We have to release the brakes. To get our minds around the truth that old solutions cannot unlock new problems. We must champion and elevate strategy to its rightful role as being by its very nature an imaginative discipline (nor merely a precursor or fluff-job for somebody else’s). We need to retire the policers and enforcers. We should ask “and what happens next?!” and seek to surprise ourselves again. We should take the mental shopping trolley to the top of the hill, set it alight (if only for dramatic effect)… and then let go.
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There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune:
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
In other words I was being asked, how - when working in advertising can so often feel like some kind of Groundhog Day experience in which we encounter the same kinds of stresses, frustrations, and disappointments again and again - could I keep going?
Now I will be the first to acknowledge that I’m ill-qualified to dispense life lessons. I’ve made too many mistakes and failed too often to credibly peddle success recipes. They’re mostly (as I’ve argued elsewhere) the work of unreliable narrators anyway. And I’m a slightly better provider of brand advice than personal development advice. That said, I think I can be bold enough to argue that if you want to have fun and be of help and value and do so consistently, over the longer (or even very long) term, then cynicism is the best strategy for failure.
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🖤🙏❤️
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Look now how small, how timid, how pusillanimous, how domesticated and de-clawed, how full of narcissistic hot air, how demoted to nothing more than a cabaret warmup act so much of what passes for ‘strategy’ appears to be, when set against its true nature, its true possibilities, and - irrespective of the size and nature of the canvas - the true, the urgent, and the thrilling need for it.
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What it is, where it is to be found, how we are to recognise it, its shape and dynamics… all this remains a mystery. And while we’re confident that we can be a part of it and even change it (whatever ‘it’) is, it’s a mystery we seem happy to keep as such. This absence of specificity calls to mind the words of the sixteenth century philosophy and statesman Francis Bacon: “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” If words are tools for thinking then perhaps if we had a clearer view on what it is we are talking about, we could have a clearer view of our place and role within it, better direct our energies, and more accurately chart and measure our impact and progress.
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The data-evidenced case for gratitude.
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There’s nothing like reclaiming a decades-long neglected garden to teach one about the creation and nurturing of things that last.
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The plates of culture are grinding and shifting beneath our feet. Forces are at work in the land. Fissures are opening. The fractal consequences bloom. All that is solid melts into air. Never did splendid isolation look so untenable.
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On the opportunity and need for revolution, on the fight of our lives, on surrounding a business with creativity, and why hope matters.
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Business leaders tell us is that a broken politics has created a void, and that in the words of Blackrock Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink “society is increasingly looking to companies, to address pressing social and economic issues”. It’s the advancement of an ideology that seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. Instead of the politics we are to have the marketplace, instead of elected representatives we are to have corporations, and instead of the citizen, we are only and everywhere consumers. We’re being asked to sign up to what the historian, essayist and university professor Tony Judt calls, “an eviscerated society”.
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We are creating more and more advertising which neglects that part of the brain we must engage if we want to create the associations and connections that lie at the heart of long-term brand building. Client businesses are failing to leverage the real power and advantage that creativity confers. In fact when we insist that marketing marketing’s priority is not the longer-term health of a brand and business but the short-term, we are in the business not of value creation but value destruction.
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