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Environmental systematics and personalities in development of an efficiently working team.

First of all, we have to talk about "Psychological Aspects":

To move in any direction, each person must have at least one of the following types of motivation:

• Professional

Our goal as leaders is to build a working system that will have at least one important reward: a professional task completed at a satisfactory level. This item is the foundation of a happy existence for any professional.

• Financial (material)

Our society is not completely altruistic (yet), and it’s unlikely that anyone would want to work without pay.

• Emotional (moral)

Creative people also need an emotional reward as fish need water - it’s their atmosphere, where they live and breathe.

• Informational (cognitive)

If your project will bring some type of new important information into the world, then this project can create an atmosphere of a reward produced by demand for the product - which in turn creates a sense of positive impact, satisfying a need for a personal accomplishment.

For example, for a high-paid designer who is passionate about protecting the environment, working with a team of attractive women aboard seashepherd.org on the international project of research and protection of whales - this kind of work would be a motivation that includes all the above listed aspects.

It’s probably impossible to teach a person who has no real experience within the area of personnel management to be a good leader. However, it’s possible to describe a system of rules under which your project will at the very least be completed.

System rules:

If you would like to establish an effective creative team, then one possible way is the use of a typical creative agency structure, which means the following:

• Depending on the size of the project, you need to build a conventional hierarchical management structure, with chief creative officer at the top who manages several art directors and designers under their subordination, and etc. This is a so-called "pyramidal system of management." There are other systems, different management structures - the choice depends on your preferences.

• You will need a clear division of roles and responsibilities.
• At the beginning of a project you need to create a well documented process of the discussion of the project - briefing, including: methods of its implementation, target dates, a description of the key stages, ways to measure outcomes and patterns of interaction.
• On the technological side, you need to configure the system for monitoring the progress of the project, assign each stage a unique name and number.
• Always make backup copies of all versions of your files and documents.
• Track when and what changes you get, and use this system to measure the load on your employees and establish priorities on the way.
• Employees in your organization who will use your services, should be treated as "clients" rather than friends or colleagues. You should think about your team as your own independent creative firm. You'll need to set limits on how often your "customers" can expect to make changes and get their corrected versions.
• Don’t promise anything beyond measure. Conversely, do not give anyone excessive timing on their projects. Your authority is being established moment by moment - remember that.
• In most organizations, internal creative groups are considered as “free” and, therefore, the work of such groups may be perceived less seriously than the external creative firms. Sometimes, the attitude of your “clients” toward your in-house group may be less than acceptable. Typically, the lower the level of professional ethics, the less your work will be taken seriously.
• You need to establish contact with the recruiters to attract freelancers, as well as with other creative agencies to which you would be able to redirect the excess work.

And finally, remember:

• The sharp separation of people who think with a left and right brains, ie, creative and logical - is absurd. We are all capable of any activity, more or less.
• It’s difficult to support the work of creative professionals without interesting projects. The very essence of this profession - is the creation of something new. Creative people get bored by routine - it simply ruins their ability to generate new ideas.
• Allow your customers to give you advice, but leave the final decision to yourself.
• You must always remain first and foremost a professional, and keep away from any emotional decisions. You are a part of the company and your job is to work with everyone, and not against anyone.
• There are no absolute rules for effective management. We are all arranged in different ways and have different motivations. Do unto others as you want done to yourself, and many things will be solved instinctively in the right direction and in unexpected ways.

I hope this information may help you a bit.

I wish you good luck! I hope you know why?  And of course it would be great to hear your stories, tips for all of the Creative Leaders out there!

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Timofey Yuriev.  Fololow me at Facebook: T-Y-V Consultancy.

©2013 by Konstantin Yuriev & Timofey Yuriev

Meetings: they are the scourge of the digital ad industry. Reps desperately trying to get on client's and agency's calendars, and when they succeed they fail. Boring tedious nonsense. 60 slides of tripe. Clients and agencies, leaning back, expecting and getting the worst.

Bad meetings are sadly the norm, are a waste of time, and demeaning to all involved. Enough!

Let's make 2013 the Year of Great Meeting in Digital Media. Below are some simple tips for making everyone involved happier and more productive:

1. Have an agenda: it makes it so much more interesting to the audience.
2. State the objective of the meeting upfront: it's a sales meeting. Be bold. Tell them upfront that you've been thinking about their business, you have an idea, and if it works you expect them to invest in it. Be honest! Unless you want to sit around and talk endlessly about "the relationship".
3. Have a point of view: People are harried and overwhelmed. If you know something of value, drop the knowledge. Loud 'n proud, baby!
4. Know your client and solve a problem: Take the time to study the client and bring a custom solution. If one size fits all, you're going to be replaced by an algorithm and an exchange anyways.
5. Bring ideas: Oscar Wilde once said  “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”  Take some risks. Move fast and break things.
6. End early: People are busy. Get to the point and finish early. People really appreciate the extra time in their day to check out BuzzFeed.com.

Now, drop the mic and leave the stage.

What should be the characteristics of a successful creative team leader?

Each one of us has a unique collection of personal and professional preferences for people we’d like to work with. But instead of looking at others and trying to adjust to the request of the masses, where the leader would become an "all-destroying terminator targeting to become a president", I would like to look objectively at how to be a leader with the most sought-after professional qualities.

When I was dealing with rational, competent professionals, in general, there were no intractable problems in the course of our work, and few inter-personal problems.

Based on this, I would like to tell you some of the stories about what leaders should not be, from my personal experience, communicating with the managing staff in the marketing and advertising industries in New York City.

I need to tell you a bit of my past background, so you’ll be able to adequately access my point of view:

I went to the U.S. in 1996, after finishing my college education in management / economics / architecture. By that point, I was an avid mountaineer, had my own private practice in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and was a successful entrepreneur. I built a night club in Russia during hard economic times. By twenty-two, I was versed in the life surrounding me. And I turned my desire to see another world into practical action.

I did not speak English, knowing only general phrases like "piece of cake" and "no problem." I used some NLP techniques on the immigration council, got my visa and bought a one-way ticket to New York. Then, after working for a year at a car wash and construction sites, sleeping in the streets, I realized that it was time to do something more entertaining. I improved my English, created a few online animations and websites, studied books on graphic design, and drew up a brand new resume containing several years of experience. After about the 17th interview, I got my first offer and my first creative boss:

Sam
Sam, was the owner of a company specializing in online learning, I met him in 1998, getting my first job as a senior graphic designer in a small firm in the lower part of historic Manhattan. Our company shared its offices with another firm, specializing in production of computer games, mainly shooters, and creating all sorts of computer-generated explosions.

Back then, I still did not speak English very well, but my portfolio, in the form of a little fish waving its tail, happily exuding little air-bubbles and shaking the entire screen when someone touched its back, made ​​Sam laugh - that’s how I got my first, legitimate salary at $23 per hour. The next 3 months were spent animating logos, buttons and creating a lot of websites on the side, with cartoons for our company employees. Sam spent most of his time at the neighbors, shooting away the boredom of his life. He had a little contact with us, occasionally sending down the table directives, on which few people paid attention because they were mostly philosophical reflections on the future of our company.

From time to time we had visitors like “monsters” from TechRepublic and ZDNet. Some of the partners of these firms were Sam’s friends since college, creating their empires at the time of the “Internet Bubble” of the nineties. With the “monsters,” we had fun chasing beer and with Sam explaining to everyone that I was a “cool specialist in GUI (graphical user interface),” sending an avalanche of organizational issues in my direction. Soon, with my help, TechRepublic, together with a handful of other corporations, were completely reorganized. I returned to my buttons lit by explosions from the adjoining rooms, and Sam returned happily to his computer shooters. A couple of months later, due to lack of activity I resigned. Two months later, the firm collapsed.

What I found for myself at this point was the:

• lack of objective
• lack of leadership

Brian
In the early part of 1999, I found work at a start-up security company specializing in advanced background checks, with its main office in New Jersey. With a fake work permit (it was not an easy time for me), I got a job there as an Art Director. I interviewed with Brian, a 30-something, balding, German-American wearing round glasses. Brian loved to smile without reason to the higher management, Japanese women, because of their obedience, and Judo, sometimes coming to the office wearing a green belt around his waist.

Brian, impressed by my story about the TechRepublic, immediately hired me. The first month, Brian gave me a lot of work to design mock-ups for a bunch of new companies, which he later sold to his superiors as brilliant innovative ideas. From time to time, he advised me what colors to use and I had to teach him the psychology of color, the meaning of graphic elements and the fundamentals of design balance. A month later, confident in his abilities, Brian would stand behind my shoulder all day long, constantly telling me what to do next. By that point my breathing has ceased to conform to its natural rhythm.

Once, over a cup of coffee, the engineers told me how Brian asked them about what computer folders are and how to create them. Over some time, Brian had ceased to ask me anything and became an “expert” on every topic of graphic design and production. At this moment I knew for sure that any given project I completed would be absolutely not the way Bryan liked. A bit later, Brian stopped all communication with me. I didn’t know what to do and as the last step - I decided to go to Brian’s boss. He told me that I had to deal with Brian personally. Brian told me that I couldn’t go home at 6 o'clock anymore, and needed to carry out other office tasks such as sorting mail. I spent a month trying to do work I was hired to do, ignoring any of Brian’s suggestions related to bookkeeping chores and the cleanliness of the place, and eventually resigned.

So, I met with:

• incompetence

Molly

Molly was a business manager and a networking specialist with a PHD in marketing. After receiving the first client through her connection, my staff carried out the work according to the customer specifications. Molly came back the next day with a request from a client to alter the project by 80%, which would take us another week. Having examined the new conditions, I realized what the customer wanted was an almost entirely new version of our project because the client couldn't clearly express their final goal. The problem was in the preliminary discussion of the project. My requests for direct contact with the client went mysteriously unanswered, and Molly had no idea how to conduct a briefing. I explained to Molly the process once again, and gave her the briefing forms. With great persuasion, Molly went back to the client for a detailed discussion of the project. She returned the next day with a request from another client to alter their project by 80% too. I refused to work with this client, and with Molly.

And that's how I stumbled on:

• incompetence
• unavailability
• indirectness
• uncommunicative

Mike
Once, in 2001, after the unification of our global company with another, two creative departments were merged. From our side, I was performing the whole process of creative work, and from the other side, the Creative Director by the name of Mike, had a team of an illustrator and a web-designer. He wore charcoal dyed hair and drove around in a Porsche and Ducati.

During the formal introduction, it became clear that I was doing the same amount of work, as everyone on the purebred American team that Mike put together. This didn’t help to create the mood of the rainbows in our brand new company.

The relationship between Mike and the marketing department was exceptionally horrendous; from time to time, he would scream at the Director of Marketing including her little helpers, and then would lock himself in his office, blasting jazz until the end of the day.

Once I came to him with a request from the marketing team to develop a brand new concept for one of our subsidiaries, where marketers had expressed a desire to create soft emotions for the brand, because target customers were pregnant women. At that, Mike explained to me that: “we are not soft people”. The logo turned out in the style of the musical band Rammstein, something that overall resembled the shape of a uniform of Oberführer SS.

Once, a frightened woman in the marketing department complained to me with tears in hers eyes that Mike promised to kill the entire Marketing Department with rat poison. I was getting more and more concerned for their mental health. After this, on recommendation of Mike I was fired. A month later, Mike’ entire team along with him was dismissed from the company, and I was invited back.

I did have a lot of fun with Mike, and I love jazz, but his personal qualities had not led to any productive work.

This is where we meet with:

• non-authenticity
• incompetence
• indirectness
• negativity

Stories such as above, allow us, with real-life examples, to understand what sometimes can exist in our management world, and with what kind of people we can work, as well as what personal traits are able to lead us into the abyss. So we found out that a leader, certainly should have the following qualities:

• Must be present.
• Must have a clear direction - if the captain doesn’t know where to go, where will he send his entire team?
• Authority and authenticity - you don’t want a leader who is not versed in his own business.
• Honesty - if your leader doesn't have a confidence, how can his team members trust him?
• Accessibility - how can we do our work if your leader is a private entity?
• Positivity - it doesn't mean that your captain has to constantly smile at everyone, but we are predisposed by our nature to do good in our world.

During the growth of my career, I met with many wonderful colleagues, and positive people in the many firms who outweigh all the negative people, they are easy to solve the most complex problems with. If you have a good boss, I congratulate you.

Qualities of a good leader can be summed up simply: know your business, know the target, understand how to develop an action plan, learn to delegate work properly, and most importantly - be truly and wholly, a good person. Everything that you do in every moment of this life - builds you and your environment.

©2011 by Konstantin Yuriev & Timofey Yuriev

So, forget about 2010. Let's talk big. REALLY big.

Here are 10 predictions for the next decade. That's right, the whole darn decade.

Sure, it's a little linkbait-y, but this is a fun way to start the new year and could ignite some great conversation. What will happen? And how will you succeed in this new decade?

1) Content Strategy Becomes the New Information Architecture: You've probably heard the saying, "Information architecture is to design what content strategy is to copy." And it's true, except that content strategy lags about 5-10 years behind IA as an agency deliverable. Expect clients to demand content strategy and hence agencies to staff up with folks who understand that the content on a site is as much a science as it is an art.

2) Marketing Sciences Get Sexy: Forget impressions, views, and hits. These dinosaurs are extinct and today's darlings (the all-too-vague visitors and clicks to name two) will likely follow them into the ether. Web metrics will get a hell of a lot sexier than bounce rate -- expect more about engagement, behavior, real customer insights. And as web metrics become more robust, the interpreters of this information -- marketing scientists -- will become the oracles of the office. Their challenge will be to not only wrestle this data into a story we can understand, but also to make info about past behavior predictive (or prescriptive) for future behavior. (Expect to see offerings like this proliferate.)

3) Google De-throned As Search King: As Google continues to diversify – phones, browsers, tons of acquisitions, etc. -- the amount of time they can focus on perfecting search falls. All this while competitors lick their chops. In '09, Microsoft's Bing brought a reasonable alternative to the fore with great ads and some innovative changes, especially for video searches. And with Wolfram Alpha and possibly others in the wings, it's likely the king of search will end this next decade looking around for all that lost market share.

4) Social Media Staffers Become Face of Business: Social media staffers have already far eclipsed your MarCom folks in terms of public visibility, but expect the same thing to happen to senior execs. Let's face it, more people know the name Scott Monty than they do Ford's own President. Frank Eliason and ComcastBonnie are the positive, helpful faces of one of the most despised corporations in the country. Of course, the best situation may be to have a senior exec who also understands social media strategy, even if the business isn't exclusively online. Expect leaders like publisher Michael Hyatt to raise the bar for business execs in the next decade.

5) The Death of Marketese: This is easily the prediction I pray for most. We learned in the last decade that people like doing business with people (wow, genius stuff there, I know). So why are so many "About" pages written in the vague, sanitized language of "marketese"? If your corporate page babbles on about "innovation" and "insights," you'd better be listing a few. Don't tell me about your "industry-leading technology;" just say you make the best damn widgets because of X, Y, and Z. Tolerance for marketese has dwindled and will disappear within the next decade. Let's hope this uninspiring copy does too.

6) Forget Resumes: For agencies in particular, and many businesses as well, resumes will disappear in the next 10 years. Expect employers to focus on what you've actually done, rather than what you say you've done. With creative examples like these, could you ever go back to single-spaced, 10-point font missives ever again? Developer Adam Darowski was one of hundreds (thousands?) of job seekers who have figured out that the blog is the new resume. When I was interviewing with Critical Mass, we discussed my blog in far more detail than any other component of my resume. They wanted to know what I did, how I lived online marketing; expect other employers to follow suit.

7) Competition from Unexpected Sources: The old rivalries used to be enough. Bill Gates' Microsoft vs. Steve Jobs' Apple, for instance. The last decade changed all that. Now, Steve Jobs faces stiff competition in the e-reader market from Amazon's Jeff Bezos and his killer Kindle. Brin and Page's Google Droid phone will be a formidable foe for the iPhone and Blackberry alike. No matter your business, be ready for new competition from unlikely places. And expect these upstarts to come in swinging.

News Continues to Decentralize: Everything from RSS to Twitter offers users personalized news feeds with no interruption. The 6 o'clock news simply can't compete and will disappear. This next decade will see a mass decentralization of news. But will the same fate befall newspapers as well? No way. Too many of us fogeys understand that nothing compliments breakfast like newsprint on a dead tree. Sure, the number of newspapers will fall, but stalwarts like the NY Times and Washington Post will endure.

9) The Decade of Mobile: FINALLY. But it's not the mobile device you're used to. Technology has caught up with our desires, but the next decade will usher in a handheld that is more mini-computer than telephone. In fact, expect VoIP to evolve quicker and eclipse the built-in phone hardware. Talking will be one of the lesser tasks solved by our ubiquitous mobile devices. The web will be with you...everywhere and all the time.

10) Hovercars. Or at least jetpacks. We deserve that much.