You’re Gonna Poke Your Eye Out!

You’ll break your neck! You’ll wind up crying! Someone’s Gonna Get Hurt! You heard them all. If you have kids, you’ve probably said something like that.

 The scene of the crime is also the scene of rehab.

When it happens at work, we just laugh it off and go back to work.

It happened to me, and didn’t involve getting hurt, losing an eye or breaking my neck.

During a morning activity in the office, there was a bit of a ball-toss game that was fairly controlled. But boys, being who they are, really got into the game. Then the Diet Coke that is a regular fixture on my desk became a victim. Then my Blackberry became a victim.

In all the scrambling to get the ball, my beloved Diet Coke – which was full – became up-ended over my Blackberry. My glasses sitting in a case got doused, but they are fine. Thank you.

So the rush to blot up the soda was on, as well as getting the battery out of my phone before it fried.

After cleanup and a Google search to find the best way to dry out a phone, the pieces are sitting nicely on my desk.

Thanks to Ben for the inspiring game; who was also kind enough to use his dry phone to immortalize the rehab.

How can I hold it against him when he has introduced me to the best tacos in Vegas? 

Thank God he didn’t bring in the John Deere today.

DNR - Do Not Resuscitate

This term was recently used by a wonderful and harried colleague in an agency. She meant to say NDA.

We all know what an NDA is – Non-disclosure Agreement.

But given the amount of paperwork required to get things done in some agencies, I think she was right. DNR.

How many bureaucracies do you have built into your system? Are there dozens of unnecessary steps, paperwork and processes?

If there's more than a step or maybe two, it’s usually because someone somewhere made a mistake. Something was overlooked. Someone skipped a very important step. And it cost your agency in time, money, relationship with your client, or reputation.

So little by little you add requirements, forms, approvals; send memos and this grows to layers of paperwork and eventually ultimatums.

All these little things add up to one big bureaucracy where you just can’t get anything done. On time. Without extraordinary support of administrative staff.

It’s time to get rid of that crap because we can’t resuscitate a bad system.

I highly recommend a DNR for bureaucracies.

An NDA should be simple. Don’t disclose our valuable info or we will sue you.

Now go forth and let bureaucracies die!

Don't Make Me Turn This Car Around!

We heard it as kids, and vowed to NEVER say it to our own kids. Then we blurted it out as if we were pre-programmed to be our parents.

You know the scenario: poking, kicking, ‘make her stop’, ‘he’s looking at me’. And the response is, Don’t make me turn this car around!

So Mom makes a threat, and sometimes, makes good on that threat.

So when things are going sideways at the agency, management gets perturbed. Word of missed deadlines, warring factions over strategy, budgets are out of control, the client doesn’t review the ad until the day it’s due and has massive changes all percolates to the top.

The basic Blame Game. No one takes responsibility.

Management gets tired of this crap. And when you don’t take the initiative to fix it – like call the client and give them a hard due date, learn to compromise on a font treatment, or quit tweaking a job (and billing time to it) – then it’s your fault.

When it’s your fault and you just kick-back and go with the dysfunctional flow, the partners come up with *brilliant* ways to make the noise stop. And it’s usually not optimal. Just another layer of repairs over something that is broken.

Like spackle. Or Bondo. It's not optimal, but it covers the problem until the cracks grow and the metal rusts through.

All of those fantastic fixes that Managers, Directors, VPs and Partners throw out are an effort to do your job for you. They don’t know how to do your job, and I’ll bet you won’t like their way of fixing it.

But something has to be done.

Here’s the takeaway: If you don’t stop kicking your sister, Mom will take you home.
The VP of Operations will introduce a New Process. No questions asked. No ice cream.

Now go and fix your system. If you don’t know how, contact me. First call is free.

Ask The People Doing The Work

If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. C-suite, Veeps, Directors, Managers – all making decisions on solutions based on their vast knowledge of how stuff gets done in an agency.

Bet they didn’t ask the people who are actually doing the work.

I know, because I’ve been there.

Something is awry. Throw something at the problem. Like software. Or a New Process.

Layers upon layers of awesome solutions thrown at problems – often at a significant cost to the agency – and always at a significant cost of employee time. Time spent to figure out what the heck to do with that new, awesome solution.

So the people doing the work find ways to make that solution work. To fix things. That’s what solutions are supposed to do.

But without a deep understanding or even a simple evaluation of what’s going on, those solutions become problems themselves.

How do we use this new thing? Who is actually going to figure it out? Is there a standard for how we’re going to roll it out? Was everyone even notified that this was comin’?

I can speak from my own experience, and from the experience I experience whenever I work with a client that has to fix something that is just plain screwed up.

The powers that be are considering new tools or processes. When it reaches the point where the blame game is being played out every day, you have to talk to the people doing the work to find out what is wrong.

Problems, issues, complaints rise to the surface faster than bubbles on that frosty microbrew at 4pm on Friday. You have to get to the bottom of the issue before you throw a solution at a problem.

Your staff is the greatest resource to solving problems – and evaluating solutions.

Start there. It’s so much faster.

And by the way. I love the complaint department. Don't ignore them.

They have laser vision when it comes to problems.