Hi, Hierarchy.

Once a week for about the last forty years I've spent a forty-five-minute hour with someone much wiser than myself.

Most of us have creative directors at work. Good creative directors have some distance away from the work problems we have to solve. That lets them bring a perspective you might not think of. 

Steve Simpson, the former CCO of Ogilvy, was amazing at that. 

I would present a manifesto to him. A film, a dozen commercials, twenty print ads, a speech delivered by a CEO or a kid's book explaining Quantum computing. In twelve minutes he'd walk over to my desk with his tiny extra-fine-point fountain pen markings in my document.

Every so often, he would "fix" some small something I didn't even know was broken. 

"How'd you do that?" I'd ask. "I couldn't make it work."

"You had it," he'd answer. "You just didn't have the distance to see it."

Like I said, when you have a good work creative director, you're lucky. When you have a good LIFE creative director, you're even luckier. 

You have someone with distance.

Back in 1996, I got a freelance job writing a website for a major corporation via a major agency. Not only had I never written a website before, I had barely even been online. It was that long ago.

So, when faced with this assignment, I was nervous.

My life creative director said something to me that I think about all the time. "The problem with the internet," he said, "is that there's no hierarchy. Everything just is and everything is equal."

You see this every day, even if you don't notice it. All these articles in The Times were within two-inches of each other online.

I'll probably get some flak for this. But lack of hierarchy is one of the issues of our world today. Dancing with the Stars to many people is more pressing than the worldwide systems failure. They're butting up against each other. How are we supposed to know which is more important?

One way I personally combat lack of hierarchy is to surround myself with hierarchy I can understand. That's why I like books. And why I especially like when the great publisher Taschen has a sale like they did a few weeks ago. 

While there's a randomness to what I ordered, there's an order to searching what I randomly chose. I ordered all this and got it delivered to my door for about $120. 

As more and more clients are abandoning the practice of appointing Agencies of Records, more and more agencies like GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company have an unfair advantage.

Purposefully small agencies like my own don't follow the hodgepodge mayhemmy way of modern Un-think. We don't rely on AI or the same standard stimulus as everyone else to excite us, to learn. We play a sort of "can you top this" with a whole wide world, not just the world wide web, as stimulation.

Most important, we aren't reading business books to learn about business. We're reading books about life and applying them to business. We aren't learning from decks and white papers. We're learning from the subway, from people, from <er> empathy.

We also have the freedom and the finances to do something the giant $10 billion market cap holding companies can't do. We can buy books. We can go for a walk. We can visit a museum. We can talk to people outside of our field and hire them because they're different. We can spend $120 on books without going through six weeks of approval and six more weeks of Concur-derived reimbursement.

In other words, we have a hierarchy. 

We put creativity first.