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.

A gathering storm

This week saw a nasty escalation of the mid-project blues that often hits me during an extended and complicated job. I fully accept that a client has a right to feel nervous, especially if we haven't worked together before. No small part of my job is to ease those concerns.

Alas, the escalation came from another, albeit not entirely unexpected, quarter. As part of the task of integrating my ideas with existing elements of the client's culture I was emailed a 'background' PowerPoint presentation, which I opened at 5am last Thursday. There, in all its barely adulterated glory was a sequence of my slides.

My ideas are a big part of my livelihood and they'd been lifted without a hint of acknowledgement or attribution. Seemingly this has been going on for about three years.  The prospect of the coming fight exhausts me. Try as I might I cannot figure a way to resolve this mess without the plagiarist losing face.

The sad irony is that the client is a pharmaceutical company; one industry that exists only on account of vigorous intellectual property law.

Joke

Over dinner with a supplier last night in Barcelona we talked about the way Australians are perceived in London.   I'd like to think that generally we're respected but there's also the cliche of us being ex-colonial chancers blagging our way across Europe.

He told me a lovely Spanish joke: -

Q: Why is Aerolinas Argentinas the world's best film school?

A: Because a cable runner who gets on a flight in Buenos Aires is a director by the time he reaches Spain

And here I was thinking that it was just us Aussies.

A good meeting

Had a meeting yesterday with a consulting client to follow up on a session I ran in August.

As part of that programme I'd introduced a couple of new terms to help them get to grips with a specific strategic issue.  Yesterday my terminology was used acutely and properly yet in an entirely unselfconscious manner.

Happily, someone else reminded the group of the provenance of the terms.

We're happier when busy

Like most self-employed people I enjoy being busy.

Recently I came across a really interesting study in the Psychological Science journal that says that human beings are happier when busy even though we're usually more inclined towards idleness.  I'm especially intrigued by new thinking in airport design whereby the distance you need to travel to get to baggage reclaim is increased so less time is spent standing around waiting.

Thick & thin

A couple of London's longer-running comedy rooms closed recently. Nothing especially unusual about this as there's a natural rate of turnover in the industry.

A couple of the promoters (anyone who cajoles a pub landlord into giving over his upstairs room for comedy is a 'promoter') have mourned the passing of their nights on the Chortle website. There's a consistency in their moanings that has been picked up elsewhere.  Somehow London's comedy-going audiences are simultaneously too thin to be profitably shared amongst all the clubs and too thick to be relied upon to find their way to the 'quality' nights (i.e. the ones run by the writers).

As in Edinburgh, bizarre forebodings of a form of Gresham's Law prevail. The hand-wringing prediction that cheaper, low quality nights will somehow drive out the better gigs that pay their acts is pathetic. If you think so little of your audience before they enter the room what chance that they'll be treated well once the show starts?

Improv history

Way back when.

An eighth of a second

Kevin Kelly is republishing his wonderfully prescient New Rules for the New Economy, first written in 1998.  I wasn't all that aware of Kelly ten years ago so it's all new to me.

In a post entitled From Places to Spaces he turns on its head an old Tom Peters maxim that cheaper products made in the developing world, American manufacturing's worst nightmare, are now just an eighth of a second away; this being the time that it takes to communicate an order from one side of the globe to the other.  But as Kelly points out: -

The good news is that those geographically far away competitors will never be any closer than an eighth of a second.  And for many things in life, that is too far away 

The trainer in me really likes this idea.  So does the comedian.  Both jobs happen in real time and I thrive on the intimacy that comes of standing at the front of a room and changing the way the audience thinks or what it feels.  By Kelly's logic the feedback loop between speaker and listener has a margin for error of less than an eighth of a second.  This is why I travel for work.

Enough of life thrives on subtle instantaneous responses that one-eighth of a second kills intimacy and spontaneity

If the secret of comedy is 'timing' then an eighth of a second is more than long enough to be the difference between success and failure, between laughter and silence.

Beginners' mind

I'm on my way to Zurich for a kick-off meeting for a new project. It's a new client, new product and new therapy area so I've spent the last few days immersed in the detail.

For me this periodic requirement to start from scratch and quickly learn the intricacies of a new field is one of the chief joys of consultancy work. I enjoy the sense that I've gone from zero knowledge about an area to maybe 85% comprehension in a matter of days.

I think that much of this pleasure comes from what Zen philosophy calls 'the beginners' mind': -

Having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject

I trust in my ability to quickly learn enough to ask intelligent if somewhat naive questions. In fact it's the quality of these questions that dictate my worth as a consultant.

Being paid to be a constant beginner can be liberating but of course it comes with a caveat: 85% comprehension is a very long way from mastery; tomorrow I need to know just enough to help my clients see their world through fresh eyes.

Understanding expectations, then meeting them

Max Dickens has a great essay on the Chortle website that presents a refreshing take on the hackneyed debate about the merits or otherwise of 'mainstream comedy'.  The essence of the piece seems to be: -

1. Understand the expectations of your audience even if these are unstated or even unrecognised
2. Please your audience by meeting those expectations
3. Don't worry about anything else

In other words: -

Don't pretend to be someone you're not and don't pretend that your audience is something that it isn't

Longform

Many improvisers divide the craft into 'longform' and 'shortform'.  Longform is certainly harder to master and therefore see as a sort of holy grail by many. 

LONGFORM – An extended improvisational format.  Sometimes used by improv teams who find that the break between the short sketches they present gives audience members a chance to leave.

Jerry Schaeffer's Devils Dictionary for Improvisational Theatre

A fool and his time are easily parted

Over 50% of all American teens see themselves as 'content providers'.  Seth Godin exhorts his acolytes to above all else 'ship' (i.e. focus on the act of completing a project rather than its quality).  500 shows at the Edinburgh were free.  Prosumer technology abounds.  This August Twitter had 96 million unique users.

We are all producers now.  The financial cost of entry to a vast array of creative endeavours is approaching zero which means every moment we're not at work we're on the horns of a dilemma: -

Do I spend the next hour consuming someone else's creativity or producing my own?

But if you're serious about being self-employed in a creative field then this zero sum game should haunt your every waking moment.

Unless you're actively working on a sitcom script then watching Arrested Development reruns isn't 'research' its 'leisure'.  This is fine provided you label it as such.  Same with reading your favourite Blogs instead of writing your own or slipping into the back of a gig when you told yourself you'd be writing new material.  A stand-up comic on the UK circuit can even convince himself that time spent on Facebook is a bit like work.  Time spent reading this Blog is time you're not creating something worthwhile.

Likewise time spent writing it.  There's a hierarchy of creative activities:-

- a Tweet is not that Blog post
- a Blog post is not that new joke
- a new joke is not that sitcom pitch
- a sitcom pitch is not that novel or short story or screenplay or business plan

A fool and his time, etc.

Who has your back?

Performance improv is an innately social art form.  Improvisers from the Loose Moose in Calgary have a pre-show ritual they insist on following wherever they perform.  Immediately before taking the stage each improviser approaches every other improviser, pats them on the back and simply says: -

I've got your back

On a good night improv feels effortless and the audience will know it's in the presence of genius but these aren't the nights you have to worry about.  It's the bad nights (we all have them) when you feel inadequate and exposed.  It's as if the audience can see what you're thinking in real time as you fruitlessly try different approaches to turn your performance around over the course of a show.  Instead of starting the next scene you hang back hoping that someone else will shoulder the load.  You start blundering onto the stage when you're not needed and staying off when you are.  Paranoia creeps in as you sit in the wings wondering if you were ever any good at this nonsense.

The truth is that you can't think your way out of a hole like this.  You have to switch off that calculating brain and feel your way forward.  In the mean time you must trust that your fellow performers will give you time and space for this to happen.  You need to hear: -

I've got your back

About ten days ago I had that bad night in London.  Happily the format of the show and the quality of the rest of the cast meant that the overall night was unaffected.  My horrible sense of exposed inadequacy was mine alone.  On the night someone had my back.

The reason that stand-up terrifies most improvisers is that no one has your back.  The main reason that sole trading terrifies most people, even those self-employed in partnerships, is that no one has your back.  When you're self-employed you accept this and develop techniques to create the time and space to feel your way out of that hole.

I work early in the morning and late at night to give my underperforming brain the additional time to complete tasks that would be simple in better times.  I keep a private journal that gives me a historical record of what I'm feeling as much as what I'm thinking.  Most importantly I stay close to smart people who I trust despite most of them living in Australia.

It's counterintuitive but I think that misanthropes are the people least equipped for a Headcount: 1 life.

Michael McIntyre

Bruce Dessau's piece about comedian Michael McIntyre in the Guardian raises a familiar point in an interesting way.

Criticisms of McIntyre, the biggest act in the UK at the moment, are a commonplace amongst the trolls lower down on the comedy food chain.  He is branded as 'mainstream' and 'lowest common denominator'; the ultimate pejoratives in comedy circles.

Yet these terms are both accurate and embraceable; McIntyre operates at the 'head' of the Long Tail* phenomenon.

'Mainstream' is what he does.  'Lowest common denominator' is what his massive audience wants.  The market compels him to be these things just as success at the 'tail' requires a comic to build a following that explicitly rejects 'mainstream'; viz Stewart Lee, Doug Stanhope and others.

I've never met McIntyre but he is universally described as a terrific guy.  His act is polished and well written and I laughed at some but not all of it.  As Dessau's article states he is introducing more people to comedy in general and to specific comedians like my mate Imran Yusuf: -

There must be a percentage of McIntyre's 5 million viewers who started their comedy education with him and are now buying tickets for more adventurous acts

What could be more self-destructive than decrying a successful performer merely for appealing to an audience that your own act doesn't reach?

* Obviously we're reading 'Acts' for 'Products' in this graphic

Trent Reznor: comedy prophet?

Big thanks to Bob Slayer for his comment on my Doug Stanhope entry.  He directed me to an excellent piece by Trent Reznor (aka Nine Inch Nails) that offers advice to the 'new / unknown artist' looking to get into the music industry.  The piece takes the broad Kevin Kelly / Chris Anderson ideas around what technology now forces you to give away: -

The point is this: music IS free whether you want to believe that or not. Every piece of music you can think of is available free right now a click away. This is a fact - it sucks as the musician BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS (for now). So... have the public get what they want FROM YOU instead of a torrent site 

And what you can do about it: -

what you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan

All of which is Kelly / Anderson / Godin gospel with the added impact that it's coming from the guy who gave us Closer.

Of course I'm unlikely to agree with Bob that I don't understand Stanhope.  I get what he does as comedian and I'm happy to believe that on his day he does it unbelievably well.  But he didn't bring his A-Game the night I saw him in London.  And it's a really dumb gig to drag your wife along to.

I think that Bob's real point was that Doug Stanhope is also interesting because he's a comedian who's gained control of his marketing in a way analogous to Reznor's advice above.  This is something that we all really need to understand.  If you'd asked me a year ago I would have said that the comedy business is different enough from the music industry that Reznor's rules don't apply then along comes Bo Burnham and it seems that comedy is just like music only more so.  This is a guy who can generate 12 million You Tube hits and then storm it at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.  Apart from anything else, Burnham looks like he's having more fun than everyone else out there still jumping through competition hoops*.

The only way to get ahead on any stand-up scene is to give your stuff away.  Unpaid gigs are the only way new comics get stage time and they resent the hell out of the fact.  Career nirvana for a comic is the day you do your last unpaid (non-charity) gig.

Maybe we've got it all wrong.  Maybe the problem with most comedians' careers is not that they've given away too much free comedy but too little.

* A happy byproduct of competitions like FHM is that they attract genuinely funny friends of mine like Andrew Watts and Catie Wilkins both of whom blog hilariously well about the experience.

A letter to Messrs Hagel III, Seely Brown & Davison

Sirs,

Last Friday I finished reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (italics yours).

Okay, I was in a foul mood as British Midlands had waited until the very last minute before canceling my connecting flight from Brussels to Edinburgh and I was in danger of missing a wedding in Scotland the next day.  But, hell, your book came recommended by The Economist so I figured that there must be some sort of big idea in there.

I was intrigued (as intended) when you cited a group of big wave surfers from Maui as an example of 'Pull' in the Introduction.  It was nice that you followed up with Li & Fung, the hundred year old, Hong Kong-based fashion outsourcing business in Chapter 1.  And I admit that I was drawn in by the breathless description of the global effort to re-encrypt Twitter so that Iranian dissidents could keep on communicating after the fraudulent elections in June last year in Chapter 2.  Well done for using the SAP Developer Network and PortalPlayer to bring us readers back to the realities of the commercial world before moving onto Chapter 3.

But that was pretty much it.

These weren't just a few quirky examples, drawn from many, of vastly different but equally successful enterprises that had mastered this new 'Pull' thing.  They were pretty much the only examples (italics mine).

By the time we got to p. 167 we were at the banal heart of your argument.  The magic that attracts the people your life needs to you is your 'passion'.  The good news is anyone can have it provided they want it enough: -

The truth is that virtually any type of work can become the focus for passion.  Many auto-repair mechanics are passionate about cars and knowing what makes them run.  Carpenters can take great delight in building things that are beautiful and enduring.

Really?  Mechanics and carpenters?  That's it?  Your hat-tip to all those drones who don't have jobs as interesting as yours is, "Jesus.  Oh, and the guy who fixes my Prius"?

Maybe this would have gone down easier if I hadn't finished the amazing NYT piece from 2000 about work in a North Carolina slaughterhouse on the plane from Vienna to Brussels: -

Up to 16 million shoulders a year come down that line here at the Smithfield Packing Co., the largest pork production plant in the world. That works out to about 32,000 a shift, 63 a minute, one every 17 seconds for each worker for eight and a half hours a day. The first time you stare down at that belt you know your body is going to give in way before the machine ever will.

Not sure that there's much room for passion in that workplace.  Perhaps things have improved in the ten years since the Times article but I doubt it.  I'd bet that the same mix of racial competition, implied violence and race-to-the-bottom working conditions keeps Smithfield Packing profitable at the expense of their employees.

That's not to say that you don't know your readership.  We're all afflicted by 'illusory superiority', that cognitive bias better known as the Lake Woebegone effect ("where all the children are above average").  It's what keeps us upgrading to the latest version of prosumer software like FinalCut Pro and promising ourselves that next year we'll make it to SWSX and buying books like yours as soon as we read about them in The Economist.  But we're not everyone.  We're not even close.

To my mind many of those farmers and food processors and street sweepers and nurses and cops whose job it is to meet the first two layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (ie 'physiological' and 'safety') will struggle to consistently inject passion into their working days.  On a good day, sure, but not every day.  As my father told me when I complained that my first paid job was boring: -

If it was always fun they wouldn't pay you to do it.

By all means write your book and, caveat emptor, market it any way you want.  Just don't pretend that you've hit upon some ground-breaking reevaluation of all work.  Better technology leading to greater interconnectivity does mean that many 'knowledge worker' jobs will be done better by passionate people working in a more connected way.  Spare me the conceit that every workplace can be rendered artisanal.

Seth Godin, I'm looking at you too.

Further thoughts on Doug Stanhope

Content aside, my lasting impression of Doug Stanhope's gig is that it was lazy and incomplete.  This wasn't helped by me seeing so many polished performances in Edinburgh last week; including such modern greats as Brendan Burns, Paul Foot, and Richard Herring.

The audience can sense the difference between the comic checking his watch to see if he can squeeze in that one last bit of material and the one visibly calculating the minimum amount of stage-time he has to endure before reasonably exiting.

Kevin Kelly vs. Doug Stanhope

As a performer / creator I have long been intrigued by Kevin Kelly's 1,000 True Fans idea.  The logic is pretty simple; first you find your fans: -

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

Then you monetise: -

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

A growing number of the smarter comics I know are thinking seriously about this.  The most commonly cited example of such a comedy career is Doug Stanhope.  Apparently Stanhope has built up such an enthusiastic following over the last twenty years that he can book and fill a theatre in any American city without the involvement of a local promoter.  He negotiates directly with the venue, sets his own ticket prices and owns 100% of the merchandising rights.  Better still, his online following is so strong he hardly need bother with local advertising; by the time you've heard Doug Stanhope is playing your town chances are his fans have already snapped up every ticket.

He's currently doing a run at the Leicester Square Theatre and I went along last night.  I wanted to see a genuine American shock comic and get a look at some of those Kellyesque True Fans.  The audience was 80% male twentysomethings few of whom, in the words of my wife, 'had ever known the touch of a woman'.  I found the show horribly misogynistic, needlessly abrasive and deeply, deeply cynical but I can't say I wasn't warned. 

I'm never going to be one of Doug Stanhope's True Fans.  I'm too old and insufficiently scared of women.  Last night I was happy to be in the minority who didn't adore the show (one punter delivered a Jagermeister to him on stage) before queueing to buy his CD's, DVD's and T-Shirts.  These guys would defend him as one of those comics that you either get or you don't.  You have to buy into his lazy libertarianism to see his act in the right light (4 stars from the Guardian?  Really?)

No one can argue with the fact that Stanhope has made a very successful career out of telling truly appalling jokes very well.  The lesson is that if you want those 1,000 True Fans (and he has many more than that) then you probably have to position yourself at the margin.  True Fandom is exclusionary as well as self-selecting.  If the plan is to create an act that would sustain you with 1,000 fans but that would-doubtless-appeal-to-many-more-if-they-only-knew-about-you then you're actually playing a different game.

Stanhope's entire professional career depends on him wanting to spend his nights with audiences like last night.  He seems perfectly happy to be owned by them.  He has to be.  True Fans crave authenticity above all else.

Image-making vs. Rent-paying

Sir Paul Smith is unarguably the most successful post-war British men's fashion designer.  He started out as a one-man-operation in the 70's in the back streets of Nottingham before being discovered by the likes of Led Zeppelin.  Last year his global sales were around £350M and he seems to be surviving the financial downturn better than most.

Last Monday The Independent ran a profile piece that gave me much food for thought.  His thoughts on the right attitude for starting your own business struck a chord: -

"I meet a lot of young designers now and they're so talented but they lack the life skills you need to make money.  When I started my clothes were quite particular and I knew I wouldn't sell a lot, so I only opened on Fridays and Saturdays. For the rest of the week I rolled up my sleeves and did shitty jobs – styling, or just borrowing a mate's Transit van to go selling suits – so I could keep the shop pure. So many people today only want the purity and wonder why they go bankrupt. You've got to have a balance between image-making and rent-paying."

I love his dichotomy between image-making and rent-paying and his blueprint for surviving tough times is wonderfully simple: -

Graft, honesty, humility – and good manners.

This applies as much to management consultants, bankers and corporate lawyers as it does to fashion designers and stand-up comics.

Working from home

Both awesome and horrible.

A trade show? A university? A holiday?

I'm on the flight home from three nights, two-and-a-half days at the Edinburgh Festival. Time enough to catch up with lots of friendly, albeit pallid faces and to see a selection of shows. I went up looking for inspiration. I'm not sure yet whether I found any.

I've just finished Joshua Ferris' wonderful novel about life in Chicago advertising, Then We Came to the End. He has a phrase that sums up the Edinburgh experience beautifully: -

Amnesty was a gift, but oblivion was terror.

I'm obviously still trying to understand the entire Festival palaver, hence this procession of strange multiple choice titles.

The only way that Edinburgh ever made sense to me as a participant was as a trade show. Regardless of the industry a successful trade show requires an epic list of necessary factors that still aren't sufficient without the luck you need to meet the buyer you need in amongst the 2400 other sellers.

Wherever you are on the comedy food chain the person who can get you to the next level is undoubtedly somewhere in the city right now. All you have to do is get them to see your show and nail the gig the night they do. This is far harder than you'd think: posters, fliers, reviewers, even audiences all need to align to achieve this. The late night bars echo with acts lamenting that they haven't been reviewed, or that the agent was one of only three punters who turned up that night, or that all of the externals were in place but due to fatigue or illness or whatever the performer just didn't find the funny on stage.

Not everyone agrees with my Trade Show definition. Plenty of acts see the Festival more as a Comedy University ('CU Jummy'?). A chance to perform in as many as a hundred shows and to watch and drink with other comics. These people wear fatigue like a badge of honour. For a month you can make your mistakes openly. Hide in plain sight. For the last few years I was happy taking this 'university' approach but if you never intend to graduate then after a while you're just the kinda creepy older guy still hanging around campus.

The final option is to treat it as a holiday. Band camp for adults. Drop a few thousand quid on a month in Scotland instead of the Seychelles and good luck to you.

Whatever the motivation Edinburgh is wet, cold, tiring, entirely indifferent to your suffering and thus perversely addictive. I'd like to think I've another show in me.

2011 anyone?

Job v. Career v. Hobby

I'm in Edinburgh for a few days to check out the 2010 Festival and catch up with some people who are performing up here. Unless I run into someone on the street who makes me an offer I can't refuse this will be the first Fringe I've been to since 2001 as a non-performer. I'm in need of inspiration not experience.

One interpretation of the festival is that this is when you focus on comedy as your career rather than just as your job. This is the month you perform your amazing, personal, funny-yet-poignant show that'll take you away from the Mirth Control / Jongleurs grind forever. That nice woman from the BBC is going to fall in love with you and change your life forever. Otherwise on Friday week you're back at your job: trying to get the attention of a hundred-strong mass of stag parties in Bristol.

That's the theory anyway. In practice there are too many excruciatingly revelatory hours with too few jokes and a legion of clever-not-funny double-acts and sketch troupes. 2,400 different shows. The aggregate amount of time devoted to writing and rehearsing all of these carefully crafted masterpieces over the last eleven months is mind-blowing. And many of them will be starting the whole process again in a week.

Because that's the third option: performing at the Edinburgh Fringe is your hobby. It's the thing you do that defined you as different from your (non-performing) workmates.

The shortlist for the Fosters Comedy Award (aka 'the Perrier') is published tomorrow. Making that list is genuinely life-changing. Everyone else is going back to a job of some sort on the 31st.

TVland

Apropos of Friday's lament about the TV pitching process: I came across the wonderfully named In the Meeja, Darling.

In the linked post the writer describes a networking event where Jay Hunt, Controller of BBC One (and thus the most powerful woman in British television according the Guardian) spoke about pitching: -

Slightly depressingly, this boiled down to "BBC One aren't going to commission anything that doesn't have a celebrity attached to it already". The example of Richard Hammond's Invisible Worlds was used as an example of a TV format that had been kicking around for ages, but apparently "only worked" once it was tested with someone with Hammond's enthusiasm.

Don't have the skill? Then you'd better have the will

By any measure Friday night's gig was a tough one.  The stage was in the corner of the pub with no room for the rows of chairs to denote 'audience'.  It was a 'free' gig so the punters there for the comedy were mixed in with a majority who were simply out for a drink and a meal at the end of the working week.  The bar, about eight feet from the stage, didn't stop (noisily) serving the entire time we were on stage.

Readers of this Blog will recognise this as a pretty familiar workplace for someone on my step of the comedy ladder.  Every night of the week across the UK there are stand-ups battling away in rooms that are no more set up for comedy than they are for polo.  Implicit in accepting the booking is an understanding the acts will somehow compensate for all these negatives and create a night of great comedy.

How has this been allowed to happen?  Why is it that we comedians turn up to work when the odds of success are so severely stacked against us?  Much can be explained by the attitude of the agencies that are paid to book the acts for these pubs.   Oftentimes the bookers take zero responsibility for the show aside from ensuring that four or five warm bodies are ready to go onstage at about 845pm.  No demands are put on the venue in terms of technical (Is there a stage?  A microphone, even?), logistical (Will you stop serving drinks at the bar whilst the acts are performing?) or marketing (Is this going to be a paying audience? How much are tickets?).  As a performer you literally have no idea how hard your job will be until you arrive at the venue.

Understandably this gives rise to a high degree of cynicism amongst acts on the circuit.  For me this has lately tipped over into a dangerous sort of out-and-out negativity.

Last Friday's gig wasn't an agency booking.  It was booked by the night's compeer; a highly talented comic who is starting a small circuit of regular shows near his home town.  As I said, it was a tough crowd but the opening act won them over.  Okay, he pulled out every trick in his 20+ years on the circuit including ventriloquism and getting the audience to clap along to Beethoven's Ninth ('Ode to Joy') played on a banjo but he got there.

I went on next and lost the room.  The audience traveled that mortifying arc from amusement to bemusement through polite silence and onto unsurreptitious chatting amongst themselves. 

The interval was scheduled for immediately after my set but the compeer did something interesting.  Instead of simply getting a round of applause for me and telling the crowd to get a drink, have a smoke and be back in twenty minutes he stayed on stage and got the audience back where he wanted them before the break.  It took him another quarter of an hour but he stayed up there to recalibrate the room so the punters were more likely to stick around for the rest of the show (remember that the audience hadn't paid to watch us and so had far less stake in seeing the night out).

These two acts stood in stark contrast to my performance.  I've gotten into the dreadful habit of walking into rooms and declaring them 'unplayable'.  Put it down to too many long car journeys with acts who make the same declaration on the way to the gig and who make a show of checking the watch on stage before asking aloud "That was about twenty minutes wasn't it?"

In his new book Linchpin: Are you indispensable? Seth Godin makes the distinction between 'the art' and 'the job'.  He uses 'art' in an especially broad sense: -

The job is what you do when you are told what to do.  The job is showing up at the factory, following instructions, meeting spec, and being managed.

Someone can always do your job a little better or faster or cheaper than you can.

The job might be difficult, it might require skill, but it's a job.

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it.  Your art is taking personal responsibility, changing the status quo, and changing people.

I call the process of doing your art "the work".  It's possible to have a job and do the work too.  In fact, that's how you become a linchpin.

The job is not the work.

pp 96-97

What annoys me most about learning this lesson is that I've never needed it with my consulting business.  I've walked into badly designed, badly laid out rooms overfilled with recalcitrant audiences all over the world but I've never declared them 'unplayable'.  The thought has never even occurred to me.  I've reflexively taken a deep breath, smiled broadly and launched into the day-long training room equivalent to 'Ode to Joy' on a banjo.

If you don't have the skill to do your job when things get tough then you'd better have the will.  Last Friday I brought neither and got found out.

Experiences 2

Thinking further about yesterday's post on new experiences, it's worth pointing out that many TV pitch meetings occur under the aegis of an unspoken but totally understood fiction: -

What is proposed in the meeting has been designed purely to get us all through that first meeting.  Most likely it will bear little resemblance to the end result of any collaboration

Really what is being pitched is the people around the table and everything else is an acceptable lie.  As ever there are wider parallels, I've come to see that part of my job as a consultant is to 'trick' my participants into trying genuinely new things.  That requires a relationship strong enough for the ultimate two word pitch:

"Trust me."

The best exponent of this that I know is an Australian events organiser named David Grant.  David has staged the 'must attend' parties for the IOC and major sponsors at eight Olympics - summer and winter - since Atlanta in 1996.  When you hire DG3 all you know is that you won't get what you expect and certainly not what you got last time.  And you won't be disappointed.

My old company, Instant Theatre, worked with David Grant Special Events (as was) in the early nineties and it was the most fun I've ever had in corporate.  My all-time favourite experience was being invited to a meeting and shown a mocked-up film poster entitled 'The Greatest Story Ever Sold' with the text surrounded by a pastiche of every 'Golden Age of Hollywood' cliche; Roman soldiers, vikings, Biblical prophet, a low-flying plane and so on.  He told me the name of the client (a hotel chain) and the conversation went like this:

Me: Great poster, do you need me to write up something for the pitch?
DG: Pitch was this morning.  We won. We start a 4-city roadshow in Brisbane in a fortnight.
Me: Okay.  How's the show going to run?
DG: No idea.  That's why you're here.

After all we were called 'Instant Theatre'.  We spent two weeks in and out of planes and hotels staging original and funny shows for enthusiastic audiences of usually cynical travel agents.  We ate and drank well and it was genuinely sad when it ended.  There are very few corporate experiences that I can say that about.

David had such an amazing reputation that most of the time "Trust me" was all it took for him to get the gig.  He also moved so fast that he had no choice but to spread that trust amongst his suppliers.  You felt privileged to be part of it and you brought your A-game.

The coolest thing about David Grant was that when he came to sell his company in 2009 he didn't go for the juicy buy-out from someone like WPP where he would be paid handsomely for his company, paid more in consultancy fees and more again for sitting on a global board.  Instead he asked two of his long-serving team-members to become partners (hence 'DG3').

He's never sold out.  Literally.

Experiences

Improvisers are taught that there is a moment in every scene when the 'routine' that has worked so far must be broken so that the narrative can progress. Timing is everything; do this too soon (before you've properly established the routine) and you confuse the audience. Leave it too late and you bore them.

'Breaking the routine' is a useful way to think about larger things like business, career and life. In life if you're trying to break a routine you really only have two options: -

1. Repeat an experience that had the desired effect in the past, or,
2. Try something for the first time.

It amazes me the lengths to which we'll go to avoid 'option 2'.  I'm in the process of pitching a TV show at the moment and the hardest task so far has been writing the 'X meets Y' paragraph of the proposal*.  The network has said that they want something genuinely new and different and we reckon that our idea is that.  Experience has taught my creative partner that because we don't have an existing relationship with them the pitch must be framed in the context of a repeat experience.

As much as they say they're looking for 'something new', most people (in televisionland at least) don't want these new experiences to come from new people.  Which is presumably why we see old faces in new formats; we've already been asked if the idea can be altered to make it 'a bit of a celebrity vehicle'.

I feel dirty and all I've done is written three pages of A4.

* The most famous (and best) of these being of course Ridley Scott's three line pitch: 'Jaws in Space', aka Alien

Some of my best friends are...

I've just read John Lanchester's Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No On Can Pay; his diagnosis of the global financial crisis.  Lucid, funny and intelligently constructed for the interested non-expert, it is further evidence in favour of the argument that a good writer should be read regardless of his choice of topic.

He makes a distinction between 'industry' and 'business' at a cultural level: -

An industry is an entity which as its primary purpose makes or does something, and makes money as a byproduct.  The car industry makes cars, the television makes TV programmes, the publishing industry makes books, and with a bit of luck they all make money too, but for the most part the people engaged in them don't regard money as the ultimate purpose and justification of what they do...  Most human enterprises, especially the most meaningful and worthwhile ones, are in that sense industries, focused primarily on doing what they do: healthcare and education are both, from this anthropological perspective, industries.

Or at least that's what they are from the point of view of the people who work in them.  But many of these enterprises are increasingly owned by people who view them not as industries but as businesses: and the purpose of a business is, purely and simply, to make money.

p169-170

The sense of personal definition is hard to overstate as anyone who has watched a merchant banker try and explain what he does for a living to a six year old can attest.

The expensive boarding school where I studied was founded in the early years of the last century by Sydney's merchant class.  Corporate law, banking, stockbroking and commodities trading were promoted as desirable, laudable careers and some of my oldest friends have achieved immense success in these fields. My first degree was a Bachelor of Business and my high school essentially programmed me for some sort of financial career yet for some hitherto inarticulated reason I've always shied away.  Lanchester nails a social phenomenon under which I have long suffered that acts as an explanation of sorts: -

I have people I count as friends who work in the City.  We get on in all the ways in which people get on, but there is sometimes a moment in talking to them when you hit a kind of wall.  It's usually to do with fundamental assumptions based on the primacy of money, and the non-reality of other schemes of value.

p174

I work in two 'industries' (entertainment and pharmaceuticals) that I believe make the world a better place, albeit in vastly different ways.  I have always considered myself to be an unashamed capitalist so I expect to be paid well for my efforts.

But I am wary of a life where achievements are best expressed in dollar terms.

Seniority v Talent

Last night I caught up with David Shore, an amazingly talented Canadian improviser who's relocated to London.  He is an alumnus of the mainstage shows at The Second City, Toronto and Improv Olympic (IO) West in LA and his move here is great news for the UK scene.

Both Second City and IO have well established highly formalised improv training schemes that produce some of North America's best comedic talents and generate massive sums of money along the way.  London has nothing like it.  People get into improv in the UK either through the traditional drama schools such as RADA and Guildhall, through university troupes like the Oxford Imps or via a myriad of classes being run in school halls and dance studios all over London every weekend.  Potentially there's a gap in the market for a London equivalent to these great American institutions.

Certainly there's money to be made and therein lies the rub: that money will be made not in ticket sales but rather through the classes: -

More students = more money

Only a small percentage of those who sign up for improv classes should ever be put on a stage in front of a paying audience.  Certainly there are many corollary benefits to such classes in terms of creativity, life skills and so on but there is a clear need to manage the expectations of each student.  There are plenty of people who will pay good money to lock into a system where seniority supposedly trumps talent.  The North American schools are generally pretty good at selling the classes without an implicit promise of 'stage time' because unless they maintain the quality of their mainstage shows then sooner or later it all falls apart.

Bad mainstage shows = fewer famous alumni = less students = less money

Sydney Theatresports, where I was trained, went into precisely this sort of downward spiral about ten years ago and it's never quite recovered.  Some of our senior people began to see the classes as an income stream rather than a way to reinvigorate our performing company with fresh talent.

An interesting metric might be this: -

The total amount a student pays from first class to first performance

In 1990 I took my first class.  It cost me $3 (three dollars).  After five classes I was onstage at the legendary Belvoir Street Theatre.  My intake included lots of writers, comics, cabaret performers as well as the usual teachers, plumbers and lawyers.

Ten years later my equivalent was paying as much as $1500 before playing to a paying audience.  That 9900% increase drove out everyone but the lawyers and teachers.  Not only were the classes drawing from a smaller pool of potential students but the sheer enormity of the fees led to increased pressure on the system to cast every graduating student in a mainstage show regardless of actual talent.  We ended up with overpopulated casts full of people who only loved the idea of performing.  Even at a distance it was obvious that they weren't having any fun on stage.  No one pays to watch that and our audiences fell further.

So does David start by staging the best possible shows with performers already on London scene in order to attract more talented students or does he start from scratch, relying on his considerable reputation to fill classes and then launch his style of improv with performers made in his own image?

Shadow play

This week I 'shadowed' a pharma rep around London for a day. We wandered in and out of various hospitals and doctors' private rooms, discussing a pretty important product that isn't doing as well as it should. As such, the experience was a string of frustrating discussions interspersed with lots of waiting room time.

I've known the rep in question for about ten years. He's knowledgeable, personable and tenacious. These are the qualities you look for in a salesperson.  He's had a very successful career but on a year-by-year basis that success depends almost entirely on the actual drug he's selling (a career representative will work on as many as ten products over his or her working life).  I've never believed that even the most exemplary rep can compensate for a second-rate drug; in medicine there's simply too much at stake for salesmanship to be an integral factor.

As good as this guy is at his job every day he fails more than he succeeds.

If he was younger he'd jump to a company with a newer, more promising pipeline but as he's in sight of a very generous final salary pension no one can afford him. Instead he spends his working days chasing down doctors he's known for years, trying to sell a drug that's underwhelmed the market since launch and planning his retirement. He does an unremarkable job incredibly well.

I know many 'creative' people who would adjudge this as all too depressing to contemplate. With all that potential how come he never Produced Something of Genuine Importance?  In the follow-your-dreams-and-the-money-will-follow-you industries such life choices are tantamount to a betrayal.

Instead he's a well paid and enthusiastic consumer of the creative output of others. His is the money that follows you following your dreams. If you play it right he's one of your Thousand True Fans

If he wasn't happy to have his job then I certainly wouldn't have mine.

The leading edge of the bell curve

I woke up to bad news.  A mate from uni days died of a heart attack leaving behind a wife and two small daughters.  He was 43.  My age.

I hadn't seen Nick in ten years and we were never close; a mate rather than a friend: -

Faces come and faces go in the ragged life you lead.
You just file them all away, to recall them when you need.
When a face just disappears you record it as a crime,
Against yourself,
Against the world.

"For a Short Time", Mick Thomas (Weddings Parties Anything)

In my 20's I lost a few of my generation to suicide and to motor accidents (a too common occurrence in rural Australia where alcohol and fatigue make for poor driving companions).  Freakishly I also lost three in plane crashes (two pilots, one passenger) and one who was my country's most famous AIDS death.

In my 30's I really lost no one of my own age.

Of course I won't be so lucky in my 40's.  This morning's text message was the leading edge of the bell curve; the first of an inevitable, increasing incidence of normal deaths.

Enjoy your own company

Life has been slow in consultingland.

When I left for Australia for holidays in April I was expecting a biliously full diary throughout May, June and July but instead I spent that time contacting those same clients with carefully timed, gingerly oblique emails.  Now the diary is starting to fill up again and despite my blacker moments it seems that the last few months were an hiatus not an endgame.  The experience has been isolating; a common complaint amongst those of us who choose a Headcount:1 mode of work.

Advice for anyone thinking of starting their own business: -

If you want to enjoy your own company then you're got to learn to enjoy your own company.

Creating conversations

This week I enjoyed a very interesting conversation with an up'n'coming comic en route to a far flung gig.

When not doing comedy he 'creates and maintains an online presence for bands'. Meaning that he uses Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and blog posts to create a conversation between artists and consumers (aka 'the fans').

If cliches like 'unlocking the power of new media' have meaning then presumably my friend would be seen to be at the forefront of this new way of doing marketing. But often he's just an old-fashioned ghostwriter and happily admits as much.

The Holy Grail of his craft is the 'high involvement response'; the fan who, of her own volition, remixes a bands' latest song or creates a mash-up or cuts together a new video and posts it on YouTube and then Tweets the link to her fifty followers who each re-Tweet it to fifty more. The payoff comes when the band emails the new music guy at BBC1 saying that their Facebook group has 2,000 UK fans and the YouTube link of the song (MP3 attached) has been hit 3,000 times in the last month. A quantifiable number of fans, presumably your listeners, have endorsed us already so get on board.

But it all begins with an authentic act of homage and my friend sees his job as to create an online environment where that might occur. The operative word is 'authentic'; something a ghostwriter can never be. He admits that he's only ever achieved this 'high involvement response' with acts that got personally involved ("they touched the keyboard"). Those clients who leave everything to my friend get mediocre results. No Facebook, no fans, no buzz.

The gods of cyberspace help those who help themselves.

I asked him who were the most successful acts to follow this marketing model and he rattled off a dozen names that of course I'd never heard of,

"But why would you? You're 43 and you're never going to pay to see them play live so you're no good to them anyway."

Writing is a team sport

It may be that The Wire's David Simon doesn't have a funny bone in his body but...

Thoughts on Big Pharma

It was a full ten minutes before I remembered why I never go to networking events.

The first person I met asked me what I did.  I said I ran a small consulting business that helps drug companies sell their drugs better.  She stepped back and using her index fingers formed a cross in a mock warding-off-Satan gesture.

It had been a while.

Let's leave aside that I was at a corporate networking event intended to allow small players like me to exchange ideas about how to better supply products and services to larger organisations.  Maybe the woman's revulsion was no more than a baseline response of someone who had yet to embrace the pretty obvious idea that if you want to make money you have to find people or entities who are happy to exchange theirs for whatever it is you do.  It was no surprise that she was setting up a quasi-charity that would subcontract services usually provided by the government.

It's somehow better for your soul to work with the public sector and being around me was killing her buzz.


For the last twenty years I've divided my time between small-scale performance (improv and stand-up) and marketing consulting to Big Pharma.  I would routinely encounter actors and writers who had the networking woman's knee-jerk reaction to my other life.  The thinking was usually something like: Big Pharma is evil.  It's evil because it exploits science or because it exploits the environment or because it profits from illness or because it makes extraordinary returns or because it exploits the developing world or because it ignore that world altogether or simply because it's big and corporate.

Certainly the industry doesn't get a lot of good press.  It misses out on the sexy medical breakthough story, which is usually attributed to the university where the research was done.  Instead Big Pharma gets the nasty side-effect story, the extraordinary profits story and the callous disregard of Africa story.  Not that the industry seems to care much.  Mostly it gets on with the business of commercialising that sexy medical breakthrough via years of additional research and hundreds of millions of dollars in the hope of making those extraordinary returns.

Still, the industry has developed a structural flaw that in the coming years will not only make it harder to defend but also hurt all of us who rely on its products.  The pipelines are slowing down and fewer new drugs are making it to market.  Megan McArdle sets out the issue in The Atlantic Magazine: -

In 1996—arguably the peak of pharmaceutical productivity in the past two decades—the FDA approved 53 NMEs (new molecular entities). These days, breaking the 20 mark is rare; last year 19 were approved, plus six “biologics,” substances such as vaccines and antibodies that are based on proteins made by living cells. Most analysts seem to think that U.S. companies just aren’t turning out as many valuable new drugs as they used to. 

The article describes a growing culture of risk aversion amongst the industry and the US Food & Drug Administration.  This is brought about by the drastic consequences of American class action litigation and a global 'merger mania' that dates back at least fifteen years.  Of the two issues, I think that the mergers are the more serious and the problem here is organisational rather than scientific.  Consider this: -

Regardless of size few institutions can competently complete more than one big task at a time.  Successfully launching a drug is a huge task.

My clients expect to launch one product a year.  So whenever two pharma companies merge we should reasonably expect the annual number of new products to drop by one.  It's the bigness of Big Pharma that hurts us*.

There are a few encouraging signs.  A few smaller companies, not operating under the pressure of Pfizer's overheads and Wall Street expectations, are now actively marketing orphan drugs.  This is good news for sufferers of certain rare but remediable diseases and a clear example of the industry doing what it should: transforming those scientific breakthroughs into a tangible improvement in the human condition.

The diseases in question are incredibly rare.  I helped launch a product that cured a very nasty disease that only affects 14 people in every million; that's less than 900 possible patients across the UK.  The drug is breathtakingly expensive and most of us would shy away from our taxes being spent on it.  Unless of course we knew someone with the disease who will die if untreated.  Insisting that the drug be made available at a cheaper price is an incomplete and naive response to the problem.  The compound sat undeveloped in a larger company's pipeline for years, these things are called 'orphans' for a reason.  Even so, the start-up that bought the rights was taking a massive risk and only did so in expectation of a decent return on investment.  Reduce that ROI and everyone loses, especially the guy with the disease.

The networking woman had flitted on before I got to explain any of this to her.  She'd found someone who knew someone at the Department of Work & Pensions with an unspent budget.

*  It especially hurts me as my business specialises in getting these product launches right

Seven ± Two

A recent article in Wired about the possible long-term effect of the internet on our brains reminded me of the concept of cognitive load: -

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time.

Most of us know cognitive load theory as 'Seven ± Two'; the idea that we can really only hold between five and nine chunks of information in our short-term memory at one time, that our RAM is limited to that many memory slots.

So how might Seven ± Two relate to creativity and performance?

Every improviser knows the discipline of 'clearing the mind' ahead of a show.  If two or three of your seven memory slots are occupied before you hit the stage then you are, by definition, 'preoccupied'.  I would say that all acts of creativity require a similar understanding.  If writing comedy is all about jamming together seemingly dissonant ideas then a preoccupied mind is always going to inhibit the process.  Whatever it takes for you to clear your mind is what you need to do.

But sometime our cognitive load can't be cleared by a mere act of will or a routine of breathing exercises.  Sometimes those 7±2 memory slots are preoccupied by something bigger than ourselves.  Something like grief or dread or hope or joy.

In which case all we can do is recognise that this is the case and try again later.

A correction

Watts emailed to say that his last post confused Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hynter and I repeated this mistake without checking.

However, his argument remains unchanged.  As does my response.

More thoughts on collaboration

It was a sure bet that Andrew Watts would take exception to my entry on the lack of collaboration in the stand-up milieu: -

It's different from other art forms because your collaborator will have a different function - Alan Bennett talks about how productive his relationship with Richard Eyre is - but there it's because Eyre is, as a director, coming at each script from a different angle to the writer.  But in stand-up, there is a direct relationship between you and the audience; and any collaborator will feel like a third party in a marriage.

Andrew is wrong-headed here (knowing him, perhaps deliberately so); he confuses the roles within a collaborative arrangement with its overall intent and he knows that a raving* of comics riffing off each others' bon mots in the pub is not the actual work of writing


I think that the real reason that so few stand-up comics can effectively write for another is a lack of personal vision (or 'voice').  No writer can collaborate with a performer who lacks the discipline to reject a joke, no matter how good, on the grounds that it isn't right for his or her act.  Occasionally I've been asked to direct a comic who hasn't yet got this voice / vision thing right and the project has quickly fallen apart.  Conversely the few times I've been lucky enough to direct comics who have artistic certainty the resulting shows have been great.


Interestingly, it's about the time that a good comic finds a voice that he or she begins to attract a fan base.  There is a consistency to Stewart Lee's left-of-centre political material that sets him apart from Tim Vine's manic punnery.  Fans will pay more and travel further to get what they want from either act than for a night of 'voiceless' acts no matter how funny.

Sadly, my own set is still a mishmash of personal anecdotes, cleverish observations, puns and so on.  Charitably you'd say that I'm still finding my voice.  Until then collaboration would be counterproductive so my ideas won't coming around Devizes to beat Watts' at sport any time soon.

***

I can't resist mentioning the comparison that has been made between the Bennett / Ayres collaboration with that of the playwright Anton Chekov and the director Constantin Stanislavsky.  Until he joined the Moscow Art Theatre Chekov was convinced that The Seagull was a comedy

* My suggestion for the collective noun

Idea sex

"What I need," said Andrew Watts, "is a gang."

One of the obvious challenges of stand-up comedy is its single-handedness.  You write alone, perform alone, succeed alone and die alone.  This fosters a natural tendency for solipsism.  Stand-up comics are far more likely to see others as rivals than do improvisers or comic actors working in, say, sketch comedy.  I wonder how much this strange individualism hurts stand-up as a form.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal Matt Ridley posits that human development accelerated not because of any physiological change in our bodies (Neanderthals had physcially larger brains than we do now) but because of trade.  The exchange of ideas that happened synchronously with the exchange of goods and services created the collective brain that has taken us from the Serengeti to cyberspace.  Ridley sees 'ideas having sex' as the basis for innovation: -

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange. 

The life of a stand-up comic stands in direct opposition to this idea.

Much of this isolationism is self-inflicted (the circuit is overpopulated by socially dysfunctional loners) but there is a cultural insistence in operation as well; one of the few absolute taboos in the industry is joke theft.   Recently Freakonomics ran a terrific piece on this: -

More often than not, however, the norms deviate from copyright: for example, copyright protects expression but not ideas, but comedians’ norms protect expression as well as ideas. Or authorship: under copyright law, two individuals who cooperate in creating a work are considered joint owners of the work. In contrast, if one comedian comes up with a joke’s premise and another thinks up the punchline, under comedians’ norms of ownership the first owns the joke and the latter has nothing.

The essay goes on to say: -

The law is not always necessary to foster creativity. Using informal group norms and sanctions, comedians are able to control joke-stealing. Without the intervention of copyright law, comedians are able to assert ownership of jokes, regulate their use and transfer, impose sanctions on joke-thieves, and maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material.

I'm not sure that I agree with this.  Gaining a reputation for stealing someone else's material (and it is considered theft) can kill a career so many comics deliberately avoid exposure to other comedy forms for fear that any exposure could contaminate their material.  The only defense against an accusation of joke thievery is "I came up with it independently" and this is partially effective at best.  In no way am I condoning joke theft; simply observing that this enforced isolationism that is a reaction to this fear has a downside.

Comedians, playwrights and novelists still live with a romanticised creator-as-auteur notion that is outdated as it excludes the possibility for collaboration and therefore stymies innovation.  The accusation of collaboration or worse hangs permanently over Shakespeare.  Yet collaboration has been de rigueur  in other comedy forms since long before the writers' room on Sid Caesar's show and the Second City technique of writing down and refining sketches that were originally improvised.

The rest of the world collaborates.  The idea of the scientist as solo genius died with the Manhattan Project.  Creative conferences like MaxFunCon and SWSX abound and multiply. yet when stand-up comedians gather there is a miasma of jealousy, envy and paranoia.  A common criticism of stand-ups when they join writers' rooms is that they don't play nicely with others.  In Ridley's terms they don't like their ideas having sex with other people's ideas.

Strange, as this is the only sex many comics are likely to get.