By all reasonable measurements she was dead already, a bag of bones and infected skin that had been found lying and dying a few hours earlier in a supermarket parking lot in Yonkers, New York.
But fate or luck or whatever energy force you personally believe in stepped forward and she was picked up by a passing truck driver who gave her to a rescue group who raced her to an emergency vet. His diagnosis was simple. “This is going be a long road. We should put her to sleep.”
The end of Summer came on Monday. November 11th. I felt the warmth slip away as I held her head in my lap, her body suddenly lighter as the sprit that powered this irresistible life force flowed out of our lives. She was ready to go. And we encouraged her to go. And I am broken without her. My blonde bombshell.
Since I began this blog I’ve written about issues that affect the leaders of businesses. Both practical and personal.
In my mind, I’ve been vague about the kind of business the blog was designed to help. After really thinking about it, I’ve decided I’m ready to be more focused.
So, I’m going to write about ideas that will help creative companies become more valuable businesses.
And I’m calling it Art, Meet Commerce.
Because after all, that’s the balancing act we all confront when we sell subjectivity.
What makes a business valuable depends on your perspective. It’s the most personal of definitions. And I hope to explore as many of them as I can. And any you suggest.
I’m also conscious that many of these ideas will apply to many kinds of businesses. After all, creativity is the fuel of innovation. And every business must innovate. Or die. There being no company that has survived by maintaining the status quo.
But instead of trying to reach the broadest audience, I’m going to provide a narrower audience with deeper insight.
An audience that uses the power of creativity to change behavior. Who are motivated to be paid relevantly for that change. And who want to leave a legacy.
In some cases I’ll write a series about a topic that requires more detail. In others I’ll pull examples from the news and talk about how they apply to creative companies.
You can expect to see a couple of posts a week from me. A realistic output that I can sustain. Probably Tuesdays and Thursdays. With the occasional spontaneous outburst thrown in.
What you’ll read will be unbiased and unvarnished. I’m trying to help. Not please.
And I welcome dissenting opinions, alternative points of view, and honest, open debate.
Speaking of which, I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men recently.
In the infancy of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, following Don Draper’s laconic interview with Ad Age, and its ensuing disastrous results, Betram Cooper admonishes Don’s diffidence.
“Turning creative success into business is your work. You failed.”
Is this, in a nutshell, the Purpose of every creative business? And what is a creative business, anyway?
Answers to these, and many other questions will be forthcoming.
Today, we need not even be sentient before we are defined by others. And the simple truth is that from the moment we are a failed pregnancy test we have two choices. Define ourselves. Or someone else will.
But whereas the multi-faceted talents of humans are often lost when their owners being placed into early boxes, businesses instead benefit from clearly defined intent.
For some companies, the willingness to define themselves comes without supporting action.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster, for instance, focused attention on BP’s claim to be safety conscious. And on corporate behavior that undermined that claim almost systematically.
But for most companies the failure goes far beyond the incongruity between stated intentions and action.
It rests instead in the belief that in the absence of a definition, the world has no negative view of you. That your image is for you to define. And no one else.
This is the fantasy of management that believes the absence of a decision is not itself a decision.
I have seen companies at intimate quarters act on the basis that the availability of a senior executive to attend a meeting was the pivot point in a process.
In the real world, the availability of a senior executive is entirely meaningless to the regard in which that company is held by its customers, suppliers and shareholders. The employees might care, because they’ve been trained to do so. But everyone else is interested only in impact. Whether financial, environmental, social or humanitarian.
And today, impact is created by companies and individuals moving not at enterprise speed but at entrepreneurial or social speed.
And in those companies every minute is spent acting. Because they know where they’re headed. And how they’re going to get there.
So the next time you find yourself waiting for someone at your company to make a decision, remind yourself of one thing.
In addition to losing all of their possessions, the family’s cat and three dogs were killed.
When the fire department arrived at the scene because the neighbor’s house was being threatened - they had paid the $75 fee - the fire chief ordered that water be sprayed only up to the property line between the two homes, despite the home owner offering to pay ‘anything’ to have his home saved.
I have a pragmatic view about building a business. You define a Purpose, hire people that you think can help you create that vision, invest in them until doing so becomes destructive to the organization or unhelpful to them, and then make a change. It’s called accountability. The mid point between ruthlessness and enablement.
Accountability must have flex in it. Circumstances and people are not fixed points of reference. And absolute rules create only dictatorships.
I believe the most effective management structure is a benevolent hierachy. One that listens and then decides. A model that allows you to judge the quality of the thinking of the leadership of an organization, and its prospects for achieving its Purpose.
I have never thought about the Purpose of a fire department. ‘Protect lives and property,’ seems like a good place to start. Sending a large bill after you’ve provided that service would be an acceptable quid pro quo for even the most radical opponent of socialized government.
The news website on which I saw this story is running an online poll. 22% of the respondents believe that the fire chief was right to let the home burn.
Clearly they’re not animal lovers.
Revolutions are not known for promoting rational thought.
Fear in buckets, yes.
Which tends only to promote the circumstances that created the need for revolution to begin with.
Running any business during a revolution is hard. The screaming and yelling drowning out most of the ability to think clearly.
But if you’re clear about why your business exists - clear to the point of being able to write it down in a single line without the use of the word ‘and’ - you’ll put out your customers’ fires with increasing ease.
It’s been an interesting couple of months. And for those of you who have been kind enough to pass comment on my blogging absence I offer thanks. And only poor excuses.
I celebrated a milestone birthday a couple of weeks ago. An event that gave me a moment to pause. Or perhaps two.
As a species, we like living but hate aging. An example of cognitive dissonance that trumps all others.
To exist, after all, requires both. A truth that becomes clearer as one does more of each of them.
In truth, this realization is less the result of age than experience. Experience being the sum total of all that we have lived, seen, heard and learned.
Most of which is provided by others.
If our view of our own lives were based only on what we experienced first hand, our evaluation of how we are doing would be both kinder and narrower. The only measurement of progress being our own intrinsic drive to grow.
The purity of that scale, however, denies us a broader context of what might be possible. Whether provided by the inspiration of the achievements of others. Or the evidence of history that as a species we have almost limitless potential.
Because once we have satisfied life’s most basic requirements - food, shelter and procreation - the rest of life becomes a journey of exploration.
Of ourselves, to begin with.
Followed, hopefully sooner rather than later, of the world in which we live.
That exploration is filled with cognitive dissonance. A logical inconsistency in our beliefs. The first of which is provided by parents. Whom we see both as perfect in their command of the universe. And flawed in their unwillingness to do only what we want.
Parents, we come to discover, are people too. A realization that arrives, for many of us, with a price on its head. Taking with it security, confidence and trust. In my case, I worked for 40 years to reconcile the image of a father with my reality of mine. A challenge that for a while I decided came at too high a price. The resolution of which was a ten year detente. In which I saw him as dead. And he gave me no reason to think otherwise.
That experience I mentioned before brings with it two things. An awareness that we are not so perfect as we think. Nor others so flawed.
A realization that comes too late for many people.
The cause of which is an extraordinary investment in what Jon Elster describes as adaptive preference formation. The retrospective justification by which we define a failure as success.
In the living of a life, the lines between true failure and the willingness simply to throw away a dream for expediency sake become impossibly blurred. We are what the journey makes us. Each step a decision that can change the course of that life. Including the chance to go back and try again if we wish.
But in the running of a business, every decision makes the journey increasingly narrow. And the outcome of that journey increasingly consequential to the lives that are impacted by the direction a company takes.
The weight of which makes the reactive, short-term management of many businesses even more confusing. The short-term cognitive dissonance between their statement of intent and their actions having profound long term consequences on their ability to evolve.
The ultimate consequence of which is extinction or re-invention.
For the established business, re-invention is always expensive. And, if guided by the same adaptive preference formation that caused the re-invention to be necessary in the first place, usually fatal.
For unless the habit of justifying failure as a planned outcome is broken, the result will be only a different kind of failure. One that sees luck as a resource and hope as a strategy. A waste of two elements critical to any successful journey.
Success is defined by what we achieve in the context of what was possible.
On a business level, that is easier to achieve when our standards become absolute, and our willingness to justify our own actions less so.
On a personal level, it is easier to achieve when we see ourselves and others as differently but equally flawed.
Today, I know one thing for certain.
My father reads my blog.
As a measurement of success that might be my greatest achievement.
"In the long run, we're all dead," posited John Maynard Keynes.
I say posited because recent announcements in the development of 3D printing suggest we may not be far away from a time where death becomes an option.
Far away being a relative term. Your children's children, perhaps.
While we consider the ramifications of that kind of evolution, an email circulating this morning highlights the requirements of sustainable evolution within the current limitations of medical science.
Knowing what you stand for.
Applying those standards consistently.
The capacity to evolve. Ideally, pro-actively.
The ability to accept there will always be critics. No matter what you do.
The discipline to remain focused regardless.
In this case, good genes have also played their considerable part. Proving that when it comes to longevity, medical science is still the pupil.
Around 5pm EST this coming Sunday, Germany will win the World Cup.
It will happen because six years ago, having been unceremoniously dumped out of the European Championships - during which the team failed to win a single game - the German football authorities decided to rebuild.
The did not undertake this mission lightly. They didn’t embark on a conversation-heavy, action-light series of meetings and investigations.
They hired a man and asked him for a plan.
Fortunately for them, and for the rest of us waiting for our respective countries to demonstrate there is a reason beyond passport issuance to believe that next time will be our time, they hired a man capable of giving them a plan.
They hired a man called Jurgen Klinsmann.
Klinsmann had won the World Cup with Germany. He had played at the highest domestic levels of German, Italian, French and English football. He had moved to California, thereby removing himself from the day-to-day petty politics of European football and ensuring he retained objectivity.
Klinsmann did three things that are a model for anyone re-building a business.
One. He solicited opinions. From players and managers alike. Everyone who would have some influence over how his German players would play. Then he empowered them to make a contribution.
Two. He defined the characteristics of how his Germany would play. Characteristics that were based on well-established German traits. Being dynamic. Aggressive. And decisive. Traits that Klinsmann readily admits were the cause of two World Wars. But which he believed could be better Purposed on the football pitch.
Three. He built an organization capable of surviving his departure, in the knowledge that the emotional effort required to build the foundations would quickly create friction between him and the German Board.
It was not an easy transition. Early results were poor. And he almost lost his job after 18 months. Only a decisive win over the U.S. in 2006 keeping him in place for the World Cup that year.
His team came third. And was celebrated throughout Germany. Then Kilinsmann resigned and handed over the model to his young assistant, Joachim Loew.
Two years later, Germany were runners up in the European Championship.
This afternoon, they play in their second consecutive World Cup semi final.
It is a case study in organizational re-structuring.
Vision. Execution. Evolution.
And built, not around an irreplaceable individual or a single skill.
But around a Purpose and a set of timeless characteristics.
Klinsmann’s work has changed the face of world football. Created a template that others will follow. And will bring hundreds of millions of Euros worth of value to the German economy.
As an Englishman, praising German anything is hard.
But between now and Sunday evening I'll be doing something for the first time in my life.
A week at Cannes is hard work. Physically. Financially. And emotionally. The relentlessness of what’s next being punctuated by the constant evaluation of how we’re doing.
How we’re doing is relative. To the day, the hour, the occasion and the group we are with.
Cannes is geo-locational and hierarchical. Success being measured on a complex, unwritten, but widely known metric. Lunch at du Cap with two prospective clients is trumped by a boat ride to St Tropez with one, but beats drinks at the Carlton with three. And La Colombe d’Or is worth changing your flight home for.
For many that don’t go to Cannes, particularly those that pay the bills, the week is seen as a waste. Of money, of focus and the opportunity to do meaningful work at home.
It’s easy to see why. Four days in the South of France comes conceptually attached to the world of Ian Fleming. Beautiful, powerful women mingling with men in white suits in the pursuit of global domination. Proof that every spy novel comes from a basis of fact.
But beyond the billionaire’s yachts’ moored off St Tropez, or Cap d’Antibes - is that a helipad or a swimming pool on the aft deck and is Armani on board this week? - beyond the glistening sheet metal of the most expensive motors, beyond the limitless supply of rosé, the simple truth is that for any advertising-related business, Cannes is the most valuable investment of the year.
People comes to Cannes wanting to engage. Heads of companies, thought leaders, decision makers, movers and shakers. All are willing to meet, to talk and to explore what might be made of this. The blue and white strata of Ralph Lauren-inspired summer vistas removing limitations of imagination that otherwise restrict the vision of those paid to have one.
This alone makes Cannes worth the price of admission. The limitless possibility of meaningful and memorable conversation with people that can make things happen.
The other return on investment is membership to the club that Cannes represents. The club of, ‘I’m serious.’
If you go to Cannes you’re tempted by the potential. If you’re there it’s because you’re serious. Oh, the beauty and booze are part of the compensation. But use them as motivation even once and you’re not going back. Because if that’s why you’re there you don’t get it. And Cannes separates the don’t get its from everyone else like a canning factory.
But there is waste at Cannes. Sleep for instance. Cannes operates in a different reality. Time passing six to eight times faster. That boat ride to St. Tropez for lunch takes 30 minutes, though your watch tells you it's seven hours since you left. Lunch at du Cap? 15. It is a reality that makes sleep impractical, every moment of disengagement a wasted opportunity to make a connection, have a conversation, promote an idea.
Fortunately, most people don’t. Sleep. At least not much. The four hours a night that seemed like a bare minimum when the week began, is reduced to nothing by the time Saturday come along - sixteen hours after we arrived on Tuesday.
The other waste at Cannes, is opportunity. Wasted by the ocean-full.
There are obvious examples. And some that are almost imperceptible.
Of the former, this year’s winner was Yahoo. A company desperate to be seen as relevant. Proving that money and its spending are not dispositive in an attempt at brand significance. Yahoo sponsored the Gutter Bar, a folly of immense proportions. Sponsoring the Gutter Bar is like sponsoring air. Everyone knows it's not true.
Yahoo also handed out purple flip flops to anyone they could find on the Croissette. All of which went un-worn, from what I could see. And promoted a branded sand castle event on the beach, at reportedly vast expense. Somehow seeing a team of people put Yahoo’s logo into a pile of sand does not convince me I should do something about my relationship with Yahoo. Nor does it tell me what they would like that relationship to be. In a world in which consumers and brands are having conversations, sticking your logo on my feet and in my face, morning noon and night is the act of a bored child, or a dying brand. Not a company trying to solve my problems or provide me with value.
Yahoo’s waste did inspire me to think about how to create the most effective brand placement at Cannes next year. The idea I came up with would change the way Cannes works for everyone that attends. And I’m going to suggest it to one of our clients. I’ll let you know if it goes anywhere.
But the greatest waste at Cannes this year was the opportunity for re-definition. By the Festival itself.
Cannes operated under the theme of “Connections Made Easy.” As an example of truth in advertising, it leaves a little room for improvement.
Cannes is an analog event. It has a badly designed, difficult to navigate, hierarchical (that word again) website. And offered ‘Cannes Connect’. An unintuitive online delegate tool.
But at check-in you are handed an enormous canvas shoulder bag filled with reams of printed paper. You could hear trees crashing in Brazillian rain forests. The week’s schedule is offered in a booklet that has no page numbers. And is too large for any short or shirt pocket.
“Connections Made Easy” is the foundational Purpose of advertising. And there is much about the Festival that encourages those connections.
But the “Made Easy” part is a work in progress.
Which makes sense.
Because Cannes is a reflection of an industry.
One struggling to separate from its past and embrace its future.
In addition to Magic Johnson, there were about 6,000 delegates. As well as some 2,000 people who attended without seeing the benefit of registering for the seminars, workshops and Awards ceremonies.
At 2,800 Euros it’s been hard to argue with that decision in years past. The downside to missing the seminars and workshops being hard to discern. The results of a 50 year old food-chain that had little new to offer, and conversations each year limited to the debate of whether a Grand Prix would or would not be awarded. Whether the consumer gained any benefit from that discussion is open to debate. Albeit a limited one.
But over the last two years the advertising food chain has been bent out of all recognition. And at Cannes this year, the conversations inside and outside the Palais started to pulse to a different rhythm. That of getting started.
The future of advertising has been debated incessantly over these last couple of years. The tv commercial is dead. Publishing is dead. It’s the web. It’s branded content. It’s apps. It’s geo-locational. TV is back. And is here to stay (this I read on the way to Cannes). It’s digital. It’s integrated. It’s all about brands. It’s all about utility.
For an industry based on subjectivity, the desire of the cognoscenti to define the future in absolute terms is at best confusing. At worst, it’s destructive. And very, very expensive.
The advertising industry is about making connections. Between an advertiser and its customers. Everything else the rest of us do serves only that purpose.
For fifty years, that relationship was one way. Today, it’s reciprocal. A concept that the industry has more success talking about than doing something about.
The advertising industry typically points to two pieces of work as representative of its ability to evolve. The first, BMW films, contributed to record breaking sales the year after they appeared on the web. That was nine years ago.
The second, Nike ID, is widely touted as the best example of an integrated platform. That work is nearly six years old.
For an industry based on innovation and creativity, it shows a frustrating paucity of imagination.
This year the festival awarded its Advertiser of the Year award to Unilever’s CMO, Keith Weed. During the week he described the industry’s attempts at digital evolution as reminiscent of high school sex. “Everyone talks about it, a few do it, no one’s very good at it.”
On Saturday night when he picked up the award he made a wish. “That a year from now, someone will have stopped talking about being integrated and will have done something integrated.” Hard to argue with that.
At best, the advertising industry is engaged in a reluctant revolution, the brakes to which are being applied by the very DNA on which the industry is based. The vertical hierarchy of the food chain, from advertiser, to agency to supplier, being reflected in the internal structure of most agencies.
Some mid-sized, creatively renowned agencies have begun to break down those constraints. Other companies, Mekanism and the Barbarian Group among them, have grown up around a horizontal model in which collaboration acts as both the glue and the fuel.
But with these relatively rare exceptions, the companies that deliver most of the industry’s work are still defined by a top-down model in which motivation is guided by winning awards, getting a better title and better clients, and the associated compensation that goes with all of that.
And at Cannes on Saturday night as the flashbulbs flashed, it was easy to see the mortar being re-applied to the traditional model - virtual tuck-pointing to a tired edifice.
But through the strobe lights it was also possible to just make out the beginnings of a new industry. A horizontal platform. Founded on two traditional strengths.
The power of story.
And our species’ limitless capacity for originality when we work together.
Over the rest of this week, I’ll talk about why those characteristics are so important, how to spot the obstacles that slow their growth and how to build them into a business model capable of leading the change. One comfortable with uncertainty.
In the meantime, I encourage you to watch the Man Who Walked Around The World, provided for your convenience below.
As I said, the power of story, and our limitless capacity for originality.
We're on the train into the city today. A stunning ride along the magnificence of the Hudson.
As I write this we're passing West Point, a powerful monument to strategic positioning and strong foundations. I'm struck by its permanence.
And after being home sick for a week, by our fragility.
I emerged back into the real world this morning, grateful for the power of antibiotics, but regretting last week's decision to rub my eye in an airport terminal filled with germs. It seemed unimportant at the time. Six days later, it's now clear it was not.
The power of technology has allowed me to remain productive. Virtual meetings, online presentations and free conference call services maintaining both our methods and our margins. Important foundations on which to build a better business.
The diversity of companies with which we work continues to expand. One week, a solo entrepreneur. The next, a global holding company. The scale and complexities change, of course. But the fundamentals remain inexorably the same.
What are we trying to achieve?
Why are our customers our customers?
Who will be our next generation of customers?
Every other question becomes a subset of these three.
Profitability: Do you want to maximize operating margin or build scale? Are we a parity product competing on price, or have we found a way to articulate our value in unique ways?
Expansion: Are we taking full advantage of the talent and capabilities we've already built? Do we add offices, services, both or neither?
Marketing: Are we built to talk or built to listen? Are we consistent? Are we surprising?
Talent: Will the people we have today solve the problems our clients will have tomorrow? Do our systems and workflow help them do better work, and help us identify the great ones faster?
It requires discipline to ask these questions. And honesty to answer them clearly.
And you may have temporary success without them.
But if the effort you put into your business is not matched by the quality of the foundations you are building, one of two things are certain.
The cost to repair them will be memorable.
Or fifty years from now, passers by - whether physical or virtual - will be looking at something other than the business you so painstakingly built.
No business is complete. For the simple reason that a company can exist only in two states. Growing. Or dying.
If you are not actively investing in your business, your company is decaying. Perhaps not yet in ways you can see. But inevitably and with growing impact. The cost of repair increasing exponentially.
Investment comes in many forms. Money being the most obvious. And often the least impactful. For the simple reason that much of it is misspent. Typically on initiatives that feel strategic, but are often simply reactive.
In today’s business environment, many companies are seeking ways to expand their income stream. Extending new services to existing clients is one strategy that most business leaders explore. It appears reassuring and feels instinctively right, building on existing capabilities and relationships.
But vertical expansion has limitations. Its very familiarity luring us into quick justification for the decision to act, while obscuring the need for more comprehensive analyses.
When building a business, the most imperative investment if that of our own ego. The question of what we do, and whether that is the best use of our company’s assets and experiences, requires a willingness to see ourselves as something other than that which our success has been built on.
Great business leaders ask themselves these questions every day. Their concern being not whether their past defines them as a success.
But whether the future they have planned is the best return for the most precious investment they have to make.
Reducing risk is a goal of almost every business owner.
Almost. Because for some, the high-wire is their preferred state of being. A work-hard, play-hard, sleep-fast fueled journey of trial and error.
As with all extremes, this one is counter-balanced. By an analytical, risk-averse approach that is instinctive to many business leaders. An approach that drives conversation and consternation. But not decisions.
But as management strategies, paralysis-by-analysis or jumping without a net both leave a business in the same state.
Inert.
The challenge is to find a management approach that creates economic return and emotional reassurance. For you and your clients.
The key, in our experience, is how you use time.
In any service business there are two ways to charge your customers. By time or by value.
In the advertising industry, time has become the norm. A model that in most agencies works like this:
Hire someone.
Give them an office.
Technology.
Benefits.
Add a profit margin.
Divide by 52 weeks
Divide by 40 hours.
Find a client willing to buy as many of those hours as possible.
A model that turns a company selling creativity into an employment agency.
And rewards it for working slowly. And for using a lot of people. To do anything.
Slow and big. A model for the Industrial Revolution.
But this is not a problem limited only to large enterprises. Smaller companies, particularly those selling specialized services, have developed their own version of this particular cognitive dissonance. Enthusiastically offering clients rate cards and line item estimates with promises of the time they will spend working on that project, while talking about their creative originality
A model which presents as unique creative inspiration. While turning the most valuable resource we own into a commodity.
Because ideas are infinite. But time is finite.
A reality we deny because measuring what is left is impossible. And undesirable.
And so we exist with the conviction that though our time will come, it will not do so until we are ready. Until we have done what we set out to do.
Even if we are not sure what that is.
But time is not free. For everything we do there is the opportunity cost of that which we chose not to do instead.
In our youth, those choices are invisible. But as we mature, the choices we make become sharper, more consequential. A reality which affects our businesses even more severely. Size being an obstacle to flexibility.
Any business that sells creativity should have only one reference for how it measures time.
What can I create from it?
The better that answer, the less your clients will care how long you take.
And the more they will reward you for the difference you make.
Your business is threatened every day by inconsistency. Whether yours, your employees or your suppliers.
The good news is you have high levels of influence over all of them. Whether you choose to exert that authority depends heavily on three factors.
One.Do you see the inconsistency? Until you define what you expect of each group, yourself included, you can not judge whether your business is meeting your standards. Or whether those standards are realistic. Or fair.
Two. Have you articulated your expectations? In the very early days of establishing our first business we were negotiating the purchase of a million dollar’s worth of film editing equipment. I told the sales rep that we were looking for a fair deal. But more importantly a relationship with someone who would treat as as partners. Honestly. And transparently.
Two weeks later, after extensive sessions of back-slapping and promises, I discovered he was selling us technology that was about to be replaced by a significant upcoming upgrade. When I confronted him, the cost to his credibility was far greater than the cost to his bottom line. And he spent the next decade working to justify my decision to give him a second chance.
We got better pricing and better service than any of our competitors. The latter being much more important when you’re running your own service business.
Three.Are there consequences when people fail to meet those standards? Consequences can take many forms. The willingness to have an uncomfortable conversation. The confidence to fire an employees when it is clear, for whatever reason, that your standards and theirs don’t match. The courage to hold yourself publicly accountable. And most powerfully the ability to fire clients whose standards undermine your own. Whether in their economic or inter-personal valuation of you and your employees.
Every day, we have a choice. To build this business. Or to do something else.
Every day we choose the former, we should make sure the things we do are actually helping to create the business we want.
A concession here. A short-cut there. A reaction justified by a passionate argument. Followed by the need to solve the next problem. Answer the next call. Get to the next meeting.
Big and small companies alike do not undermine themselves intentionally. They do so by choosing to see the world falsely.
And protecting themselves from the wrong threat.
While leaving Keyser Söze to wreck havoc without distraction.
Successful companies confront the issues that are really controlling their business.
For small businesses, that is often the partnership. Do you all want the same outcome? And what are you sacrificing to keep everyone happy?
For mid-size companies, look at your staffing. And get rid of those people that you love and adore, but who don’t have the talent to let you be the company you want to be.
And for large companies, confront your client contracts. If the advertising industry is typical, they are one sided and driven by factors that provide no value to either party.
"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist."
I didn’t intend to take so long a break from writing. A couple of days turned into a week which turned into a month and then suddenly, here we are. Fifty days later.
Which is also how businesses lose their way. Not dramatically. Or explosively. But moment by moment. Drop by drop. Without the benefit of audible warning. A self-imposed short-coming. There being few organizations that offer incentives to the dissenting voice.
I had excuses. A very large client and a demanding brief. One that challenged and stimulated in equal measure. The very best kind of work.
As a business we emerged from the last couple of months with a clearer sense of our own Purpose. To unlock the potential of creative businesses of any size. From multi-national enterprises - our most recent client - to single-owner entrepreneurs.
And over the last couple of months we have been reminded of a simple truth when it comes to building successful businesses.
Size matters.
For big companies, the trick is to use it without being slowed by it. A balance most have not yet achieved.
For small companies, the trick is inverted. Which is to think big. While taking advantage of one of the great advantages of being an entrepreneur. The freedom to act.
An advantage that many throw away.
I will be talking a lot more about building organizations that unlock the value of creativity over the next few months. I hope you’ll pass the word to those you think will be interested. And I hope to see you here 2-3 times a week, regardless of what else I’m up to.
For those of you that have written to me over the last couple of weeks asking me to get back to writing regularly, thank you for your interest.
And your push.
On a very personal note, a very dear friend of ours, Heather Guillen and her husband Tom, suffered the tragedy of losing their prematurely born son Tommy, last Saturday.
Heather writes a blog called Poor Lucky Me. She has continued to write it during the trauma she and Tom are now living through. It is one of the most human and raw accounts of life I have ever encountered. And it has changed my perspective about a lot of things in the days since I heard their terrible news.
I have no wisdom to account for a loss so complete that every breath must now be a deliberated choice.
I'm impatient for change. A good quality on which to build businesses. The status quo and self-satisfaction being the two greatest enemies of value creation. However you define value.
I write this post on technology that didn't exist to me this morning, on an app I didn't know about last Wednesday.
I do so, not because I am certain it will improve the quality of the process or the results.
But because I am not.
And because the cost and risk of exploration are acceptable.
Learning what we don't know is more important than learning what we do. A simple truth I am reminded of in every conversation in which I listen more than I speak.
Cost and risk, however, are subjective. And should always be measured against a fixed point of reference. Which is that the cost and risk of maintaining the status quo are always higher than we think.
And deny us the thrill of waiting, four-year old like, for the delivery of this wondrous window into the future that I now hold in my hand.
Steve Jobs announcement that Apple is withdrawing the iPad from market two days before its launch has stunned those of us that believed this device would change everything.
The rumor of an inherent problem in the iPad experience has led some to wonder whether the same is true of the iPhone and iPod, and there is speculation we may see a return to more traditional forms of communication for a while, with less reliance on state of the art technology. Regardless of the facts, the withdrawal of the iPad for “the foreseeable future” has changed some people's view of the future. It was perhaps inevitable. Nevertheless, this gain in objectivity comes at the cost of optimism.
The other breaking news of the day, of course, in the wake of yesterday’s Vanity Fair story about Tiger Woods, is Michelle Obama’s announcement that Tiger, his wife Erin and their children will be moving into the White House for at least the rest of the year.
The hope is that she and the President can provide them with the kind of domestic stability that they need to help them overcome the problems Tiger has created in his marriage.
Responding to questions about whether the public scrutiny of the White House was in fact the best environment for the family to try to rebuild, the First Lady stressed that in her view, public awareness of Tiger’s schedule would do much to restore the trust that was missing because Erin would now know where Tiger was at all times.
I’m counting the days until my iPad is delivered. Three.
Which is one fewer than the number of ways it already needs improving.
1. eBooks should have audio tracks. Music embedded into the digital pages. Background noise that fill out the scene. Spoken recipes as you cook. A whole new medium waiting to be unlocked.
3. We need a magazine tear-sheet app, which allows people like Chris and Jamie to throw away their boxes of clippings, and organize them digitally instead in a virtual index of ideas and inspirations.
4. Its wireless feature should extend to my thoughts. Because typing is analog technology in its most primitive form.
Earlier this week I wrote a post about The Politics of Change. My Mother-in-Law read it and sent me back a response about her frustration with the politics of America, the partisan and self-interested and divisive process that led us to the Health Care bill we have today. And why she was increasingly feeling as though her voice isn't heard in this political system, and that her vote didn't matter.
Katie and I don't always agree. But I believe in her heart. And I believe she matters. And that as flawed as the process is, it's easy to lose sight of progress in the vapid, political noise of today on all sides.
Don't forget, Rosa Parks only got a seat on the bus a few years before I was born. Today Rosa Parks is the First Lady and her husband is the President. And his greatest rival to the office, whom he beat by less than one percent, was a person who ninety years ago wouldn't have been allowed to vote. A woman.
Change takes time. But once we establish a new expectation, however flawed, it becomes the platform on which the impossible can take flight. It was only 42 years between Lindbergh's flight and Armstrong's walk. And you remember how much opposition there was during Vietnam to spending money to send men to the moon. Most of the technology we use today, including the technology you and I are using to have this exchange, came from that decision.
We should want perfect change. It demands more of all of us. But when the only alternative to the status quo is imperfect change we should celebrate it for what it is. A chance to raise our sights higher.
Which makes finding ways to explain the value that our consultancy provides a personal daily wrestling match. Culture versus commerce. But there is comfort in knowing I am not alone.
My father, who has been known to write a word or two, penned an article some years ago that I pinned on my office wall through three career changes. It described the differences between an English and American selling sensibility.
“We imply,” he wrote. “We infer. If the opportunity doesn’t manifest itself, we withdraw. Sell, my dear fellow? Sell, who us?”
Selling is an art form. The essence of which is built on relationships. The best I have known do so effortlessly and authentically. Most of us having long since developed an instinct for superficiality.
But even the best sales people need something to work with.
Aspirational products and services help. Easy to write. Hard to provide.
Aspiration is a frame of reference that requires a context. Those that have and those that don’t, works pretty well.
And a set of standards. Acclaimed by others, being a good starting point.
The first step to becoming aspirational comes when you apply standards to your business. The higher the standards held by a business, the more its customers see those standards as a reflection of their own success. It’s how Goyard charges $3,000 for a bag that can be replicated for $15.
Being acclaimed by others means blowing your own horn. Or having others do it for you. Which in these days of earned audiences is much more powerful.
I owned a film editing company for a number of years. For the first eight of those I was one of the chorus who complained that at every advertising industry award show, the endless list of credits never included the name of the editor.
Even on the award for best editing. True fact.
The average :30 second commercial has 3-4 hours of film. Without an editor, it’s not called a commercial. It’s called dailies.
The best attended industry awards show in America is that of the AICP, traveling as it does to every major market. For an award show recognizing, ‘The Art and Technique of the American Commercial’ it made little sense to me that the artists involved would not be recognized. Particularly since each year’s award winner are included in the permanent archive at MOMA.
Aspiration eat your heart out.
In 2003, I approached Matt Miller, the CEO of the AICP. “I’d like to sponsor the editor credit,” I said. “I don’t care who cuts the work, I want each editor to be credited. Just put a small line in the back of the book each year that the editorial credit is brought to you by the Whitehouse."
It took a year, but to his great credit Matt refused the money and recognized the validity of my argument. Or the fact that I wasn’t going away.
Since 2005, every editor has been credited on every piece of work recognized at the AICP show. Their names now immortalized in the MOMA archive.
Building a company that people aspire to work with is step two.
First they have to value what you do.
The fastest path to which, ironically, is celebrating your competition.
Since I began this blog I’ve written about issues that affect the leaders of businesses. Both practical and personal.
