[ photo courtesy ]
There is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.
Normally attributed to either Ralph Waldo Emerson or Harry Truman, this quote is one of my favourites as it’s a pithy reminder of how much more we can achieve through collaboration than through competition. And a reminder of how much we often fail to achieve because we’re so focused on trying to make sure we get the credit.
It’s true in so many walks of life, but sadly particularly true when it comes to agencies’ work. We all talk the talk about integration with agency partners – but when push comes to shove, everyone’s constantly fighting to get the credit. Because in the main, we work within a model that doesn’t really reward collaboration, and in practice rewards singular ownership of ideas. Sure, awards entries may get jointly submitted, but the winner will always claim it as ‘theirs’. And of course the same examples appear in multiple agencies’ creds – and rightly so because good ideas have many fathers (or mothers) – but in each case you’ll generally have each agency claiming each idea as ‘theirs’, relegating agency partners’ contributions to the sidelines.
At Naked a lot of our IMC processes revolve around co-creation with multiple stakeholders, including people from around the client organisation and different agency partners. But when we share examples of work resulting from various IMC programmes with new prospects, we’re frequently met with a response along the lines of ‘yes, but whose idea was it‘.
Ideas are our currency. So it’s totally understandable that we want to protect them, lest they be stolen by a competitor and they claim the credit – with damaging consequences both to our reputations and our bottom lines. But in doing so, we lock great ideas down, stifling the potential of what they could be if we could collaborate instead of competing. And maybe it’s a utopian view that’s incompatible with the stark business realities of our industry, and how much appointments and remuneration are tied with being able to claim ideas as ours.
But just think what we could achieve if we were truly, genuinely able to be more open and collaborative in our day-to-day working practices, instead of worrying about who got the credit?
Thank you for this. Collaboration is efficiency. Here’s another one from William James that I think fits your point: “Just for today I will exercise my soul in three ways: I will do somebody a good turn and not get found out. I will do at least two things I don’t want to do.”
Claiming credit is like scratching. Short-term relief for flea-bitten, but annoying for everyone else. In the long term, it can have really unhealthy consequences.
Amen to that etc.
x
as a client-side creative, i have big heart for these sentiments too.
Here here. I’m in absolute agreement: I really like the idea of micro-interactions, as David Armano v eloquently discusses: that it’s the small interactions we have with brands that matter to us, and about delighting people through these interactions, that adds up to a bigger whole. Which of course it’s how it’s always been, and why the idea of a big comms idea is so dangerous, because of course it’s so easy for this to be undone when you don’t have every brand interaction sitting under this one ‘big idea’….
This comment was originally posted on Feeding the Puppy
…totally, Katy, everything becomes this homogenised, dulled iteration of the lovely thing that it probably set out to be.
Bethan over at Engine said to me earlier on something about an ‘organising thought’ rather than a big idea… that’s a much better thing to aspire to, I think. And something you can recognise in the companies I talked about above, and many more examples you can name too…
This comment was originally posted on Feeding the Puppy