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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 Lewis Media Centre, he frequently found reasons to leap around the stage, 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 Beijing 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.