DEJECTION, HOPE, TENTERHOOKS, DISBELIEF, ELATION

So we won a cricket match we’d seemed to be doomed to lose.

What on earth’s going on?  The recent Test Match was transformed from abject to spectacular and I can’t take such nail-biting drama.

Incidentally the real hero is the last man, the redoubtable Jack Leach whose 1 not out was the bravest feat of survival ever.

Me? I’m off to bed. Exhausted.

Do you think Brexit will be like this with the EU caving in and agreeing on no back-stop, no leaving fee and giving us a free trade deal and saying sorry for being so mean? It wouldn’t be more surprising than what happened in Yorkshire on Sunday.

MOMENTUM IS KING

Do you recall that story about Sisyphus, a thoroughly nasty piece of work by all accounts , who was forever condemned to push the same  heavy boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again every time?
Imagine the encouraging call “Push, push Sisyphus” followed by “oops”.

It struck me that the 71% of people (unearthed by the Royal Society of Arts in research) who show up as dissatisfied and unhappy with their jobs probably feel like this Corinthian king. Bored and fed up.
What they are lacking is momentum. They’re living a Groundhog Day existence making simply no progress at all with every day feeling the same as the last.

In a recent Test Match at Lords both sides had players who took the match by the scruff of the neck and made something unexpected happen. We see it in markets where traders still bellow seductively about their wares - “lovely juice-oozing strawberries, strong gob-burning Cheddar”….

Yet in a world of self service and social media we just let things sit there in a rather docile way until big-data spreadsheets tell us what’s happened to sales.

Momentum? Remember the Olympics and the delicious demolition of cynics as momentum built to that dizzy climax of Day 8, August 4th when Britain won six gold medals and the good humour of the whole event spilt over into helpless disbelief - could life ever get better?

Momentum? The Ivy and The Chiltern Firehouse - restaurants that you can’t get into because the momentum of their reputation exceeds the reality of their offering.

Momentum? Game of Thrones or Oliver Twist - yes, Dickens was the original momentum builder and master of the cliff hanger.

I love the moment when, with a cunning mixture of promotion, packaging and chutzpah, momentum begins to unfold before you, because a nerve is struck and imagination is fired up. It’s that lighting the blue touch paper moment when the fizzing sound of ignition briefly precedes a bang.

Momentum is the most important aspect of marketing. You can have a great plan but if nothing happens you’re a loser. Marketing is littered by brilliant people who cautiously advanced but achieved no oomph. The skill is in in making something happen out there not looking good in here, the boardroom. To achieve momentum you need to inspire a following, get people trying your product or service and then telling others they like it.

Forget the bottom line. If you don’t have a top line you don’t have a business. Buy sales, give your product away or hire beautiful people to sample it. Flaunt it don’t intellectualise.

There’s a new book by Yuval Noah Harari called “Sapiens” and it’s about us, human beings, and why we’ve made it so big. He attributes it to our ability to tell stories, create visions and so on.

Great stories create momentum. Stories that involve people, engage and inspire them -  momentous stories.
And, remember, momentum is king.

I KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE BEING A 24/7 GLOBAL PERSON

My brain hurts and I’m jet lagged and I’m convinced there’s something seriously wrong with me. You see I’ve had my radio on all night listening to the Test Match in Sydney and before that I watched an episode of House.

The combination of the two is lethal.

I dozed off and dreamt that Gregory House and Thirteen were peering at me on my bed saying:-

“It’s gone from being a nasty attack of Collingwood to Advanced Hussey, although of course that’s treatable, messy but treatable but now I’m afraid we may have complications…”
“Not Swann’s Disease”
“No worse than that. Haddins”
“If it’s Haddins he’s had it.”
“Poor Richard”…..

Poor indeed….and knackered.

A bit like doing a new job which some will be doing in this new year.

If you think that it’s hard doing your job in charge of the UK try controlling a global empire and hear things like this:

“They don’t like it in Seoul but in Rio they can’t get enough, in Kabul it’s been banned and in Calcutta they’ve diluted it with sheep’s milk”…
“What about Helsinki?”
“…delisted and a court case pending.”

The real issue for anyone trying to run a global brand or company is trying to remember everything that’s relevant and putting a hundred cultural quirks, foibles and differences into a usable framework. Try too hard and your brain may shut down with a deep voice inside your skull intoning “you have tried to perform an illegal procedure.”

Some words of advice to anyone newly doing an international job:

1.    Get a good up to date map of the world and learn where everywhere actually is (most of us last did this at school)
2.    Learn the populations per major country – you can stop at Australia - that come in 50th  (the UK is 22nd in the league table and Germany is the first European country at 14th).
3.    Read “The Week” every week which gives you the best idiots guide to what’s happening where in the world.
4.    And the Economist which isn’t for idiots.
5.    Read this overview drawn from a talk at the RSA by Mike Geoghagan Ex CEO of HSBC which helped me.
6.    Get travelling and keeping notes about anything that defines a culture.

It may or may not help to know that a relatively low % of US International Sales Directors are reputed to have passports. It sounds like an urban myth but pass it on anyway.