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