WE ALL NEED A BIT OF DRAMA

Recently the UK has been in thrall to the Archer’s story of Helen being emotionally manipulated by her ghastly husband Rob. This story of bullying has raised around £100,000 for the Helen Titchener Rescue Fund on JustGiving. When it was Helen rather than Rob who snapped into physical violence in the recent climax a lot of people got very angry accusing the show’s producers of ”irresponsibility” and of treating the situation as just a soap opera. The story had become so real it had crossed the line of reality.

We live in a post-comfort zone world where we need drama. Young people relish the squirming effect of a stressful situation and of sharing their discomfort with others. Stories are the diet of our times. Some companies, seizing on this, actually appoint Chief Storytellers who emulating  Anglo Saxon bards create concepts like the “corporate camp fire” urging executives to “gather round and attend the tale of the Persil (or whatever) launch.” We are all players in a highly charged narrative. You don’t go to work, you go to theatre.

Stories are changing with the relatively new quotient of  increasing unpredictability … long running dramas like Game of Thrones and House of Cards where anything can happen and even (no especially) the good and virtuous, although there aren’t many of those, get brutally and unexpectedly done away with. The punchline “and they all lived happily ever after” is for the birds.

Today “the hero was unjustly accused, gruesomely killed and the villain went off with his wife whom he first turned mad before throwing her to his crazed poodles and going off to receive his knighthood from King Harry unexpectedly sitting on the throne after that terrible train crash in 2018 did away with the other heirs.”

This is the Elizabethan world of John Webster not the cosy world of Jane Austen. It’s a world of power, violence and politics. The lurid world of Westminster has reached Ambridge and beyond. Conspiracy theory abounds. The line gets crossed again when in the BBC2 Drama Line of Duty a photograph of police and politician in a child abuse investigation is shown with Jimmy Savile in the background.

Dramatic and unpredictable narrative has become addictive.  Andrew Stanton the writer of Pixar’s “Toy Story” describes drama as “anticipation mingled with uncertainty.” The punchline to a story could nowadays be anything but we live in constant hope of horrid surprise.

If Lord of the Rings were rewritten Sam would meet a grisly end, Frodo would secrete the ring and give a chilling grin to the camera in the last scene.

Stat Trek hit the point with their immortal “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” That’s the journey but now it needs more …. “and unjustly suffers an unexpected fate.”

“But the new Persil shrunk all the clothes so the people thought they’d got fat and committed suicide and their zombie-ghosts came for the Persil Board.”

Ha, ha …….

TWO ESSENTIALS WE CAN DO WITHOUT

I’ve written quite a lot on leadership. Shelves in bookshops are crammed with beastly tomes on the subject (“Leadership Plain and Simple”; “the Top 100 Ways to be a Great Leader”; “The Three Levels of Leadership” and over 24,000 more on this subject). I worked out that being conservative there’s around 1 ¼ billion words on the topic and counting.

And I’m not sure that I really believe in the concept of the leader, well not the Genghis Khan sort of leader we keep pretend we’re seeking. It’s the terminology that goes with leadership that worries me. We don’t talk about the calming of leadership or the guidance of leadership. Instead we talk about the “smack of firm leadership”.

We had the legendary workaholic Harriet Green ex CEO of Thomas Cook who allegedly fired people whilst painting her nails. Nice. We had Steve Jobs who when at Pixar, fired people and didn't give any severance pay. Pamela Kerwin, a Pixar employee, pleaded that employees at least be given two weeks’ notice.

"Okay," he said, "but the notice is retroactive from two weeks ago."

Frank Lowe, the advertising man who founded Lowe Howard Spink, being an insomniac, would summon senior executives at midnight to a meeting. They returned home exhausted and he’d call to get them back saying there was other stuff to go through.

Recent research into football management suggests changing managers in general has little effect. The irony of the David Moyes’ debacle at Manchester United was his successor’s record, whilst he was being praised for being so much better, was actually pretty much the same as David’s.

The nearest to making sense of the leadership cult came from Jim Collins in his book “From Good to Great” when he talked about what he called ‘level five leaders’. These were leaders “in whom genuine personal humility blends with intense professional will.”

The second thing I wanted to comment upon is the pointlessness, indeed the destructive capability, of much market research. Anyone in advertising always knew it was futile to expect the average consumer to know what day it was let alone whether an ad was any good. Steve Jobs was smart as well as behaving boorishly from time to time. Dismissing the idea that people knew what they wanted he said average people just can’t predict. Instead: “We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

The polls in the recent election rather prove the point. The one below was pretty typical of a week ago. Scores an F.

Look at trends and think of basics. The conservatives had a better economic plan which just made more people feel safer. A few weeks earlier Benjamin Netanyahu, predicted to lose badly in Israel, won
comfortably by making more people feel safer too.

So don’t ask people. Just work it out…that’s what we get paid to do

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

We all spend too much time worrying about what other people think. John Carey’s wonderful book “The Unexpected Professor” describes him wandering through his favourite books and poems and describes a life of literature and learning in Oxford.  He made even the formidable Milton fun. He talked and wrote in simple English and with a lightness of touch. Carey laments the poverty of insight in most literary criticism.

I’d extend that to management books, to political books to virtually everything. Why do so many of us live in a world of recycled views, a kind of air-conditioned world where many of the interesting bits have been filtered out? Asking “what do you think?” may for many seem a bit dangerous. Because if it happens to be at odds with what your boss thinks then you  don’t think it, even if you do (if you see what I mean.)

In his book “Creativity.inc” Ed Catmull (joint founder of Pixar) says they decided early on:
“if we made something we wanted to see , other people would want to see it too.”
The über- creative Steve Jobs (also Chairman of Pixar) put it like this “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Because most people don’t think because they’re scared to, they either agree with what someone else they like says or the group says or their boss says even if it’s daft. Psychological experiments show that in a rigged focus group with a bunch of plants saying line A is longer than line B
__________________________  line A
_____________________________________________ line B

Then the rest of the group, denying the evidence of their eyes, will be cajoled to into agreeing line A is definitely longer.

There was an old story about the management consultant who being allegedly very good at his job was also in consequence very rich. In being asked by a client what the time was he countered oleaginously “what time would you like it to be?”

But the real entrepreneurs, the risk takers who believe they are right and others are wrong, the people who have an idea and focus on making that idea better are the characters I want to spend time with.
I loved the recent report of Lidl who are mounting an assault on the other retailers with exceedingly good low priced claret.

Paul Goldschmidt, owner of Chateau Siaurac , who is supplying a 2007 Réserve de la Baronne at £13.99, said: “Some retailers bargain on quality — but Lidl didn’t."

Lidl didn’t because they know what they think and I bet their expenditure on market research is infinitesimal, if it exists at all, compared to Tesco. Poor Tesco who are listening to their customers giving them what they say they want and being accordingly shafted.

Too few people are spending enough time doing what matters. Deciding what they think, being true to their own values and doing and saying accordingly - clearly, loudly, and proudly.