David Brooks, the self-described "moderate" columnist
for "The New York Times" has a really brilliant op-ed in today's
paper with a title I simply couldn't pass up. His piece is called "Sam
Spade at Starbucks." You can read it here, unless the Times' firewall
intervenes. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/13/opinion/brooks-sam-spade-at-starbucks.html?hp
Brooks' column is about idealism, but the need for idealism to be
grounded in the hard, often brutal realities of life. I think Brooks' thinking
has direct bearing on many of the issues and mania in our business.
What Brooks is talking about is the idealism of so many to attempt
to change the world through extra-governmental intervention. Things like
micro-loans, colorful wrist bands, and KONY videos. We embrace these acts while
ignoring that these sort of efforts will fail to have lasting impact if bigger,
institutional, structural changes aren't made.
The key sentences from Brooks--and I urge you to read his entire
column (it should take you less than four minutes)--are these: "...there’s only so much good you can do unless you are willing
to confront corruption, venality and disorder head-on."
Now here's where I think the parallel to our
business comes in.
A lot of energy and time is spent in our business
doing things that "show well." We chase after awards and build our
reputations on things with a high-sheen of pangloss. We seem to have no
appetite as an industry for work that does the hard infrastructure work that
most companies need.
We don't laud and applaud the hardheadedness, the
hard-boiledness that it takes to win over clients and effect change in their
organizations. It's much more glamorous to send a lion or a pencil to yet
another Scrabble ad or burrito restaurant in Tulsa.
This is not just about my personal disdain for
the supercilious and superficial nature of the Awards-Industrial complex.
It's about people who think the industry is about
apps and toys and gimmickry.
As I have said many times before in this space
and in others, most client organizations don't even know what business they're
in or what it is they sell. Our job is the tough job of defining, demonstrating
and disseminating meaning.
It's the devil in the details. It's the quotidian. It's the
acknowledgement that not all brands are cool and are going to do neato stuff.
Work, as a wise man once said, is work.
hear, hear.
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