THE OLD NEED REINVENTING...LIKE CATS

Tom Goodwin is an Executive Vice President and head of Innovation at Zenith Media. Here’s what he said last week on Linkedin:

“Living in New York and working in advertising I rarely see people over the age of fifty.  I'm never exposed to, let alone have the pleasure of working alongside them. This is one of the worst things about working in marketing right now.  As an industry we're obsessed with youth, we're endlessly trying to get "upwardly mobile Millennials" or "hard to reach youthful influencers" or some nonsensical and largely broke crowd who can't afford the premium SUV we have on offer. Meanwhile we've not looked around the BA First Lounge or the Hyatt Hotel lobby, or the Emirates Business class cabin to see that all the people with money and influence are actually rather old. And wise.

Occasionally, on the rare events where I get to listen to some of the wonderful old folk of advertising, it quickly makes me realize how much we as an industry suffer from a lack of wisdom. We have incredible levels of vision, an abundance of precociousness, brilliant creativity, but as an industry we pretty much have no wisdom at all.”

Personally being one of those “wonderful old folk of advertising” I found myself in profound agreement with Tom who is still in his 30s.

In Japan where the concept of mentoring has always been taken more seriously, “senpai” is someone of a higher age, or senior and “kōhai” is a protégé or junior. Wisdom there is a prized commodity whereas here it’s all over when you hit 50 or 60.  Yet watching Liz Truss our Justice Secretary, a gangling 42 year old and clearly out of her depth, I lamented the lost wisdom of predecessors like Ken Clarke and  Jack Straw, Poor, young Liz. There was no justice in putting her in that job without the gravitas and wisdom to clothe her naked inexperience.

Cats like the aged have a problem too. They kill allegedly 55 million birds a year in the UK.  Their DNA is shockingly obvious. They are predators and pretty selfish creatures.  But the most successful pets in the world numerically.

Their relaunch comes in a new design. The more sedate pussy. Welcome to the “sausage cat” - apparently it’s a fashion wow (or miaow) in America coming your way soon - slowly.

Cats and the aged are not much alike but like cats we aged need to become more visible. We need to review how we’re perceived and relaunch ourselves if our “wisdom” and thoughtfulness is to be treated more seriously. Too many of us are grumpy, petulant lamenters of lost youth - critics of the young rather than enthusiastic spectators and coaches of a youth potentially better than we ever were. We need to get out of BA First lounges and start working again to show how useful we can be and how we can complement the skills of today’s dynamic leaders.

TOMORROW - an additional blog from Richard.

MONET. MONET. MONET.

This week I went to the incredibly popular Royal Academy show “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse”. It had been described by the Guardian as

“a ravishing joy from start to finish”.

Yet - oh dear. Am I a philistine? I was a bit bored. Monet is in the money as an artist - one of his many lilies “The Water Lily Pond” sold for $54 million at New York in May last year but there was a dreary sameness of colourful blobs throughout the exhibition. I found myself growling that flowers are precise and mathematical in design not random slobs. My mind was annoyed and my heart unmoved.

Until I came to the less well known Alfred Parsons (no me neither). Born in 1847 he died in 1920. He lived in Broadway where artists of the late 19th century congregated.   He was an artist, illustrator and a garden designer. As it happens I know one of the gardens he designed. It’s wonderful.

Here is the picture that really caught my wife’s eye and mine. It has movement and invites you in. It is one of the pictures in the RA that actually smelt of flowers. These rude orange lilies reek of summer and there’s a back story behind that gate…a couple embracing or a cat sunning itself. The painting is alive. It’s also valuable but more like $20,000 than $20 million.

I’ve decided to listen to my heart more and less to what I’m told to think. And let that terrible expression of the second rate businessman “the devil lies in the detail” be forever sent into exile. That’ll be good news for Boris Johnson whom, as far as I know is not keen on gardening, painting or detail.  If he had a song here’s how it would go:-

“You put your right arm in
your right arm out
In, out, in, out,
You shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around
That's what it's all about...”

But I digress….

After recent weeks of working on presentations and reading business books I’d had enough. They maybe full of quotable stuff from chaps like Peter Drucker positioning culture as the key to success:

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” he said; right on Peter.

Because yes, it’s good (but like Monet is it worth the money?) So I decided to refresh my mind with some John Le Carré.

My wife had bought me “The Night Manager” which is also currently on TV - it’s BBC drama at its swaggering best. The book’s astonishing, dense and beautifully written; it speaks to my mind and to my heart.

He’s such a fine craftsman and his definition of what a story is, is  unsurpassable:
“‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not a story.
‘The cat sat on another cat’s mat’ is a story.”

He also wrote a book called “The Constant Gardener” which brings me back to Monet……
Painting the Mo Garden: Monet to Matisse

BASTARDS DON'T ALWAYS WIN

Pete Shuttleworth, the founder of a new and very successful Film Production Country, Hoi Polloi, leaned over the table of Café Coho near Brighton Station and asked me if “bastards always won”.

Outside the sun was shining and people trudged along the pavement. In Brighton there’s a curious “sod you,” lumbering walking style which I put down to a shortage of hunger. In London everyone sprints.

Being a bastard works best if you’re a rich genius like Jobs, Bezos or Zuckerberg. It worked for Stalin and Attila too. Bezos comes up with great put-downs like:

“Are you lazy or just incompetent?”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tried not to be a bastard. He sent an internal memo out last Tuesday announcing that 336 employees were leaving the company. He wanted to avoid corporate speak, messed up by talking about “roadmaps” and “streamlining” but, to be fair, it was a reasonable try. The corporate bastard took over in the hands of HR (aka the Grim Reapers) closing down Twitter and e-mail accounts of the unfortunate 336 with the cryptic words  “you have been removed”. 

Anyone who hasn’t seen the opening of “Margin Call” should. In a major downsizing exercise, HR assassins in the film swoop into the New York offices of a New York Investment Bank slaughtering as they go,.

But the fictional CEO (Jeremy Irons) and Dorsey aren’t bastards, they are just doing what CEOs do when under critical profit pressure, they cut cost.

The really nasty people are the prevaricators and those who stop talent being as good as it should be. These are the death-eaters of management who suck the energy and creativity from people who work with them. I worked for one of these. There are a lot of them around. And one of their characteristics is they interview well and they’re brilliant presenters. But deep down they are evil. They feed greedily on the talent of others and they are devoid of any generosity of spirit.

Back to those lumberers outside the café in Brighton - well at least they were all smiling - and Pete who got it spot on in saying the key to the business who knew best - advertising - was to be “smart and hard.” 

You also have to strive to work with the best people. As Bezos (again) said:

“Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful”

At Netflix they say what makes a great business is not perks but “stunning colleagues” who are smart, hard and driven to do great work. When you work alongside really great people, as they also discovered at Pixar, great stuff happens.

But this is a competitive world and to win you have to remember this - the words of George C. Scott in the film “Patton":

”Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his county. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his country.”

WE'RE GOING TO LIVE TO A HUNDRED

Do you remember the 1980 TV series “Fame”? It was about the New York School of Performing Arts. This week I remembered one of the songs in it.
“Fame …. I’m going to live forever
Baby, remember my name”

It was no surprise to hear at the London Business School this week that we had moved into an era where there was a fair certainty most would live to a hundred. Hurray… that’ll keep King William pretty busy. 80 million telegrams….or will they do it the other way round - send e-mails to the families of those whose members miss the century - “hard luck!”

The thesis is this. Governments and Corporations don’t know what to do with the oldies. But we can’t afford to support people for 35 years after retirement. Pensions used to pay out for only 5 or so years and then “aagghh!”

So we’ll have to work to 80….and the question is doing what exactly? Bricklaying, digging, riot policing?

The plan on paper looks fine - we learn up to 22 then hone that learning into practical, high earning work for 20 years then take a new learning sabbatical and emerge to do good work but much less well paid and at age 65 - 70 pause before embarking on a decade or so of creative mentoring before, aged 80, heading for Southampton for the cruise ships.

Talking about an abrupt change to pension arrangements is not something governments will ever do - suicide is something they tend to try and avoid.

Do you remember the film 1976 Logan’s Run which depicts a dystopian future society in which population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by killing everyone who reaches the age of thirty thereby preventing overpopulation? Thought not.

Nature will use its cocktail of plague, pestilence and natural disaster to control population growth but what are those who make it through this going to do? The alarming data from a US University who’ve conducted research into MBA graduate aspirations over 20 years is that the new cohort is a bit different.

• 1/3 say they won’t have children
• 1/3 say their work is all
• 1/s say they’d negotiate equal work rights in marriage (if they got married…. If!!!)

We are considering the intractable problem of irreversibility. If you marry at 20 and make a mistake it’s an 80 year error or worse - it could turn out to be 4 errors of  20 years each with a devastating impact on your wealth.

But don’t despair.

The solutions are threefold:

• Grandchildren
• Technology
• Creative thinking

It’s seriously time to stop thinking about WORK but to see work as life and creative and fun and carry on doing it as long as we can disguising our visible age by technology and cosmetics.

After all did anyone know the genius PD James was 90 odd when she died still writing? Oh and Melvyn Bragg above is 80.

DO WE REALLY UNDERSTAND HOW TO DEVELOP?

I’ve had a recent stint of travelling through Europe and I’ve been reflecting on our frustrating country that I’ve lived in and loved for so long.

Do you remember the 1960s and a wave of “new music”, Herman’s Hermits for instance with “No Milk Today” or “Bus Stop” by the Hollies - prosaic, local love stories….no Empire building here.

Then we had the strike-ridden, high-inflation ‘70s.

The Thatcher axe wielding ‘80s followed when we relearnt the art of combat …. invading  New York and pillaging ad agencies, banks and businesses.

And then the ‘90s, noughties and the current decade when we became middle class, more meritocratic and technophiles. A world in which London started winning the race to become arts, sports and financial centre of the world.

What could go wrong?

Last week I was told what by the guy running Russia for a multinational:
“I love your country but from my perspective it’s fumbling along without any clear strategy….if it were a company it’d be ripe for takeover”.  (Probably Vladimir Putin feels the same.)

Listen to the British news in which pratfalls are celebrated more than success and cynicism rules and you’ll take the point my friend from Russia made. Unlike most of the EU, compared with whom we are doing brilliantly, we seem unable to promote our strengths. Creativity, innovation, arts, media and yes finance (over-cooked as that sector has been).

Psychologists have proved that human beings are more responsive to bad news. Good news seems so cheesy in comparison. That’s why for some Peter Mead’s book “When in Doubt be Nice” was an awkward read. Where was the tabasco wit, the flagrant irony?

Recently a very nice guy said “We must play the ball not the man” to which a very smart and funny German retorted “No. Play the man first - always. Then everyone knows where they stand”.

We need to sharpen up. We are living in a global economy and over the past six weeks at various conferences I’ve reflected on how lacking in confidence we seem despite having a growing economy; English is the language all business speaks and speaks well; we are becoming an increasingly desirable country to visit; our capital city bestrides the world - top of the cultural pops.

To thrive and grow we need to look forward, enjoy our economic status, we need to be confident, fast-footed and relaxed. We need to become traders  again not tubby diplomats.

I’ve loved travelling Europe and its neighbours hearing optimists regardless of their current “temporary little local blips”. My growth conversations with Russians, Egyptians, Turks, Poles and people from the Gulf, ….opportunity-hunters explaining in flawless English why their future looks so great, have felt unusually inspiring and refreshing.

Maybe we don’t want to succeed. Maybe being miserable fatalists is our natural role in life.

But I don’t think so.

We should travel much more, talk up our successes and feel good.

That’s all it takes, Tiger.

IT'S HALF TIME AMERICA

This is it.  The Wieden and Kennedy ad. for Chrysler that appeared during the Superbowl.

Whether you love it or not will depend on how you feel about the American ability to dramatise things and on that cowboy in their souls.

I’m just back from my fix in New York.

From the best shoeshine any man ever had in Grand Central Station for $4. It was balletic and brilliant – a lightning performance with brush, polish and cloth ending in new shoes.

To wall-to-wall advertising… and when I say wall-to-wall folks I’m not just talking about any walls I’m talking about the tallest, straightest, best cemented walls in the history of walls, so eat your heart out Great Wall of China…this is an American wall.

To this being a city where art, diversity, plenty, money and business collide in a knickerbocker glory of excitement. A city where as if reliving the line “New York, New York so good they had to name it twice” people repeat themselves as in constant wonder.

“Richard Hall from London, Richard Hall…my”

“23rd floor Sir? Yep 23, 23rd…a great floor” (a reflective comment by a fellow lift passenger)

I saw the diary page of Virginia Woolf written four days before she committed suicide and her walking stick found floating in the River Ouse; the 1608 quarto version of King Lear; e.e. cummings “Humanity I love you” and the typewriter on which it was typed and, and, and….

It’s a city of soaring hope, expectation and pride; a city where everyone wants to talk or to pitch an idea.
I went to a meeting of the Luxury Marketing Council of New York at the French Institute Alliance Francaise where Francis Cholle spoke about his book the Intuitive Compass. During Q&A a lady called Carole Hyatt stood and rebuked Francis for generalising about how brains worked. She triumphantly proclaimed:-
“And as research proves women think 28,000 times faster than men do”

The women in the room erupted into applause.

In New York the possibilities (and exaggerations) of life are explored and given theatrical colour.
The fastest, best, biggest, whitest, sexiest, most transformational is here. That jacket in Bergdorf Goodman for just $4,500; that orange juice from my mouth asking for it to my mouth drinking it, 45 seconds; that Caravaggio of Peter denying Christ three times (or 28,000 times) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and most of all people doing their best to be the best.

It’s half time in America and I’m a believer.