The sharp end of the Greek financial crisis

Greece has stopped paying the pharmaceutical companies.  A letter from the local pharmaceutical industry association to the Greek government reads in part: -

In the first quarter of 2011, hospitals and pharmacies purchased medicinal products worth about €70 million, of which only €332 have been paid!  That is not a typing error.

In response a number of the majors are apparently just going to cut off supply of medicines.  Watch out for a proliferation of black market and counterfeit medicines at home as well as wealthier Greek citizens seeking out treatment in other European countries.  I don't know how easy it would be for someone to rock up to an NHS cancer centre and demand access to Herceptin but you can bet that some of the private clinics on Harley Street will see an uptick in business.

Apologies for the blitheness of that last remark but the fact remains: many middle class and poor Greeks will be denied access to a lot of modern drugs.  Whilst this puts them in the same boat as most people world, including lots of poorer Americans, it is at odds with what might be described as a broader European health care ethos.

Not a good time to be one of the 42% of Greek adults who smoke.

Ideas obvious but unrealised

Yesterday I listened to a podcast about Helsinki, which Monocle magazine named as its 'World's Most Livable City'. 

One of the many great things about Helsinki is its small size.  The entire population of Finland is only 5.5 million and I was especially taken with an interview with a young Finnish architect named Tuomas Toivonen* who expressed a very specific sentiment that you only get from small countries: -

If you don't do it probably no one else will

This is such a change from the breathless urgency with which most of the world approaches a project: -

Do it now before someone beats you to it

I've long been plagued by this sense that life is a kind of zero-sum gold rush.  The sense that whilst there's certainly success to be had, there isn't enough to go around.  More than that, if I don't capitalise immediately on that cool idea I had this morning then it'll just float back into the ether and settle on some more deserving soul.

The idea that the muses are both jealous and capricious is as old as literature.  The trouble these days is that thanks to the internet I get to watch in real time as Calliope favours some other creative type who followed through on the very same concept I had six months ago but parked on a To Do List.  As the modern marketplace of ideas only really rewards the first, then the best, of any sort of offering it's easy to beat myself up over dropped opportunities.  It feels very much like plagiarism but of course I'm the victim of nothing more than my own inertia.

There's no solution to this.  You can't follow through on every idle thought that occurs in the morning shower, that way madness lies.  The best anyone can do is choose the project that interests you the most and execute it in a way that only you can.  Then it becomes the thing that only you can do; if you don't do it no one else will.

The best ideas are obvious but unrealised.  The ones sitting right on the cusp of the adjacent possible.  What they crave is time, money and (especially) attention and they're just going to keep floating around out there until someone gives them what they want.

* And there's nothing Tyler Brûlé's team loves more than a young Nordic architect / designer...

What you don't want to hear is...

Yesterday the T2 section of The Times ran a terrific interview with Reginald D Hunter, who is one of my favourite stand-ups.  The article was another exercise in Reg cultivating his persona as the thoughtful guy who tells you the things you don't want to hear, albeit in as charming and funny a manner as possible.

His latest show, Even the Devil Sometimes Tells the Truth, is apparently an exploration of what he calls 'institutionalised female privilege', a topic which will undoubtedly leave him open to accusations of misogyny.  Given that Reg is a black man raised in Georgia whose award-winning 2006 show was called Pride and Prejudice and Niggas it's fair to say he's made a career out of courting uninformed charges of prejudice.

Like all great comics he sets out to make his audience laugh then think; in that order.  He knows he's got to tread a line to do this well and in the interview he describes part of his rehearsal routine: -

OK, today I'm going to look in the mirror and work on saying these things without them being misogynist

Reg's only way to the funny is over some very thin PC ice so he's going to have to muster all of his considerable skill, craft and charisma to get his audience where he wants to go without anyone taking offense along the way.  He wants to challenge but not offend us.  Reg Hunter is a master of the dying art of telling someone what he doesn't want to hear without him hating you when you're done.

Few politicians even bother with it.  Consider the centre-right politicians the world over who are happy to be portrayed relishing the fiscal pain they're about to inflict on their economies.  Even the most naive lefty accepts that Britain has to reduce it's public spending but George Osborne still succeeds in giving offense by not looking unhappy enough.  Or at all.  A spin doctor would argue that he's 'energising his base'; which is the most immature, counterproductive and ultimately damaging political habit to come out of America in the last twenty years.  Right now Australian political discourse is being destroyed by this puerile game playing.  The death of civility and all that.

There are plenty of unpalatable things that each of us needs to hear in various aspects of our lives.  As an external consultant I'm sometimes brought into workplaces as a messenger of sorts*.   Part of my job is to communicate to people that they need to do their job differently.  Either because times have changed or because they just weren't all that good to begin with, their current performance is no longer regarded as up to scratch.

Which is a shitty thing to have to hear.

But if I offend my audience then they'll immediately stop listening to my proposed solutions and focus on reasons why I'm wrong.  In the past I've been wrong in so, so, many ways: my analysis of the problem, my suggested solution, my personal background, my accent, my dress sense, even the colour, layout and, on one memorable day, my choice of font on my slides.  Who knew Times New Roman could vex so much?

This balance between truth-telling without giving offense sits at the heart of so many jobs.  Teachers, coaches, salepeople all have to get it right.  The discipline standing in front of a (real or metaphorical) mirror and practicing how to verbalise a fault without it being received as an attack is always worth the effort.


* At least I'm a strategist-cum-trainer so I don't get involved in the outplacement work brought to life in the film Up in the Air.  Although I suppose that if you're going to get sacked then a chat with George Clooney, a man more charming than even Reg Hunter, would possibly sweeten the pill

Excellent advice

Great article from the HBR blog. 

Adrenaline plays funny tricks on the mind, and you need to establish the muscle memory of a full, physical rehearsal in order to give your body something remembered to do when the adrenaline kicks in. A mental run-through is not enough. You must rehearse. 

I love the phrase 'jumping the couch'.

Choosing to read

I read books at one of two speeds: days or months.

Part of my problem is that once I start a book I finish it.  It's the same with films and plays.  I have a personal rule that borders on a fetish: when I sit down to something I will see it through to the end.  My reasoning is that once you start prematurely disposing of Art the unfamiliar can be unfairly branded as mediocre and your horizons narrow.  I resent the badly written book that's been sitting on my bedside table since we got back from Greece three weeks ago but I balance that against the Headcount:1 discipline of sticking with difficult tasks.

Like any avid reader I can't put down a book I love but when something bores me I get distracted.   Newspapers, magazines, podcasts, NewsFire and Instapaper all beckon from the periphery.  A symptom of the modern condition that there's always something else to read so unless you develop some sort of discipline your attention will go AWOL: -

Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine

It's hard to disagree with Merlin Mann's analysis that nowadays your attention is a more valuable commodity than your time.  The ticket price of a £25 book is easily dwarfed by the month of frustration of that unfinished book on the bedside table.  When the art is free, as at much of the Edinburgh Fringe, the real cost of consumption is even more obvious. 

Curation is now a vital aspect in any civilised life but sooner or later you've got to make a choice.  An hour spent scanning Twitter to see what others are reading is an hour not reading anything but Twitter.

Judgement

No one is more judged in civilised society than the stand-up comedian.  Every twelve seconds you're rated.

Jerry Seinfeld

Jerry Seinfeld is fantastic in this, as is Louis CK.  Chris Rock is wonderfully gracious but Ricky Gervais just comes across as an interloper.

(part 1 of 4 on YouTube)

The things we told ourselves

"After your session finishes we're all going out for dinner nearby as a team and the Director would love it if you'd both join us."

My business partner and I agreed enthusiastically and so set in train one of the longest, hardest most miserable nights of work I have ever done.

We started the training consultancy in Australia in the mid-90's, working solely with the pharmaceutical industry and, as pharma is as incestuous as any other sector, the choice to specialise paid off immediately.  Our reputation quickly, happily spread and we were starting to get used to those long-haul Business class flights to work with English-speaking clients in South Asia, Canada and the UK.  The US lay just out of reach at this stage but we'd managed to overcome the cultural cringe that comes from growing up on the far side of the planet.  This is a vital step for any antipodean looking to work globally.  If you'd asked us we would've airily told you that we weren't at all surprised that our ideas were so well received in far flung places but we would've been lying; we couldn't believe our luck.

Aye, there's the rub: we still saw it as luck.  Without ever discussing it openly, we'd decide to ride that luck as far as we could.

We said yes to every job that would pay, no matter how tight the timings or how ridiculous the travel schedule.  We also insisted on flying business class from Australia even though that priced us out of who knows how many projects and we co-facilitated every programme thus doubling those already substantial travel costs.  We told the clients (and ourselves) we were a high-impact double-act, a masterful combination of disparate talents and insights that combined delivered a truly unique and valuable training experience.  The honest truth was that if one of us was going to be sitting near the pointy end of QF001 then sure as hell the other one was going to be there too.

Which is how we found ourselves sitting exhausted in the function room of a country house hotel in the English Midlands in February at the close of Day Two of a three-day programme for a new UK client.  We'd arrived from Australia less than 36 hours before the training started and had yet to design Day Three.  We usually only ran two-day programmes but the client hadn't been able to justify the travel costs for two people for just two days so we blithely added on the third to get the gig.  Like I said, we rode that luck as far as we could.

We told ourselves we'd go through the existing programme and build in the new stuff on the plane over; after all it's effectively 24 hours travel time from Sydney to Heathrow.  But we'd just come off an equally arduous project in Australia and New Zealand, my partner was missing his wife and kids just as I was missing my girlfriend and we were both a bit miserable, the inflight service was great and there was host of new movies that just demanded watching.  And by then we didn't like each other all that much.

We told ourselves that we'd review the complete programme and make all the changes needed before we got to Bangkok so we could relax and sleep on the night leg into London.  We changed that to an agreement that we'd make the jet lag work to our advantage by waking up three or four hours before we landed at Heathrow to break out the laptops and get the work done once we were good and rested.  Then we were going to get to the London hotel we used upon arrival and power through the work in a single day before leaving for the Midlands the following morning.

We left Australia with only two days of a three-day programme written and we arrived at the country house hotel in exactly the same state.

Day One went brilliantly.  The team was motivated, the client was delighted but afterwards we were too exhausted to do anything except crawl into bed and get ready for tomorrow.  We told ourselves that we were almost over the jet lag and that the design of Day Three would magically present itself once Day Two was done.  The second day went as well as the first.  Even at the end of that long day the room was abuzz with everyone was wondering what fantastic stuff we'd have them doing on the final day.  Us included.

Then the Director invited us to join the team for dinner nearby.  We eagerly accepted.  We told ourselves that this was a fantastic networking opportunity to further our relationship at the upper echelons of a major multinational.  And we both had to go to the dinner because the only thing we hated more than doing more work than the other guy was having that other guy assess our work afterwards.  In a perfect iteration of Game Theory either we worked together or we worked not at all.

'Dinner' was a misnomer.  So was 'nearby'.  We were bundled onto a coach with the rest of the group and bussed across two counties to a cavernous and therefore freezing indoor Go-Kart track.  The Director reckoned that this sort of thing was good for team morale.  It took well over two hours to get there, although in fairness the driver did get lost a couple of times as he'd never been to Wales before.

Once at the track we were divided into teams to compete in a mini-version of Le Mans; each team-member taking it in turn to drive until the we'd been on the track for 90 minutes.  The winning team would be the one whose kart had done the most laps.  Competition, the Director thought, was also good for team morale.  My partner and I were put on the Director's team and he hated losing as much as he liked drinking.  We told ourselves it was a fantastic networking opportunity.

Neither of us turned out to be especially good kart drivers.  After one shift each we graciously gave up further turns at the wheel and sat shivering in the stand slowing sipping strong English beer and quietly weeping with exhaustion as the Director did his best to make up the gap we'd put between our kart and the front-runners.  At the end of the hour and half he'd put in an Ayrton Senna-esque performance to grab us a podium finish.  No thanks to you two, he said.

It was after midnight when we got back to the country house hotel.  The management didn't run to all-night room service so we begged as much instant coffee as we could get from the front desk, showered and met in my room to start work just before 1am.

In 21 hours we'd be on the plane home so the required effort was twofold; we had to force ourselves to do the work but also to care if that work was any good.  I have never loathed anyone as much as I loathed my partner that freezing night in February in that country house hotel in the Midlands.  The feeling was mutual and for hours neither of us ventured forth an idea that the other deemed even remotely worthwhile.  Slowly, bitterly finally we ground out a draft agenda and got the new PowerPoint deck finished around dawn.  We ate breakfast in the room, drinking silver potful after silver potful of weak English coffee until we were jittery and awake enough to face the day.

Somehow we nailed it.   Somehow we performed our way through until the 330pm finish and the team left feeling great about the entire three-day programme.  The Director thanked us heartily and intimated that there'd be plenty more work for us in the future.  He was as good as his word remains a valued client and friend to this day.

Once the limo arrived to take us back to Heathrow my partner and I didn't exchange another word until we congratulated each other through gritted teeth at the taxi stand in Sydney.  It wasn't the last job we did as a double-act but never again did we make the double-act a deal-breaker.  We haven't looked back since.

Congresses

The problem with catching up with an overseas client attending the international medical congress being staged on your city is that he's unlikely to be the only client there. Everyone knows I work widely across the industry but no one needs to be reminded of the fact.

A paradox of identity

Think about all those times you've left a meeting with that carefully drafted background document still in your bag or all those old business cards you paid for but never handed out. Certainly it's waste, but is it overcapitalisation?

Probably. The challenge of spending not-too-much on a given project is one of the fundamental challenges of business. The only difference in a Headcount:1 world is that we just call it 'waste'.

The challenge faced by the self-employed is that we constantly undervalue our time. I suspect that this is because of our extremely high levels of self-identification: what we do is who we are.  Ergo, if we're not working how do we know we even exist? I'm being more serious here than I may seem: -

Q: What's the difference between self-employment and unemployment?
A: The self-employed get up every morning and do something.

Farmers patrol their fields. Stand-up comics take unpaid gigs. Consultants like me trawl the Internet accumulating a level of detail about my clients that runs needlessly deep. Others dutifully attend 'networking' events and try and sell their services to suppliers with identical offerings to our own. We work because that's what we do.

How do I know this time is wasted? Because if a more valuable activity presented itself we'd shift our time, energy and attention to it in a heartbeat. We waste time, energy and attention on our egos as manifested in our businesses. The alternative is to 'waste' those scarce resources on our families and a healthier version of ourselves.

No self-employed person can lead a truly happy and balanced life without resolving this paradox of identity

Don't ask me, I'm just a girl

The Placebo Effect site carries details of a gory wrongful dismissal suit in the US that has mutated by way of a bizarre sexual harassment suit into another massive overtime claim for American drug reps.

The company in question, Endo, has done neither itself nor the wider industry any favours.  The plaintiff, a rep named Susan Quinn claims that her boss, Melissa Phillips, coached her with the following advice: -

Ms. Phillips also stated to Ms. Quinn that she should be familiar with the physicians she called on by, for example, sharing details about her private life. Ms. Phillips also told Ms. Quinn that she should use smaller words to appear less intelligent.

Ah, the Malibu Stacy school of pharmaceutical selling.

Non-financial overinvestment

If you've ever bought a residential property you're familiar with the principle of overinvestment.  It's the moment during the inspection when you start wondering about the state of mind of the people who are selling.  You look at your partner and whisper,

"Really?  They must've spent another thousand pounds on that?  I mean we like the place well enough but they're kidding themselves if they think they're getting their money back on whatever they spent on that skylight / fireplace / waterfall / bedroom spa unit..."

I'm not thinking about the feature that was obviously installed because the vendors thought that they'd enjoy the use of it but rather that addition they made because of a transparent thought that it would increase the resale value*.  By definition this incremental spend as an investment: something that will return them more money than they laid out.  If they don't get that additional return then they've overinvested.

There's a parallel with my sort of knowledge work.  When I have too much time on my hands I'm in danger of devoting more attention to a project than it warrants.  Sometimes I'm guilty of devoting more attention to a project than it can bear.  In either case I'm guilty of overinvestment,

"Really?  He must've spent another couple of extra days on that?  I mean we like the concept well enough but he's kidding himself if he thinks we're going to pay extra for however long he spent on those new graphics / additional background research..."

If my time is worth something when I'm busy then it's worth something when I'm not.  Allowing that figure to shift is crazy.  If I have spare time on my hands then it shouldn't be devoted to my client's goals but rather my own.

* A good rule to remember when selling a house or flat is that you're never going to guess the shade of blue the buyer wants so either paint the wall white or leave it as is

A price-maker but a date-taker

I've found myself musing on the nature of success.  When you're in the middle of a life how do you know if it's going well?

This is especially acute if you're self-employed and thus denied the external loci of the annual performance review, the promotion achieved or denied and the size of your bonus.  What indicators can you look to to vindicate the choice you made to go out on your own?  I don't think it's enough to get to the end of the tax year and check the bank account, especially as money is rarely the chief reason why people start their own businesses.  Making money is necessary for survival but not sufficient for success.

I need an array of projects at different stages of the development cycle.  These projects should be with a range of clients and preferably spread around the world.

My development cycle runs something like this: -

• Initial inquiry ➙ credentials presentation
• Identified need ➙ costed proposal
• Project sign-off & timeline agreed
• Design ➙ delivery ➙ invoice
• Feedback
• Initial discussion on follow-up

My business model relies on me delivering twenty or so projects a year.  Obviously life is so much easier when they spread out over the calendar rather than the stress of 'feast or famine' but of course that's preferable to no projects at all.

Because my work requires largish numbers of people to be herded into a single room I have very little influence over the delivery date of the project.  I'm a price-maker but a date-taker.

Summer is always quiet in Europe because of holidays.  January is busy because everyone wants kick-off meetings which means that December is a high-stress month of preparation interrupted by the 'silly season'.

So can I achieve this even spread of projects over the year?  Geography helps as America takes shorter summer holidays than Europe and my Asian clients operate with less seasonality still (Chinese New Year notwithstanding).  More important is upping the variety of my offering: if my business is built solely on 'energiser' sessions for sales teams then I'm going to be busy at New Year and a la rentrée and no other time.  That's not going to make me feel successful.

A good starting point is actually documenting the development cycle.  Understanding where each active project is sitting on the continuum helps me to spot upcoming periods of stress.  It also forces me to keep prospecting for new work through the busy patches and it forces me to develop offerings that aren't so seasonal; for example working with smaller, more easily assembled groups of marketing as well as larger sales teams.

If in the course of a week I'm pitching, writing proposals, meeting new clients for the first time and actually delivering a project then I'm pleased.  Whenever I can see months that look like this I sometimes go crazy and start wishing for a vacation.

The self-employed: often pleased, rarely happy.