A normal day at the office

My friend Julian Burton has just created an online version of his current exhibtion at the LSE, The Art of Complexity.

It's a delightful exhibition showing Julian's unusual perspective on organisational change. In his work, he has sat through more change management jargon than most, and his pictures - amongst other things - capture the limitations of much that is said about how to lead organisations.

What Julian's art does is capture a more human truth about what it can be like to work in organisation, which can often be a prompt to more honest and authentic conversation - a far more valuable contribution to change than any amount of management-speak. You can find out more about the exhibition here.

David Bowie says IP is in for a bashing

The Church of the Customer blog quotes an NY Times interview with David Bowie, who says:

I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.

Bowie believes the future of the music industry is that songs become advertisements for artists, who must rely more on touring to making a living. As the blog points out, Bowie has been a master innovator and his view carries some credibility.

Personally, I find many of the people who bang on about protecting their IP a bit unattractive. If Isaac Newton can acknowledge standing on the shoulders of giants, I think the music industry and a few others could show a greater awareness that any idea is the end product of a rich tapestry of culture and other' peoples ideas. For myself, I don't try too hard to own my ideas because I learn so much by sharing them and exposing them to other people's criticism and comment. And one of the greatest pleasures is being part of great Improv, whether comedy or music, where the real thrill is in the spirit of collaboration and spontaneity.

Trust and NGOs

My friend Olaf Brugman has invited me to take part in a workshop in Brussels on October 29th. It looks set to be an interesting gathering of Knowledge Managment gurus so I'm feeling quite chuffed to be speaking there. I'm going to talk about trust which I like doing - even though the more I write about it, the fuzzier a topic I think it is!

One thing I like to empasise about trust is to think of it as something we do, not just a nice warm feeling we're all somehow entitled to feel. Too many debates on the topic have a "why, oh why?" quality, bemoaning the disappearance of trust in society. There's plenty of evidence that we don't trust the media and institutions in the way we used to... but I think it's not that trust has disappeared, it's just that we make much more personal choices about how we invest it.

Lots of organisations try to create trust with reassuring image making, but I think that misses the point. The best way to create trust is to invest trust in others, to speak with integrity and beware of making empty promises that can't be delivered. Sometimes we choose to trust others and get let down - but that to my mind is a price we have to pay to learn who to trust and in what context. It's better not to think of trust as an anaeshetic to prevent pain; actually risking hurt is probably a pre-requisite for creating trust.

NGOs tend to come off best in surveys of institutions we trust, but I think that can be misleading - and certainly Olaf confirms that that kind of trust vanishes fast if an organisation lets people down.

New Abbey

So the Abbey National is rebranding itself this morning.

As I write this entry, they are revealing their new look, their shortened name (just "Abbey") and their ambitions...

We've got a new look, that you can see here, which emphasises just how the new Abbey is different from the old. Fresh, friendly and colourful, like the way we aim to do business.

Bold stuff. Of course these days any right-minded person is sceptical of rebranding, after abortive exercises like Monday, Consignia and BA's tailfins. The new look for Abbey is certainly very different... but I'm doubtful whether the reality of the Abbey can change as fast as their colour scheme and logo. Indeed, is it really human to expect a culture to change in that kind of dramatic way?

Still, the ambitions are interesting.

We're starting a revolution with the aim of democratising money - helping everyone, not just the privileged few, get on top of their money

Now that sounds interesting, and potentially a refreshing change of strategy if it's true. It will be interesting to see how these very high-sounding principles operate in the real world.

What's missing, for me, is any acknowledgement of the bank's recent difficult past. Obviously, they want to forget it and they want us to forget it. I'm not sure they'll be able to shed that reputation so easily.

Time will tell!

Jersey

I've just given a presentation on Beyond Branding in Jersey. It was fun to take ideas that have been percolating for months and give them a public airing.

It was a good excuse to go through months of notes and ideas and re-present the arguments. I realised how easy it is for me to think an idea is getting a bit tired - and then realise that for a fresh audience it's exciting.

And - as always - I learn so much from the stories of participants which reinforced the stories and ideas of the book.

We had some fun going through some of the websites that challenge brands. I even got the audience a little excited when I showed them jerseysucks.com - though they quickly realised it was about NewJersey sucking, not this rather charming island.

I did an interview for the Jersey Evening Postafter the seminar. They got me to pose for a picture with a Mars Bar, as a visual reference about branding. I hope my co-authors forgive me!

Then this morning I spent time with a client from the seminar talking through ways they can use the principles to create a more human brand for themselves. They had already done a two-page internal memo as a result of the seminar... I got a kick out of that... seeing something I and a lot of others have been working on for many months getting out into the real world and having an impact!

Putting humanity into branding

We live in a world of too much marketing and too much branding. People’s faith in advertising has fallen to new lows, as we simply fail to engage with the claims advertisers make.

I think the humanity has been driven out of most branding programmes, replaced by an ever-growing list of clever-sounding jargon and “tools” designed to manipulate rather than engage with consumers. It’s time to put human passion back.

Dysfunctional branding

Many fundamental principles of marketing and branding would be regarded as deeply dysfunctional in person-to-person relationships.

Here are a few examples

Marketing shibboleth: “Put the customer first”

Therapeutic interpretation: A wife who always puts her husband first (or vice versa) is likely to have a deeply unhappy marriage. Oddly, both partners will be unhappy because none of us really enjoy the company of sycophants (even though a lot of brand managers spend their time in the company of such people).

At extremes, in relationships this leads to battered spouse syndrome.

Or both partners may try to constantly please the other and neither find out how to satisfy themselves. This leads to dull marriages that end in affairs.

The general label for this kind of behaviour in real relationships is co-dependency

Marketing shibboleth: “Differentiate or die”

Therapeutic interpretation: Branding puts far too much effort into differentiation. But this is simply another way of being co-dependent, because we allow our identity to be dictated by others.

An individual whose main purpose is to be different often wastes energy on pointless cosmetic changes instead of realising that the easiest way to be different is to be true to yourself. Many brands lack any sense of purpose which can be the key to standing out. This is manifestly the case with banks like Barclays with its absurd giantesque advertising with Anthony Hopkins.

Marketing shibboleth: “Consistency of presentation is vital”

Therapeutic interpretation: It’s absurd that companies produce multi-volume manuals to control the exact colour scheme for their logo. This is like the dysfunctional adolescent who is obsessed with appearance to the point of bulimia or anorexia. Instead of building self-esteem, they undermine it.

And no sensible employee wants to be guided by a rule book, they want to be inspired by example. Presentation is completely secondary to behaviour, as the British Airways tailfin and Consignia examples demonstrate.

An approach based on more human principles would favour authenticity over perfection. It’s also likely be more effective: as we are constantly bombarded by marketing claims, our willingness to believe them decreases. The solution of many marketers is to seek out ever louder or more intrusive creative work, but in a “tragedy of the commons” this solution makes the underlying problem even worse. The truly distinctive choice is to reduce the hype and increase the honesty.

The low-cost airlines have been big beneficiaries of cutting through this nonsense with under-promise. They are (relatively) cheap and offer a matching level of service. Easyjet seems to revel in the ITV series which frequently demonstrates its human shortcomings. With no investment in CRM and frequent-flyer pseudo-loyalty, they seem to have created a more realistic relationship with customers. Of course, Southwest airlines takes the biscuit for no holds barred self-mockery. After a bumpy landing, the flight attendant announced: "We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal."

Such straightforwardness makes perfect sense in our personal lives: none of us would be long attracted to a friend who spoke of himself in the same narcissistic language as many advertisers. Likewise, if we formed a relationship with someone who claimed their life would be dedicated solely to our pleasure we’d be wise to expect some serious problems down the line.

In a network economy of great transparency, all marketing rests on a series of real human conversations and relationships. These more authentic relationships must start inside organisations.

In praise of “negative” emotions

Bad news: if you want passion in your organisation, you can’t pick and choose what form it takes. You might get laughter but you might also get tears; you may get enthusiasm but you’ll also have to deal with anger.

I remember taking part in meetings to steer a £30m two-year branding project in which everyone was very polite. One day, a skirmish broke out as someone (me) started to openly criticise some of the work. Arguments broke out, until the brand director intervened and expressed his disappointment that the normal spirit of teamwork seemed to have failed us.

Of course the “normal spirit of teamwork” was code for a spirit of denial, where doubt and challenge were suppressed in favour of the illusion of unanimity. As the cause of the skirmish, I soon found myself marginalised from the process. One participant subsequently revealed his strategy at these meetings: to sit there and not allow the wrenching of their stomach to manifest in any discussions.

And the inauthenticity of these meetings resulted inauthentic marketing to consumers. This campaign, which shall remain nameless, is without question one of the most spectacular rebranding failures of modern times, and was canned by its financiers after two years of negligible results.

Yet the teamwork exemplified is exactly the type that many businesses inculcate. (A friend recently told me that at Hewlett Packard there was something called the “Hewlett Packard Yes”: which meant the passionless assent of people unwilling to state their real views.)

Play to human strengths

What’s needed is a balancing intervention in favour of practices and ideas that play up to our human strengths. Perhaps foremost among these are techniques from the world of Improv theatre, as well as some tools from psychotherapy. These techniques focus attention on what creates real satisfaction in human relationships.

For example, I recently worked with a niche furnishing brand. I was asked to help the sales team become more effective but quickly discovered a series of misunderstandings and anxieties between them and management. I started using a simple concept created by family therapist Virginia Satir. Called a temperature reading, it is designed to help couples or teams to actually examine the nature of their relationship by going through a simple and consistent agenda.

The starts with appreciations, and works its way through new information, puzzles, complaints with recommendations to wishes and hopes. Without going into detail, this relationship tool allowed all concerned to give voice to deeply felt but as yet unexpressed needs and concerns – many of which could be easily resolved one exposed to daylight. None of which were emerging in conventional daily meetings.

Another powerful tool is Improv. Actors in Improvisational Theatre have learnt how to create compelling scenes totally spontaneously, with no script. In doing so, they have inadvertently stumbled on principles that are a powerful antidote to the prevailing mentality that stifles the power of the human spirit in organisations.

Get businesspeople playing a few of the warm-up games that Improv actors play and strange things happen: the energy level of the group rises and often laughter bursts out. Gradually, people get better at creating greater spontaneity in their communications and their emotional state changes. They start to experience the power of (forgive the jargon) co-creativity.

For example, take a game called One Word Story. A group of players make up a story, where each can only contribute one words at a time, in a circle. After a few stumbles, most story circles start producing funny and satisfying stories, yet no-one is really in control and everyone must acknowledge that they have contributed to the outcome. Arguably the holy grail of team building, within minutes of first trying. And people can be encouraged to ask: what if my working relationships and meetings could be more like this?

Relationship thinking starts to undermine the fundamental economics of brand consultancies and ad agencies, which depend on claims to control and manage relationships on behalf of their clients. What’s needed is an approach based on facilitation, rather than agency; a style that relies on improving the quality of human contact to allow participants to access more of their innate resources for connecting – instead of claiming to do it for them.

As Alan Mitchell points out “The counter-intuitive effect of the information age... is to shift the focus of value from financial or industrial wealth to human wealth; to search for competitive edge by unleashing the full potential of people assets rather than thing assets.” (Alan Mitchell, Right Side Up).

If you want your brand to be truly engaging, you have encourage some unleashing!

Engaging meetings

I spent today at a meeting of the Financial Services Forum. This was a gathering of people working in financial services with an interest in marketing.

This was well above average for conferences and it struck me that people were engaged in debate, rather than slumbering through powerpoint. This was partly as it was staged in a TV studio and recorded like a TV show, which meant you never knew if a camera was watching you. (And it was very disconcerting when asking a question to find a giant version of my purple shirt on a big screen in fromt of me as I spoke!).

What really made it tick was Anthony Thomson who hosted the show. He did this really well, challenging his guests and picking members of the audience by name and challenging them as well to express a view. He seems to strike just the right balance of being provocative in a good spirited way. As a result the audience was engaged and not passive.

And this fits a prejudice of mine: satsifying a group of people is not about being driven by them, it involves being willing to challenge them.

Just Undo It?

The AntiBrand: blackSpot sneakers, a project by Adbusters, attacks Nike directly. In doing so they take on what has become one of the great icons of the branding age.

I agree with Tony on this, who comments:

This looks and sounds really exciting, because as I've said for a long time, it's about time some of these corporates received a good kicking from some competition. I don't feel that strongly against Nike, but I like the principle, and possibility

... of course, this "antibrand" is itself a brand, albeit one created in a different way. Their website is full of vigour and attitude, but is (as yet) a bit short on details of how exactly this brand will live up to higher values than they see in Nike. For instance, investor information is an email link rather than a page of open information. My feeling is that adbusters (who are behind this) will build this in an interesting and transparent fashion.

One good thing about the Giant Brands is that - these days - by making themselves obvious, they increase the pressure to get their act together. Precisely because criticism like this can catch fire so easily in a networked world. I'm not sure I would want to kill Nike, but I hope this encourages it to keep moving towards the light.

(Thanks also to Gary Lawrence Murphy for his part in the chain leading me to this story)

P2P application from a refugee camp

From the newsletter of envisional comes word of this CNET article

Deep in the tense Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, a new file-swapping service is daring record labels and movie studios to turn their piracy-hunting into an international incident.

Dubbed Earthstation 5, the new file-swapping network is openly flouting international copyright norms at a time when many older peer-to-peer companies are trying to establish themselves as legitimate technology companies. One of the brashest of a new generation of file-trading networks, it is serving as a new test case for the ability of high-tech security measures and international borders to preserve privacy on the Net.

The full article questions just how far this particular site has got... but it confirms the almighty challenge that the music industry faces in trying to enforce its digital rights. I don't have any easy answers on how best to balance the needs of artists with the benefits of a free exchange of ideas. But it seems to me that the Intellectual Property enforcers are going to have a real practical struggle enforcing their own ideas of what's fair.

Values - ideal or real

I am blogging from my friend Thomas's office in Essex. All around are those inspirational posters... eg "PERSISTENCE Now that we've exhausted all possibilities... let's get started" (With a picture of a pencil worn down to the stub.)

Tom tells me he used to like these things, but increasingly he finds them annoying. I think he'll be taking them down soon.

In the end, these exhortations to live up to ideal values will irritate any sane person... This reminds me of the conversation I had yesterday with my Mutual Marketing partner Tim Kitchin. We both agreed that the trouble with many statements of values that companies produce is that they are so poorly connected with reality.

If that's true, then making statements of ideals simply undermines credibility and probably reduces an organisation's ability to live up to them.

In change work, I've often found more energy for change comes from an honest acknowledgement of where we are, than of fantasies of where we'd like to be.

Follies of ranking

John Porcaro blogsmore evidence of the dangers of running businesses by crude interpretations of numbers... how superficial metrics can cover a rich tapestry of human issues and guide businesses down crazy paths.

John also links to this excellent piece, Let's hear it for B Players which also shows that there is far richer and subtler value in people than any spreadsheet can ever demonstrate. It includes these observations...

At the extreme, A players think more about what's good for Brand Me than what's good for the company

Since most leaders are themselves A players, they tend to undervalue B players who have a different worldview

Companies are routinely blinded to the important role B players serve in saving organizations from themselves

Of course, the very labels A and B beg questions. One of the richest learnings of doing Improv is that in good collaborations, value results from a subtle blend of quite different inputs... and no-one is worse at Improv than the person who tries to be a Star.

In praise of um... er..... deeper meaning

Gary L Murphy blogs these delightful insights on the value of those ums and ers which pepper our speech.

There's also waaaaay more to language than what Mrs Whazzername taught back in Grade 5. Much more. There's a subtle fluidity of invention beyond the reach of grammar books and a word-sound-power that only our neural pathways truly understand, like the ways r-uff and r-ough are subjectively identical and yet native english speakers learn to produce the two very electrically different sounds.

And so too with, you know, those, like, interjection things, y'know? According to new research Earl tells us was just published in Nature, science is on my side: 'Er' cautions listeners to stay on side; 'Ums' and 'uhs' contain meaning. Right on.

Once again, it turns out that what we do naturally has more value than we realise; whereas clever contrivances intended to "improve" our effectiveness often just destroy significance. A good lesson for all those presentation trainers and "image consultants" out there!

What brand are you?

Thanks to Matt Tucker at Smith Associates for telling me about What Brand Are You. It strikes me that lots of companies waste money on superficial rebranding exercises and I enjoyed this ironic comment on the phenomenon. A cute bit of viral marketing for The Design Conspiracy.

Collaboration

I've been doing a lot of thinking - and worrying - about collaboration. I think the ability to collaborate effectively is becoming ever more essential - yet it's also often hard to do.

In business, two trends combine to put more focus on collaboration skills. First, the plethora of downsizing and outsourcing means that many brands are increasingly just fronts for networks of smaller companies and operators. Second, the power of the net makes it easier and easier - at least theoretically - for folks to work remotely and in shifting alliances.

Ourhouse is, in effect, a portal into my own personal network of people and ideas. So I'm involved in a whole string of collaborations. These include Beyond Branding, Mutual Marketing, and the Clarity Partnership. In addition, I am part of a group of six Improv practitioners, in Europe and the US, who are collaborating to devise and share ideas for workshops and facilitation in the areas of teamwork, creativity and relationship building. Then there is my role as an editor of Knowledgeboard, a European knowledge management website and on top of that, I manage the website for Improvinbiz.

Maintaining momentum in each of these is challenging. It's very easy to start a collaboration, but maintaining them and resolving the conflicts inherent in them requires focus and effort. I sometimes worry that I've become a plate spinner, with my attention divided between too many different projects. Yet I also believe that what I'm doing is what we're all going to have to do in this networked economy - learn to work effectively and with passion in many different groups concurrently.

And crucially, I have built real human connections with an array of very smart people in different parts of the world. The range of talents I can tap into is far greater than I ever enjoyed working in conventional companies.

And what is crucial in sustaining these networks is not some computer model or numbers-based matrix. It's my willingness to engage in conversations and relationships with my fellow human beings. And its these "soft" skills that need more attention - in my humble opinion - in the network economy.

The joy of conversation

I've just had a delightful meeting with Emma Cahill, co-founder of publishing house Snowbooks. They describe their approach thus:

We publish far fewer titles than some publishers- but this makes for very, very good books. We give ourselves enough time to make sure each book is as well written, well edited, well designed and well produced as it can be. And we only publish books which are good enough to raise the hairs on the back of our necks...

I liked the sound of this, and Emma had come heartily recommended by my friend Jack Yan. I went to kick around the idea of doing a book with Jack. What followed was a long, rambling, entertaining conversation. Emma's plan for taking the idea forward was simple... let's have more, deeper conversations. I could tell she meant it. This is about as human and intelligent a description of a "business process" as you will find and beats the pants off the usual parade of matrices, boxes and trademarked "tools" and "instruments" I'm used to seeing.

What a relief to find another person in business who actually recognises the value of conversation and building relationships. And her company seems to really get authenticity: they're publishing what interests them, they're not following publishing conventions they don't like, and - best of all - they really want to engage with their authors instead of keeping them at arm's length.

Watch this company!

Authenticity: you can't fake it

Thanks (again) to John Porcaro for linking me to the Customer Evangelists' blog where I found this:

OLD SCHOOL: Ad agency pays teen bloggers to sample soda products and faces a backlash. Doh!

The Old School example shows the trouble Dr Pepper landed in when they tried to fake the authentic chat generated by blogs.

Again and again, I am reminded of Woody Allen's ironically stated ambition to: "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. And then see if I can get them mass-produced in plastic."

Customer-centricity: is it the answer?

John Porcaro pointed me to Michael Hammer's website for The Agenda, which aims to "offer businesspeople some guidelines on how to survive in an economy where customers have the upper hand."

There are several extract's from Hammer's new book here on the challenges of what he calls The Customer Economy. Judging by these, he certainly writes engagingly on how the power in the economy has shifted from sellers to buyers. Like most gurus, he coins his own acronyms such as ETDBW which stands for Easy to Do Business With. Also like many, his style is somewhat apocalyptic and exhorting:

The halcyon days of the 1990s were an aberration. Tough times are the norm. Only rarely do external events conspire to give us an environment in which businesses can operate nearly effortlessly.

On the other hand, one of the causes of customer power is that in the 20th century

scarcity gave way to abundance, as supply overtook and exceeded demand

To me, these ideas are somewhat at odds with each other... that in a time of abundance, business is increasingly tough. That doesn't fit my idea of an abundant world, in which there is enough to go round and people can afford to be generous and civil in their dealings with each other.

For me, "in today's increasingly competitive business environment" is a very grey-haired, bewhiskered cliche on which Hammer performs his own riff.

And much of what he writes here, and others elsewhere, on the triumph of the customer, troubles me.

Yes, it's good to see complacent businesses forced to take proper care of customers. Equally, in our society it seems that the default setting for being a customer is to be constantly making demands and probably dumping on the latest suppliers all the frustrations of living in an over-stimulated world.

Buyer-centricity actually makes the same mistake as seller-centricity: it fails to realise that we are all both buyers and sellers - of ideas, enthusiasms, products and our time. One moment I'm buying, another I'm selling... I don't want to spend my life switching from demanding bully to cowering sycophant.

I know a consultancy that had an ethos of always making its customers happy... but in so doing caused nervous breakdowns and failed marriages for its people. To my mind, that's customer-centricity gone mad.

So what I would argue for is not a "what-time-would-you-like-it-to-be?" customer approach, but one that is based on a relationship of reciprocity. That offers real engagment, instead of the breathless attempt to please at all times. After all, we don't make friendships with bland ciphers, we make them with people who have quirks, eccentricities and all the normal human foibles. They sometimes irritate us, let us down or fail us, and we try to carry on because we're only human.

In fact my own favourite brands engage me in a community and often leave me more work to do, not less. (I blogged a few days ago about the challenge of joining the Movable Type community). So I'm not sure I go along with ETDBW...

The individual transcends the bland...

Brilliant blog entry by my good pal Tim Kitchin - Claire brings BA to life - recording an experience we shared last week.

After encountering BA's uninspired customer questionnaire, Tim is grumbling about this mechanistic approach to relationships...

And then... something truly magical happens. The stewardess Claire (Wilkinson?) comes up to me and my MutualMarketing companion John Moore and fellow traveller Luke Nicholson of Ethical Media fame, and says (drum roll here):

"We've read your questionnaire. Thankyou. Great feedback. Very interesting. I wanted to talk to you about what we do in CSR. BA has an active programme enabling staff to participate in ethical initiatives on an unpaid basis. Here's what we've done in Africa... I think I've heard of your web-site (NB. This is of course unlikely to be true! #;�} ) I will go to your web-site. This has been a helpful discussion."

I love stories where the individual breaks the corporate ice. Should Claire have read the questionnaire? I don't care, she has done the right thing, stuck her neck out and engaged. Fantastic. If BA has created a culture where Claire can do this, then they deserve credit too.

The perils of boxed solutions

John Porcaro's blog points towards this entry on coaching knowledge workers by Jim McGee. I particularly liked this paragraph:

...the industrial mindset, and perhaps human nature to some degree, encourages us to sort problems into the bins we have learned to be comfortable with. To the client, their problem is unique. To the consultant it looks a lot like the last fifteen they've dealt with. This is why a client turns to consultants in the first place, but there's an important shift in attitude that separates the best consultants from the rest. It's a shift from shoving a problem into a particular standardized box to drawing on a deeper experience base to focus on the unique aspects of the problem at hand.

It's human to want solutions in neat boxes, but neatness often drives out humanity. The Japanese make haikus in praise of the "messiness" of the cherry blossom. The rest of the article and surrounding cluster of comments is worth a read.