My last post about Irony reminded me of a list of nine different types of joke that I got from a comedy scriptwriting book. They are:

• Exaggeration – I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate. Some people have a stream of consciousness, mine’s more of a puddle
• Word Play – He had engine trouble – he was hit by a train. The footballer had car trouble – on the way to the ground a fan belted him
• Pun – In the event of fire, inform any ember of the staff
• Twisted Cliché – People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones
• Reverse Gag – My garage told me to keep the oil but change the car
• Illogical Logic – I tried to put a Euro in the parking-meter for my German car
• Insult – If your suggestion was a light-bulb you might have the faintest idea. You’re so un-hip – why doesn’t your bum fall off?
• Sex Gag – Save your breath for blowing up your girlfriend
• Topical – Home secretary Alan Johnson is reducing police paperwork by making the forms smaller.

If you want to apply these you simply make a list of words and phrases relating to your chosen subject. Here’s mine about “the Brits”:

Hooligans, Irony, Beer, Stiff Upper Lip, Mrs Thatcher, Cross of St George, Island Race, Tea-drinking, Bad Food

Then try each one with each joke type:

In England, they order their food, pay and then run off without eating it (Bad Food/Reverse Gag).

You can hear some more like these in my radio play “The Archie and Cilla Show”.

Have funny!

Some years ago, I was trying to explain the British (or more specifically, the English) sense of irony to a German. Because he was an engineer and much given to scientific method, we created the grid shown above to set the concept within the general context of “jokes.”

We decided that, whatever our nationality, we can make jokes about ourselves and about others. These jokes can be about a permanent or a temporary condition. This gave us three different joke types:

• Two stereotypical types of joke, where the “permanent condition” is indicative of a national or cultural characteristic. For example, on seeing the proverbial glass, an optimist says it’s half-full. The pessimist says it’s half-empty. But the German says its 50% over-engineered. Regardless of who makes this joke (self or others, a German or me) its still about one of their national characteristics, the stereotype of reliable (see VW ad ) engineering
• What I call “clowning” where the joke is about myself and concerns a temporary condition. Once, whilst running a session, I had to pause part way through an explanation because I was unable to pull the top off my flip-chart pen. I announced that the pen was the Excalibur of felt-tips and I would never be King… Despite the pre-requisite knowledge of Arthurian legend and a tone more tragic than comic, my remark showed a willingness to let others have a little fun at my expense
• The delightfully named “Schadenfreude” – or joy from others’ sadness. A man walks into a bar. Ouch! It was an iron bar. Includes fart jokes (embarrassment), banana skins and other physical comedy scenes.

To illustrate the concept of irony, my German colleague and I chose the topical subject of Iraq. Having spent the spring and summer of 2003 defending UK foreign policy to my colleagues from the rest of Europe, I’d arrived at a stock response:

The British are an island race. Tony Blair says: “I land troops wherever George Bush tells me to.”

Taking one definition of verbal irony – that speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves – I suggested setting this joke up with an opening assertion:

The British attitude to European unity can be understood by the fact that we are an island race. (This implies that there are geographical and historical reasons for our permanent condition of separateness.) Tony Blair says: “I land troops wherever George Bush tells me to.” (The punchline contradicts the original meaning by showing that our permanent condition is in fact to be in thrall to the US.)

The skill in using irony, we concluded, lies in how well the speaker subverts stereotypical expectations. A criticism of “us Brits” is that it’s often hard to know when we are being serious – we say one thing and then immediately go on to imply the opposite. This may explain the stereotype about our notorious “sense of humour.” No one gets irony the way we do…

This gave us a fourth category to add to our grid:
• The ironic stereotype where a permanent condition of self or others changes meaning in the telling.

Take the ever-popular subject of beer. It’s an old stereotype in the rest of the world that our beer is inferior to other nations’ products:

English beer tastes so bad its best to pour it straight down the toilet and cut out the middle-man.

By incorporating another stereotype – the notion of British inefficiency – we can mean the opposite of what we say:

English beer is a wonderful example of British efficiency – it tastes so bad its best to pour it down the toilet and cut out the middle-man.

So now you know. How to make funny jokes and both use or fully appreciate irony. Handy, eh?

Every time I pass a pub now, there’s a morbid fascination to see how busy it isn’t.

Occasionally, I’ll go into one and have a drink. I like proper beer but it makes me fat and, more immediately, drunk.

Following the sad demise of the automatic hand dryer – a roaring noise, a vertical gale of warm air and cold wet hands which you could dry by running through your newly deranged hairstyle in a vain attempt to restore it to some semblance of order – lots of pubs have paper towels. Such is their pathological need to not run out before closing time, they cram the dispenser so full that the first tentative tug usually brings a dozen or more out in one clump. So the very act of overfilling means they run out sooner, I always conclude. This is known as the law of unintended consequences.

Another example of this was the Beer Orders which appeared in the UK in the early 1990s. At the time most pubs were owned by big brewers, and appeared to be taking advantage of a monopoly situation. The legislation was intended to force brewers to sell off most of their pubs, and to allow those they retained to sell at least some beer from small independent brewers. It imagined a return to idyllic pubs with owner landlords all selling local brews. It bombed. Some of the brewers decided they preferred owning pubs and sold the brewing side, most of the pubs that were sold went in bulk to new, huge pub-owning chains. Brewers consolidated even further. Choice went down. Forced to buy expensive beer from the huge PubCos in return for ostensibly cheap leases, landlords were caught by first cheap supermarket alcohol and then by the smoking ban. So the pubs closed down.

But, whilst sleeping off last night’s football-fuelled beerfest this morning, the Radio Four current affairs fairy whispered something magical in my ear – the growing number of breweries in the UK made it the “undisputed top brewing country in the world”.

“Britain has more small craft breweries per head of population than all other major industrialised countries; but it also offers tremendous choice,” said Roger Protz, editor of the Good Beer Guide.

“While most other countries offer mainly mainstream lagers, Britain has enormous diversity – milds, bitters, strong ales, porters, stouts, barley wines, old ales, Christmas ales, spring beers, golden ales and harvest ales to name just a few.”

So, much like Yellow Pages, the law of unintended consequences is not just there for the nasty things in life and apart from the usual screw-ups (step-forward Financial Services Act) and Murphy’s Law (the first spill in months is always on your new, expensive carpet, shirt or tablecloth), those awfully nice Wikipedia peeps describe a third category - a positive unexpected benefit, usually referred to as serendipity or a windfall.

So if I pass a pub these days, serendipitously open, there are lots of great beers to drink. That’s why I get so pissed I can’t work the towel dispenser. Why do they fill those things so full? What a waste, no wonder they’re often empty. Hmm – my hair looks kind of windswept…

Five reasons to read “The Junior Officers Reading Club” by Patrick Hennessey (published by Allen Lane)

1. Though we’ve successfully wedged the i-pod speakers into the dashboard of the WMIK (a weapons mounted installation kit: a stripped-down and up-gunned Land Rover) the combination of wind and static crackle on the radio is drowning out even Metallica’s ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ which – after extensive debate – has pipped Too Many DJs Prodigy vs Enya ‘Smack My Bitch Up (Orinoco Flow)’ as the soundtrack of choice for our first foray ‘OUT’ (page 21)
2. The RAF crew as we’d landed had capitulated to the yankeeism that’s everywhere and played The Killers over the C130 intercom, and it was still playing in my head, ‘boy, one day you’ll be a man,’ as we drank in the city through the open chopper doors (page 157)
3. We’re appreciative of the lift of 2 Many DJs mash ups or AVH’s ‘My My My’ as we cock pistols or fix bayonets and charge once more into the labyrinth of stone and goats and rabid dogs (page 176)
4. Of course there weren’t enough vehicles and of course communications were rubbish, of course we needed more helicopters and of course the boys were tired, but it had ever been and would ever be thus. No army in the world ever had all it needed, no commander ever suffered from too many resources, and the funny thing was we resented the presumptuous journalism more than the shortages (page 197)
5. Nothing rankled more than having friends and colleagues spun by clueless, career-politician dickheads (page 272)

The Bizlike Organisation apologies unreservedly for any infringement of copyright, but you’ll sell more books now, won’t you? Buy this book.

1. There’s no escaping that claustrophobic digicam point of view
2. Likeable characters including the ballsy woman who takes one for the team
3. Enormous monster that trashes skyscrapers plus horrid little ones that get up-close and personal
4. Best line from army guy: “Whatever it is – it’s winning!”
5. Utterly astounding ending that turns it all into a chick-flick

“Homes and Gardens” is a cornucopia of DIY and horticulture in our little village on the edge of the city, last stop before the manicured lawns give way to rough moorland grasses. The shop’s proximity to Bizlike Mansions means that five-mile, 55-minute round trips to B&Q, for a picture hook or a pot of weed-killer, are rarely necessary. Recently, John the owner and I were discussing his recent form on the bowling green, it being high season. He bemoaned a run of losses that had led him to question how he could play the game for 40 years and still produce such poor results. I had just read something on Twitter about NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) coaching so I asked if he had a pack of playing cards. They sell everything so he produced one.

I asked him to pick out some cards and write a word or phrase connected with his game on each one. He produced a magic-marker and this was the result:
* Joker – “X” (he emphasised that this did not mean he didn’t take the game seriously!)
* Jack of Clubs – “No 1”
* King of Hearts – “Best”
* Ace of Spades – “Choice”
* 2 of Diamonds – “Line”

With hindsight, I could have asked him to elaborate about the “X” factor to see exactly what it meant to his bowling.

I explained the exercise and how he should look through his five cards before that evening’s match and use them to “call up” the qualities that they represented. The NLP term for this is “anchoring” which I understand to mean a way of imbuing inanimate objects with abstract concepts. In this case the cards would anchor the 5 key aspects of his “bowling mojo”. John seemed unfazed by this mumbo-jumbo and explained that he had studied Sports Psychology at the local university and he knew very well that at the top of any game “it was 80% mental and 20% technical.” I could have asked him how studying sports psychology had led him to own a DIY/Garden store but that wasn’t the object of my immediate curiosity. He explained his belief that bowls was about “rolling” and that “the moment you try to push, you’ve got trouble” before expressing his concern that that evening’s weather conditions would not “suit his game.”

Some days passed before I was able to ask him how he had got on. He was unimpressed by his performance which I was half expecting given his get-out clause of “weather conditions.” The cards didn’t work, was his conclusion. We left it there and I quickly shelved my latest blog on NLP in sports psychology.

Some weeks later I saw him again in his lair (pictured). He was a changed bowler and proudly announced his break-though. He had been failing to account for how quickly the greens were drying out, despite the wet summer, and so had been pushing, not rolling, the bowls in the expectation of more resistance. It seemed a no-brainer to me, and I don’t even play bowls, but maybe the cards and John’s explanations had given me some insight. In any case, he was genuinely excited about his discovery so perhaps I was in on the genesis of some understanding that had previously eluded him.

You could say that the cards were merely incidental in his technical revelation and that John would have reached this conclusion anyway, sooner or later, in dealing with his run of bad form. But why not try it for yourself? Think about one of your primary skill-sets – can you select five or six images and symbols and use the qualities you associate to access them, develop them further or correct some fault?

It’s on the cards.

1. Secret encryption techniques applied to my blogs give our military overlords advance information about alien missile attack patterns (Time out of Joint)

2. I invented the I-Twing, up-to-the-minute oracle of social change (The Man in the High Castle)

3. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain (Blade Runner)

Here’s a good example of ABC storytelling (or Anecdote-Based Communication to give it its Sunday name). My main page has a quick tutorial to help you reproduce the effect.

I once worked with an investment expert who told the following story:

Albert Einstein (a very credible character who lends weight to the argument) once theorised about an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters. Eventually, he said, one of them would type out the soliloquy from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. But as you can imagine, it would take a very long time before this happened…

Quite a picture, eh? When I tell this tale I sometimes present Einstein himself reading out sheets from some of the monkeys’ typewriters:
“Mix.. Yez.. Pittel.. ick – no good!” says the 20th Century’s greatest thinker.
“Ord.. Fard.. Nord.. Glock – no good either,” he says.
“Wait!” he cries triumphantly, “Listen to this: To be or not to be, that is the – Mix Yez Pittel ick – damn!”
This gives an unexpected twist to the tale so it occasionally gets a laugh.

Then, having established his narrative with an interesting scenario and credible characters (except for the monkeys!), the investment expert revealed the point of his story. Just like Einstein’s simian horde, statistically speaking his competitors would get it right some of the time. But the question he asked potential investors was this: Wouldn’t they rather invest with someone who has a better approach than mere probability? This creates unease, bordering on fear.

So: memorable story + credible main character (plus the Bard) + good point + introduction and then removal of negative emotions + a bit of a twist if you tell it well = full ABC marks and a subtle dig at the competition.

If you’re going to sin – be original! Use anecdote-based communication techniques.

photo courtesy of catdesigns@yahoo.com

The other day I posted a piece on “Lethal Generosity” – a business strategy to achieve thought-leader status by giving stuff away and making life difficult for your competitors. I suggested that the parties involved are impacted by an act of lethal generosity thus:

* Positive for company or individual being generous especially if they can take the “moral high-ground”
* Positive for the clients – the beneficiaries of this generosity
* Negative for the competitors who are the recipients of the “lethal” effects.

Microsoft did it when they saw off Netscape as they gave away their own browser bundled with their Windows package.

A cynic would argue that most politicians use this strategy already but because they are lethally generous with our own money, promising to spend big and tax small, it’s a hard one to sustain competitively.

But the UK Shadow Chancellor recently changed all that in a rather bizarre way by offering to save us all with Tory economic “tough love” and promising to become the most disliked man in Britain. Applying the formula gives us:

* Positive for the Tories who aren’t even being generous and can take the “moral high-ground” for just that reason
* Negative for us, the electorate – the “beneficiaries” of these stringent measures
* Negative for the Labour Party who will be the recipients of the hoped-for “lethal” voting effects.

How about that for a neat inversion of Focus-group-Blair’s New Labour project? The more you loathe us, the better the job we’re doing!

John Major said of his economic reign: “If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working” but either he was talking to Edwina Currie or he was way ahead of his time. Or both. No moral high ground there but this time round the strategy may prove more lethal to Labour.

Depends on how us voters perceive the reverse psychology…

photo courtesy of catdesigns@yahoo.com

A search on Google combined with an example from my own experience suggests that several versions of Lethal Generosity are currently in operation. Regardless of where it is used, it is a strategy intended to show thought-leadership and gain commercial advantage. In this article I will look at some examples and analyze the ways in which each act of generosity may be more or less “lethal” to the parties concerned.

Shel Israel’s “Global Neighbourhoods” is the best-known source of the term lethal generosity and tells of Jeremiah Owyang’s “Hitachi Wiki” that unified the client and supplier Data Storage community behind his site’s thought leadership. Shel reasons thus: “This is about as far away from the ageing command and control philosophy as you can get. In today’s competitive environment, you need to understand that the customer is in control. If you want to win, give the customer what the customer wants. If you do this often enough and credibly enough it will be brutal to your competitors – unless the competitor rises to the occasion and tries to “out-generous” you back”.

Let us say that the parties most impacted by any act of lethal generosity are:
* The company or individual being generous
* The clients – the beneficiaries of this generosity
* The competitors – recipients of the “lethal” effects.
We can now look at some examples from these three perspectives.

This month (July ’09) Shel Israel’s Global Neighbourhood blog reported on the case of Rackspace, a hosting service that had recently experienced a brief downtime which incapacitated a significant number of their service users. The company immediately used all the social media channels available to them to apologise and explain what happened and what they were doing about it. The interesting thing here is the reactions of their competitors. One, an old-style traditional, attempted to hijack Rackspace customers with the offer of an “easy transition plan” whilst another used their blog to stand behind their competitor as “communicative, forthright and responsive to its customers” and suggesting that Rackspace’s customers stood by them too.

The impact on all concerned is as follows:
* Rackspace is viewed more positively for its responsiveness
* Their clients will feel marginally more positive through the perceived additional trust in their supplier
* The supportive competitor will be viewed positively for their stance as “thought-leaders” whilst everyone will have a very negative view of the old-style traditional opportunist “hijackers.”

In summary, some moral high-ground is taken and the good-guys win.

A less well-known manifestation of Lethal Generosity occurs in the legal profession. Mark Bennet is a criminal defense trial lawyer who makes all his motions to court freely available to anyone, including other criminal lawyers. He says: “I don’t believe I have competition among the criminal defense bar. Colleagues, yes: competition, no. We happen to be fishing in the same hole, but there are plenty of fish for all of us.” Debate following his generous manifesto sees two predictable positions – the cautious, approving “open-source” philosophers versus the “enabling incompetency is still enabling” alliance.

The debate is swung convincingly in the pro direction by Michael Schaffer: “The repeating of work is one of the worst hazards and biggest costs of any proprietary activity – it drains resources by forcing everyone to solve the same problems over and over, and it causes repeaters – even competent ones – to make the same mistakes of invention over and over. In criminal defense that lost time and those mistakes do not just lead to lost profits – they break lives.”

Applying the formula to the lawyer gives us:
* Positive impact for him as a thought-leader in criminal law
* All clients are positively impacted through the availability of tried and tested motions to court
* The competition all benefit, be they expert or “incompetent”

So the lethally generous sometimes need to balance commercial advantage with “the common good” and it helps to have a thought-leader role and an environment in which to debate these issues.

In a final example, I know of an award-winning thought-leader company which gives away free “flatpack” software to clients and non-clients alike that enables them to dispense with the cost of engaging other competing suppliers in the provision of compulsory compliance-related services. The CEO is proud of this act of lethal generosity and in a very active online environment seems unperturbed by the possibility of adverse reaction in the industry. Applying the formula, we see why:

* The company is positively impacted as any slight loss of revenue from gifting, not selling, the “flatpacks” is offset by massive gratitude of clients, both actual and potential
* The clients experience a big positive in cost savings
* Competitors are neutrally impacted if they are other similar high-end suppliers, but the impact is very negative for other competitors lower down the “food chain”.

In this case the CEO could argue that the low-end providers in the market are a drain on resources that prevent the community at large from solving much more mission-critical performance problems for their clients. This simply reinforces his whole thought-leader strategic advantage for his lethally generous company. Unlike the previous example only the low-end competitors are the ones who lose!

In our increasingly connected world, where social media brings greater transparency and sharing of ideas, we as individuals and companies must expect to see more and more of our actions reported on and questioned. The world is a free-market economy although some markets, it would appear, are more free and more lethal than others.