Advertising Sucks!

The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come – Andrew Essex – (Spiegel and Grau)

If I had a dime for every time a self-proclaimed expert labeled something as dead that went on to have a long, and fruitful lives, I could have retired to my own private island and have a bevy of bikini clad beauties to serve me cool beverages.

Andrew Essex, the former CEO of the much vaunted ad agency Droga5 is the latest in a long line of folks to take on the mantle of undertaker and proclaim the death of something. Essex directs his embalming fluid in at his former industry in the new book, The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come.

The reasoning behind Mr. Essex’s proclamation is that millions of folks have downloaded ad blocking apps/software or are signing on with subscriptions services to avoid ad content that advertisers will wake up and stop spending/wasting money on ineffective advertising. His concerns are not without foundation, but perhaps his conclusion is a reach; and maybe that was the goal here, to be just provocative enough to sell books.

The real problem isn’t that advertising is dead, but more simply put, IT FLAT OUT SUCKS! Seriously…watch just long enough to see 100 ads…about two hours of network viewing. 99 out of the 100 ads will feature the always enlightening “stupid man”; you can’t help but wonder how these clowns manage to dress themselves in the morning. Is it any wonder that even more people aren’t tuning out or blocking ads.

Essex settles into a meandering pace here; at times a little inside for the average reader, at times redundant, and at others a little off track. At the end of the day he makes a reasoned case, I’m just not certain he gets to a solid solution to the problem he posits and that it couldn’t have been done in the form of a long article rather than a book.

Be an Inspiring Leader

The Inspiration Code: How the Best Leaders Energize People Every Day – Kristi Hedges (AMACOM)

Quick show of hands, how many of you have worked for someone like this; you are speaking to your company leader and they are looking off into the distance or depending on the setting seemingly looking for someone more important than you that they can speak with?

Or how about the one that you want to wash your hands after meeting them because they are about a sincere as a slimy eel or the one who is listless and apparently doesn’t have much time or energy for you as an employee, let alone as a person?

If you are a leader and any one of these examples sounds at all like you, then you should seriously consider picking up a copy of executive coach Kristi Hedges new book, The Inspiration Code: How the Best Leaders Energize People Every Day. Hedges outlines some pretty straight forward strategies for leaders to become inspired leaders; those folks who truly make an impact not only on their business but on the folks they lead.

Hedges has spent time not only coaching leaders, but also studying successful leaders actions to see what it is that do and what sets them apart from the rest of the pack. From there she has been able to qualify and quantify what they do and boil it down into a series of steps that she labels the Inspire Path:                                                                           

• Present: Focused on the person in front of them, not distracted, visibly stressed, or locked into an agenda. They are truly open to new ideas.
• Personal: Authentic and real, and perhaps most important they LISTEN. They know how to find and expand potential.
• Passionate: They infuse energy, calibrate it, and manage it as one of their greatest skills. This is a critical step! Most often my first question to leaders or those who want to move into a leadership role is; what are you passionate about?
• Purposeful: They are intentional and willing to have courageous discussions about purpose, and role model how to live into their own.

The great thing about this is that while it is couched as a way to crack the secret of being a great leader; much of this stuff is really not hard to do. Hedges gives you the steps in the process put these things into action quickly and to sustain them so you can have a real, measurable impact.

Mission: Growth

The Bridge to Growth- How Servant Leaders Achieve Better Results and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever – Jude Rake – (Skyhorse Publishing)

“Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders,” - leadership guru Tom Peters.

A few years back, charged with leading a seminar on leadership, I found the Tom Peters quote above as part of my planning and I shared it with the class. It was one of those quotes that stuck with me and I have used it often since then, because it just makes so much sense for how I approach leadership.

Some have dubbed it servant leadership, but it’s just the way that I determined a long time before I became a leader, that I was going to conduct business as a leader. Now veteran business leader Jude Rake has encapsulated servant leadership and it’s direct connection to business growth in his new book, The Bridge to Growth- How Servant Leaders Achieve Better Results and Why It Matters Now More Than Ever.

Rake boils things down to 9 principles of servant leadership:

•        Grow leaders and difference makers, not just followers.
•         Build and orchestrate high-performance teams more powerful than the sum of their parts.
•         Focus the organization on strategic priorities, simplify operations, and accelerate progress.
•      Champion the people who purchase and use your products and services.
•         Cultivate a performance-based culture of innovation.
•         Communicate relentlessly.
•         See the world through the eyes of others.
•         Be the model you want emulated.
•         Coach people to achieve more than they thought possible.

These are spot on; grow leaders is straight up Tom Peters, communicate relentlessly; you simply cannot over communicate when it comes to mission vision and values. Culture should always be a priority, it’s been proven over and over again, yet some still resist moving it to the head of the line.

Rake does a nice job of spelling out how you can expedite this transition in your business and he serves it up in bite size, bullet-pointed chunks that you can implement starting today. The format makes this a great resource to keep within reach.

The Essence of Leadership

Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths – Scott Keller and Mary Meaney (Bloomsbury Business)

Think about it; how much time has been spent studying leadership and at what cost? Now add all of the words that have been written in countless studies, white papers, presentations and books. It’s mindboggling to even ponder.

Well that is the basic concept behind the new book Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths, from McKinsey business consultants Scott Keller and Mary Meany. The pair utilized McKinsey and Company’s decades long experience and information database along with a catalog of articles from the Harvard Business Review to boil down a formidable mountain of accumulated leadership knowledge into a list of what they dubbed ten timeless truths about leading organizations.

The list of ten is disseminated in three categories:

Talent and teams

1. How do I attract and retain the right talent?

2. How do I develop the talent we need to win?

3. How do I manage performance to unlock our full potential?

4. How do I create a high-performing leadership team?

Decision making and design

5. How do I improve the quality and speed of decision making?

6. How do I reorganize to capture maximum value quickly?

7. How do I reduce overhead costs sustainably?

Culture and change

8. How do I make culture a competitive advantage?

9. How do I lead organization-wide transformational change?

10. How do I successfully transition into a new leadership role?

Just imagine, having the sheer volume of information distilled down to what amounts to the essence of leadership. This is a goldmine for leaders at every stage of their career and delivered in a easily accessible and ready to put into play format.

This is really the nuts and bolts side of leadership in a how to format. Will this make you the ultimate leadership machine? Probably not, but it does give you a starting point to tackle many of the issues leaders are charged with dealing with a regular basis.