"Content is king." As resonant as 'Put a Tiger in Your Tank.'
'Have a break, have a Kit-Kat.' 'We're only here for the beer.' And so on. I think we've got it. Some of us got it long before others. But I refer you to the fact that a lot of people here (and elsewhere) on LinkedIn who keep telling us that this is very, very important, don't actually create any content. They just point us in the direction of content created by others and this is quite often contrary to the nature of their titles and their 'areas of expertise'.
I think that there are two kinds of contributors.
I think I would say that your ability to check databases, You Tube, and other professional sites does not make you a savant. Boys and girls. You cannot expound the importance of content if you do not create it.
So why don't they?
I wonder why that is?
I think we know.
And I am far from being the only one who has noticed.
Monday, 8 July 2013
Wednesday, 3 July 2013
The till person was right
By now just about everyone has read about the Sainsbury's checkout operative who refused to serve the terminally rude girl who was on her mobile. The clue to where I sand on this is evident in the earlier sentence. I have lost count of the number of times I have wanted to deck some self-important idiot who slowed things down for the rest of us in a supermarket, including parents with crying and fractious kinder, because they HAD to spout crap into their phones.
She and her ilk need to understand that they are in a transaction with a sentient being at the till and not an ATM. No wonder they get pissed-off. More and more one sees signs in smaller shops stating that if you talk on your mobile while you're being served you are not going to be. Good for them.
But the problem doesn't begin and end at the tills.
Dom Jolly was bang-on. It's about civility and awareness and consideration of others. It's about all those selfish idiots who devolve responsibility for themselves to us as they stand texting in shop doorways, or come to a dead halt in front of you on the street, or block stairwells, contraflows and escalators, or hold up traffic as they natter or text on the zebra crossing. Or leave their seat to bring their conversation to wherever you are because they are terminally thick, ignorant, stupid and trying so very hard to look cool and 'in the swim'.
So Sainsbury's, a cursory scan of the message boards of the national press should tell you that the overwhelming majority have sided with your checkout girl. You spend a lot of money via internal communications and recruitment materials telling prospects that you respect the individual and so on. Now's your opportunity to show it. Make it a policy. Don't berate that person, give her a year's worth of vouchers, a big pat on the back and ban the ignorant and selfish customer.
 |
| I am in the habit of drawing things that happen around me. This was done some five years ago. And it turns out that the person featured is the director of a very famous, flavour of the month dance troupe, not that that makes him any less annoying or ignorant. |
But the problem doesn't begin and end at the tills.
Dom Jolly was bang-on. It's about civility and awareness and consideration of others. It's about all those selfish idiots who devolve responsibility for themselves to us as they stand texting in shop doorways, or come to a dead halt in front of you on the street, or block stairwells, contraflows and escalators, or hold up traffic as they natter or text on the zebra crossing. Or leave their seat to bring their conversation to wherever you are because they are terminally thick, ignorant, stupid and trying so very hard to look cool and 'in the swim'.
So Sainsbury's, a cursory scan of the message boards of the national press should tell you that the overwhelming majority have sided with your checkout girl. You spend a lot of money via internal communications and recruitment materials telling prospects that you respect the individual and so on. Now's your opportunity to show it. Make it a policy. Don't berate that person, give her a year's worth of vouchers, a big pat on the back and ban the ignorant and selfish customer.
Being bad made it good
Some twenty-three years on I'll never forget the look on her face when I pulled the cover visual we had been forbidden to present out of the bag. But sometimes you just have to do what's right even if your immediate client won't. It's called doing your job.
We were presenting the concept for a brochure, which was ground-breaking in its sector (as verified by the subsequent awards, plaudits and plagiarism) for a client who could be described as the original blue-chip company. At the time it was such a departure that our immediate day-to-day client was in a permanent tizzy. Smelling Salts at the ready, we had read the brief back to her on more than one occasion with increasing emphasis on the pivotal words and we had pressed the point that you can't say you're different unless you showed it. That, at least, she understood. But when it came to the cover – the element that would signify real in-your-face change – she wanted some dreadful bodge; new and different inside and old and corporate on the outside. The fact that no one would give it time of day and thus negate all we were doing (and spending) passed her by.
She wasn't a stupid woman by any means. We liked her. She just wasn't thinking about the brief or the job. She was too busy trying to second guess what her boss would think of both it and her. So when the day of the big presentation arrived we knew that we couldn't let the bodge happen. And so the cover went into the bag and off we went.
Our ultimate client was old-school personified; no one's fool and a 'name' in his sector. Longevity, was his middle name. She was bricking-it. Her anxiousness was palpable, you could smell it. And so we started our very expensive bout of show and tell and he 'got it' straight away. From the very first board the positive affirmations and comments came thick and fast until he was almost selling it to us. We looked at each other and knowing what the other was thinking I pulled the cover visual out of the bag. Her face went on FF from disbelief, panic, horror and finally to cat-got-the-cream, as she heard him say, 'superb', many, many times over.
She got the adulation she craved.
He got the solution both he and the company needed.
We got the response and result we knew we'd get.
Everyone got what they wanted.
But it took an act of insubordination to make everyone happy.
Clients and their companies are like sandwiches.
At the base there's the support, admin and junior staff. At the top, the CEO, the board and the heads of this and that. And then there's the middle bit, middle management, and generally speaking they're the ones who don't or won't 'get it', because having got to where they are their focus is on staying there or advancement, which means that they won't rock the boat or make waves. They stifle creativity and innovation. Like a failed Vaudeville act, their days are spent trying to persuade the likes of you and me that their powers of telepathy are such that "they know what they will go for".
Not that our side gets off lightly either.
There are those who will just roll over even when they know that they'll end up with a piece of work they'll be less than proud of and a client they'll eventually lose because a competitor or someone will point out your errors and you'll be asked why you didn't 'see it'.
It's a real problem and I'm sure that you have one or two of your own at the moment, so don't roll over.
Instead, visualise my client bounding on-stage to pick up his award with applause ringing in his ears and remember that being bad made it good.
We were presenting the concept for a brochure, which was ground-breaking in its sector (as verified by the subsequent awards, plaudits and plagiarism) for a client who could be described as the original blue-chip company. At the time it was such a departure that our immediate day-to-day client was in a permanent tizzy. Smelling Salts at the ready, we had read the brief back to her on more than one occasion with increasing emphasis on the pivotal words and we had pressed the point that you can't say you're different unless you showed it. That, at least, she understood. But when it came to the cover – the element that would signify real in-your-face change – she wanted some dreadful bodge; new and different inside and old and corporate on the outside. The fact that no one would give it time of day and thus negate all we were doing (and spending) passed her by.
She wasn't a stupid woman by any means. We liked her. She just wasn't thinking about the brief or the job. She was too busy trying to second guess what her boss would think of both it and her. So when the day of the big presentation arrived we knew that we couldn't let the bodge happen. And so the cover went into the bag and off we went.
Our ultimate client was old-school personified; no one's fool and a 'name' in his sector. Longevity, was his middle name. She was bricking-it. Her anxiousness was palpable, you could smell it. And so we started our very expensive bout of show and tell and he 'got it' straight away. From the very first board the positive affirmations and comments came thick and fast until he was almost selling it to us. We looked at each other and knowing what the other was thinking I pulled the cover visual out of the bag. Her face went on FF from disbelief, panic, horror and finally to cat-got-the-cream, as she heard him say, 'superb', many, many times over.
She got the adulation she craved.
He got the solution both he and the company needed.
We got the response and result we knew we'd get.
Everyone got what they wanted.
But it took an act of insubordination to make everyone happy.
Clients and their companies are like sandwiches.
At the base there's the support, admin and junior staff. At the top, the CEO, the board and the heads of this and that. And then there's the middle bit, middle management, and generally speaking they're the ones who don't or won't 'get it', because having got to where they are their focus is on staying there or advancement, which means that they won't rock the boat or make waves. They stifle creativity and innovation. Like a failed Vaudeville act, their days are spent trying to persuade the likes of you and me that their powers of telepathy are such that "they know what they will go for".
Not that our side gets off lightly either.
There are those who will just roll over even when they know that they'll end up with a piece of work they'll be less than proud of and a client they'll eventually lose because a competitor or someone will point out your errors and you'll be asked why you didn't 'see it'.
It's a real problem and I'm sure that you have one or two of your own at the moment, so don't roll over.
Instead, visualise my client bounding on-stage to pick up his award with applause ringing in his ears and remember that being bad made it good.
Monday, 1 July 2013
Nice bark...
A South Korean friend once said that we get the balance of old and new right. That we know how to mix it up. That it's one of our best virtues and values. And I was reminded of this when I saw these at St. Paul's this afternoon. The old and the very different working together in a magical kind of way. It's a living instillation which is designed to make us appreciate the importance of trees, especially, I suppose, in the middle of a major city. We walk by these all the time, but probably fail to really see them, hence the blue. This small visitor from Sweden loved them. Perhaps she was thinking of that Potter chap.
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Heston's toast with egg...on his face
We're returning to a favourite subject because I think that world-class asininity deserves to be acknowledged whenever it is witnessed. Yes, we're going to Little Chef, the company which has had its heart ripped out and stuffed with some over-priced and out-of-reach organic something or other, and then blasted with a blow torch by moonlight on a slab of Portland Stone by Heston and his friends at RCapital.
After six wrong-headed years they've seen the infra-red heating light and shown Heston the emergency exit, because they've finally realised that their customers don't care for his concoctions and they want the kind of food they associate with Little Chef, you know, the stuff its name was built on. At times like this it's hard not to slip into Littlejohn-speak. In fact it can't be avoided. You couldn't make it up!
What happened here was that the vanity and ambition of a chef was fed by a television company, who then blinded the owners with the stardust they sprinkled on them, thus rendering them blind to, as Basil Fawlty so eloquently put it, 'the bleeding obvious'. And it's been fun to watch, but not funny at all if you happen to be one of the people who were made redundant whilst they continued with their redundant repositioning exercise.
The person who has benefited most from this farce is the titular chef, who accrued a lucrative deal with Waitrose (amongst others) on the back of the publicity generated by the Channel 4 programme. The people who have most definitely not benefited are the staff and the customers. Call me quaint, but I don't think it's supposed to be that way around.
Did RCaptial and their consultants do any research at all? And if they did they must have binned it, because even a fleeting chat with their customers would have told them that they were flogging the wrong chef.
This piece in last Sunday's Mail on Sunday was perhaps the best of the bunch and contains some choice quotes from staff and customers alike and the relief that he's now off-menu literally (as of this Monday) and figuratively is tangible. If you missed it it's worth a read so you can quote from it the next time one of your clients acts like they've been on the magic mushrooms.
I can't cook at all, Heston. Even putting something in the oven to warm up carries the possibility of a trip to A&E, but I can make a decent bit of toast. Lovely stuff.
The stuff they want.
After six wrong-headed years they've seen the infra-red heating light and shown Heston the emergency exit, because they've finally realised that their customers don't care for his concoctions and they want the kind of food they associate with Little Chef, you know, the stuff its name was built on. At times like this it's hard not to slip into Littlejohn-speak. In fact it can't be avoided. You couldn't make it up!
What happened here was that the vanity and ambition of a chef was fed by a television company, who then blinded the owners with the stardust they sprinkled on them, thus rendering them blind to, as Basil Fawlty so eloquently put it, 'the bleeding obvious'. And it's been fun to watch, but not funny at all if you happen to be one of the people who were made redundant whilst they continued with their redundant repositioning exercise.
The person who has benefited most from this farce is the titular chef, who accrued a lucrative deal with Waitrose (amongst others) on the back of the publicity generated by the Channel 4 programme. The people who have most definitely not benefited are the staff and the customers. Call me quaint, but I don't think it's supposed to be that way around.
Did RCaptial and their consultants do any research at all? And if they did they must have binned it, because even a fleeting chat with their customers would have told them that they were flogging the wrong chef.
This piece in last Sunday's Mail on Sunday was perhaps the best of the bunch and contains some choice quotes from staff and customers alike and the relief that he's now off-menu literally (as of this Monday) and figuratively is tangible. If you missed it it's worth a read so you can quote from it the next time one of your clients acts like they've been on the magic mushrooms.
I can't cook at all, Heston. Even putting something in the oven to warm up carries the possibility of a trip to A&E, but I can make a decent bit of toast. Lovely stuff.
The stuff they want.
 |
| For you, Heston... |
Friday, 21 June 2013
The perfect contrast
 |
| Wonderful Charlie Chaplin performer on the Southbank, London, today. |
He says nothing but conveys everything and I say too much, by which I mean that I say what others won't. I'm famous for it. It's both a virtue and an inhibitor. I don't set out to be contrary or difficult, it's just my nature. I can't and won't say that black is white when it so obviously isn't. I just can't. Beware the monoculture. You know, when someone, somewhere says, "you're just what we need but you won't fit in" because what they mean is you won't tow the line. So don't take that to heart. Don't think that it's you, because it is most definitely them. Ask yourself, do you really want to work for someone who needs to have that degree of control over you? I don't. If only I had a penny for every occasion that someone had said that to me.
If you have any sense, you recruit people for what they can add, not what they can replicate. So beware. That should be your barometer...always.
I am what I am.
I can't be anything or anyone else. What I am is why I can do what I can do. That applies to you too.
Won't. Can't. Shan't.
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Red, White but never Blue
The noise was terrific and so was the sight of planes old and new flying at very low levels over Covent Garden this afternoon. They were part of a fly-past to mark Trooping the Colour, but most of the people who came to a halt, smartphones and iPads aloft, didn't know that. For a while King Street was a contemporary Pompeii. No one moved. Heads turned upwards. Children silent. All watching the planes. The only noise being the oooh's and ahh's in exclamation of the sheer size of some of the craft and their proximity to them. I was going to Tesco, but I stopped and turned, because I new that 'they' must surely be on their way. Sure enough, an almighty roar and then the hallmark red, white and blue smoke of the Red Arrows. Everyone. But everyone, clapped, cheered and shouted. Big Issue sellers punched the air. Big Lads came out of the Round House pub and cheered. And it seems that this very iconic symbol of Britishness has fans way beyond these shores. It was great to see and experience. And then I met this fine chap and his lady wife leaving Skylon, they having been to the ceremony itself. Don't they look great! No need to dream about winning the lottery, because we already did. We're British.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)