So this is going to come across as a massive corporate toady post.
I should also point out that the fact my contract is up for renewal is purely coincidental.
When we’d sold cynic and I was looking for ‘options’, the one criteria that was really important to me was I needed to feel I had ‘a home’ … somewhere that let me feel I belonged, somewhere that embraced me for me.
Now that might sound easy enough, but having come from being a partner of a company I started to an employee of a company someone else started meant that some of the ‘quirks’ my previous colleagues basically had to accept, might suddenly be deal breakers for someone else.
Anyway, as you know, I ended up at W+K.
I really like it here.
It’s challenging, exciting, creative, provoking, demanding and invigorating … though if I’m being honest, it took me 9 months to feel that way, because at the beginning, I was trying to work out how the fuck things worked given they embraced chaos far more than I embraced chaos and I was someone my previous bosses and clients had defined as ‘a shit storm starter’.
But that’s not why I am writing this.
You see a few weeks ago, some stuff happened to me, stuff that had the potential to dramatically affect my time at W+K.
Because I have a modicum of professionalism, I told my MD the situation and – as you’d expect – he was considerate and compassionate.
Of course you should expect nothing less from your boss, especially when [1] you sit next to him and [2] you work together every single day … but it was still good to have that level of unwavering support.
But then something I didn’t expect happened.
I got emails.
Lots of emails.
From people throughout the company.
Sure, some were from folk I work with on global business … sure, some were from colleagues and peers dotted around the network … but others were from the sort of people you’d think have far, far better things to do.
Like our global ECD’s.
And our global CFO.
And our global COO.
And our global HR Director.
And they were all nice and sent encouragement and offered to help me in any way that they could.
Real help, not bland bullshit designed to make them feel better without actually committing them to do anything.
Think about it for a second … some of the most important people in the whole fucking industry, wrote to some planning twat in China to send their support.
Hell, I’ve worked in companies where colleagues didn’t acknowledge my existence, let alone the MD … and they were MD’s who had all the industry impact and influence of a muffled fart in a lift.
Hell, I once had a CEO who genuinely thought – after 3 months of me working there and seeing me every single day – that I was the fucking photocopier repair man. I kid you not.
So with that in mind, those emails from those people meant a lot to me … a hell of a lot.
Christ, I hardly have anything to do with them and yet they all took time out of their day on the other side of the World to get in touch.
That doesn’t make them great advertising people, it makes them great people and that’s why I think W+K is special – because for all the incredible talent they have residing in the walls of their 8 offices, they accept and embrace people for who they are as opposed to evaluating their value purely by their level of productivity … which is handy given the amount of time I spend writing the rubbish on this blog.
Anyway, as much as I know they would hate that I’ve written a post publicly highlighting their compassion [which they’ll never see because, fortunately for them, even their worst nightmare could never imagine something so mindblowingly horrific as visiting here], I just want to say thank you to them – and all my other colleagues and companions – because apart from being wonderful, it absolutely demonstrated why I made the right decision 3 years ago, so if you could just renew my contract, that would be tops thanks. Ha.