So I’m starting something new. Or perhaps more accurately, several new things. Some of them are my things and some of them my clients’.
I don’t have a lot of business philosophy to dole out. I get a bit stuck after ‘work hard’ and ‘try to be nice to people’. But there is a new credo I’d like to try and stick to: let’s not lie to ourselves. It seems to me that we humans tend to like to look back on events and frame them as if they were the result of our brilliant strategic thinking, following along our best plans with only the occasional need for a heroic correction by… guess who.
This was probably best said by Rory Sutherland:
‘You’ll observe this phenomenon in most descriptions of battles wherein victory is usually attributed (especially by the victors) to a few early strategic decisions made by the most senior people on the field. It simply doesn’t do to say that Agincourt was the result of an unusually muddy field and some opportunistic Welshmen with big mallets.’
A Masterclass in Brand Planning: The Timeless Works of Stephen King
It’s not the first time I’ve started a consultancy / agency and I’m reminded of just how much happenstance is involved. We get so used to the ‘CV version’ of events that we forget what really happened. With Brass Tacks Digital (which became VCCP digital), we absolutely won our first client because I was in the right place at the right time, and someone else did something really stupid. We survived when others didn’t purely because we fell into a sideline doing a kind of slightly uncool work. At Fortune Cookie, we won our biggest project because I’d happened to have breakfast with an old friend that week and he happened to have already worked out the answer to my client’s problem.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t plan. But expect to put most plans in the bin on first contact with the enemy. And when you are – in the end – successful, don’t kid yourself. And more importantly, don’t kid other people that it was all part of some genius masterplan.
This is not fair on people who don’t have a masterplan, because it misrepresents the role that both luck and adaptability have in being successful.
I think the same is true of confidence. How confident should you be? I know from experience of both myself and others that you can be super confident and wrong. You can be super confident and totally making it up. And you can be super confident and get it right by mistake.
One of our first clients at the new company sent me the above outline of the creative process – a very accurate description of all sorts of creativity, from writing a book to launching a new product into the market.
It’s nice to be confident. And leaders, to a certain extent, must portray confidence. But I think there’s strength in the humility too. If you don’t end up at 3 (‘This is shit’) and 4 (‘I am shit’) from time to time, you’re probably not trying hard enough. Again, the skill isn’t to be able to hover forever in 1 (‘This is awesome’) like a psychopath but rather to know that you have been there, and you will be there again.
Make. Believe. is about exactly this.
Why (oh why) is it expected in business today that in order to even start making an interesting idea real, we have to have a ‘strong leader’ convince us it’s going to work (normally with no real evidence), betting their reputation and often their mortgage on it?
Isn’t this the Nick Leeson, Bernie Maddof school of business? In today’s world, we can find out if our ideas are any good really fast, often faster than others can even get their tedious PowerPoints and Excel ready. As a colleague once told me, we should be more ‘shippy’ and less ‘slidey’. Get your product shipped in some form and you will be much further along and know more than if you stare at a Microsoft productivity tool. Surely that’s obvious.
So that’s a long way round of introducing the new business. I’ll be back shortly to update on some of the early projects we are working on. My promise is to include the good and the bad, and to focus on what we’ve learned from it.
Leading product 