What they didn't teach me at Business School

I've spent a lifetime in marketing creating new products, briefing new campaigns, starting new companies. I've worked in different sectors: fast-moving consumer goods, financial services and oil among others. And with world-class brands: Heinz, Nestlé, Prudential, NatWest and Shell – where latterly I was Chairman of Shell Brands International AG.

I have learnt much, made mistakes and enjoyed success. As a marketer, I have always tried to take the 'customer point of view', believed in the 'power of research data' and the value of 'impactful communications'.

I have been privileged to learn at the feet of masters, through gaining an HND in Business Studies and a postgraduate Diploma in Marketing; and through attending courses at IMD in Switzerland, London Business School, Wharton and Harvard in the US. I learnt and applied much of what I was taught.

However, in retiring from Shell at 55 I find myself reflecting on what they didn't teach me at business school. What did I learn as a practitioner? Here is my personal answer: ten lessons, from the coalface of business.

1. LANGUAGE

No one prepared me for brutal and foul language used to intimidate. I started my career with HJ Heinz, a fine company, obsessed with delivering quality brands and great training. Armed on my first day with the confidence of height, polished shoes, smile, firm handshake and briefcase with a thermos of hot soup to sample buyers, I had been taught that you seize the door handle, enter the store and announce: 'Mr Heinz here – to take your order.' The Tesco manager responded with: 'Fuck off!' I quickly retreated, found the nearest phone box and called my area manager. I thought it might be an offence to repeat such language over the phone (so naive), but I had to tell him the story of my failure at the first hurdle. His advice was: 'Go back in there, tell him to fuck off and give you the order.' With heart in mouth, I did, and got the order.

Lesson: fight fire with fire.

2. ETHICS

At Nestlé, I took over the most successful region in the country. Could a young marketing man take over a sales role, and keep the top spot in the national league tables for the region? I took one of our best customers to lunch. On the walls of the restaurant were pictures by a local artist. My customer admired them, said he would like one, but didn't have any money. I instantly realised I was expected to give him a gift – a bribe. I had a millisecond to make it clear that I would not buy it for him. I was punished. He made my life hell. However, in the end we delivered great business results.

Lesson: be clear about your personal value system so, when you are tempted, be able to reject without the bat of an eyelid.

3. CREATIVITY

You learn about the importance of the advertising brief, of managing the creative process, of getting it all together in an integrated campaign. But no one told me about the 'magic moment'. At Prudential, the agency (WCRS) developed a 'big idea' – looking at people's aspirations about what they wanted to be. In one of the executions, a couple sat on a sofa, talking about their dreams. It was mildly humorous and engaging. At the end the actress gave 'a look' to her partner, a look that was worth a thousand words. It set the work alight, and sent the recall scores through the roof.

Lesson: where in communications materials is the 'hot button' that connects with audiences in a way that achieves breakthrough?

4. CONSULTANTS

We are warned: 'Be careful of consultants. They borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then charge you for telling you the time. The clever ones keep the watch – so you become dependent on them for telling you the time.'

When I joined NatWest, a major international consultancy firm slotted themselves into my diary during my induction period to present their work on the 'way forward'. My heart sank as I noticed a deck of presentation slides land on the desk with a thud. The first slide presented the proposition of their work. It said: 'Britain's Biggest Bank'. I said, 'I thought that the future was about not being boastful about our size, but about being more that just a bank.' They said, 'Oh, we'd better start again.' The bill was £1 million.

Lesson: employ consultants in a series of single work orders, for agreed prices, and manage their time.

5. FACTS

At Shell, I inherited a major sponsorship contract with Ferrari and Formula 1. The feeling in the company was that this was 'a good thing'. I had been taught about the benefit of sponsorships in a new media landscape, where traditional advertising needed to be supplemented with new ways of engaging with customers. But would shareholders accept a renewal of the contract based merely on our gut feeling? We set out to use quantitative research to understand the correlation between the awareness of Shell's association with Ferrari, and how it influenced the buying behaviour of our target – and hence its value in dollars. We learned what we needed to do to improve the value of the brand association between an oil company and the passion brand of Ferrari.

Lesson: data are your friends. Be dispassionate and objective. Don't perfume the pig. Use market research information, not just to confirm your instincts, but to generate an understanding of value in monetary terms.

6. MULTI-LEVEL WORKING

Business schools have modules on 'work–life balance', and in companies like Shell this was taken up as a cause célèbre. But when your boss sends you a series of emails on a Sunday when he himself is on holiday some of the 'cause' is nonsense. Work and life are not compartmentalised. Much of work is a privilege and a joy. Some of life is hard work.

Lesson: try to go beyond sequential working – do parallel working. Prioritise every day and become an expert juggler. Learn from a working mother – they do it best.

7. STAMINA

Stamina is never mentioned as an issue, but you surely do need it. We're told we should continuously get out and about, to 'keep one's feet in the street'. The older I got, the earlier I started work. The competition doesn't sleep and customers don't care that we need to sleep. That electronic boss the laptop, and a continuous flood of emails is remorseless and relentless. It really is a 24/7 world. And much international travel takes place over weekends. This in itself is not a problem, but manage it or it manages you.

Lesson: plan and book your holidays. Give yourself quality time moments; keep your brain alive to the wider world.

8. PATIENCE

We are taught that business is action, that impatience is a virtue and that aggression is good. Military language and models of war are common. Analogies using 'Supertankers', 'Elephants' and 'Dinosaurs' are bandied about to get us off our butts and into the jungle firing on all cylinders. But magic wands or silver bullets don't work for big companies. Progress is a long and winding road.

Lesson: you enter a market town by town. You grow a market town by town. You retake a market town by town. The 'stairway to heaven' is about a patient understanding that moving forward is about the steps from today to tomorrow. It is not about grand gestures. It is not just about talking about 'vision', but delivering it.

9. POLITICS

The subject of company politics is avoided at business school. It is associated with 'brown nosing', and wasting time on internal distractions that have no external value. So it isn't worth teaching. But does your network in business matter? Is it important? Surely business is about results, and these will be transparent to all?

I observed one man that I worked for. He was no better than others around him, in fact in many ways he was worse. Shallow and self-interested, he loved to use the shock tactic of foul language, to bully across his point of view. But, did he ever focus on his boss, keeping in daily touch, continuously feeding morsels of good news, often the achievements of others (implied as his), passing by the boss's door on the off-chance of a soundbite, lurking by the lift and delivering a quick 'lift speech' about his achievements.

Lesson: as a boss, people who focus on internal politics are quite easy to spot – they talk 'I' and not 'we'. And if they do talk about the team, they rarely know anything about their private lives. Good bosses are always available to their teams, and have regular face-to-face and one-to-one meetings. Think about managing up. But do it through sound business cases and lobby before you present the final case. Provide cover for your team, and try always to support them.

10. CUSTOMER

We are taught that the customer is king, that customer-centric companies win. We are encouraged to have rafts of staff dedicated to identifying consumer insights.

But what about the value of your own experience? At Nestlé we had tastings and samplings several times a day, and were encouraged to buy and try our own and competitor products at home. Before I joined NatWest I went into a branch to open an account. I believed that I should use and experience the product and service that I was going to be promoting. It was hard to open an account.

Over the coming weeks, I found the queues in the branch challenging, and was horrified when Direct Debits didn't stick and call centre staff were clearly trying to get rid of me as quickly as possible. Awful direct mailings landed on my doorstep – clearly with little knowledge of my income, lifestage and likely wants. I shared the outcomes of these experiences with my director colleagues, who were aghast that I should bother to use the bank – they didn't. They used a private bank in the group, so they had no direct experience of the pain of our customers.

Also, in the same bank, I was called in by the chairman one day, to explain why we were getting such a mauling in the press for bad service. The answer was that our research over many years confirmed the assertions of the press. The problem was that somehow the data didn't get to the board – or they didn't listen.

Lesson: become a consumer of the product or service you market. Challenge and expect all board members to do the same.

This article featured in Market Leader, Autumn 2007.