ka-POW-er!

Sometimes what a new idea needs is catchy terminology.

GenOps: An Information Technology philosophy that stresses collaboration between creative departments or design teams and Information Technology (IT) professionals.

The name is derived from “gen”, a Greek root meaning “born” or “to become” and “Ops”, from “Operations”. A mindset that fully supports the birth of ideas.

An IT Department following the GenOps philosophy works with and is empowered by a management team which fully understands that creative output is the primary currency of the business. The IT Department fully supports and enables creativity from an operational standpoint, then determines how to meet criteria for compliance, security, and a dependable infrastructure.

GenOps is contrasted with siloed IT operations, which primarily exist to make their own operations easier, having lost touch with the mission of IT within a creative or innovative business.

Seth’s Blog is prolific and consistently good, though every once in a while a post resonates with me so much, I feel chills up my neck. Today’s post, Organized Bravery, is one of those. (Go read it. It’s short.)

The part that resonates with me most is this:

During times of change, the only organizations that thrive are those that are eager to interact and change as well.

The ones who take risks, thrive. This means allowing employees to take risks. Being human. Allowing mistakes. Cleaning up & making things right. And above all, making an impact in the lives of our team members, clients, and vendors. Not merely surviving. Thriving.

That’s what I want my business to do. You too?

“Here is Edward Bear coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.” -A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

It struck me last night following the AICP screening that there are a lot of miserable people in advertising. The thing is, they have little time to think about it because they are so overworked. They are squeezed by their clients. They are squeezed by their managers who are squeezed by their parent companies who are squeezed by their shareholders. Why? Because everyone is focused on costs and efficiency in the pursuit of profitability.

For the love of Pete, people, it’s time to wake UP! We’re not making widgets in a factory!

Ideas, branding insight, strategy and the myriad of services provided by Advertising Agencies are not commodities, and should not be priced as such. These services are valuable to our clients, reinforcing their brands, their connections with customers, and ultimately communicating their value to their clients. They are professional services. They are not off-shorable. When we do our jobs well, people happily purchase our clients’ products. And our clients are profitable as a result.

Our compensation needs to reflect not how much time we spent on a project, but our results, so that we can be profitable as well. Only then can we stop bumping our heads for a moment and focus on reinvesting some of those profits into our talent and our cultures.

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At first glance, it would seem odd that a culture of creativity would have to be designed within a large advertising firm. An ad agency should be teeming with creativity, right? Culture, however, takes years to develop, and advertising is no different.

James Shuttleworth, Chief Strategy Officer at Draftfcb Chicago recently made a presentation, which, while targeted to Agency Planners, offers excellent advice to managers and HR as well. Some of his (heavily paraphrased) points:

• Culture and Corporate Values can only be codified by observing how people behave. (Translation: a Mission Statement by itself is empty)
• Dreaming is not enough. It must be based on research and leveraged to provide innovative solutions.
• HR and Planning should work together to make smarter hiring decisions, enabling digital and traditional teams to become better integrated.
• There is a need for well-rounded people who can connect the skill sets and strengths of various teams.

A Winning Culture is rewarding work, and is often the basis of success and profitability.

Gizmodo has compiled a list of its favorite “serendipitous innovations”.

A reminder that allowing for affordable mistakes and learning from them is an important part of an innovative culture.

Over the weekend here in Boston, a well-known chef did something so surprising, it made the headlines. He kicked a patron out of his restaurant.

While his restaurant had made mistakes, every effort was made to appease the unhappy customer. Rather than listening to reason, the customer continued to complain so obstinately, that it upset other patrons, causing one table to leave and another patron to slam a glass of wine, breaking it.

Quoting Chef Andy Husbands,

“I love my staff, and they work very hard, and I have to back them up. And this woman was being really unfair and mean.”

How would his staff have felt if Husbands did not back them up? How many other patrons would have stormed out had he not ejected this toxic customer? I think it is clear that Husbands values morale and acted to protect both the atmosphere and the reputation of his establishment. His patrons agreed. They gave Husbands a round of applause for his actions.

In Brand Is Culture, Culture Is Brand, Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor discusses the importance of “personal identification between employees and customers”.

Success is not just about marketing differently from other companies… It is also, and perhaps more important(ly), about caring more than other companies — about customers, about colleagues, about how the organization conducts itself in a world with endless opportunities to cut corners and compromise on values. (Emphasis mine.)

Taylor explains this giving two examples. One, a banking executive who is VP of both Marketing and Human Resources. Another, an insurance and financial-services company serving the U.S. military and their families, which trains its employees by putting them through “boot camp”.

You can’t be special, distinctive, and compelling in the marketplace unless you create something special, distinctive, and compelling in the workplace.

This starts by codifying your culture, aligning management, then the workforce, making personnel changes as necessary. Harsh, perhaps; but this is not hiring and firing to line someone’s pockets. It is hiring and firing to create the best possible team to best serve your clients, who alone determine your success.

Read Taylor’s entire post.

I was reading an interview with a newly appointed ad agency CEO in a business newspaper, and was honestly excited about the changes he would bring to the company as well as its impact on the local creative economy. It was a short interview, and unfortunately the interviewer started playing “mind association”. For one of the questions, the interviewer asked, “What is your greatest fear?” He responded, “Failure”.

The answer sucker punched any hope I had.

I was stunned. What kind of pressure is the parent company (Cough!Havas!Cough!) putting on this guy? What kind of culture shapes such a response? Clearly he was hired to make big improvements; there’s a stated goal of doubling business in five years’ time. He’s not going to accomplish this following the same trajectory of his predecessors. He will need to take the company in a bold, new direction, but apparently he’s expected to do so by playing it safe!

Contrast that with a blog post by a rival agency’s Chief Creative Officer, Mullen’s Edward Boches. In The fastest way to success might be to fail first, he mentions how refreshing it was to have a conversation with a company president who was transparent about the mistakes his company made.

“Yet each anecdote about what didn’t work was immediately followed with, ‘But here’s what we learned.”

Quoting Boches:

We live in an age where there is so much pressure to succeed.  Every proposal and idea gets scrutinized, analyzed, and too often paralyzed. But there’s a real value in trying things, in experimenting, in taking a calculated chance.

At Creative Reaction, we are not fans of “mistake avoidance”. We are fans of “mistake recovery”. Success requires taking risks. Rather than having a culture that avoids mistakes using the blunt mallet of bureaucracy, mistake recovery values a culture where mistakes can be made, then quickly corrected.

Nobody has all the answers. Even the most well-thought-out plans fail. Mistakes will be made. Just be sure to learn from them and let them vault you to success.

(Click to search for “failure” or “mistake” to see related posts.)

Gotta love ad agencies with a DIY/entrepreneurial bent.

Via PSFK, is this story about (non-) Ad Agency Anomaly, which recently released a song and a music video to support both the song’s artist and Diesel’s spring/summer line of fashions.

The real story here is Anomaly. Take a few moments to explore their web site. If it doesn’t elicit a response, you don’t have a pulse.

A pair of recent articles show how conglomerates are obsessed with piracy, and yet, ironically, are blind to their own roles in creating the impetus for it.

The first, from techdirt, where Comcast’s COO blames consumers for piracy and hopes to educate them “to respect subscription revenue”.

The second, a more detailed and analytic account from Ars Technica, is about Paramount seemingly blaming everybody on the Internet for piracy.

A big part of the issue is that conglomerates are so big and have so many business units, that they cannot innovate without hurting one of their own companies. And so they go crying to the government and ask for more regulation. It’s really kind of sad. They are limiting their own innovation and revenue streams, while alienating their audience.

Their audience is what drives business, and simply wants more control over what content it buys and how & when it buys it. It’s time for a shake-up.