My unreasonably fair lady

Ask anyone to name an Irish author and you might get Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. And

not much else.

But if you were to ask the Man on the Clapham Omnibus to name anything written by Shaw you might get ‘My Fair Lady’.

It wasn’t.

That was Lerner and Loewe.

But he did write ‘Pygmalion’, the play on which the musical is based.

His name might be famous but famous for what.

Yet this was a man who wrote more than 60 plays.

Including ‘Man and Superman’, ‘Arms and the man’, ‘Major Barbara’, and ‘Saint Joan’.

And he is the only person to have been awarded a Nobel Prize (for literature) and an Oscar (for best adapted screenplay) for his film adaptation of his play ’Pygmalion’.

He had nothing to do with ‘My Fair Lady’ which appeared 3 years after his death.

But Shaw was far more than a playwright.

He wanted to change society, not through revolution, but through a gradual promotion of socialism.

He was a leading light in the Fabian Society which became the foundation philosophy of the Labour Party

He was a man of vision and championed many causes unpopular at the time but which we now take for granted.

He wanted to change society, to change the world, to make it a better place.

A man determined to leave his thumbprint on the world around him.

He spoke for a woman’s right to vote which begat Margaret Thatcher.

He promoted universal healthcare which begat the NHS.

He championed a minimum wage which begat the Living Wage, a cause now taken up by George Osborne.

And he sought the abolition of hereditary privilege which begat the introduction of Life Peers.

He helped establish the London School of Economics.

After death he even funded a new alphabet, the Shavian Alphabet, to address the vagaries of English spelling.

He was not a man to accept the world as it was.

He wanted a better world, a different world. He wanted society, the world to change, to progress. And he would use his skills as a writer, as an essayist and a lecturer to bring this about.

But his most impactful words appear in ‘Maxims for Revolutionaries’ in ‘Man and Superman’:

‘The reasonable adapts himself to the conditions around him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man’

You might describe these words as at the heart of Shaw’s approach to life.

And a philosophy adopted at great personal cost by Rosa Parks to end segregation in America; by Nelson Mandela to end apartheid; even by Tim Berners Lee to improve our lives through the World Wide Web.

This has to be the most important quote in the world. Ever. For anyone wanting to challenge and change.

And that is why it behoves us all to be unreasonable. To adapt the world to ourselves. In everything we do.

How unreasonable are you going to be today?

Hold your horses

In 1942 Britain after 3 years of war was almost on its knees.

Since 1940 it had been fighting Germany on its own.  And although the USA and Russia had now joined in, it was still having to fight and resist on three fronts.

In Europe. In the Middle East. In the Far East.

As a consequence Britain was facing a manpower crisis. It was under pressure to find more fit men of fighting age for its army, navy and air force.

Without taking too many men from vital war industries.

To find the men it needed the War Ministry initiated a review of everything it did to identify duplicated and needless tasks.

This is the kind of thing that today many businesses hire expensive consultants to do to strip out costs.

One of the activities reviewed was the manpower requirements needed to fire a field gun.

The study concluded that it required four trained artillery men to do this.

And yet each battery contained five men.

No one knew why each battery was fully staffed with five. But the commanders insisted that each battery required five men because that was the standard artillery doctrine, the way it had always been done.

With equal adamance those doing the research argued that only four were needed.

A stalemate ensued between the advocates of the status quo and the advocates of progressiveness.

Until some eagle-eyed subaltern identified the reason for the extra man.

For centuries artillery had been taken into battle by horses.

And on the battlefield someone was required to hold onto the horses so that they did not flee when the cannons started noisily to fire.

This was the role of the fifth man.

There was only one problem.

In the years between World War 1 and World War 2 virtually all the horse drawn artillery units had been mechanised. Artillery was no longer taken into battle by horses. There was no longer any horses  to hold. There was no need for a fifth man.

This was a sacred cow.

But it is not just in the military that you will find dogged logic, persistent thinking. Many brands, many businesses share these traits.

A common set of beliefs can be a strength for any brand but having a dominant logic can lock the brand into a narrow way of thinking. And can lead to group think.

This is not good.

We need to develop and systemise an uncommon sense. A different way at looking at the business and its markets.  New thinking to provide competitive advantage.

But to get there requires the sacred cows, the common assumptions of the business and the market in which it operates to be identified, challenged, tested and destroyed.

And by discarding the sacred cows when examination exposes them to be untrue, a brand can liberate itself.

Sam Walton was once told that you don’t place ‘good sized discount stores into little one horse towns’. He did.

And he credited his success to his destruction of this market assumption, this sacred cow.

So what are the things that you never question or challenge in your business, in the markets you serve?

Making a list of these will be a start.

To ensure you are not the one left holding the horses.

Stuff your face

How many hot dogs can you eat in 12 minutes?

Believe it or not the World Record is 62.

Every year there is a contest to determine the fastest speed eater of hot dogs. The challenge is to see who can eat the most hot dogs in 12 minutes.

For years and years the record had steadily crept up, one hot dog at a time.

By 2000 the record stood at 25 hot dogs. Still impressive.

The technique adopted by most competitors had stayed the same year after year.

It was simple.

To stuff as many hot dogs as greedily and as quickly into the mouth as possible.

Presumably he or she with the biggest mouth won.

In the early years of the new Millennium a new face had come onto the scene. He adopted a new approach.

For Takeru Kobayashi it was not just about speed. It was about breaking down the approach and seeking improvements across the technique.

Instead of eating the hot dog whole, he tried breaking it in half. He found that it gave him more options for chewing, and freed his hands to improve loading.

Then he experimented with eating the dog and bread separately.

Next he tested dipping the rolls in water, then water sprinkled with vegetable oil, then he videotaped his training sessions. All designed to help find new ways to eat a hot dog as quickly as possible.

Finally he looked to find different ways of chewing and swallowing to create space in his stomach in order to avoid vomiting.

In 2000 when he first turned up to compete he didn’t look the part. He was slight and short, unlike his supersized competitors who had been gorging on hot dogs for years.

He wasn't taken seriously at first.

But he smashed the competition and the world record out of sight, eating an incredible 50 hot dogs.

In one year he had doubled the world record.

This thinking, this approach is called Marginal Gains Theory.

Where the little things matter.

Where by looking for continuous improvement across all the small things we do, we can create a cumulative effect that can be significant and substantive.

And by breaking down the process and the thinking into its constituent parts we can find new ways of thinking, new approaches, to the challenge. Finding marginal gains as we go.

Each gain might be small but the cumulative effective can be revolutionary. Transformative.

All it requires is a creative and marginal gain mindset and the will to challenge established ways of doing things.

And if it can work in improving hot dog performance, it can work in improving marketing performance.

Where are your marginal gains?