Life’s a Pitch by Roger Mavity and Stephen Bayley

Out on 5th March!

How to be more business-like with your emotions and more emotional about business. The date which leads to a passionate affair is a pitch. The interview which starts your career is a pitch. Every new meeting, every new opportunity, involves pitching. We’re at it all the time.

Life’s a Pitch tells you how to do it better.
How to be best, first or, at least, different.
How to be noticed and how to get to ‘yes’.
How to become smarter, cleverer, sexier.

Witty, irreverent, and filled with unconventional wisdom,
Life’s a Pitch will help you win life’s battles –
in business, at home, and over lunch…

A few more words on the title....

Dictionary Entry

Pitch (pit-sch), v. [ME. Piche(n; also later pitched). Origin, history and sense-development are obsc.]

1. To thrust in, fix in; make fast, settle, set place. 2. To plant, implant; to fix, stick fasten. Later to make fast with stakes. 3. To place or locate oneself; to take up position, settle or alight. 4. To set in order, arrange; to fix the order, position, rate, price or value of. 5. To pit (one person) against another. 6. To fix, settle, or place in thought. 7. To present, strut, flog, blag, persuade in order to win a deal.

How to use this book

Making a pitch is not just a matter of winning the pet food account in an airless meeting room at one of those hotels where people conduct that sort of business. The whole of life is a pitch. Everything you do is a matter of presentation and persuasion. Getting dressed. Dating. Lunch. Sending an e-mail. As soon as you get the idea, it comes infectious. But, until now, there has never been an inspirational book written on the subject of how to do it.

Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity have similar philosophies though from very different backgrounds. Roger wrote the first part and Stephen wrote the second, although they have been continuously interfering in each other’s territory. The result is both business-manual and a philosophy for life.

In the first part Roger looks at pitching in a highly pragmatic way: how do you design and deliver your pitch to get the result you want? He examines how you pitch in business and how you can do it far better. He goes on to look at the parallels between the way you pitch for business and the way you pitch yourself in life. You can use Roger’s part of the book to understand the mechanics (as well as the psychology) of a brilliant pitch and to lean how to do it yourself.

Stephen’s part of the book is more discursive and anecdotal. Intended to be provocative, it looks at the differences between appearance and reality, between style and substance, between who you are and what you want to be and how bad behaviour can sometimes get good results. Whether discussing business or life, this is in a way the ultimate design book because it is a book about how to design your personality.

Although Life’s a Pitch is in two distinct parts, there’s a single large idea behind the book. How you pitch your ideas and how you pitch yourself will determine the course of your life. Learning how to do it effectively (and understanding why you need to) can mean the difference between success and failure: because the truth is the the whole of life’s a pitch…

 

 

Stephen Bayley, by Roger Mavity

When I first met Stephen and he was introduced to me as an academic, an art historian and an author, I feared he might prove a little too earnest for my taste. But then he gave me a copy of his latest book: it was not entitled Post-structuralism Re-assessed but Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and I realized that we had more in common than I had expected.

As I got to know Stephen better, I discovered that he wasn't only interested in sex, drink and fast cars: he is also interested in tennis. (But you can only play tennis in the summer, whereas the other three sports are year-round activities.)

In much the same way as marriage is widely held to be the best way of spoiling a good romance, so working together is often the best way of spoiling a good friendship. That hasn't proved to be the case with Stephen and me. We were good friends long before we conceived the idea of this book, but working together has cemented that friendship. I've learnt that Stephen has, beneath the surface, an encyclopaedic knowledge and a penetrating intelligence, while on the surface he has great style and a mischievous sense of fun - not a bad formula for enjoying life, if you think about it.

In between books and broadcasting, Stephen has found time to be the first head of the Design Museum and a consultant on design strategy to such huge corporations as Coca-Cola and the Ford Motor Company.

ROGER MAVITY, by Stephen Bayley

'What time of day is it, Rog?' In the familiar joke about the moral bankruptcy of the advertising business, Rog would reply, 'What time of day would you like it to be?' But while Roger Mavity has many of the Machiavellian talents and predispositions required to get to the very top of a business that George Orwell likened to the 'rattling of a stick in a swill bucket', he is wholly without the supine reflexes of advertising's groundlings. On the contrary, Rog gives a clear impression of being very much in charge. All that time in the swill bucket was not wasted.

Before we met, he had an apprenticeship at an agency called French Gold Abbott that matured (if, that is, anything in adland ever actually improves with age) into the best of the best. Rog was there when the Habitat and Volvo accounts were pitched for, won and executed with a superior intelligence and style that raised the game in British advertising. But if business is a battle, no one knows better than Rog that it is a bit like Stendhal's account of Waterloo: foggy chaos interrupted by sporadic bouts of furious activity.

He has built and sold his own agency. Working for Granada, he ran the successful pitch for Forte Group, the biggest and most bitter takeover battle the London Stock Exchange has ever seen. While I was once director of one of Terence Conran's far-flung dominions, Rog is now chief executive of the whole Conran empire. He has thus acquired the authority of an infinitely wise, if sometimes sardonic, media Buddha. He takes photographs, he sails. He talks. In fact, his wife says he 'talks in paragraphs'. This is his first and, he says, his last book. A pity, because I have never enjoyed any collaboration so much.

 

http://www.lifesapitch.uk.com/

 

Roger Mavity learned about pitching the hard way - in the advertising business, where he pitched for, and won, such accounts as Volvo, Fosters, Honda and Burberry. He went on to head two divisions of Granada Group, where he master-minded the company's successful bid for Forte Group - still the largest hostile takeover bid in British commercial history. He was Chairman of Citigate Drew Rogerson, one of the UK's largest financial PR companies, and is now Chief Executive of Conran Holdings.

Charles Allen, founding Chief Executive of ITV describes him as 'without doubt the best presenter I have ever seen.'

Stephen Bayley first became famous as an authority on style and design when Sir Terence Conran chose him to head up the Boilerhouse at the V&A, Britain's first permanent exhibition of design. He then went on the become the first Chief Executive of the Design Museum and he is now a celebrated, outspoken broadcaster and critic, author of 12 books and consultant on design and presentation to companies such as Ford and Coca-Cola.

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