Authenticity

Last night I went to watch a friend perform at a London hip-hop event that showcased works-in-progress from artists working in that culture. The idea behind the night is to give hip-hop performers (rappers, dancers, poets, etc) the chance to develop stage pieces that may one day have a bigger future in front of less sympathetic crowds.

After each piece there was a Q&A and the audience gave focused and positive feedback. The night is run by Jonzi D who has created an environment based on his belief that hip-hop is an authentic dialogue between performer and audience.

It was a quite wonderful experience until the very last act; two sexily-dressed women in the All Saints mold. Incredibly they lip-synched to their song, a vacuous rap about not much at all. They certainly looked great and their dancing was superb but even a newcomer like me could see that they just didn't fit.

Authenticity: we know it when we see it.

In Copenhagen 2

Stop Press: the session started at 10:00 and the first mention of the weekend was 10:09.

In Copenhagen

I am in Denmark to run a workshop for a pharma client that is launching a new product. The launch is vitally important (aren't they all?). So important that they've gone to the trouble and expense of inviting me over from London to run the day-long session.

Except that I've just been told that now my workshop won't be starting until 10am.

That's not a problem is it?

Of course not.

So I'm down in the hotel lobby having a coffee and watching lovely Copenhagen cycle past in the sunshine. And wondering how much usable time I'll get before everyone's thoughts turn irrevocably to the weekend.

On the road again

I've just noticed that of late my posts have focused more on my comedy than my consultancy.

Given the state of the world economy I must say how nice it is to work in pharma, a sector that is proving to be better than recession-proof. Not only are my clients still launching products with the same regularity as ever but because of the GFC even more is riding on the success of those launches.

This week I'm in Zurich and Copenhagen working with separate clients who gave me identical briefs: -

This time we can't afford to not 'get it right the first time'*

Higher internal stakes are always welcome news for external consultants like me.

* Apologies for the mangling double-negative but that's essentially what each client said in the meeting

We are live

The online presence for Scenes from Communal Living (improv show) is up and running.

It should be hard

Kate Smurfwaite, a friend who is a good, smart and passionate comic, maintains that success in comedy is worthwhile because it is takes application and passion and even then not everyone will succeed.

I'm reminded of the first year lecture in logic that discussed necessary and sufficient conditions. Adapting the basic idea to my argument: -

'Talent' is a necessary condition for success in this field but it certainly isn't sufficient on its own; you also need 'dogged determination'

The reverse statement is equally true: -

'Dogged determination' is a necessary condition for success in this field but it certainly isn't sufficient on its own; you also need 'talent'

Every successful person I know would understand this instinctively. My quarrel is with those who argue that 'luck' is a necessary condition for success. How can you genuinely pursue a goal if you have a heartfelt belief that success will require some entirely random, external event to occur some time in the future?

Noses pressed up against the glass

The UK comedy scene is much exercised by a slanging match on chortle.co.uk (the industry website). The nub of the issue is that a comic, who I would describe as no further than midway up the food chain, has taken issue with the Edinburgh Free Fringe.

His criticism is little more than a rehashing of the reasoning that if a market is flooded by cheap (or in this case free) product then the consumer gets dangerously confused as price no longer functions as an indicator of quality. The argument is a sort of weird take on Gresham's Law; that cheap / bad comedy will drive the good stuff out of circulation.

There is no shortage of responses accusing the writer of a badly disguised ulterior motive: he is somehow promoting his ticketed show. I don't really understand this accusation as (a) he's only talking to the industry, but also (b) he's just pissing everyone off anyway.

This year I'm directly involved in two Free Fringe shows and two ticketed shows so obviously I think that there is a place and a role for both. The genuine and incontrovertible benefit of the Free Fringe is that it affords Edinburgh locals easy access to the festival that takes over their city for a month every year. Tickets for a nighttime show start at £8 for a one hour performance. A couple seeing three hours of comedy is paying at least £50 before they've even made it to the bar.

The Edinburgh Festival is one of the truly great events on the British cultural calendar. It's fun and funny and wonderful and sexy and cool. To have it go on around you in your home town but to feel uninvited would be terrible.

Earning the right...

Because every comedy circuit in the world is already heavily populated by comics of exactly his background, every new white middle class male comic with a degree in the Humanities has the same concern: how to stand out from the crowd?

I think that the reason why newer (usually younger and always male) comics make extreme on-stage choices is the belief that a stand-up comedy career is not so much a craft as a lottery. There is a sense that 'minority' acts (women, non-whites, comics with disabilities and so on) receive additional attention and therefore are afforded opportunities that the white male comics in question are denied. The logic goes something like this: -

Of course I've got what it takes to make it as a comic. My real problem is that because I'm new I'm not getting to perform in the big 'comedy literate' rooms where they'll get my stuff. Female and ethnic acts with much less talent than me get to play those rooms just because they're female / ethnic.

What angle will get me there?

In the four or so years that I've been on the UK circuit I've seen new comics transcend the imagined gamut of responses to this challenge with hypnotic yet predictably disastrous results. Through the cracks of my fingers I've watched everything from highly offensive, over-the-top racism to cod interpretative dance and from truly tragic costuming to deep expositions of vaguely traumatic personal histories without so much as a hint of a punchline in five long minutes of material.

Of course this is nothing more than the old marketing issue of Unique Selling Proposition (USP) writ large. But marketers know (or at least they should) that the USP is only the beginning of the conversation. As well as being seen as 'different', the market still has to see you as 'worthwhile' and that's where the craft comes in. Any comic who watches Roy Chubby Brown and sees only the swearing or who uses the fact that Eddie Izzard frocks up as the explanation for his success is in willful denial about the craft that all good comics bring to the stage every night.

We have to earn the right to take up the audience's time.

A perfect fit

Last night I had an excited call from a friend who is diving headlong into a business opportunity that she claims is 'a perfect fit'.

What she can offer in time and skills is exactly what her prospective partner needs and there is a quid pro quo in terms of opportunity and lifestyle. The plan involves her relocating to the country, which is great because she's looking for a 'sea change' and she's already found someone to rent her house. She wants to believe that nothing could be simpler.

And that's the problem: there are few 'perfect fits' in life.

No adult should believe that such synchronicity is a naturally occurring phenomenon any more than we should believe that the machine will work right out of the box.

Meetings 2

The meeting as existential crisis

Commit publicly

There are all sorts of sites on the web that focus on the broad subject of Getting Things Done ('GTD').

Some have a technological bias whilst others are more philosophical but somewhere in each of them will be a section on goal-setting and the need to 'commit publicly'. There's no more to this than the observation that we 're more likely to reach a goal once we've announced it to the world. Stand-up comedy requires a radical public commitment. If it's just some scribbled notes hidden away in a desk drawer then it's yet to exist. Like most worthwhile things in life you can really only learn how to do it after you've started.

There's a quote I love from the English jazz musician George Melly. A friend had been offered the position of restaurant reviewer for a London newspaper but worried that as he knew nothing whatsoever about food he was grossly unqualified. Melly's reply: -

By the time they find out that you know nothing about it, you will know something about it.

A brand by any other name...

The results of recent elections for UK local government and European Parliament have been announced and, as expected, Gordon Brown's Labour Party has done dreadfully. This morning the commentariat has been banging on about: -

What this means for the Labour Party brand

Of course what they really mean is: -

What this means for the Labour Party

The inclusion of the word adds nothing to the sentence and is therefore rendered meaningless.

I'm going to have to stop using 'brand' as a coverall term for 'positive presence' in a marketplace / psychological space / whatever.

Meetings

One of the advantages of the Headcount: 1 model is that because I charge what I like for my time I don't get invited to many meetings. At least not to many that I don't want to go to.

In a recent post Seth Godin describes meetings as functioning as a 'pressure release valve' in joint venture scenarios. This is a perfect description of how things worked when I had a business partner. Although we didn't even live in the same city we'd still both store up all our frustrations until we were alone in the meeting room and then we'd just let rip. We were even self-aware enough to recognise that the angst we each felt ahead of these meetings was making us needlessly unhappy yet for years we persisted in having them.

Years ago I read a piece about David Geffen in which he insisted that no face-to-face meeting go longer than 23 minutes*. There was an extensive rationale behind this that I remember seeing as sound if a little extreme. Nowadays I couldn't agree more. 23 minutes is about right for any meeting other than scriptwriting**.


* Can anyone can refer me to this? I can't track it down anywhere

** Training sessions, marketing workshops and rehearsals aren't 'meetings' per se. They have a specific purpose and should be run by a single trainer, facilitator or theatrical director

Dreaming spires

Last night I ran a workshop for the Oxford Imps, the university's improv troupe. The session was held at beautiful Magdalen College and the guided tour of the grounds beforehand was an unquantifiable bonus.

A theatrical 'workshop' is a strange beast; not quite a rehearsal and not a part of a progression of classes. It should not be positioned as remedial and neither should it seek to alter the artistic DNA of the group in question. I find that such sessions work best by piquing the interest of the individual performer rather than speaking to the wider group. Anything more usually falls prey to overreach.

The session turned out to be a strange confluence of my two worlds. Whilst the content was obviously 'comedy', as the Artistic Director invited me seemingly with no more than partial consultation with the wider group, the context was decidedly 'corporate'.

I've wandered into enough corporate training rooms in enough places to know the unspoken question forming in the collective mind: -

Why exactly am I here?

Neither the 'arty' nature of the subject or the youth and relative inexperience of the participants absolved me of the need to answer this. Throughout the session I found we lost impetus unless I kept restating that our aim was personal development and not a wholesale, group-wide step change.

So no different in attitude from how I would approach any sales or marketing team training.