Strands of Genius: Adam Morgan + H/L presents: Key 2024 Consumer Trends
featuring: an interview with our guest editor and a research report
Welcome to the Bonus edition of Strands of Genius! On Fridays, we’ll be publishing interviews from our guest editors, and sharing a research report. Thanks for being along for the ride. Oh and by the way, you look great today :)
:: STEAL THIS THINKING | RESEARCH REPORT ::
Every year, the H/L Strategy + Insights team takes a hard look at the consumer trends and behaviors impacting marketers in the New Year. In this report they have pulled together trends they believe will be most important to respond to in 2024.
:: DIVE IN | THE INTERVIEW ::
ADAM MORGAN, FOUNDING PARTNER OF EATBIGFISH
>> Adam Morgan guest curated Strands on February 1st 2024. Read it here.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what keeps you busy. How did you end up doing what you’re doing today?
I am always a little bemused to find myself as the partner in a small business, to be honest, because I am a reluctant entrepreneur. I never remotely imagined that I’d start my own thing. But 25 years ago I spent 18 months writing a business book about challenger brand strategy as a blueprint for an ad agency I was at, only to find when I’d finished it that the agency didn’t want it anymore. I’m a very easygoing person, but that really, really pissed me off for about six months. I thought ‘The hell with all of you – I’m going to show you that you’ve made a mistake’. So while I never meant to start my own business, I found that anger really useful: it was like a big grumpy hand between my shoulder blades pushing me out of my comfortable corporate orbit. You hear a lot of stuff about ‘follow your passion’; that would have been complete nonsense to me till I hit that moment – and then it was suddenly clear, relevant and absolutely imperative. I left big agency life on my 40th birthday and started with a couple of friends building eatbigfish in the US and the UK around the ideas in that book (Eating the big fish), and making up the business model – essentially strategic and culture workshop processes with clients - between us as we went along. We celebrate our 25th anniversary as a business this year – with, spookily, 25 of us in the company - and I still feel it is the best job in the world. And I’m hoping one or two of the other 24 feel that way too.
What excites you most about what you do?
I love thinking through the different layers of problem-solving in the work we do. We are usually given a strategic problem by a client, but obviously strategy in business is rarely just an intellectual problem. It’s usually a social one as well – you need to get a broad ownership within a company around it, all of whom feel they have their fingerprints all over its creation – and a cultural one too; a strategy is only as good as the culture that supports it. So over a typical three month involvement we are helping cross-disciplinary client teams work together in new ways to solve the challenge in front of them, often creating new relationships and a new working vocabulary and culture between them as they do so. And doing that well, in a way that feels relatively natural and right to the group, requires a very particular combination of skills. Every cluster of challenges like this on any given project is different, and you learn something new each time. It’s a real privilege. I still find it extraordinary that at the age of 65 I am doing something that I enjoy so much every day.
What beliefs define your approach to work? How would you define your leadership style?
One of my frustrations when I was in advertising was how the industry had simply surrendered its authority on brands and advertising worked by failing to invest in itself, in learning and knowledge. Madness. So I believed from the beginning that it was critical for us as a company to do the opposite: to have a clear focus and clear source of authority through original primary research into and thinking about how challengers succeed – no one else was talking about them then. The research would lead to books in which we shared that knowledge, the authority the books gave us would allow us to charge a premium, and that premium would in turn buy us the space to do more research. We just needed to maintain that circle and we’d be good. But that belief and model was tested very early in the life of the business after 9/11, when we were only six people and had just committed to someone as our full time researcher into challengers. Well, our business completely dried up for three months after that, and we found ourselves without much money having to decide just how committed we could afford to be to that belief and principle about investing in learning. But we stuck with it, the business picked up again, we got back into the rhythm of that circle, and that has become an important and defining decision in our early life for me. And I’m really glad in retrospect that we were tested so hard and so early on it; it cemented it in place.
My sense of what kind of leader to be was very influenced by a friend giving me a book called ‘E-myth’ when I first started the business. The book said that the myth about being an entrepreneur was the idea that if you were good at doing something (making cup cakes, for instance) you should start a business around it. No, the book said, to succeed in a small business you need three particular skills. First you need to be a good technician – if you sell cupcakes, you need to be a good cupcake maker. Second, you need to be a good entrepreneur: good at building the brand, the customer base for your cupcakes, hustling business in through the door. And third you need to be a good manager, of cash flow and of people. But very few individuals are good at all three of these, so you need to be really clear on which you are good at, and where you need partners to complement you. I knew I was a good technician, and I quickly found I could be a good entrepreneur around something that I really believed in. But I also knew I was going to be a very bad manager of the commercial side of the business, and so I was lucky enough to meet up with someone I’d worked with before who was brilliant both at managing the money and at managing people, who’s really the one who’s made the business work.
So my leadership has focused very much on being consistently very clear on the principles that matter to us, modeling the kinds of approach I think are important to us as entrepreneurs and technicians…and leaving the leadership of the areas I am no good at to people who are.
What has been the most rewarding project you’ve worked on and why?
I worked in LA for a while in an ad agency called Chiat Day with a legendary creative director called Lee Clow. It was in that Frank Gehry building with the three storey pair of Claes Oldenburg binoculars int the middle. on Main St in Venice that’s now the Google HQ there. Lee had been involved in a lot of very famous creative work, including the famous Apple 1984 campaign. But one of the things I loved about working with him was that he never talked about the past, or stuff he’d done. What he got excited about, his entire focus, was what he was working on at the moment, the next project.
I loved that attitude; I still do. I can find pretty much anything interesting, and I become completely absorbed by the project I’m working on, and the clients I and the team and working on it with. What I am doing now, the problem I am trying to help them solve now, is always the most rewarding one.
We are big believers in diversity -- Not only because we believe in equality, but because we also think it’s better for business. How do you frame these kinds of conversations, both internally and with clients? Is there an emphasis on action, or are the conversations really more about communication?
I mentioned earlier that we believe that strategy in a business is inherently both social and cultural, and so our process is very intentional about creating engagements that allow broad groups of people to participate and contribute; we find that they are very often coming together in this kind of way for the first time. And so one of the key skills of a strategic facilitator like me in those kinds of engagement is to notice if people aren’t feeling they can contribute in some way, and ensure they do, in a safe space.
We are very clear up front that a key part of the preparatory stage in any project is really helping the client consider the right kind of breadth of casting, and therefore representation: it puts a more interesting range of perspectives in the room, themselves the ingredients of a stronger solution, and creates a broader ownership around that solution. Which in turn means the solution will have a broader group of protectors and helpers when, further down the road, it hits the inevitable corporate antibodies and external speedbumps that are an almost inevitable part of any process.
Switching gears a bit, how do you find time to balance personal interests with your career? Do you believe work/life balance is possible? Anything you’ve implemented that you recommend that others try?
For the longest time I found this very hard: if your business is your own baby, you feel you can always make it better if you just spend a little more time on it. So an hour later here, an hour on the weekend there can easily turn into something much more than that. And suddenly you’ve been living at work for 10 years.
And then two things happened, really. A friend sent me a piece about a Japanese concept called ‘Yutori’, which roughly translates as ‘spaciousness in one’s life’. It means deliberately creating or holding space around what you are doing, to allow you to enjoy and appreciate it more. So, for instance, if I was coming to visit you and hadn’t been to your neighbourhood before, Yutori means I might choose to come 15 minutes early so I could just walk round the neighbourhood before we got together to explore it and see what it was like. And I realise when she sent me this that Yutori was an idea and a way of living that I really yearned for, because I felt I was continually rushing through everything. And giving it a name and a focusing idea really helped me articulate and become more intentional about what I wanted. So I sat down with my coach, and we’ve been spending regular time thinking through how to create more Yutori in my day, my week, my life. It’s really helping.
And then the second thing that has happened is that I have found a creative itch I really want to scratch: writing children’s picture books. It came out of an online poetry club I set up with two friends in lockdown that morphed into something else, and I’ve realised it is something I really want to do, and do now. So in July I am moving to three days a week in the business, and spending the other two days with my characters, exploring where I am going to take them and they are going to take me. I will have a new, very high motivation to maintain my fences and boundaries much more carefully. We’ll see how it goes.
But being 65 also helps. I have a post-it stuck up above my desk, that says LISADFA. It means ‘Life is short, Adam: don’t fuck around’.
What’s your media diet? Where do you find inspiration?
When I started writing business books I thought of the interviews as simply necessary content generators; the more I have gone on, I realise the one to one interviews are what I really love. In another life I’d like to have been Studs Terkel. I’ve been doing 12 new interviews over the last six months for a podcast I’ve been making (Let’s Make This More Interesting), and they’ve been exhilarating, difficult and incredibly stimulating. So those remain one of my main sources of inspiration.
For podcasts I like In Our Time, The Uncensored CMO and Squiggly Careers. But I tend not to read or listen too much to what other people are thinking or working on. Shortly after I started the company I met an organisational guru called Charles Handy, who had published a number of very successful books. I asked him his three key bits of advice to someone like me just starting out, and one of them was “Don’t read other people’s stuff – it drives you mad. You spend all your time thinking ‘Well, I can’t write about that now, because they’ve written about it'”. I occasionally get caught out, but overall I personally have found that to be very good advice if you want to develop and write yourself.
What’s the best piece of advice/knowledge you’ve stolen, and who/where’d you steal it from?
I find that learnings come in and out of my life according to what’s going on. But two of them have intersected recently and are my current lodestars. The first is something a copywriter, Nick Warren, said to me when I was interviewing him in Johannesburg about Industrial Theatre (a form of theatre used as a way of communicating safety information to miners in South Africa, for example). I asked Nick why they put so much drama and musicality into what was essentially safety information, and he said: ‘When it’s a matter of life and death you can’t afford to bore the audience’. I loved that, and it’s made me much more conscious and intentional about when I really need to dial up the engagement in what I do. ‘Is this a meeting or occasion when I can afford to bore the audience?’ is a question we should all be asking ourselves much more often.
And the intersection was with a conversation for the podcast recently with a reality TV show producer, Maz Farrelly. She says ‘Everything is a production’, by which she means you have to think about and ‘produce’ situations to get the result you want: you need to really think about what your engaging headline is, how you’re going to frame what you’re trying to do, and so on. So now I’m much more conscious and intentional about the week ahead: what do I need to create more time and energy to ‘produce’, when audience engagement is critical, and how am I going to do it?
What is giving your life meaning right now and why?
I’ve been studying challengers for 25 years. People sometimes ask me if I get bored of studying the same subject – don’t I want to move into something else. And the answer is no: why on earth would I? Challengers are the anti-blah; they can’t afford to bore their audiences. They are often the seeds or early wash of cultural shifts in a category and perhaps beyond. They rely on ideas that will get us to sit up and see things differently. My question is the opposite: why would one want to study anything else?
You can keep in touch with Adam on LinkedIn.
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rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
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