It has been four months and probably around 500 phone calls to top marketing and advertising agencies as well as companies trying to talk to them about innovative new ideas that will make them money since I started up the new company in October.
My new business manager and I have been to many meetings and talked to many leading figures in the internet world. It never ceases to amaze me, how much mediocrity there is and how most people prefer to follow than to take a chance whilst pretending they are leading their companies forward.
An over whelming number of so called innovative figures in key positions for growing companies will not even listen to a new idea from people who have made a lot of money for people in the past.
I am amazed that there is such a degree of rigidity when approaching one’s job in the city. It is a rare find to find people are genuinely interested in listening. It seems most people, even people whose responsibility it is, is to bring new ideas to a company prefer to hunker down and pretend the world doesn’t really exist and just get through their day and appear to be doing their job.
Our business is finally taking traction now as we enter into a second round of meetings with key partners, but what a task it has been to get there.
My theory is that there are actually very few innovation centres in the world and that these are actually just one or two people in each place who are true entrepreneurs. They drive everything and everyone just talks the talk and pretends to be innovative.
Most managers and directors, wont even hear an idea. They either don’t even let you present an idea, or they think they are listening but they don’t hear. They somehow have a subconscious block to anything that might change their day to day, or make them visible to people higher up the ladder.
It is no wonder there is a recession going on with the inefficient middle manager nightmares that populate so many of the big companies. It has been said that this recession will be a recession of the middle classes. I hope it shakes out a few of the mediocre middle management whose sole purpose seems to be to pass pieces of paper to other mediocre managers either in their own organisations or in others.
It took Richard Branson a year and half to get his first advertising to get is first magazine off the ground and he spent all that time calling everyone he could. He made it and so will we.
