25 Years.

Aug 25, 2008

People ask you what you’ve learned. You have to have learned something.

    Those at our company have given a range of answers. We’ve learned to be patient, we say, to hire great people, to take answers from anywhere, even from clients. We have learned that advertising is art, we say, that you can’t make everybody happy, and that even though we often think sex, food and death are the funniest things on earth, not everyone else agrees.


    In other words, we say all kinds of things.

    I’ve thought of another way of answering this question, though,that’s much shorter and to the point. For it turns out that there are only two forces at work in a successful creative business:

    Accountability. And forgiveness.
    
    A great agency is a high-temperature fusion of both. Old Testament and New Testament. A long memory and a short one.
    
That’s all you really have to know.

    We learned about accountability early on, and we’re still learning about it this week. It starts with yourself, actually, when you’ve just opened the agency and you’re alone in your office. How honest can you be with yourself about whether the work you’re doing is really valuable? Are you really making a difference?

    The depth of your honesty will be the biggest limitation on your achievement.

    If you’re any good, you’ll find yourself alone in that same room, with that same question, 25 years later. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, has put it another way. He lives in fear, he says, that he’ll wake up one morning and find his company “completely and utterly irrelevant.”

    When you add employees, accountability gets even more complicated. In my first efforts as a creative director, I found myself liking everyone’s ideas because I wanted them to like me. I confused a relaxation of judgment with encouragement.
    
    It turns out that hard and clear – some would say brutal – judgment is actually the best kind of encouragement, if it’s carefully administered. People will listen to you and the work around you will improve, not because you let people do the first thing that comes into their heads, but because you lead them to the best work they’re capable of.

    That often requires the discarding of a lot of beloved material. It’s your job to keep everyone advancing enthusiastically through that thicket, despite the fact that the explosions of their most cherished ideas are still ringing in their ears. That’s honesty. That’s accountability. It must be carried to extremes, even when it would be easier to just hack something out because the meeting is getting close. It’s an exploration of what you’re made of, and it requires constant refreshment and self-analysis.

For more Goodby, Silverstein & Partners coverage:
A Note from Lee Clow
Just regular guys: Silverstein and Goodby
Q & A with Jeff Goodby
Q & A with Rich Silverstein
Meet the Partners
The Client is Always Right
25 Years