Birth of the FIIBI Club

On Facebook Joy Clark reports a reunion of Lintas Sydney Ladies at the Yum Yum Eatery in beautiful Killcare ‒ and it reminded me of the first stirrings of a Ladies’ Dining Club at the agency in the mid-1980s.

The problem getting started was not in signing up members, but rather in deciding where to go. One restaurant would be proposed and rejected. Then another. And another.

Until, one day, I think it was the somewhat proper Susannah Throsby (as she was) who announced: “Fuck it, I’ll book it.”

And so was born the FIIBI Club.

All over for Facebook?

It's “all over for Facebook?” according to the Daily Telegraph, noting that the early-adopter young are now abandoning the site as their elders move in.

As a consequence it’s seen as “uncool” according to a research study conducted by Professor Daniel Miller of UCL: “Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it.”

Now researchers at Princeton are predicting that FB will lose 80% of its users by 2017, resulting in Facebook themselves, using the same logic, saying that by 2021 Princeton will have no students. Hilarious! 

Given that the flight of the young from the site, and its increasing adoption by wrinklier folk, means that its age profile is shifting upwards, I would imagine that Facebook’s management will be delighted to be able to sell advertising space to folk with real disposable income.

Who are you, Alexandra K Trenfor?

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.”

I came across this wonderful quote recently, posted by a Facebook friend. Isn’t it perfect?

It’s by Alexandra K Trenfor. And I discover it’s all over the internet, always attributed to her.

But who on earth is she? And if she said (or wrote) this one, how come there aren’t lots more wise thoughts where that one came from?

Declare yourself, Alexandra!

 

Boom and bust syndrome

The flotation of Facebook and its fall in price the day after reminds me of a workshop I facilitated several years ago for Unilever in Rio de Janeiro (someone has to do it). I fell into conversation with a young American consultant there from Paris.

“My husband and I have invested steadily in so far loss-making companies from Silicon Valley and have made millions,” she boasted.

Probably out to prick her bubble, not having had such a joyous ride, I responded: “My own feeling is that the NASDAQ is going to tumble. Quite soon. 50% or maybe more.”

“No chance!” was her reply.

“But the losses? Not to mention the slowing of growth?”

“The rules have changed,” she responded.

"Don't think so."

And that’s exactly what happened – the following month.

I love the writer Somerset Maugham’s pithy summary in his The Facts of Life:

“How’s the market today,” he asked.

“Booming. Even the suckers are making money.”

Always in Beta

“Do and learn,” advises Marc Pritchard, global marketing and brand building officer of Procter & Gamble, in a recent speech. “We have to try new things, be accepting that some things won’t work and learn why.”
 

This is far from the risk-averse P&G that I knew. They used to talk endlessly, and only reluctantly made decisions to act. Pritchard recognised this in his address: “We are trying to make this shift ourselves at P&G,” he said, “and it’s not always easy.”

But the validity and power of this approach is amply confirmed by the experience of many of the most successful businesses in Silicon Valley – Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Disney and others.

In an article in the current issue of Market Leader magazine, Marc Nohr reports that it’s a constant refrain in their corridors – “test, test, test”, “launch and learn”, “always in beta”.

Market research is nearly always a poor substitute for real life experience – especially in the case of breakthrough innovation.

It’s something that those big old corporations need to learn. And soon if they are to survive.

The Art of Conversation - is it dead?

I don’t know why there is so much noise in the system about email, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and the rest – all of them apparently destroying the so-called Art of Conversation.

In reality they do exactly the reverse, bringing new forms of conversation (with old and new friends and acquaintances) via new media.

And the issues involved in dialogue are just the same as in face-to-face intercourse – inability to listen, not sharing the airtime, assuming negative intention, sarcasm masquerading as humour and so on.

Of course there are new social protocols which grow up around each new channel. Enjoyable to learn (and to ignore).

For example, “Hello” was first coined in response to the need for an ice-breaker on new-fangled telephone calls. It’s credited to Thomas Edison in 1877.

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.)

A sort of Christmas card

One of my favourite poems in this season is "Journey of the Magi". TS Eliot first published it as “a sort of Christmas card” in 1927. The first five lines are within quotation marks because Eliot had taken that passage from a sermon given by Lancelot Andrewes in 1622.

The whole is a reminiscence by one of the Magi (or Kings if you prefer) of almost incomprehensible change, told in old age.

I’m to read it at Evensong in the parish church of our village on the Northamptonshire-Oxfordshire border on the Sunday before the Twelfth Night, Ephiphany, marking the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem.

Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Debrett’s informs us that “it’s simply not sufficient to send your ‘season’s greetings’ via Facebook”. No mention of the blogosphere. Ah well.

Happy Christmas!