Our three Smarter Ways of Working Book Club reviews this quarter offer inspiration for those seeking to break the rules (of business), a further installment of Freakonomics, and the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell.
Despite the presence of Gladwell and the Freakonomics team of Stephen D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner on this list, our Book Club Choice is Players by Tim Harris - a less well known author perhaps, but he’s come up with a wonderful book, packed with tales of sporting figures who re-wrote the rules in their particular sport. We all know how useful a sporting analogy can be in a presentation or document – and here are 250 for you.
In Superfreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner carry on the good work of looking a little closer at the numbers, until they reveal what’s really going on in the world. Among other things, they solve the problems associated with climate change, while reminding us all not to take anything – and definitely not statistics – at face value.
What the Dog Saw is a collection of essays by Malcom Gladwell, all of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. As such, it’s less focussed than his previous books, but takes a similarly individual view on topics including ketchup, dogs and investment strategy, while also answering the tricky question: How Do We Hire When We Can't Tell Who's Right for the Job?
“I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren’t any rules, how could you break them?” Leo “The Lip” Durocher.
This is the great quotation that opens this quarter’s MediaCom Smarter Advertiser Book Club choice: The Players by Tim Harris.
And it’s really the main reason that it is the book club choice. We live in times of enormous change and turmoil in the communications industry. Sacred Cows that have sustained traditional planning and trading practices are tumbling around us, or are being shot down. Rules are changing that have been good practice for business for a decade or more. Purchase funnels have become “pregnant” as selection criteria based on brand saliency is interrupted and expanded by consumer opinions online or by price comparison or aggregator websites. Shared risk trading models are on the table. Creative work will be generated by media owners or by consumers. Paid for search can be a brand builder. A mistake in customer service can be broadcast to hundreds of thousands over Twitter before you even know it has happened.
We all have a role in creating the new rules of engagement for the industry. And so as a bit of inspiration for 2010 we send you this book. It’s about 250 men, women and animals, each of whom transformed at least one major world sport. Famous or infamous, remembered or forgotten, the game was step changed forever by them.
A decade ago I was in a creative work presentation for a car-hire company – the brand leader at the time. The suit who presented the work prefaced it with a picture of the Fosbury Flop – claiming that the ad he was about to show was as game changing as this event. I don’t remember the ad but the story of Dick Fosbury included in this book – the high jumper who went from 48th to 1st at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968 by going backwards over the bar - has stayed with me ever since as an inspiration.
Of the 250 stories in the book everyone will have their own personal favourites. Highlights for me include some very well known ones and some that are so obscure they’ll feed great trivia competitions in the pub as well as acting as inspiration for tough business conditions.
The well know of course include Muhammed Ali who Harris claims invented rap as well as being a boxing revolutionary. There is Michael Jordan, who is the most marketed sporting star ever. Nike paid him an initial $500,000 with the potential for more to endorse their “Primetime” boots with air pockets. The Air Jordans sold $100m in one year alone netting Jordan $20m.
Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike features in the list too. I was aware of his business success but unaware of his management style. Harris cites Brendan Foster who was President of Nike under Knight and who described him as a “black hole” sucking in ideas and expressing nothing.
I had not heard of Masaru Furukawa. An Olympic swimmer he was pretty much uncatchable in the pool in the mid 1950s. He exploited the then rules to swim underwater. On one afternoon in 1955 he set four world-record times. After he won the 1956 Olympic 200 metres title the international swimming authority decided that the style was dangerous, dull to watch and impossible to officiate and changed the rules. But for the short term he was unbeatable. I’m definitely going to start asking “Can we do a Furukawa?”.
As a final snapshot there’s Mick the Miller the greyhound who for a time made the dogs a more popular sport than even football. It wasn’t that he was fast (although he could run 12 times his own body length in a second). What won him so many fans was that he had judgement too – and he used his tail as a rudder to gain position round the curves of the race track. “Though scientists claim that dogs are merely instinctive reactors, those who saw Mick race believed him to be twice as clever as any other dog, able to win from any position”.
This book is a rich source of analogy and of inspiration. The stories of some of sport’s greatest achievers deliver all kinds of brilliance to borrow from. Some are around subversiveness and opportunism. Some feature villains. Others are about people of principle who stood up for what was right even at great personal cost.
We hope you enjoy it and wish you a successful and prosperous New Year.
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What could be better than the best selling Freakonomics? SUPERfreakonomics – that’s what. This instalment of microeconomics is an easy and entertaining read that is sure to start some heated dinner party debates. Our insightful writers share their different view on everything from tailored pricing for services provided by prostitutes in Chicago and the real reason there are so many unplanned births in India, to the simple cures for the hospital deaths of women in labour and the climate crisis.
The common theme that threads these enjoyable real life accounts together is that our interpretation of ‘the numbers’ - they do not always tell the true story. We have all heard our finance director declare “the devil is in the detail” and do you know what, they might just be right. Too often we skim a series of numbers, an in depth effectiveness study or indeed the daily news and derive our own conclusions to a situation. In many cases the ones that reflect populist opinion. In this book, our writers take the effort to dig deeper and uncover what is really going on but is being blurred by the statistics.
Having a better understanding of what the numbers are really telling you helps you;
Understand your audience: the age and race of a customer determines the price of sexual favours in downtown Chicago.
Adapt your product to your consumer: a condom specifically tailored for Indian men will reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies.
Reframe your message: to reduce the mortality rate during child birth was to instruct doctors to wash their hands between leaving the autopsy room and entering the labour ward.
Have faith that sometimes the cheapest and easiest answer is quite often right: a 300m rubber tube floating in the ocean to disrupt global winds and almost eradicate the threat of hurricanes.
This book is a fun read that makes the reader think twice about what is true while opening the their eye to what alternate narrative the numbers may be trying to tell them. Oh, and it will once again demonstrate how closely related we are to monkeys.
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I approached reading this excellent tome with some trepidation. I had never read Gladwell cover to cover before and have always felt him to be a little bit over-hyped. He has been prolific in his ad-land friendly pop-sociology, but how much of the content has really stuck? Was he an essayist who had stretched himself too far when going into three hundred plus pages?
I learned two things in reading ‘What the Dog Saw’. Firstly that Gladwell is brilliant over twenty five pages and secondly that his articles have an incredibly endearing quality to them; rooting truths about contemporary society in accessible personal stories. He reminds us that being curious and developing a passion for explanation are crucial to anyone who relies on influencing people’s decision making to make a living.
‘What the Dog Saw’ is a collection of Gladwell’s best pieces for the New Yorker from 1996 to the present day. The topics covered range from the identification of dangerous dog breeds through to the unique properties of Heinz Tomato Ketchup. Gladwell uses the quirky narratives to communicate a discovery about human behaviour and the way we explain and categorise it.
The book starts with a eulogy to a family of highly driven, obsessively inventive, makers of kitchen gadgets. They grew their business on the basis of ‘Heath-Robinson’ style experimentation to build the ultimate food processor, vegetable slicer or oven; efforts matched only by their passionate pitching of these products either face to face or via QVC.
What we learn is the triumph and tragedy of people who are fanatically driven and operate in a very specific ‘world’. The ability to sell millions via TV home shopping being the culmination of turbulent family relationships as they strove to manufacture and sell better and better kitchen products.
On one level there is probably something for all of us to learn from their inability to see a bigger picture in life. However, the real moral of the story for people in the marketing communications business, will be to not underestimate the power of a pitch to the punters rooted in a performance of personal conviction (no matter how old fashioned an idea it may seem).
Gladwell also explains that despite superior ingredients and manufacturing processes, no other brand can displace Heinz Ketchup. The crux of the story is that competitors have missed the point that Heinz Ketchup is loved for tasting like itself (prepare to understand your tongue better) and the formative experience it delivers to children and rivals that have tried to fight on quality and ‘out-tomato’ Heinz were bound to fail.
Other favourites of mine from ‘What the Dog Saw’ include the story of hair colouring advertising and the battle between Clairol (Does she or doesn’t she?) and L’Oreal (Because I’m worth it), in the context for the battle for liberation fought by American women in the workplace and in ad agencies in the late twentieth century. I also loved the exploration of the weakness of prevailing techniques for hiring and identifying future star performers that compares the US college football draft with training primary school teachers.
I urge you to read this book – preferably on your way into the office. Each article will simultaneously make you smile and offer you up some nuggets of insight that could change the way you approach a problem that day. After reading this I was able to both impress my wife with an explanation of the importance of ‘umami’ to her taste buds and bore one of my friends on the poverty of McKinsey’s advice to the now disgraced Enron on its hiring policy. Surely worth a couple of hours of anyone’s time!
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