The Self Deluders

I don't normally write in detail about sport. Sport business yes but sport performance, very very rarely. Sport and more precisely the business of sport is more than a passion for me, it's a profession.

However, I usually keep my personal opinions, well...personal (haha, that's crap - I didn't even believe it as I was writing it). I rarely keep my opinions to myself and today they turn to the Australian professional cricket community - or as I now like to refer to them, the 'self deluders'.....

The utter train wreck that was this Ashes series will long be burnt into Australia's psyche. For many of us, this was the first time we have suffered such a globally public and shameful 'pantsing', and worst of all it comes at the hands of the old enemy. With the complete and remorseless dismantling of our cricket credentials, England can now rightfully turn its attention to worthy opponents such as India and South Africa who will at least test their mettle.

England is afforded that luxury because they follow the most basic rules of excellence, which include; set challenging goals, self awareness is a virtue, learn from those doing it better (or best) and success only resides in a place where accountability also exists.

For Australia's part, we are working to a different rule book....Cricket Australia, the selectors and the players seem to live on Delusion St.

Rather than Australia nobly coming clean with its public and saying, "look, we are know we are not very good at the moment, we are rebuilding and we are going to try some new strategies and some new players and this may or may not work" they continue to push the, "we trained hard and think we can turn it around at the...(insert name of ashes graveyard venue here)....

Australia must be close to a world ranking below #5. We must come clean with ourselves. We are a very ordinary cricket team. There is some chance we will not win a test (let alone a series) for quite some time, years perhaps, given we have the top 3 teams next on the calendar, AND it will get worse before it gets better. Cricket Australia should remove all of the trophies in their foyer of their Jolimont office and stop talking about the McGrath, Warne, Waugh era. It's gone. GONE!

I have a friend in the my office who finishes every debate on AFL football by saying '16 premierships' about his beloved Carlton. But like our cricket community this cry for past glory actually holds success back. England has shown that records can tumble very quickly. Our successful recent past will quickly fade into pleasant memory but will be a continued reminder of how far we have fallen.

Nobody, least of all me, can say for certain how we have gone from the greatest of all time to pretty awful, so quickly. However if England could move on up from the basement to the penthouse of world sport, to be a genuine leader in just about everything they compete in, we sure as hell can.

It's time for Cricket Australia to put a ban on peripheral activity....IPL, television commercials, et al...for Australian players who are under performing. Great financial success should be a reward for excellence rather than the consolation of mediocrity.

right, time to watch some tennis....

Equality of Opportunity VS Meritocracy

A few days ago I posed you a question via my various social media accounts.

I asked, 'what do you believe in above all else?' The responses I received were really interesting and interestingly, very similar. It made me think about what my 'not negotiable' values are. In the response of wikileaks and the millions of people who have recently demonstrated the importance that free speech plays in their lives, I wanted to figure out what cause or idea resonates the most in my life (and yours, hence the question).

I dismissed general slogans such as Freedom, Equality and Respect as they are obviously important and required ideals in any well functioning society but leave more questions than answers. They have so much grey, so many caveats that they make me uncomfortable.

After much consideration, and like many of you, I couldn't pinpoint one single ideal but rather I settled on two - Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.

Meritocracy is very important to me. It is the idea that reward is given to the person who is most deserving of it. Meritocracy would not allow Prince Charles to rule Britain (and Australia for that matter) purely because of his blood line. It would not allow Sarah Palin to be a potential presidential candidate because of popularity alone. We would ask, ‘is this the best person to do that job?’ I put to you that in both examples above, the answer is no. In fact, in Prince Charles’ case, meritocracy would challenge the very idea of monarchy itself.

In a society ruled by meritocracy in its purest form, where you end up is determined by your ability alone. That seems fair to me. But as you are no doubt now saying to yourselves, 'what is the point of meritocracy if some people have an easier path than others? Of course their outcome will be better.' Quite right you are.

How can meritocracy exist when some people have access to great education and others have none at all? When some people can move passed illness or injury due to world class medical assistance and others are forever plagued with aliments that are easily treated in a more developed or prosperous environments. Surely here, meritocracy is meaningless.

If ability and ability alone determined outcome, as I believe it should, we would (and should) see far more minorities assuming positions of power and success. But we don't. We don't because meritocracy can only work when people start from the same point.

Enter, Equality of Opportunity. This is the idea that everyone is provided the same base from which to build their lives. That does not mean that everyone finishes the same way, like socialism for instance. It represents the idea that everyone is provided the same essential ingredients to succeed (education, health care, food, etc) and then it is up to them to do with that what they can. Some will invariably succeed and other will invariably not but their starting point would not be the determining factor.

Equality of opportunity would mean that all people, regardless of background, culture, language, sex, sexual preference, religion and any other variable you can think of, start the race from the same line.

That too seems fair to me....

Wikileaks - my musings

I know I know you are sick to death of the topic but the wikileaks saga has captured my interest and focus more than anything else has in years.

Some of my thoughts in no particular order:

- The fact that western govs are frantically changing legislation to stop wikileaks from operating, directly indicates that to date, wikileaks has not broken any laws - if they had, they would have just been arrested.

- The information censorship of wikileaks is as oppressive and undemocratic as anything in China, Russia or the middle east. American politicians calling for the assassination of Julian Assange for information distribution should be read as his leaked docs in action...life imitating leaks so to speak....

- Democracy is not a 'choose your own adventure' novel. It doesn't apply in some situations but not in others. Just because the information is hurtful to the govt of the day doesn't make it any less worthy of exposure. The govt is elected by us. they work for us. the information is ours.

- The idea that the information being exposed endangers lives can not be supported by fact. To date no one can point to a single incident of wikileaked info directly leading to deaths of civilians or govt operatives.

-I am yet to be convinced that what wikileaks is doing is any different to what the news organisations used to do, when they were more competent. If the NY Times broke these stories in the 50's would we be listening to the same outcry? No they'd be getting pulitzers.

- The fact that our major on and offline institutions can be coerced to infringe on wikileaks rights without a charge being laid is frightening. we should not be discussing what Zuckerberg and Facebook are going to do with our information, we should be asking what is a democratically elected government doing restricting the rights of a media institution that as not broken a single current law?

Fight on wikileaks, fight on....

I have succumbed....

I have succumbed to business catchphrase clique.

I tried to fight it for so long. The ROI, PPP, CSR set have long espoused ideas which can be neatly wrapped into a cute little box, easily digestible for the rest of us.

I'm afraid it gets worse, much worse. Today I am going to join the ranks of the offenders. I stand before you guilty of a crime against business language.

To that end, I would like to introduce you all to my little friend, ROR.

ROR is simple to say, simple to use and pack one hell of a punch!!!

ROR, or Return on Reach is simply an executive and board tool for determining the extent to which your company drives value in proportion to it's market reach. Measured against a number of variables such as sales, staff cost, advertising spend etc....

For instance, if Facebook with 500 million members (a big big reach) generates $2BN in annual revenue how does that really compare with a single city television network with a maximum market of 9 million homes driving $600 million in revenues? Changes the perception of value and success a little bit, no?

We've been doing some comparisons of media entities, big and small at Mummu HQ and the results are both surprising and fascinating. We are now starting to measure all of our own media assets (and we have few of them) against an ROR criteria - and it works!

So go forth and sing ROR as loudly and proudly as you throw out it's cousins, ROI and CSR....

I feel so cheap and tawdry now....

It's not linear....

There is very little about business, particularly entrepreneurial business that is linear.

Not growth, not opportunity, not investment, not customer relations or brand development. In fact I would go so far as to say that real entrepreneurship, market changing innovation can only occur in a state of controlled chaos.

Controlled Chaos is the state in which guidelines and boundaries exist at the outset... and then explode into new directions, and previously unforeseen outcomes (think of things like distribution channels, customer management, inventory management, risk profile tend to fairly common across industries).

All industries converge when it comes to operating in the consensus view of 'best model practice'. It is not until someone challenges the consensus view and demonstrates true innovation that the market evolves and a new consensus view is established.

Given this, entrepreneurial warriors need not only the appropriate temperament and skill set for operating in chaos, they actually need to be the catalyst for chaos.

A state of chaos serves two distinct benefits for the entrepreneur:

1. It necessitates flexibility, quick thinking and nimbleness

2. It unbalances your competition who are only comfortable competing in the traditional way, across traditional levers. Change the levers and watch them drop the ball on the traditional game as they try to catch up on the new one!

I will come back to chaos again shortly but be weary of the traditionalist third party service provider (lawyer, banker, investor, board member) who dismisses chaos out of hand - just make sure it's controlled....

pipeline (the second epiphany) online paid models...wtf?

I exist in a universe where incredibly the following is unfolding before my eyes....

- The media and advertising landscapes are morphing into something that is changing the relationship between them and their individual and combined relationships with their audiences / customers, FOREVER.

- 'Old world' pipe masters such as News Corp, Fairfax, et al. are trying to use their once heralded commercial domination to perverse the free supply of information online to protect their cash flows (see paid online subscription models at both orgs above)

- Younger generation 'information consumers' will (and are) questioning the need to transfer the old 'pay for information' model into the digital world (thanks Google). After all, why pay for an article from the WSJ if you can search for a topic or article and find information aplenty albeit from a different source (perhaps not as familiar or credible - on the surface).

- Old world pipe masters are STILL trying to pull the same levers as they always have to affect their bottom line - price, cost cutting, subscription, advertising. This begs the question, do they REALLY understand where the value exists in their business?

Let's break this timeline down a little:

• Consumers want free information access
• Advertisers want to 'return on reach'
• Traditional media products are drawing smaller audiences, so
• Traditional media products move online
• Advertisers follow the old masters online (brand recognition) but not with the same fervor
• Traditional media entities now online try to change online consumer behaviour

I hear you all screaming... 'hold on there, Amazon and iTunes make you 'pay to play'. True but they provide you with something tangible that we have always been happy to pay for literature and music. True we used to hand over $2 or a printed newspaper, some (myself included) still do, but information online is an entirely different proposition. Information has NEVER been more accessible, there has NEVER been more of it and truth and quality is no longer the exclusive domain of major media entities. Never in history have so many conflicting voices had an opportunity to share a pulpit.

So what does all of this have to do with pipeline I hear you say.... well, everything.

Pipeline saves traditional media owners from having to turn the www world into an online version of 1985.

Follow the logic....

• Media orgs carry the risk of losing brand loyalists for moving to paid online models
• Media orgs have a growing distressed advertising inventory in traditional formats
• Media orgs are looking to keep advertisers happy and invested in their brand

Hence Rupert Murdoch and his fellow pipeline masters are damned if they do go to paid online subscription (suffer consumer backlash and over time, dwindling authority) and damned if they don't (suffer continued advertising losses). Hmmmm, what's a billionaire to do???

Why the answer is simple my dear Watson....

Change the relationship with your advertisers....remove the master / servant model of the past 60 years and genuinely come together for the same end. The one thing advertisers want is quality reach - not coincidently, this is the one thing pipeline delivers.

The answer comes in the form of the chain...

Pipe - Destination - Consumer Product - Advertiser Product

OWN THE CHAIN, OWN THE CHAIN, OWN THE CHAIN.....

The 'M'

It's a new beginning. Mummu Media is born and the result is that I feel renewed and re-energised. The excitement and challenge of starting from scratch is something I have missed and is a little intoxicating.

The freshness of heady and ambitious plans, a new environment, a new look and being in constant problem solving mode is agreeing with me.

The shift has only been a slightly tangential direction but the day to day result of moving slightly off the well tread path onto a new one has already had a dramatically positive affect.

Commercial artistry is around the corner again....watch out!