I can’t believe I haven’t told this war story before … Next week I’ll explain, LinkedIn warrior style, what I think it tells us about management cybernetics, but for a Friday post let’s just have the daft anecdote. I swear that this is 100% morally true, which is to say that many of the details may be a pack of lies, but it describes a real event and this is how it felt to me at the time.
Basically, the relationship between equity sales and equity research is often slightly strained. Salespeople often want analysts to come and meet their clients, but the analysts often have different ideas about how to prioritize their time. And also, the clients who are most keen on meeting analysts are not always the most important ones, and the salespeople whose style leans heaviest on the research department are not always the ones with the best clients. So there’s a tension there – the demands on the time made by the salesforce need to be reconciled with how much marketing (particularly overseas marketing involving time-consuming and unpleasant travel) the research teams are prepared to do.
There are various ways to handle this. At one brokerage firm I won’t name, at a time I also won’t specify, we had a “Trade Fair” (also not the name it was given internally). This was a day of meetings, at which the various research teams would sit down for half an hour with each of the sales teams and sign up to a marketing agenda for the next twelve months, with specific commitments that would be written down and signed by both sides.
As you can imagine, it was usually bad-tempered and hellish. Except for the year I was in charge. A combination of absence and illness had meant that none of the team’s actual leadership could make it to the trade fair, so I was given the job of negotiating for us. This caused a little trepidation ahead of time, but I got the other analysts together and told them I had a strategy, and they had to do what I said. Trade Fair came and went, and it was the most pleasant experience imaginable for us; we got the best feedback from sales possible and were marked down as a particularly “commercial” and “co-operative” franchise.
The strategy was this. Each team member had a pad of paper in front of them, on which I had written the letters “SYDN”. Whenever things started getting tense, or when we were asked something unreasonable, or someone started to recriminate about past promises not kept, I nodded my head, and everyone was to remind themselves of the letters on the paper. Because this was the genius strategy I had outlined in the huddle beforehand.
Say Yes, then Do Nothing.
Basically, the planning exercise was daft, it always had been. Like any plan which falls apart on contact with the enemy, the Trade Fair agreements were out of date the moment the printer toner hit the paper. There were always unforeseen circumstances, deals, market movements, client gains and losses, and so on. Usually no more than three-quarters of the actual personnel would be constant from one plan to another. For this reason, the promises and targets were never followed up or monitored for more than a few weeks, and the actual marketing activity which took place was agreed on an ad hoc basis between individual analysts and salespeople, on the basis of rough reciprocity and favour-banks, the only way it ever possibly could have been. So the sensible thing to do at the Trade Fair was smile and express maximum enthusiasm, agree to all suggestions no matter how daft, in the knowledge that you weren’t promising anything that you might have to deliver.
I was really proud of this strategy; I even put together a book proposal for a sort of comedy management guide, relating it to Winston Churchill’s apocryphal practice of tipping the remnants of his in-tray into his out-tray every evening to see how little ever came back. The only mistake I made was allowing my wife to find out I was doing the same thing to her.
Always employed this strategy with university senior management. Saved me a lot of time and stress.
Reminiscent of Mel Brooks' advice about managing upwards: “I’d learned one very simple trick: Say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot.
After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out”… You say yes, and you never do it.
That’s great advice for life. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.”