Australia at the RA

To the Royal Academy for their latest show, Australia. What a joy it is – filled both with old friends and new acquaintances. And a real credit to its curators ‒ Ron Radford and Anne Gray from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and Kathleen Soriano of the RA  in London.

The last major exhibition of Australian art in Britain took place at the Tate Gallery in 1962 ‒ over half a century ago. Although, as the catalogue shows, it had plenty of fine paintings, it was treated in a patronising fashion by the London art establishment, only “rather better than the more woeful prophets might have predicted,” according to The Times.

That kind of condescension has a long track-record. The critic RAM Stevenson (Robert Louis’s cousin) recalled the first substantial showing of Australian work in London in 1886, which included four paintings by Tom Roberts (including “Coming South”), as “still English, or, to speak more correctly, showed us fashions of painting that were founded upon the English trade picture… mechanical drawings and geological, botanical or topographical diagrams.”

By 1898, on the occasion of the second major Australian exhibition (at the Grafton Gallery), Stevenson was more enthusiastic: “The cleverest, the most brilliant, the highest toned work in the show is Mr Streeton’s square canvas, ‘Early Summer’.”*

The current exhibition, focused on landscape, is filled with major works, many of which have travelled around the world for the first time. Let’s see whether it unleashes a wave of patronising comment reminiscent of 1886. 

*Was this painting “Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom”, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Australia in Adelaide?

Sport as metaphor for life

In a provocative piece in Melbourne’s The Age, the columnist Tim Soutphommasane asserts that Australia’s current malaise on the cricket field “may also say something about the state of the nation… cricket as a metaphor for life.”

Has he not noticed that, while Europe and North America have struggled to get any semblance of forward motion, the economy in Australia has remained in robust health?

I'm always leary about sport/society metaphors. When I lived in Sydney in the early 1980s, Australia went crazy about their "historic" winning of the ultimate prize in sailing, the America's Cup. However, the strong feeling of euphoria accompanied a deep national slide into recession...

And the man behind the achievement, entrepreneur Alan Bond, was eventually sent to prison for fraud.

Now how do you decode all that, metaphorically?

Immigrants as the drivers of economic growth

In the 1980s, when I lived in Sydney, Aussies prided themselves on having created a truly harmonious multicultural society. It always seemed to me to be overstated, so I commissioned a study rather provocatively entitled “Racism in Australia”.

At that time the latest influx of immigrants was from Vietnam. Many of them were highly qualified in a multitude of areas, but they arrived having lost the war with the Communists and with little or no English. They took any job they could get, many of them as taxi drivers or taking in laundry. Within a very short space of time they were setting up businesses of all kinds. And their children were doing spectacularly well at school and university.

A striking insight came during one focus group, when an Aussie mum said: “I walk past the university library late evening. And the lights are still on in the library. And I know who’s in there working…”

Working too hard, apparently. It was those Vietnamese, of course. Resentment seems to follow every new immigrant wave.

It occurred to me as a result of that study that in reality Australia’s long-term success economically had been continuously driven by successive waves of immigrants – from England, Ireland and Scotland, Italy, Greece and Lebanon, Serbia and Croatia, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Singapore, Japan and so on.

In a fairly recent mixed society, such as Australia (or indeed the USA), with hindsight, this is rather obvious. But my sense is that it also applies in less evident ways to the “older” nations… such as Britain.

Above: "Shearing the Rams" by Tom Roberts, 1888-90, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Riding into the funeral pyre

Girls brought up on the farm in country Victoria in Australia are usually fit and healthy, learning to ride very young. Certainly Marjorie Lawrence from Dean’s Marsh had no problems in this department.

So in January 1936, when she had her chance to make her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in one of operas’s most demanding roles, Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, she thought that it might be a good idea to follow the composer’s specific instructions – to mount and ride her horse, Grane, on-stage into Siegfried’s blazing funeral pyre, the climax of the opera.

Perhaps, she thought, it would be only polite to check this out with the director and conductor in advance. Under no circumstances, they responded. It would be much too risky.

And why take the risk? It had never been done. Unthinkable. Just do what your illustrious predecessors have done – at Bayreuth and Covent Garden, in Vienna and Paris, here at the Met. Lead the horse quietly off-stage behind the bonfire.

For many of those predecessors, to do what she was proposing would be a physical impossibility – several would have been just too large and most of the rest wouldn’t have been able to ride anyway.

Of course, to the astonishment of the audience, the critics and not least the stage director and the conductor, she leapt adroitly aboard and rode Grane confidently exactly as the libretto instructs, singing all the while.

The New York newspapers reported the event in full. She had sung magnificently. And now she was a star.

The performance was recorded live and was issued on CD in 2004. Here she is singing Brünnhilde, recorded in Paris and in French:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8UmfC-6ToA

Sadly she was struck down by polio in her prime at 32. But that's another story.

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.

When the going gets tough

Neville Wran was premier of New South Wales in Australia in the 1980s. A canny old bird. His newly-elected political opponent, the glamorous young Nick Greiner, was doing brilliantly in the polls.

“Let’s see how he does when the blowtorch is applied to the belly.” This was Wran’s acerbic assessment.

That’s the real test of leadership. By comparison, leading when you’re winning is so easy.

Why is it that, when the going gets tough, leaders so often abandon the supportive people-management strategies that served them so well in good times, reverting to fear and blame?

Deep down they must know that, even if it can get results in the short-term, over the long haul it just won’t work.

Hemming and hawing over Diet Coke

Here is another example of fast-following being better than leading.

Twenty years ago, it became clear that there was a really major market out there for diet cola. And regular Coke had the reputation for being stuffed with calories.

The Coca-Cola Company had sold for many years a brand called TAB – and the reason that the company gave it a separate name, far from Coke, was that it tasted foul.

So the challenge was to produce a good-tasting product with zero calories. First to market was a local US brand, Royal Crown. It tasted good and consumers liked it. But the truth was that they were faced with a powerful global competitor who could obliterate them quite easily.

So after much hemming and hawing – it seemed to take years – Coca-Cola finally launched Diet-Coke (Coca-Cola Lite in many markets), which built massive sales everywhere, including in Australia, where my ad agency, Lintas, handled the launch.

I think the lesson is not to go up against a much bigger competitor with your new product if they can blow you out of the water so easily.

In that case, you’ll need an important aspect of your product or brand that’s either hard to copy, or, better still, has some IP protection.

Helena Rubinstein and the Sheep of Australia

I have recently been discussing with Facebook friends the apparent shortage of women innovators. Among the many contributory factors, one is that so many of the trained engineers and scientists in the western world have always been men.

But innovation comes in many forms and one woman that I find fascinating is the legendary Helena Rubinstein.

Born in 1870 in Krakow, Poland, she moved to Australia in 1902. She had very little English and no money. But she did have family there – her uncle was a shopkeeper in Coleraine, a small town some 350 kilometres west of Melbourne. This was Big Sheep country and there was an unending supply of lanolin, the grease secreted by the sheep to keep their woolly coats in good condition. Rubinstein used the lanolin as the basis of her own skin creams, disguising its unpleasant odour with lavender and other fragrances.

Later she moved to set up business in Collins Street, still the smartest place for shopping in Melbourne, then Sydney, then London, Paris and New York. She was a brilliant marketer of her products, creating the whole concept of “problem skin” and discovering that, if sales were flagging, raising prices was a good way to get things moving again. Her pushy mantra was: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”

She was to become the first self-made female millionaire.

(I see that there’s a new book out by Ruth Brandon about Rubinstein and the founder of L’Oréal, Eugène Schueller, which I’ve not yet seen.)

Le Fair Play

Shortly after the bombing of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 – I was there and heard the blast – I was having lunch in Sydney with my then boss, regional director Jean-François Lacour.

“What’s the French for fair play?” I asked provocatively.

The French government of the day had decided that interference in their atomic testing programme had gone far enough and had sent secret service agents to deal with Rainbow Warrior.

Their action appalled New Zealanders. And I myself was outraged and thought it a clear breach of the unwritten rules of fairness.

Lacour thought for a moment. “Le Fair Play,” he responded.

Of course, the concept of fairness does not rank high in the value system of the French, whereas for Australians and New Zealanders it comes right at the top of the pile.

Now, some twenty six years later, I’m much less clear as to how to understand the notion, nor how to know it when you’ve got it.

Will Hutton has recently published a book entitled Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality – Why we need a Fair Society. If you decide to read it, do let me know if he gets anywhere useful in defining fairness.

Is it the same as “win-win”? Or something else entirely?

Nothing to do with me, mate

My friend Peter Quantrill was a bit shocked by the inept response of the chairman of Australia’s cricket selectors, Andrew Hilditch, following his team’s drubbing at the hands of England in the Ashes series in Sydney.

“I think we’ve done a very good job as a selection panel,” said Hilditch, unable to shoulder any responsibility for the rout.

“I figure someone in his position would have undertaken a modicum of media training,” Peter wrote to me.

And yesterday we had MI5’s chief of staff, giving evidence at the inquest into the 7/7 bombings in London, saying that it would be “nonsensical and offensive” to suggest that the security service bore any responsibility for the 52 deaths. (Silly me. I’d thought it was their job to detect and forestall such things.)

It all puts me in mind of the recent BP fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico.

In fact, although I occasionally coach people in media relations, I'm rather ambivalent about the value of media training. For example, if BP CEO Tony Hayward (above) had been better coached, he might not have veered wildly between the inappropriate and the obstructive, and could well still be top dog there.

In the end, I’d rather leaders were just themselves in response to media interrogation. Better for everyone in the long run.

And always better to assume responsibility.

Giving it a Go

I’d been living and working in Sydney for a few months when a young journalist from the Financial Times in London showed up. She was to write a feature article on my experience there, particularly comparing British and Australian management styles.

“Well,” I began, “in England we’ll discuss some new project for eighteen months or so, and there will be a really good reason when we decide not to go ahead with it. Now in Australia we’ll discuss it for about twenty minutes and decide to ‘give it a go’.”

I got into trouble with my boss in London over the article when it ran. “Unpatriotic,” he called it. It was certainly somewhat overstated, but the impulse behind it was, and remains, fundamentally true. “Give it a go” is an essential Australian expression, without an exact equivalent in English English.

The upside to a lengthy gestation period can be to reduce risk, aiming to get towards perfection. But the downside is that there’s often no chance in the meantime to see what will happen in real life – then to learn and adapt.

The advantage of the Aussie version is that things are tried out in practice with customers. And the problem can be that risks are not managed adequately.

Where am I on all this? In innovation, as in so many things, the perfect is the enemy of the good – and is often unachievable. So my advice is usually to give it a go.

Which culture do you live and work in?