How often are we juking the stats to make the answers fit into a preconceived brief, agenda, pay structure or particular monetizable skill set, (the old “if only in possesion of a hammer” problem), or corporate culture ? If companies come to you in search of answers the key to helping them is to ask better questions, regardless of where they may lead you and them.

If, like the teachers in the clip and in real life, we start at the end (how do WE get paid? Waht would THEY want to HEAR?) this will only lead to bandage improvements. And to envious looks at companies who truly start with the work (schoolkids, consumers, solutions) in mind, thus creating better odds at stable long term success and all that comes with it.

Wherever you go, there you are. No regrets, no sympathy.

His life is turned upside down when a young MBA (played by Anna Kendrick) comes in and figures out that by doing the firing online and from one central location, the cost of business can be reduced by 85%. Clooney tries to convince her that this is not as clearcut as Kendrick thinks it is.

The contrast between Clooney and Kendrick serves as a nice backdrop for some practices we all know but sometimes need reminding of*:

Culture vs category Culture leads to better understanding of category

There are many problems in the lives of people, that may not directly relate to our products, but offer a chance to solve problems with tangible solutions.

Kendrick came in and saw one thing from her limited exposure and training. ” If we can cut the cost of flying by doing it via internet, we can make a killing”. Of course she is right.

Cutting cost would have made the fictional company more money. Yet what she had not experienced, was the stuff that happens all around the product they offer (in this case the firing of people).

There are issues that play a big part in the lives of the fired ones that have no relation to getting fired. Yet could have offered her company opportunities to be of bigger additional value to clients and customers than just being cheaper.

Culture (or let me rephrase that large word: an understanding of the wider lives of customers other than their behaviour when interacting with our clients catergory product) can be a fertile place for cash. But it means widening our scope.

There is this story about the public service system in Mexico around the 1950’s. It was notorious for its ineffectiveness. But gradually the productivity went up, without active involvement of the Gov. Nobody could, on the surface find a reason for this change. Turns out it was the aircondtitioning.

The siesta was something very strongly engraved in Mecixan live. Whether they be public servants, bankers, mechanics or farmers. The practice was part of the country.

So when the Mexican governement started installing airconditioning machines in city halls and other places where the servants worked, it had unexpected results.

The siesta was used for killing downtime around the hottest time of day, because it was dangerous to be outside (or that was the orginal practice, which carried over even when not entirely true for civil servants in the 1950’s anymore). Now the temperture was being kept steady at a workable one with the help of airco’s.

Slowly but surely this had an effect on the behaviour of the servants that led them not to take siestas and thus upping productivity.

Imagine if the sellers of the airco had pitched it as a means to up productivity or effectiveness, based on this insight and possible new use of product? Would that have been better than just a device to keep people cool?

I don’t know (all history tells us is, that they were bought on the strenght of other considerations), but if we had to sell airco in this day and age it would be an interesting, appealing and memorable pitch compared to standard pitches of just keeping cool.

People are influenced by all kinds of things: the context of interaction, people we look to/at, folklore, the physical world around us, previous experiences, fears, insecurities, much more… and the category product. Use it all to be of better service and ultimately more profitable.

This concludes this series of posts.

*For arguments sake I leave the morality of working for/with a company that fires people for a living out of the equation. Same goes for the actual movie. No accounting for taste.

His life is turned upside down when a young MBA (played by Anna Kendrick) comes in and figures out that by doing the firing online and from one central location, the cost of business can be reduced by 85%. Clooney tries to convince her that this is not as clearcut as Kendrick thinks it is.

The contrast between Clooney and Kendrick serves as a nice backdrop for some practices we all know but sometimes need reminding of*:

Kiss ass vs Kick Ass Kiss a little to Kick alot, or not..there is no golden rule to start with just a result to end with.

Clooney is ambiguity. Kendrick certainty. She is the one with the demands and the firm beliefs about how the world should work. He is more comfortable with the idea of working with how the world is first to get the world to work how it could be.

This post flows from the previous post, but focusses more on the process of selling our services. Bells and whistles matter (to a certain extend of course, whether we care to admit or not). Awards, good offices, smart suits, leggy blonds, the truth, famous clients, solutions that make money (plain hard cold cash). They all matter.

Suppose you are a brand new manager from some FMCG company and you would know the truth about the way most of our solutions come into existence.

“Take in a load of information, letting this all simmer, working towards and hoping that what the brain comes up with will be something profitable and competitive. Because to tell you the truth, we really have only so much control over whether this will be a hit or not.”

You’d have to be walking in some pretty comfortable shoes to go “ok….appreciate the honesty and I acknowlegde that there are no garantuees, but let us proceed anyways”. Most clients are not like that from the start.

They need, and should be given, an appropriate shock/comfort ratio to transition from non (or not enough) participatory to participating (fully). The politics of business is perhaps to some shallow, but not to be underestimated or be ashamed of.

So unless you can always choose partners who, within their culture have embraced ambiguity (because they are owners of the business and have lived it themselves, or they know that conventional methods will not help them achieve their goal of topping the leader), remember that there is no shame in kissing a bit of ass every now and then.

Because given the right encouragement and results, most clients will grow with the agency and start to develop solutions that can bring out the full potential of a business.

So don’t sit in the corner sulking : “They don’t understand how it should be”. Show and prove in terms the client understands. Remember: a leader without followers is just a person walking alone.

*For arguments sake I leave the morality of working for/with a company that fires people for a living out of the equation. Same goes for the actual movie. No accounting for taste.

His life is turned upside down when a young MBA (played by Anna Kendrick) comes in and figures out that by doing the firing online and from one central location, the cost of business can be reduced by 85%. Clooney tries to convince her that this is not as clearcut as Kendrick thinks it is.

The contrast between Clooney and Kendrick serves as a nice backdrop for some practices we all know but sometimes need reminding of*:

Change vs Status Quo Plan for transitions

Kendrick is positioned as the new, naive and better way of doing stuff. Clooney is the guy who is set in his ways and tries to keep the boat from rocking.

But the lesson here is that when it comes to the art of business it is not about about the binary. About embracing change or status quo..it is about the transitions. Change as we all know is constant.

Plenty of businesses, unfortunately, have picked one side or the other. Musiclabels, newspapers, the dotcom era of burn to earn. But this ignores one important insight idea.

The money is in the transition. From one to another. I once heard said about the Iphone that this was what Apple figured out and are making a killing of.

The Iphone, could be argued, has no innovative seperate things to it: phone new. Internet new. mp3 new, touch new. But they made it easy and seamless for us to transition from one position to the next.

From: “Who would need or want all this hightech stuff, I just want a phone to call and got a pc to do web stuff” to the next position: “WoW, this is very handy indeed, how did I ever do without”.

While Apple is always cheered for its ability to create evangelists out of their (cutting edge loving) customers they did not become big till they focused on the casually convert(ing)ed consumer.

The type that goes to church maybe twice a year (instead of every week), but leaves a donation everytime he does go, because that is his way of showing that he is still cares enough about, but is not totaly goverend by the church (or the next big revolutionary trend). Kinda like indulgences.

Know where the money is. It is in a lot of industries, still somewhere around the middle. They are blandish for a reason. They wish not to be, but are afraid to rock the boat to much. Help them makes sense and fun of the transitions in life and chances are you will be rewarded. In this life or the next.

*For arguments sake I leave the morality of working for/with a company that fires people for a living out of the equation. Same goes for the actual movie. No accounting for taste.

His life is turned upside down when a young MBA (always them MBA’s, played by Anna Kendrick) comes in and figures out that by doing the firing online and from one central location, the cost of business can be reduced by 85%. Clooney tries to convince her that this is not as clearcut as Kendrick thinks it is.

The contrast between Clooney and Kendrick serves as a nice backdrop for some practices we all know but sometimes need reminding of*:

Client vs Agency Client + Agency = Result
Kendrick comes in and tells Clooney, who has been at this job well over 15 year (and from the looks of it getting results), that there are better ways to do it. The subtext quite clearly being: “thank heaven you were smart enough to hire me, now get me some coffee and move out of the way while I apply the newest thinking to save the day”.

So he takes her out on the road. Trying to prove that she may know about the business, but does not know what the business is about.

The nuances about customers, the different ways they react (good and bad) and how these sitiations are always openings to create positive experiences. Of course this brings some sort of personal enlightment to Kendrick, but the point is one we could do well to remember as business people.

Yes the client has issues, otherwise we would not be needed. But most likely the client has been earning their living doing what they do, for a long time. Longer then we have earned ours by doing our work. Be humble and listen to clients, they may actually teach us a thing or two that will help us help them.

No need to grovel or to behave like the Beyonder. Work together, share the agenda and it might just benefit both.

*For arguments sake I leave the morality of working for/with a company that fires people for a living out of the equation. Same goes for the actual movie. No accounting for taste.

I have noticed something odd recently which, while discussing it with a few people, got me in some heated debates whether or not I was aware of how foolish what I was saying, made me look (thank Lord I have my looks, ha!)

Native Dutch (from Western/Dutch descent from a cultural point of view, thus excluding third/fourth gen from non West european descent) subliminal nationalism.

As is perhaps known, the largest political party (in the polling) is the populist party PVV, led by Geert Wilders. Yet the act of publicly acknowledging that you as a Dutch native (with the sterotypical label put on you by foreigners of tolerance) are sympathetic to these views is still (though declining) taboo.

Below a picture of a radio station advert on a billboard.

A radio station advertising with “100% NL”. Again as a statement, it means they play Dutch music. Yet against the backdrop of political and social unrest it gets interesting indeed.

Dutch speaking music has always been around, and popular. But it was never mainstream. Played on local and regional radio/tv and with performers playing in community centres, so to speak. But since around the rise of the late Fortuyn it has steadily become more mainstream.

From reality shows about singers to them being covered in the big dailys like the Telegraaf and filling football stadiums for days in a row, the liking of Dutch music seems to have taken on a subtext of more than entertainment.

Now of course chauvinism is not new, as with every world cup football every nation feels a surge of pride coming on, but this feels different, coming from a place of fear rather than joy.

And now this winter. Ice skating. The quintessential Dutch sport (We/they are regular world and Olympic champions in this sport).

Yet the sudden demand for ice skate rings is almost bigger than supply. This was before the weather made for natural ice and one could argue that after a decade of no natural ice we are all going out in drones to enjoy this rare opportunity.

Having visited several rings out of curiousity around the city I can not help but sense a sort of “fist bump” effect amongst the Native: we are the same, we are Dutch in a Holland that is “tanning” in its culture (though the argument can be made that Dutch culture never was pure to begin, but that is talking rationaly when, no pain felt is untrue in the world of the victim ).

Again the above radiostation may just have put a slogan thought up in a few seconds on a billboard, but in the conxtext of changing society, demographics and culture in Holland, I find it one of the more powerfull pieces of advertising I have seen in a while (even if it just one sentence, no more).

Now of course this is all speculative, but the point is not whether it is true or not. the point is, that we often (to often) look at we want (people to want), when we plan our actions.

Not enough at what keeps people from doing stuff we want or doing other stuff than we want, which (when looked at) could reveal a less pretty picture then we care to admit, far less rational behaviour then we (by now) should know and a reality often at odds with client views of their own customer, product, buying reason and company.

And in this there are many opportunities we miss to create positive (for I am not advocating fear mongering in output, merely in acknowledging it in more diverse research and development of strategy) powerfull ideas that drive both the needs of our clients and resonate within the context of the lives of their customers.

I was really struck by the rigidness of the views of the people i discussed this hypothesis with (the absence of evidence does not mean this is evidence of absence after all) and again reminded that if we are striving to create work that resonates in the real world we should start researching and thinking in 3D, wherever the evidence (or lack thereof) takes us.

Wicked problem is a phrase used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.(source wikipedia)

What is needed are : Good Solutions.*

1. A good solution accepts given limits, using so far as possible what is at hand. The fartherfetched the solution, the less it should be trusted. Granted that a farm can be too small it is nevertheless true that enlarging scale is a deceptive solution; it solves one problem by acquiring another or several others.

2. A good solution accepts also the limitations of discipline. Agricultural problems should receive solutions that are agricultural, not technological or economic.

3. A good solution improves the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern – it is a qualitative solution – rather than enlarging or complicating some part of a pattern at the expense or in neglect of the rest.

4. A good solution solves more than one problem, and it does not make new problems. I am talking about health as opposed to almost any cure, coherence of pattern as opposed to almost any solution produced piecemeal or in isolation. The return of organic wastes to the soil may, at first glance, appear to be a good solution per se. But that is not invariably or necessarily true. It is true only if the wastes are returned to the right place at the right time in the pattern of the farm, if the waste does not contain toxic materials, if the quantity is not too great, and if not too much energy or money is expended in transporting it.

5. A good solution will satisfy a while range of criteria; it will be good in all respects. A farm that has found correct agricultural solutions to its problems will be fertile,productive, healthful, conservative, beautiful, pleasant to live on. This standard obviously must be qualified to the extent that the pattern of the life of a farm will be adversely affected by distortions in any of the larger patterns that contain it. It is hard, for instance, for the economy of a farm to maintain its health in a national industrial economy in which farm earnings are apt to be low and expenses high.

But it is apparently true, even in such an economy, that the farmers most apt to survive are those who do not go too far out of agriculture into either industry or banking – and who, moreover, live like farmers, not like businessmen. This seems especially true for the smaller farmers.

6. A good solution embodies a clear distinction between biological order and mechanical order, between farming and industry. Farmers who fail to make this distinction are ideal customers of the equipment companies, but they often fail to understand that the real strength of a farm is in the soil.

7. Good solutions have wide margins, so that the failure of one solution does not imply the impossibility of another. Industrial agriculture tends to put its eggs into fewer and fewer baskets, and to make “going for broke” its only way of going. But to grow grain should not make it impossible to pasture livestock, and to have a lot of power should not make it impossible to use only a little.

8. A good solution always answers the question, How much is enough? Industrial solutions have always rested on the assumption that enough is all you can get. But that destroys agriculture, as it destroys nature and culture. The good health of a farm implies a limit of scale, because it implies a limit of attention, and because such a limit is invariably implied by any pattern. You destroy a square, for example, by enlarging one angle of lengthening one side.

And in any sort of work there is a point past which more quantity necessarily implies less quality. In some kinds of industrial agriculture, such as cash grain farming, it is possible (to borrow an insight from Professor Timothy Taylor) to think of technology as a substitute for skill. But even in such farming that possibility is illusory; the illusion can be maintained only so long as the consequences can be ignored.

The illusion is much shorter lived when animals are included in the farm pattern, because the husbandry of animals is so insistently a human skill. A healthy farm incorporates a pattern that a single human mind can comprehend, make, maintain, vary in response to circumstances, and pay steady attention to. That this limit is obviously variable from one farmer and farm to another does not mean that it does not exist.

9. A good solution should be cheap, and it should not enrich one person by the distress or impoverishment of another. In agriculture, so-called “inputs” are, from a different point of view, outputs – expenses. In all things, I think, but especially in agriculture struggling to survive in an industrial economy, any solution that calls for an expenditure to a manufacturer should be held in suspicion – not rejected necessarily, but as a rule mistrusted.

10. Good solutions exist only in proof, and are not to be expected from some absentee owners or absentee experts. Problems must be solved in work and in place, with particular knowledge, fidelity, and care, by people who will suffer the consequences of their mistakes. There is no theoretical or ideal practice. Practical advice or direction from people who have no practice may have some value, but its value is questionable and is limited. The divisions of capital, management, and labor, characteristic of an industrial system, are therefore utterly alien to the health of farming – as they probably also are to the health of manufacturing.

The good health of a farm depends on the farmer’s mind; the good health of his mind has its dependence, and its proof, in physical work. The good farmer’s mind and his body – his management and his labor – work together as intimately as his heart and lungs. And the capital of a well-farmed farm by definition includes the farmer, mind and body both. Farmer and farm are one thing, an organism.

11. Once the farmer’s mind, his body, and his farm are understood as a single organism, and once it is understood that the question of the endurance of this organism is a question about the sufficiency and integrity of a pattern, then the word organic can be usefully admitted into this series of standards. It is a word that I have been defining all along, though I have not used it.

An organic farm, properly speaking, is not one that uses certain methods and substances and avoids others; it is a farm whose structure is formed in imitation of the structure of a natural system; it has the integrity, the independence, and the benign dependence of an organism. Sir Albert Howard said that a good farm is an analogue of the forest which “manures itself.” A farm that imports too much fertility, even as feed or manure, is in this sense as inorganic as a farm that exports too much or that imports chemical fertilizer.

12. The introduction of the term organic permits me to say more plainly and usefully some things that I have said or implied earlier. In an organism, what is good for one part is good for another. What is good for the mind is good for the body; what is good for the arm is good for the heart. We know that sometimes a part may be sacrificed for the whole; a life may be saved by the amputation of an arm.

But we also know that such remedies are desperate, irreversible, and destructive; it is impossible to improve the body by amputation. And such remedies do not imply a safe logic. As tendencies they are fatal: you cannot save your arm by the sacrifice of your life.Perhaps most of us who know local histories of agriculture know of fields that in hard times have been sacrificed to save a farm, and we know that though such a thing is possible it is dangerous. The danger is worse when topsoil is sacrificed for the sake of a crop.

And if we understand the farm as an organism, we see that it is impossible to sacrifice the health of the soil to improve the health of plants, or to sacrifice the health of plants to improve the health of animals, or to sacrifice the health of animals to improve the health of people. In a biological pattern – as in the pattern of a community – the exploitive means and motives of industrial economics are immediately destructive and ultimately suicidal.

13. It is the nature of any organic pattern to be contained within a larger one. And so a good solution in one pattern preserves the integrity of the pattern that contains it. A good agricultural solution, for example, would not pollute or erode a watershed.

What is good for the water is good for the ground, what is good for the ground is good for the plants, what is good for the plants is good for animals, what is good for animals is good for people, what is good for people is good for the air, what is good for the air is good for the water. And vice versa.

14. But we must not forget that those human solutions that we may call organic are not natural. We are talking about organic artifacts, organic only by imitation or analogy. Our ability to make such artifacts depends on virtues that are specifically human: accurate memory, observation, insight, imagination, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity, restraint.

Restraint – for us, now – above all: the ability to accept and live within limits; to resist changes that are merely novel or fashionable; to resist greed and pride; to resist the temptation to “solve” problems by ignoring them, accepting them as “trade-offs,” or bequeathing them to posterity. A good solution, then, must be in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law.

*A Good Solution comes from the work of  Wendell Berry Chapter 9 : Solving for Pattern

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural (North Point Press, 1981). Originally published in the Rodale Press periodical The New Farm.