It’s always great to read perspectives from people who have worked in your industry. This new book by Jason Sperling is another great addition to an advertising creative’s library. Overall, it looks beautiful and is easy to browse. The headlines of sections and the main points summarized at the end of each chapter really help convey the insights. It does tend to focus on people working in the ad, entertainment, and music industry. It’s great to hear from different leaders but sometimes you keep hearing from the same people. There were a lot of great quotes that were mentioned too.

1 – MANAGING PEOPLE

  • Trade the spotlight for flashlights.
    • Share the limelight with others.
    • Allow people to find their way.
    • Remember the importance of being a mentor.
  • Don’t manage departments. Manage people. 
    • There’s a fine line between being a facilitator and dictator. To facilitate you need a high level of emotional intelligence because it requires meeting everyone’s needs differently- David Oyelowo
    • It’s nearly identical to parenting several kids. Despite being exposed to exactly the same input and having been given the same success criteria, they approach it all in completely different ways and with different work ethics. -Brian Miller
    • Tailor your management style to the individual.
  • Remember the feeling.
    • Understanding and empathy helps strengthen your personal connection to your team.
    • Today’s leaders employ empathy and emotion in their leadership style.
  • The delicate task of killing babies.
    • “Let’s let it suck for a while and then come back to it.”
    • Don’t reject people. If you have to reject ideas, do it in a way that isn’t personal to the people behind the ideas.
    • Be hard on the work but nice to the people. Kill bad ideas fast, but don’t kill people’s spirits.
    • Nothing is more frustrating to a team than when you don’t give great feedback and people don’t know what you want.
    • “If you come here, you have to fall in love with building sandcastles rather than the sandcastles themselves.” -Duncan Milner
  • Mirrors help reduce blind spots.
    • Giving and getting feedback is necessary for growth.
    • Specific and honest feedback can have positive effect on performance.
    • Be a strong advocate for people & their projects.
  • Pull people up with you.
    • Talented people want support and recognition.
  • Set realistic expectations for your team(even if you have impossible expectations for yourself).
    • Judge effort along with effectiveness.
    • Establish realistic expectations for your team.
  • Make failure an option.
    • “It’s important to make people feel comfortable saying dumb things in front of you and making mistakes. You need to provide sanctuary and give people the freedom to play.” Lance Jensen.
    • The flow of ideas can be more important than the quality of ideas.
  • The burden of bad news.
    • An inability to deliver bad news can negatively affect others on the team.
    • As a leader, you have a burden to put the company first.
  • If you have a bull in a china shop, move the china.
    • While you give your overacheiver room to create, protect the people in your group who aren’t as aggresive or self-motivated from feeling threatened.
    • Remember that both ambitious and steadfast employees are valuable.
  • Make more yous.
    • An important measure of your success is the next wave of great creative leaders that you help to cultivate.
    • Helping develop talent also reflects positively on you.
  • Don’t make anyone feel like a yellow Starburst.
    • Favoring some people more than others will result in feelings of alienation.
    • Remember that because you’re the boss, your words and actions carry more weight.
    • Focus on being inclusive.
  • Make their struggle your struggle.
    • If you want to be a leader that people respect, admire, and love to work for, then remember this: whatever your team is going through, go through it with them. Leaders will engender far more loyalty from their teams when those teams realize that the leader’s role doesn’t grant them special priviledges, but rather, certain responsibilities, which entail climbing into the trenches with their teams.
    • The sacrifices you make on behalf of your team become sacrifices they make for you later.
    • The things you do to help your team when things aren’t going well will define you.
  • Give a hundred. Expect ten in return.
    • Invest in your team’s personal success and happiness, regardless of reciprocation.
  • Don’t take departures personally.

2 – BEING A LEADER 

  • In battle, always start with the bluntest weapon.  
    • Determine which battles are worth fighting for and which aren’t worth it.
    • As a leader, how you do battle is just as important as the fight itself.
  • Greatness necessitates compromise. Sometimes.   
    • Compromise on certain elements may open people up to other things they normally wouldn’t consider.
    • “You’ve got an ice cream sundae and you’re ready to throw it away because you didn’t get the sprinkles.” – Susan Credle
  • Align your spine.   
    • Great things happen when you surround yourself with people who share your same beliefs, passions, and whose talents complement your own.
  • Learn to deputize  
    • “Power is to empower.” – Benjamin Zander
    • Balance mentorship with autonomy.
    • Delegation starts with putting the right people in the right positions.
    • The consequence of not deputizing people is to strip them of a desire to have a point of view about the work. When you know your POV isn’t going to be validated or valued by micromanaging creative leaders, it makes you want to give up. – Brian Miller
  • Only apes throw their poop at people.  
    • “Great leaders share credit and take the blame.”
    • Sharing responsibility engenders loyalty. Not sharing it can result in a loss of respect and decreased motivation.
  • Sometimes you need to be a benevolent dictator.  
    • When people feel like they’re being heard, they’ll be more invested in the outcome.
    • Regardless of opinions, sometimes it’s necessary to step in and decide.
  • Opposition attracts  
    • Create a culture where it’s acceptable to disagree.
    • “Instead of giving directions, I’d ask questions. I’d ask questions to get them to do explorations that maybe they hadn’t thought about on their own. It left people feeling really empowered and invested in whatever solution we ended up going with.” – Sam Bergen
  • Bring out the human in people.   
    • Your mood and outlook is reflected by your team.
    • Access and engagement with you offers people reassurance and opportunities to share their thoughts.
    • Establishing a fun, relaxed atmosphere positively affects the work.
  • Act your title.
    • One of the biggest hurdles for creative people to becoming strong, effective leaders is a lack of maturity.
    • The things that are important to creative people today are collaboration, empathy, and an investment in their success.
  • High-paid prima donnas make perfect targets.   
    • Look out for signs of divas during the interviews. Are they interested in the company or themselves?
  • Your job description is just a starting point.   
    • It’s great to be valuable, but it’s even better to be invaluable.
    • “I’ve always had this annoying thing in me that I have to be the person that no one can have a meeting without. I made sure to overdeliver because I wanted to be indispensable.” – Rob Schwartz
  • There’s nothing wrong with being a lifelong maker.
    • Not every creative person is going to be an effective manager.

3 – MANAGING CLIENTS AND HIGHER-UPS  

  • Straddle the line between partner and prodder. 
    • The more trust you develop, the more apt clients will be to listen to you.
    • Clients need to know you’re looking out for their best interests first.
  • Put your client’s and company’s concerns above your own. 
    • When clients know you’re committed to their success, they’ll be more commited to you.
  • Be mindful of the person above the person above. 
    • The best way to avoid surprises is to share more, and share more often, with the people who matter most.
    • Extrapolate what is being said by whom. Determine what the top leaders are saying and answer their concerns.
  • Don’t rise so high that you lose sight of the people below you. 
    • “Be protective of your team, invest them in success, never undercut or undermine them, and they will do good work for you.” – Valerie Van Galder
  • Everyone at the table deserves respect (even if it’s not apparent why yet) 
    • Being respectful of everyone can help build allies.
    • The less powerful people in the room are often more involved day-to-day. It’s good to have their buy-in on projects.
  • Put a ring on it.
    • When a client sees you’re in it for them, they’ll open up and be willing to listen.
  • Aspire to be a client whisperer.
    • “Clients don’t buy ads, they buy a relationship.” – Tom McElligott
    • You’re more likely to become a whisperer if clients see you’re honest and trustworthy.
  • Don’t treat insights or ideas like buried treasure.
    • You can live or die on how you present work.
    • Get to the point (unless you’ve got something smart or insightful to say.)

4 – THE WORK  

  • Great work still matters, but for different reasons.
    • As a leader, the effectiveness of the work takes on added importance.
    • Your distance from the work allows you to think about it differently than its creators.
  • A POV is IMP.
    • Taras Wayner’s quote (see below)
    • Sharing your vision withe everyone encourages collaboration and involvement.
    • A vision gives you a lens to properly evaluate work and know what is great.
  • Fingerprints can leave smudges.
    • You need to recognize when to step back, and recognize when to step in. Leaders make the mistake of thinking their job is to consistently be seen as leading, as opposed to being someone who engenders confidence in the endeavor. You don’t have to be leading in every moment. As Martin Scorsese said, “Ninety percent of directing is casting.”  
  • Maintain a culture of consistency.  
    • People appreciate consistency in communication.
    • Always give the why when making decisions.
  • Less pushing, more pulling.  
    • How you make things is just as important as what you make.
    • I wait for people to find the right path, and when I see them arrive at the answer on their own, that’s when I step in and say, “That’s it.” It’s like catching a fish – you’re waiting for a little nibble, that thing you agree with, and then you pull on the line. Because the ideas originate from everyone else in the room, they feel more ownership, and they feel like I’m listening instead of dictating. – Davis Guggenheim
  • Falling on too many swords kills credibility.
    • When you fall on your sword for something, you’re showing such a strong creative conviction that it makes other people question themselves. When you fall on too many, it makes other people question you. 
    • One of the operating principles at Amazon is having the backbone to “disagree and commit.” They believe that, as a leader, it’s your obligaton to challenge decisions if you disagree, and not to compromise just because it’s easier. It’s just as important to fall on a sword against something as it to fall on one for something.
  • Take risks but mitigate disasters.
    • Belief and passion help convince people to take risks.
    • Don’t let data stop you from doing great work, fast.  
  • Awards should be the fortuitous result of smart work, not the goal. 
  • Work rarely sells itself.
    • Leave room for meaningful feedback or discussion.
    • Sell your excitement about the work. People want to feel how much you love it.
    • Present with humility. Avoid too much showmanship or flair.  
  • Keep making things if making things makes you happy.
    • “One challenge we often run into is that those who say they want to lead often have a hard time actually making the leap from implementing to delegating. It’s easy to raise your hand and say, “I want a position that involves more responsibility and more compensation.” But when you’re also an expert craftsperson, it takes a real leap of faith to stay hands off and trust others to do things just as well. What we tell our leaders is that by not taking up the craft they become “force multipliers” and can effect far more positive change. By trusting their teams to make the right fixes, to solve problems, and to take ownership of creation, leaders can focus on the bigger picture and moreover help each team member grow through regular guidance.” -Ted Price

5 – THE CAREER  

  • When it comes to your job, be selfless. When it comes to your career, be selfish.  
  • Keep working on you v.2.  
    • In order to lead, you have to evolve your thinking as the job evolves.
  • Avoid burning a bridge you don’t intend to walk across.  
    • It’s perfectly fine to take meetings, but be honest going into them.
  • A higher salary only makes you happy on payday.
    • It’s important to be sure your vision aligns with the company’s vision. 
  • Go away and stay away. 
    • It’s important to your creativity and career longevity to disconnect.
  • We all need a “fuck it” bucket.  
  • A healthier perspective of what’s truly important in life can remedy some of that personal distress and help us get through tougher times. Work didn’t sell. Fuck it, you’re not perfect and you’ll get the next one. Talented creative person quits. Fuck it, another great one will come along. Angry client. Fuck it, you did your best and hopefully it works out. Boss threatens your job. Fuck it, if this one doesn’t work out you’ll get a new one. Go on, fill that fuck it bucket up.
  • Try to establish a work-you balance. 
  • When I first took a leadership position, I wish I would have…

Additional quotes:

“Chaos is the only friend who helps you be creative.” – Dan Wieden

“When it comes to leadership, you need to have a destination, and you need to be able to convince people to make the journey with you.” – Jon Ikeda

“One of the biggest mistakes many of us make when we make the leap from creative to manager is that we go into the job without a vision. That lack of vision leads to new creative directors getting stuck in something called “the drift”: we arrive with the burning desire to do “great work” and make our mark. But we often arrive with no vision for what constitutes great work, or how to direct work to become great, and no filters by which to judge “great work.” So, we drift our way through it. We make statements like, “I’ll know it when I see it,” or, “It’s just not good enough.” This eventually leads to frustration from the creatives, the strategists, and the account team, as well as the newly minted creative director. These actions lead to a demotivated team guessing what their boss wants.

The best thing a new CD can do to avoid the drift is to have a vision.

What the best creative leaders like Susan Hoffman, Gerry Graf, and Nick Law all have in common is that they helped craft the great work they’re known for by having a vision for how to get to that great work. Even though each of their styles of work is different, their vision gave them the tools and lenses to properly judge work and nurture it to greatness. And, when they killed work, they used the principles of their vision to give a reason for why it wasn’t right, along with direction for how to get to that great work again.

The best CDs I’ve worked for didn’t just do great work, they understood why the work was great. They had a strong belief for why they didn’t like something, or why they did. The best agencies I’ve worked for had a shared vision. Creative, business leads operations, and finance are all aligned behind the same vision. The opposite is also true. The worst jobs I had were working for people without a vision, and for companies whose leaders didn’t share in the same vision. Understanding this has helped me make the right job choices and grow into a more confident creative director. So, state an intention and find a vision and then go out there and do great work.” – Taras Wayner