An Interview with Rare Consulting's Co-Founder, Ben Pask
Ben Pask, Co-founder of Rare Consulting discusses both his personal and professional inspirations ahead of speaking at Inspiration 2015
Ben Pask, Co-founder of Rare Consulting discusses both his personal and professional inspirations ahead of speaking at Inspiration 2015, Book Now
Who Are You?
Hi, I’m Ben Pask. I’m the Co-founder of Rare: Training and Consultancy. I guess, what do I do? Professionally, we’re all about demystifying marketing for people across all levels within businesses. Personally, I love pubs, I like longboarding, and I like really heavy metal.
What Inspires You And Where Do You Look For Inspiration?
I think, again professionally, it wouldn’t really be anything related to the work I do. I tend to like to read different kinds of perspectives and different viewpoints on a range of topics. I think personally, even though the lines the pretty blurry there, I think terms of things like music, or arts, or film it tends to be, again, pretty disparate sort of sources. Things that don’t really necessarily have a common thread. I quite like being exposed to different kind of ideas and concepts. I like a good broad spectrum. I guess I don’t really take inspiration from one particular thread, I don’t think.
What Do You Do When You Have An Idea And How Do You Go About Turning It Into Reality?
What I would do when I have an idea and turn it into reality, I’m a big believer in sharing. I tend not to keep ideas to myself so I quite like bringing in different perspectives and ideas on things. For example, if I’m maybe working on music with people I play music with, or ideas in work, I’ll typically kind of have a rough idea, throw it to someone and say, "What do you think? What’s your perspective? What’s your viewpoint?" It’s a really good way to validate whether it’s worthwhile doing or not.
To bring it to reality again, I’m a big fan of a lot of the testing on principal, quite a big fan of just putting it out there and seeing what the feedback is. I always think it’s best to use speed as your ally rather than sort of sitting around and pontificating on what’s the perfect way of doing it, because nothing’s perfect, really.
Talk Us Through An Idea Of Yours, From Inspiration to Realisation
I think quite an easy one professionally would be setting up Rare. I’ve identified working with a lot of clients that there was quite a few common problems with people not feeling particularly confident with what they’re talking about. I thought one good way to solve that wasn’t to create another agency, we got plenty of those. I thought the best approach would be to actually create a business that focuses on giving people the confidence. That would be through training exercises or consultancy workshops, and that kind of thing. It’s all about trying to empower people to make choices for themselves with a good degree of confidence.
Personally, I think quite a good example recently, was quite fortunate enough to put a record out on a label called New Heavy Sounds. That was quite an interesting one because we’d given a six-month lead time to work with the producer we wanted to work with. We had the idea of what we wanted to do. The record’s called Terminal, it’s all about end times and the impact of political systems and ecosystems on modern day, and the man’s place within that. We had six months to write the record. I think by keeping focus on what the theme was it was quite easy for us to get from the start to the end point of that journey. Been pretty lucky with reviews, it’s done quite well, actually. Got 4 K’s in Kerrang, just wanted to get that in there ’cause my fifteen-year-self would be quite excited about that.
What Are You Going To Talk About At Inspiration?
I’m going to focus predominately on empowerment of collective forces and how ideas are much better served and inspiration’s much better realized when you work together with other people. I’ll be talking a lot about social currency and how the interconnectedness between people always yields much better performance. There’s loads of research that supports that notion. Rare have done a bit of work called the Innovation Index with Manchester Met University and one of the biggest barriers we found to innovation within business was this notion of empowerment. One of the central themes throughout the talk with be about how do we instil the notion of empowerment amongst employers, what’s the role of leadership, and how can we create the right infrastructure to allow empowerment to exist within businesses. That’s going to be the prime focus of it. There will be a lot of anecdotes, a lot of stories from people we spoke to, such as the likes of Google, GSK, Springwise, Anesta, and some perspectives from some of the wider field of research, and that kind of thing.
Hear Ben Speak at Inspiration 2015, book your place now:
