The Best Place To Work

Le Chateau de Touffou is one of the best places to work I know. I have had the good fortune to go there twice to work and both times have been magical. It is not the grounds and the magnificent architecture and art or the sense of history, but the long meals (4 course lunch and dinner, with wine that go against modern day work practices) and most importantly Madame Ogilvy who has lived in the chateau for almost 40 years. It is her home and that it is a home makes all the difference to people's ability to get on with one another and to work productively, at least in my experience. Every company should have one (or for smaller companies, a slightly less grand one).

For the full set of pics, click here, and go for the slideshow in the upper right.

Pitching

I was recently asked to put down some thoughts about pitching. It has been before, and better than I could do, notably here, by Jon Steel, and here, by Mavity and Bayley. However, I thought I would post thoughts on the subject. 

1. If you have a good chance pitch it
2. If you are not suitable, or don’t want to do it, don’t pitch it
3. Small tight team
4. Team leader crucial
5. Clear the diary
6. Get info early.
7. Be obsessive about it. Know most. Learn most.
8. Build hypothesis fast.
9. Dip in an out of research during the process if you need. Best pitch based on real insight.
10. Develop a clear and simple point of view
11. Build a simple argument based around a SINGLE pivotal point. Everything should related to that.
12. Problem – solution is never a bad way to go. Definition of problem is half way to a solution
13. Don’t be scared to say what is ‘right’ as opposed to what you think client wants to hear
14. time spent approx 30% strat 30% creative 30% presentation
15. Different functions lead different parts of process but pitching is where functional divisions are at their most blurred (for the good)
16. Cut people out who don’t need to be there but use ‘outsiders’ when needed
17. Have one person own the deck. Different people can write/present different bits, but the deck should be owed by one person.
18. Have an outside POV who doesn’t know too much about there are a couple of key points in the process (with enough time for their input to be reflected upon and included)
19. Can you win the pitch without a meeting/before the meeting: relationship, showing thinking? Work?
20. Rehearse, esp the links between speakers
21. Never plan to fill the meeting timewise. Plan to go well under time. Everything takes longer than you think.
22. The pitch meeting is about theatre and simplicity
23. Don’t let ppt control you. Try to avoid it.
24. One thought per slide (audience can’t read and listen at the same time)
25. Think about audience all the time
26. You need to be tightly rehearsed but loose in presentation (if you see what I mean)
27. Winning the pitch and winning the business are two very different things

Coley Porter Bell Red Nose Cross Dress Day

One of the things I like about Coley Porter Bell is dress up Friday. Not because I am in inveterate dresser upper but because it is done out of a such a good spirit. It is not a management directive, somebody makes a suggestion and if there is enough momentum for the idea around the office, people dress up. Some of the themes from the past have been "posh" Friday (when a chap with a double barrelled name was leaving), "chav" Friday (chavs were invented when I was away but it seems to be an update of Essex man/woman - all sheeny track suits and bling), "animal" Friday (dress as animal of your choice) and "accident" Friday (look like you have had an accident).

This Friday was cross dress Friday, and we did it for Red Nose Day. Here is the group picture:

Coley Porter Bell Blog

A plug for the Coley Porter Bell blog that went live today. It is worth a look, here.

Change

In today's London Times a short piece about how people manage grief but repackaged about how they manage change at work. It is based on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of dealing with bereavement, but is used to describe emotional reactions to all types of change or trauma. It's pretty dark stuff but worth thinking about, especially when so many people are being made redundant every day.

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

On the news front Mandelson pumped $2.3bn into the UK car industry to try to prevent those five stages occuring.

Pressure

"You have to learn how to use the pressure".

Gianluca Vialli, the great Italian football player said this, or something very like this, when interviewed on Radio 5 Live this afternoon about the pressures of managing in the Premier League.

It made me think of a manager, of any kind, being able to take on significant pressure that the team is facing and be a vessel for and yet somehow transforming it into positive energy for everyone around. Perhaps Obama has been able to do that. I wish I could.

Pork Chops at $4.99 or Brand Anthem?

There are clients who want to sell pork chops for $4.99, and are only ever going to creative work that sells pork chops for $4.99.

But of course the agency decide it is an excellent opportunity to create an amazing new brand campaign.

99.9% of the time , this scenario is going to end in a mess; too much time wasted, too much agency resource pointed needlessly in the wrong direction, too much course correction needed. It all smacks of irresponsible fiscal management and ends up with demotivated staff who don't feel confidence in what they are being asked to do ("here we go again").

Why not just recognise that this client wants to sell pork chops at $4.99? Wouldn't be better for the agency to devote its resources to answering the brief spectacularly well? Selling $4.99 pork chops can be done very creatively. Save the big brand anthem effort for the client who wants it.

Agencies are usually to blame for the mess. They really should know better. But clients aren't exempt from blame. By pandering to the agency's desires or not being clear about the task they are quite capable of bluring what should be a simple brief.

There is a very powerful lesson in this. Understand what the client is asking for, and what they are going to buy.

I mean if you asked a shop assistant for a yoghurt you wouldn't expect her to come back with some broccoli, would you?

Don't Be A Snippy Chimp

I had the good fortune of going to a brilliant 'inspiration' talk from Dave Brailsford, the Performance Director of British Cycling. It was anything but the charicature motivational speaker thing event. Brailsford established his credentials by comparing the 1 Gold medal won in the 76 years to 2004 by British cyclists with the haul gained in 2008, that would have put British Cycling, if it were a country, ahead of France in the medals table; 8 golds and 14 medals in total.

He put his success down to three key points (plus a huge increase in lottery funding).

1. Focus. Taking only cyclists with podium potential. Brailsford was offered 46 places by the British Olympic authorities, but they took only 23. The rest weren't good enough. They set goals; not goals of beating others, but of being the best they could be, identifying a time as the goal. The times were audacious but were not unrealistic. They had been carefully worked out.

2. People. Brailsford got in the right people. The one he talked about most is Steve Peters, the only psychiatrist working in the top echleons of sports apparently (mostly, it is sports psychologists). In essence Peters talks about the emotional 'chimp mode' that if left uncontrolled, can take over, just when you don't need it. You can't change your chimp, but you can learn how to manage it so it doesn't impair performance.

Brailsford also doesn't believe in 'fear' coaching. Only positive coaching. It was part of a value system that on the team had to buy into. One very senior coach was fired for not buying into the vlaues, and others didn't last. Podium potential riders needed podium coaching.

3. Aggregated Marginal Gains. When the prepartion for the 2008 games began Brailsford gave everyone on the pursuit team, including all backroom staff, a short film for inspiration. It essentially showed their 2004 Athens defeat by the Australian team with a dramatic voice over from a movie, by Al Pacino I think, about winning one inch at a time. This laid out the philosophy to the team. They were ruthless and ingenious about breaking down every tiny element of performance. For example, McClaren F1 team did modelling on aerodynamics (helmets, body position) and race strategy. One resulting change, that defied conventional wisdom, was the start 0ff man switching from 3/4 lap to 1 and 1/4 first leg. They also got the team to 'feel' the right speed so that riders could change when they wanted to keep the speed up, rather than everything being pre-set (ie one lap per rider). In the final this resulted in one of the riders riding an unheard of 2 and 1/4 laps without a change. But it also took in learning how to wash hands properly, so avoiding the main source of passing bugs. They went to such lengths that team members were employed in Bejing to keep door handles clean. Brailsford even 'joked' about taking an inch out of riders collar bones to lessen the wind resistance. It was a joke, but I bet he had the figures!

One other comment Brailsford made was the importance of removing all stresses from the race itself which meant the performers were then freed up, as far as possible, to perform to their best. In essence it was all about preparation and leaving as little to chance.

There are some good implications for individuals and for organisations alike:

Focus

Audacious but realistic goals carefully worked out

Best people

Best people on side

Don't focus on the competition, focus on your own performance

There are improvements to be made in many many areas.

There are improvements to be made in many areas you don't even know about.

Every area should be looked at from scratch - conventional wisdom needs to be challenged.

Get rid of as much stress before the event so you can focus on performance during the event (not the stress of it).

Understand the chimp inside and work on it.

Genius or Graft

Great article in yesterday's Guardian, an edited extract from Malcolm Gladwell's new book 'The Outliers', that questions the notion that genuis is born and not the result of other factors.

Gladwell suggests that hard graft is vital. That there seems to be a magic number of around 10,000 hours 'practice' to obtain expertise. He quotes Daniel Levitin, a neurologist, who contends that this holds true across sport, music, programming and many other subjects.

He argues that timing is also vital. For example Gladwell demonstrates that the richest Americans ever were all born between 1831 and 1840, just the right time to take advantage of the industrial transformation of America that happened in the 1860s and 1870s. He also suggests the best time to be born to take advantage of the personal computer revolution that started in Jan 1975 with the announcement of the first assemble-it-yourself at home PC, the Altair 8800, was between 1952 and 1958. He shows that a whole raft of computer legends were in fact born in this period.

It is a beguiling argument. But many people were born at the right time, and many of those people worked hard, though not all of them are "geniuses", so I suspect there are still other variables that distinguish the "geniuses" from the rest of us. Nevertheless, the theory gives us hope that we can, with hard graft and good timing, make it big. It is nothing if not democratic.

Extracts from the book are here.

One last thought, the hard graft and timing theory, as a prerequisite for success is not totally new, as here suggests!

The Battle of Big Thinking

Graham Fink receives the Mexican wrestling belt as winner of the 2008 Battle of Big Thinking from Malcolm White yesterday afternoon. Graham's idea was big and brilliant. Driven by the belief that we need to put different, or opposite, thinking in the same place to create ideas, he proposed a way to put people in touch with their 'opposite brains' by meeting people from a different walk of life. These people would meet for an hour and see what happens. Any ideas would be submitted to a website. He called it the bigthinkingclub.

His master strokes were twofold. Firstly, that he was going to make it happen, not just talk about it. And by pledging to launch the club if he won, he pulled that one off. Secondly, he seduced us by recognising us as founder members! How flattering is that.

The other outstanding piece was Nigel Newton, CEO of Bloomsbury publishing, who spoke about trusting our instincts rather than the analysis whilst we watched a seemingly random series of data slides about the minutia of Lloyd's life pass by.

Molecular Boardroom

Having posted yesterday, here, about looking at the world in detail, it was a wonderful coincidence that I was lucky enough to see a boardroom that does just that earlier this week. This is the boardroom at DSM in the Netherlands:

The idea was to signal a more creative environment. The company understands the world at a molecular level and used that as an inspiration for the room. As well as the amazing walls, the room has a glass ceiling as well; and effect that makes it even more extraordinary. Below is a good example of how the ceiling amplifies the effect:
The company also has a history of buying art from local artists and employes a curator full time to run the collection. I couldn't resist putting some more shots of the boardroom walls in my 'Artzy Surfaces' flickr collection, here .

Blue Sky

Coley Porter Bell hold an annual competition called 'Blue Sky' which encourages entrances to explore a passion, one that is likely to in some way be connected to creativity. Past winners have created an adult, retro ice cream brand, explored the role of colour on buildings, looked at the effect of billboard ban in Sao Paulo and even explored fear. Here is a link, and here as well. The winner gets £3000 and two weeks off to spend on their Blue Sky project. They have to give a presentation to the company once completed. The entries are submitted anonymously, so the selection panel are judging on the merit of the entry.

The winning entry for 2006 was to write a book. This is it, written, printed and complete with blurb and quotes on the back cover, a 400 page plus parody of the branding industy:

Brilliant Business Cards

A (bad, it's the Blackberry camera again!) picture of Eco3's business cards; well, stickers really.
Eco3 are an environmental and sustainability consultancy, see here for more details. Their business cards are terrific. They re-use other bits of card, for example a train ticket or a cut a bit of card from chocolate packaging and then put their sticker on it. Brilliant!

My first question was whether the 'sticker' method was more damaging to the environment than the 'print business cards' method. Of course they had done the research and it was a third less damaging.

Wonderful stuff.

The Conspiracy of Yes

I have theory, and I call it "The Conspiracy of Yes". I use it when trying to explain the inertia that happens in (our) business when the relationship - usually between agency and client - becomes an end in itself. Like this:

Client Manager: Can you do a campaign for me? I need it in two weeks to take to my boss.
Agency Manager: It will be tough but we'll do it for you.
Agency Manager to Agency Team: We simply have to do it. And we could do some great work.
Agency Team: OK. What's the brief?
Agency Manager: Project X
Agency Team: What about Project X?
Agency Manager: We need to do some work for it.
Agency Team: What work?
Agency Manager: Some ideas.
Agency Team: On what?
Agency Manager: Project X
Agency Team: This is useless!
(ok, you get the picture now)

Exasperated, the Agency Team start working.

Two weeks later work is shared with the Client Manager. The Agency Team have worked flat out for two weeks. After the meeting the Client Manager praises the agency, particularly the Agency Manager for getting so much good work out in such a short space of time.

The Client Manager then takes the work to their boss, subtling boasting how they managed to get all this work out of the agency in two weeks from start to finish but, though good, it isn't quite right.

The Client Manager's Boss's assessment of the situation is as follows: Well done Client Manager. You have worked the agency hard, and got all this work out of them AND had the smarts to realise that it isn't quite right. Good for you.

The Client Manager happily scurries off to debrief the Agency Manager.

Client Manager: The Boss really appreciated all the hard work and the ideas you delivered, but he thinks it isn't quite right. We need some more. You have two weeks.

And so on.

The objective of all this activity gets lost. There is a good chance that nothing will get made either. The Agency Manager and Client Manager fall into this rythmn that shows lots of industry but little else. Unless there are big changes at either the client company or the agency, this cycle could go on for a long time. Occasionally, something will be made, but it will be so safe as to be unnoticed. But by now, the Client Manager and Agency Manager recognise, even if only subconciously, that this way of working keeps everything ticking over just nicely thank you, and them safely in their jobs for the foreseeable future.

Pithy Nuggets

I gave a short presentation on Tuesday to the WPP Fellows in New York. It was entitled "10 things I may or may not have learnt or am still trying to learn, that may or may not be useful, masquerading as pithy nuggets of my work philosophy and presented as an attempt to pass a handy hint or two to younger and smarter people so they can get further than I have done quicker than I have done" Here are the slides:



The tips themselves are:
1. Eat your greens
2. Snuffle for truffles
3. The central question
4. Go to the source
5. Find common ground
6. WPP is a corporation
7. The Binary Brief
8. Take a stroll on philosophy beach
9. Take a risk when buying shoes
10. The slide is self explanatory

Feel free to suggest additional tips. I can extend the presentation or swap out from my original ten.

Making Work Work

I was perusing Russell Davies' excellent blog, and saw a piece about what makes a great creative business. The piece is called the magnificent seven and the double-deckers. He thinks there are two ways to start or be a great creative business; either a bunch of experts (the magnificent seven) or a bunch of friends (the double-deckers).

I vaguely recall reading an article by a Swedish professor about measuring creativity in the work place. I will try to track it down. I don't recall any mention of either the magnificent seven or the double-deckers.

In the meantime, I did find a posting of 10 seeeeriously cool workplaces by Chief Happiness Officer, Alexander Kjerulf. Here are my three favourite pictures, firstly of a slide between floors at Red Bull in London:


and secondly, two pictures of the extremely unfactory-looking Volkswagen Phaeton plant, Dresden:





And Alexander Kjerulf's Chief Happiness Site is here. It is very 'happy', in that Danish Junior Senior 'Move Your Feet' way. It also has some pretty useful tidbits.