Commentary

Sacrificing Perfection For Excellence

Am I naïve in expecting people to want to deliver great work that exudes all their pride, experience, intellectual property, commitment and hard work? Where's the disconnect from reality? Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of great work in the industry. But let's take an inflective look at what seems to drive most of the middle-of-the-road ideas and execution in digital marketing today.

Intrinsically, I do believe that people want to produce great work. But more often than not we foster organizational cultures that reinforce safe, boring decisions and suppress creative thinking in the name of accountability and in order to secure job stability. Forget sacrificing perfection for excellence -- excellence is being sacrificed daily for competence.

Of course, culture trickles down from the top. Executive management and subsequent layers of management must commit to motivating their teams to produce great thinking. The motivation should be positive with aspirations for success, not based on fear of failure and job security. This dynamic transcends the individual organization and includes the client/agency relationship. With great thinking comes great execution. Unfortunately clients tend to value the execution more than the thinking because it's hard to explain the value of thinking to procurement, a CFO, or CEO. The execution is tangible. The execution is also non-collaborative and easy to point a finger at.

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While an individual's career can excel when effective creative ideas come to life, often we dissuade true out-of-the-box thinking by creating a fear of failure. After all, not every creative idea will pan out. In fact, most won't. As the battle for consumers' attention rages on, it takes far more creativity to breakthrough and impact the market in a significant way. We need to push ourselves harder and collaborate more willingly and intelligently. It's ok to fail sometimes. If you don't fail every so often then you are not trying hard enough, not stepping outside of your comfort zone, and not pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

In order for digital marketing to achieve its potential, it is essential to promote creative thinking throughout all facets of our business - strategy and planning, media, creative, technology, and analytics, across all channels, and on both the client-side and agency-side. We should be challenging ourselves and those around us to balance creative and strategic thinking - to adopt and cultivate abductive reasoning skills beyond the deductive and inductive reasoning that we are programmed and reinforced to put to work day in and day out. Of course, easier said than done.

The motivations and challenges of strategic and creative thinking are driven by financial and human resource issues that are directly related to the output of performance. There are realities that we must all work around. Agencies work on thinner margins than clients care to admit, and clients have more internal pressures that agencies are not always privy to. There is a shortage of true talent in the industry, and the cost of that talent is increasing. In a perfect world, organizational culture would account and adjust for these variables, but we don't live in a perfect world.

What does your organization do to foster excellence?

2 comments about "Sacrificing Perfection For Excellence".
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  1. Clyde Boyce from Firefly Media, April 5, 2011 at 5:36 p.m.

    This is a subject I totally agree with you on. In most cases, agencies are focused on tactical execution and not strategic innovative thinking. This is born out of the pressure to keep up with the day-to-day work of just getting the execution, tracking and optimizations done.

    Most have every intention of, at least, considering more innovative solutions, but the time is never carved out for team to really search for these opportunities.

    We actually make it a mandate that we take the time to identify relevant, innovative, new ideas to present to clients. We split up into teams and each team is required to research and present the opportunities internaly, which are then vetted before going to clients. Only one in about 10 is successful, but the key is, we are always looking and presenting these opportunities.

  2. Paula Lynn from Who Else Unlimited, April 5, 2011 at 9:56 p.m.

    In a CYA world, are you surprised? The Peter Principle presides.

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