The bar stool test

Back when I was younger and didn’t know better, I used to write ads for a living. I wasn’t very good at it.

So, when my creative director called me into his office late one Thursday, I thought he was going to fire me. 

Instead, he told me to grab my coat and took me to the pub round the corner. He sat me on a bar stool, bought me a beer and said:

‘What do you do for fun?’

I wasn’t sure how to take this. He was a fierce and flamboyant character with a famously volcanic temper – there were rumours he’d been a gangster in an earlier life.

I answered cautiously that I liked meeting up with my friends in pubs, like this, and sharing funny stories from our week.

‘Okay’, he said. ‘Imagine we’re friends. Tell me a story.’

So, cautiously again, I told him about a drunken exchange I’d had the previous evening with a Spanish busker.

He grinned and said: ‘Very good. Have another pint.’

We stayed there for a while and had a few more beers: it turned into a surprisingly enjoyable evening. He was an excellent raconteur and an appreciative listener. I got more relaxed, the conversation flowed and he seemed to be enjoying it: at one point, he threw back his head and literally roared with laughter. 

In fact, I was just thinking how unlike his reputation he was when, abruptly, he looked at his watch, put down his glass and announced that he had to be going.

‘This has been fun,’ he said, standing up.

It had, I agreed.

‘I’ve enjoyed your company’, he said.

Likewise, I said.

Then he stopped smiling, poked me in the chest and said:

‘So why are your ads crap, then?’

I didn’t know how to reply. I spluttered something about rubbish briefs, unreasonable client expectations, still finding my feet….

He said: ‘No. Your ads are crap because you’re not doing your job. Your job is to make people want to spend time with our clients’ products, which means you have to make them likeable. When you’re chatting in a pub, you’re likeable. When you’re writing ads, you’re boring. And no-one wants to spend time with boring ads any more than they want to spend time with boring people. Now finish your beer and go and write me an ad that sounds like you on a bar stool.’

Thirty-three years later, that’s still the best advice anyone’s ever given me. 

Unintended consequences

One of the most fascinating examples of a large-scale transformation programme is the ‘great leap forward’ introduced by Mao Zedong in communist China in the late 1950s.

Mao was frustrated at the slow pace of China’s development and was determined to accelerate it. One of his key priorities was to increase grain production. To help with this, he introduced a campaign urging everyone in China to kill sparrows. 

Sparrows were thought to consume 2kg of grain a year each, so Mao reasoned that every sparrow less would mean 2kg more grain that he could export to earn valuable foreign currency.

Nests were destroyed, eggs were smashed, chicks were killed. Millions of volunteers formed into groups, banging pots and pans under sparrows’ nests so they couldn’t rest and would eventually drop dead from exhaustion.

The campaign was remarkably effective. Within a few months, sparrows had all but disappeared from the Chinese countryside.

The problem was that, as well as eating grain, the sparrows had also been eating all the locusts and other insects that would otherwise have been attacking the crops.

As the sparrow population dwindled, the insect population surged, wreaking havoc in the grain fields: instead of a surplus, China found itself struggling with a shortage.

And this is where the story gets really dark.

Because it was such a priority to increase grain production, local party officials were under pressure to deliver ever-higher quotas. The rewards for reporting the biggest increases were spectacular – including the chance to meet Mao himself – while the penalties for failure were brutal. 

As a result, officials competed with each other to report production figures that were up to ten times higher than reality. Delighted by the apparent success of his policies, Mao struck a series of deals to export grain to other countries.

In order to meet these export commitments, the officials were now required to deliver the ‘surplus’ they had reported. Grain stores all over the country were ransacked, leaving the people who had picked it to starve to death. Only when the stench of rotting corpses became too great to hide did the truth begin to emerge.

Some 30 million people are now known to have died in the Great Chinese Famine. Mao remained in power, but was edged aside from economic affairs. The reforms of the ‘great leap forward’ were quietly shut down. And 250,000 sparrows were imported from the Soviet Union to begin rebalancing China’s ecology.

What conclusion should we draw from this? That ambitious transformation projects are doomed to fail? Not necessarily – although KPMG estimates that 70% of major transformational change projects don’t work.

For me, there are two big lessons.

First: simple solutions to complex problems are always attractive, but there’s usually a reason why no-one’s tried them before. So, before you kill all the sparrows, spend a bit of time thinking about what will happen next.

Second: be honest about failure. Most change doesn’t work first time, however much you may want it to. If you incentivise people to pretend it’s working when it isn’t, you won’t be able to fix it until it’s too late.

Whistle while you work

‘Never be afraid of something you can whistle.’

That was the advice Burt Bacharach’s mentor gave him when he was studying at music school in California in the 1940s – and he took it to heart.

While other songwriters wrestled to stay relevant with contemporary musical styles and lyrical complexity, Bacharach went straight for the melody every time.

Which didn’t make him cool – but did make him incredibly successful throughout a career spanning seven decades.

Walk on by.

I say a little prayer.

Raindrops keep falling on my head.

I’ll never fall in love again.

Bacharach wrote some of the biggest hits for some of the biggest stars in music: Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Tom Jones, Elvis Costello, Adele. They liked his songs for the same reason everyone else liked them: because they were simple and catchy.

Which is why that mentor’s advice is equally useful for anyone working in any area of communication or engagement.

You can spend a lot of time and effort agonising about how to make your message clever or fashionable or award-winning. Or you can make it something people want to whistle.

Guess which they prefer?

Keep it simple, stupid

This week marks 20 years since the space shuttle Columbia burned up during its re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board. 

The accident happened because several of the shuttle’s heat-resistant tiles were damaged by a piece of foam during take-off.

NASA’s mission team had noticed the foam hitting the tiles. So they called in specialist engineers from Boeing to help them assess the potential risk.

The slide above is taken from Boeing’s presentation. It’s their analysis of a test carried out to simulate a tile being struck by foam.

You’ll notice a few things about this slide.

First, just how many words there are on it. Powerpoint is presentation software: it’s great for making a single, compelling point (ideally with a big picture), but terrible for conducting a balanced pro/con analysis.

Second, you’ll notice the headline seems positive: ‘Review of test data indicates conservatism for tile penetration’ sounds like engineer-speak for ‘you don’t really need to worry about this.’ 

Yet, when you look into the detail in the bottom half of the slide, the story is quite different. Suddenly we’re talking about ‘significant tile damage’ – and we learn that the size of the sample tested was 640 times smaller than the size of the chunk that actually hit the shuttle. In other words, the test results have almost no relevance to the real situation, so the headline is misleading.

The problem is that both these facts are buried right down at the bottom, in low hierarchy bullet points, in amongst many other, equally-dense slides. So it would be very easy for someone in the audience to miss them and to focus, instead, on the more positive conclusion in the headline. 

The NASA team had options: they could have deployed a military satellite to take a closer look at the damage; they could have attempted a repair in space. Both these options were expensive and difficult: in the event, they decided the risk was low enough not to warrant either, so they did nothing. 

And seven people died. 

Every day, in companies all over the world, similarly unclear presentations lead to similarly bad decisions (hopefully, without similarly tragic consequences). 

So this anniversary is a timely reminder that the way we communicate inside a business matters: not just the big townhall presentations, but the everyday project pitches, briefings, updates, reports.

If your people don’t know how to use Powerpoint to tell their story clearly, then don’t let them use it at all. Make them present without slides.

Trust me: when they don’t have an electronic crutch to lean on, they’ll quickly learn the value of keeping their message simple.

Energy trumps talent

A few years back, I found myself sharing a table with Chris Blackwell, the legendary founder of Island Records.

He was a lovely man: funny, charming and self-deprecating, with a spectacular fund of stories.

The one I liked best was about how he came to give U2 their first recording contract.

‘I was in London at the time,’ he said, ‘and one of my A&R guys told me I should go and see this band from Dublin, who were playing a small venue in Hammersmith that night.

‘I didn’t really like their demo tape – it wasn’t my kind of music at all. But I was living not far from Hammersmith and the A&R guy was insistent, so I agreed to drop in.’

He arrived as the band were halfway through their third number. There were five people in the audience: Chris, his girlfriend, the A&R guy and a couple of old boys nursing their pints at the bar.

‘The thing is’, said Chris, ‘they still played the gig like it was Wembley stadium. Their energy was tremendous. Song after song, they belted it out with absolute conviction. So I told the A&R guy to sign them, but only on condition that we didn’t spend a penny promoting them.’

When Island celebrated its 40^th birthday, Chris said he felt a little embarrassed about the moving tribute paid to him by Bono for having the belief to back U2 at the start.

‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure I did believe in their music. But I totally believed in them. They were so determined to be the biggest band in the world that we never had to lift a finger to help them. They were so professional, so focused on getting the right gigs, the right airtime, building a fanbase: they did it all themselves.’

It’s a reminder that you can have the best plan in the world, the greatest resources, the smartest people – and none of that will make much difference if those people don’t also have the drive and belief to make it happen.

Energy trumps talent every time.

Bolt from the blue

Back in the days before Netflix and smartphones, being bored used to be a normal part of the human experience. 

I remember hours spent gazing out of the car window as a child, counting different coloured cars, playing I-spy, making shapes out of clouds.

That doesn’t really happen any more. 

We’ve got so used to constant mental and sensory stimulation that we feel genuinely lost without it.

In fact, a recent study, led by Professor Tim Wilson at the University of Virginia, found that most people would rather give themselves a painful electric shock than sit quietly in an empty room for 15 minutes.

The study put hundreds of undergraduates in a room on their own for 15 minutes with no stimulation, to ‘entertain themselves with their own thoughts.’ Most said they found it hard to focus and at least 50% said they actively disliked the experience.

Some of the students were then put in a room where there was one thing they could do: they could give themselves an electric shock. But it was a sufficiently strong and unpleasant electric shock that all of them had earlier said they would pay to avoid it. 

Despite this, when the alternative was to sit alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes, 67% chose to shock themselves at least once (one very odd chap zapped himself 190 times: he was left out of the final analysis).

‘The untutored mind does not like being left alone with itself’, Professor Wilson concluded in his study. ‘People prefer doing to thinking, even when what they’re doing is so unpleasant that they’d normally pay to avoid it.’

This is a really important point to keep in mind if you want to improve the quality of planning and innovation in your business. 

Thinking is hard work. Most of us don’t instinctively like doing it. And, thanks to the non-stop, always-on stimulus of modern life, most of us don’t really have to: instead, we just keep ourselves busy doing other stuff.

That’s why you’ll always hear people say they have their best ideas when they’re in the shower or out walking. Because they’re doing something worthwhile (which means they’re scratching the itch of ‘being busy’). But they’re also suspending outside stimulus for long enough to engage their mind properly with a problem or idea. Which is when the magic happens.

So your challenge as a business is to help your people recreate that kind of environment during the working day. 

That’s partly about finding a way to shut out the ‘noise’ (meetings, deadlines, presentations, emails) for at least a little while. 

And partly about making it okay for people to use that space to let their minds wander – without having to worry that their colleagues will think they’re just slacking off.

Having ‘a buzzing, stimulating workplace’ is great for your employer brand.

But, if you care about the quality of thinking in that workplace, wouldn’t it be better if people could stop and smell the roses every now and then?

It’s not about you. It’s about them.

I spent the early part of my life in Nigeria, which has a rich tradition of story-telling, especially among the Hausa tribes of Northern Nigeria, who like to share ‘dilemma tales’ around the evening meal.

These are stories where there isn’t a prescribed ending. Instead, the audience is given a set of facts and a series of alternative outcomes, which they discuss to decide what should happen next.

In one story, for instance, a young man is treated badly by his cruel father, so he runs away. He is taken in by the kindly chief of a neighbouring village, who adopts him as his son and treats him well. But then, through a peculiar combination of circumstances, the real father and adoptive father find themselves pitted against one another. The boy is forced to choose which of them may live and which must die. Where should his loyalty lie?

In another story, the protagonist is a blind man, whose wife, mother and mother-in-law are also blind. Walking along the road one day, he stumbles over something and discovers, to his surprise, that it’s a working eye. He pops it in and, sight restored, finds six other eyes in the road. He gives two to his wife, but must then decide how to divide the remaining four eyes between five sockets. 

Should he risk his wife’s scorn by only giving one to her mother? Would it be better to upset his own mother? Or should he nobly keep just one eye for himself – but risk his wife finding him less attractive than potential two-eyed suitors? 

The stories serve a double purpose: as entertainment and as a kind of moral litmus test, a way to debate and establish cultural norms. It’s the same principle that makes Love Island compulsive viewing – and the reason why soap operas incorporate topical issues into their plot-lines. Because it gives people a chance to get involved. 

Stories are always more interesting to us when we feel involved in them. It’s a point eloquently explained in an article written some years ago by Jeremy Bullmore, the warmest and wisest man in advertising, who died this week:

Involvement seems to me to be the most important part of communication. 

If I do everything as the sender, the only thing left for the receiver to do is refute it, because the only contribution you can make is to disagree with me.

All good storytellers entice their receivers into willing and constructive collaboration. It’s a skilful, delicate and difficult thing to do – particularly in advertising where the pressures of committee and cost tend to favour the ‘explicit’, the ‘unambiguous’, the ‘message which just can’t fail to be understood’.

The explicit and the unambiguous shut out the recipient.

That’s every bit as true on the inside of an organisation as it is on the outside. 

Senior leaders often like the idea that they can bend a narrative to suit their chosen facts and then just keep hammering out a message until ‘everybody gets it.’ 

But they’re forgetting the most important rule of communication, which is that, when nobody’s listening, you’re not communicating.

As Jeremy Bullmore always understood, if you want people to be engaged with your story, you have to start by getting them involved.

Viva la Resolution

Happy New Year.

And congratulations: if you’re in the 41% of adults who made a new year’s resolution, chances are you’re still on track with it.

Of course, that may not last long. Studies suggest that, on average, 22% of new year resolutions fail within the first week. 40% within the first month. And, by year end, only 8% of resolutions will still be holding.

Sorry to bring you down like that, but it’s always best to be realistic about these things.

In any case, as failure rates go, that’s not dramatically worse than most corporate transformation projects.

Consultancy KPMG says only 30% of corporate transformation programmes achieve sufficient progress to be considered a success.

And, since the Project Management Institute estimates global transformation activity this year will account for around 65 million full time workers and $15 trillion in economic activity, that’s an awful lot of wasted time and money.

So don’t feel too bad about yourself as you’re hanging laundry on your otherwise unused cross-trainer. Most of us have been there. And, by and large, the reasons why most corporate transformations don’t work are pretty much the same. 

For me, the three big ones are:

1. Lack of motivation. ‘Why?’ is always the most important question. It’s easy to give up drinking when you wake up hungover on January 1; less easy to stay on the wagon when you’re out with friends three weeks later. If you’re going to make the effort to do something difficult, there has to be a prize that makes it worthwhile. For most people in most businesses, the end goal of a transformation programme is often either something that doesn’t directly affect them (the business makes more money; the leadership team gets a bonus) or something they feel actively threatened by (they have to learn a new system; there may be fewer jobs). Change takes effort – so, unless the people in your business really want to change things, nothing will happen.

2. Lack of clarity. Most resolutions are framed in pretty vague terms (‘lose weight’, ‘learn a language’) and transformation programmes are often the same. There tends to be a lot of detail about ‘what’s wrong today’, but less detail about the steps to correct it: what will happen and when, who’s involved, what it will look and feel like for them and how progress will be measured. Without that clarity, it’s very difficult to generate and maintain momentum.

3. Lack of focus. Most resolutions run out of steam because life gets in the way (‘I’m too busy to go to the gym’, ‘The weather’s too depressing to give up chocolate now’). Transformation programmes are the same: priorities change, market conditions fluctuate, teams get shuffled, new opportunities crop up. In most cases, there isn’t a dedicated transformation team – it’s something people are doing on top of their day jobs. The more other things they’ve got to think about, the less likely they are to give it their best attention.

Of course, the good news is that all three of these points can be corrected with surprisingly little difficulty: you can make your resolution one of the 8% that sticks and your transformation programme one of the 30% that succeeds. 

All it takes is more discipline in the planning, more engaging communication; and, of course, you have to want it enough.

Do you?

Ho ho ho

Most of you have probably seen the ‘Santa brand book’ at some point over the last eight years, but it’s still (by a country mile) my favourite piece of festive promotion.

So, in case you haven’t seen it – or just fancy seeing it again – click the link below.

Happy Christmas.

https://www.quietroom.co.uk/santa_brandbook/

Positivity is contagious

A long time ago, when I was a student, I used to spend my Summers working on campsites in France.

One of them – right on the northwest tip of Brittany – was run by a lovely old man called Pierre le Cuff. He had thick white hair, twinkling eyes and, in the three months I knew him, the only time I saw him without a broad smile on his face was when he was playing boules.

Every morning around 10, M. le Cuff used to stop at my tent. He’d pull up a chair, I’d make him a coffee and we’d chat for 20 minutes. Often about his wife, who he adored. Or about the weather, which was terrible that year.

At one point, it rained solidly for four weeks: the wind got so strong that three of his tents blew into the sea. Bookings took a hammering: the campsite was barely half-full at what ought to have been the busiest time of year – he must have been losing money hand over fist.

And still he’d show up every morning at my tent with a cheery grin and a bag of croissants.

Then he’d wander round the campsite doing the same with all his customers. Laughing about the weather, making a fuss of the kids, offering suggestions for day trips and restaurants to visit.

No wonder most of them came back year after year. Especially the British campers, of whom M. le Cuff was particularly fond. 

When I asked him why, he laughed and said:

‘Because the British broke my leg.’

In 1940, at the start of the war, M. le Cuff was in a French cavalry regiment. He broke his leg during a football match with the neighbouring British artillery. It was a bad break and he was still in hospital four days later, when his regiment went into action against the invading German Panzers. All his friends were killed – as he would have been, if not for a clumsy tackle by a burly geordie.

One of the perks of my job is that I get to meet a lot of different leaders in a lot of different businesses.

They’re a fascinating mix of personalities. But, without exception, the one characteristic all the most successful ones share is a positive outlook. 

They don’t waste time worrying about things they can’t control (like the weather or a broken leg). Instead, they focus all their energy on what they can control, because that’s where the opportunity is.

Whenever I used to grumble about the rain, M. le Cuff would make me stop and look at the scenery around us. It was beautiful, even through the drizzle: windswept dunes, turquoise water, a white sand beach with nobody on it.

He’d sweep his arm from one horizon to the other and say:

‘I’m the luckiest man in the world.’

You know what? I think he was right.

P.S. In case you’re wondering, the campsite is still there – and thriving (these days, it’s run by M. le Cuff’s son, Hubert). Camping des Abers in Landeda. One of my favourite places in the world.