hooked into LinkedIn and finding that MyBook and FaceSpace are just not for me (how does anyone keep up with it all?) Twitter looked like it might fill a bite sized information gap professionally. Somewhere between Google Alerts and Marketing Week.

If only I'd kept my mouth shut. This is what happened on the 20th May.

WTF!!! This is astonishing. Suicide!! RT For the DIYers out there-- RT @MRbyMR: Using Google Docs to make a survey http://bit.ly/3x1Uph
8:27 AM May 20th¶

Sorry for the 'wtf' reaction. How can an industry disintermediate itself like this and not worry? No wonder research is undervalued. Madness
8:29 AM May 20th¶

@tomewing point taken but there's a bigger issue here which 140 characters can't address. Will find a way of doing it long-form!
8:41 AM May 20th¶

@researchlive hmmm yes but....I think my reaction is to a bigger question of quality and perceived value overall. I'll blog more thoughts.
10:51 AM May 20th

So here I am. Blogging more thoughts. Not that these thoughts are particularly well formed but they are, so to speak, all I've got!

My reaction and concern is relatively simple. In all the years I've been working with research agencies there's been a consistent refrain of 'we're never valued for the work we do'. And this debate is one that seems to paralyze market research periodically. It's rather like the Marketing 'why don't we have a seat at the Board' debate.

I agree. I don't think market research is valued appropriately by the buyers and users. I think the industry has an image problem. And there is little evidence that this situation is being addressed sensibly and collectively. And then I read a tweet that draws attention to a DIY forum/survey application in Google Docs and my mind does a back-flip.

First reaction - this was posted by Research magazine. I may be way off track here but that seems to be tantamount to official endorsement. (I know I'm going to get into so much hot water for that sentence. The good burghers of Research towers - who do a very fine job - will treasure their independence and neutrality).

Second reaction - why would anyone want to encourage DIY survey creation when the consequence simply damages an already weakened discipline? From my little rock orbiting on the outer reaches of the research galaxy I see the 'low barrier to entry' that DIY provides as a real pain in the posterior. Just based on my experience the case goes like this -

Ø Market research is generally a poorly understood as a discipline by Board members, budget holders and commissioning managers.

Ø There are many reasons for this but one of the contributing factors is the 'how hard can it be?' attitude which is fuelled by the ready availability of cheap and fast (seen as good things) DIY survey tools.

Ø The buyers decision becomes focussed of methodology and content - hey, lets do it on-line and we'll write the questions ourselves - and not on business objective.

Ø These surveys are often/usually poorly written and poorly executed and superficially analysed.

Ø As a result the findings (rarely recommendations) are less than insightful and often a poor reflection of the Executives' own prejudices.

Ø The Board member, budget holder and commissioning manager walk away thinking - it was cheap and quick but didn’t really tell me much. I'm not sure this market research thing is all its cracked up to be. Maybe we'll skip it next time.

Ø And of course the impact on respondents is equally interesting as pestering them with inane questions that have little internal logic or coherent narrative creates a secondary negative impact which in my B2B world hits another set of decision makers.

Third reaction - the reaction to my reaction was interesting in that there didn't seem to be much concern and that this DIY stuff is ok. Always happy for a bit of cultural realignment!

If I might just get my retaliation in first on one point. I am not having a go at freelancers or marketing managers or similar who know their research, understand how to put together good intelligent surveys and for whom this type of low cost tool is an essential component of their toolkit.

Nuff said.

Reflections #2: Only Connect

2009-04-12T19:37:00.006+01:00

In this second part of the Reflections series the author considers the way agencies approached client management and wonders if things will ever change.

If madness is defined as doing the same thing time and time again hoping to get a different result what then should I conclude from the last five years of calls that have started “Hello, I’m your new account manager at Global Research Inc.”? The subsequent couple of months almost always proved that said account manager really wasn’t.

The poppet (male or female) who came along to meet us was (almost always) too young, too inexperienced and too focussed on the short term to be of any real use. They disliked the complexity of decision making they found in our business, they were flummoxed by the organisation’s buying model. They seemed to resent the fact that their role took them away from proper research which is what they had signed up for in the first place. Don’t screw up and I’ll be promoted in a year to AD and get back to doing real work. Phew.

Not everyone was like this. Some agencies have hired ‘business development managers’ who are, by comparison, rabid attack-dogs who are meant to sniff out, convert and close every ‘sales opportunity’. With a telephone manner as sharp as their suits, these revenue driven Rottweilers quickly become irritants to be tolerated and preferably avoided. Their problem is an inability to sustain a research based discussion for more than five minutes without betraying a very real lack of knowledge and a sales obsessed approach that gave them a gad-fly focus when projects and budgets shifted around, as they always do.

Is it any wonder that the small and medium sized firms got a disproportionate amount of our attention and our business? They offered access to good researchers and experienced Directors, they tended to have a lower turnover of staff which gave us continuity of contact and they knew that the only way they would win business would be to listen and be responsive.

Of course what one gains in terms of quality of contact one loses in the marketing sciences and depth of knowledge that the larger firms have. But as they were never able to marshal those for the client it seemed like a false trade-off. And I should be clear; the smaller firms are responsive, not proactive. There is a huge difference and one that still leaves much to deliver.

Over five years I was lucky enough to work with two outstanding account managers. One worked in the US and the other in the UK. They were consistent, year after year, in their support for our business. They were always curious, always ready to discuss project ideas and always ready to share their work or market observations with us. It doesn’t sound that difficult but the truth is they stood out like beacons in a fog of mediocrity. As a direct result of their account management efforts they won new business from us. That is business that they created through the power of the relationship.

Neither of these two individuals worked for a major, global research firm. Neither started life in agencies checking tables.

Working in a B2B world where my own firm’s business model was built around relationship management in a multi-supplier market meant that my team was more than a little sensitive to the good, bad and indifferent attributes of client management. We were awash with research on what customers wanted from their suppliers in terms of product and especially overall relationship and we refined our understanding year after year of the essentials of corporate customer relationships.

In the end we distilled the whole thing down to eight words, a sort of management haiku in which every word was weighed, measured and placed with great precision and for maximum impact. A slightly expanded version would be as follows:-

#1 Be an expert in your own field: know your business inside-out and know your own company inside-out. In a multi-supplier market any weakness on either of these axes of competence will be spotted very quickly through direct comparison with your competitors!

#2 Understand their sector and business: don’t pretend to be an expert, you’re not, but do display an insider’s knowledge of markets, competitors and industry issues.

#3 Be curious and flexible: if you’re not curious about your client then you’re not likely to ask the right questions which will not lead you to the right answers. Change job, now. Be flexible because the world demands it. Get over it.

#4 Develop ideas for discussion: unless specifically instructed to do so, never present a single solution for implementation, ever. Always present ideas for discussion. Customers like to feel as though they are part of the solution.

#5 Deliver: operational excellence is expected and any failure will punished in a downgrading of the relationship. It’s tough but true.

Do these apply to the research buying world? I think so. Do agencies organise and deliver against these points? Sometimes. Is there hope for the future? Undoubtedly. Like so many businesses, organising around customers is easy to say and hard, but not impossible to do. It remains one of the richer ironies of the research world that, typically, the suppliers fail to practice what they preach.

Reflection #2: Account or Relationship Management is not a tick-box exercise. It requires a blend of skills and experience that is distinct from pure research roles. Few, if any, of the bigger firms deliver this service yet they are ideally placed to benefit from it and so leave the small/medium agencies with a clear opportunity to differentiate through superior client relationships.

Reflections #1: Physician, Heal Thyself

2009-03-30T10:38:00.009+01:00

In this first part of the Reflections series the author considers the age old divide between clients and agencies and identifies a fundamental challenge for both to tackle.

After five years running a market research team in a bank I am left with a number of very clear impressions about the nature of market research as a discipline, as an industry and as part of the business decision-making landscape. However, the strongest impression is of a house that is divided against itself. On one side sit the clients, of whom I was a vocal and energetic member, and on the other side sit the agencies.

Of course, our relationships with agencies were complex. But only complex in the way that any relationship is complex being based on that intangible magic that comes from personalities making connections. However throughout my time I found it generally held to be true that agencies and clients regarded each other with respectful distrust. We both needed the other and yet both sides thought the other to be delivering less than was wanted, needed or expected.

I began to learn and absorb the client-side view that agencies set the bar unrealistically high and consistently failed to deliver the insight – one of the most hateful words of my time in this business – they so clearly, achingly wanted to deliver. These were purveyors of eureka moments that usually came up with a ho-hum moment. “Tell me something I don’t know” is a much repeated, all too painful phrase that echoes around Executive offices.

Agencies would respond by saying that they needed to be closer to the strategic ebb and flow of client debate; so we introduced them to sponsoring Executives who explained all. We were told they needed to be engaged earlier in projects; so we changed our commissioning process to include pre-brief briefings and micro-proposals. We were told that they could really deliver value in Executive discussions not huge presentations; so we arranged these with the senior management teams.

And yet, and yet….for all that we listened and changed we, as clients, never really cracked it. We never got to the point where we felt the agencies were delivering what they wanted or were capable of. This was, of course, intensely frustrating, for everyone.

Towards the end of my time I began to think less and less about agencies that ‘failed’ to deliver what a client wanted – it’s too easy a target and too well worn a complaint – and started to think about the role and behaviour of the client. And a different possibility presents itself, perhaps, that clients of market research get the research they deserve. That old programming acronym, GIGO or Garbage In Garbage Out, is perfect for describing the situation.

Over the years I saw briefs that were embarrassingly bad, objectives that simply weren’t, deliverables that were confusing and project management that was no more than traffic direction. There are plenty of reasons, some of them understandable, for this but whatever they are it is hard to accept that clients and client-side research teams are entirely without fault in the client/agency debate.

Agencies of all sizes, creeds and persuasions are bound by not only a vocational ethic but also a clearly stated set of rules and regulations, the MRS Code of Conduct. Together these create a framework for behaviour and professional rigour that underpins the supply side. What underpins the buyer side? What ‘Code of Conduct’ exists to describe and support the process of commissioning millions of pounds of strategically important and tactically essential business decision support?

For all that we clients have moaned about the lack of client focus within the MRS it has given us spectacular freedom to do what we want with no governance, either formal or peer-group, to provide professional oversight. We have no accreditation, no agreed process, no requirement to be part of a professional body, no CPD. In short we are free to do as we wish. It’s a wonder that agencies manage to cope with us at all.

So what might be the foundations of such a Client Code of Conduct? Here are five points that work for me.

1. Research is a valuable resource; do not abuse it, it is not ‘disposable’.
2. Agencies have businesses to run. Take time to understand this.
3. Educate and communicate internally, continually; from the top down.
4. Always provide clear briefs that reflect the scale and nature of the job.
5. Complete and publish your MRS/AURA accreditation (should it ever exist).

If I had to pick only one of these then it would be Educate & Communicate. By far and away my biggest single surprise and disappointment on the client-side has been the lack of Senior Executive understanding of the existence, nature and potential of customer and market research and most importantly how it can be used effectively in the business decision making process.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many MBAs are on the Board, how often the term ‘customer focus’ is wheeled out by a firm or how often a fad, system or paradigm shift is proclaimed that ‘puts the customer at the heart of our business delivery’ market research seems to remain an afterthought, a curiosity or something that other people do. This needs to change, this is the challenge that the client-side researcher owns but everyone shares.

Reflection #1: client research teams need to take responsibility for ensuring that their own Senior Executives understand what research is and how it should be used. This will lead to better internal project definition and briefing then, in turn, better briefings for agencies. Not surprisingly the better will be the outcome for all.

The author spent 5 years in B2B building, managing and leading a market research unit in one of the UK’s larger banks. A professional marketer rather than a professional researcher he has none-the-less paid his dues as a mystery shopper, telephone interviewer and group moderator and has enjoyed (sic) writing discussion guides, DP specs and code frames. He does not expect this or any future article to please everyone.