Buying time, expecting attention

In the early 90's I once worked on a project to establish a sales/marketing culture for a mid-tier pharma company establishing it's own Australian operation for the first time. Their products were important, if a little mundane and somewhat limited in scope. The company had identified that as the size of the business meant that there was almost no scope for career advancement it was going to struggle to recruit effective salespeople.

Their solution was to staff the sales force with experienced women looking to reenter the industry after having children. Prima facie it was a good fit. The company needed solid experienced performers but who weren't interested in promotion and the women wanted to rejoin the workforce but on more sympathetic, less careerist terms. With the right HR attitude to flexible working hours it looked like a 'win-win'.

For a while it worked well enough. The new team was highly energised and quickly established a healthy, credible presence in the marketplace. Sure, the job-sharing and ongoing maternity leave coverage issues required additional Head Office and sales manager admin but no more than had been anticipated.

About nine months later, after the initial euphoria of launch had died down, the mood changed abruptly. Both management and the individual salespeople were suddenly, totally disenchanted. The company expected the women to still be grateful for the opportunity to rejoin the workforce on such sympathetic terms and that gratitude to manifest itself as greater attention to detail. The women couldn't see what the problem was: they were turning up and doing the job (sick kids who needed early collection from child care notwithstanding) weren't they?

The women were selling time only whereas the company thought that their (complete) attention came as part of the package. Within a year the complexion of the team had shifted back to the usual blend of unambitious old stagers, thrusting careerists and a few women with young children but decent family support to allay the early-pick-up-from-child-care-issue.

No pregnant person can give an employer his or her complete attention. Ditto for anyone with a new baby. It doesn't matter of that baby is real or metaphoric (i.e. a nascent IOS app, a comedy career or a that business you're starting up on the side) and it's no less true if both you and your employer buy into the fiction that selling only your time will be sufficient.

Something you love more than your job is always going to take attention away from that job. Because in part that's what love is.

Blue chin syndrome

Thinking further about this need to earn an audience's attention reminded of a phenomenon that Grainne Maguire, a stand-up comedian friend of mine, calls 'blue chin syndrome': -

The gig isn't going well when out in the darkness you see all these blue chins; audience member's faces uplit by their mobile phones as they text their friends

This is bad enough when the device in question is a Nokia.  If they bring out the iPads it's probably time to vacate the stage.

Earning attention

At his non-rambling best Merlin Mann is one of my favourite contemporary online writer-thinkers.  Lately he's been energetically promoting the idea that what counts in life is not so much where we spend our time or money but rather where we focus our attention.

Every professional performer has endured the experience of a paying audience getting bored and talking through your act: -

Even after they've given you their time and money you still have to earn your audience's attention

The signals that you've yet to earn that attention are pretty blatant if you know what you're looking for.  My first corporate theatre gig, which was also my first paid work after I quit the marketing department of Coca-Cola, was a morning of team building for some long since subsumed Sydney freight company.  The maiden outing of Alternative Corporate Training Services (aka 'ACTS')* was in mid-December 1991 and the job had been a long time coming.  Our show used improv techniques to teach teamwork to corporate types but we'd really just been hired to make the group laugh for an hour whilst they set up for Christmas lunch in the room next door.  I have three distinct memories of that afternoon: -

1. There was no air conditioning so it was stifling.  It was Sydney in December and our hour was the only thing between the group and a fridge full of icy beer
2. We took the 'stage' (read: walked to the space at the front) to the Emerson, Lake & Palmer version of Fanfare to the Common Man.  The idea was the entrance would be epic but as the venue had no sound desk we'd brought along an old boom-box, which I had to clunk on then hold above my head from the back of the room
3. As we started the MD, who hadn't signed off on our appearance, sat at the foremost table took out a massive mobile phone and ostentatiously placed it in front of him

The signal was as clear as day: you have my attention but only for as long as no one (anyone) from the outside world wants it.  The amateurishness of our entrance, our visible lack of self-belief and even our dumb company name meant we hadn't earned the right to ask him to switch off his phone.  Everyone in the room knew it and our gig went downhill from there.

There's a moment with every audience when you have to 'get them'.  If that point in time passes without you earning the room's attention you will struggle thereafter.  The same rule applies with absolutely every kind of audience; a target market of prescribing doctors, an electorate or an online community.

That day in 1991 we stumbled through the hour by dropping the team building message and playing for laughs, which is all they wanted anyway.  They paid us in cash and we went directly to the Chinese restaurant up the road and spent the entire fee on our own boozy Christmas lunch.  Late that afternoon our pager beeped (we shared the one between us) and a booking agent offered us a gig at a January kick-off event.  At that second, boom-boxless, gig we earned the attention of the room and ACTS-CORPRO-Instant Theatre-Dramatic Change went on from there.



* Because we were a theatre group.  Geddit?  No?  Anyone? This was the first of our dumb company names.  After that we went for CORPRO Productions ('Corporate Impro') before getting to Instant Theatre then Dramatic Change

Desperate times, desperate measures

The question of whether American drug reps are salespeople or robots is back to the Supreme Court.  If the suit is successful then the pharmaceutical industry will owe its (former) employees many millions of dollars in unpaid overtime.

This is a natural consequence of Big Pharma viciously downsizing its sales teams at the end of the blockbuster era.  The companies have no choice but to shed all these jobs but as the entire industry is contracting their laid-off employees can pursue this overtime claim with impunity.  There aren't enough new jobs emerging in the industry so there's no reward for not being labelled a troublemaker who went after this additional cash.  If you're not going to get another gig anyway you might as well try for whatever you can get?

Structural change.  Boy, I don't know...*

* With apologies to Aaron Sorkin

The fourth bite

I'm in California catching up with friends.  Last night my wife and I dined with them at a busy family restaurant (pizzas, burgers).  The atmosphere was buzzy and the wait staff were as friendly as the portions were huge.  So to my banal observation of the week:-

American restaurant food loses its flavour at the third mouthful

The plate looks great when set down in front of you and that first bite is amazing.  As are the next two.  You find yourself thinking that America is the greatest country on earth.  Then almost immediately your palate jades.  You start reaching for the salt and pepper and hot sauce.  You start picking out the protein and vegetables and leaving the starch.  You start breathing heavily.  Your sense of struggle is heightened as you realise that you're not yet halfway through the obscene pile of food on your plate.  You find yourself thinking that it's no wonder that America is the fattest country on earth.

But look around you.  No one else at the table is even attempting to finish their serving.  Only a gluttonous fool eats much past that fourth mouthful.  No big deal.  The busboy appears and removes the Americans' unfinished meals.  Only we two Australians, raised in a different eating culture, doggedly persist.  We plough on, well past the point of discomfort and mocked by the knowledge that what we're now doing is actually unhealthy.  Eventually we concede defeat and the accusing plates are taken away.

"Now, I hope you folks have all left enough room for desert?"

And it begins again.

Disappointed Bridge

Disappointed Bridge was the dumbest company name I ever came up with. The business in question was going to be the TV production arm of a theatre company we'd been running successfully in Sydney for a number of years. As part of this move the three founders invited Bryan to join us as a partner. He was a friend with a strong background in television but I suspect he really only came on board because of our cool offices.

And they were so, so cool; a former dance studio with a massive sprung wooden floor in a converted pier with panoramic views of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The space was far too big for our meagre needs when we weren't actually rehearsing but when a friend offered us the chance to sublet, the wow factor was such that we couldn't turn it down.

Immediately after Bryan joined us we settled into the artfully spaced sofas and started brainstorming ideas for the new venture as a matter of urgency. Nothing so workaday as ideas for an actual television show mind; we needed a cool name for the business itself. And only a name as cool as our offices would suffice.

We ran an unsurprising gamut of obliquely clever and archly fey suggestions, including the obvious but taken 'Pier Productions', when I hit upon it, "Disappointed Bridge Productions!"

This was met with a predictable silence. I'd been reading James Joyce's Ulysses (which tells you everything you need to know about who I was at the time).

"There's a great joke in Ulysses: 'What's the definition of a pier? A disappointed bridge.'"

Genius, I thought; a company name that was apposite, witty and just a little off the mainstream. Just like the TV we planned to make.  Bryan, who knew me less well than the others but TV far better was withering in his sarcasm, "Yeah, because it's going to sound great when we're waiting in the lobby of Channel Nine and the receptionist calls up and says, 'The guys from Disappointing Bridge' are here to see you".

Bryan now makes lots of TV. I do not.

Waiting for a life-changing event

"A lot of farmers," said my brother-in-law, "won't move from their unsustainable farming practices until they have some sort of 'life-changing' event."

We were on a tour of the farm where I grew up in the 70's and 80's that he now runs with my sister and he was lamenting the unenlightened habits of many Australian farmers.  As I've mentioned before, he's an enthusiastic (evangelical) proponent of holistic farming.

I suppose the 'life-changing event' he imagines is some not-quite-fatal event like a heart attack or having the bank seriously question whether the farm's debt should be allowed to roll over.   But as any doctor will tell you non-fatal heart attacks are rarely life-changing.  We're humans and we hold our habits, good and bad, far closer than we'd like to admit.

It is useless to try and reason a man out of something he wasn't reasoned into.

Jonathan Swift

My brother-in-law has it wrong.  The 'life-changing event' he's seeking isn't for the farmer but the farm.  The best hope for changing practices on a given bit of dirt comes with change of ownership through inheritance or sale; and new ideas are far more likely to be trialled under totally new ownership of the asset.

The land we drove over was first used for grazing cattle in 1819 by a man named William Lee who helped build the very earliest road over the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney.  Lee was granted title to something like 60,000 acres in 1832.  Over the years that holding was broken up into smaller properties although the Lee family are still prominent in the district.  My father bought our farm (4300 acres) from the Lees in the early 1960's.  The land has been owned by only two families in the almost 200 years since white settlement reached that part of Australia. Not a lot of scope for 'life-changing events' in that timeline.

It's a great modern example of the most persistent economic unit in history: the family owned and operated farm, reports of whose demise have been greatly exaggerated.  That persistence is borne of an old fashioned mindset; farmers who create a life that serves an asset that will outlive them.  This is at odds with the way that almost everyone in the rich world lives; we build a life that serves the personal needs of our families and ourselves.  We build unremarkable bourgeois lives instead of creating then stewarding some good thing that will outlive us.

As much as we freelancers believe that we're different from the wage slaves we used to be, in this respect we're exactly the same.  Seriously expecting your son to one day take over your web design business is as weird as assuming that he'll ascend to your regional sales manager role.

We have to admit that we're not building assets, just lives, and the best we can hope for is that most bourgeois of aspirations: leaving enough cash in the kitty for our kids to have their choice of futures.

Do unto others...

Over the years and around the world I've worked with many of the major pharmaceutical companies but for whatever reason I haven't often crossed paths with Pfizer.  As such my impressions of the world's largest pharma company has usually been that of their competitors.

For over twenty years Pfizer has been the most ruthlessly single-minded marketing outfit in the industry.  By flooding doctors' offices with legions of undertrained reps, often as many as eight per territory for a single product, it sold good drugs (Lipitor, Viagra) in a bad way.  This successful focus on 'share of voice' triggered an arms race wherein every company selling a product in Primary Care had to proliferate sales reps or else be elbowed out of the doctor's mind.  This deluge of drug reps selling poorly differentiated products by parroting two or three key messages with scant regard for a prescriber's clinical needs has destroyed the industry's claim to be a partner in the fight against disease.  Most doctors now see the industry not as a partner but as an enemy and Pfizer's 'share of voice' strategy is a major cause of this shift.

As I said, I've not done much work for Pfizer but I've often been brought in to help prepare a defensive response to an upcoming Pfizer launch into a given market.  Even in specialty care fields like oncology there's a perception that Pfizer will enter the fray with a massive sales/marketing investment dispatched with a discipline that feels like violence.  All of those barroom laments at sales conferences about the underhanded things done by 'the other guy' are usually about the Pfizer rep.

This ruthlessness goes way beyond the hurly-burly of a couple of reps scrambling after a prescription in a suburban clinic somewhere in America.  Pfizer has effectively declared war on the government of New Zealand by demanding that Pharmac, the highly effective regulatory body charged with controlling the country's drug costs, be neutered in the name of an impending Free Trade Agreement.  Admittedly Pfizer isn't acting alone here and so far the NZ government has stood its ground but this story has a way to run yet.

You could argue that Pfizer really isn't any different from any of the other players (i.e. my clients); just a little more focused on the bottom line and a little more eager to adopt practices that will hurt the entire industry in the long term.

I disagree.  Lipitor, the largest selling drug of all time, is now off patent and in pursuit of this bottom line Pfizer is devouring the very people who drove that success.  I can just about stomach the job cuts because we could all see those coming; although this is cold comfort to the 16,300 employees losing their jobs in the coming weeks.  What I wasn't aware of was Pfizer's longer-term move to cap (American) retiree health benefits at $11,700 p.a. despite the cost of the policy being over $22,000 and rising.  The ex-employee pays the rest.  According to the Placebo Effect blog this will save the company about $534 million a year.  When Pfizer's sucked you dry it really does just discard the husk and move on.

The only justifiable stance the pharma industry has ever been able to take was set out by George Merck in 1950: -

We try never to forget that medicine is for the people.  It is not for the profits.  The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear.  The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been. 

In pursuit of profits Pfizer has thrown so much under the bus; the one-to-one relationship with the doctor, the collegiate nature of the industry, its world class research centres in Kent and Michigan and its own employees, past and present.  Its decline from industry dominance is not to be lamented.

Negativity bias

I am a social creature.  I enjoy the company of others and have always made an effort to maintain friendships despite living on the far side of the planet from the people I knew growing up.

Technology makes this much easier to achieve than in times past.  Facebook means we can keep up with the smaller details of others' lives and Skype affords us cost-free face-to-face interactions whenever both parties are at the computer, which is most if the time.  Still, there's no substitute for being in a room with a friend so that's how I spent much of my time in Sydney last week.

As I've mentioned earlier when an ex-pat comes home after an extended absence a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't mechanism kicks in.  As with any scenario where resources are finite (i.e. my time in this case) but demand is practically infinite, a zero-sum game develops.  Time spent catching up with one person is unavailable for any other purpose be it work, sleep, exercise or seeing someone else.  This fact is as obvious as it is brutal but its very obviousness creates a different, more subtle problem.

Most of my friends and family in Australia lead successful (read: boring) lives so these one-on-one catch-ups often turn out to be boring conversations that go something like this: -

Me: So how's everything with you?
Old Friend: Great.
Me: Family?
OF: Great.
Me: Job?
OF: Great.
Me: Parents.  How're your parents doing?
OF: Good...

Quickly pressure starts to mount under the conversation.  We both feel it.  After all I've made time for this one person to the exclusion of all others and we can't seem to lift the discussion out of bourgeois banality.  My old friend feels the need to somehow sing for her supper so she drags something out of left field: -

OF: Did you hear about my sister-in-law?
Me: No.  I don't think I know her.
OF: Oh, I'm sure you would've met her at something.  Anyway, her father has been diagnosed with Parkinson's.
Me: That's dreadful.  It must be very hard on everyone.
OF: Well, they live in Melbourne so we don't really see them that much but it has been hard on my brother.
Me: I think I might remember meeting him at your wedding...

We've moved on from personal banality to surveying the horizons of our person existence for second- or even third-hand suffering to make sure that our time together isn't wasted and by the end of the catch-up we're both a little exhausted.  An entire week of this can leave a guy not only wrung-out but thoroughly depressed as a negativity bias kicks in.  I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not getting a true snapshot of anyone's life.

We want our friends to be there to support us through the bad times so maybe there's a tendency to road-test the disaster scenarios that lie in each of our futures just to see how it feels.  Of course when the truly bad stuff has been and gone we joke about it.  The easiest, funniest conversations to have are the ones where there's true sadness at the heart of the story: -

OF: Did you hear what happened when my Dad got arrested?
Me: No!  I never even heard he'd been in trouble!
OF: It's hilarious really.  Anyway we get this strange call from my stepmother late at night...

All of this effort and analysis is a poor substitution for propinquity but it's all we ex-pats have to offer.

A temporary lobotomy

Whilst in Sydney I endured the most banal of travel mishaps: I left my iPhone in the back of a cab.  We need not dwell on the details except to say that it was late in the evening and that wine had been taken.

My less than sympathetic mother joked that the loss was the equivalent of a lobotomy.  She was 100% correct in that I've outsourced much of my memory and lower-level mental functioning to a shiny piece of Apple.  To people of my parents' age there is still something shameful about an unnatural over-reliance on machines to assist with menial tasks such as addition, subtraction and the recall of phone numbers.  There are two responses to this: -

1. These are menial tasks.  Why expend any more effort on them than necessary?
2. Reliance on an iPhone for memory is no more unnatural than relying on a kitchen for digestion

In his wonderfully thought-provoking book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly describes technology as the entirely inevitable next stage of evolution.  A kitchen can be thought of as an external stomach that allows mankind to extract nutrients from a much wider range of foodstuffs.  Our species' ability to survive on cooked foods that can kill us if eaten raw is the reason why we dominate the planet.

Opting out of any technology, be it cooking or iPhone apps, is willfully contrarian and silly.  Still, doubtless there once lived some paleolithic version of me whose mother joked that his preference for cooked meat was proof that he'd gone soft.

London. Dawn. An uneasy peace prevails

Got back to London yesterday after three weeks away. Mostly I was catching up with family in Australia in Far North Queensland and western New South Wales but I also managed the best part of a week seeing friends in Sydney and Wellington (NZ). With all the bad behaviour in England this week I found it harder and harder to 'sell' the UK as a sensible place to live when Oz is an option.

I like Great Britain and I love London but the ambient anger we've seen this week isn't going to dissipate until the city / country regains some sense of shared opportunity. I'm still trying to work out where I want to grow old but I'm not sure I'd stay in the UK if I were still young.

Something bigger than a career

A few years ago in the context of showbiz careers I mused as follows: -

Isn't a successful career just one where you do what you love until you don't have to do it any more?

As I get ready to leave the farm I how this thought might apply to owner-operator agriculture.  Farmers' bodies wear out quicker than most and yet as in Australia 50% will die within five years of retirement, quitting doesn't seem to be much of an option.  If you stay you wear out.  If you leave you die anyway.

'Secession planning' is a growing industry in the bush as smart farmers look to 'step back' and hand the business over to the next generation whilst still retaining some small role for themselves instead of selling the business outright before heading to the coast to die.  Done properly this is a way to extend the enterprise past 40-50 years but done badly it turns into a defensive exercise in personal survival that mortgages the prospects of the next generation.

The critical issue is in the word 'career'.  Your career terminates when you do.  Whereas a successful business is a bigger thing that can (should) outlast you.  Headcount: 1 enterprises are careers that die with us; they can no more be handed on to the next generation than an actor can bequeath her role in a sitcom to her daughter.

The difference is in the asset mix.  Farms must be 'asset-heavy' to flourish whereas any career based on personal talent can function 'asset-light'.  Successful consultants, actors, writers and the like take the fruits of their labours and buy real estate whereas ambitious farmers buy more land, stock and equipment.

This is probably obvious to anyone except a farmer's son who chose to use his brains to make his way in the world rather than stay at home and build a life based on his brains, physical effort and the farm where he grew up.