Opinion

Jobs satisfaction

In this guest post, Andrew Wilson says the lessons of the biopic of Steve Jobs should be learned by the marketing industry.

There’s a saying I’ve heard in church circles, used when a preacher’s otherwise great teaching is undermined by a few errant ideas: ‘Eat the chicken, and spit out the bones’.

It’s an acknowledgment that we live in a world where no one person is going to have it ‘all sorted’, where even great people make mistakes, and where we need to develop the skill of listening to others without having to choose between either accepting everything they say, or rejecting it in its entirety.

And so I found myself regurgitating this adage as I left the cinema after the (Mumbrella-hosted) preview of Jobs last week. While the story of Apple’s founder is familiar to most of us, the movie is a good overview (far more worthwhile than its current IMDB rating would suggest) of a man whose passion, singular focus, and ultimate success are hugely inspirational.

But it also shows us a man whose manner of dealing with people was ruthless at best, and downright immoral at worst. For every moment of greatness, there’s a moment of ‘you-need-to-be-punched-in-the-face, Steve’ tyranny. It’s a reminder that it is wise to neither idolise nor demonise people, but rather learn what we can from them.

With that long-winded disclaimer that I’m not a hardcore Steve Jobs fan, I want to recommend that anyone in the creative industry take themselves off to see the movie. Because we all need a reminder (if not a lesson) about what true vision is, what inspired long-term thinking looks like, and how it can pay to stand for something you truly believe in when the opposing forces are stacked up against you.

Of course, it’s easier to be creative when you’re Steve Jobs and you’re running the show; less so when you’re agencyside and answerable to clients who don’t ‘get it’. But if clients aren’t inspired by our ideas, then they’re not going to believe their audience will be either.

As agencies, we need to reclaim some ground here – and fortunately there’s lots of evidence mounting around the importance of solid creative and ‘big picture’ thinking which should allow us to inspire the more rigid clients once more.

Remember, as agency folk one of our biggest assets is externality. Which means we need to be responsible for pulling people out of the every day – the office politics, the spreadsheets, all the minute details – and pointing to the horizon to say ‘Look! Look what’s possible!’ and then helping them navigate their way there.

We won’t win all those conversations, but as Wayne Gretsky famously said: you miss 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take. And as Jobs reminds us, even the greatest visionaries don’t win all those conversations about their big ideas either.

So even if you know the gist of the story, I recommend again that you go and see the movie. If you can spit out the bones – walking all over people in the pursuit of perfection, using your clout to manipulate financial markets, etcetera – you’ll be left with two hours of chicken which will challenge you to pursue meaningful creativity and to always dream of how things could be. And that, my friends, is how we will both inspire people and find job satisfaction in the process.

Andrew Wilson is founder of consultancy The Other Dimension

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