SIZE BEATS PUNY - FIGURE IT!

I’ve been listening to the arguments all week. It’s become increasingly clear that size matters. That’s why China is now tipped by the Economist to overtake the USA as the world’s biggest economy by the end of this year.

It’s why the Astra Zeneca takeover by Pfizer makes so much sense….. but I’ve got a bit confused by this. Apparently the most significant recent breakthroughs by pharmaceutical companies have actually been achieved by midsized companies.  The fact is too many big mergers have been disasters for us to assume this one will work.

The Huffington Post notes that 70 to 90 percent  of mergers fail . Here are a series that we can all recall - AOL and Time Warner - disaster; EBay and Skype - disaster; Quaker buying Snapple for $3.6 billion and then selling just 27 months later for $300million and worse, Daimler Benz buying Chrysler for $36 billion and then paying Cerberus Capital $650 million to sever the ties a few years later.

My biggest concern is this Pfizer/Astra Zeneca story is about innovation and learning. No wonder that tiny little academic institutions like Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard with student populations of just 22,000, 18,000 and 21,000 respectively are struggling when there are mighty organisations like the Indira Ghandi University (3.5 million and number one in the world); The Payane Noor University, Tehran (800,000 and number 8) and even the lowly Modern University for the Humanities in Moscow at 48th in the league table has 100,000 students.

So innovation and excellence go with size.

I’ll say that again so you can fully appreciate how absurd the equation of scale with excellence is.
Innovation and excellence go with size. Unless you mean “go” in the “disappear, are absent from and destroyed by” sense of the word because the reality is, as we should by now have learned, scale fails. Creativity is killed by size.

John Lewis Christmas 2013 created by a little agency - Adam and Eve

Any of you who are thinking of setting up Goliath Advertising Inc. forget it.  The hot agencies in the UK right now are I’m told Adam and Eve, Weiden Kennedy, Droga5 and Corner. None are big and although Adam and Eve was bought by Omnicom it is still aggressively independent. More start-ups like the Counter are happening whereas Abbott Mead,with as many as 400 staff as the London number one agency, is described by some as a “behemoth”.

This mad merger will probably happen but I doubt, no,  I do more than doubt, I’ll be confounded and astounded if there’s any addition of value, innovation or human  advancement as a result of such folly. Ian Read the Pfizer CEO will get rich plus a few others but breakthroughs, achievements and success - forget it. Big isn’t beautiful it’s just barmy and the mid-sized and small businesses are where the big brains will go. Oh and to Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard too.

www.colourfulthinkers.com

BEWARE TREATING FASHION TRENDS AS PERMANENT

When I was very small I was shaken awake by mother one Sunday night. She had urgent news for me.

“It’s wonderful. Wake up. Bird Dog is number one”.

She’d been listening to Radio Luxembourg and she was living proof that being old didn’t mean you couldn’t join in. Or was she? At that moment I wondered if the Everly Brothers were meant for me.

The recent controversy over social media this week made me think about age.  The trouble is if you are in that quarter of the population over the age of 60 who are struggling to either comprehend the way to make it work or to come to terms with whether it actually matters, social media seems as hard to understand as the Sex Pistols were to our parent’s generation.

Much of the problem lies in the sheer inappropriateness of MPs and mature citizens, with their aching extremities, pretending they are young and trendy and merrily tweeting their passing thoughts. It also exposes the dangers of playing a game where you don’t really know all the rules.

As Daryll Scott the Creative Director of Noggin advised us: don’t try and join in because whilst it’s second nature to the young it’s not for you. You trying to be techno-cool is embarrassing, as embarrassing as a 60 year old trying to dance the invisible horse Gangnam style. After all do you remember watching your father doing the twist?

Enter 17 year old Jordan Hatch. Government is now advised by teenagers like him. We’ve seen him this week in his shorts and trainers talking very sensibly about websites. Someone who knows how to interpret fashion trends and predict what will be important and what won’t.

Many people say the world has been usurped by a conspiracy between technology and youth – that quarter of the population aged between 15 and 30. But beware they have discarded their laptops for their mobile phones and the social media they like and use are way beyond Twitter and Facebook. They’re Pinterest, Snapchat, Kik and Tumblr. Things are changing very fast.

But what is fashion and what’s sustainable?

What price the Washington Post?

Actually it’s $250 million. That’s what Jeff Bezos of Amazon paid for it. He has a brand that resonates with truth; a brand that’s been around for nearly 150 years; a brand that could link past, present and future handled right. (Look at the success of the Mail Online which is,  now, the world’s most popular news site.)
The trick will be to do what happens in Dr. Who – regenerate every so often as the Mail has done.
So when they shake you awake now they’ll be saying.

“It’s wonderful. Private Eye Online has overtaken the Huffington Post. Honestly.”

www.colourfulthinkers.com