Can you hear me at the back?
Reinventing the business conference
“It’s not easy,” says Brendan Barns, assuming his customary expression of bottomless anxiety. “This is a massive personal cost – half a million pounds, and I can’t afford that unless we get the right number of delegates. We have six weeks to get another 200 people. Worst-case scenario? I lose my home. Do I have sleepless nights? I do.”
Barns’ features, usually hidden behind metal-framed specs, are rounded and blurry. Cropped hair sits above his pale face with all the elegance of half a coconut. He shakes hands feebly, stands awkwardly and has a tendency to say the wrong thing. All the same, he’s capable of rousing considerable support from friends and colleagues in his revolutionary mission – to reinvent the business conference.
The first time we meet, Barns spares no effort detailing the bitter tedium of conferences he has attended – and explaining how he intends to enliven his own event, scheduled to take place a few weeks later. Most conferences, he says, offer stale sandwiches and too-strong coffee. Speakers rarely mingle with punters. PowerPoint presentations, cramming too many facts into too many slides, put the audience to sleep. At Barns’ event, it will be punters, not speakers, who set the agenda – by sending him in advance details of the topics that concern them most – and Barns will hire the best available speakers to address those issues.
I’m intrigued by Barns and his crazy dream. I have a hunch it could be interesting to follow him as he struggles to save the two-bedroom flat behind St Paul’s he has remortgaged in order to finance this groundbreaking event. “Obviously, we’re not going to make money in the first year,” he concedes. “But with the right momentum, four or five years down the line it could be a commercial success.” Inspired by the World Economic Forum, Barns is aiming high. “I want to build a Davos,” he says.
By his own account, Barns is an unlikely entrepreneur. He grew up in Dorset, the youngest child of parents who worked in the health sector. “They always encouraged me,” he says. “But they’ve never been able to give me financial support…. A lot of those people, like [Charles] Dunstone and Stelios [Haj Iouanni] and [Richard] Branson had quite rich backgrounds. Me, if I lose everything – well, I started with nothing and I’ll go back to nothing.”
At Poole Grammar School, Barns failed his A levels. After working as a waiter he retook them at night school, supporting himself by stacking shelves at Tesco. With two “A”s and a “B” he decided to be the first in his family to go to university – at the London School of Economics. “I studied Plato and Aristotle and all the great thinkers.”
He also founded a political club, inviting high profile speakers, and after graduating went to work at the heart of New Labour – including a stint as Tony Blair’s research assistant. But he concluded that politicians are “full of shit and after power”, and in 1996 left to set up an agency supplying speakers to business events. And two years ago he hit on the conferences idea.
Last summer, he wrote to Charles Handy, Britain’s most celebrated management guru, asking him to take part in the first London Business Forum. Handy’s wife, who doubles as his agent, was taken by him. “Elizabeth said, ‘There’s this impressive young man with an interesting idea, and I think we should see him,” Handy remembers.
Having secured Handy – for his customary, substantial fee – Barns built the rest of the event around him. He booked a venue – Excel, in Docklands – hired event organisers and sent out bumf promising a discount of 40 per cent off the full price of £1,000 to anybody who booked before the end of January.
But in mid-February, with six weeks to go, Barns is despondent. In fact, he’s been thinking of abandoning the entire project. Friends assure him that the idea is sound, but they’re worried that, amid economic gloom, people are declining to spend money on conferences. Roughly 700 have put in a request for information. “We are hounding them, saying that there are only a couple of places left and they have to sign up quickly.” In fact, fewer than 200 have signed up, and Barns needs three times as many.
Two weeks later, I visit Barns at his top-floor office, on Pudding Lane, for a meeting with his event managers: Simon Hambley, the managing director of Acclaim, and freelance consultants Emma Chesters and Richard Knight. There’s a lot on the agenda.
For a lively start to the event, Barns wants to engage musicians. A London-based orchestra would cost about £12,000, so he’s approached the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra – offering £3,000 – and started work finding cheap flights. Another novelty will be name badges, which Barns wants only to show forenames – not surnames, job titles or the name of a delegate’s company. There will also be a “thought wall” on which delegates can write up ideas during breaks.
Moving on to food and drink, which Barns wishes to be lavish and varied, Chesters wonders whether to “do something wacky” with paper cups. Alternatively, she suggests, “We could get mugs. It’s almost as cheap to make them as to hire them.” Hiring a mug, she says, costs £4.50. This has a visibly demoralising effect on Barns. While the discussion moves on, he sits silently. After a while he interrupts to ask: “How can they justify £4.50 for a mug?”
Afterwards, he takes me downstairs to meet his team, including Aisha-Simone Ishmael, who runs the database. To date, 190 people have confirmed attendance, she says. Of those, 165 have also paid. “We haven’t been that strict, till now,” Barns notes, “but with only a month to go…” He abandons the sentence to say that Unilever told him they never pay for this kind of thing in advance and yet want the early-bird price. “They’re not coming,” he says grimly.
A week before the big day, I call Barns. He sounds glum. “I’m having good days and bad days,” he says. “Good hours and bad hours.” One of his colleagues, Nina Parson, tells me Barns is susceptible to “incredible” mood swings. Nevertheless, she says, he’s great to work for. “It sounds sappy, but he really cares about us. I did think about leaving, for a while, but he took us out for lunch and apologised for his moods. He said we could stop writing our CVs.”
Barns’ melancholy is understandable. “Bookings have dried up,” he says. “Have we had a booking today? No. Did we get one yesterday? We had two. This is the worst time in ten years for organising this kind of event because people have frozen their budgets.”
Consequently, he’s has abandoned the glitzy Excel, in favour of a cheaper, smaller venue beneath railway arches located in wasteland east of Liverpool Street. “I did have in my mind that if we had to change venues then I would be a failure. But at the end of the day success or failure is not based on the venue. We still have to pay Excel £40,000,” he says, “but we’re saving £130,000. We were looking at spending £30,000 just to lay carpets.”
He’s also revisted Handy, to ask that he avoid rehashing his recent book, The Elephant and the Flea. “I said I wanted him to talk about something else. He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘You tell me. That’s why I’m employing you.” Did Handy like being spoken to like this? “He loved it, I think.” Also, Barns told Handy not to use an overhead projector, which Barns considers nearly as boring as using PowerPoint. Instead, they came up with the idea that Handy could write on canvas with fat marker pens. Or paint with a mop. But Handy said no to those ideas. Barns’ solution: “I said, how about doing it as grafitti, with an aerosol? If it doesn’t work, he can use an overhead projector.”
Our last meeting takes place one day before the conference. For the first time, Barns looks cheerful. “It’s like before exams,” he explains, bounding towards me from behind his desk. “Further revision is useless.”
Altogether, 262 delegates have confirmed attendance. “I’m happy that we have some small companies coming,” says Barns. “But I would like greater numbers from the large organisations. If BP wanted to put on something like this they would spend a fortune. Some people are paying £250 and others are paying £600. I’ve tried to be fair. If you are a small company trying to do something with the environment and you offer £250, I might say OK. But £50? That’s insulting. The food alone costs £60 per person.” So saying, Barns reverts to his familiar bruised solemnity.
The next morning, I arrive at the venue shortly before the 8.00am start and find Barns dressed in a suit specially drycleaned for the occasion, a gold tie (“suggesting quality”) and a blue shirt given to him for Christmas by his parents. He leads me downstairs and shows me the “thought wall”, outside the auditorium. This is already scattered with Post It notes on which have been scribbled the aphoristic insights on which the philosophers of management rely so heavily. “If you’re too busy trying not to fall over, you’ll never walk forward,” reads one. Another says: “There is no such thing as failure. Only feedback.”
The opening session with the orchestra proves highly effective. Delegates sit scattered among the musicians as they play Brahms. Miha Pogacnik, who runs the session, has the manner of a mad professor – but with additional violin skills. He starts by asking the audience – not just the musicians – to give him an “A”. (Like everybody else, I hum along, while a white-haired Bosnian viola player draws his bow within inches of my knee.) Pogacnik describes the music as a “hero’s journey” – arguably, a posh term for somebody’s career – and he frequently stops the music to bark out quirky insights that are at least vaguely related to business and the workplace. For instance: “You hear that harmony? Harmony is good. But it is not the only thing. The worst thing is sugary harmony – with a knife in the back!”
Enlivened by this, we make our way towards the auditorium for the speakers. (On the way, I spot Barns, looking haunted. The orchestra, which is leaving immediately, wants payment in cash.) The first person on stage is John Humphrys, the TV and radio presenter hired to introduce and interrogate the speakers. His opening comments, including a gag that weaves together the words Blair, Campbell and wanker, strike a sour note after the uplifting orchestral session. But perhaps that’s what Humphrys is here for: to deflate an event that might otherwise become overblown and self-congratulatory.
The first three speakers consider, in turn: the power of customers, employees as assets, and how to be fully motivated. The first is a master of portentous rhetoric. The second is lower key. The third arrives on stage in a bed, asks why alarm clocks aren’t called “opportunity clocks”; commends Mohammed Ali’s “mission statement” (“I am the greatest”) and wonders why people limit themselves to “achievable and realistic” goals. “Think of your great heroes. Did they settle for that? No! So why not go for ridiculous and awesome!?”
When he’s finished, all three speakers gather for a Q&A session. There are plenty of questions from the audience. When time runs out, Humphrys says, “These guys are going to be here all day, so please do nail them.”
Next up is the star turn, Handy, who walks on stage in a lab coat, holding an aerosol spray with which he sketches a curve on a white board. This rises slowly, from the left, then drops off more sharply on the right, like the flight of an arrow. “This is the most important line in your life,” Handy says, adding, “You are… there,” as he marks a small cross slightly to the left of centre. “You have a lovely five years ahead of you, with bigger cars, more money and so on.” A shiver travels round the room as delegates absorb the implications of this; but Handy spends his remaining time describing ways in which to cheat the downward slope through constant self-reinvention.
At lunchtime, I ask Humphrys what he thinks so far. “I do a lot of these things,” he confides, “and sometimes rather dread them. You get people who run big companies but they can’t speak and you get a bit embarrassed for them. And normally you struggle to get questions. What Brendan has done is get people who can speak. I have absolutely loved it. And he didn’t pay me to say that.”
The afternoon session begins with a speaker who fires off facts with menace. For instance: “Retirement was set at 65 by Bismarck because no one lived past that age.” Next, Simon Woodroffe, the founder of Yo! Sushi, gives a lugubrious account of failure – “I was coming up to 40, I was really worried that I was going to grow old and embittered” – enlivened by his comically sharp sideburns and yellow shoes. Finally, a speaker called Ken Robinson uses deadpan comedy to tell us that even the most successful people must overcome discouragement. “Paul McCartney was not allowed into his school choir,” he says. “How good must that choir have been?”
As the speakers deliver their sparkling insights, many delegates frantically scribble them on notepads. Of course, not everything is worth writing down. During the final Q&A, when Robinson casually says, “One of the most important things is that companies must make a profit,” nobody bothers to make a note. But one person who should is Barns, who told me the final position yesterday. His home is safe, but altogether the London Business Forum has lost him £110,000.
“People say, how much money are you making? But it’s difficult in any business to make a big profit in your first nine months. I’m pretty pleased that we’ve only lost £110,000. This is a long term investment.”
The biggest expense, payable to Acclaim, is £150,000; which Barns suspects may be less than it should be. “I think Simon [Hambley, Acclaim’s managing director] is subsidising this,” he confides. “Not because he is a do-gooder but because he believes in what we’re doing.” (Barns’ concern is misplaced. Hambley later tells me Acclaim has not made a loss on this event.)
After the last speaker, Humphrys congratulates Barns on putting together the event; and Barns mounts the catwalk for his final thoughts. Speaking without notes, he paces nervously, hands clenched behind him and shoulders hunched, staring at the floor and looking paler than ever. He starts by thanking his speakers – particularly Handy, “for believing in a 30 year old entrepreneur who thinks he can reinvent the business conference”. He also thanks Humphrys (“brilliant as ever”), his colleagues, Tracy, Nina and Aisha (whom he invites to stand for applause), the event managers (“particularly Simon, Emma and Richard”) and even his PR company. I’m sorry to say that this gratitude is too much for some parts of the audience: as the thank-yous pile up, the woman sitting beside me tuts audibly.
I understand why she does this – the speech is too long, and ill judged – but I find myself resenting this woman’s impatience. She has no idea what Barns has been through. Of course, there’s no reason she should – but I know. Like his friends and colleagues, I’ve worried that Barns might lose his home in a cause that is, to say the least, rather odd. (Why would anybody with a revolutionary cast of mind turn his attention to conferences?) And though I know him to lack the easy charm of so many entrepreneurs – he’s too earnest to be charming – I find myself admiring his determination, and liking him, all the more for that reason.
The day after the conference, I send an email offering my congratulations and hoping he is pleased by how it went. He writes back at once. “I’m full of energy, hyped up and excited about next year’s event,” he says. And a few days later he sends me a 28-page document containing feedback from delegates. “I haven’t censored anything, so you’ll see that there are a couple of people that didn’t like us, but on the whole I think it would be fair to say the consensus is overwhelmingly positive.”
He’s right. The complaints, for a start, are not altogether fair: one man grumbles that he went home with a cold. Praise is conveyed with the kind of apostolic verve you might expect to encounter in fringe churches. One woman delegate, from a tobacco company, writes: “I had given up going to conference-type events. I find most of them to be management consultancy pick-up joints. It was really refreshing not to have a badge with your company name on it. People made an effort to speak to you on a different level rather than just cruising for business… I couldn’t go to sleep till the early hours of the morning because of the number of ideas buzzing around in my head. I will not miss next year for anything.”
Barns, in his email, continues: “Charles Handy kindly wrote a letter to me in which he was kind enough to describe me as ‘a true alchemist, passionate, dogged and different and I admire you for all these, plus your courage’. When I read those words I actually get quite emotional, I’m not sure why although the words make me remember a phrase my father wrote in my autograph book when I was about five years old. He said, ‘Brendan, only dead fish swim in the mainstream.’ It took me a long time to work out what he meant – but ever since it clicked I’ve driven myself never to be a dead fish.”
PLUS
It’s not only because of economic gloom – or that catch-all explanation, September 11 – that conference organisers find it hard to lure delegates. Another reason is that many people consider conferences a waste of time. One who feels like that is Stuart Popham, head of the finance practice at the international law firm Clifford Chance. “You don’t tend to learn much at conferences,” says Popham, “except maybe from the inspirational speakers, like that guy, In Search of Excellence, whatsisname, Tom Peters… The principal benefit is in seeing [people] and being seen. We don’t like to go to conferences where there are a lot of other lawyers because we don’t get any work from them.”
PLUS
Between them, delegates at the first London Business Forum represented an impressive mix: banks, accountants, management consultants, a premier league football club, the BBC, a tobacco company, healthcare organisations, a school of management, a coffee chain, an internet service provider, railway companies, law firms, supermarkets, IT specialists, regional development agencies, Westminster Abbey and several unfamiliar names from the human resources sector.
3173 words. First published 4 June 02. © FT Magazine
3 June 02