The US Supreme Court agrees with your claim that your job is pointless

Drug reps working for Novartis in the US have won a case in the Supreme Court that awards them a share of over $100,000,000 in back pay for unpaid overtime.  Merck and Boehringer Ingelheim face a similar bills.

The case, which has been working its way through the American legal system, revolves around a question of whether a drug rep was a salesperson (in which case ineligible for overtime) or something else.  The reps in question were calling on Primary Care physicians (GP's).  They testified that the nature of their work was robotic: -

One Rep testified that Reps were expected to act like “robots” because of the limitations on what they could say during sales calls.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed:-

The Reps, inter alia,

• have no role in planning Novartis's marketing strategy;
• have no tole in formulating the "core messages" they deliver to physicians;
• are required to visit a given physician a certain number of times per trimester as established by Novartis;
• are required to promote a given drug a certain number of times per trimester as established by Novartis;
• are required to hold at least the number of promotional events ordered by Novartis;
• are not allowed to deviate from the promotional "core messages";
• and are forbidden to answer any question for which they have not been scripted.

Novartis' defense against the robot claim was so weak as to be laughable: -

Novartis argues that the Reps exercise a great deal of discretion because they are free to decide in what order to visit physicians offices

Talk about letting go of the reins.  My favourite aspect of this comes from the ruling made by a lower court which had actually ruled in Novartis's favour: - 

They do not begin to answer why or how a robot or an automaton could or should earn an average salary of $91,500 per year.  Nor do they explain why NPC (Novartis) would employ 6,000 Reps at a cost in excess of half a billion dollars per year.

It defies logic to accept that, in such a situation, Reps are expected to do nothing but chant slogans and mouth platitudes.

So the argument that Novartis made was, "Why would we pay them so much if they were robots?  Do you think that we're that stupid?"  In overturning the decision the Second Circuit Court in effect said, "Yes.  Yes we do" and the US Supreme Court agreed.

The restrictive sales processes adopted by American pharma companies are built around an overriding medico-legal strategy.  The worry is that a misspoken word from a rep might lead to one of those law suits that would cost them millions of dollars.

Oh, the irony.

Why consultants exist

Anosognosia (n) a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of that disability

Best manifested as...

Dunning-Kruger Effect —the phenomenon whereupon one's incompetence masks the ability to recognise that incompetence

Strong ties

Last October Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker about the strengths and limitations of Twitter and other forms social media. He compares the (successful) American civil rights movement of the 1960's with the (generally unsuccessful) colour revolutions of the last few years.

Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist

Gladwell's argument is that Facebook and Twitter are all very well for establishing the 'weak ties' that are great for disseminating information but no replacement for the 'strong tie' relationships needed to ferment political change. Tweeting your dislike of the government is not the same as occupying Tahrir Square. Friends are only of use to you if they're by your side. You need to bear witness to each others' commitment.

High-risk activism... is a “strong-tie” phenomenon. This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

So what we know can be expanded by 'weak ties' whereas what we do is rarely influenced in that way.

Last week I was in Birmingham helping a client refine their strategy for a new breast cancer treatment. The sales team has successfully established almost universal awareness of the product but the number of actual sales (prescriptions) has been disappointing. Cancer is a grim business and oncologists are thus quite conservative. Whilst no one wants to be the last person to start using a new therapy neither does anyone want to be first. This leads to chicken-and-egg scenarios, which is where my client finds itself.

The sales team is frustrated by doctors' reticence to make what they see is a very low-risk change to prescribing. Every rep I spoke to believes passionately in the product but that's just what they're paid for. They don't have any 'skin in the game'; no pharma rep will ever get the 3am call saying that a terminally ill woman has been admitted to hospital with an unexpected side effect that no one on staff has any experience of handling yet.

So what can my client do to get this group to act differently (ie start prescribing the drug)? By discovering and cultivating any 'strong tie' relationships that exist between the less conservative members of the population. The sales team has to act on the answers to two questions...

1. Which doctors out there believe in our product?
2. How do we connect them; first to each other and then to everyone else?

This is a well-established path in pharma marketing. The client will stage a series of educational meetings where less believing customers are given the chance to bear witness to the testimony of their peers. As non-peers, the sales team's role in all of this is peripheral; they have no real role in these 'strong tie' relationships. Frequently they get in the way at the worst possible time.

On the flipside of my life Andrew Watts is starting up a comedy club in the wilds of Wiltshire. He's been musing over best way of promoting what will undoubtedly be a consistently high quality night. Hopefully he'll dodge the all-too-common reliance on facilities like Facebook and Twitter to drag in the punters.

It's no Tahrir Square but many people find the idea of a night of going to live comedy stressful. The most cited reason for this is a terror of being singled out / picked on. I suspect that this is a polite misplacement; the larger, usually unspoken fear is that the acts will just suck. A night spent in deep sympathy for an audibly sweating twentysomething comic dying in an otherwise silent room is a highly unpalatable prospect.

One of the hallmarks of a (newly) successful comedy night in a rural or even provincial setting is a large number of group bookings. In Gladwell's parlance this is a 'strong tie' phenomenon in action; punters are less likely to view the night as stressful and so more likely to attend if encouraged to go as a group.

My advice to Watts is to offer a heavy discount for larger group bookings, at least in the early days. Once punters have come to the opinion that it's a quality night their stress level will dissipate and they're much more likely to return in twos and threes.

Of course it'll also help if he doesn't book comics whose acts rely on picking on the more unfortunate looking individuals in the crowd. That sort of behaviour's the height of rudeness down Devizes way.

The adjacent possible

Steven Johnson is one of my favourite authors.  He thinks deeply over a gamut of topics ranging from the impact of new technologies to urban planning and collaborates with the likes of Brian Eno, which is just a little bit sexy.  His latest book is Where Good Ideas Come From, (cool YouTube summary here.)

The idea that intrigued me the most was the 'adjacent possible'.  The term was coined by an evolutionary biologist named Stuart Kauffman to describe how the building blocks of life can only have emerged in a certain sequence: -

In the case of the prebiotic chemistry, the adjacent possible defines all those molecular reactions that were directly achievable in the primordial soup.  Sunflowers and mosquitoes and brains exist outside of that circle of possibility.  The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

p. 31

The idea speaks directly to many aspects of life but especially to the human impulse for storytelling.  In a good story events unfold in a sequence.  The building blocks of character and incident get combined and recombined in an order that the listener finds inherently pleasing.  The same goes for a great symphony or pop song or play or joke.  It's the logic that underpins the mildly addictive iPhone game Doodle God.  It's presumably why a rule of thumb states that no new characters can appear in a film script after page 50.

I think it's especially good way to distinguish between good improvisers and average ones.  Once you master the basics improv is a great platform for wacky ideas.  For a while every improviser goes through a the-wackier-the-idea-the-better phase but at its heart improv is a storytelling discipline, which is where the idea of the adjacent possible hits home: -

The weaker, wackier improviser will jump from establishing premise to zany-crazy outcome in a heartbeat then wonder why his (admittedly very funny) ideas leave the audience cold.  The stronger improviser will take us to exactly the same place but slowly.  She'll combine and recombine ideas and so usher us into that wonderful shadow future

This is why weaker improvisers prefer 'time warp' formats that rely on the viewer mentally joining up the deliberate gaps left in the narrative.  Audiences will happily participate in this game (and they are genuinely participating) but this is very different from the satisfaction of watching events unfold in the manner of 'proper' storytelling.

Stand-up comics must have an innate understanding of the adjacent possible; if you don't take the audience with you then you're on your own, which is an extremely lonely place to be with a mic in your hand.  A great routine will make leaps in logic that are precisely calibrated to reward the audience for keeping up.  The rest of us do well to remember the great Logan Murray's definition of a good joke: -

All information necessary for the punchline is present in the set-up

It took me ages to see just how wonderful this definition is.  And a perfect example of the adjacent possible.

Betriebsrat

Another interesting aspect of last week's pilot programme in Munich was the intervention of the company's Betriebsrat (Works Council).  Here is the strange contradiction at the heart of the modern German economy; dynamic and innovative yet also so very protective.  In Mitteleuropa not everything is sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

I am a farmer's son who has been self-employed for most of his life with no more than a passing acquaintance with organised labour so this was all a new experience for me.

As the session was officially designated as 'training', severe and immutable restrictions were imposed on which observers were allowed in the room.  These were announced late on Monday morning ahead of a Tuesday start.   As a designated 'co-facilitator' I was okay but strictly on a 'named basis'.  Not all of the Head Office attendees were so lucky.

Everything I read indicates that the German economic model is functioning better than any of its competitors so who am I to question their methods?

But what I did learn was that you'd better check with the Works Council before you schedule an observable pilot programme in Germany.  Given that no trainee likes being under the microscope as they learn the Betriebsrat knew exactly what it was doing in warding off the Head Office observers.

Subcontractors II

More pan-European training projects = more non-English delivery = more hassles with bilingual subcontractors.  Good problems to have but problems nonetheless.

Last week it was a 'pilot' with a German team in Munich.  The rub was that this time the client sourced their own external trainer to deliver my programme.  Nice guy, 20+ years in sales training and pharma industry experience before that.  Was it ever going to be a decent fit?  Not even close.

Why is it that no 3rd-party trainer can stick to the script?  Every one of them is somehow compelled to 'add additional value' with some banal personal touch right at the beginning of my programme.  There appears to be two main reasons for this: -

1. The trainer needs to start with some element of content that he knows and trusts before diving into all this new stuff belonging to the pushy Australian taking notes at the back of the room
2. Putting his own spin on things is the best way for the trainer to make himself irreplaceable

As the guy who has to deliver a product that's replicable in any European context your motivation for dicking around with my stuff is pretty much irrelevant to me but even so reason 1. is more excusable than 2.  There's a case to be made for you getting comfortable in your own skin as you start, whereas trying to make yourself irreplaceable is always going to piss me off.  And I'm always going to have enough influence over the roll-out for you to want to keep me onside.

What really confounds me is the hackneyed nature of the stuff they crowbar into the precious first minutes of my carefully crafted programme.  Lately it's been decades-old vision intended to soften up the participants with some message about how nobody-knows-everything-so-everybody-can-learn-something-from-today or all-the-best-sportspeople-still-practice-the-basics or whatever.  It's a video for Christ's sake; the sort of one-way stimulus that hasn't worked in a high school or university in years.

By introducing himself in this way the trainer is making a performance error so basic that no stand-up comic makes it after even a few months: you're apologising for being there.  Worse, not only are you starting on the defensive by pleading a case for being listened to, you're outsourcing that rationalisation to a fucking video.

At the heart of this rant is a recognition that few trainers see the world as I do.  I doubt that my oh-so-experienced German colleague considers himself a performer.  Which might be why he made so many annoying technical errors such as sitting down whilst speaking and allowing the focus in the room to splinter during group discussions.  To be fair he only lost me completely when he introduced his collection of novelty sound effects (motorbike starting, jet taking off, air raid siren).

I'm guessing that even in German there's a difference between amusing and bemusing your audience.

Subcontractors

Like most Australians I am cheerfully, obnoxiously monolingual.  It's remarkable how infrequently this is an impediment to working in Europe.  Not one of my clients speaks less than 'business English' and most not just fluently but eloquently.  One of the great luxuries of my provenance is that I can travel the world assuming that the other guy has the skills to bridge the language gap.

Only when I'm asked to train a European non-English sales team is my (lack of) language a barrier.  Asian and Middle Eastern sales teams do not insist that suppliers like me are fluent in their language.  Conversely, a salesperson contentedly living and working in Lyon or Nuremberg with no ambition to climb the corporate ladder has no more need for English than her Sydney-based colleague has for French or German.  European delivery is literally the only time when I'm expected to do the heavy lifting in terms of language and on my own I fail miserably.

In consultancy terms, I have a capability problem: I'm forced to subcontract the face-to-face component of such projects to other suppliers.  Readers of this Blog won't be surprised that I find this hard.  The self-reliance, not so say solipsism, of my Headcount: 1 work life means I rarely have to play nicely with others.

Earlier in the month I delivered a programme simultaneously in French, German, Italian and Spanish.  Well, four terrific bilingual trainers did the delivery whilst I shuttled from room to room giving a somewhat adequate impression of being in change.  It all went off as planned and we all left with reputations enhanced.

Drastically short timelines had forced me to recruit the trainers en masse.  Someone I trust at another consultancy gave me a strong recommendation and that trainer brought in three colleagues.  In an instant my capability issue was solved.  However, from the outset the four of them made it abundantly clear that they had a wealth of shared experiences and I was the outsider.  For some reason this bothered me and it took a while for me to pinpoint the reason why.  After all I spend my professional life as an outsider interacting with large groups who share many experiences not the least of which is working for the same company in identical roles.

My disquiet stemmed from the fact that my dealing with them oscillated between that of individual suppliers each requiring my undivided attention and a cartel negotiating en bloc.  And they were a cartel.  There was an awareness, subconscious perhaps, that my ability to replace any or all of them  was practically zero, especially as the project had to be delivered so early in the new year.  The role of shop steward was shared around; at different times each declared that he or she was speaking on behalf of the group.  A picture emerged near constant back-channel communication over my project's shortcomings.

No man likes being talked about behind his back.

Then less than a week before delivery I was forced into an across-the-board financial renegotiation resulting in a fee increase that pushed the project to the verge of unprofitability.  I later discovered that the shop steward in question wasn't actually speaking for the four but the implication that he was improved his bargaining position at the time.  By outsourcing the recruitment of the team I took myself out of the loop.

Perhaps part of the problem was that without an English language component of the project my prominence was lessened.  My main job was running interference for the the trainers in the presence of a less-than-perfect client.  It's not easy to be a coach when you're used to being a player.

One of the major failings of my career has been my inability to develop other trainers to a point where clients see them as interchangeable with me.  My personal brand has always been too strong and I've taken a perverse pleasure in that.  Yet without that facility my company's capacity for growth is limited by my Headcount: 1 diary.  Right now my earnings are entirely tied to what I can charge for my own time.  Learning to work effectively with subcontractors is an obvious first step in moving beyond this limitation.

I'm 43 years old and I cannot do this job in this way forever. 

Happy Australia Day

Five takes on Australian identity: -

I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found in the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses.  It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their nation.

Robert Menzies
Prime Minister 1939-41, 1949-66

Not lip service, nor obsequious homage to superiors, nor servile observance of forms and customs...  the Australian army is proof that individualism is the best and not the worst foundation upon which to build up collective discipline.

General John Monash
Commander of the Australian Corps 1918

When you play test cricket, you don’t give the Englishmen an inch.  Play it tough, all the way.  Grind them into the dust.

Donald Bradman
Cricket Captain 1937-48

You feel free in Australia.  There is great relief in the atmosphere - a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form.  The Skies open above you and the areas open around you.

DH Lawrence
Visitor to Australia in 1922

A fair go for all, regardless of ethnicity, race or religion, except for Poms, Seppos and Kiwis.

Anon

Niching

"The danger with your approach is that we risk niching the product with the individual customer."

As it usually does the comment came from a sales manager at the back of the room.  Salespeople are paid to be ambitious (let's not say greedy) and, practical souls that they are, tend to view the contributions of external consultants like me with a suspicion that regularly crosses over into contempt.

Niching, in the marketing sense, is one of those words that stupid people toss into a discussion to seem more intelligent.  Apparently we are all marketers now, which creates endless frustration for those of us who actually know what we're talking about.

Let's start with the definition: -

niche (n) a specialised but profitable corner of the market: [as adj.] important new niche markets.

When did having a profitable corner of a market become a Bad Thing?  Somehow owning a corner isn't ambitious enough.  We could have an entire wall or even half a room if only we weren't so conservative.  The confusion stems from the differing outlook of sales (where the aim is to have the customer do something specific, usually in the short-term) and marketing (which attempts to get the customer to think or feel a certain certain way over time).

For action-focused salespeople, the worth of a customer should only be determined by his or her current and future actions: either buying our products or not.  To say that an individual has 'niched the product' is meaningless.  Yet in many sales teams there is a strange, pervasive sense that we can remedy this non-existent threat by asking it away.  This is how we get those horribly jarring questions at the end of bad sales calls: -

Why are you staying just one night at our hotel?  Why don't I put you down for five?

The logic is that by demanding that the individual customer do more for us we can't be accused of niching ourselves.

Marketers, who should think deeply about such things, know that a niche (aka a 'segment') is a description of an aggregation of customers that have a certain, consistent set of needs.  If we can meet those needs and make a profit then we just need to communicate this in a meaningful way.  If not then turn your attention elsewhere.

Salesmanship requires passion and persistence.  A big part of marketing is dispassionately doing the maths and being prepared to walk away.

You might be a bad client if...

Are you a bad client?  Maybe you are but just don't know it yet.   From time to time we all need a little help in recognising our shortcomings.  As the joke goes, everyone thinks they're funny and no one thinks they're bad in bed, so here's a handy spotter's guide.

You might be a bad client if you...

1. Get your advertising agency to write your internal emails for you
2. Insist that the entire project team sit in on four-hour teleconferences that are really just a procession of one-on-one conversations between you and individual suppliers
3. Openly refer to your co-workers as idiots who cannot think for themselves
4. Don't bother printing out materials ahead of teleconferences then complain that you can't open the PDF file on your iPhone and then insist that the tabled multipage documents be read aloud
5. Talk to your legal department before picking up a phone to discuss a problem in person
6. Demand a discounted fee for the privilege of working with you for the first time
7. Refer to internal processes by acronyms and individuals by their first names and get annoyed when asked to explain what you mean
8. Respond to verbal questions via email and emailed questions verbally
9. Schedule daylong meetings  the week before Christmas that start at 9am (and so require people to fly in the night before, thus spending more time away from family) and then fail to produce a daylong agenda
10. Let relationships between suppliers fester to the point where turf wars develop
11. Demand 'world's best practice' proposals where cost, timing and every other conceivable parameter are ignored because you can't be bothered thinking through the inevitable and necessary limitations your company will impose on the project from the outset
12. Insist on having a personal but not necessarily amicable relationship with subcontractors thus disrupting your suppliers' delivery chains
13. Fail to master MS-Outlook and so force everyone around you to second guess whether your hour-long meeting will take fifteen minutes or half a day
14. Identify a non-problem, insist that it be solved and then accuse everyone else of acting like old maids when it doesn't come to pass
15. Can't imagine how salespeople of different nationalities might just get along over drinks and dinner
16. Aren't really sure if you're negotiating in £ or € (seriously)

Glad to have that off my chest.

It begins

I'm sitting at St Pancras station waiting for a train to Paris. My working year begins in earnest this afternoon with that fiddly, unnecessarily complicated, multiplayer project that drew down so much of my emotional reserves at the end of last year.

There are a myriad of little decisions still to be made, none of which are singularly vital but which nonetheless have the potential to run into one another and thus damage the overall project. The danger is that as there's no clear sense of who makes what decision we end up with yet more turf wars. My kingdom for a strong client, etc.

The time to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is nigh.

Blindingly obvious (when you think about it)

Last night I caught up with a few performer types for some year-end pints.  I was introduced to a guy who described himself as a film maker.  He'd recently set up a production company and we had a very interesting discussion about the challenge of getting stuff to screen, in particular the difference between film and television.  He shared an insight that had never occurred to me before: - 

To make a film all you need is money.  After that it all comes down to the quality of the work

To make TV you usually need a programming slot before you begin

Whereas film production companies focus on making films, TV production companies devote all their energy to the pitch before the creative process can even begin.

The patron saint of Australian expats

This is a bittersweet time of year for expats, especially those of us from the Southern Hemisphere and if we have a patron saint it is Clive James.  I was given his wonderful Unreliable Memoirs for Christmas years ago and its influence is obvious.

The second volume covers James' relocation to England and it ends thusly: - 

As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the City of London.  Down there in the street I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other.  In Sydney Harbour, twelve thousand miles away and ten hours from now, the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires.  It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back.  All in, the whippy's taken.  Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection.  It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home. 

Next year in Sydney?*

*With apologies to the Seder

In Warsaw

No city is so boring that it cannot amuse for two days. No airport is so amazing that it does not begin to pall after two hours.

My wife and I have been stuck in Warsaw for 48 additional hours and counting. We're now a long way past both the two-day and two-hour marks.  It's the shortest day of the year and it's back out to Frederic Chopin airport to sit at a gate or perhaps even on the plane itself hoping that Heathrow deigns to allow us entry.  Time will doubtless crawl; not a great way to spend the longest night of the year.  And across the world passengers just like us will be doing exactly the same thing.  No longer in Miami or Barcelona or Oslo we're reduced to generic tubes of people, 100% interchangeable in the eyes of air traffic control.

Last night we sat around the airport bar with a crowd of twentysomething fellow passengers waiting for the flight to finally cancel and cooking up crazy schemes to hire a minibus and drive round the clock for Calais.  Aren't all the best long-distance driving plans are made whilst drinking heavily with perfect strangers?  We snuck out through immigration and back to our hotel.

Just down the street from where we slept is a nondescript plaque, one of hundreds around the city. It commemorates the fact that nine Poles were summarily executed on that spot by 'Hitlerite' troops on August 1, 1944.

Horrible as this memorial is I find something optimistic and forward looking about the fact that the troops are identified historically as 'Hitlerite' rather than racially as German.  And I love the fact that Poland's national airport is named not for a monarch or a president or a general or an explorer but rather for an artist.

A grim game of pass the parcel

For me a consulting project is typically built on a bilateral relationship: there's just me and the customer. This is not to say that I don't expect to have a number of contacts within the client organisation, only that there's usually a clear vision and a single, one-way financial flow (them to me).

I've been spoilt. For years I've been spared the ongoing, low-level, zero-sum-game aggravation of multilateral relationships that a complex, event-driven project entails.

Next year a piece of my work is the centrepiece of a large meeting that apparently also requires an advertising agency, a graphic design firm and a special events supplier. On the far side of this triumvirate is a necessary array of translators, printers, airlines, hotels and so on. A complex situation is thus made even more complicated by flagrant jockeying for position over interminable teleconferences.  I like to think I play nicely with others (despite years of sole tradership submitted as evidence to the contrary). No, the conflict hasn't arisen over personality but due to billing mechanisms.

I have long charged a high day-rate that acts as a sort of whole-of-project fee. Once we agree on a number I'm committing myself to everything necessary to drag the project over the line. This is works very well for my standard project-driven bilateral relationship.

Contrast this with the more typical agency relationship where fees are generated based on hourly billing but where there's a ceiling to the total fee. This means that the agency's agenda is to eagerly volunteer for all work on offer up until the fee ceiling is reached and then either negotiate an elevation of that ceiling or be compelled to decline any excess tasks. The ability to negotiate this elevation without displeasing the client is the mark of a good account service person.

What happens in a situation like the present; a large, multi-player project where there is a substantial but very finite budget? Fee structures drive behaviours in evermore obvious ways. The early days were a gold rush; everyone magnanimously volunteered to take on each new task without regard for the actual competency of the volunteering company. Agencies were organising travel and graphic design firms were commissioning translation services.  This is when strong clients are invaluable; they see what's going on and put a stop to at least the most flagrant overreaching.

Why aren't there more strong clients?

Now the seam is tapping out and there's a growing list of fiddly, unpleasant tasks are being shifted from supplier to supplier, in danger of not being done at all. We've suddenly gone from gold rush to a grim game of pass the parcel and the project is beginning to suffer.

My fee structure (and personal philosophy) leaves me especially exposed; my inclination is say, "Oh for goodness' sake just let me do it." which, is of course what everyone else is waiting for.  It's all horribly demotivating but what can I do?

When the big day comes I'll be the one standing up and speaking whilst everyone else is already back at the office drafting their invoices.

Colin Munro (1940-2010)

My father’s best friend died on Monday.  Colin ‘Slim’ Munro was the doyen of the ABC’s Rural Department for over 25 years.  He died of a stroke but had already succumbed to a vicious dementia whose timely diagnosis had been stymied by deafness suffered since childhood.

For many years Slim was the voice of Australia All Over, a Sunday morning call-in radio programme that celebrated the spirit of a rural Australia where isolation and hardship was met with laconic humour and reflexive kindness.  The premise was that ordinary people living in often extreme circumstances had wonderful stories to tell if properly encouraged.  On air and in person Slim was a genius of teasing out a tale that seemed commonplace to the teller but was extraordinary to the rest of us.

He was an indefatigable supporter of latterly unfashionable rural charities like the Country Women’s Association and the Stockman’s Hall of Fame.  He was a wonderful after-dinner speaker who was in continual demand throughout the Australian bush.

In Slim’s time the ABC really did see itself as being owned by all Australians.  He certainly felt that way and he affected an amazing ability to remember the name of everyone he’d ever met.  He’d met so many thousands of lovely yet thoroughly ordinary people that his recall wasn’t always immediate.  Watching him ask a procession of perfectly disguised triangulating questions until his memory jogged was to witness a peculiar sort of genius.  Dementia was an especially cruel fate.

Slim and Dad met on their first day at Wagga Agricultural College in 1958.  Their friendship was both immediate and unwavering.  Slim had known five generations of my family.  He’d taken champagne and chicken sandwiches at my great grandmother’s bedside on the day of my parent’s wedding and he’d spoken at the lunch to celebrate my first niece’s baptism.  To be loved by someone loved by so many others is a blessing that my family will always cherish.

I grieve for Slim but my heart breaks for my father.  Never again will he cause his best friend’s face to light up merely by walking into the room.  Our ability to affect another in such a way dies with that person.

The attractions of improv

A new American online literary magazine called The Point has a piece about the improv scene in New York.  The type of show that it describes ('The Harold') is an established 'Chicago-style' format that is well-known in North America but rarely done well in other places.

For the last month I've been taking 'Harold' classes with David Shore, a highly credentialed Canadian teacher-performer.  There are enough genuine variations in what the format demands from what I know already to warrant some formal teaching on the matter.  I've enjoyed myself.  Whether there's a place for the Harold in the crowded London comedy-theatre market is the bigger question.

There are between 12 and 15 of us at any given class and quite a range in experience, ambition and accomplishment.  With twenty-plus years of performing under my belt I'm one of the two 'oldest' in both improv and planetary terms.  The make-up of the group is almost identical to that of the first Theatresports class I took with Lyn Pierse.  Looking around the room is like looking at a mirror image of my younger self.  Even more so than other forms of comedy, improv are overwhelmingly white, middle class and degree educated, although there is now less of a bias against female performers, especially when compared to stand-up.

It's the motivations that haven't changed.  They're the same in New York and London in 2010 as they were for me in Sydney in 1990: -

They came to the city after college to discover themselves, to become individuals. At some point in those first few months they needed work and they got their first gig as a caterer or their first glimpse of real-life corporate culture.  Do you remember that moment?  The surprise at seeing actual cubicles?  The dronelike aspect of people just a few years older than you?  The humiliation of eating at your own desk?  It’s a culture of boredom.  Everyone seems to be wearing a false face.  Spontaneity is almost actively discouraged.  You realize, perhaps for the first time, how easy it is to be meaningless— even to be successful and meaningless.  It is a world most of us want to backpedal away from, but don’t know how.  And then somehow the unicycle of improv comes wobbling by.  Is it any wonder we leap on it?

I can still show you the exact seat I sat in Belvoir St Theatre the first time I went to a Sunday night Theatresports show.  I can tell you exactly who was in the cast and even the content of some of the scenes.  On Monday morning I got up and went off to my marketing job at Unilever but nothing was ever the same again.

Great Merlin Mann piece

Using the analogy of a sandwich shop, Merlin Mann teases out some lovely truths about the relationship between a smaller external supplier and a new client.  

1. The Sandwich Guy can’t do much for you until you’re hungry enough to really want a sandwich.
2. Once you’re hungry enough, you still have to pay money for the sandwich. This won’t not come up.

Couldn't have said it better myself.  In fact I didn't.

On the buses

Spain last week. Germany today. Greece and Poland to go before the year is out. All is well in consultingland; if I'm not on planes I'm most likely not getting paid.

There's a peculiar zen-state that rescues habitual travellers from the procession of petty indignities that is modern air travel. Check in (online), line-up and zone out. Even so, most of us have a particular issue that cuts through the mental stasis to trigger a bout of low-level seething.

For me it's the increasing practice of deplaning passengers away from the terminal onto buses. I know this is essentially an irrational grievance; tarmac disembarkation greatly increases an airport's capacity which is a good thing. My annoyance stems from an barely irrepressible need to move far faster than the slowest of my fellow passengers. Upon arrival I want my autonomy back as soon as possible.

Nowhere does this seething strike me so often or so markedly than at Heathrow's Terminal Five, built at a cost of £4.3 billion for the exclusive use of British Airways, surely the World's Most Underwhelming Airline.

BA makes a habit of making unsustainable promises that often bear no relationship to the real world. Predictions of 'a rapid approach to Heathrow' are inevitably revised to account for 15-20 minutes on a holding pattern circling London. Time lost on departure is never 'made up thanks to favourable tail winds'. And 'having you at your terminal' is of course BA-speak for 'pulling up next to some slippery metal stairs opposite a seatless bus on some windswept corner of the airport'.

All with the Richard Rogers-designed building shining like a beacon in the distance.

The dangers of easy money

Instapaper pointed me to an except from Anthony Bourdain's new book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.  The piece is a very funny and obviously heartfelt attempt to discourage all but the genuinely obsessive from attempting a career as a chef: -

Nobody will tell you this, but I will: If you're thirty-two years old and considering a career in professional kitchens?  If you're wondering if, perhaps, you are too old? Let me answer that question for you: Yes.  You are too old.

 By the time you get out of school—at thirty-four, even if you’re fucking Escoffier—you will have precious few useful years left to you in the grind of real-world working kitchens.  That’s if you’re lucky enough to even get a job.

At thirty-four, you will immediately be “Grandpa” or “Grandma” to the other—inevitably much, much younger, faster-moving, more physically fit—cooks in residence.

To a someone who took up stand-up just before his fortieth birthday there are obvious parallels (the key word is 'grind').  The older you are the more you've gotta want it because so much of life is more appealing than another night of long car journeys and indifferent audiences for very little money.

I also love the way that Bourdain describes his industry's attitude to chefs who took the 'safe' option of a hotel kitchen or country club: -

If it matters to you, watch groups of chefs at food and wine festivals—or wherever industry people congregate and drink together after work.  Observe their behaviors—as if spying on animals in the wild. Notice the hotel and country club chefs approach the pack.  Immediately, the eyes of the pack will glaze over a little bit at the point of introduction.  The hotel or country club species will be marginalized, shunted to the outside of the alpha animals.  With jobs and lives that are widely viewed as being cushier and more secure, they enjoy less prestige—and less respect.

The analogue here is with 'hotel chef' and 'corporate comedy'.

Of late I've caught up with some of the wonderfully talented alumnus of Scenes from Communal Living.  In the eleven months since our last UK show they've almost all gone on to the 'next stage'; winning awards and competitions, getting both agents and amazing reviews of their sell-out shows.

At least two of them have started fielding offers for corporate gigs; Christmas parties mainly and the occasional after-dinner slot at a sales conference.  This is the top of an extremely slippery slope.  The money will seem mind-blowing at first, especially coming on top of all that travel to cool and exotic places but it doesn't take long before a reputation for being a corporate comic means that you 'enjoy less prestige—and less respect.'

And if your peers don't rate you then those fickle, easily influenced people who commission television won't even know you're alive.

Corporate money now = no TV deal later.