How the mighty fall

Cicero is pleased to report that he is still here.

Despite last week’s tad controversial thoughts on how to improve airport security while making it easy, straightforward and hassle free for the majority of us to continue to fly, the world has not ended nor the roof caved in. Although it is understood that there are teams of hit men form the sub polar regions out looking for your guide, your muse and your mentor as we speak. Hopefully you will continue to hear words of wisdom and profound common sense next week.

Strangely Cicero is still awaiting the call from those charged with airport security requesting his advice, hints and tips. It can only be a matter of time.

For some strange and bizarre reason, Cicero has been spending a lot of time recently thinking about Sir Fred Goodwin, the erstwhile Head Honcho at Royal Bank of Scotland. This is not some bizarre fetish for Celtic bankers that is being exposed here but a curiosity to understand what drives the mighty who have achieved greatness onto fail, and in Sir Fred Goodwin’s case, to fail mightily.

As the Homeric tradition teaches us, was this yet another case of Icarus flying to close to Jupiter’s winged chariot while Daedulus watched?

At the heart of business failure is hubris, a pride born of success. Your previous success as a business and as a leader makes you arrogant and complacent. You become insulated by success and fail to appreciate the extent to which luck plays its part in your success. Consequently you over-estimate your own capabilities.

Is any of this ringing true for you, Sir Fred?

And from this flows the undisciplined pursuit of success. The discipline you have exerted to this point, whether it be financial, operational or creative, you start to abandon. Extravagant decision making follows. See ABN Amro, purchase of.

When you see this going on around you, when a business starts to build fountains, marble colonnades and statues, get out and get out quickly. Hubris is now at epidemic proportions.

Still with me, Sir Fred? Note Sir Fred, a sure giveaway, unless you acquire such monikers for humility these days.

From this point on decline although not inevitable has set in and it will take a strong leader with humility to spare who can prevent this. Negative data starts to be discounted and the positive accentuated and spun to great effect. The business and its Head Honchos are now in denial and blame is assigned to external factors. See also British Prime Ministers and their Chancellors.

The business with decline apparent will start to grasp at straws taking more and more risks searching for that magic bullet, which rarely exists, to provide the route to salvation. Each knock back, each failure, each false dawn, will erode financial strength and organisational spirit and morale. The end is nigh. And as we have seen the decline and the end can happen at frightening speed. See Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, any government owned UK bank, Iceland, Leeds United.

Could Sir Fred, or any other corporate Icarus, have avoided his, or her in these enlightened times, fate?

Yes. The answer is not to think of you as a great leader. To do so is the kiss of death for any Head Honcho and the business he, or she, leads. Head Honchos must demonstrate real humility. It is not about them, it is about their business. Head Honchos who succeed take responsibility for their results rather than the credit for the good times and blaming external events for the bad. Rise and fall are both self inflicted and both are within our own control.

And so the next time you see a Head Honcho feted and celebrated and garlanded, and enjoying it, you can be sure that company is doomed, certain that the mighty are about to fall. You mark Cicero’s fine words.

One last thought for all us budding leaders. What applies to Head Honchos also applies to leaders throughout the business who are not quite Head Honchos. Personal decline and business decline is down to what we do to do to ourselves. You have been warned.

Is it only me…..who thinks that the eco-mentalists have been lying to us and who is pleased their lying theories have been exposed?

If you are an eco-mentalist or a fully paid up member of the Green Gestapo you might like to stop reading at this point.

For if you are one of these, you must these days feel like an atheist arriving at the Pearly Gates to be greeted by St Peter saying to you ‘you must feel a proper Charlie’. It is now clear that for years you have been wearing the Emperor’s new clothes. And for years you have played fast and loose with the facts to exert enormous, and substantially fraudulent, influence on governments and on all our lives. I hope you are hanging your heads in shame.

First we have the eco-mentalists sexing up their facts, their e-mails and their dodgy dossier of spurious scientific tosh to support the argument that the weather was warming up. Guys, there are people in government who would be proud of you. Next time we want to start an illegal war we will know where to come.

And as if that was not bad enough it now appears that the UN Nobel prize winning climate change team got a key fact wrong. It now seems that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to disappear.

What else have you got wrong? What other tosh have you been peddling? What else has been distorted and made up?

Is it any wonder that many of us now believe that the eco-mentalists, relishing their 15 minutes in the low carbon footprint spotlight, are perpetuating a conspiracy to exaggerate the effects of climate change, global warming, or whatever wonky weather is being called this week.

Now that your lies, your frauds, your scientific hyperbole, have been exposed, is it only me who wants the eco-mentalists to get out of our lives?

Stop influencing governments to us tax back to the Stone Age in the name of eco-mentalism. Let me drive a 4x4 if I want to; get a plastic bag in the shop for free when I need one; fly whenever and wherever I want, subject of course to the airport stasi concluding that I am not going to blow the plane from the sky.

Wonky weather happens. It has been happening for millennia. It will happen for countless more millennia. And there is nothing we can do about it. It happens. Get over it.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.

Eeny, meeny, miny,mo

Salvete, amici.

It seems that you think that the non appearance of these musings on account of the recent inclement weather was considered by you a pretty lame excuse. How could the populus even consider that Cicero might hide behind the weather? But if you do think that then please accept these humble words of apology.

However given the level of disruption produced by a few snow flakes and the rush to inaction in so many areas induced by the health and safety issues inherent in said snow flakes, it is surely not totally inappropriate that Cicero’s non appearance might be a part of this trend.

Anyway the weather this week has been so much kinder making non appearance inexcusable.

There have also been questions asked about an update on the lifts in the TSSB. Happily, and unlike many other items of the nation’s infrastructure brought to its knees by the recent spate of wonky weather, the lifts have worked magnificently well and all lifts continue to operate satisfactorily. Yes, you did read it right. All lifts are working. One more reason for the apparatus of the state to work at its best on your behalf. Have you noticed the difference? An improvement in your security perhaps? Enhanced quality of public services, maybe?

And before moving on, Cicero would like to thank the devotee who gave Cicero a biography of oneself. It is a mightily good read. Cicero is indebted even though it is very weird reading about oneself in the words of another.

Do you remember Cicero’s Marketing Professional friend or MPF? Last week Cicero was sheltering with said MPF from the inclement weather in a local taverna discussing what makes great marketing.

What a great topic.

For Cicero great marketing is about making choices. It is being clear about what you are going to do and what you are not going to do; who your brand is going to serve and who you won’t; what your brand will stand for and what it won’t.

Anything else is beige marketing. And matt beige at that. It is drab, insipid and uninspiring. It might be done well but it is not great marketing. Quite frankly it is dull.

Great marketing for Cicero means being clear about whom you want your potential customers to be and who they are not. It means understanding their emotional and functional needs and defining and segmenting them on this basis. Great marketing is based on targeting specific clusters of shared needs.

And it means tight targeting. Great marketing is built on keeping the faith and accepting that targeting fewer customers means better results. And this is delivered when the demands of the sales and finance directors for more and more power, in true USS Enterprise fashion are strongly and decisively resisted Sometimes the marketing just ‘cannae take it, captain’. Sometimes great marketing might even mean devoting time and money to excluding people from your brand if it serves the business better.

Finally great marketing is based on a single minded 3 word positioning that eschews triangles, pyramids and wheels. It is being crystal clear about what the brand stands for, a definition that is tight, unambiguous and waffle free, and based on a meeting the needs of a well defined cluster of potential customers.

And that’s it. It’s all about choice and keeping faith to your choice. Great marketing might not be as random or as chancy as eeny, meeny, miny, mo but the principle is pretty much the same.

It seemed to satisfy Cicero’s MPF who returned to his TSSB to start to make his choices.

Is it only me?

It was interesting to see over the Xmas period the international response to the latest potential terrorist outrage in the skies over America. Of course the knee jerk response by all governments, including this one, was to improve security at airports which is rapidly becoming a byword for increased inconvenience and hassle for all. Indeed the level of hassle we are experiencing now when we try to fly is becoming such that it is this rather than the barmy arguments over the effects of flying on wonky weather which might give the eco-mentalists their greatest victory and reduce flyers which they claim are biggest nuisance to our weather. How ironic.

Is it only me who resents the increasing levels of hassle by over officious security personnel at airports when trying to fly?

It is about time that all those responsible for adding layer upon layer upon layer of inconvenient security measures so that they are seen to be doing something, realised that the vast majority of people who fly have done and are doing nothing wrong.

It is about time that they realised that it is not the Eskimos or retired librarians from Nether Wallop or stressed and harassed families trying to reach Disneyland or other continental sunspots that are threatening lives and blowing up planes.

If you really want to protect us all, minimise the hassle we all face and allow us to enjoy the airport experience, might I implore the authorities to look for the tell tale risk indicators, and hassle and inconvenience those who appear risky. Body scan them. Get them to remove their shoes, coats, belts and just about anything else that can be removed. Strip search the risky ones, with rubber gloves if necessary.

If that means we have to be a wee bit non PC, good. I’m all for that. I just don’t like being assumed guilty until some electronic gizmo gives me the all clear. It is frankly annoying, de-grading and hugely inconvenient. And I’m not sure it even works.

If we have computers that can predict the climate is going to hot up decades hence, that the oceans are going to rise 27 inches over the next 47 years and even the thickage of the Polar ice cap 61 years and 8 months hence, surely we can identify those most likely to be willing to blow an airlines from the sky and subject them to a lot of annoying, fruitless, and time wasting hassle and inconvenience.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus.

I have seen the future and it works

Happy New Year to you.

Or as the Celtic tribes from across Hadrian’s Wall will say ‘lang may yer lum reek’ which translates as ‘long may your chimney smoke’. Nope, don’t know why either.

And apologies if you rushed to this site last week eager to have your Cicero fix. You must have been bitterly disappointed. Sadly Cicero was defeated by the weather conditions. But now Cicero is back and the year can continue from where we left off prior to the Saturnalian revels. It is good to be back and to commune with you again.

Hopefully you have survived the recent and continuing bout of dodgy weather. This is not the time to be smug and gleeful but there is a degree of shadenfreude to be enjoyed watching the so called climate experts try to explain away the recent snow drifts when we are supposed to be facing cataclysmic global warming. Have you noticed how there is now a distinction being drawn between climate and weather? How much snow needs to fall, how far does the temperature need to plummet, how much ice does there need to be on our cars in the morning, before we acknowledge that global warning is just wonky weather? Given that our meteorologists now have their own dodgy and sexed up dossier to rival Blair’s, it can’t be long now.

But enough of the weather.

Cicero has seen the future and it works.

Regular and devoted aficionados of these musings will know that Cicero has long predicted the demise of monologue advertising as practised by many big brands. And for Cicero the future is all about developing communication programmes which practice the art of 4 C Marketing-communications which encourage co-creation, collaboration, conversation and communities. This kind of 4 C marketing is especially relevant, but not exclusively so, when a brand wants to get down and mix it with the kids or with the yoof, innit.

Now for many marketing directors and their teams it is all about size, the size of their marketing budgets, that is. For with big budgets you can run big expensive glossy advertising programmes that are seen by millions; or you can undertake huge direct marketing programmes which carpet bomb hallways across the land with the precision of a B49 bomber in Vietnam; or have your brand on more street corners than inebriated women on a hen night.

But recently Cicero was privy to a 4 C marketing campaign which reached fewer people than have toes and fingers. And which worked in delivering its objectives. And also in winning a fair few effective marketing awards, which are the best kind to win unless you are a true advertising ab fab luvvie.

The campaign in question was for the RNLI, the people who pull you from the sea when you are on the verge of drowning, who wanted the yoof to become more aware of their work. And it did this by engaging in their world through their influencers and through their channels. It wanted to take them on a journey to show that the values of today’s yoof were indeed closely aligned with those of the RNLI, despite the media portrayal of naughty yoof stereotypes.

And to do this it identified a dozen or so key yoof bloggers and sent them unbranded parcels and hoodies and encouraged them to blog about the ‘mystery parcel’ and to challenge yoof stereotypes. The RNLI was off and running and a viral yoof conversation was swiftly underway, a community formed and the yoof audience instantly involved in the co-creation and collaboration to define the true values of today’s yoof. Eventually the brand was revealed and the experience of the brand and its values demonstrated and brought to life.

This is not the forum to do no more than outline the mechanics of the campaign, you are a busy person with a life to lead, but you will no doubt be unsurprised to learn that the Ciceronic blog was excluded from participating in this campaign, much to Cicero’s bemusement and annoyance.

Did it work? Yes. The content generated by the campaign was seen over a million times, over 11% of yoof audience saw the material and even newspapers covered the developing story. Not bad for the price of 12 packs.

As said above, Cicero has seen the future and it works. And it also just goes to prove that you really can teach an oldish dog new tricks.

Is it only me?

The other day I was sitting at my desk in my Top Secret State Bunker, or TSSB, minding my own business but of course worrying ceaselessly about your safety and security, when the taxpayer funded phone on my State supplied desk rang. It was another apparatchik ringing from his TSSB.

Naturally I was expecting to discuss important matters of State or at least a review of the body politic. All I got was some chit chat about our respective states of well being. But after a bit we finally moved onto the coup de grace of the discussion and the real purpose of the call and it was…..wait for it…..and I kid you not…..to be informed that I was to be sent an e-mail later in the day to arrange for said apparatchik and myself to meet and to swap war stories and tales of malfunctioning lifts from our respective TSSBs.

Yes, you heard it right. The purpose of the call was to warn me that an e-mail was wending its electronic way to me. How absurd is that? Very, in my book.

Do we do act like this with any other form of communication? It is no wonder that our in boxes are full to bursting each and every day. It is no surprise that server capacity is close to saturation with pointless e-mails like the one I am to receive, with cheap promotions for dysfunctional penile remedies and off colour Tiger Woods jokes.

E-mails were supposed to make our lives easier but I can only wonder at the high level of inefficiency in built to our communication processes if we are constantly making phone calls to warn of the impending arrival of an e-mail. It defies even my logic that it was not possible to conclude our arrangements when we were communing on the telephone instead of waiting for my e-mail missive to arrive which will no doubt generate a flurry of e-mails as we make our arrangements. And all the while my attention is diverted and your security and well being imperilled.

But then of course it might only be me.

Have a great week.

Sis felix. Et sis fortunatus. Semper.

Its snow fun!!!

Due to the continuing adverse weather and for health and safety reasons, Cicero Speaks will not appear this week. Cicero would like to apologiese for letting his fans and devotees down. Subject to health and safety, Cicero will be here next week.