Customer First

Prophecy from the twighlight zone

 

 

This blog is written from the twilight zone – literally. We left Heathrow at 4pm and will arrive in Calgary at 6pm and the sun has been setting for 6 hours – tests the concept of a red sky at night…

Is there a time for all of us when the sci-fi projected future of our youth becomes a reality? The wheel goes round. We respect the creative vision of these cultural prophets. Orson Well’s tanks, George Orwell’s ‘big brother watching’ spookily manifest with a surveillance camera on every corner, all normalised years ago. An old future is again being made new reality and we are watching its manifestation.

Today’s auspicious reference points come straight from the 26 year old digital world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner - minus the replicants and flying cars (that bit seems more difficult to make  a reality…)  In our communal environments we are increasingly surrounded by the moving image – digital advertising on the underground, flat screen news at the airport, downloads to our hand-helds. My children no longer ‘watch the television’ they download content… or they make their own. They share their brand allegiances on msm, u-tube and Bebo and advertisers embrace the individual’s choice. The young folk actually choose the ads from the brands they wish to watch and download them onto pc’s and ipods. The ad was historically an annoying insert within the content or context – now it is the content or context itself…The brands we choose are integral to our identity and the ad is now an emblem or flag of allegiance. Brands and the identities they serve know no boundaries in a digital world and will erode and homogenise culture. The dark, digital genie predicted by the likes of Ridley Scott is out of the bottle and his prophesy is unraveling.

Where are today’s cultural prophets? Who are they and what are are their visions? Answers on Facebook please.

Logic, argument, reason …and lying

 

Marketing often employs poor argument and relies for its success on the consumers’ lack of reason - wrapping products in a valid argument that is based on false premises or using true claims in an invalid argument. The marketing people wearing white hats use valid reasoned argument based on sound premises that are true. On the other hand… lying – using claims that are untrue or arguments that are invalid exploits the consumers’ insecurities and vulnerabilities to a tea...

It is a fact emotion clouds our ability to reason.

The more emotionally vulnerable people are, the more easily they are manipulated. The vulnerable are not only the down trodden, or as obvious as the buyers of lottery tickets. They are people in power too, they can lack the ability to reason – and most of them are men. Women have known this since the time of the cave. Men may be physically stronger but are ten times more emotionally vulnerable and their denial fuels the power of the yin, the dark, the deep, the feminine, the emotional. And Plato had a point.

A seminal moment for me was a number of years ago making a presentation to a company board and I began to discuss the relevance and importance of emotion in the functioning of business. The CEO stopped me in my tracks to claim that there was no place for emotion in business and that my line of thinking was wasting time, pointless and beginning to annoy him. It was at that point that I became acutely aware that the board members, including the CEO were wearing Ralph Loren shirts, writing with Mont Blanc pens, using Rolex time pieces and a look out of the window revealed top of the range BMW’s in the executive parking bay. In their denial they seemed to be making some pretty unreasoned emotionally based decisions outside of the boardroom and that despite, or maybe because of their power they were exceptionally vulnerable.

When we are vulnerable reason goes out the window just when we need it most. When we most desperately want to believe we suspend the need to be rigorous in our thinking. Or we delude ourselves with complex premises that appear true but are based on falsehoods. If the current state of the world economy is anything to go by it proves that the powerful are as vulnerable as the weak – maybe more so.

So in difficult times like now, when the stakes are even higher, before making a decision it pays to check both the truth of the premises and the validity of conclusions. That is unless you enjoy being deceived – as a consenting adult it is often fun to see how far the fantasy can go, and pay for it gladly.

What makes a conclusion truthful is not the validity of the argument but the truthfulness of the claims. For example the argument ‘Only frogs wear snorkels, this animal wears a snorkel, therefore it is a frog!’ – a valid argument that is untrue. Marketing often employs a slight of hand which presents valid argument with false claims. We understand the validity of argument we just don’t check the claims. Worse – we want to believe the falsehood even more when it taps into our insecurities. Untruthful claims stick and even though the consumers of them know they are duped, if enough people believe the lie it becomes a group truth. Sorry to reveal it here but sadly Nike does not make you a winner (based on a valid argument ‘only winners wear Nike, I wear Nike therefore I am a winner…) Red Bull does not give you wings, and Volvo is not the safest car.

When in the good times we can afford to play with our vulnerabilities, we have the extra cash. Now is not a time for poor decisions swayed by emotion, now is the time for reason, for logic. And in decision making logic trumps emotion every time and it is the lack of logic and reason that marketing communications try to exploit, and with unbridled success. If the recession brings benefits I hope that improved reason and logic be one of them.

To find out how logical you are try this fun test at http://www.think-logically.co.uk/lt.htm

In favour of difficult behaviour

If we are to believe recent press reports there is a highly visible epidemic - ADHD and dyslexia and all manors of ‘special’ needs. It is well documented that these difficulties often present themselves through challenging behaviours.

According to Darwinian laws, if dyslexia inhibited survival it would not be present in the gene pool and yet it is. The incidence of dyslexia in western society runs at a consistent 10% of the population ranging from 4% seriously affected to mild symptoms. It seems difficult people have a purpose. And ‘special needs’ can mean ‘special gifts’. Certain groups have increased predisposition to dyslexia and ADHD – entrepreneurs, creative services and sports requiring super fast visual processing… Being loosely wired can for some be a positive advantage. If dyslexia is related to creativity then we can assume that society naturally needs 10% of the population to be dyslexic it follows that a healthy and functioning group should employ 10% dyslexic people… But there’s a problem, anxieties associated with the presentation of these psychological and behavioural symptoms are reaching an all time high. Society is begging the question – ‘How can we cure these people before they seriously threaten us…?’ These children are ill. We must fix them up. A society populated by ‘special needs’?  What a terrifying prospect?

So, we are galvanized to cure these problems – with drugs wherever possible! Let’s turn these ‘wrong’ behaviours off and homogenize these dysfunctions, sanitize and subdue – “ahh that’s better,” we say…

Maybe ADHD or dyslexia is not the scary thing – but, it is society’s response and the denial associated with the proposed treatments which is terrifying.

It’s a weird thing to consider that at a time when allegedly we have more freedom than ever (particularly in the areas of conspicuous consumption i.e. we can happily indulge ourselves - or is that gorge ourselves…- to death) we are conversely less free than ever to explore and express ourselves as individuals and that this repression is manifesting itself in increasingly neurotic behaviour – like overcrowded rats our creative drives, desires and passions become destructive. We can eat and fuck what we like; and we can buy anything off eBay, but we are more controlled than ever in what we can think, say and do. It is a gratuitous fatuous freedom within high-voltage conformist electric fences. Step over the line and be hospitalized, sued or charged.

Do parents live in fear of their neighbours, their children’s peers and friends? Is playing in front of the computer accepted as somehow safer than playing in the street, or across the fields. Children can eat excessively but they can’t go out to play. Things are getting dangerously out of balance.

Our children are restricted psychologically, emotionally and physically. Ultimately it is their creative drives that are suppressed and this repression must contribute to the psychosis which presents itself as excesses of introversion or extroversion. At the most prosaic level, it must be mad that children are banned from exploring the creative arts of paper aeroplanes and conkers because of ‘health and safety’ and yet they are free to express themselves creatively by hurling rocks and knives at each other during the lunch break – a true story, my sister is a teacher and she is unable to open the window in case little Jenny or Johnny feel the urge to throw themselves out. Creative energy must be liberated or it becomes a destructive psychotic force.

Put simply the psychology of some people is more predisposed to creative function and psychosis than others – we must accept that some brains are more loosely wired.

This is the context for many current behavioural dysfunctions that are presented as psycho clinical conditions. This is not to say that these conditions do not exist but the repressive environment we find ourselves in, made worse by masquerading as freedom goes some way to explain why our children and the wider society is suffering. And the more we try to control the situation with medication the worse it is likely to become.

Societies value sameness and wish to ‘cure’ and suppress difference.

This is not a new phenomenon but it is made worse by our increasingly chaotic post modern age. The more our boundaries breakdown – globalisation, internet, and technology – the more we will desire control and yet the more elusive that control will become. It’s ironic that the creative drives that fuel the development of urban, production based civilisation creates societies populated by peoples expected to perform within a given repeatable ‘spread sheet’. The tools that have been created to serve us, to make our society predictable and controllable are now fragmenting it. As we strive for more control our technology and urbanisation has the undesirable bi-product of increasing our chaos.

Paradoxically in chaos creativity thrives. We should embrace it not control it. Now here’s a thought - maybe these children we vilify so much in the media they do not threaten us but provide us with our hope. Potentially these are the creative people that can show us the way.

We cannot be absolute – in any community there must be significant levels of conformity to function and process things, to repeat and scale-up functions to create wealth. In organisations and businesses and groups conformity helps everything fit together and provides competitive advantage – things and people conform and get along together.

“When we find ourselves in groups we inevitably find ourselves in the minority occasionally. Generally speaking, we will feel a little uncomfortable with that situation, which explains why we generally seek out groups with interests similar to our own. Imagine, though, that you are in a group where you are sure you are right and everyone else is wrong…”

If we were all different all the time we could not repeat things with any degree of success, society or a business can not function with excessive experimentation. There needs to be sameness so that groups can coagulate to perform as communities. But we have gone too far – in the past the Brits were renowned for celebrating the eccentric, the outsider, the innovator – not now.

As established boundaries break down and chaos increases the quest for conformity won’t save you. It is difference that you need. Different ideas, different approaches delivered by different minds. Are we recognising difference and the important role it plays in a healthy society or are we subduing and repressing it?

The creative mind could be being seen as disruptive rather than valuable and the more we control the more the psychosis of repressed creativity becomes evident – ADHD and dyslexia. These behavioural challenges are more often viewed as illnesses to be cured rather than indications of special gifts and talents. They are judged as weaknesses to be overcome not strengths to be nurtured. To celebrate them rather than fear them would be a challenge to our modern view of the world. In our modern times unstructured creative behaviours are more taboo than ever. It takes the most visionary parents or the strongest character to survive outside the accepted spectrum of ‘normality’.

Maybe it is not so strange that surveys of dyslexia for the prison population and among entrepreneurs are similar:

For the first time, new research shows that entrepreneurs are five times more likely to suffer from dyslexia then your average

UK

citizen and this has major implications for this Government’s key aim of creating a more entrepreneurial British society through initiatives such as this week’s National Enterprise week.

The research carried out by Simfonec, a science research centre based at Cass Business School, found that 20% of entrepreneurs (business owners employing at least one person) studied were dyslexic whereas employed managers (those who supervise at least one person) reflected the UK national dyslexia incidence level of 4%.

The research also found that 70% of dyslexic entrepreneurs who participated in the second, more in depth stage of the research, did not succeed at school. Researcher and Director of Simfonec, Dr Julie Logan notes that some of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs such as Sir Richard Branson, Sir Alan Sugar, Anita Roddick and Sir Norman Foster allegedly suffer from dyslexia and says this research not only links dyslexia and entrepreneurship for the first time but it also has fundamental implications about how entrepreneurship should be fostered.

A 1996 study by the National Probation Service found that 52% of prisoners in London

exhibited signs of dyslexia. A study earlier this year by the British Dyslexia Association and the Youth Offending Team in Bradford found that over half of the young offenders were dyslexic. Cass BusinessSchoolLondon 2006.

Are the indicators of dyslexia and ADHD problems a reflection of their sick minds or does it reflect societies inability to embrace, understand and nurture the special creative talents of this minority group. Dyslexia and ADHD can often present itself as disruptive and even anti-social behaviour undoubtedly, but is it right that the reaction is to cage it and cure it rather than nurture it.

Failure is not an option – it is essential

If you are going to fail it pays to fail spectacularly. Failure itself has value and when truly glorious, failure brings with it equal success.

Would Scott have been more famous if he had succeeded in reaching the South Pole first? In the UK Scott is more remembered than Amundsen. Shackelton*, similarly enshrined, didn’t do too well either with his ship the Endurance sinking at the first ice flow. His failure to cross the southern continent was actually trumped by his success; to preserve the life of his men.

Who remembers the winner of the ski jump competition at the Calgary Olympics in 1988? We all know who came last. The competition that year entertained both the greatest ever winner Matt Nykanen** from Finland who won three golds in the competition and the greatest ever loser Eddie the Eagle*** and it was Eddie who was feted with a private jet and chat show celebrity status. By all accounts Eddie was both brave (with serious short sight and bottle-bottom glasses that steamed up so badly he couldn’t see. Every jump could have been his last - that took guts) and humble; an all round good bloke, a plasterer from Stroud who held both the British ski jumping and stunt jumping records and 9^th in the world rankings of amateur speed skating (106 mph). Getting to the Olympics had been an overwhelming success and his failure was just success in disguise and the spirit is summed up by this reference from Wikipedia - At the closing ceremony the president of the Games singled him out for his contribution: "At this Games some competitors have won gold, some have broken records and one has even flown like an eagle." At that moment, 100,000 people in the stadium roared 'Eddie! Eddie!'. It was the first time in the history of the games that an individual athlete had been mentioned in the closing speech.

Which Apollo mission became a movie? Was it the Apollo 11 successful lunar landing? Nope it was the Apollo 13 mission that failed that made it to celluloid celebration. Apollo 13’s success was not landing on the moon it was getting the astronauts back to earth all in one piece.

If we suffer a failure, we can find a success within it if we redefine our terms of reference. Don’t indulge in failure, failure is not defeat because in every failure there is a success we just have to find it. It is a rule. Take heart. Look at your failures afresh and revaluate them for their success. The thing about failure is it means you had a go, you tried and to paraphrase the well known saying “…it is better to have tried and failed, than never to have tried at all”

If you are going to fail, fail spectacularly! Avoid the wishy washy, half baked failure – an anonymous failure has no value what so ever. This is the kind of failure we fear and it is this fear we project to make the glorious failure enshrined by a few, into an outstanding success.

No. A great failure needs PR, a well marketed failure made visible becomes part of our urban myth and is celebrated. To be a successful failure get yourself a big stage and fall off it! Climb to the heights and as Buzz Lightyear said if you can’t fly “… fall with style!”

As we project our desires on others success we project our anxieties on others failures. Celebrity adorns outstanding failure just as it kisses success. There is a small but significant caveat, a warning to those who are in pursuit of failure’s success; the celebrity of failure is enhanced by death. Colin Campbell’s failed water speed record in Bluebird was both sublime and fatal. It pays to try and not be a dead failure and miss out on failure’s rewards. 

Vincent Van Gogh was singularly the most unsuccessful artist of his generation and the Van Gogh Museum is in effect a temple to failure. Before failing as an artist Vincent had already failed as art dealer, school teacher, and missionary and most significantly in relationships. Vincent couldn’t be anything. His self doubt drove him on. In Vincent’s own words in a letter to his brother Theo “I hope that the products of failure may be success.” Visitors to the museum indulge and gorge on the painter’s failure a feeding frenzy of often misguided exaltation, not of the man’s work but his profound inadequacy which at some subliminal level touches there own so they can shudder and move on thankful that their failure is not as absolute as his. And yet they miss the point – their fear of failure is really just their fear of success.  

Unlike his contemporaries; Cezanne, Matisse, Gauguin, et al Vincent was un-painterly and challenged every artistic convention - it wasn’t likeness or even impression, it was expression - which made his work profoundly unattractive to potential buyers and in his life he only ever sold one painting. Paradoxically it is this commercial failure that has made his catalogue one of the most complete and the museum is stuffed with his work.

As mentioned before, don’t be a dead failure. The sad part of the Vincent story is that the profound depth of his failure in life is balanced by the profound recognition his work has achieved in death. In 1987, one hundred years after it was painted Irises was sold to Alan Bond for $60 million.

To fail isn’t an option it is essential. Success is always built in, we just have to find it and wait for it.

*Reference Harvard Gazette  He was an Antarctic explorer who never got near the South Pole. A mariner whose ship sank miles from its destination in some of the world's most hostile seas.

Yet Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated Antarctic expedition have much to teach modern business leaders, says Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor of Business Administration Nancy Koehn. She has created and taught a business case called "Leadership in Crisis: Ernest Shackleton and the Epic Voyage of the Endurance."

"How he did what he did is very instructive," says Koehn of the now celebrated explorer and leader of a heroic expedition that saw all 28 members survive despite several years of harsh conditions and devastating, potentially deadly, setbacks. "It has both inspirational lessons and things we don't want to do." It's this duality, she says, that makes Shackleton such a compelling case, knocking him off a mythologized pedestal and into the messy stew of humanity, where good and bad, success and failure coexist.

What's more, as movies and books have demonstrated in the past decade, the voyage of the ship Endurance makes for a grippingly good story.

It is 1914, the peak of Europe's fascination with polar exploration and the eve of Britain's involvement in World War I. Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set out to be the first to traverse Antarctica. They head south from

South Georgia Island, a whaling outpost, despite warnings of pack ice, and within a month, the

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'Part of what the Shackleton story is about . . . is leading under moments of great uncertainty when the game is changing, and may change on a dime.'

- Nancy Koehn, HBS Professor of Business Administration

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Endurance is frozen solid in ice. Although Antarctica is within sight, the ice floes carry the Endurance off course, away from land. Ten months later, in October 1915, the ship suffers irreparable damage by the massive ice floes and sinks; Shackleton and his crew abandon ship and camp on the ice. With his men's survival, not Antarctica, as his new goal, Shackleton mounts several failed rescue attempts, the last of which gets his crew to uninhabited Elephant Island

. From there, in April 1916, he and five others travel in a lifeboat back to South Georgia Island, where they cross the uncharted interior to secure help at a whaling station. After several attempts and four months, they return to rescue the remaining 22 men, all of whom are alive.

** Reference Wikipedia At the 1988 Calgary Olympics, Matt Nykanen ( Finland) produced the greatest performance in Olympic ski jumping history. Nykanen stormed the field to win the 70m and 90m events, then led Finland to the first-ever team gold and became the first ski jumper ever to collect three gold medals in one Olympics.

*** Reference Wikipedia Edwards was born in Cheltenham, England, and was working as a plasterer when he qualified, as the sole British applicant, for the 1988 Winter Olympics ski-jumping competition. He had previously represented Great Britain at the 1987 World Championships, and was ranked 55th in the world. Eddie began jumping under the watchful eye of Chuck Berghorn in Lake Placid NY, using his equipment though he had to wear six layers of socks to make the boots fit. Edwards was handicapped by his weight - at about 82 kg (181 lb), more than 9 kg (20 lb) heavier than the next heaviest competitor - and by his lack of financial support for training - he was totally self-funded. Another problem was that he was very short sighted, requiring him to wear his glasses at all times, even though when skiing they fogged to such an extent that he could not see. He finished last in both the 70 m and 90 m events. From the beginning, though, his legend was embroidered with falsehoods.

“	"They said I was afraid of heights. But I was doing 60 jumps a day then, which is hardly something someone who was afraid of heights would do." But he was afraid of jumping? "Of course I was. There was always a chance that my next jump would be my last. A big chance."	”
—The Guardian, 3 September 2007 [3]

However, his lack of success endeared him to people all across the globe. The worse he did, the more popular he became. He subsequently became a media celebrity and appeared on talk-shows around the world. The press nicknamed him "Mr. Magoo", and one Italian journalist called him a "ski dropper".^[4]

The widespread attention that Edwards received in Calgary turned into a large embarrassment for the ski jumping establishment. Many athletes and officials felt that he was 'making a mockery' of the sport. Shortly after the Olympics finished, the entry requirements were greatly toughened, making it next to impossible for anyone to follow his example.

At the closing ceremony the president of the Games singled him out for his contribution: "At this Games some competitors have won gold, some have broken records and one has even flown like an eagle." At that moment, 100,000 people in the stadium roared 'Eddie! Eddie!'. It was the first time in the history of the games that an individual athlete had been mentioned in the closing speech.

"The slowest car we have ever built"

 

The new campaign for the Audi R8 stands out. The counter intuitive campaign with a dialectic slogan “The slowest car we have ever built” hits just the right note when the accepted wisdom of the day is that fast is always better than slow. Promoting ‘the other’ has a very arresting affect (Persil ran a successful campaign for washing powder with the slogan “Dirt is good”. This campaign promotes the argument that it is the slowness of the build that guarantees the speed of the drive. Slow becomes the qualifier of speed and provides ‘the reasons to believe’. Our homogenous consumer age has created access for all and craft is the casualty – Audi is right to tap into this erosion of value and this campaign hits the mark.

Ignorance is as powerful as knowledge

The accepted notion is that knowledge is power.  This is true but ignorance is powerful too.  Before you employ your next star performer or business consultant stop and think - ask yourself a question, is it the knowledgeable candidate or the naïve and ignorant one that best serves your interests?

Sometimes we confuse intelligence and intellectual capability with knowledge.  Just because someone is knowledgeable doesn't make them smart and just because someone is ignorant, doesn't mean that they are stupid. Knowledge can obfuscate the truth. The mind that is untrammelled by the limitations and burden of knowledge can explore the creativity of naivety – the naïve will dare to ask the questions that the knowledgeable assume as immutable – we know that children have an innate wisdom born of ignorance, witnessed by the proverb ‘Out of the mouths of babes* and the Danish Fairy Tale The Emperor's New Clothes written by Hans Christian Andersen** The moral of the story is that :- Just because the whole world believes that something is true, doesn’t mean that it is, and perhaps also that one should not refrain from asking a question that may, at the time, be considered to be stupid by the majority.

Einstein was famous for his contribution to the ‘creation of knowledge’ not always for being knowledgeable. When in the US he was asked to fill in a basic academic test “to one question as to the speed of sound, Einstein replied: ‘I don’t know. I don’t crowd my memory with facts that I can easily find in an encyclopaedia.’ Einstein said he couldn’t understand how anybody could know so much and understand so little” ***

In the right hands, ignorance is a truly powerful force.  Ignorance is not limited by the boundaries of knowledge.  Ignorance doesn't have to play by the rules.  Ignorance is the crucible of creativity.  And yet ignorance is too often limited by anxiety, for the majority our experimentation is blocked “if we don't know, then we don't have a go...” when we should just do it anyway. In the hands of the brave and unhindered, prepared to march into territories of the unknown, for them ignorance is strangely liberating. The story of George Dantzig illustrates the point. "An event in Dantzig's life became the origin of a famous urban legend in 1939 while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, Professor Jerzy Neyman wrote four examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the four problems were a homework assignment and wrote two of them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for two, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue. Six weeks later, Dantzig received a visit from an excited professor Neyman, who had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal. Years later another researcher, Abraham Wald, was preparing to publish a paper which arrived at a conclusion for the second problem, and included Dantzig as its co-author when he learned of the earlier solution.

This story began to spread, and was used as a motivational lesson demonstrating the power of positive thinking. Over time Dantzig's name was removed and facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend.****

We need to challenge the accepted wisdom that the more we know the better off we are.  We educate our children so that they can get on in the world.  We value the A grades and degrees from Harvard and Oxford. But sometimes it's what we don't know, that gives us a powerful competitive advantage. No consultant is worth their salt unless they are prepared to question the accepted, reveal what they don’t know to test the accepted wisdom and promote their naivety.

In business ignorance is a precedent for success. Many of the world's greatest entrepreneurs have few academic notations – they did’nt know much so they just made it up! (Steve Jobs –‘He re-calls dropping out of college one of the best decisions he ever made*****’ Richard Branson - challenged academically by dyslexia; Alan Sugar – left school at 16…), and the unacceptable notion is that - it wasn't what they knew that was the key to their success, it was what they didn't know that was the stimulus for their creativity.  Their ignorance was the precursor that mobilized their success.

Knowledge can inhibit vision, if your knowledge tells you that the impossible is just that and you believe it then you are unlikely to try “If I knew then what I know today then I would have never got started…” is a much quoted line – much better not to know in the first place. Ignorance is not only bliss it can be an advantage. Put yours to good use.

*PSALMS viii. 2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hath thou ordained strength

**THE EMPORER’S NEW CLOTHES first published in 1837, as part of Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children).

*** IN THE MIND’S EYE Thomas West p. 124

**** WIKIPEDIA

Listening and ignoring – it is not attitude that drives revenue, it is behaviour.

The accepted wisdom is that it is always best to listen to the customer. However, is there a case to ignore what they are saying? When attitude and behaviour become detached from each other, what people say is no longer a good indicator of how they will behave. There is sometimes a case not to listen to the customer.

The fact is that the UK has a weight problem and for a minute there it was not just the do-gooders and the media that was concerned, for a short while the people were concerned too. Listening to the customers’ voice MacDonald’s changed their tune to keep in step: redesigning their menus to include low cal salads, fruit juices and carrot stick options for their happy meals. Sadly for MacDonald’s it was not what their customers wanted, their reputation was improved but their profits suffered. It seems that the furor over weight changed our attitude but had little effect on behaviour.

3 years later and the wheel turns – revolution to counter-revolution.

MacDonald’s is back on Big Mac course. For all the doom laden sooth saying in the media many of us really do desire to be super sized it seems, after all. Burger fortunes have been revitalized by a return to the ‘big Mac big idea’. It appears that the people liked the idea of salads but they liked to eat burgers even more. MacDonald’s have now taken their customers’ opinion for healthy menus with a pinch of ‘low-salt’ and have realigned their menu with the deeper emotional desires for high-fat rather than high-fibre food.

The counter-intuitive lesson here is not always to listen to what customers say – this may be rational and logical but out of step with the deeper emotional drivers that will ultimately drive the decision to buy. What people say and what they do can be woefully misaligned. Most of us would like to be ‘buff’ and yet consume grub like ‘biffas’. We talk about our concerns for the environment and take weekend breaks on budget airlines. I admire those who live by what they say, but often the relationship between attitude and behaviour is not so black and white. More often there are many shades of grey. We do well in forming marketing strategies to be open to the space between attitude and behaviour and remember – as the MacDonald’s example shows us – it is not attitude that drives revenue, it is behaviour. Actions do speak louder than words. A word of caution for market research that identifies a need by listening to customers in focus groups and customer feedback, stimulating investment in a product that customers may have no intention of actually using. It can take many years for the behaviour to change. Listen to the customer and watch their behaviour too.

Brand success is a balance between the sharp and the blunt

Are you the kind of person that leaves a few coins in your pocket to test the security scanner at airports; presses a button… just to see what it will do; was accident prone as a child; skis off-piste and has an impulsive attraction to dangerous sports, or is prepared to try almost anything just once, then it is likely that you are an edge dweller – living on that tantalizing line between excitement and accident!

Why is the edge important in business? I was thinking about this whilst talking with a particularly edge dwelling CEO. He reminded me of the importance of knowing where the business edge is; knowing when to push it but not to overstep it…

I realised that his constant quest for that sharp edge ignored the necessity for bluntness too - the edge is exciting, light, sharp, quick, and hard but must be balanced to be sustainable with a blunt side; boring, heavy, solid, soft and slow that has the ability to absorb shocks without breaking. A business on the edge is as unsustainable as an edgeless one that is all soft and flabby.

As with all conflicts that need to be harmonized, sharp and blunt oppose each other – so there is a tendency for a business to be either too sharp or too blunt. For millennia sword smiths have struggled to find the balance too. The problem is that the sharpest edge is hard and brittle whereas if the steel is too soft then it cannot be sharpened - it is flexible but blunt. The perfect sword is arguably the Japanese Katana. “The Japanese sword blade is formed from a combination of three different steels: a harder outer jacket steel wrapped around a relatively softer, inner core. This creates a blade which has a unique hard, razor sharp cutting edge with an inner core which is resilient and able to absorb shocks in a way which reduces the possibility of the blade breaking or bending when used in combat.” www.wikipedia.com

Businesses must also search for the edge but if too sharp they burn brightly for a short while cutting through the blandness of the competition but without substance and weight they run out of steam, they are sharp but weak – Laker Airways, Napster, boo.com - the business equivalent of a brittle blade. To be successful there must be balance between the sharpness of the marketing and the blunt weight of the organisation that provides the momentum to see the cut through. My entrepreneurial CEO was driven to make the whole organisation sharp and edgy. This quest for the edge created an anxiety in the business and misunderstandings in his team. Meetings had a hounded and desperate quality as all wracked their brains to sharpen up – not withstanding the fact that edge dwelling is a preference for some, it is terrifying for many. I realised in this scenario that rather than search for the edge in everything we do better to harmonise the blunt and the sharp. The Tai Chi Dao (sabre) I recently acquired has a sharpened side for slashing and cutting and a blunt side for weight and support and the hilt is solid blunt metal too and can deliver a blunt blow which is just as devastating as a sharp slash.

All great, sustainable brands achieve a balance between their sharp edge and the blunt strength of the organisation. When searching for the edge – for the sharpness that will deliver competitive advantage – don’t forget the ‘blunt side’. It is not possible to be sharp in everything we do, sometimes we wish to be blunt. 80% of your business activity needs to be just like the competition based on a sound product and organizational and market fundamentals. The edge is the remaining 20%.

What does this mean? Rather than expecting management to search for the edge in everything they do – ask them to implement one edgy idea and reinforce best practice in everything else.

A business that is blunt and dull is obviously competitively vulnerable. So too the over edgy – this is a business that is likely to cut itself.

Imbalance is weakness. Better to know where to be sharp and reinforce this with the weight and power of bluntness!

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A thought on value...

Middle age is a wonderful thing, and I consider myself a newly paid up member.... In midlife you are caught in a twighlight zone a bit like one of those skateboarders at the top of the jump who appear to just hang there in mid-air before they begin their descent - that feels like middle age to me.

It is a special time. It is a time of choices.

Recently I had time to reflect on the concept of value and how this reveals itself in different life stages. From my vantage point of at the top of the jump - frieze frame - I observe how I got here and where I can choose to go on the descent....

Frozen in time I look back to the springtime of adulthood and observe the thirty year old, thrusting, energetic; believing in the value of ‘things’, holding onto status and ambition at all cost, valuing image with peers, siblings and contempories. And I look forward to life’s winter and observe the future 80 year old and I learn from observing my father. He recently moved into a small flat and has spent the last couple of months giving his 'valuable' things (that have no value to him) away, choosing to surround himself not with the trappings of image and status but finding release and comfort by surrounding himself with the mementos of a life lived - the stick he whittled droving cattle in Australia, a seaside ornament, a cartridge case from the North West Frontier, a book given to him by his father...

What can I learn from this as I hang there suspended on my mid-life skateboard? It seems to me that the truly valuable things, the things that will keep me warm in life’s winter are not the things we buy or the things we own – they have no lasting warmth. The truly valuable things that give us warmth in the end are the memories we have, the relationships we made, the difference we contributed, the knowledge we passed on. In middle-age we still have the time to make the choice and invest in the real value – which is strangely ‘unreal’ and has no bought status at all.

As gravity begins to grip my mid-life skate board and I begin to increase speed on the descent it seems to me that I have a choice: try and desperately hold onto status or worse try and acquire more physical tokens of success – stuff. Or value the intangible and let image and status go, relax and have some fun, invest in sharing jokes, drinking wine and passing on my knowledge found and stock up on the memories and relationships that will provide the real warmth in the cold weather to come... weeeeeeee!

Be aware that different will become the same

In business we often set out to change things because of our frustrations with the status quo, but a word of caution we must be careful that we do not replace the existing system with our version of the same thing and end up changing nothing.

Whilst recently reading a book about the young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore, I was struck by the incredible contradictions in the man. 

• As a youth, he was trained to be a priest, and in fact his group of Seminarians in the

  Caucasus

  became a hotbed of revolutionary unrest.  In later years, he supressed religion. 
• A hero of the peasants and repressed, he became responsible for the death of between 25 and 30 million people during the Great Terror of the 1930’s. 
• He fought against autocracy of the Czarist state, and yet became a total megalomaniac.

What can we learn from these excessive contradictions?  As we fight for change, the biggest lesson I suppose, is that we do not become the thing that we strive to change and as in Stalin's case, become the very thing that we hated. 

Stalin was a product of circumstance, predisposition and opportunity I can not help but believe that the repression of the Czarist state would have inevitably produced a Stalin as the circumstances in

Germany

produced a Hitler.  It is not the individuals themselves, but that they are a product of human nature and providence.  Stalin had a warm and humorous side as well as the inferiority complex and paranoia that drove him.  Stalin's justifiable cause turned itself to a mirror of the evil it replaced.

What preserves us from falling into the same trap so illuminated by Stalin?  Self actualization and individuation must be the goal.  To be aware of our innate conflicts, not just one side of them to avoid the delusion that only one side of the argument resides in the person or people you are in conflict with – you contain the other too. 

Stalin from a Jungian point of view is an extreme example of despising in others the very thing that he is in denial of himself - his motivation to overcome the oppressors was served by his inferiority complex that drove his need for power and control. This denial ultimately turned him into the very kind of oppressor who in his younger years as a trainee priest was the target for his motivation and aggression. The moral of this tale? If we are motivated by our dislike of the behaviour of others we must try and identify the behaviour in ourselves if we are not just simply to replace their subconscious flaws with ours.