Is the Internet Changing our Brains?

I have been involved in a debate about whether the internet has changed marketing. It began in an exchange between myself and Paul Feldwick in Market Leader, the UK Marketing Society’s journal, and then moved on-line. There have been, as we hoped, some great contributions, including one from Elen Lewis who referenced an article in The Guardian that features several very eminent scientists (and a novelist) debating whether and how the internet has changed our very brains. I was interested in this since a big part of my argument that marketing has fundamentally changed as a result of the internet is based on the fact that society and people have changed. To be able to show that our brains have changed is therefore a killer point.

The article is worth reading in its entirety and being given some quiet consideration rather than surfing this short post to get the gist – you will realize the relevance/irony of this recommendation if you do. However, if, as a child of the internet, it is gist you want then here it is. Yes the internet is changing our brains. Some argue that it is for the worse, some argue it is just different with pro’s and cons, others argue it is our choice whether or not we allow it to change our brains (reading more books would help us retain our intellectual reasoning apparently).

For me the most interesting comment in the Guardian piece comes from Ed Bullmore, Cambridge Professor of Psychiatry no less. He argues that the internet resembles a human brain and how it works and therefore we can learn a lot about how we think by studying it. He calls the internet “a prosthesis of our collective memory” that’s an artificial brain to you and me. I know extrapolation is a dangerous thing but it has struck me before that if, at some point in the near future (near being imminent in evolutionary terms) everything that has ever been written and conceived, everyone one of us, every artifact and idea is digitally coded and available on the internet, and if every person on the planet is uploading their thoughts and conversations in real time, and if there are search engines and social networks able to allow each and everyone of us to access and connect all of these things again in real time, that is in effect one global brain is it not? This sounds a bit far fetched I agree. So do the views of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Far from being shame-faced that community information has leaked out he believes that everything should be transparent and publically available. He thinks – this is really crazy – that the world would be a better place, we would all behave better, if there were no secrets, if we were all honest with each other. Actually there must be a flaw in this argument since I have only one brain and I’m not honest with myself.

Anyway, the fact is that the big brains agree the internet is changing our brains and how they function as well as how we interact in our global cyber society. I think that means marketing must be changed fundamentally since at its heart it is about influencing how people think, behave and choose, individually and collectively, to the commercial benefit of a business. In fact I’d say that was game, set and match Paul! I’d now like to move on to a debate about the cult of celebrity and its role in our slide into destructive global decadence (aka Paris Hilton will be the death of all of us).

Any takers?

Has the Internet Changed Everything?

At Judie Lannon’s invitation (editor of Market Leader) Paul Feldwick and I have kicked off a debate about the impact of the internet on marketing. He is in the ‘nothing’s changed’ corner and I am arguing ‘everything has changed’. You can read his opening salvo (which picks up on comments I made in this blog) and my reply in the latest edition of Market Leader. The debate is continued on their web site.

As usual with these things, in reality, I don’t think Paul and I are that far apart. I don’t think the fundamentals of marketing will change that much, in other words the purpose and objectives of marketing, but the means by which we do marketing will change – already have in fact. More importantly business and marketing will change because people are changing. I argue this has always been the case – since the Stone Age, technology has changed society. The technology revolution we are living through is the biggest ever in terms of speed, scale and (low) cost. I am trying to focus the debate on 3 areas of change:-

1. The way we market goods and services (research, innovation, communications, pricing, distribution)
2. The goods and services (especially the latter) that we can market
3. The market itself – the internet is multi-dimensional exchange. It is BtoB, BtoC, CtoC and CtoB. What gets exchanged ranges from goods and services to ideas and the currency is money, time, information, entertainment and ideas.

Any way  - what do you think? Tune in and join the debate if not. I’ll keep you posted.

What a load of B********

Just read Sherrington’s post on technology making us behave badly, internet etiquette etc (I do wish he’d run this stuff past me first). What a load of Billy Bollocks. The whole point of the internet is to be extreme, to drop the normal niceties and tell it like it is. That’s my philosophy. Someone can’t take a joke then f*** them (if I find someone has edited this and put in asterisks I’ll be really p**** off).

By the way, if any of you have been wondering where I’ve been I’d like to point out that I have been posting like a demon but most of them get spiked by Sherrington. If you are reading this then it means the bunch of flowers I sent Amanda has done the trick and she has slipped it past Shezza while he’s been busy with his ‘other ventures’.

Amanda is the one who converts all his ramblings and mine into stuff that can actually be posted since neither of us know one end of a computer from the other.

Up yours, Stame

Both/And Agencies

Interesting piece by Tony Quin in Adweek about the battle for supremacy between traditional ad agencies and digital agencies. He concludes, sensibly, that it will be a “both/and” outcome. Some clients, on some occasions will want digital as part of a ‘full service’ agency offering, others will want more specialist digital or eMarketing agencies. Yet more – in my view the smart clients – will reject the idea of any kind of lead agency and will pull together a team of experts from a variety of agencies to suit their needs. (For more on this read “So you wanna know about eMarketing” available here)

Finance directors have been doing this for years. Depending on the particular project they have, they cherry pick advisors from banks, lawyers, accountants and consultants. For regulatory reasons (e.g. when share issues are involved) there may be one lead advisor but in reality it is a team led by the FD. Marketing Directors would do well to watch closely how they do this.

In Quin’s article he criticizes digital agencies for their inexperience in acting as a lead agency. I think there is some truth in this. Digital marketers are not always very good at explaining why they do what they do and the role of technology in particular. But frankly it was the same with Ad Agencies in the early days. Clients did not really understand how it worked or the nature of the creative process (many still don’t). Over time ad agencies got better at presenting what they did and clients became much more savvy about how agencies and creativity works, or at least confident enough that it did work that they let them get on with it.

That needs to happen in digital. Yes the agency need to explain better the ins and outs of their craft but clients need to grow up. Too many are still seduced by sexy web sites that fundamentally don’t deliver and are clueless about the many other, often more important, tactics of eMarketing. They have imported rather clumsily their ‘creative appreciation’  from analogue, mass market media and it doesn’t help. At least the digital agencies are helped in this ‘journey towards mutual understanding’ by the numbers. They can prove their case with ROI.

While the debate at the moment is focused on the traditional ad agency versus digital specialist spectrum there is another dimension, a triangular one, that interests/frustrates clients and has done for years. Strategy versus execution versus creativity. All agencies, traditional through to digital, design to communications, even the management consultancies struggle with this perceived trade-off. If you are a great strategic thinker then chances are you’re not so creative; if you are really creative you are not always so practical; if you really know how to manage the details of the execution you probably weren’t smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place. A bit harsh but fair I think. Agencies or teams of agencies that can resolve this trade off and deliver fresh work that meets the business strategy and is delivered faultlessly have the upper hand.

In my view this trade off is easier to address than the digital versus traditional debate, at least for the next 5 years or so. I explain why in more detail in my eBook but the headline is that role of metrics and technology in the thinking and practice of eMarketing is so fundamentally alien to ad agencies that they will never be able to embrace it effectively. For many – not all – marketing projects where digital is pivotal you will not find a both/and agency.

Dealing with R&D

I’ve always believed that good marketers are consumer focused but technically inspired. Real innovation comes in that spark between a market insight and a technical possibility. I recall a conversation with the head of R&D in Unilever – sadly one that happened so close to me leaving that nothing ever came of it. We were shooting the breeze in my office. We’d just been in a research debrief where some new detergents powder had failed to deliver much in the way of a significant consumer preference (even in a paired comparison test which normally exaggerates any differences). I asked him whether we had got to the stage where all innovation was going to be so incremental that it was not worth the effort. What could we do that would genuinely be a dramatic step forward (apart from new formats – liquids and tablets etc – which is the direction the market was going)? He gave me a wry smile and said “I could develop you a product that would give a huge improvement in washing performance and I could deliver it at a much lower price. But you’d have to do something for me. You’d have to persuade people to change their habits and use 3 separate products”. I sat up and paid attention
He explained that washing powders are a cocktail of chemicals. I knew this. “Yes, but what you don’t appreciate is how much performance we sacrifice and cost we incur keeping them all stable. A washing machine has 3 dosing compartments”. (They don’t these days but this was 20 years ago). “If you could persuade people to buy 3 separate products and use each one in a different compartment we could give them a performance improvement even an idiot would notice and we could do it at half the price of a normal powder”.

What is the point of the story? Firstly, the kind of conversation I was having is unusual for a marketer to have with the head of R&D. It was relaxed, friendly and we were exploring possibilities in a much more constructive way. Secondly, I could understand what he was saying. I am not showing off here – all the Unilever Marketers understand the technical side of their products (at least they used to). I gave up chemistry at school but nevertheless I had a good understanding of all the chemical ingredients in any of the products I marketed for Unilever. Marketers have to make it their business to understand the technology, processes and systems behind their brands. It is essential to be able to work collaboratively with R&D.

Finally I had asked him a stretch question with no constraints. How can we do something amazing? Most times this kind of question is much more conservatively put and framed with many constraints in terms of cost and deadlines. To get the best out of R&D you have to ask challenging questions and neither constrain nor allow them to double guess you. Here are some examples:-

If money was no object what would the most expensive product in the world look like?
Another way to ask the same question – what do professionals use? (this has driven most of the innovation in photography)
If we had to sell this at half the price what could we offer that would meet peoples’ basic needs?
If we designed a product that was the best for just this one occasion or that particular person what would it be? (Market Segmentation is the most reliable way to innovate).

I could go on but you get the idea. The last time I tried this was with Pilsner Urquell. Everyone knows that the fresh Pilsner you drink in bars in Prague tastes like nectar. The bottled product we drink around the world is still a fine beer – the best in the view of many experts – but not as good as fresh draught Pilsner Urquell. There were many reasons for this and I think I had a basic grasp of the technical reasons why. The question I asked the Chief Brewer was how we could deliver the same drinking experience with a packaged product that had been exported (all Pilsner Urquell is brewed only in Plizen – hence the name, Pilsner Urquell, which means the ‘Original Pilsner’). I stressed that there were no constraints in terms of cost or packaging format. Before the brewing expert could answer several of my senior colleagues, especially the boss, started to explain with patronizing patience why this was impossible. The conversation never progressed. There has been some work done I believe but to my taste the bottled Pilsner still disappoints – I have tasted the real thing and this is not it.
Simple consumer insight – everyone prefers the taste of the fresh draught Pilsner. Challenging question – we want that in a packaged product that might be 3 months old or more – but no constraints. That is where you get the best out of R&D.
You don’t often get perfection but you can force yourself to change the rules and in doing so you can take a big step forward. The next time I go to Prague I will look forward to a great big glass of draught Pilsner Urquell. At home I drink Guinness in a can – the one that has a widget because Guinness asked the right question and imposed no constraints. The first prototype of Draught Guinness in a can involved a separate syringe of beer that had to be injected into the glass after the can had been poured. Clearly crazy but people liked the end result, which was very close to fresh draught Guinness. With that encouragement they developed the in-can widget (which does what the syringe had done i.e. inject a shot of Guinness under pressure to release the nitrogen and create the creamy taste).

Understand your product in every technical detail and spend at least as much time with R&D as you do with the consumer, talking their language, asking the right questions. Or as Mark Twain said – “you can do what you always did and get what you always got”.

Some tips on measuring Brand Health

You’ll have gathered that I don’t blog regularly. I know I should but I don’t. I blog spasmodically, when I have something I want to share, a book I have read or some piece of business/marketing insight I’m thinking about. So, here’s something about measuring Brand Health. It was prompted by a question an old colleague asked me the other day. He works for a large global business (no hints) that wants to become even more brand-led and wants to make a regular review of the health of its brands the catalyst for this.

I wrote him quite a nice thought piece on this (no I won’t share that just yet – I may develop it a bit first and maybe write an article). It is a subject on which I have some strong views based on several years wrestling with it, although I would not claim to be the world’s expert (marketing expert is an oxymoron – marketers are a mile wide and an inch deep, sometimes not even an inch). Tell you what – I’ll give you the headlines.

Brands account for roughly half the value of a business if they have them. If not you can call it reputation and it amounts to the same thing (the value of a brand is its reputation).
Therefore, brand health (or a company’s reputation) should be reviewed by the board of a company as often as they review their financial performance. Just doing this will force the business to be more brand-led.
You have to start with inputs and outputs. The inputs are the various things you can invest behind a brand to create growth – product quality, distribution, competitive pricing, weight and quality of marketing & communications. The outputs are the market place performance results that should come from all this investment – market share, revenue, margin, ROI. Are we doing the right things, are they having the right results?

Some people look for some composite score for all of this. Some even focus on brand value using whichever methodology has caught their eye. In my view this is all pointless. It will be some form of a balanced scorecard where “apples” will have been added to “pears” and some of the fruit salad will be both arbitrary and subjective. Either way it ends up being very theoretical and not very useful – neither predictive nor diagnostic in my experience.

It is nevertheless worth focusing on what converts the inputs to the outputs in order to get some insight that is both diagnostic and predictive of future performance – surely that’s the point of the whole thing, if not then you might as well just count the cash and plot the financial graphs.

To do this properly requires some fact-based understanding about how brands work, in particular how people in the category come to adopt – or unadopt – brands. Most brand owners don’t have this understanding – they may think they do, but they don’t. They will have pieces of the story (based on some facts and a lot of speculation and prejudice) but nowhere close to the whole story of why someone chooses, this time, to buy a BMW rather than an Audi, or an Apple rather than a Dell.

There are consultancies who will tell you otherwise – there are as many models of brand health and brand conversion as there are consultancies, all sold to potential clients with total conviction that they are right. What does that tell you?

The perfect model of what drives conversion to a brand is the Holy Grail of marketing. Many claim to have found it, no-one has, at least not yet. So while we keep looking – and we should – here are the things I look at in a brand to see how healthy it is:-

Brand Price Elasticity – since the ultimate test of the strength of a brand is that people are prepared to pay a price premium for it (or a higher volume at parity price) price elasticity, how it compares versus the consideration set of competitive brands and how it improves over time, is the ultimate measure. The issues are that a) getting accurate data regularly is expensive b) very careful thought needs to given as to the competitive consideration set (it is rarely who you think) and the sample (you don’t want to know the views of everyone or the data just gets flattened). However, there are useful proxies for price elasticity that can be tracked.

Recruitment – any brand needs to be recruiting younger (than its target) users or it eventually goes into decline, a decline that can be hard or impossible to reverse. Declining uptake (and weakening attitudes) among younger users has proved to be an extremely accurate predictor of future brand performance.

Differentiation – not a lot of people know that the Y&R Brand Evaluator model was developed by MIT. Even fewer know that MIT did an exercise to look at which of the 4 key measures in the model correlated highest with actual market performance. The answer was differentiation. The more the target audience perceives a brand to be different to its competitors the stronger it is and the better it performs over time. One would assume the perceived difference would need to be relevant (one of the other scores in the Y&R model) but it doesn’t (or maybe sensible marketers ensure the difference is always relevant). But the fact is that brands that stand out as different from their consideration set perform consistently well (Apple, VW, Guinness, Nike)

Momentum – this is based on the latest from social sciences but again, like differentiation, has been to shown to reflect brand strength accurately and in the short term (unlike standard image and attribute measures, momentum scores can change in just a few months). As humans we tend to gravitate towards what we perceive to be what everyone else is doing – we follow the perceived trends like a flock of birds or shoal of fish (literally). The extent to which people think that a brand is ‘getting more popular’ is a key score.

As I say, all of these can and should be measured and tracked. But a healthy brand needs some other things to stay healthy. A healthy brand needs healthy foundations. I list my top three below but would stress that in my view these cannot be measured. They need to be assessed by people with experience:-

A Great Brand Positioning – clear, competitive and inspires great execution

Famous Brand Signifiers – strong brands are shown to have well known collaterals (can be a pack design, logo, some aspect of the product experience, music etc)

“Product Recipe” – a clearly set out technical specification that is linked to its brand positioning and its signifiers. Distinctive brands don’t just happen by chance and they don’t remain distinctive over time by chance. Someone or something is keeping them that way.

Last but not least – consistency. Healthy brands are consistent (even though their form and their messages will evolve over time albeit executed with a freshness that feels almost inconsistent). All the strongest brands adapt with the changing trends of its market and society and yet maintain a consistency of personality and identity. Now that is tough to do – about as tough as all of us find it to enjoy life, build careers, please the family and stay healthy.

How to Survive as Group Marketing Director

I have been asked many times about this, most recently by an old colleague who was interested in my advice about whether he should accept a ‘promotion’ to be the new Group Marketing Director, in other words to move into the newly created role. It is tricky. It’s a fancy sounding title but a job that can cause a lot of stress, frustration and disappointment on all sides.

If there is a role for a Group Marketing Director it is normally because there are a number of other executive marketing directors across a group of companies, often, but not always, a multi-national group. So there will be divisional or local CEO’s and Marketing Directors in the mix. What, then, is the job of the Group Marketing Director? This is often very poorly defined and, perhaps as a consequence, has a very unclear degree of authority. I have filled the role twice in my career and worked with many GMD/CMO’s in large corporates during my consultancy days.

My first crack at this came in Unilever, my last position for them – no coincidence. I was the global leader for two product categories working in the centre as part of the staff team for the main board Unilever Director. This was over 20 years ago and Unilever has undergone many evolutions of management structure since then but basically my job was to develop and police a global marketing strategy. There was not much of a brief, my boss was a particularly taciturn man, so I was left to figure out exactly what this meant. Unilever was groping its way towards a global manufacturing strategy starting with Europe and in order to make this possible we had to harmonize – crunch into one shape – the various brands we had in my categories (dishwash, hard surface cleaners and fabric conditioners – very glamorous). This was not a welcome move among the local marketing directors and their bosses. One of them, boss of the French business, explained to his MD that under no circumstances was he to offer me any co-operation or assist in any way. He did this in front of me with a big smile on his face – a smile which faded somewhat when his MD, a good mate of mine, explained to him that I spoke pretty good French and had understood every word.

In fact I found this first role fairly easy. The strategy was not that complicated, the benefits of it were unarguable (several studies had shown that harmonizing the brands and moving to a European manufacturing strategy would double the profits of that division), and all the local marketing directors were my mates. I had recently been one of them, in charge of Spain. So they trusted me and we were able to make a sensible plan. The local bosses were more tricky, as I’ve said, but they all fell in line eventually when it was linked to their bonuses and/or they were replaced with people who were on message. Nevertheless I found the whole experience very boring, especially working in the, then, stultifyingly dull Unilever House. I was a brand marketer – I liked doing things not just talking about things.

My next opportunity to be a Group Marketer came when I was offered the newly created role at SABMiller Plc working for Graham Mackay in London. It carried a seat on the main executive board so there was implied authority to the title Group Marketing Director. However, the brief was still somewhat woolly and to be honest in 4 years I never did get to the bottom of it. I knew what the ‘Barons’ (the CEO’s of the regional businesses) expected, they just wanted a sexual advisor (“we’ll ask for your fucking advice when we want it”) but it conflicted with what I thought my boss and the business needed. Graham is the best CEO I have ever met and the lack of clarity was due not to any indecisiveness on his part. I was the first GMD and the business was evolving very fast on the back of some mega acquisition deals. I ended up doing 4 years in the job, one year more than I had originally agreed to, and in hindsight I wished I had stuck to the original plan. I found the last 18 months thoroughly miserable. It turns out the brief was to ensure the regional businesses raised their game in marketing in a business with predominantly local brands and a highly devolved management ethos. I was effectively the ‘burr in the saddle’ to get them to take marketing much more seriously which they did really well to their credit. My role and that of my team, which had started so well, became one of internal consultants and trainers.

I did not go into SABMiller blind. Before I took the job I consulted a few mates who had been in similar roles and listened to their advice. I even got a very valuable briefing from the great Sergio Zyman, Coke’s famous former CMO. He did the job twice and the second time around he had the sense to negotiate a very clear and powerful board mandate. His word on any aspect of marketing in any part of the world was law. His central marketing team – which he strengthened hugely – had the right to walk in to any Coke market, anytime, anywhere, and ask to see whatever they wanted. If they did not like it  – or Sergio did not like – it got changed.

Maybe that is a bit extreme, but the fact is ‘Group Marketing’ can be the end of a promising career. For it not to be, the issues that make the role so ambiguous need to be tackled.

So here is my formula for a successful Group Marketing Director. It requires getting totally clear on 4 issues:-

1.    What is the brief for Group Marketing – what constitutes success?
2.    How will this be measured?
3.    What’s in it for the local marketing teams – what are the implications?
4.    What’s the mandate – what authority do you have and how will conflict get resolved?

Start with the brief. What is the vision for marketing in the business, what is the agenda? Some vague idea about common standards of excellence and sharing best practice won’t cut it. Precisely what does the board want to achieve?
When that is sorted out you can move on to how it will be measured. What gets measured gets done and even if it can sometimes prove hard to measure precisely some aspects of marketing, there should nevertheless be some objective form of tracking the performance of Group Marketing.

Next, you need to tackle the implications for the local marketing teams. If they are expected to fall in line it must be clear what they get out of this process. If the answer is that they will find their jobs somewhat diminished to just execution then this must be confronted (as I understand it has been in Unilever). And then their bosses need to sign up for this (in my view, literally sign up) and have compliance made part of their bonus & appraisal.

Finally, what authority, in what areas, does the GMD have? If it is just implicit i.e. he reports to the boss and the boss will back him, well that’s something. But better still make it explicit – give the GMD accountability and responsibility. Don’t fudge this – it will always catch you out.

The best situation is, like Sergio, to have a really powerful mandate. The beauty is you then very rarely need to use it. Because every one knows you have the power, you can afford to be conciliatory, to listen, to understand and to be confident that you are having honest conversations. You can decide when to offer exemptions to certain aspects of ‘group marketing policy’. You can be reasonable. The worst situation is not to have a mandate and to behave as if you do. You come across as the typical ‘prick from head office’.

There’s lots more I could explain but I will leave it with these headlines. In my view I, or someone like me, should be used as a kind of coach-come-referee to both the CEO/Board and the Group Marketing Director, an objective but experienced (scarred) person who can offer the occasional voice of reason if the issues become too complex or intractable. But that is just an opinion. If the 4 issues are sorted out well upfront it should not be necessary to have a mediator. I just don’t trust that they ever are.

Finally, what is the difference between a CMO and a Group Marketing Director? In my view the former always has positional power and are responsible and accountable for the following:-
•    The health and growth of the business’ priority brands
•    Raising the marketing capabilities of the whole organization
•    Investing resource to explore new marketing tools and capabilities that will give the business competitive advantage (an example right now for many businesses would be digital marketing).

Is that what you thought a Group Marketing Director did? Then call them the CMO, it always was a better title because it positions him or her alongside the CEO and CFO, and everyone knows what they do.

So You Want to Run an Agency?

A few months back I finally got round to writing an eBook about my views on running (and selling) agencies. It’s available as a free download on this site. I make it clear at the beginning that I don’t regard this as a seminal work. It’s just my views based on my experience from running The Added Value Group and working with many other agencies and consultancies over the years.

I always made it my business to quiz people in other businesses about all aspects of building and managing an agency, to see what I could learn. And some people have been kind enough to ask me. I have gladly offered my advice with the proviso that it’s just one point of view and that, like me, they should get lots of different perspectives and cherry pick what they think will work for them. For better or worse I have now written this all down and made it available, for FREE, to anyone who is interested. It covers all the important aspects, as I see them, from managing the people, winning and keeping clients, to the more prosaic stuff like what to call the agency and how to design the offices. There’s a chunky section on financial management and how/whether/when to sell the business.

A few heads of agencies I know have now read it and have recommended it to their colleagues – there are a few nice twitters floating around about it this week. So it can’t be complete rubbish. I stress it is a personal view, an input into a debate all good agencies should continually have – only the curious win. Stame’s eBook is funnier (and more profane) but if you run an agency, or aspire to, mine is perhaps more useful.

Game Theory and the Retailers’s dilemma

As Christmas approaches a number of retailers, whether they realize it or not, will participate in a game of “Prisoner’s Dilemma”. They will have to decide whether to hold their nerve and their prices until after the main holiday season, when traditionally the ‘sales’ period starts, or whether to introduce discounts before Christmas in an effort to hit top-line targets and steal a march on competition. The decision they take has to take account of what they think their competitors will do. If every retailer holds their nerve everyone will enjoy a higher bottom line, if everyone launches their ‘sales’ early everyone loses (except the consumer) because it is a zero sum game. But if one retailer moves ahead of the others they win relative to their competitors.

This kind of strategic decision is inter-dependant – the outcome depends on the actions or inaction of others -  and is the basis of Game Theory developed in the 1940’s by Neumann and Morgenstern for economics. In 1950 Flood and Dresher developed the example of the prisoner’s dilemma to illustrate the use of Game Theory. You can read the full version of this in Wiki but the basic idea is that 2 prisoners are held in separate cells accused of a crime. If both confess they get a 5 years sentence. If neither confess they get 6 months. If one betrays the other he goes free and the other guy gets 10 years. On the assumption that less prison time is better and there is no honour among thieves it is better for both to choose to confess. If the game is repeated eventually people can figure out that it is better to ‘co-operate’ and stay silent.

In 1995 Harvard Business Review carried an article by Brandenburger and Nalebuff (crazy names, crazy guys) which tried to re-launch the use of Game Theory in business strategy since so many business decisions have outcomes that depend on the decisions of others – like the prisoners dilemma. There don’t seem to be many takers for this very mathematical branch of business science. Decisions are discussed taking into account opinions on what competitors may or may not do, but it is rare for this to involve the kind of complex matrices and algorithms advanced by the purest disciples of Game Theory.

So you can expect the ‘sales’ to start early this year as every retailer takes the pre-emptive retaliation route. The retailers and their shareholders will lose out, consumers will win and no-one will learn. When the Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario was tried out among a sample of ‘ordinary people’ 40% took the ‘say nothing’ option. In other words they assumed that everyone realizes it is better to co-operate. Suckers.

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.