Serendipity Book

Just say No to the new managerial cult of Yes

Nice piece in the FT Business Life section by Lucy Kellaway (subscription required) about saying no:

For people in any position of authority the ability to say no is the most important skill there is. All good parents must say it often. So must all good managers. No, you can’t have a pay rise. No, you can’t be promoted. No, you can’t travel club class. No, we are not going to an offsite workshop to discuss living our core values.

Of course, managers have to be able to say yes too, otherwise their organisations would shrivel up and die. But No is the norm, the basic rule, while Yes is for special occasions (yes, you can have a pay rise, yes your idea is brilliant.)

Put like this it sounds banal, though actually it’s heresy. An illogical love of Yes is the basis for all modern management thought. The ideal modern manager is meant to be enabling, empowering, encouraging and nurturing, which means that his default position must be Yes. By contrast, No is considered demotivating, uncreative and a thoroughly bad thing.

As if we didn't already have an image problem

Mad Men premieres tonight on AMC in the U.S. ... "Mad Men is AMC’s provocative new original series from writer and executive producer Matthew Weiner of The Sopranos. Set in 1960 New York, Mad Men pulls the viewer into an unexpected new world - the high-powered and glamorous “Golden Age” of advertising - where everyone is selling something and nothing is ever what you expect it to be."

Via: Variety

Good thinking about managing creativity (part 2)

The second in the series of articles about Managing Creativity in the recent issue of Market Leader is a wonderfully eloquent diatribe against the increasing commoditisation of creativity written by Gordon Torr, ex-chair of the worldwide creative council of JWT and now a consultant and trainer.

In it, Gordon argues that agencies are now increasingly managed for efficiency, valuing productivity over craft, to the detriment of the quality of the ideas produced. He points out that all historic attempts to increase productivity based on scientific management theories, starting with Taylorism and continuing right up to the present day, have all resulted in the deskilling of the workforce.

Scientific management sought to break all tasks into their individual components, separating those tasks that could be 'routinised' from those that required an element of human judgement. The routine tasks could be reallocated to cheaper, unskilled workers, while the discretionary aspects of the task could be moved upwards to management, affording them more control over the outcomes.

Deskilling is a deliberate an systematic removal of the 'craft' from the 'craftsman'. It's the divorce of the mental from the manual, the apartheid of conception and execution.

In creative industries, however, Gordon notes that "creative tasks are, always and by definition, entirely discretionary. Their outcomes are indeterminate and they are naturally antipathetic to any kind of control".  He continues, "according to the traditional deskilling model, thinkers should be sent upstairs and the doers should remain on the factory floor. But in the creative industries the thinkers are the doers. This is the paradox of managing creativity, the very nub of the peculiar conflict between managing for efficiency and managing for ideas."

In other words I think Gordon is arguing that conception should not be divided from execution, and without explicitly saying it, I believe he is arguing that that planning and creative should not be divorced from each other.

Which leads me to ask, is planning really deskilling creative? In our attempts to be more efficient throughthe division of labour into specialisms have we turned our creatives into idea monkeys and by removing them from the more discretionary decision-making about strategy? Is creative generalism the answer or will there always be a role for specialists?

The McNamara Fallacy of Measurement

On the subject of effectiveness and measurement once again, this is an extract from management thinker Charles Handy 's book 'The Empty Raincoat' where he refers to 'The McNamara Fallacy':

1. The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured.  This is OK as far as it goes.
2. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
3. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness.
4. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist.  This is suicide.

Anyone would think I might be preparing a presentation on this theme at the moment ;-)

Guy Murphy on Measuring the Effectiveness of Communications

The most relevant of the IPA, MCCA, PRCA and ISBA best practice guides [PDF] to my day to day work is the sixth one on Communications Strategy which was written by JWT's Worldwide Planning Director (and the rest) Guy Murphy which can be found here [PDF].

The most interesting section for me was the section on measuring the effectiveness of marketing communications. The reason why I found the section was interesting is that, unlike many practitioners of effectiveness within media, creative and research agencies who are often selling a black or grey box methodology to their clients, Guy is willing to admit that the measurement of effectiveness is actually very difficult and is  becoming less and less easy as our media landscape changes:

Some have expressed the view that measuring effectiveness in this new complex communications world will always be far too difficult. Indeed some go further and suggest that the money is better spent getting the strategy right at the beginning rather than measuring its effect at the end. This has strong support amongst clients and agencies with over a third of them agreeing with that view.

Others draw a comparison with the development of advertising evaluation over the decades and feel encouraged that what once seemed impossible (the measurable link between advertising and sales) became a reality. Perhaps if there were a greater commitment to a few simple methodologies (e.g. area tests, pre/post analysis, built-in direct response) then progress would be more achievable.

The truth is that just as communication itself is struggling to keep up with consumers, effectiveness is struggling to keep up with communication. We are entering a period where it will be more difficult to know the return on investment of individual channels. In such a scenario there will be an inevitable shift of emphasis onto more interim measures.

So whilst the snake oil salesmen continue to talk up the viability of measuring the ROI of communications, practioners like Guy know that in reality the measurement of effectiveness is getting harder and harder every year as our media fragments and campaigns become increasingly diverse.

With this in mind, Guy provides an instructive critique of econometric modelling, a technique that which is often wrongly considered to be an effectiveness panacea:

To some extent econometrics can provide the answer. But it is important to distinguish between identifying the total effect of communication and the specific effect of the individual channels.

Modelling can certainly help identify the former, but it can sometimes struggle with the latter. There is a condition, called ‘multi-colinearity’, which makes it impossible to tease apart the effect of individual channels when they run together consistently across time.

And of course, as most communications activity across multiple channels is deliberately planned to run in parallel, econometrics can rarely tell you which channel has been effective.

Finally, Guy goes on to note that whilst we will have increasing amounts of behavioural data in the digital era that this data is rarely conclusive:

The digitisation of media means that the behavioural activity of consumers around communication can be the subject of simple quantitative analysis. The world of the red button and the click-through will allow for the most precise knowledge of consumer interaction.

That said, it will be important to not be overly-wooed by this new measureable world. Hits, clicks, and page-views are just interim measures and therefore are no substitute for understanding the commercial return of communication spend.

If you are interested in finding out more on this topic then you could try the best practice guide to evaluation [PDF] from the same series which was published in 2005.

Original ideas cannot be assessed based on what was successful in the past

I'm going to start my day with a little quote from Bill Bernbach ...

“However much we would like advertising to be a science-because life would be simpler that way-the fact is that it is not. It is a subtle, ever-changing art, defying formularization, flowering on freshness and withering on imitation; where what was effective one day, for that very reason, will not be effective the next, because it has lost the maximum impact of originality.”

This quote appears in the new best practice guide to 'Judging Creative Ideas' which was launched last week by the IPA, ISBA, MCCA, and PRCA. Sadly the IPA has chosen to hide their guide, as ever, in their members-only section but ISBA have kindly posted it here [PDF].

The guide is part of a series of publications jointly commissioned by the four industry bodies which are designed to improve client-agency relationships. If you liked the Bernbach quote above, you can find many more nuggets from Bernbach here, in DDB's 'Bill Bernbach Said'.

Petrol consumption and prices

Wonderfuly simple graphic from The Economist. I wonder if this ever has an impact on U.S. foreign policy?

Bridge Installation at the London Design Festival

The London Design Festival last September included this spectacular installation called  Bridge, by Michael Cross. It features a series of steps that rise out of the water as you walk across them, as if walking on water.

An estimated 300,000 people from over 30 countries attended the 2006 festival which was centred on the Truman Brewery. The 2007 festival starts on the 15th September for 10 days and will be hubbed around the South Bank.

MIT > Digitally-controlled Walls Made of Water

Our digital and physical works blur further as MIT News reports that MIT architects and engineers have created a building that is literally made of water that features liquid curtains for walls - curtains that not only can be programmed to display images or messages but can also sense an approaching object and automatically part to let it through.

The "digital water pavilion" - an interactive structure made of digitally controlled water curtains - will be located at the entrance to Expo Zaragoza 2008, in front of a new bridge designed by Zaha Hadid. The structure will contain an exhibition area, a cafe and various public spaces."

"To understand the concept of digital water, imagine something like an inkjet printer on a large scale, which controls droplets of falling water," explains Carlo Ratti, head of MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory.

Rati added: "In the Nineties, digital technology led us to fantasize about distant virtual worlds. Today we have moved on: the future of architecture might deal with digitally augmented environments, where bits and atoms seamlessly merge."

Agency squatter?

More strange happenings in West Kensington. It appears that we have squatters. One of my esteemed colleagues sent an email around this afternoon asking:

"Does anyone know who has put a tent up on the 2nd Floor. If you have set up camp in bay 6 on the second floor, please call Neil on x2214 (He wants to move you on)."

So I went and checked:

Ahah. It turns out that the resident of the tent is none other than the mysterious "Green Man", our in-house environmental conscience. He has replied to say: "not bothering anyone am i? a fella used to be able to set up camp wherever he laid his hat. well my hat is on the second floor..."