A Change In Attitude

While watching a bit of TV I stumbled upon this and wanted to post the link ... it really stood out.

The busyness economy works on face time, incremental improvement, strategic long-term planning, return on investment, and hierarchical control. The burst economy, enabled by the Web, works on innovation, flat knowledge networks, and discontinuous productivity:

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/04/19/busyness-vs-burst-why-corporate-web-workers-look-unproductive/

From looking at this and the clashes you have seen written about on this blog - it does highlight a big issue with the management of digital in our industry. Now I am not going to say one side is better than the other - THIS is to have a discussion not mark sides.

Well when you look at people - this can be the first conflict. The sort of person you need to really challenge and change the way we do things is NOT a typical recruitment advertising corporate player. In fact the exact opposite - how do we handle this? Building teams is always an issue ... especially teams to re-think our business. I would suggest Edward de Bonno, How To Have A Beautiful Mind as a starting point - it is more important to be interesting than to be right (both sides need to think about this).

When you look at process ... innovation does not come from formal business structures. It also does not come from business planning or attempts to talk about the future - you should not impose one's views on a problem; one should rather study it, and in time a solution will reveal itself (that was actually written by Albert Einstein but it summed up my thoughts). When you look at this the constant attempts to be the first or to do shameless self-promotion is not actually improving the industry. Intelligent collaboration is needed to improve our overall ability to achieve the migration to digital - so how can we work to improve our overall solutions.

Remove the short-term mind-set - I have got to admit I have never worked in an industry that based itself so much on short-term targets. When you look at every long-term debate. Recruitment is getting more and more of an issue for business (the Economist article earlier this year is probably the most important). So why is it that so many media owners and agencies are crying over their shrinking market? Maybe the business models of the past just do not work? If you look at Ralph Stacey, Managing Chaos - he suggests that as the process of change makes long-term planning more difficult then we need new flexible business structure to deal with this. Planning becomes more important - but not in the traditional mindset of 5 year development plans.

My final little point on this is saying we need to use the talent in the industry ... to be honest most brains are wasted on pointless delivery issues - caused by all of the above. Maybe it is time to start stepping up and changing things - it needs a new mind-set from the agency management teams + working together to have intelligent discussions and collaboration on key issues (a trading currency and system integration). I could go on but this is not a rant - I am really interested to see what people think?

Comments

[Peter Gold]

John

A good find and both very real and topical! The challenge will of course be to find the right match, bursty people for bursty clients, get the match right and surely it will make for an interesting relationship.

One of the challenges will be to demonstrate real results and the evidence to support it; too often I see unproven data served up by sales people with no evidence yet taken as real by clients. Why? Because maybe they are busy not bursty? Maybe busy is easier to contend with and show how their money is spent. Weekly review meetings, daily reports, constant e-mails that are kept in the inbox and brought out when there are 'problems'. IM wouldn't give them this historical evidence of who said what (unless of course the save these chat files as well!)

Once again, I hope that results will be seen as more important than the journey, value rather than cost, bursty not busy - we can live in hope....

I think the article opens up many questions and hope this post gets some more comments.