Watch out for the Bastard Barons

On this rare occasion I find myself agreeing with most of what Sherrington wrote about being a Group Marketing Director. Not that I ever actually got to be one myself – I was far too talented to be considered. You know what they say – those that can, do and those that can’t, move to head office. I was briefly in HQ I admit and did come across some really unpleasant Barons – bosses of the operating businesses who regard people from the centre as about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool. I list them as one of the 10 types of people you have to watch out for in business. Check it out here.

Up yours, Stame

The Most Important Car Since The Car

I watched Top Gear the other night, the one where James May flew all the way to LA to test drive the new Hydrogen Honda, nick-named, ‘The Bomb’. He said it was the most important car since the invention of the car – bollocks. It was a really boring Honda Sedan that just happened to be powered by an  ‘alternative fuel’. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for reducing dependence on oil to screw the Arabs but I don’t believe it makes any difference to climate change or saving the planet. And if the price you pay is driving a Honda then you can count me out.

The most important car at the moment is the new Porsche Carrera PDK. The little acronym is kraut for double clutch. Don’t really understand how it works (2 clutches = faster gear changes I think). The point is it goes like shit off a shovel. The Porsche just got even faster. My bank balance is looking quite healthy at the moment thanks to all the work I am getting off the back of my eBooks so I thought I might treat myself to a new ‘porker’. Still the best super car on the road and as Dudley Moore said in that film about nutters who start writing TV Ads, “You can’t get laid in a Porsche, but you can get laid with a Porsche”.

Up Yours

Stame Reilly Shares his “Uncomfortable Business Truths” on World Tour

This viral thing is great – I don’t mean Swine Flu, I mean the way word spreads on the digital grapevine. This guy David Meerman Scott put me on to it. You write a killer e book (mine took me most of a weekend) punt it to a few of the right people and suddenly, before you can say “money for old rope”, you’ve become a pandemic and the offers flood in. My book, “That’s all very well but…“, exposes the truth in business, uncomfortable though they may be. Greed and fear are what drive innovation; most businesses succeed by getting from crap to mediocre; consensus management sucks; people swarm to new ideas like flies to a turd; everyone hates marketers for good reasons and most people in business lie like a cheap suit. These are the big ideas that everyone is latching on to. I have been offered so many speaking gigs ( 20 minutes to develop a quick powerpoint presentation, 40 minutes on stage, pick up the cheque and back to the suite in your first class hotel, all expenses paid – nearest thing to being a rock star) I am going to have to do a world tour. Davos want me for next year, TED.com have been chasing me, all the Top Business Schools are re-writing their MBA programmes to build me in, Footsie 50 Companies want me as the key note speaker for their senior management conferences. It’s this mometum thing I talk about in my book – once the ball starts rolling so does the cash.

I’m thinking of building in more of the rock start vibe. I’m having tee shirts done and special editions of my trade mark hat. I’m going to do encores rather than Q&A, there will be industrial quantities of drugs & alcohol after I come off stage. Of course I’ll be needing some groupees to help me blow the cash and anything else that takes their fancy. (If any of you girls are interested in applying here’s my selection process – put your hands behind you neck with your elbows sticking out and walk towards the wall – if your elbows touch first, don’t bother).

I have reinvented the business book and now I feel the need to reinvent business speaking. I’ve got my opening line (I pinched it from someone else). “Hello Chicago, it’s really great to be here and if I’ve been here before then its really great to be back”. I quite fancy a few Non Executive Directorships as well if anyone knows of any going – $100k a year to pitch up and pontificate at the odd board meeting then run for the hills when the shit hits the fan. My kind of gig. Business is diseased and I am the virus that’s going to fix it – spread the word. Up yours

What Do Agency Planners Actually Do?

I met someone at a party the other night and, pretending I cared, I asked them what they do. “I’m an Agency Planner”, they replied. And I said, quick as a flash, “I knew that, I asked you what do you do?”. Hilarious, at least I thought so. Of course I then got all the bullshit about ‘voice of the consumer’ and ‘helping to refine the brief’, ‘guardian of the brand values, strategic guidance etc etc etc’. She was quite pretty so I decided to be nice. ” I suppose I’m asking what do you do that other people aren’t supposed to do”. She looked confused. She was young, she worked for a BIG agency on BIG brands, she had grown up in a world where Agency Planners are the norm, accepted as an integral part of the ‘agency team’. She was sweet so she tried to explain it all to me. “I look at all the data and research on the brand and interpret what it means for the brand communication strategy”. Doesn’t the brand manager and research agency do that? ” I help craft the brief so the creative team really  understand what they need to deliver”. Doesn’t the account director do that? “I’m like the conscience of the brand, I think about long term direction”. Doesn’t the Marketing Director do that? She could see that I wasn’t getting it so she started to tell me about her qualifications. Turns out she had a good degree in psychology from a decent red brick university. “So why aren’t you a psychologist then, you could run focus groups?”

Seeing the conversation was leading nowhere she asked me what I do. “I’m an internationally acclaimed online writer and a business speaker in high demand – just about to embark on a ‘World Tour’ as it happens”. She smiled, a little too patronizingly for my liking. Had I written anything she might have heard of, she inquired with what I’m pretty sure was a smirk. “Yeah, I’ve written a top seller about the real truth in business, its got a great chapter on why everyone hates marketers. I’m just researching my next ebook, “How Agencies rip you off” and it’s going to have a chapter called “Agency Planners – as useful as a chocolate kettle”. I wanted to say ‘as useful as tits on a boar’ but it seemed unnecessarily rude. At this moment she spotted someone she knew across the room and made her excuses.

As she walked away, I muttered to myself, Up yours.

How to Deal With Spammers

I don’t know about you but I’ve been getting a stupid amount of spam emails from Chinese Electronics traders. I must receive about 3 a day, some are in Spanish for reasons I cannot fathom. My Spanish is a bit rusty but I think they are as badly worded as the ones that come in “English”. They start with ‘amigo’ as opposed to “Dear Friend”  – like that’s going to make me warm to them.

My policy has been to ignore and delete but lately I’ve started replying. It takes them no time just to click a button and send a billion emails around the world, one of which will clog up my inbox. So I hope my reply manages to waste just a little of their time. Especially since I always start by inquiring about some really big order I’d like to place. 

”Would you be able to supply me with 5 million Sony Plasm TV’s suitable for the blind and deaf?” 
”I’d like to purchase a squillion toasters that are able to work under water”. 
”Do you by any chance have Nokia phones for left handed people in stock?”.

That kind of thing. Being Chinese businesses I also make a point of stipulating certain conditions to do with their HR policy.

“In order to comply with our corporate social responsibility policy can I ask you to confirm that every member of your labour force is over 10 years old and paid more than $10 per hour”.
”Can you reassure me that no person in your company  is, or ever has been, a member of a left wing party guilty of human rights abuse?”
”For hygiene reasons we will need to ensure that no person who spits in the street or picks their nose has come into contact with these goods.”

My latest innovation is to ask for a favour. “In  return for my business, which you say you will highly value, can I ask you to sign a petition I have organised in support of China giving up all claims on Taiwan and Tibet”.

To date I have received no replies, but I like to think some senior person (aka grubby little trader) will have spent money having my reply translated and wasted time trying to figure out whether it’s genuine. A mate of mine pointed out that the laugh might be on me if they ever deliver my order and charge me for it. I agreed that’s a risk but one that is mitigated by the fact that I give them Sherrington’s address and credit card details.

Up yours.

Why it Pays to be Negative

I was interested to read Sherrington’s piece on Game Theory, in fact it was hard to tear my self away from it and go back to reading the telephone directory. This is exactly the kind of management bollocks I keep warning you about. No surprise it was written up in the HBR along with all the other guru-babble management techniques all those Brookes Brother clones read before they go back to deciding things the way they always do – what would my boss like, what will make me look good, what is least risky to my career? Here’s my version of Game theory.

Imagine you are asked to give your view on an investment decision, any investment decision. Imagine for one glorious moment anyone gives a shit what you think. If you say yes and it turns out to be a great success how many marks out of 10 will you personally get? You cannot be dumb enough to think it will be 10 out of 10, success has many fathers (or mothers, jeez I hate this PC stuff). Maybe you will get 7 if you are lucky. Now imagine you said no, and it nevertheless went ahead to be a winner. Will you get zero? No, because you can always claim circumstances had changed, you can even argue you were merely trying to play Devil’s advocate. Maybe you score 3 out of 10. What if you voted ‘no’ and it turned out you were on the money, the thing flops and you get to play a very major ‘I told you so card’? Organizations respect that kind of mature judgment, you would probably score a 9. And if you said yes and it flopped – well, organizations do not like people who back losers. You can try to spread the blame – “I wasn’t the only one who voted ‘yes’, even my boss thought it was a great idea, the guy you fired last week” – but it doesn’t play well. You will get close to zero.

So using this game theory, add up the scores for saying no – it totals 12. Now add up the scores for saying yes – 7 maybe 8 if you are lucky (are you following this – just write it up in a little matrix, if you can’t do that then it’s unlikely you would be asked to vote on anything more important than where to have the Christmas Party). If you play the odds it is always better to say NO! And that is exactly how it works in big organizations, who tell you “It’s OK to make mistakes” but always forget to add “in theory”.

Rely on good old Stame to tell you it like it is.

Up yours

Malcolm Gladwell’s Secret of Success?

Buggered if I know but I wish I had it. This little twerp is making millions spinning the simplest of observations into global best selling books and highly lucrative lecture tours.

Tipping Point – Things catch on and some people spread the news.

Blink – smart people are quick on the uptake

Outliers – you get good at something by doing it a lot and it helps if you were born in to the right family at the right time.

Thank you Sherlock. How does he get away with it? His TED.com video explains in 15 tedious minutes about how some American twat figured out that we like a bit of a choice. It’s not money for old rope, its money for very thin string.

I can’t wait to see his next best sellers:-

A Stitch in time saves Nine – how getting on with things helps you get on.
Look before you leap – some problems can be averted.
Too many cooks spoil the broth – there is only so much Gordon Ramsey anyone can stomach.

He can spin this out for years. Seth Bloody Godin is just as pisspoor. Purple cows stand out – so do chickens with a skunk stuck on their head but you wouldn’t want to eat one. If you want some real guru wisdom check out my titles here. I am also available to give lectures and key note speeches and will cost you quite a lot less than Mr. Glad – wellwhywouldn’thebe.

Up yours.

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.

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.

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.