image source: www.telegraph.co.uk

May 2012 and once again I am not invited to Google Zeitgeist conference.  How on earth am I to stay on top of what the zeitgeist actually is without 3 days in May rubbing shoulders with world leaders and media CEOs?  Oh I know, its OK, I can ask an iphone 4S Siri.  

Me: “What is the Zeitgeist ?”

Siri: “An album by the Smashing Pumpkins” 

Alternatively I can Google the question of course.  Luckily this week Google Search became 1000 times smarter – which is just as well because, just like you, I was beginning to think “This search business is a bit dumb, I wish it would keep up“. 

Mind you, does it have to be 1000 times smarter? It was pretty smart already. Twice as smart would have been impressive. 1000 time smarter  might be overkill – like a torch with the power of a million candles.

Still, it’s just more evidence of how ahead of the game Google really is.

And a feature in the Times by Chris Ayres this week showed how lovely their management approach is too. 

It profiled Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google’s earliest engineers who is now their head of personal growth and “Jolly Good Fellow” at the organisation

As such he gets to go and speak at TED and to meet all the most important visitors to Google’s HQ (ie world leaders).  He may be speaking at Zeitgeist this year, I actually don’t know because I am not invited (again, did I mention that before), but if he is please do make a point of meeting him if you are going.

In the Times Chade-Meng Tan talked about a friend of his who had broken with the traditional treadmill of career promotion and moved to working a 4 day week because he wanted to prioritise his personal health : “to look after himself first”.  As a result he was able to master his temper which had hampered his professional prospects and therefore achieved a promotion that had escaped him previously. 

This really does strike a refreshing note.  Too much leadership training out there seems to be very focussed on the Jack Welch school of management which focuses on pressurising employees to outperform each other.  Indeed he was nicknamed Neutron Jack in the early 80s for his propensity to eliminate employees while leaving buildings intact.  

Whilst clearly efficiency is crucial to business success humanity, putting people first, makes the real difference to getting the best out of employees.

When asked what made service in Pret a Manger so brilliant Julian Metcalfe claimed that he simply employed happy people.  Entrepreneur Tony Hsieh  places huge priority too on company culture.  This culture includes the mandate to “do more with less” ie efficiency, but also to “be humble”.  After candidates for a job at Zappos are delivered from the airport to HQ to be interviewed the management ask the shuttle bus driver about how they behaved on the bus as part of the selection process.

So what will I be doing when not at Zeitgeist?  I hope to spend time instead humbly spreading some happiness and inspiration at 124 Theobalds Road.  (Actually in the interest of telling the truth I don’t always spread happiness all the time).   Speaking of telling the truth – have you seen my book on the subject ?

image source - www.telegraph.co.uk

Imagine that you are about to make a critical senior appointment for your company.  In fact an appointment that is widely regarded as the most crucial and high profile in the industry.  Getting the right man (or woman) for the job is essential to your immediate future success.  You consult your colleagues, you perhaps speak to some head hunters about who is out there.  Then you interview only one candidate and immediately appoint him. 

Could you do that ?  I don’t think I could.  Even if I knew exactly who I wanted for the job, and in our industry it is easy to think that you know or know of all the top people, you would want to bring in more than just one person to talk to.  I also think I would want some people who were left of field to interview if only to endorse my decision.

Yet this was the stunning process for the role of England Manager.  One interview, one job offer.  As far as I know, no back up plan.

Hodgson’s appointment underwhelmed the football pundits of the nation. The nation, against all objective evidence to the contrary, thinks of the England team as a complete set of world beating footballers who are just one world beating football manager short of winning the European Championship.  Roy Hodgson isn’t known for this. His reputation is built on taking mid table teams to the height of their potential (Switzerland, Fulham).

My resident football expert thinks that this makes him an interesting appointment.  He pundits that if we look at the England team with our heads and not our hearts they are more like a “mid table” team that needs a manager who can make them over achieve against technically better teams (Spain, Germany, Holland).

It has long been my observation that we talk about England’s performance in international competitions with a surprising degree of shocked disappointment when once again they don’t do that well.  We come up with theories of (excuses for) why this has happened (including bounce of ball, the other team’s dirty play, the weather, the presence (or absence) of wives and girlfriends and missing goal line technology). 

This is also what can happen when your team fail to win a pitch.  The brief was rubbish, the client wasn’t listening, the support team let you down, the IT failed, the biscuits were stale. 

This hedonistic editing gets you nowhere.  Certainly it makes you feel better about what has happened.  It allows your bruised ego to find comfort.  It does not put you in a position to have a better chance of winning the next pitch.  Truth hurts, but truth is necessary for progress.

If you don’t want to see the plug for my book, look away now….

For more about truth in business, including Alex Ferguson’s Wayne Rooney Truth Turning Point  my new book Tell the Truth is available now

This is one of my favourite lines from the classic movie “A Face in the Crowd”, which I watched for the first time this weekend, and which I hugely recommend.  Directed in 1957 by Elia Kazan it tells the story of a drifter who finds fame and fortune when randomly picked out from a crowd by a radio station. 

Bizarrely it was Bob Dylan’s recommendation that first drew me to the film.   Interviewed about what celebrity does to a person (and after all he should know), he referenced a couple of great films, including this one. 

Bear with me…I am getting to the point.

The film is notable for its relevance still today.   In fact it seems more relevant to today’s swift rise and fall of minor celebrities than it could possibly have been at the time of its release.  It is also worth watching for its contemporary depiction of Madison Avenue.  This is fascinating set against the series Mad Men (set in the 1960s) which so many of us are glued to but which paints a far more glamorous image than the one depicted here. 

The protagonist of A Face in the Crowd is Larry Rhodes, a drunken drifter who rises to become the star of national TV.  He’s facilitated in his rise by a Madison Avenue ad agency.  His early dealings with the suits from the agency don’t go well.  He dismisses them as men who “say gezundheit before you even sneeze”.

But surely this is the very definition of great client service.  To pre-empt problems before they arise.  To anticipate what will go wrong (and provide a tissue).

Meanwhile (spoiler alert), Rhodes is doomed to fall as he increasingly begins to have contempt for his fans, the very people that have made his fortune.  He fails to be true to his roots and to himself.  His downfall – a microphone that’s on when it should have been turned off and reveals what he really thinks.  How modern is that ? (Gordon Brown, Nicholas Sarkozy etc) and see my new book Tell the Truth (available here).

source : http://www.economistconferences.co.uk/

I may be harping on for my own reasons about truth at the moment (book available NOW) but with trust in government and business in the UK in decline and well below the global average we need marketing to deliver truthful communications if we expect any kind of lasting competitive advantage.

Growing scepticism is clearly visible in the 2012 Edelman Trustbarometer.    On the upside trust in media information sources has increased, not just in the UK but worldwide.  TV and radio news and traditional broadsheet newspapers score particularly well.

On the downside in the UK survey : Trust in government leaders has declined.  Trust in company CEOs has declined.  Trust in technical experts in companies has fallen off a cliff.

In stark contrast trust in “a person like myself” has shot up (really significantly from 35% to 60% in a year).  This makes the role of positive word of mouth profound, and word of mouth is best generated by truthful communications. 

The other factor to shift is how much people trust what “regular employees” of a company tell them about that company.

This makes the role of the employer brand equally profound.  At a recent Economist Summit Chris Craft spoke eloquently about the need to ensure that the advertised brand is represented in the employer brand for every single member of staff.    The employee should be considered as part of any campaign’s target market.

In 2007 we proclaimed that we were now in the Age of Dialogue and claimed that what your target market say about you is as significant as what you tell them through your advertising.

Edelman’s Trustbarometer proves this continues to be true.

Last week I was invited to CSTTG (home of creative legend Dave Trott) to debate the future of branded content with Sanjay Nazerali, Director, Marketing, Communications & Audiences, BBC Journalism at the BBC. The debate covered whether the news agenda was liable to being sullied by commercial association. My co-panelist who obviously knows a great deal more about the news than I do was concerned that beyond the rigour of the reach of Ofcom there was a danger of the integrity of the news being threatened. He calls for advertisers to regard funding of news content as a part of their CSR.

Pragmatically I’m unsure that this is any kind of longterm solution. Apart from anything else each one of us already pays a tax on “independent” journalism in the UK in the shape of the BBC licence fee.

And the BBC shapes a great deal of our journalistic landscape as every commercial provider knows who has to deal with that reality.
The latest Deloitte “State of the Media Democracy Survey”  points out that the UK consumer has fewer content subscriptions than his or her international equivalent, and half that of the US consumer.

I doubt if advertiser altruism is a serious solution for the dangers surrounding the commercialisation of news.
The greatest possible safeguard for news is the consumer’s appetite for information and their willingness to search beyond the headlines for what is really going on. This means an opportunity for brands that can satisfy this on the platforms that the consumer will subscribe to.

The solution will come from developing and divergent technologies and services. The trend in the UK for early adoption of technology continues and not only do UK consumers have more devices than their European counterparts (on average the UK consumer has access to 9.7 devices each according to Deloitte/YouGov) they also “demonstrate a growing appetite for new media services to use on them”.