The best advice I ever got

When I started to work as a junior copywriter, my first task was to create headlines for a charter travel company, marketing their Greece vacations. Proud of myself, I handed about 50 headlines to my CD and was waiting for the Clio's to roll in.
After he read all my work, the Creative Director looked at me and said: "Never show me any work you wouldn't want to share immediately with your best friends."

When would I share an idea with my best friends?
a) The idea (headline/campaign/new business ventures) has to be so easy to understand that my friends, who don't work in advertising, can get it quickly
b) The idea has to be so new/unexpected that it creates one of those Aha moments

At heart, his advice told me that I should treat a 20-word dog food label, a text link on Google or CTA on a banner just like it's going to be big. Important. As something that matters. It does matter to the client. It should matter to me.

The difference between success and failure

How does a visionary project turn into an utter failure? When does a great strategy and an innovative plan turn into a project you never want to mention again?

I've seen it too many times: The strategy was spot-on, the tactics delight the client and the plan has enough breathing room to allow for revisions and issues. And all this excitement and energy ends up in a mediocre, at best, effort that leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth.
Mind you, I'm not talking about oversold projects that never had the chance to make it to the Olymp. I'm talking about projects that looked like sure winners and ended up being stinkers.

The reason? One word: Execution.
We tend to pay a lot of attention to strategy, innovation and tactics. But too often we forget the real key to success: implementation.

Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan wrtoe the essential guide to Implementation: 'Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things done.'
If you have a chance, grab it. If not, here are some quotes:

"Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability."

And my favorite:

"I saw that leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy, on intellectualizing and philosophizing, and not enough on implementation. People would agree on a project or initiative, and then nothing would come of it."

How many companies fail every year because they don't execute. How many innovative campaigns don't connect because they were not executed appropriately?
Way too many.

Words to think about

From one of my heroes - Tom Peters

"The economist Alan Binder calls himself “a free trader down to my toes.” But what’s that goop seeping between his toes these days?

This from a must read-ingest, major Wall Street Journal piece (yesterday/0328): “Mr Binder … remains an implacable opponent of tariffs and trade barriers. But now he is saying loudly that a new industrial revolution—communication technology that allows services to be delivered from afar—will put as many as 40 million American jobs at risk of being shipped out of the country in the next decade or two.” And that staggering stat, per Mr Binder, is “only the tip of a very big iceberg.”

Four-zero million!
Just the start!
Zounds!

Suggests to me it’s time, per a Post earlier this week, to dust off the “Brand You Plan.” There probably will be, alas, counter-productive Federal legislation. But that will be a wee finger in the dike.

The message is clear—and, to a point, simple. Work on your “value proposition” with renewed urgency. Your odds of landing on your feet are directly proportional to the uniqueness of what you have to sell to the world.

(As I’ve said 100, or 1,000, times this does not translate into dog eat dog competition. To the contrary, you will be the architect of, valued participant in intricate Webs of Value Added that involve many, many others from here, there, and everywhere.)

Hence, unprecedented team skills and individual prowess are both a must.

I’m not an alarmist. (Much.) Still, I’d argue that … today is the day to act! (Yesterday would be better.) Is the project you are working on right now worthy of becoming a chapter, or at least a sidebar, in you emergent & urgent “Brand You Saga”? If not, what do you aim on doing to make it so? Moreover, what on-line course/s (or whatever) are you looking at as another part of your “investment portfolio”?

The problem is more or less simple. The solution is more or less simple. All that’s left is the 98.3 percent called Urgent Execution."

This inspired me to read 'Execution: The discipline of getting things done' by Larry Bossidy.