The modern agency CEO faces unprecedented leadership trials
If an agency CEO could travel in time, they’d almost certainly want to go back to the 1950s, where things were a lot less complicated, writes TrinityP3 chairman Michael Farmer.
We don’t get to pick the era we live in. We’re human, though, and we dream about other times and other places. Given a choice, today’s agency CEOs might dream about turning back the clock sixty years or so, when the world — and the ad agency within it — was much simpler and a lot more fun.
Television was new and growing in 1958. There were only 40 million TV households (today’s number is 120 million) and the agency’s creative challenge was how to get better at TV and print — and grow even faster than the post-war economy.
Interesting topic but your pivot of the debate is around 10 years to late.
What do we need as leaders now and in the future
I’m sure there are some male CEOs who look back to the 50s with envy but for the female leaders in agencies this would be horrific – they and their progressive male counterparts are focusing on creating new pathways and legacies for agencies for the next few years. (Few, because change is constant and accelerated compared to “the good old days”)
I’m crying with both eyes for creative agency CEOs.
This article doesn’t land a coherent point
“The past was better” is just “familiarity bias.” You tend to forget the crap and just remember the better bits and favor things that you are already familiar with. Hint: it was not as good as you remember it! Nothing is new under the sun and there was always strife and turmoil of one sort or another: that is the human condition. I’m sure females and gays found the 50’s to be just SOOOOO wonderful! And in any power structure there is always someone looking to kill you and take your place. This has never changed. So I don’t know why any CEO (who needs to be a sociopath and/or narcissist to get to the “top”) would be “crying” except in aid of some Machiavellian strategy. That said, the traditional western business culture/system is an anathema to creativity. These idiotic business structures which are really just mass production factories cannot create, only copy or regurgitate. So these “numbers” MBA business type CEOs couldn’t be doing a better job of killing what they pretend to want to foster than if they sat down with a committee and planned out the most efficient ways to kill creativity stone cold dead right at birth. It is no wonder that most women don’t want any part of this dystopian “tooth and claw” continuous stress “corporate” life. Creativity needs to be nurtured, encouraged and supported, not demanded at the end of a Nazi machine gun. I know this makes no sense at all to non-creative money/KPIs worshiping dullards.
TL:DR – Unless you’re a creative you are stupid.