Nature's wiles

Monkeying around is all right, but you need to understand predators to survive.

What I've liked
A curious monkey slips into an open window, walks away with a shiny phone and (to paraphrase the nursery rhyme) everywhere the monkey went, the network was sure to go.

Okay, it is not everyday that we see monkeys in advertising so when a well-produced, well-crafted television commercial with a sweet monkey appears, it is bound to be a clutter-breaker. And a clutter-breaker it most definitely is, dutifully doing its designated job of drawing attention and even persuading the viewer to its point of view.

In as much as it has achieved that, the new TVC for Idea is performing really well. Even though the storyline is sharply reminiscent of another cellular company that had employed a four-legged friend as its network ambassador. So much so that every time I see the Idea ad, I think about its competitor!

Which brings me to another point. Now that mobile phones have been in India for the past decade, I wonder if network availability has not become a basic hygiene factor by now.

Even if you did make allowances for infrastructural delays in the initial years, today with a subscriber base that is galloping every year, a functioning network is taken for granted and expected.

Moreover, the world has long moved on to one where manufacturers and service providers are falling over each other to load the instrument with every conceivable value-add possible, from calorie counters to "get-to-meet-your-hero" contests. If only we had this ad way back in the nineties, or even in the early 2000s, how marvellously appropriate it would have been!

What I've learned
The galvanising power of fear
Most of us live our lives harnessed by innumerable fears not realising that 99.9 per cent of our fears never materialise. But yet, even the most well-informed among us continue to be ridden by some really incongruous ones.

For instance, the doctor who checks my blood pressure regularly refuses to check his own for fear it might be not to his liking.

A surgeon friend of mine is petrified of his knee operation because as he says: "I know only too well what can go wrong!" But having aired my opinion on the pointlessness of being irrationally fearful, let me now talk about how useful this primal response of ours can be for our progress.

Natural historians are quick to point out that an animal that has no fear of its natural predators is not likely to survive for long. As far as I have seen, this holds very true in the corporate jungle.

As most of my team members at Mudra probably remember, every account that we pitched for was like a life and death battle. It was so because I made it appear so. I would magnify the fear of loss to such an extent that winning was paramount in every member's mind right from the top boss down to the finishing artist who worked on the pitch. I would visualise for them the string of consequences that would result when an agency's reputation takes a beating on a stranger's turf.

Thus keyed up, with nothing less than 100 per cent invested from everybody, the team would charge ahead and invariably win. This was the simple secret behind the saying in the agency that when I was heading the pitch, we never lost! There was no magic wand that I waved to make it possible. They did it all on their own.

Their performance, which on an ordinary day would have been well below par, was tightened to a perfect pitch because there was the fear of loss looming above them. And that brought out each of their personal bests.

As long as we don't let fear cripple us, it can be put to very good use when we let it fire us up with enough adrenalin to help us outperform.

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