Walter Barnett at 150

I missed Walter Barnett’s 150th birthday. He was born on 25 January 1862.

Walter who? H Walter Barnett. Australia’s first world-class portrait photographer. I was lucky enough to rediscover him and his fine work and thought Something Should Be Done about it. But what?

So on a trip to Sydney, I went to see my friend Leo Schofield, at that time director of the Sydney Festival. Leo knows everything worth knowing about the arts in Australia.

“What do you think of Walter Barnett’s work, Leo?” I asked as innocently as possible.

“Walter who?”

“You know, the Australian portrait photographer,” I replied.

“No. Don’t think I know of him,” said Leo.

Cue for me to lay out on Leo’s desk a dozen or so photocopies of Barnett portraits – the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, the great pianist Paderewski, Mark Twain, the “father” of Australia Sir Henry Parkes, artists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, Dame Nellie Melba, actress Sarah Bernhardt (above), sculptor Auguste Rodin and so on.

There was a pause.

“Will you curate an exhibition for the Festival?” asked Leo.

“Well yes. I’d be delighted to.”

That morning, Leo called Andrew Sayers, director of the recently-opened National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, and so Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett became an NPG project that ran in Sydney, Canberra and the Mornington Peninsula.

Overall it was visited by some 186,000 people.

How long haul business class was transformed

In the 1990s, there was a battle royal between airlines over long-haul business class.

In fact, the competitive situation seemed to me to be like angels being danced on the head of a pin, so slender were the real differences between the various players. One would offer a 45 degree seat recline, another an extra four inches of legroom, while a third would offer bone china crockery.

But in practical terms they were all so close together that customers bought primarily on price. Everyone was losing money.

So British Airways set up a big innovation workshop. People from every part of the airline plus several regular long-haul business class passengers. Some sixty of us in all. I designed and facilitated the workshop for them – in Dubai – and people flew in for it from around the globe.

Mostly on day one we brainstormed possible wishes for improvement. I was astonished by the services that business class passengers might wish for: massage my feet, cool my brow, peel me a grape, champagne intravenously and so on and so on.

Then, towards the end of the day, quite quietly, one of the passenger participants said: “You know, I’d trade all that, every bit of it, for a decent night’s sleep.” And what that meant, to him, was to have a flat bed, just like the folks in First Class.

It was as though the clouds had parted. Here was a genuine difference. After all, the majority of long-haul flights are overnight ones.

But identifying the breakthrough insight was just the beginning. BA then had to work out how to deliver the new benefit without sacrificing half the passenger density. And this they did using their “herringbone” layout.

Altogether it transformed BA’s long-haul business class – Club World as it’s branded – in terms of reputation, share, sales, price-point and profitability.

And for some reason or other, their competitors failed to respond for several years. But that’s another story.

My fifteen minutes of fame

Chapter of accidents, more like.

As world president of the International Advertising Association, I was asked to chair the first-ever advertising conference in China. It was May 1991, just twenty-four months after the Tiananmen Square protests.

The fun started early. Arriving early morning on an overnight flight at Beijing airport in my comfortable track-suit, hair awry, I was greeted by TV cameras, photographers and eager Chinese journos, notepads at the ready.

On the day before the conference, I made five speeches to different gatherings, ending with a Gala Banquet in the Great Hall of the People. My host kept reassuring me that no speech would be required, but I knew enough by this stage to be aware that it just might be a necessity. So, after some twenty of twenty-seven courses (I couldn’t get past twelve), he motioned to me that it was my turn. Up I got…

In the weeks running up to the conference I was constantly badgered by the organisers for a copy of my opening keynote speech. But since I was going to speak about the nexus between market economy, freedom of the press and the role of advertising, I was advised that all the interesting bits would be censored.

So I kept it all to myself until the last moment, personally handing copies to each of the interpreters. There were around ten thousand delegates.

In the break afterwards, there was a long, long line of people to shake hands (and be photographed) with, and from time-to-time one would whisper to me, “We never heard all that before here.”

Job done. Even if it was just a start.

Making predictions

By definition, in innovation we are dealing with the future. And we know that the future is always a foreign country – they will do things differently there.

The problem, of course is in prediction. And that problem is compounded by the degree of attention that we pay to our leaders at any given time.

Take Davos. The great and the good regularly assemble there in order to pontificate. In 1997 the world’s political and economic elect designated Southeast Asia as the most dynamic region. This was shortly ahead of meltdown, the Asian financial crisis, when Thailand, hardest hit, effectively became bankrupt.

Then in 2008 Davos totally failed to predict the forthcoming global banking crisis, initiated by Bear Stearns and Lehmann Brothers.

Almost laughable was the 1991 prediction of Lord Rees-Mogg, one of Britain’s most respected pundits, who foresaw “a decade of escalating economic and political disorder unparalleled since the 1930s.” Right outcome (broadly). Wrong decade.

Robert Millikan, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1923, declared: “There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom.”

The problem arises fundamentally from hubris. I get a senior governmental or academic position and start to believe that I know what the future holds.

It was George Santayana who said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Perhaps more useful are the words of Yogi Berra: “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Secrets and confidentiality

Often I’m asked by clients to sign confidentiality agreements. I’m sure that these are important from a legal viewpoint.

But in truth they are not really the point.

The point is to know inside oneself that you’re not going to tell one client another client’s secrets, however tempting it is to appear “in the know”.

So mum’s the word. In all circumstances. Whether or not a written agreement is in force.

Among McKinsey & Company’s values is this:

Keep our client information confidential: We don’t reveal sensitive information. We don’t promote our own good work. We focus on making our clients successful.

Couldn’t be clearer. Sometimes not so easy to live up to in a large firm.

Of course, when stuff is in the public domain, it’s no longer a secret. I have known clients who don’t appear to grasp this!

Women wanted for innovation?

Interesting piece on the Voxy news/blog site in New Zealand lamenting the lack of women innovators: http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/women-wanted-innovation/5/116926

According to Voxy, women take out less than 1% of all patents in New Zealand. Of course, this is a real problem – and not only in Kiwiland, but all over the Western world.

In my view the source of the matter lies in the negative attitudes of women towards science and mathematics, and in particular towards engineering. In the “West” there are simply too few women engineers. For it’s engineers that dominate the patent game.

I wonder what the figures look like in Russia or China, where there are shedloads of female engineers?

But perhaps Voxy is taking too pessimistic a view of the situation. After all, in the real world, most innovation happens without any consideration of patents – in strategy, in brand development, in organisational change, in people management, in design, in cultural development, in the arts and so on.

And women may well be in the majority in all those fields, innovating day by day.

On being interviewed in Australia

I was sent to Sydney in 1980 to see the Unilever Ice Cream client and review the work of our agency. I was responsible at that time for Lintas’s Unilever ice cream portfolio around the world.

I was there for about two and a half days. All went well. The people in the agency seemed terrific. And, of course, I loved Sydney and thought how great it would be to live there.

On the final afternoon, the bar opened around five, and a party of us moved on to dinner. Then to bar one, bar two and so on.

At something like five in the morning, all that was left of us was the brilliant and witty Jeff Seldon, and myself.

When I got home, the boss of the network said, “Well they liked you. Do you want the job?”

And that’s how I became chairman of Lintas Australia. I had the time of my life there.

Stepping out with William Lisle Bowles

Aside from my regular daily walking regime, yesterday afternoon I “went out” for the first time in a while. Quite a step.

I led a meeting of our local village reading group – on our own local Romantic poet, William Lisle Bowles, now almost totally forgotten.

Bowles was born in 1762 in King’s Sutton and lived his first seven years here, where his father was the vicar. So this year is the 250th anniversary of his birth.

In short, he was one of the earliest pioneers of the move into Romanticism. So his poetry, mainly in sonnet form, influenced many of those who followed – Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Keats etc. In 1794 Coleridge wrote a sonnet in fulsome praise of Bowles.

This is one of William Lisle Bowles’s own sonnets. See what you think.

O TIME! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
Softest on sorrow's wound, and slowly thence,
(Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
Stealest the long-forgotten pang away;
On Thee I rest my only hope at last,
And think, when thou hast dried the bitter tear
That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on many a sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile --
As some poor bird, at day's departing hour,
Sings in the sunbeam, of the transient shower
Forgetful, tho' its wings are wet the while: --
Yet ah! how much must that poor heart endure,
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure!