Climate change is bollocks

As usual you need good old Stame to give you the real truth. Yes the climate is changing, planet is heating up etc. The climate has always changed since the Big Bang – it is either heating up or cooling down. Luckily for us it’s getting warmer which is increasing the number of potential holiday destinations and turning grotty inland properties in to highly desirable beach front residences. Who suffers from this – the smug bastards who currently have houses on the coast.

What is total bollocks is that mankind has any real impact on any of this. Just remember the environmentalists always get it wrong. In the 19th Century they banged on about how London would soon be uninhabitable due to the growing piles of horseshit in the streets. Then we had the problem of fog caused by coal which meant all our grannies had to spend more expensive smokeless coal brickettes – I say grannies because the rest of us had nice central heating installed instead. 20 years ago we were going to lose all the forests due to Acid Rain – turned out the rain wasn’t so acidic after all. Now we are being asked to stop driving our gas guzzling Range Rovers in favour of crappy little Volvo hybrids. The fact is that the ship that brings us our Volvo’s from Sweden emits more CO2 in one trip than a ship full of Range Rovers would in a lifetime (fact). If we really want to reduce emissions kill all the cows that belch and fart more CO2 in a day than China does in a year. And the truth is none of this makes any real difference because the planet will continue getting warmer until it starts to cool down  – which it will.

No argument that we need to find a replacement for oil, if only to screw over the Oil Sheiks. And we will develop more and more alternative fuels because there is money and political capital to be made doing so. In 10 years all this global warming stuff is going to look as daft as the Millennium Bug.

In the meantime, up yours.

Is “Hot, Flat and Crowded” a Business Book?

Thomas L. Friedman’s book ‘The World is Flat’ won the 2005 inaugural Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the year award. This award recognizes business books that offer, “the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance and economics”. You can check out the judges panel, the shortlists and subsequent winners on the FT web site for the awards. I am keeping an eye on this for additions to my Top 10 Business Books (to read before you waste any more shareholders money) feature. My criteria go beyond just being insightful, although I agree this is important. I look for durable, seminal best sellers that a broad range of business people found to be useful and I ensure that consistently great writers and thought-leaders have at least one of their books represented. Having read Friedman’s latest book, ‘Hot, flat and crowded’ I think he deserves to be on my  Top 10 list (which is actually 25, now 26, books)

But is ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded’ actually a business book? ‘The World is Flat’ dealt with the new age of globalization being ushered in by the technological revolution and its implications for more than just business. However, its relevance and value for anyone in business is unquestionable and it deserved its accolades in this respect. In ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded’ Friedman broadens his view to look at the convergence of 3 global trends (crises in the making) of globalization, climate change and the population explosion. He details how we got where we are, just how bad it is and what we need to do about it. By ‘we’ he means very specifically America and that is a criticism that could be leveled at him. Friedman is very explicit that as world leaders only the USA can lead the way by driving the green revolution he advocates (implores) his countrymen to join.

Friedman is a good writer and is very well connected, travelled and read. He rams home every aspect of his message – the history, the status report and the diagnosis – with numerous anecdotes, analogies and bits of evidence gleaned from a dazzling list of experts. It is shocking, alarming and often entertaining but a second criticism is that it is long winded. In my normal style I will encourage you to read the book itself (it is a good read) but will also summarize the main messages.

Our dependence on oil combined with exponential population growth and in particular a burgeoning middle class who all aspire to live ‘like Americans’ means we are doomed unless we (America) changes track and leads a green revolution. Oil is creating dangerous levels of CO2 and putting power and money in the hands of undemocratic extremists. The weather and the politics are fast approaching the stage of being hazardous to our survival. In fact one of the main issues is that whilst we are programmed to think linearly the convergence of ‘hot, flat and crowded’ is creating exponential leaps into dangerous and unchartered waters.
Up until very recently there have only been 2 of what Friedman calls ‘Americums’, that is a block of circa 350 million materialistic, ambitious, wasteful consumers – America obviously and old Europe. In just a couple of decades there will be 8 or 9 and that is totally unsustainable.

He offers many different aspects of the solution but there is one central theme. We have to replace oil as far as possible with widely available sustainable energy sources. The place most motivated and most able to do this is America. Rather flippantly he describes a talk he gave in China where he actively encouraged the Chinese to carry on developing along traditional lines based on dirty fuels and widespread pollution because this will give the USA the head start it needs to develop the green technology it can sell to the world and thus reinforce its position as world leaders.

International readers may not share his mission that America must lead the green revolution but he is convincing about the overall problem and solution. We used to rely on coal/steam and horses. We now rely on oil. This must change and fast. Being optimistic by nature I believe we will. There is no reason to believe that with the science and technology available to us now, let alone what might be just around the corner, we have the tools to wean us off oil. (Check out Amory Lovins on TED.com if you don’t believe me). There is now a sense of urgency, probably heightened by the financial crisis and a growing realization that it can never again be business as usual. Friedman’s book is a huge best seller and one must therefore believe has made a major contribution to the global ‘wake up call’ that is needed. Go to any airport, take any flight and you will find someone with their nose buried in this book.

Is it a business book? Yes it most certainly is for two reasons. Most of the noses buried in this book belong to people in business and fundamentally it will be business, American or otherwise, that will lead this green, sustainable revolution. Why? Because as Friedman points out, there is big money to be made out of the green revolution just as there was in the industrial revolution that caused the problems in the first place. It may be arrogant and myopic to assume that the money will all be made in America, however.

Why Would a CMO Want to be a CEO?

It’s all very well giving people advice about how to progress to the top job if you are marketer but who says they want to? The CEO might be a bit better paid but not enough to compensate you for all the time you have to spend in pension reviews and investor relations meetings. Most of a CEO’s job is really dull as far as I can see. CMO’s have big budgets and agency meetings. They have progressed from doing all the twiddly bits on brands and they now get the chance to terrorize those that do – the hapless brand manager and their equally useless agencies. They score the best freebies, especially if they are cute enough to sponsor all the things they like, such as rugby and lap dancing (although the latter can be quite contentious.  And CMO’s hold the job that is least accountable for the highest pay.

If they have got any sense they make sure they move on to some even higher paid CMO job every 3 years or so. Year 1 – just getting to grips with the market. Year 2 – undoing everything my predecessor did in an effort to ‘strengthen our brand equity’ whatever the fuck that means. Year 3 – start lining up my next job.

My advice, if you make it to CMO just guard the title and keep changing the company you work for until it’s time to retire early and line up a few cushy advisor roles.

Up yours.

How to progress from CMO to CEO – advice from Spencer Stuart

Here is something for all you ambitious marketers out there. How do you make the leap from being head of marketing to CEO? The general view is that this is very rare, more often CEO’s come through the route of general management, finance or operations. Frank Birkel and Jonathan Harper from Spencer Stuart, one the world’s leading executive search firms, have done some research and published their findings. We have it on good authority that one of the people they interviewed, a CMO who has become a highly successful CEO, is my old mate, Martin Glenn. The full article is available from the Spencer Stuart web site. Marketers can read it for advice on how best to position themselves to be considered for the top job – in most companies the board overlook their own CMO when discussing candidates for CEO – people in other functions can use it to make the argument against appointing someone with a specialist marketing background. There should be strong competition to be the boss.

Here are some of the highlights:-

1.    CMO’s (or marketing directors) often have to make a double transition. They have to move company and move function to get considered. Hardly anyone promotes their own incumbent CMO to CEO.
2.    The main reason is that CMO’s are seen as too specialist and too ignorant of other functions and finance in particular.
3.    It is marginally easier in marketing –led businesses like consumer goods but nowhere is it easy or common.
4.    There are ways around this – volunteering to get on cross functional project teams builds your experience. CMO’s also need to demonstrate their willingness to learn, hands on, about other functions and to present more data driven evidence of marketing success to build credibility.
5.    More often than not they will first need to take a sideways move into a general management role e.g. running a division.
6.    Not all marketing directors sit at the very top table, the senior leadership team. If they can break through to the board this obviously gives them the chance to see how the whole business works together.
7.    CMO’s need to appreciate that the kind of leadership skills a CEO has are different to leading a marketing team. It is not just that they have to be broader in their scope; they have to be prepared to penetrate the bullshit CEO’s get given (everyone tells them what they want them to hear) and often make decisions on less than perfect data.
8.    CMO’s may have the advantage of being naturally good communicators and may think they have great people skills but again the CEO has to have a different kind of communication and people skills. They talk to vastly different audiences and they have to persuade other people to get along with each other, not just get along with other people.
9.    Finally, the CEO’s in the research who had come through the marketing route seriously questioned whether most CMO’s really wanted their job. It can be lonely at the top; you need to get a buzz from financial data and investor meetings; you need the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of job.

It is comforting to hear from the CEO’s that the worst mistake a CMO can make, if they do make it to the top job, is to forget about marketing. They need to stop playing at being brand managers but they need to retain their obsession with the customer and top line growth.

You have been warned.

Business The McDonalds Way

Paul Facella worked at McDonalds for 33 years rising from crew member to senior executive (not unusual  – 7 out of 10 McDonalds executives rose through the ranks). He published a book this year, “Everything I know about business I learned at McDonalds” which wins first prize as a statement of the obvious. It is the only place you worked Paul – the more impressive title would have been “Everything I learned about business I learned FROM McDonalds”. And of course Paul groups his learning under 7 headings which, unoriginally, he calls ‘the 7 Leadership Principles that Drive Break-Out Success’.

They cover:-
Honesty and integrity
Relationships
Standards – Never be satisfied
Lead by example
Courage: Telling it like it is
Communication
Recognition (motivation through recognition of staff service)

It makes you wonder why lying, smug, dysfunctional bastards with no principles, who constantly sit back and let others do what they can’t be bothered to do while taking all the credit and none of the blame just never seem to make it in business.
This is very unfair to a book we quite liked. McDonalds is a great business and Facella’s war stories are worth reading, especially the ones about the marvelous Ray Kroc, the man who had the sense not to be the eponymous founder, preferring the brand name McDonalds which he thought sounded more homely because he liked the Scots.

McDonalds did two things brilliantly.

Firstly, they introduced assembly production to fast food (just like Henry Ford introduced it to car manufacture many years before) but instead of hiding it away at the back of the restaurant they made it totally transparent. They have that much admired obsession with quality which Kroc enforced ruthlessly (he once publicly shut down a restaurant that failed to meet his high standards on an inspection visit) but if your kitchen is completely open to view – a goldfish bowl – it gives no opportunity to drop your standards.

Secondly they put into practice ‘recognition’, the most powerful form of motivation, so powerful it can transform the most callow of youth into responsible, confident, polite citizens with a strong work ethic and ambition.

One of the most popular reprints ever from the Harvard Business Review is ‘One more time: How do you motivate Employees?’ by Frederick Herzberg. He makes this exact same point, that recognition both formal and informal (preferably both) is what really encourages people to do their best. McDonalds made it the cornerstone of their business model. To pay hamburger wages and get cordon bleu service is a very clever thing to pull off.

What McDonalds have not done so well is adapt to changing consumer attitudes and needs. They were not entirely honest and full of integrity when it came to their food’s nutritional value. Ray Kroc apparently once said that he did not know what food McDonalds would serve in the future but was certain they would be selling more of it than anyone else. He started out as a milk shake salesman (he was 52 years old when he spotted the McDonald Bothers hamburger store and had this idea about a national fast food chain) so he was not wedded to burgers. A man with his vision may have spotted the need to evolve the food at McDonald’s a little sooner than they did.

Have Your Meetings Standing Up

Rather unusually I find myself in agreement with Sherrington’s last post on how to run decent meetings. But as usual he misses out a couple of practical points that really improve meetings and make them work for you.

Firstly, make sure there are no chairs or coffee. If people have to stand up and there is no possibility of a caffeine injection until the meeting finishes you will be surprised at a how quickly you get through the agenda.

Secondly, make sure you knobble the person who writes the minutes. Most people forget what they agreed to so if you can steer the minutes written up in your favour you can lighten your to-do list and swing a few decisions in your direction.

You see this kind of practical, down to earth business advice that you get from good old Stame.

Up yours.

Meeting Bloody Meetings

It would fair to say that all of us regard meetings as the washing up of business – you know it has to be done but no-one enjoys doing it. “What did you do at work today?” Answer: “I was in meetings all day”. This is rarely said with a smile on the lips. Every now and again you have a ‘good meeting’ which means a) you felt it accomplished something and b) it did not seem to take too long. But that is the exception rather than the rule. Well, here is a simple approach to improving most of the meetings in which you find yourself. It addresses two of the most important things that causes meetings to be ‘bad – i.e. don’t accomplish anything, take too long.

Firstly, people talking at cross purposes; secondly, poor time management. Here’s how it works.

You can divide anything you do in a meeting into 4 headings:-

1. Information download – someone has to let everybody know something about something e.g. the results of some recent test programme.
2. Information receiving – someone needs to hear back from everyone about something e.g. the results in their department of some recent initiative.
3. Problem solving – there is an issue which needs to be discussed, people need to share their views, make suggestions and in some form or another think creatively e.g. the last initiative failed, what are we going to do about it?
4. Decision making – the meeting has to decide something e.g. whether to make a particular investment.

What goes wrong is that it is never made clear under what heading an item falls. You think you are just giving an information download. I think you want a big discussion about it and offer lots of creative suggestions about what you should do next. You have a problem that you need help with. I think you are just feeding back information. The meeting rambles on aimlessly with far too much time spent on simple/low priority items and far too little spent on more complex and/or important issues.
So the first step is to indicate clearly exactly which heading an item on the agenda falls under and allocate ownership of that item to someone.

The second step is then to agree in advance what time is required for each item. Simple information giving should not take more than 10 minutes but Problem solving will take longer. By organizing the agenda clearly and allocating time realistically you can use the time in the meeting much more productively.

This is not theory – it has been proven to work. Just try it for a few meetings and see the results. It will feel like you just bought your first dishwasher and doing the dishes will never be a chore again.

Business Book Bollocks

I cannot believe Sherrington has published his ’10 Best Business Books to read’ and not included mine (which can be downloaded from this site here). Mine are more honest, more useful and are mercifully short. In ‘10 uncomfortable truths’ I even make it clear why you should be wary of all the bollocks you read in business books (other than mine).

Do yourself a favour, download my stuff and learn why innovation is bullshit, consensus sucks and who you have to watch out for in business (short people, anyone from Yorkshire, HR wankers and many more).

Up yours.

10 Best Business Books to Read (before you waste any more shareholders money)

It seemed such a simple idea. Do a bit of research, get recommendations from a selected list of business experts, check the business book best-seller lists and come up with the definitive list of 10 business books everyone should read (before they waste any more shareholders money). Well it turns out it is not that simple.

Start with the best-seller lists  – there are a lot of them, Amazon, HarperBusiness, Forbes, New York Times and they don’t agree with each other. And do you mean, ‘of all time’ or ‘recently’. More importantly you have to edit the lists to get to genuine thought-leaders rather than the highly topical, self-help, or ‘get rich quick’ titles. Current best sellers are any titles that help you get rich quick, digitally, sustainably, in a recession.

Do you include biographies (Warren Buffet is a winner) or profiles of ‘great organizations’ (Google is popular but then so was IBM 20 years ago)? However, if you do a bit of sensible editing you can get to a useful list. So then you take the pulse of a reasonable sample of business leaders and experts to get their favorites. Just because a book is a best seller does not mean real shakers and movers found it interesting and useful. It is worth remembering that more than 85% of all business books are bought but never actually read – what does that tell you? So  you ask the experts about what they not only bought but read and found useful -  Valuable? Up to a point. What you find is that people are very different and make some very esoteric choices. I don’t just mean “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu which is of course about war not business but has important lessons or Machiavelli’s “The Prince” which is about conniving politics – ditto. No I mean really esoteric. One of my favourites is ‘Longitude’ by Dava Sobel – essential reading for the serious innovator.

Finally, someone we really respect, Judie Lannon, editor of Market Leader, makes a killer point. Do you mean titles or authors? She then tells me of several writers she likes rather than any individual title e.g. Charles Handy.
Not so simple after all. But when was anything worthwhile meant to be simple? So here it is, 25 not 10, essential Best Business Books everyone should read. How was the list compiled? Combination of all of the above. These are best sellers by thought-leaders, of durable value, highly rated by a broad sample of business experts and I have made sure that the consistently good writers have one of their most famous books included.

They are in alphabetical order!

Barbarians at the Gate – Bryan Burrough
Behind the Scenes in Advertising – Jeremy Bullmore
Blue Ocean Strategy – W.Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne
Built to Last – Jim Collins and Jerry Porras
Competing for the Future – Gary Hamel & CK Prahalad
Competitive Advantage – Michael Porter
Eating The Big Fish – Adam Morgan
Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman
Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubnr
Funky Business – Jonas Ridderstrale & Kjell Nordstrom
Great to Good – Jim Collins
In Search of Excellence – Tom Peters et al
No Logo – Naomi Klein
One Minute Manager – Kenneth Blanchard & Spencer Johnson
Purple Cow – Seth Godin
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People- Stephen R, Covey
Technology’s Long Tail – Chris Anderson
The Age of Unreason – Charles Handy
The Essential Drucker – Peter F. Drucker
The Great Crash 1929 – J.K. Galbraith
The Innovators Dilemma – Clayton M. Christensen
Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell
The New Age of Innovation – CK Prahalad & MS Kishnan
Up The Organization – Robert Townsend
When Giants learn to dance – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

You won’t agree – I don’t entirely agree and I compiled it! There are several titles in this list that are there because there sales are stunning and they were seminal, not necessarily because they are the absolutely best title on that topic. You must have spotted some terrible omissions.

As a matter of fact, I’m back!

As I was trying to think about what to write as my first post in several months I realized I could do no better than the words of the glammest of the Glam Rockers, Mr. Gary Glitter

Hello, Hello, it’s good to be back, it’s good to be back
Hello, Hello, tell all your friends, I’m back, I’m back,
As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, I’m back!

Did you miss me, yeah, while I was gone
Did you hang my picture on your wall
Did you kiss me, yeah, every single day
Although you couldn’t kiss me at all
And did you love me, yeah, like a good little girl
Did you tell that naughty boy not to call
Did you love me, yeah, in your own little world
Although you couldn’t see me at all

Did you miss me, yeah, while I was gone
Did you hug your pillow in your bed
Did you kiss me, yeah, all night long and treasure every word I said
And did, you want me, yeah, to come back again
Did you know I’ve been so far away
Did you want me, yeah,
Did you tell your friends, to think about me every day

Hello, Hello, it’s good to be back, it’s good to be back
Hello, Hello, I’m back again, on the right track,
And as a matter of fact, I’m back!

OK, the sentiment of these words is slightly marred by the realization that the ‘good little girl’ Gary had in mind was a pre-pubescent Cambodian. But lets try to get past that because, as a matter of fact, Stame is back!

And don’t blame me for the radio silence. Sherrington was the one who wanted to fuck around and redesign the site and since he pays for all this I couldn’t very well argue although the old site worked well enough for me.

What have I been up to? Well – thank you for asking – I’ve been working on a few ideas for a new eBook. Undeterred by the fact that precious few of you have read the last one (available on this site, just a little click to download it, is that too much to ask?) I have been exploring new themes in the “ most people in business are wankers” genre that I feel I have made my own.

Seth Godin may have written “All Marketers are liars” but he’s a total wanker and is trying to make a few serious points to prove that he is the best marketer of them all. I was thinking more along the lines that “All people in advertising are fucking liars” and I won’t be trying secretly to prove that they’re really worth their weight in gold. I think they’re worth their weight in shit because they’re full of it.

Then I turned my attention to digital marketers. Sherrington has fallen in love with all this bollocks and spends all his time these days hanging out with his binary buddies. I’ve met a few of them and can confirm that they are indeed well balanced people – they have a chip on both shoulders. They remind me of the media (pronounced ‘meeedjah’) buyers in the ‘80’s. Forever whinging about how nobody gets the value of what they do, ad boys only treat them as an after-thought, clients don’t appreciate the unique skills they have etc etc.

Well I admit I don’t get the value of what eMarketers do. I use the internet to email, look stuff up and download porn as do most of my mates unless you include the women. I tried Twitter once – I followed Stephen Fry for a few days. As Rod Liddle pointed out in an article in the Spectator, it is full of Fry “narcissistically referring to himself in the third person with some whimsical exclamation last used when Hilaire Belloc was in his prime”. Facebook is just a bunch of spotty teenagers trying to appear cool to another bunch of spotty teenagers. Email marketing is just digital junk mail – anytime I get an email that starts ‘Dear Stame’ I know someone is trying to sell me something (my mates normally start with ‘Oi, Shitforbrains’, even my bank manager just says ‘Hi there Bloodclot’) and I adjust my filters accordingly. You can spend a lot or a little on a web site and the result looks pretty much the same (witness this new load of crap Sherrington has just spent his not-very-hard-earned cash on – it cost the price of a used car).

But what really pisses me off about the new generation of digital marketers is their holier than thou, ‘we get it, you don’t because we were born digital and you’re just a dinosaur’ attitude. The Caxton Press meant you could spread the written word faster but it still required content people wanted to read. The internet has caused an explosion of the production and spread of information and the empowerment of people in their ability to participate in this. OK, I get this but I still don’t see why I should have to listen to some wanker with a diploma in IT from Kingston Poly explain ‘Social Meedjah’ to me when I know he can’t think or reason because he spent most of his time at said college playing World of Warcraft.

I am very happy with my social media where a few sms’s and emails (and this blog) are as hi-tech as it gets. The Telegraph, Spectator and Radio 4 do me fine thanks very much.

So I was starting to focus on debunking all this eMarketing tosh when Sherrington told me that this is what he’s working on, although of course his eBook will explain why digital is the ‘promised land’ in business and why eMarketers are the new Messiahs. He seemed a little peeved when I told him what I was planning and frankly quite menacing when he suggested I might like to think again.

So instead I wrote an extremely useful book about 10 types of people who are out to get you in business. Along with my 10 Uncomfortable truths in business it makes for essential reading – the kind of sound advice you do not get at business schools or on the shelves of airport book shops. So do yourself a favour, go to Free Downlaods and download them NOW (I’m not kidding, right now!).

Up yours, Stame