My Next Big Idea

‘If there’s an original thought out there, I could do with it right now.’ Bob Dylan, Brownsville Girl

In 1997, UK public relations firm August One Communications gave all employees an allocation of days off work that could be taken for no reason. They were known as ‘Duvet Days’. I heard about them when I was working in the marketing department of a cable company and our ad agency was in for a meeting. One of their team couldn’t attend and it was put down to them taking a ‘duvet day’. Being extremely proficient in the sleeping department, I think that moment very nearly persuaded me to go work in a hip creative agency. However, over the years I have thought about those ‘duvet days’ and wondered how many great ideas came from those pressure free days just lolling about.

Who needs a good idea anyway? Can’t businesses do just fine doing what they have always done? Probably not, and here’s why. Since time immemorial the lifeblood of a business has been its market. The market is populated by customers with needs, and the business seeks to fulfil those needs. The fulfilment of need is underscored by a value exchange: the business provides goods or services and the customer generally parts with money. However, the market is not just populated by customers, it’s also the domain of competition which is great for customers (as it provides choice and keeps prices keen), but not so great for business who would far prefer to dictate the terms of the customer interaction. So, the question for most businesses (unless you happen to be a water company or a rail franchise holder) is ‘how on earth do I constantly provide more value to my customers than the competition?’ in order to avoid becoming obsolete. Well, at the risk of over-simplifying, you’d better hope you don’t run out of seriously good ideas..

If you accept this basic premise, then let’s unpeel the onion a little more and explore where those ideas might come from - under that duvet perhaps? But first, a brief side note, to shore up support for the theory that good ideas are really worth pursuing.

If you work in a large enterprise then the concept of corporate mortality is probably not something you spend much time pondering unless of course you worked at Blackberry (see our story: ‘Will You Miss Me’, April 3, 2023), Nortel, PanAm, Toys R Us, Compaq, Blockbuster, Comet, Phones4U, Thomas Cook.. Considering the aforementioned, perhaps you should, because if you look at the research (McKinsey’s famous 2014 study on corporate longevity), the facts are alarming: in 1958 the average lifespan of the S&P 500 was 61 years, at present it is around 18 years.. Now of course it is overly simplistic (and not the point of this article) to suggest that good ideas will exclusively prevent companies going to the wall. The point is rather to say that survival is far from guaranteed and to stand some chance of lasting longer than 20 years then you had better make sure that your organisational capacity to ideate, adapt & compete is well oiled.

With McKinsey’s rather sobering research leaving an unpleasant taste in the mouth, we should redouble our efforts to understand where good ideas come from, because (until you read the research), it feels like they simply come out-of-the-blue. Disappointingly, those ‘a-ha’ or ‘eureka’ moments tend not to have fabulous mystical origins, rather their roots are in neuroscience and our own daily physical rhythms. But before we dive into the science, stop and think when you last had a ‘good’ idea - where were you and what were you doing at the time? I’ve been keeping a log of mine recently, largely because it is now beyond debate that my best ideas rarely come to me when I’m sat in my office in front of my laptop. In no particular order my new ideas have come to me whilst driving, washing the dishes, pruning the fruit trees, repairing the chicken coop, painting my son’s bedroom, brushing my teeth and walking the dog. Broadly speaking then, these are solitary times when I am distracted from the day-to-day running of the business and immersed in something that is either repetitive, outside of my work environment or deeply relaxing. Dog walking probably comes out on top with pruning the fruit trees a decent ‘runner up’. As the owner of a young Airedale Terrier, I tend not to include Monty in the pleasures of maintaining espaliers as there would be far less time for those good ideas to come forward.

As I considered them, it seemed that there was a bit of a pattern surrounding those idea-producing-activities. All of them seemed to allow me to subconsciously ‘process’ complex issues without realising it. Indeed the research and the science says that this is absolutely what is happening. Incidentally, it has been proven that creativity is not a skill exclusive to certain personality types - it can be influenced by both situation and context in a phenomenon known as Psychological Distance (studies carried out by: Lile Jia, Edward R. Hirta and Samuel C. Karpena of Indiana University and covered in this story in Scientific American by Oren Shapira & Nira Liberman). Essentially the research shows that creative ideation can be improved by distancing people from the problem that they are trying to solve - asking, for example, ‘how might Elon Musk solve this problem?’ By taking a different perspective, people are freed from their own perceived limitations or professional ‘can’t do’ biases, coming up with hitherto unimagined ideas.

Now let’s get back to why we have our best ideas when we are invariably somewhere other than work. Let’s assume that you have been wracking your brain, wrestling with a particularly challenging business issue. You're sat there in your office, staring at the wall or your computer screen, going through a myriad of fuzzy permutations for a possible solution and frankly not much is coming back, by way of good ideas. You call it a day, close down your laptop and hit the road home. Once home, there are few things that need doing and judging by the tail-wagging, it looks like the dog needs a walk. Half-way round your favourite walk and Bingo! a thought pops into your head and you’ve had an idea how to fix that problem. Why on earth didn’t it occur to you earlier?

Well, several neuroscientists (Shelley H. Carson, Alice Flaherty, Mark Fenske and others) explain that activities such as walking, or taking a shower, or yes, pruning fruit trees satisfy some key physiological conditions that are good for creative ideation. Getting out of that ‘work environment’ or changing the scenery to a place that is contextually different gives you psychological distance from your problem. This, in turn, allows you to consider different alternatives (usually subconsciously). Furthermore, engaging in a relaxing activity that is removed from your usual environment provides you with 2 key conditions to stimulate creativity. Firstly, relaxing activity (such as walking) stimulates the production of dopamine (a chemical linked to creativity) and secondly these activities allow our brain to be distracted. Distraction is an important part of the creative process as it both counterbalances the effect of dopamine (which in excess can actually hinder creativity), whilst providing space for what has been termed ‘an incubation period’ in which the ideas, that have been produced in our subconscious mind, are able to manifest themselves in our conscious minds - giving rise to the expression, ‘an idea popped into my head’.

Why engaging in relaxing, mindful activity allows us to be creative is a vast area of complex neuroscience and, without wishing in any way to do the work of incredible academics a disservice, the research in part aims to prove what we have instinctively known for millennia: that some activity is particularly good at giving rise to the odd great idea. In fact, the evidence that activity such as walking is good for our creativity can be traced back as far as Aristotle who founded his school of philosophy in 355BC. Aristotle’s school became known as the Peripatos because of its peripatoi (covered walkways) along which Aristotle lectured his students whilst walking. Over the course of history, many other famous names have extolled the virtues of walking as a catalyst for great ideas and creativity, from Nikola Tesla and Ernest Hemingway to Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs - even the miserable genius Nietzsche said, ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.’

In bringing this fascinating topic to a close let’s go back to duvet days because even though they are not exactly linked to creativity, they serve a similar purpose: they aim to address issues that are seemingly tricky to resolve, like employee energy, motivation and sense of worth. So, in a simple, grown up and brilliant way they acknowledge that we are not robots and every so often we need to get off the hamster wheel in order to recharge our batteries. In the same vein we have seen that corporate mortality rates have dropped from 61 to under 20 years driven by less stable markets, increased technological disruption and global competition. If enterprises are to do more than just survive, they need an ideating workforce that can create value and drive growth more than ever. On that basis, it might just be time to insist, that every so often, all employees are sent out on a jolly good walk.

Acknowledgements and Further Reading:

dr shelley h. carson, harvard psychology dept. associate, author ‘your creative brain’

dr alice flaherty, joint associate professor of neurology & psychiatry, harvard medical school, author

mark fenske, university of guelph, cognitive neuroscientist & professor, dept. of psychology, author

jia lile, national university of singapore, associate professor & director of the situated goal pursuit lab

———

nicole dean: Stepping Up Your Creativity: Walking, Meditation, and the Creative Brain » Brain World (brainworldmagazine.com)

Alan Henry: Why Great Ideas Always Come In the Shower (and How to Harness Them), life hacker

ian davis: reflections on corporate longevity, mckinsey

nira liberman & oren shapira: an easy way to increase creativity, scientific american

Dream Teams

Let’s face it. We live in the age of ‘me’. There’s not a single good example of how ‘me’ made more of an impact than ‘we’ in civilisation. Now don’t get me wrong, I am in no way diminishing the role of inspirational leaders but I’m pretty sure every inspirational leader would say that it was the team that ultimately delivered. It’s that sense of selflessness that made them inspirational in the first place.

In a sense, this piece will talk about great teams and inspirational leadership, as both are intrinsically linked. The fact that I am posting this on LinkedIn - the world’s greatest business platform for the celebration of ‘I’ - is something I will address separately. In my defence, as part of this article, I aim to give credit to some of the great teams and leaders I have been fortunate enough to work with.

Ok. To the matter in hand. Back in 1994 I joined a fledgling organisation running out of an inordinately large, glass-fronted, building in Guildford next to Colgate Palmolive. This company was called CableTel and within 6 years would become Virgin Media. At the time CableTel was run by a tight, predominantly American, Management Team that had spotted an opportunity to launch triple play services in the UK market. Within a month of working with them, I realised this team had one singular ambition - to take the fight to BT and Sky. That sounded like fun - the David in me thought those two Goliaths had had it their way for too long. At the helm of the Management Team was a young, approachable and insanely smart ex-Harvard grad called J. Barclay Knapp. Barclay had a list of 10 rules. Unfortunately, I have lost the list, but I do remember one rule and it was this; ‘Deliver the bad news - the good news can wait’. Barclay was the kind of CEO who, at 8.30pm at night would come out of his office, sit down next to you, order a couple of pizzas and start proof reading the latest marketing collateral with you. I thought JBK was ‘the’ man - I absolutely put him on a pedestal.

In those early days I doubt there were more than 30 people in the company. Outside of the Management Team most of us were in our mid to late 20s. We were marketing juniors, PA’s, network designers etc. Our jobs were to do pretty much whatever was needed. We worked long hours and we had a LOT of fun. Frankly, we didn’t even know what we weren’t necessarily capable of.

On one occasion, I guess around June time, I was invited to a board meeting - as were my two pals, Sarah and Wendy, who were PAs to the Director of Marketing and the CEO respectively. We were giving a progress update on uniforms for the network installers and the livery design for the network installer’s vans. After a while the agenda moved on to the director’s holiday schedules. It became clear that pretty much the whole Management Team would be on holiday at the same time. One by one, the directors offered to change their dates. What happened next is something that I will never forget. Barclay stepped in and said, ‘Folks, there’s no need to change your holiday plans. If any of you think that this company will stop just because you are not here, then you need to have a rethink. Besides, Sarah, Wendy and Jim can run things.’ I was 25. I never felt so empowered and euphoric in my life. Over the course of 6 years I worked with some truly outstanding people and the experience changed my life.

CableTel was full of great teams and young leaders. It was the kind of place where no matter how young you were or what your background was, if you showed ability you were given as much rope as you needed (to hang yourself with). I saw a PA go on to run major construction projects, I saw a Glaswegian call centre agent go on to become Operations Director - both were not even 30. At 27 I had a £1.5M budget and was running Direct Marketing in the consumer team - working for another inspirational manager - John Aarons. John didn’t run the marketing team, John ran the marketing FAMILY. John was kind, hugely experienced, passionate and trusting. When John announced he was moving on to be Brand Director at Cable & Wireless the team was devastated. We would’ve run off a cliff for John Aarons. That was the kind of loyalty that leaders at CableTel inspired.

I think CableTel’s rocketship ride to success is an interesting case study. Think about it - within 6 years this company was a household name across many parts of the UK and was a serious threat to the two encumbents. Yes, ultimately there were bumps - Chapter 11 was a low point - but ultimately Virgin Media is what it is now because of CableTel.

Beyond great teamwork and inspirational leadership though, what was at the essence of CableTel’s success? It is my firm belief that the company’s leadership understood that EVERYONE would benefit by working towards the vision. In short, gold-plated careers were built on the success of teamwork. At CableTel, political skulduggery was replaced by selfless investment in teams. The hiring mantra at CableTel was to ‘employ people that were smarter than you’. I’d say that was robustly delivered - one of my former colleagues is now CEO Google Fibre and another Deputy CEO of the Prince’s Trust.

Eventually I moved on and, to my acute shock, I became aware that not all companies were like my alma mater. I confess, for a few years, I struggled to come to terms with the fact that some companies thrived on ‘I’ much more than ‘we’. I will also confess that I found it hard to accept this alternative reality. For a few years I railed against the idea that a career could be built more on political guile than value contributed. My years in business have not dented my profound belief in teams and inspiring leadership, however, I recognise that political prowess can be a positive force - especially when used to smooth the way so a team can perform. I remain fairly damning about those who exclusively use political skill to further a career.

There are 3 important reasons why great teams and inspiring leaders are critical to organisational success. Firstly, all companies move. Ideally, companies move in unison towards a single focus point which, for convenience, we shall term the ‘vision’. Visions, by their nature, can be rather abstract and must be clearly communicated and in a way that provides meaning and motivation. Inspirational leaders must take this singular vision and explain how their teams should contribute to its attainment. They must bring the vision to life in a way that has meaning and purpose. Inspirational leaders must engender a sense of loyalty and resilience to carry a team through those tough moments. Finally, a great team, unified by inspirational leadership, will work collectively to deliver on key milestones. It will pick up its team-mates during times of difficulty, knowing that they would not hesitate to do the same.

What is the enduring lesson that I learnt from my time at CableTel? In many ways it is this: leaders who inspire loyalty and passion can build teams that will walk over hot coals for them and, ultimately, the company. Teams like this really can move mountains.

Some of the CableTel Dream Team:

Barclay Knapp, Marv Steigman, John Aarons, Dinni Jain, Tom & Alfredo Della Rocco, Ian Jeffers, Alan Hindley, George Krieg, Robert MacKenzie, Terry Ryan, Wendy Fry, Sarah Binder, Caroline Rothwell, Hamid Heidary, Tony Ross, Greg Melly, Tara (nee’ Markwick) Paonessa, Steve Wagner, Miguel Milano, Christina Dinsmore Weguelin, John Edwards, Simon Hunt, AP and many many others…

Independent Thinker?

If you’ve been working in the same company for over 3 years have you ever wondered if your capacity for independent thinking has been reined in? In the course of my career I estimate that I have spent around 23 years working in major corporates. I honestly didn’t realise that this had had much of an effect on me. Until I left that is.

A month into setting up Perspective Matters I realised that I spoke ‘differently’. My tone and the language I used was, by other people’s standards, very ‘corporate’. Not considering myself to be a typical corporate guy, I confess I woke up to this reality with a degree of irritation and dismay. It was rather ironic as former colleagues used to describe me as ‘the least corporate guy they’d ever worked with’.

I had become the product of corporate culture. I consciously realised that I needed to ‘de-corporatise’ in order to thrive on the ‘outside’. One of primary benefits that you bring as an external consultant is the value of seeing problems through a clear lens. That lens cannot function effectively when it is geared towards a particular mindset or mode of thinking. Strong corporate cultures provide a range of wonderful benefits but the downside is, they can also lead to, a herd mentality manifested as thinking or behaving in a certain way.

Large organisations with strong cultural identities, are, in essence, like enormous sheep dips. The longer you work there, the more you are thoroughly dipped. Before too long the process starts to rub off on you. Putting employees through this seemingly invisible process - when the culture is in balance - can create a workforce with fabulous attributes: motivation, passion, resilience, togetherness. However, when cultures have elements that are out of balance, organisations can suffer the consequences of unintended and undesirable behaviours. Take, for example, a culture overly pivoted to, say, ‘winning’. All businesses want to win, it’s what makes business meaningful. Equally though, there are examples of companies whose desire to win has been overtaken by intolerance to failure. This over-rotation can create a culture that stifles creativity and suppresses independent thinking. These cultures can breed teams that prefer to stay safe - not daring to go off-piste with new suggestions - or blindly treading the party line.

In these types of organisations, the reluctance to ‘speak up’ can often mean that poor decisions are not subject to the scrutiny of the ‘alternative voice’. It can mean a predisposition to do things ‘the way they have always been done’ over a willingness to ‘try something new’. These cultures can be like the emperor’s new clothes, where employees can feel so intimidated they suppress or ignore what good sense is telling them. The consequences of placatory engagement can lead to shaky plans and strategies that are faithfully executed with either poor returns or unintended consequences.

There is a lesson here for both employees and leaders. At the heart of it individuals must have the courage and confidence to communicate either concerns or, great new ideas. Equally, leaders must get comfortable with views that might not be their own and should not view questionning as rebellion, but as an opportunity to explore other ways of doing things. Companies that manage to create a safe environment for transparency have better mechanisms for avoiding poor decisions and have a greater ability to innovate because they manage to sweat the intellectual capital of their workforce.

Cultures that do not demand and embrace independent thinking risk a variety of outcomes that range from underperformance to bankruptcy (either voluntary or as a result of more serious circumstances) - think of Blackberry, Pan Am, Toys R Us and Blockbuster Video to name but a few. All were well established businesses that failed to mitigate competitive threats by exploring new ideas. All believed that their past successes would ensure longevity. Whatever your view on the reasons for their failure, it is hard to argue that their demise was inevitable.

Looking now from the ‘outside - in’, I have learnt a few things. The first is that corporate culture has a direct impact on business success (or failure), the second is that the impact of culture is inevitable (for good or bad) and, as a consequence, the third must endorse the value of an independent perspective. I have also learnt that if you leave corporate life to start your own business, recognise that you may well need to undergo a period of ‘de-corporatisation’ before you can view situations through a clear lens.

Whatever type of culture you find yourself in, my advice is to try your best to maintain an independent perspective, seek out differing opinions and have the courage to put forward new ideas when those on the table raise more questions than answers. If you find it hard to break free from any ‘herding’ mindset, then consciously shift your viewpoint to see things through the eyes of your customer. If, after all that, you are still struggling for clarity, then seriously think about getting in a consultant to help you navigate.

For further reading: https://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/the-law-of-the-emperors-wardrobe/

Patience. The Greatest Virtue?

If I have learnt anything at all over the last 30 years of being in business it is this: progress always takes longer than you anticipated.

Why is it that we are so damned impatient? There are most likely a couple of reasons. Probably the first is that we humans are inherently hopeful. We want to believe that our actions have the results that will fulfil our ambitions. We tend to be broadly optimistic. The second is that increasingly we live in an age of high expectation that has become exaggerated due to, what we perceive to be, positive experiences with technology. We’ve all listened to Simon Sinek’s brilliant explanation of what hooks us on social media. Write a post, then wait for the ‘likes’ to get a dopamine hit masked as an instant sense of approval. Through a combination of our own natural tendencies and technology that plays to our weaknesses, we have become inherently impatient. Read on, I’ll make a point in a second.

The issue is that we humans only have one set of core personal characteristics. We do not have the ability to partition our pyschological hard-drives - one for work, one for our personal lives. Our base instincts, formed from our experiences over thousands of years of hunting and gathering, form the rule book for our core guidance systems: the enteric gut brain, the vagus nerve, the amygdala and so on. These are the ancient systems that come to work with us every day and frame our behaviours.

OK. So we humans are the way we are - optimistic pleasure seekers doing what we do with as little effort as possible in order to survive. Set this against the backdrop of what often constitutes corporate success (profitable growth at speed) and it is little wonder that many businesses make decisions geared towards brittle, short-term gains to the detriment of more robust but longer term success. It is one reason why many companies use strategy as wall paper rather than a foundation.

In many ways developing and executing a robust strategy is an esoteric battle against impatience. Strategy’s purpose is to design a long term framework to guide a business towards a measurable vision of success. It is, by nature a complex process that needs to carefully consider, parry and act upon a vast array of moving parts - some known and some that can be reasonably anticipated. Once conceived, it takes time to implement and execute and it is this timeframe that can be rather unpopular. Our underlying human nature often pushes us towards fast decisions that return short-lived gains. In essence, quick decisions (whilst sometimes necessary), can sometimes translate as 2 steps forward and 3 steps back bringing rise to a raft of recuperative measures that distract us further from steady, yet solid, progress.

Senior management must have the courage to rebut the temptations of short-termism in exchange for a quick buck, by appraising themselves of the hard facts and cautioning against the consequences of deviating from a well-considered strategic path. This dilemma is felt most acutely by sales leaders and management boards where the pressure to demonstrate constant progress is at its most extreme.

We would do well to remember the story of Icarus, who did not heed the advice of his father and in flying too close to the sun, fell to his death. It is hard to resist the lure of short-term gains, but faced with the consequences there is a very good reason that, in life as in business, patience is a virtue.

For further insights: https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior

Being Human.

You are what you eat and your company is your people. The first has always been true and the second has never been truer.

Two and a half months into the UK lockdown and we have seen millions of people working from home. During this period, and out of sheer consequence, people’s business lives and personal lives have been rudely forced into a state of inevitable co-habitation. For some companies that already have a well-developed approach to WFH, this quick unilateral shift will have been less disruptive. For others, it will have thrown up numerous challenges. Why some have adapted better than others relates more to the influence corporate culture has on a favoured management style than much else.

Historically, many businesses will have adopted the ‘conference’ call as part of their day-to-day toolkit. With the abrupt end of face-to-face meetings and heavily restricted travel, interaction is now conducted virtually from locations as salubrious as the dining room table next to a pile of washing, a sleeping cat, a home-schooling teen or a woofing dog. Tolerance and flexibility are a must. ‘Voice-only’ conference calls were wonderfully equitable, but the almost mandatory inclusion of video has introduced a WFH playing field that is, unsurprisingly, far from level. Personal circumstance means that whilst some may retire to a quiet, readymade, home office, others will do their best, camped out at the kitchen table with the cat.

Tolerance and flexibility are not just ‘nice-to-haves’ - they have become essential elements in the virtual management tool-kit. Take, for example, your standard weekly team meeting or team call. Depending on the personal style of the manager in question, it could well be that prior to the lockdown restrictions being in place, interactions were strictly ‘business’ focussed with little time spent circulating through the team with enquiries relating to how individuals were ‘doing’. Asking how the family was, or whether they were ‘coping’, might have been short, snappy, exchanges - serving more as largely meaningless preambles to the pressing business priorities at hand. As the business and personal lives of employees collided it became swiftly apparent that in order to manage business success it would be vital to understand the new, additional stresses that employees were having to deal with alongside their work commitments. You don’t need to do much research to know intuitively that stressed employees perform far worse than those that aren’t. More empathetic managers have quickly recalibrated their focus on employee well-being, ensuring that they take time to understand employees circumstances within the wider and more holistic approach to driving performance. It is quite simply a fact that employees, who feel they can be truly transparent and have the support from their managers, are happier and more motivated than those who feel emotionally vulnerable.

From this perspective the question arises whether, post Covid-19, a more ‘human’ style of management will remain. Let’s take a likely scenario and assess whether it might. To do this we have to take a view on a few assumptions. The first is that some form of social distancing is, in the absence of a vaccine, likely to be a feature of physical office life for the foreseeable future. That is not ideal, as socially distanced office environments present a gamut of logistical challenges, many of which come with new costs. Masks may need to be supplied and most likely refreshed on a daily basis. Work surfaces and office equipment will need to be regularly disinfected. Rightly or wrongly staff lavatories might be perceived to be particularly problematic. In contrast to the challenges of creating effective socially distanced offices, there will be many aspects of WFH that will have proved financially beneficial and so are likely to remain. Certainly there are short-term financial benefits for many employees. In the longer term there might be financial benefits for companies too as they evaluate how they can reduce costs associated with under-utilised office space. Whatever balance is struck between coming to the office or WFH one thing is clear: there will be a move to a much more home-based workforce. Even when the pandemic is over the die will have been cast for a new way of working. It must be one that is is flexible enough to accommodate the realities of working from home, be it an enthusiastic 3 year old waving a toy bunny in front of your webcam, Amazon appearing at the door with a delivery of clothes pegs, the dog barking just at the point you’re due to come off mute or your connection to the video call dropping because you had a power cut. Managers will have to accept the reality that when business and personal lives are forced to co-habit it is better to accommodate these changes than expend negative energy fighting them.

It is hopefully a real benefit that, because of Covid-19, employees are now much more likely to see their colleagues through a lens that is less monochrome. I think it is very probable that we will see the necessary rise of the ‘empathetic’ manager as one who can deliver success from teams that are more virtually connected. We are, after all, human beings not robots.

Further reading: https://www.forbes.com/sites/deloitte/2020/11/23/leading-the-enlightened-workforce-in-the-next-normal/?

Necessity. The Mother of Invention.

There is no greater influence on invention (or innovation) than necessity, and now, globally most businesses be they sole traders, small family run companies or international conglomerates face a time of necessity. Why is this? If you are reading this at the start of April 2020 the context of this story will not surprise you. The reason for this need to invent is the global coronavirus pandemic. Not since WWII has anything so dramatically changed our working lives. Almost certainly, every single business will have had to ‘get inventive’ either due to governmental regulations around working practice or simply a heavily reduced workforce. Right now necessity is in abundance.

So why do we need a crisis to inspire us to invent? It is probably due to own survival instincts. Normally, when business is stable our working corporate culture contains, to a significant degree, an inherent lack of desire to disrupt the status quo. It is an unfortunate trend that we remain reluctant to act with urgency even when business performance is ‘ok’. The problem is largely that no company really suffered truly dire consequences (ie. bankruptcy, insolvency, takeover, massive headcount reductions etc) when things were ‘ok’. When things are ok, you get by, you cut a cost here, a cost there, reduce international travel but everyone still gets paid. ‘OK’ does not come tagged with a sense of urgency. To understand this in greater detail you will have to wait for a forthcoming post on how you build a culture where ‘ok’ is classified as a crisis.

Why then, when a true crisis erupts, do we invent? It is, as I stated in the previous paragraph, down to our own sense of survival. If a crisis is such that it directly threatens your income (and it is that income that pays for the roof over your head), then you will find that such a sobering reality forces you to invent and invent very very fast. You only have to look at how business all over the world are inventing new ways to survive. Let me give you a few examples. Take what I would call recreational leisure and past-times. My wife is a yoga instructor and has, for the past 20 years, run a highly successful yoga business on the Berks/Oxon borders. She runs day-time and evening classes, a few specialised one-to-ones and some retreats. All her classes are taught face-to-face. It was obvious to her that soon all her venues would close and that social distancing would make ‘normal’ classes impossible. Before I go on, let me explain where necessity fits into this story.

We had already set an objective for her business, last year, that she would deliver some online classes. Well, my wife is also a full-time mum, as well as a sole trader, so perhaps it is no surprise that she finished last year with this objective outstanding. Roll-on two months into 2020 and the threat from coronavirus was imminent. Necessity was there, front and centre, in the starring role and nothing was more important than immediately working out how to move classes on-line. Her business, was already fully-enabled for e-commerce, online payment and automated bookings so the next step was to knit this together with a live-streaming solution. Now, I should tell you that my wife is the least technical person I know - ctrl c for ‘copy’ is still lost on her for example…I can also tell you that within 3 days my wife had invested in a video conferencing business account, resolved all sound and picture quality issues, had effectively communicated to her customer base her new proposition - all accompanied by a fully automated solution that made bookings, took payments and sent emails with joining instructions. Impressive huh? I’d say so. Within a week she had someone join her class from LA International Airport about to join a repatriation flight and someone under lock-down in Hong Kong. Frank Zappa would’ve been proud.

I’ve seen the same ferocious invention in other small businesses, my sons guitar classes now all online, high-end catering companies that are now applying their skills to the elderly and shipping huge volumes of ready made meals, Dyson using their manufacturing to step into producing ventilators for the NHS and the list goes on. On a national scale, look at what the UK has achieved in the face of this crisis. In less than 2 weeks London’s ExCel centre was transformed into a 4000 bed hospital called ‘NHS Nightingale’. It seems like there’s nothing quite like a crisis to help you understand what red-tape and process you need to help you make a good decision… Not much. Nothing helps you to understand what matters most quite like a crisis.

And that is why necessity is the mother of invention. Thanks for the toilet roll Frank.

PS. If you are in need of some yoga to get you and your staff through this period of crisis, feel free to sign up to Beth’s online yoga classes at: https://www.beyoga.co.uk/online-classes/

The C-Suite and Why They Matter

Everyone talks about the C-Suite or the CxO. In fact engagement with the C-Suite is bandied around sales meetings and conference calls to such an extent that much of the time talking about meeting with the CxO plays second fiddle to what you are actually going to talk to them about.

For many, even quite senior, Account Directors, the customer’s C-Suite is a strange enigma. Hard to reach, hard to interest, hard to secure regular follow up and hard to read. In fact the C-Suite are just plain hard - full-stop. But in reality, it’s only hard to engage them if you don’t take time to see their perspective or understand what matters to them. Do that and most people realise that the C-Suite are a pretty straightforward bunch - especially considering they carry the weight of the world (I mean shareholders) on their shoulders.

So, just why do the C-Suite matter so much to sales anyway? The truth is if you are selling pens, then they don’t matter much at all, on the other hand if you are selling solutions to highly complex business problems then getting the C-Suite on side can be a matter of whether you win or lose. The chances are that if you are selling a solution that genuinely solves a significant business challenge, saves a significant amount of money or better makes your customer a significant amount of money you will be touching your customer’s strategy. And if you are touching your customer’s strategy then you are in the realm of the C-Suite, because that’s what they care about. On this basis, if your competition is successfully explaining how their proposal neatly compliments their customer’s strategy then it is as likely as a dime to a dollar that they’ll be securing the support of the C-Suite when it comes to decision making time.

From years in business, my observations of how many CxO meetings were approached was often a bit like this. There were normally two contexts. Setting out the stall to drive the agenda for ‘strategic partnership’ or trying to win last minute support for a highly competitive slug of business. Of course both are important reasons for meeting with any member of the C-Suite - no issue with the rationale then. And yet, despite the strong intentions, few such meetings went as well as they could.

See if this sketch rings bells. After a seemingly endless sequence of mails a date is finally nailed in the CxO’s agenda. The meeting is 2 month’s into the future. The date is shared internally and the diaries of a couple of executives blocked. 2 weeks prior to the session a request is made for an agenda. This invariably catches most people off-guard and there then follows a further flurry of emails to knock out a headline agenda and quickly send it over to the executive assistant. The meeting is looming now, so a cross functional team is pulled together generally involving the account director, a raft of subject matter experts who will pull together the material relating to the latest and greatest in their portfolios and 2 conference calls and 140 slides later most of the team think they’re ready.

It’s at that point, with 4 days to go, that one of the nominated executives can’t attend. There’s a conflict, but not to worry, the VP of product development will stand in - they know the material ‘intimately’. Not ideal, but ok. This VP reviews the material and changes a few slides, but unfortunately, he can’t attend the final review call as he’s travelling for the next few days. The 3rd and final call is attended by a senior director who has been asked to attend by the other attending executive who is wrapped up in a town hall. This director, who’s not attending the meeting with the CxO, innocently asks why there are 140 slides for a 90 minute session. Knowing that the meeting is with the CxO and maximum one other, he then asks how many people are attending the meeting. Apparently there are 4 ‘must attend’ subject matter experts, 1 executive (his boss) and a stand-in for the other executive who can’t now go. This call does not go well and the Account Director works late into the night to tie up loose threads in a fit of mild panic. Perhaps it won’t be so bad, everyone is meeting in Starbucks to align 45 minutes before the session tomorrow.

Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. The difference between this and a stellar outcome? Understanding what really drives the C-Suite and then early and effective planning.

The Holy Trinity. What 3 things matter to you?

Over the years I have been fortunate enough to work for some great people and some great leaders. When I moved into consultancy during my time at Nokia, I worked for a divisional Vice President. Now, I was never one for deference in corporate hierarchies, I was respectful of course, but before I was prepared to really ‘rate’ a manager they needed to prove their worth. I mean, managers expect it of their staff, so why not the other way around?

As I bedded into my new role, having just come out of nearly 12 years of senior sales leadership roles on an account generating close to a billion euros per year, I realised both how much I knew and how little too. My manager, was older than me and had spent time in very senior roles in media, entertainment and consultancy and frankly was a stickler for focus and discipline. Rightly so. Every two weeks we would have a one-to-one call - just 30 mins if I was lucky - and during these calls we would discuss high-lights, low-lights and key activities for the coming weeks ahead. Eager to show activity and progress I would join the calls with a ready prepared list of everything I was working on. I was a hard worker and in my mind nothing gave me more comfort than a packed activity schedule. The last thing I wanted my new manager to think was I was spending my time twiddling my fingers.

About 3 months into my new role, we were on our usual bi-weekly and I was reeling off my expansive activity and project list. I was pretty determined to cover all the bases and the various opportunities I had uncovered - after all I had worked like a Trojan in those first 3 months to get off to a flying start. After a while and most likely mid-sentence - he was Dutch - he stopped me. ‘Jim’, he said, ‘these are admirable and worthy activities but how are you going to deliver them all?’. He waited for my response and I sat there on the call slightly nonplussed. Assuming he wanted the background thinking on how I would do all that I had reeled off, I started explaining my plan for execution. After a couple of minutes the insanity of what I was proposing dealt me a depressing sucker punch. It was, if you like, a complete reality check. I stopped, conscious by now of how daft my plan for success seemed.

After a moment’s silence, he said this me: ‘Jim, I would like you to think about the 3 activities on your list that you consider most vital to the businesses success. Take a few days to think about it. I do not want a list of 3 before the end of the day. In fact, if you send it to me by the end of the day, it will be wrong. Think about it please and put some time in my diary for early next week.’ We closed the call and dutifully I began to do what he said. I finished my first list of 3 in 10 minutes. I knew something was wrong.

I sat there and thought about each item in turn, then returned to my original list. I started to assess which of my projects would indeed add most value to the business and which were most feasible in terms of execution. It was not as easy as I had originally thought. I revised the list based on ‘business impact’ and over the next 48 hours reassessed the list based on further thought and analysis. Eventually, satisfied, I put time in my managers diary for a follow-up.

When my boss joined the call he asked me how I had got on, whether I had identified a suitable list of 3 and how I had approached the task. Listening to my recommendations and approach he seemed satisfied. Then he said to me, ‘OK Jim. That seems reasonable. Now all I want you to do now is execute those 3 and make them a real success. That might take you some time, but let’s review where you stand in a month or so.’

Over the course of the next few weeks I applied myself to executing. I quickly realised how much work was involved in executing them successfully and that any more than 3 projects would have been utterly unfeasible. Eventually, some months later my projects were up and running and gaining significant traction throughout the organisation.

Focusing on only 3 things was the best advice I ever received in my career.

What if? Wake up to scenario planning.

I have long been a noisy advocate of the prudence of seriously working through ‘what if’ scenarios. I have to say, being a noisy advocate doesn’t actually mean that anyone will listen. That’s because humans are pretty much allergic to change and because they are allergic to change, they are equally reluctant to contemplate any events (no matter how plausible) that are likely to create the need for change. It sometimes takes the unthinkable to happen to portray this reticence as sheer insanity. Many years ago now when I started working with my business associate Matt Leary, I was sitting in one of his sales training sessions and he said this, ‘If you can anticipate it, you can prepare for it’. I never forgot those words - how true they ring today.

Fast forward to where we find ourselves today - in the middle of a global pandemic which has literally imposed an entirely ‘new normal’. Everything is different. Offices shut. Planes grounded. Home-working - mandatory. Schools closed. Economy - mothballed. Face-to-face meetings? Forget it…

It would be a pretty reasonable response from anyone who said, ‘even if we did scenario planning there’s no way we could have imagined the coronavirus’. Sure, it’s a fair point. A global pandemic of this proportion seemed an unlikely prospect in January. Now, it’s happening…and we need to cope. More than cope though we need to adapt and we need to adapt fast. Right now the essence of business success is simply ‘staying in business’.

The harsh reality is that this is also a time in which future battles will be won and lost. Those that adapt fastest to these new conditions are almost certainly those who realise that now is a good time to steal a march on competition. So, now is the time to stop and assess what has changed, what is the impact and what new measures and procedures must be put in place to survive now and secure a fast exit out of the pits when danger has passed. This is why, if you missed your chance to scenario plan for a global pandemic knocking your business for six, you should urgently be planning for the next scenario. And what might this next scenario be I hear you ask?? Let me offer you a thought…

The coronavirus pandemic, as we have seen, forced the world to adopt new coping mechanisms, both in our lives at home and in the office. These new coping mechanisms have created new ways of working largely manifested as even greater reliance on the communications technology we use as part of our ‘interaction toolkit’. The extent of the Work From Home (WFH) mandate means that these new working practices will soon become embedded habits and this ‘new normal’ will quite soon become just ‘normal’. Profound danger awaits those who are waiting for everything to ‘return to normal’. Normal has gone and a new normal arrived and you can bet your bottom dollar that this new normal will, quite soon, just be the way you do things.

So, whatever you do over the next few weeks and months, make sure you take time to make scenario planning part of your normal business practice. It is much a much neglected discipline and it is hard and can be time consuming, but nothing can prepare you like anticipation. Think of it as an insurance policy - every month you begrudge the payment, but when you find that the improbable just happened, you’ll be jolly glad you were paying those premiums…

Market Forces. Nothing to do with me...

Everyone in sales wants to sell right? Sales though, is just the desired outcome of effective persuasion. Robert Cialdini, Emeritus Professor at Arizona State University wrote his seminal book ‘Influence’ on the role of the psychology of persuasion.

Having spent pretty much my entire career in a very technical industry I have seen first hand why traditional kit vendors excel at managing customers in the middle tiers of technology and operations - and why the consultants dominate the board room. To borrow from a political euphemism, ‘it’s the market stupid’.

If you work in telecoms, then think back to the early 90’s. Think back to the days of the first 2G networks and ask yourself which business disciplines made the mobile revolution happen - technology and operations. And for sure, we owed the technologists a lot over the subsequent 20 years. If you were in sales and didn’t know your 3G from a bacon sandwich then the chances were you wouldn’t have had much influence in a lot of meetings; but as Bob Dylan once famously sang, ‘the times they are a-changin’’. This is certainly true for winning sales engagement strategies in telecoms, although it sometimes does not feel like the industry has made much progress weaning itself off the ‘crack equivalent’ of techno-centric selling. The reasons for this reluctant change to business conversations are both blindingly obvious and understandable. Like ardent smokers who have all been told to quit, the telco vendor industry which has grown up on a diet of Moore’s law and erlangs, can’t quite accept that banging on about feeds and speeds is bad for sales success. Intuitively sales leadership knows it, but the shift to a different dialogue is much harder than it seemed. And shift it must.

But if you’re no longer going to bludgeon your customer exclusively with techno babble then are you prepared to develop a dialogue that firmly demonstrates how your solutions support your customer’s strategy? And do you really understand your customer’s business and what is driving it anyway? And I’m not talking about being able to reel off the headlines of their 4 strategic pillars. Oh, no. You’re going to have to do better than that…

And why the need for a change in dialogue anyway? You can take your chances and bet the farm on your technical advantage if you like, but you know the truth: every year selling gets harder and single digit growth doesn’t keep you in a job for ever.

Let’s take another look at how the telecoms industry has evolved over the last 20 years. It will shed some light on why sales approaches must change if winning is the objective. We’ll do a whistle-stop tour of the highs and the lows. 2G, phones the size of bricks carried around in suitcases by stockbrokers: mobile telecoms was a niche proposition for the wealthy built by geeks who wanted to see if they could. Most people were so mindblown you could make a phone call without wires that technologists were elevated to superstar status. When the subscriber numbers expanded beyond the ultra- rich to mere mortals, these same techies became gods. If your second language wasn’t in telecommunications engineering you didn’t exist. MBA? Forget it - this was the age of the PhD. Over the next 15 to 20 years technologists came to occupy the upper echelons of most mobile network operators and vendors alike and the accepted exchange between these parties was, yes, you guessed it - technological.

But change was coming. The stratospheric rise in subscriber numbers began to tail off and the industry founded on technical innovation was ironically under attack from technical innovation. Let’s just say that the FANGs were nipping at the profit margins and blood was being drawn. The mobile operators started to replace the senior technical vanguard with business executives with experience in adding up numbers, and other mystical measures like Net Promoter Scores (NPS), ARPU and NPV. Around the boardroom table, technology investment decisions became more and more rooted in what business the new tech would enable. The book of blank cheques for the fanciest mousetrap was looking decidedly skinny.

This issue became increasingly more extreme as the industry moved from 3G to 4G. Subscriber penetration levels were already anywhere between 90 and 110% and attracted to the early margins, competition between operators was fierce. This competition served to suppress profitability which started to stress the business model. An industry heavily addicted to the promises of ever greater speeds and universal coverage lurched forward through subsequent spectrum auctions and technology investments and before long many of the mobile operators were choking under mounting levels of crippling debt.

As I point out, the need to focus more on business and strategy was identified earlier by the mobile operators. The vendor community on the other hand was far slower to match this change of focus with different sales conversations. Of course it was not that good old tech conversations couldn’t happen anymore, it was just that these conversations took place lower down the organisation. As a consequence, vendor influence started to wane at the CxO level as increasingly their need for good strategic advice shifted to consultancies and those vendors able to ‘talk business’.

It didn’t need to be that way…and it’s still not too late for tech vendors to rebalance their customer conversations. But it is now quite a transformational process but get it right and significant advantage can be gained.

Fluffy Bunnies & Golfing Slackers

Having spent a decent proportion of my career in both sales and marketing I feel relatively well qualified to write this particular post. I don’t feel too bad about the title either as I’m sure someone has called me a fluffy bunny at some point although, I’d have to protest if I’d even been called a golfing slacker as I simply have no clue which end of a golf club is the business end. But I digress and so to the topic in hand which might equally be entitled:

‘Sales and marketing and never the twain shall meet (or think the other adds a shred of value)…’

Of course it’s a slight generalisation but not so much from my own experience. Read any decent management thinking on the roles of sales and marketing and most experts will tell you that these two essential functions are part of the same overall objective which is to drive revenues. There must be a million and one analogies for portraying how these two work together, but I like to think of it as a team of two working to break rocks. Marketing expertly positions the rock and sales bring down the sledge hammer. Hopefully the rock breaks and marketing doesn’t end up with its fingers in a splint. At least that’s the general idea.

Inevitably though, and in part due to the way marketing is often structured in big tech corporates, there are broken fingers and a lot of peripheral damage when the sledge hammer misses its target. The truth is that it’s rarely either party’s fault. The fluffy bunnies are generally the victims of ruthless cost-saving that manifests itself as ‘efficient centralisation’ and the golfing slackers…well, they probably perform a miracle everyday to deliver the numbers.

So, let’s deal with the first travesty and its implications. Centralisation of the marketing function. First of all let’s take a broad brush look at where ‘the numbers’ come from. In the telecommunications product and services space it’s pretty reasonable to look at the pareto principle, meaning that 80% of revenues come from 20% of the customer base. Next it’s worth taking a look at the tools that strategic accounts (and in particular those that are driving those big revenue streams) have at their finger tips. The tools that any ‘normal business’ would use to achieve ‘competitive advantage’, which is another way of saying being ‘strategically relevant’ to customers. Before we go on let’s get some perspective on these sales accounts. If we are talking about a global tier 1 vendor then we are most likely talking about an account that generates more revenue than a FTSE 250 company - in other words 100’s of millions. It would be strange to think of a company of this size without a dedicated marketing function supporting sales, yet this is pretty much the norm in major account sales structures.

Just to be completely accurate, it’s not that these ‘flagship’ strategic accounts don’t have access to marketing resource - because they do. The issue is rather how effective the marketing resource is when sales account teams tap into it. That already sounds damning, but it’s not really the fault of the individuals. When dedicated marketing support is removed from top strategic account teams and centralised, one simple thing happens:

Marketing becomes GENERIC

To the best of my knowledge you’d never find Seth Godin nor Philip Kotler flying the flag for vanilla marketing. These days, more ever than before, customers want to work with vendors that understand their situation, market and strategy. Equally, strategic account teams strive permanently to achieve ‘relevancy’. Generic marketing serves neither customers nor account teams well. On that simple basis, it’s often where the name calling begins and it shouldn’t. Sales want customised relevance and marketeers want the time and flexibility to deliver the kind of targeted support that really will make a difference to their golfing colleagues (joke).

If we are hellbent on finger pointing perhaps it should be at the CMO who, in the interest of saving a buck here and a buck there, decided to pull back the most important resource that could directly affect sales relevancy in the 20% of customers who drive 80% of revenues.

Just saying…

Sales Left to Chance?

It has always struck me that the one department that should get more support than any other is sales. After all no sales, no cash, no cash, no salaries, no investments - well, frankly if sales don’t win then the future isn’t that great really. Sales is the engine of your organisation and if you’re not investing in supporting them at the point of critical need, then you could be leaving success to chance.

‘But’, I hear you say, ‘we pay them the big money to bring in the deals. They should just know what to do to win.’ Another says, ‘They get training. We invested thousands in that last programme. They should be fully equipped.’ Yep, true. Well, kind of. The thing is, it’s everyone that loses if sales don’t win at every available opportunity. Not winning enough means headcount cuts. It means under investment in innovation. It means cutting budgets. It means doing without all the stuff that made your company a cool place to work out. Ever wondered why that nice coffee machine in the lobby is now for guests only? I’ll tell you. Sales didn’t win as much as they hoped.

The thing is this. Even in a downturn, some companies win more than others. So, where do you want to be? Do you want to be winning more than others or just settling for the line that says, ‘the conditions are tough out there right now, we expect a decline on last year’s numbers.’ Only you can decide where your head is at on that one.

I can tell you one thing though. When sales win and exceed expectations everyone in the company benefits. And that is why every company should provide sales with support at the point of critical need. If you are going to tie resource up supporting opportunities then you’d better make damn sure sales have the best chance of winning. Why would you allocate their time to opportunity x, y or z otherwise? I mean you wouldn’t put money on a horse you knew stood no chance of winning would you??

Deals, especially, the large complex game-changers, cannot be left to chance. They cannot be thrown support at the 11th hour with an expectation that it will make a difference. If you want to give your sales teams the maximum chance of winning, then early, high value customer engagement is critical. And that takes planning and an independent eye. Someone who will stand in the room and guide a team through the thinking that will actually create a plan of engagement that has relevance and impact in front of customers. Someone who will call it like it is, if there is still work to be done.

Having spent literally years in sales leadership in ‘big corporates’ I know the challenges that sales teams face. And I empathise. No, I really do empathise. Corporate process and often the underlying culture provide a significant headwind into which sales must march on a daily basis. I will never forget hearing a senior sales leader say that he ‘performed a miracle for his company every day’ such were the organisational obstacles he faced. This headwind translates into everything that is bad for sales: lack of time, slipping behind competition, reactivity not proactivity, doing without thinking and organisational pressures that restrict commercial innovation. Yet, from my experience, if you can get a team in a room for a day and provide a framework for creative thinking then you will at least stack the cards a little more in their favour. And given that sales effectively pay everyone’s salary, why on earth wouldn’t you do that?