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Event Review

Whenever Steve McDermott speaks at the London Business Forum, there's always the possibility he might kill himself. In 2005, he arrived at our "Inspiration in the Square" event by sprinting up a wet flight of steps, losing his footing, turning a complete somersault and crashing heavily onto the stage. It could have been a premature end to an award-winning speaking career. It was certainly embarrassing. But for McDermott himself, it was primarily a "learning opportunity". The difference between winners and losers, in his view, is that losers don't fail enough.

Making a mistake during a speech can actually be helpful, he argued in this tongue-in-cheek guide to failure, because it proves to an audience you're human, and that puts them instinctively on your side. It also makes everyone feel more relaxed - desensitised to embarrassment, if you will. McDermott doesn't care if you dislike his chatty, digressive delivery, or his squeaky Yorkshire accent, which sounds like Geoffrey Boycott piped through a kazoo. These are the very things that make him just like you.

Having said this, he does attach a great deal of significance to the way his events begin. There's a four-minute rule in any business, he argued. "It's about first impressions." Research shows that if you fail to win a customer in the first four minutes of contact then you'll lose them forever.

Accordingly, he spent his first few minutes of this event walking into the audience, encouraging us to collaborate with a few jokes and gently nudging us out of our usual comfort zones. Failures tend to shy away from such engagement with their customers, he said, in the same way that they ask "poor questions" when things go wrong. They might, for example, ask "Why did this happen to me?" rather than "How can I learn from this failure?"

If you can shift your perspective of failure to one that is pragmatic, constructive and forward-looking then you can make a major difference to your personal life as well as your professional life, he argued. For example, he once found out that he was upsetting his kids by failing to greet them enthusiastically when he got home from work. So he asked himself: "How would the best dad in the world act when he got home?" and acted accordingly. Remember, he said, "You only have to do [something] for four minutes," to turn a perception into reality.

Critical to this process is the ability to visualise success. You need to "formulate and indelibly stamp on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding," McDermott said, quoting Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking. Everybody is capable of vivid visualisation, but most of us find it easier to visualise negatives than positives. To demonstrate this point, he got us all to imagine we were chewing a giant emery board. Such a horrible sensation was far easier to imagine than, say, the feeling of earning a pay rise or a promotion. "Failures have a marvellous ability to think about what they don't want," he said.

Later, in the Q&A session following the event, one audience member returned to the topic by confessing that she couldn't stop fretting about things and imagining the worst. Could McDermott recommend any good techniques to extinguish this feeling? Yes, he replied, tossing an elastic band to this person and everyone else in the room who felt they suffered from the same problem, "This is a technique they use [to rehabilitate] sex-offenders..."

The guinea pigs were asked to put the elastic bands around their wrists and, periodically, to flick them hard against their skin. Each blow was unpleasant - a sharp stinging pain. "Every time you have thoughts you shouldn't have, give it a ping," McDermott advised. "Failures don't take responsibility for anything, especially how they feel," he explained, but applying this small amount of pain to one's self at a time of mental indiscipline is enough to retrain the brain - in effect, to create an aversion to negative behaviours.

Equally, McDermott said, "It's very important to visualise yourself being successful." He cited Mohammed Ali as the ultimate exemplar of positive self-visualisation, explaining that the fighter used to run through each fight in his head before entering the ring, imagining what he called the "future history" of his triumph.

If you're able to do the same then what you'll find is that other stuff falls into place on it's own, he argued. It's a well-known phenomenon in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), a method of altering behaviour based on interpersonal communication. "What NLP discovered was that you are exposed to two million pieces of sensory information a second," McDermott said. "If you consciously tried to process all that, you'd go up in flames, so you have to filter stuff out."

Cue the "reticular activating system," which creates mental filters based on the goals that you set yourself. For example, if you decide you want a particular car, suddenly you see them everywhere. "You only notice them when you set goals around them." However, McDermott added: "Clever, successful people focus on what they want to be and what they want to do." They do not focus on possessions they want to have.

Another audience member said he had no problem setting goals for himself but that, in spite of good intentions, he never seemed to achieve those goals. In reply, McDermott suggested that people often don't have, or don't give themselves, a big enough reason to succeed in pursuit of certain goals.

"Bring a goal to mind and [score it] on a scale of one to 10, where one is 'Not that bothered,' and 10 is 'Truly important.' How strong is your reason why?" he asked. "If it scores below five or six, it's not going to happen." You have to ask yourself, "Do I truly want that?" he continued. "You can't have everything, but you can have anything. The challenge is to define what the anything is... It's the law of the excluded alternative."

Equally, McDermott said, if you bring a deadline for something forward then it might go up your list of priorities and become something you are more bothered about.

"Goal-setting should be a triangle," he argued, where the vertices are: "reason why," "clearly defined goal," and "self-belief". When faced with any challenge you should consider how you'd score yourself on these three criteria on a scale from one to 10. For example, you might be afraid to start your own business because you think you're too old. In this instance, you could improve your self-belief score by finding someone who achieved the same goal at the same age. Overcoming such mental obstacles is a particularly British problem, he argued, because here "we play the game of low self-esteem tennis," where people trying to outdo one another "over how crap they are".

Ultimately, you'll only get job satisfaction if you have a clear sense of purpose. "What gets you out of bed in the morning?" McDermott asked. He held up an alarm clock, but argued the device itself was ultimately not our reason for rising but our motivation for the working day ahead. "Zig Ziglar, the American motivational speaker, says this should be called an 'opportunity clock'," he laughed. "[The Americans] just don't get us, do they?" Nevertheless, he said, it's certainly the case that people like Simon Woodroffe rely on their sense of purpose to get them out of bed in the morning. The alternative, McDermott argued, is to "live a life of quiet desperation and then die."

Most people work not out of a sense of purpose but a sense of expediency, or "instrumental compliance". They work nine-to-five because they have bills to pay, and only give themselves the opportunity to live during weekends and holidays. Extrapolate this to other workers and "whole companies don't know why they exist," McDermott said. They may say, "We exist to deliver shareholder value, [but] that's not a purpose, it's an outcome."

The real questions that individuals and companies should be asking themselves are "Why do we do what we do?" and "What business are we in?" An enlightened boss in this regard, he said, was Richard Baker, chief executive of the Alliance Boots Group, who issued the following quote: "My profound belief is this: I don't think people expect jobs for life any more, but what they do expect is jobs with life - worthwhile work."

McDermott conceded it's easier for some people than others to feel they're doing something worthwhile. He recalled speaking to an audience at the Driving Standards Agency, where the audience was mainly men, 98% driving examiners and civil servants, "So they want to know when the event starts, when it finishes and whether we've got an hour for lunch." The question for this organisation, as for so many others, was, "How can we make what we do feel worthwhile?"

McDermott solved the problem by suggesting to them that the business they were in was not "taking tests" but "helping to save lives." There's usually a way, he suggested, in which the purpose of an organisation can be reframed to demonstrate its value in the broadest possible terms, to make the type of work "worth getting out of bed for".