Business And Leadership, Ireland's Business News Service

When Peter Fisk, CEO of The Genius Works, started writing his first book Marketing Geniushe realised that people traditionally regarded as brilliant, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein, all simply looked at problems in a different way.

Fisk says the problem we face now is death by incrementalism. “We are always trying to get slightly better, but someone else gets slightly better faster. Business owners have to keep walking forwards to stay still at the moment. A more radical approach is needed; they have to leap ahead and break through conventions.

“Imagine 2012, when we’re back in the upturn, what the world will be like. The world’s biggest airline is likely to be Air Asia in Kuala Lumpur, which will combine low cost with the premium service of Singapore Airlines. People will be making most of their purchases on an iPhone, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Space Travel will allow people to go to space for £20,000 sterling, redefining consumer expectations of a ‘day out’.”

Originally a nuclear physics graduate, Fisk decided to explore the whole area of left-brain and right-brain thinking in putting across his argument.

“A genius is not some magical person genetically born with a gift. Based on the latest research, it is clear that while genius is often thought to equate purely to intelligence, it is not necessary to have an extraordinarily high IQ to speak 15 languages by the age of eight, or to master the intricacies of quantum mechanics. Genius is less about how intelligent you are, and more about how you apply that intelligence in creative ways.

“It’s about training your mind to see things everybody else sees, but in a new way. It often seems like an obvious thing afterwards and you wonder why you didn’t do it before. Take airlines selling tickets directly to customers – I remember sitting in British Airways [BA] 20 years ago and those in charge wouldn’t dare do that for fear of annoying travel agents.”

Fisk enjoyed being a scientist but found it all too factual and theoretical, with not much room for personal creativity, so he got into business, doing brand management at BA. “I was expected to do spreadsheets and I resented that,” he says. “I realised people in organisations tended to be pigeonholed as either good with numbers or else creative, and that businesses were increasingly thinking numbers were more important – an Excel spreadsheet was the answer to everything.

“It is important to measure results but it doesn’t move you forward – you need ideas and intuition to make the leaps. I could see that people running organisations were becoming too left-brain focused and were not using their right brains enough.”

The left hemisphere of the brain is largely about logic. It sees things in black and white and in linear ways and is focused on inc-remental behaviour – in other words, doing one thing at a time, which is largely masculine. The right hemisphere of the brain app-roaches things intuitively and holistically. It’s interested in the way things are connected. It deals more with feelings instead of hard fact, and is more feminine.

“What you really need when running a business is both – you need the logic to focus on how to make money out of complex situations and the intuitive side to look for opportunities,” says Fisk.

“It doesn’t mean you have to have the perfect balance in every person, but that you have teams that bring both together. The CEO needs to connect the two sides and be a connector of ideas.”

Going local
Fisk is an experienced strategist and marketer, having spent many years working with the likes of American Express, Coca-Cola, Marks & Spencer and Microsoft. During that time he says he has seen several examples of organisations having to think differently.

“For 100 years Coca-Cola arrogantly tried to teach the world to sing and the message was that everybody needed it and bought it in the same way. How arrogant is that?” he says.

“Coca-Cola imposed its brand on everybody, treating everybody the same way. It rapidly realised in recent years that its customer base was becoming increasingly different.

“If you treat the market as average, you will come across as mediocre. In the past four or five years profits declined, particularly for the Coca-Cola drink itself.”

The outcome was the brand decided to localise virtually all of its business, opting for a different ad agency for each market. It recognised that in India, for example, Coca-Cola is a complement to meals so should be sold where people buy food, while in Australia, by contrast, people drink it between meals, so it needed to be distributed differently.

“The portfolio of drinks was widened and Coca-Cola used many more brands, recognising that people resented big companies and having Americanism imposed upon them,” says Fisk.

“While the world is more global in terms of connectivity, it has become more local in terms of people’s tastes and the way marketing is developed.”

Looking at small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Fisk cites the example of UK office-services company Regus, which employed five people at the time he worked with it, with Mark Dixon at the helm.

Regus hires out facilities such as desks or meeting rooms. “It started out trying to market itself to big companies, pushing brochures at them in unfocused ways. Over time, Mark realised it’s not about how much you push brochures, it’s how responsive you are when a person wants something from you.

“Mark decided to stop the bombardment of communication and instead ensure the company was ready to help people when they needed it – for example, someone wanting an office for a week in Holland, or a meeting room in London for a day. Regus became much more successful by pulling people to it and being flexible in the way it responded.”

Fisk says Dixon is an entrepreneur who had to change his role as the company grew. “Mark had to become less of a driver and more of a facilitator, trusting people with more expertise than he had in certain areas. A manager is hands on, whereas a leader inspires people to do things. Part of this is to treat emp-loyees as equals not subordinates.”

Taking the fast track
One of the ways firms can avoid death by incrementalism, as Fisk mentioned earlier, is to take a fast-track approach, which means looking at models elsewhere and finding creative ways to apply them to their own situation.

“It is accelerated learning based on what the emerging practice is around the world. For example, on one occasion I was working with a bank and we looked at the way Wizzit in South Africa used purely mobile phones and text messaging; and how Umpqua Bank in the US decided to learn from businesses other than banks, such as Starbucks and Carlton Hotels, in terms of how it developed products and laid out the physical locations. We also looked at pier-to-pier lending business Zopa, where people are lending and borrowing between each other without a bank.”

This time of crisis has forced the world to change in seismic ways, and in 2012 we will realise it wasn’t all about the economy, says Fisk.

“There has been a big shift from west to east in terms of industrial power and a shift from mass market to niches. You can’t treat markets as wholes any more; you have to look for valuable niches and profit pockets.

“The world favours small rather than large companies now. Charles Darwin talked about the species most able to adapt being the ones that evolve and survive. Nowadays, it’s not about how many databases you have or how many people you employ. Larger companies have more problems moving into different markets and letting go of capabilities. Smaller companies are more agile and can make partnerships more quickly.

“People will trust small rather than big companies when there is ongoing distress in the large institutions. They will look more carefully at who they’re buying from.”

This article first appeared in Owner Manager magazine