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Event Review

Watching Michael Heppell speak is like shotgunning a bucket of espresso. The man generates so much energy that, were he wired up to the National Grid, the UK's carbon emissions would plummet overnight.

Like any Geordie, he's ebullient and friendly. But there's also a fervour detectable behind the eyes, an immutable belief in the message he's been communicating to business for the past four years: "Be brilliant!" It's a mantra he repeats in a variety of ways on stage, and through a variety of media: animated slides, group calisthenics... even the occasional song.

Heppell moves his barrel-chested frame like a rugby forward - nimbly and wildly by turns - as if he might dive into the audience at any moment. Indeed, when he addressed the London Business Forum (LBF) at the British Library Conference Centre, he frequently found reasons to run among the stalls, whipping the 200-strong audience into activities they would normally be too embarrassed to dream about, let alone do in front of their peers.

Anyone who wished to respond to one of Heppell's questions had to shout their reply. When an answer was obvious, the whole audience was encouraged to shout it en masse. Yet no one seemed too self-conscious. This was a "safe environment," in which people shouldn't feel guilty about exuberance, he said. We develop best when we "play full out," "turn off our sensitivity meters" and "learn at extremes".

Heppell wanted to rid us of our fear of change, as well as our fear of humiliation. "Are you passionate about change?" he asked at the beginning of his presentation. "Are you one of these people who, when a new change programme comes in at work, says: 'Woo-hoo! Sign me up. Yes, I would love to reapply for my own job again'?" The audience wasn't sure. Asked to rate their enthusiasm on a scale of one to 100, most gave themselves a score of between 60 and 70.

The essential problem here, Heppell argued, is that most people like learning but hate changing as a result of what they learn. "Learning is the easy part," he said. "Coming along to an event like this, in a nice venue, hear the speaker, do all that stuff, that's easy... Because the secret isn't in the knowing, the secret's in the doing."

He asked the audience to commit themselves to "90 days of massive action," beginning immediately after the event, to digest the lessons and embed the techniques they were about to learn. "If you run your businesses and you run your lives in 90-day cycles, it's long enough to get things done [but] short enough to get the passion and the excitement to go with them." Why should these things be necessary? Because "it is no longer good enough to do a good job," he explained. "That's why we're talking about how to be brilliant."

The difference between being good and being brilliant is disproportionately large, Heppell suggested. At the Athens Olympics, only one-hundredth of a second separated the men who came first and second in the 100m sprint final, he pointed out. Yet the winner got a $15m Nike contract and the opportunity to run in any race meeting in the world while the runner-up got significantly less; and those who came outside the top three gained next to nothing, in material terms.

It's no different in business, he said. Here too, brilliance can generate a disproportionate amount of value. By way of example he described a visit to the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Singapore where, seven years after his previous stay, the doorman greeted him from his limousine with the words: "Good afternoon. Welcome back to the Ritz Carlton, Mr Heppell." At the same time, a member of staff recognised that Mr Heppell's wife and 11-year-old daughter, Sarah, were visiting the hotel for the first time, and presented the latter with a posy of flowers. Heppell said that when the concierge asked for his credit card at check-in, even that was done in a heart-warming fashion. He has sung the praises of Ritz-Carlton at every event since.

"Customer satisfaction is worthless, customer loyalty is priceless." That's a key part of the Brilliant! philosophy, as well as being the title of a book by business author Jeffrey Gitomer. "When you get loyal customers, they will do anything before they switch," Heppell suggested. "[If] you take some friends [to your favourite restaurant] and then the service isn't quite as good, or the food isn't quite as good, what do you do? You start to defend the restaurant, don't you? 'Oh, well maybe they've got a few staff off tonight or something... I'll go over it with Luigi, we'll make sure it's all right.' We become the advocate."

It's also possible to be brilliant as an individual, Heppell said. Audiences across the world (including this one) consistently rate Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Anita Roddick and Mother Teresa as the people they regard as "most brilliant". And these people have a common trait - positive thinking - that seems relatively easy to emulate. However, Heppell added, being brilliant takes more. "If you were to walk into your garden full of weeds and do positive thinking, would it get rid of the weeds?" he asked, paraphrasing the US motivational speaker Tony Robbins. "No, it's positive actions that make the difference."

For most leaders, the easiest way to shift from positive thinking to positive action is through language, Heppell argued. "For the next 30 days, what would happen if you changed your stimulus response?" he asked. "The next time somebody says, 'How are you?' what if you told them you were brilliant?"

It's an "oomph word," he said, ordering everyone to stand up, shout "Brilliant!" with their fists in the air and give a pelvic thrust for good measure. "Have a little look around. Every single person who used that word has suddenly got their banana in the right way round!" You can achieve similarly positive effects by changing your response to other common questions, he argued - if, instead of saying "I'm knackered," you say "I need some more energy," or instead of saying "I'm pissed off about this," you say "I could feel happier about this." Choose different words and you get different results.

The second key characteristic of brilliant people is that they "break out of limiting beliefs," Heppell said. In other words, they keep stepping out of their comfort zone until that comfort zone grows bigger. Brilliant leaders, he added, encourage so many people to venture outside their comfort zone that it becomes uncomfortable for others not to do the same. To demonstrate this latter point, he got the audience performing a wacky dance and song to the music of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Hair Bear Bunch. We stood, gyrated, shouted, looked ridiculous, but nevertheless acted as a team and, as a result, felt little embarrassment.

The third key characteristic of brilliant people is that they "think differently," Heppell said. "If they thought the same as everybody else, they would get the same results as everybody else." And the best case study for thinking differently, he argued, is Muhammad Ali.

Critical to the great boxer's success was the mantra, "I am the greatest," a positive affirmation that he repeated to himself continuously - before, during and after he was world heavyweight champion. What Ali did not say, Heppell pointed out, was: "I am the greatest... If everything goes according to the business plan and we get the funding."

Heppell's event concluded with a montage of images and sounds that evoked how Ali prepared for his fights - visualising himself getting stronger in training; performing certain rituals of dress and mental preparation at the venue; then stepping into the ring and imagining his opponent shrinking into the canvas.

At the point of knock-out he would "freeze the image and surround it with a brilliant white light," Heppell said. "Never again would he consider any other outcome other than that. He'd go to bed at night and that's what he would see. He'd wake up the next morning and that's what he would see. Anybody mentioned the fight and that's what he would see. And he called it creating a future history, a future that he was so certain of it was as though the historians had already recorded it... Is that how you set your goals?"