Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Comment, Culture, Cunning, Embarrassing Moments, Management
OK, so we all know the answer to the question in this post.
But despite hiding hundreds of stickers around my old office … making packing tape with my colleagues face on it … creating badge/buttons with the face of another colleague on them … sending annoying all staff emails … giving annoying art to designers … proudly buying and displaying horrific art for my team to witness every time they step into my office … buying Useless Boxes for people … continually taking bad instagrams of my workmates … crafting terrible ‘personalized’ clothing for leaving presents and basically being a class-1 dick to all and sundry, I’m still not sure.
Or should I say I wasn’t sure until I had a stamp of my signature made so I could stamp colleagues birthday cards to show that personal touch without much effort, as demonstrated by Leigh’s errrrrm, forehead.
So if you think Monday is horrible, be grateful it isn’t being spent in the same office as me.
Always a silver lining.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Chaos, Confidence, Creativity, Culture, Daddyhood, Education, Emotion, Empathy, Equality, Innocence, Jill, Love, Management, Mum & Dad, Otis, Parents
So Otis goes to this amazing hippy kindergarten school near where we live.
It’s a co-parenting school which means that the parents have to help with the schooling of the kids, not just with the funding.
It follows a very specific philosophy defined by the founder and it’s a place where kids learn through expressing their creativity.
They even have a ‘mud room’ for the kids to cause mayhem when it rains.
Put simply, we love it.
A few weeks ago, we went there on the weekend to help decorate it during spring break when I came across these 2 signs in the school …
I love them.
It sums up everything we adore about the school.
It captures exactly why Otis feels it’s a safe and happy place for him to explore.
It also addresses something I have been looking into for a while, which is the lack of outlet American men have to express their feelings.
Everything is built on acting tough.
Crying is for wimps.
Hell, even the bars are full of sports TV’s basting out scores, which means people don’t have the quiet to talk to one another – something I had growing up in England that actually encouraged the sharing of feelings and emotions. Albeit often wrapped up in banter.
The macho pride that seems to underpin so much of American male society feels like it’s still the 1950’s … which is why I love that this school doesn’t tell kids to ‘stop crying’, but asks what is wrong and then sympathises with their predicament which remarkably, helps them stop crying far more quickly and in a more positive way than any shouting would ever do.
Now imagine if companies operated by the same ideals.
Listening.
Valuing.
Caring.
Developing.
Oh I know those words appear in a million mission statements, but we all know they’re often used more as an illusion than an action.
In the bid to build office ‘culture’, so many organizations forget it’s not just about what you say – or even what you do – it’s the practiced beliefs that defines what everyone values, which is why companies could learn even more from this school than my dear Otis.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, America, Anniversary, Attitude & Aptitude, Chaos, Creativity, Culture, Cunning, Deutsch, EvilGenius, Goodbye China, Wieden+Kennedy
So today is a year since I left Wieden and – in 6 days – Shanghai.
That’s incredible.
In some ways it seems it was just a few weeks and in other ways, it feels like a lifetime ago.
While it was absolutely time to start a new adventure – something LA and Deutsch have kindly given me – I still miss China and Wieden very much because I had 7 years of brilliant things happen in my life [such as this] and career [such as this and this] there … though I have it on good authority this sentimentality is only one way, mainly because those stickers I left behind are still being discovered.
And they will for many more years to come.
Cue: Evil laugh.
One of the things that has always done my head in is how many American’s claim some sort of Irish descendency on St Patrick’s Day.
I don’t know why it bothers me so much, but it does.
This inner-boiling point reached new heights for me this year for 2 key reasons …
+ I now live here so get to see it first hand.
+ Trump is President, voted in by people who liked his ‘stop the immigrants’ message.
I’ve got to admit, I found it interesting watching so many people claim they were of Irish descent [when in reality, it was probably about 1/1000th Irish or that they once drank some Jameson’s whiskey] given the likelihood a great deal of them passionately want to stop any immigrants [read: anyone not white] enter the US … but hey, as we’ve seen with the gun laws, when America wants to, they can do crazy like few can do crazy.
Talking of crazy, have a look at this sign I saw outside an Irish pub that day.
Specifically, the last drink on the menu board …
Yeah … let’s all laugh at the drink called ‘car bomb’.
That’s funny isn’t it.
Something that killed so many people is a great way to celebrate St Patrick’s Day.
Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think American’s would find it funny if a bar in London created a drink called 9/11 to celebrate July 4th, do you?
Yes, you can call it a bad joke. Or just plain ol’ cultural ignorance. But as I wrote years ago when the Borat movie came out, it’s amazing how people can laugh at human unpleasantness when it’s not about them and wrapped up in ‘humour’ to make the bitterness appear less ugly.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Business, Comment, Creative Brief, Creative Development, Creativity, Differentiation, Insight, Martin Weigel, Paula, Planners, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Planning, Point Of View, Relevance, Research
A few weeks ago, I ran a planner training session – with the amazing Paula Bloodworth – in Amsterdam.
The theme of it the session was this …
When we first presented the image, you could tell a few people were wondering what the hell I was going on about.
It was a training session … designed to help planners make less mistakes, not more … but they were missing the point.
Planning isn’t about perfecting.
It’s not even about differentiating
It’s about making things happen … moving things forward … opening new possibilities … increasing value [copyright Weigel] and you don’t get to that if you just stick with the traditional approaches, practices and goals.
Of course this doesn’t mean you get to be an irresponsible dick with someone else’s money, but it does mean you have to look at problems in ways that normal approaches may not get – or even appreciate – and to do that, you need confidence.
Confidence in your abilities.
Confidence in feeling uncomfortable.
Confidence in making others feel uncomfortable.
Of course, at the end, you have to pull it all together because not only are you not going to get a client to try something without the chance of great reward, they need to know there’s method behind your madness … and while you might not always achieve the result you all wanted, ‘failing’ because you were pushing for something great is rarely failure, because not only do you all get a shitload of learnings from the exercise [learnings that can get you over the line next time] but you often end up opening a door to a World the whole industry never imagined and now wants to run full-pelt through.
In other words, you are pushing things forward not keeping things the same.
Which all helps explain why I believe planners should aspire to make better mistakes rather than succeed at average levels … because while consistency may get you the promotion, confidence creates the possibilities.