SHOP AS YOUR CUSTOMER
See the experience through their eyes. We have a friend who owns an advertising agency. Every year or so he calls his company as if he’s a total stranger looking to give his company new business. The first time he tried it he spent 20 minutes stuck in his phone tree, being transferred to different offices. He learned a lot from the pain of his experience. Now every facet of his business reflects his learning. Responsive customer connection is reflected on on his web site, in his phone tree and every employee knows exactly what to do with a new business call. Whatever your business, experience it like a customer. How are you treated? What’s good and great? What can be improved? Now go out and make it better!
WORD FAST
Want to improve your writing? Don’t speak for a day. Some societies even have a cultural term for this. It’s called a “word fast.” The trick is to take a notebook and pen and then only communicate by writing. Or texting. Don’t answer your phone. Don’t speak to people. Only communicate with them by writing. At the end of the day you’ll find your writing has become more precise, clearer and more action oriented. Now bring those attributes back into your daily writing.
BOUND TO BE CREATIVE
Many creative people take the attitude, “get out of my way and just let me create.” It’s a path to unfocused, unsatisfying work…that will lead to many revisions. A tightly defined strategy is not confining, it’s liberating. When you create to a clear direction, the sky’s the limit to brilliant solutions. If you want to be a great (not just good) creative person, don’t start any assignment without a clear strategy.
MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVE
Too many people manage blindly. They may know what they’re doing and demanding, but no one else does. It’s all highly subjective and changeable day by day. If you want to be a great manager, for any given project always make your objective clear. You’ll find people are much happier working for you and will be much more efficient and successful in meeting your stated goals.
THE PEOPLE METER
A simple way to test your pop culture IQ is to review the 25 most interesting people published in People magazine every year. In the age of social media, you’ll want to know who’s the center of the social swirl, too. So score yourself on who you know and look to increase your score every year. You’ll find, as in many things, the more you know, the more you know.
FIND THE ENEMY OF THE PRODUCT
Great lesson from Ed McCabe – one of the greatest copywriters in advertising history. Instead of just finding a competitive advantage, McCabe would look for the biggest point of resistance. He would look for the people who were least likely to ever try or use the product – and talk to them. His thinking was that if you could convince the biggest resistors, you could easily win the hearts and minds of the undecideds. Try it. Focus your next message on the biggest resistance people have to your product or service.
THERE’S NEVER TIME TO DO IT RIGHT…
Have you noticed your production timelines lately — how the approval time built into the schedule is five or ten times longer than the time you’ve allotted to do the actual work? If that’s true, you’ve got a breakdown in your processes. It means people don’t trust each other in the approval chain. You need to reexamine how work is created, assignments are defined, strategies are developed and approvals are given. In the ideal flow, you should have at least as much time to create the work as you do to get it approved.
SPEC IS A 4-LETTER WORD
Spec is ugly. It’s an insult to both the person who asks for it and the person who delivers it. If you ask for spec, you’re really looking to pick someone’s brain for free. How insulting to the people you want to do business with. If you say you’re willing to do spec, you devalue your own services. We were in a new business pitch with one of our partners who settled the spec question for us once and for all. When we told them our price, the prospective client said, “Well, I had a team in here last week and they showed us three ideas for nothing.” At which point our partner got up, looked at the client and said, “I sure hope you got your money’s worth” and walked out of the meeting.
PIZZA IS A POWERFUL MANAGEMENT TOOL
When was the last time you served up pizza and soda (or beer) for your team? It’s an important cultural signal that says, “we’re all in this together.” Food is a great motivator. It’s an important management tool and should be served up fairly regularly.
