Ged Carroll

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  • Unstuck

    Quick reviews of Unstuck and 11 1/2 Ideas that work.

    I had been meaning to get around to reading this book for a good while. Unstuck is a trouble-shooting guide for situations when you can’t think your way out of a problem or are suffering from inertia. The book was based on a set of flash cards developed by the authors as part of an MBA module that they taught at Harvard.It is quite easy to imagine it as a big decision tree or one of them Dungeons and Dragons books that the geekiest kids at school used to read all the time as you are guided from problem recognition and diagnosis through to resolving the problem in a creative manner.

    The best thing of all, unlike technical support helplines and customer service functions you are not kept on hold for an hour because they are swamped with other callers. Definitely one to keep in the desk drawer.

    11 1/2 Weird Ideas That Work was a book that I read on the way back from Dresden. It is a thinkpiece for managers on how they can further develop innovation within an organisation that is not too corporate in its culture by bringing in disruptive influences and processes – a sort of ‘grain of sand’ in your shoe effect. Sutton is very particular about laying out the parameters of what kind of organisation his techniques will or won’t work for. He cites extensively examples from organisations like design and user experience company IDEO through to small business units in large corporates like phone-tapping technology company Hewlett-Packard.

    Whilst the book makes for interesting reading, applying its ideas successfully may be much harder to do .

  • Everything bad is good for you(sort of)

    I had wanted to read Steven Johnson’s Everything bad is good for you: how popular culture is making us smarter since he gave a talk in association with Demos last year.

    I finally got the chance to read the book on a three-day business trip to Dresden in eastern Germany.

    The proposition of the book is that more complex layered story lines in modern television series such as 24 and many computer games give the people who consume them a different set of skills to the material that appeared in the past.

    Forcing them to deal and understand complex social relationships and hit the ground running without having to see simple plot flags.Even shows like Big Brother and The Real World are supposed to stretch their EQ as they try to make sense of the goings on in the house These new skills also extended to new devices including computer games and internet communications technologies including email and messaging.

    Everything bad is good for you sounds like a grown up version of the excuses that I used to give my parents as a child to unsuccessfully get more TV time. More book reviews here.

    Now I believe in email because it allows users to maintain a larger loose network of contacts that researchers have found to have a number of advantages (and I am a PR tart, so it makes sense for me to try and extend my influence far and wide.)

    However this piece in Popbitch was interesting:

    In sickness and in email

    Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson got married in the South of France last month.

    They read their vows to each other off their Blackberries.

    Who said romance was dead?

    I can just see it now, The bride was wearing an ivory wedding dress with an external bodice and skull detailing to accent her glamous body art and the groom wore Levis and a 1974 Led Zepplin US tour t-shirt.

    Both the bride and groom sported matching BlackBerry Pearl devices.

    A BlackBerry is so essential that you need to take it to your wedding? Please! What about electronic ettiquette?

  • Client conflict

    The US Council of PR is about to talk about the thorny issue of client conflict according to Tim Dyson soon, and Edelman a PR company that has a number of conflicted clients under its roof had decided not to renew its membership. Connection? Some six years ago when I worked at Edelman we used to say that two was a conflict but three was a specialism. This was particularly true with regards to the roster of management consultancies that the technology team had on its books: Arthur D Little, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and DiamondCluster International. I worked on both Cap Gemini and DiamondCluster at the same time.

    It is interesting that Tim Dyson of NextFiveteen mentions Edelman’s expertise in conflicts yet fails to mention his own agency Bite, who in London have Samsung, Toshiba and Apple all in the same building.

    Indeed I write this not to be critical of Edelman’s approach. Instead I just wish there were some clear standards on what was deemed an acceptable way of managing conflicting clients.

    Is the expertise of Bite’s London office not making it around the network despite Clive Armitage and Judy Wilks moving Stateside over the years? And could this targeting of Edelman have anything to do with Richard spurring some cheque book driven growth with the purchase of A+R Partners? ;-)

    As an industry, PR spends a lot of time talking about the value of brand to our clients, but what about our own agency’s brand? I had an interesting experience on Thursday evening at the T3 birthday party; ran into a PR person who was reluctant to admit where they worked.

    Not the usual banter about being reluctant to admit that they were a paid shill in the company of journalists. Not that they tried to hide the fact that they were an in-house PR person so that I didn’t try and beat them into signing a three-year rolling agency-of-record contract with my employer. They were concerned by the reaction of their peers (ok me and my team mate Alex) if they revealed the agency where they worked.

    That’s pretty poor, how can we as an industry expect to be the brand guardians of our clients when we are reluctant to admit where we work?

    UPDATE

    I am going to close out further comments on this post now as both sides have made their point and there is no point in having a flame war by proxy. Understandably if you feel that I’m curtailing the conversation email me at the address listed in the header and I promise to post the best views for and against editiorial censorship on blogs. More on marketing here.

  • Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne


    Blue Ocean Strategy is an easy to read book that I managed to zip through in next to no time at all. Kim and Mauborgne have written a book that is accessible and easy-to-read, cover-to-cover or dip in and out of for reference or inspiration.The book’s premise is that most business strategy books are about conflict and competition and this is wasteful. Instead it provides a framework for strategists to Think Different and differentiate their businesses instead.

    The blue ocean of the title is the space that the business puts between itself and competitors, in contrast to the red ocean from business conflict. A classic example of a red ocean would be the Chinese approach to business. In China you will see competing restaurants right next to each other. The idea is that one might move in. It becomes successful, which encourages others to compete next to them since it is a known successful formula in that area. The neighbourhood of restaurants does bring in diners, but margins are small due to the level of competition. 

    A classic example would be to think about the PC manufacturers. A classic red ocean environment where IBM left due to competitive pressures, HP and Compaq merged to unsuccessfully in a failed effort to leverage the economic benefits of their combined scale and Apple and Dell are the only two long-term profitable success stories through innovation.

    The problem is now that Dell’s process smarts have become the norm and both Apple and HP have used their operational efficiency techniques to improve their own businesses with leaner supply chains and total product customisation.

    I wholeheartedly recommend Blue Ocean Strategy. However the type-a personalities in charge of many organisations that most need to read it, will never touch the book or hear its message and as the bard said there-in lies the rub. More book reviews here. 

  • Yahoo Found + more news

    Yahoo Found 

    Advertising Age has a case study of the Yahoo Found campaign that ran in London.The Yahoo Found campaign was interesting because it used the environment as an interaction with the poster executions to give it an experiential feel.

    The Yahoo Found campaign reasonated for a long time with consumers and we took found arrows on to the streets long after the poster campaign had finished to hijack the Dukes of Hazzard UK fillm premiere, SES London (with the help of Vegas showgirl outfits) and a Harry Potter book launch.

    Running a brand building campaign like Yahoo Found on a sustained basis takes a lot of cojones, especially in a corporate environment. Its a pity that Yahoo Found wasn’t exploited to its full potential.The problem that marketers now face is that brand activating tactics Google Adwords provide a safer option with PowerPoint friendly data that can be dropped into pivot tables and used like a crutch to support their decision-making in the face of a hostile management.

    What this doesn’t capture is brand equity through salience and mental availability which provides more diffuse benefits of preference over time.

    Influential analyst houses

    Interesting survey over at Duncan Chapple’s blog over which analyst houses have the most influence.Whilst the split may may change depending on what tech sector your client is in, its an interesting piece of research; particularly when you see the dominance of US focused players.

    And the fact that a good third of the most influential analysts are in the other category indicating a large amount of fragmented trusted expertise.

    EU roaming charges

    Meanwhile the GSM Association have a handy site that allows you to compare roaming charges when you visit different countries in Europe.

    I tried it using Orange post paid as my settings to have a look at different carriers. What I found interesting was that in the countries that I sampled (Germany, Ireland, Spain, France) there was not price differential between the carriers. Of course this was an unscientific test isn’t at all indicative of price fixing is it?