Desires we never knew we had

A funny thing happened to Dr Geoffrey Miller. He’s a leading American evolutionary psychologist.

At a conference that brought together economists and psychologists in London in 1999, he noticed for the first time a group of people who looked different from all the academics there.

They were marketers. And they were interested in psychology because they wanted to know more about people’s preferences and how these worked.

Talking with marketers, Dr Miller noticed: “A new world opened up.” He recorded the experience in his book Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, where he observed that marketers and marketing-oriented companies “help us discover desires we never knew we had, and ways of fulfilling them we never imagined.”

I don’t believe that traditional market research, nearly all borrowed from psychology, did any such thing. In my experience, that sort of enquiry, both qualitative and quantitative, was conducted in the present, holding firmly on to a rear view mirror. And this kind of research still holds sway in many of the more conservative organisations.

But over the past fifteen years or so, a sea-change has occurred whereby newly-developed “insight” processes (based on face-to-face interaction and walking together imaginatively into the future) have gradually replaced that rear-view mirror.

Of course, this work leads marketers to new and more interesting places – but it’s hard to replicate. So it can leave risk-averse managements very fearful of failure.

Trying things out is at the very heart of Darwinian evolution! The point for us is to manage the risks involved.

All for one, one for all?

This famous and oft-quoted line, the epitome of good teamwork, comes, as everyone knows, from Alexandre Dumas père’s novel published in 1844, The Three Musketeers.

“Tous pour un, un pour tous.” It is intended as a lifelong bond of loyalty, brotherly love and mutual support between Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan. Through thick and thin.

It’s so often used as a keystone nowadays in teamwork training exercises.

But how difficult it is to realise in the world of today, where team members are changed with such frequency, and where individuals within a team are in practice competing with each other for recognition and preferment.

Teamwork today is for Christmas, not for life.

The river is the goal

In recent weeks I’ve been doing a lot of “visioning” with senior management teams from diverse organisations – in food and beverage, white goods, energy, orchestras and international education. It’s always very interesting and engrossing work.

I think that having a sense of direction is useful, so long as it doesn’t become a straitjacket, getting in the way of responding to change in the competitive environment and within the team.

But much more important than the destination is the journey.

As the conductor, Vladimir Jurowski (currently in the middle of a Prokofiev fest in London), has said in an interview: “The way is its own destination.” And, paraphrasing Hermann Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha, “The river is the goal.”

Risk and the financial meltdown

I’ve been developing new products with financial services organisations – banks, building societies, insurance companies, credit card operators etc – for several decades. Nearly all the majors, both in Britain and internationally.

In my early days (by which I mean the 1970s), there seemed to be a rather strict regime, where risk assessment and legal issues would be dominant in our thinking.

But some time along the way (in the mid-eighties, I think), the gung-ho marketing folk seemed to get the upper hand, and the risk and legal people were pushed back, discounted, assuming a much less intrusive presence.

I wonder if others share this perception? How widespread did it become in the industry? Was this shift a factor in the recent financial meltdown?

And what is the situation now? Have the risk managers reasserted themselves?

Why are so many leaders so bad at their jobs?

In spite of the massive amount of research into the subject and the plethora of training offerings available to new leaders, still they fail.

In the USA, some 40% of new leaders lose their jobs within 18 months. And there’s scant evidence that the 60% who manage to remain in post are much more competent or successful.

In 1969, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull published a best-selling book, The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. Maybe it’s time for a new generation of managers to discover it. It’s still in print.

The best-known maxim enunciated by the authors was that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.

What appears to happen is that managers who do well in a particular role get promoted and fail miserably in the more senior job, which usually requires a quite different personality, approach and skill-set.

When I worked in the advertising business, the best copywriters and art directors regularly were moved up to be creative directors in charge of lots of very volatile underlings. They almost invariably lacked the people skills that mark out the finest creative directors.

The only person that I ever worked with who really understood this was Charles Saatchi. His best creatives stayed in the jobs where they excelled, applauded and paid tons of money, while others better suited provided the leadership and management.

More recent research* seems to confirm the Peter Principle. Rather extraordinarily, it appears that promoting people who are not good at their jobs has a greater success rate than promoting the ones who are.

But surely the key point is to understand what’s really needed in particular leadership roles ‒ and identify and put in place people who genuinely fit the bill.

*“The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.

Alfred Hill: Australasia’s finest composer?

How exciting it must have been for the sixteen year-old Australasian, Alfred Hill, to arrive in Leipzig to study violin and composition in 1887, able to observe at close quarters most of the greatest musicians and composers of that time – Brahms, Joachim, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Sarasate, Bruch and Ysaÿe among them ‒ and within two years to be inducted into the legendary Gewandhaus orchestra.

Born in Melbourne in 1869, he was raised in Wellington, where he became something of a musical prodigy before going on to Leipzig to study at the Conservatorium. The training he received there was extremely thorough, but already Leipzig was felt by many to be living in the past, under the shadow of Mendelssohn and Schumann.

So how sad, later in life, to be deemed out-of-date and consequently ignored in one’s own lifetime.

Over the course of a long life, lived primarily in Sydney, Alfred Hill composed constantly, and, although he experimentally incorporated both Maori and Aboriginal motifs in his work, he never escaped from the late Romantic style he acquired in Leipzig. In the meantime, from the early years of the twentieth century, the musical world had become preoccupied with “modernism” – Stravinsky, Bartok, Debussy, Schoenberg and the rest.

The consequence is that the bulk of Hill’s music languishes in various libraries in Australia and New Zealand, unperformed and unknown.

So kudos to Naxos and to the Dominion Quartet for recording all of Alfred Hill’s fine series of quartets for the first time. And to the DQ’s viola-player, Donald Maurice, for editing and publishing Hill’s fascinating Leipzig diary.

But there’s so much more to discover.

The Importance of Being Plausible

Walking the canals in Birmingham (more there than in Venice, don’t you know) with friends from Sydney, I was asked by one of them who had invented the vitally important system of locks.

I had no idea. “Don’t think it was the Romans,” was all I could offer.

So I decided to approach the skipper of a passing narrow-boat. He and his crew at that moment had just negotiated their way through another lock (more than in Venice, we can be sure). He looked to me very much the expert, cap set at jaunty angle.

Not fazed at all by my approach, he gave us a rather comprehensive answer. The Chinese were involved, of course. The Babylonians. The Dutch (very flat, Holland). And something about Robert Barron in England, who had invented the “double-acting tumbler lock” in 1778.

I was impressed and said so to our helpful informant, adding: “At least, it all sounded very plausible to me – and plausibility is very important, you know.”

My little jest did not result in any smiles from Mr Jaunty Cap. In fact he gave me a rather odd look.

As we walked away, my wife Sophie said to me: “You do know who that was?”

“No idea,” I responded. “Who?”

“That was David Suchet." Only one of our finest (and most plausible) actors. And a passionate supporter of our canals.

With Larry Lamb at the Gabba

The opening of The Iron Lady in London reminds me of the two days that I spent with Sir Larry Lamb at the England-Australia test match at the Gabba in Brisbane in 1982.

These were days of cricket-watching, drinking and talking. He did a great deal more than me of both the last two.

And we ate soft-shell crab, a Queensland delicacy.

By this stage Larry was editor-in-chief of The Australian. Previously, in London, he had been the pioneering editor of Britain's biggest-selling newspaper, The Sun. Two stories he told stick in the mind.

First, of the daily meetings prior to the 1979 election that he had with Margaret Thatcher and Tim Bell to plot the following day’s front-page headline in The Sun. It’s generally agreed that swinging that mass-market tabloid behind Thatcher won her the election.

Then, of his rejected proposal to build an executive loo at The Australian. “Tell him to piss out of the window like the rest of us,” was apparently Rupert Murdoch’s decision. Larry was not best pleased.