The Curse of the Designer, or: Credit Where Credit Is Due
Designers are a cursed bunch. I’ve worked with a lot of extremely talented ones during my time in marketing, communications, and public relations. And, I’ve been a real pain in the ass (for lack of a better term) to some of them. But, I think that unlike a lot of people in positions like mine, I get it. I know I’m making life miserable. And, I’m really, really sorry for that.
We - the marketing, public relations, and communications mangers, directors, coordinators, and Vice Presidents of the world - ask for the greatest thing of all time (every time) and in the process give them completely unrealistic deadlines to accomplish it. And they take it. And do it.
An ad in two hours? No problem. A brochure by tomorrow? Sure. A guide by Friday? Definitely. A re-branding of the entire organization by next week? Will do.
Designers are pretty much the greatest people ever. And we - the marketing, public relations, and communications folks - treat them like just another tool. We treat them like the software they use to create works of art.
This has to stop.
Designers aren’t a tool. They are brilliant people. They need to be involved in the strategic planning of any marketing, advertising, or public relations campaign you run…from the very beginning. They need to be listened to. They need realistic deadlines (imagine what they could do with more time!). And, they need to be recognized. Because, without them, your communications goals cannot be accomplished.
Did your campaign win an award? That’s awesome. Now, tell everyone that it’s amazing because of your designer.
A happy designer is a better designer and a better designer makes your life easier and puts your boss and clients in a better mood.
I don’t think I need to explain that more revenue usually follows.
Let’s stop the insanity. Designers are people, too.
Also, if you happen to be in the need of some wonderful design work, please be sure to get in touch with my friends over at evil-designs. They are the best that I know. And I say that professionally, not just personally.
A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.
Source: ryangraves
Germany reminds me of a goody two-shoes teenager who’s respectful, gets good grades and seems to be oh-so-responsible, but then goes out binge-drinking with the bad boys the minute the adults’ backs are turned. It happened with the Maastricht Treaty and now it looks to be happening again.
To be fair, I suppose I should add France to this allegation but, well — it’s France. For historical, cultural and political reasons Germany is the one that carries the burden of our high expectations of moral rectitude.
Source: financeaddict.com
Barack Obama, Post-Partisan, Meets Washington Gridlock
“Yet our political system was designed to be infuriating. As George Edwards notes in his study of Presidents as facilitators, the American system ‘is too complicated, power too decentralized, and interests too diverse for one person, no matter how extraordinary, to dominate.’ Obama, like many Presidents, came to office talking like a director. But he ended up governing like a facilitator, which is what the most successful Presidents have always done. Even Lincoln famously admitted, ‘I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events controlled me.’”
Auditing Culture - An Essay
Because it’s earnings season, we’re going to hear a few key phrases pop up in business reports for the next few weeks. These include, but are not limited to, earnings per share and shareholder value, net income, gross revenue, mark-to-market, and GAAP, among others.
I am not going to take the time to get into what all these mean. Rather, I want to think a bit bigger: What does IT all mean. A company’s stock may swing wildly with the distribution of any one accounting term. For Bank of America, it’s net income, for Netflix, it’s subscribers; for Morgan Stanley, it’s trading revenue; for Goldman Sachs, it’s compensation per employee, etc. But, surely, these individual numbers cannot be the end-all measurements of a company’s success.
I took on this topic a few months ago in a paper I wrote for my Culture, Organization, and Technology class. It begins to address the core concept of auditing culture, it’s role on our lives, and how it affects our institutions.
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Every day, we audit our lives, we audit others’ lives, and others – in turn – audit us. This is partially due to the “audit culture” in which we live, as we seek to quantify what is otherwise subjective (Raymond).
Auditing life is fairly easy, as much of it is quantifiable: How much money is in our bank account, the number of emails we receive and send, the days per week we exercise, how many hours we spend watching television, how many hours we sleep, and so on.
In recent years, as it has become easier to track our daily actions, a growing subculture of people has formed, who meticulously track their lives (Wolf). If we wanted to, we could quantify life into one simple number, effectively creating an indicator that we can use to make “policy” decisions about ourselves (Raymond).
Yet, this raises a question: What are the implications of this audit culture?
Michael E. McIntyre suggests that while auditing is a useful and necessary tool, it is not the answer. A drive to audit everything, he argues, could eventually lead to diminished innovation.
On an individual level, a drive to measure certain aspects of our life, could lead us to forgo better possibilities. If, for example, I wanted to become healthier and only measured my success by my weight displayed on a scale, I could potentially do more harm than good, as weight is only one measure of a person’s health. I could overlook alternatives to fitness, such as weight lifting, which may increase what the scale shows, but make me generally healthier.
McIntyre says, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” and that there is a danger in assuming that humans function like machines and can be analyzed as such. The idea of happiness and leading a fulfilling live is largely intangible. However, there is something to be said for realizing that an audit of our lives, even subconsciously, is taking place on a minute-by-minute basis., either by ourselves or others around us.
There is an assumption that through the auditing process we can have, “An absolute ‘assurance’ of quality, value, and other such desirables” (McIntyre). These measures collectively allow us to better understand our lives. Comparing the present to the past allows us to see where our strengths and weaknesses are; it helps us to forecast where we may be in the future and set goals to get there.
However, when we begin measuring our worth solely based on one number – be it the dollars in our bank account or the number of friends we have on Facebook, these personal audits go from being useful to destructive. Doing so has the potential to constrain our lives before we even understand them, setting rules and measures based only on what has happened in the past, leaving out the possibility of innovation (McIntyre) and unforeseen personal growth.
This culture of auditing has become prevalent in American institutional and organizational life. However, it often coexists with auditing failures, such as Enron, Arthur Andersen, and WorldCom; the financial crisis; and, more recently, MF Global and Olympus. How does this happen and – more importantly – how can it be prevented?
In “The Greed Cycle”, John Cassidy examines the history of financial compensation, particularly with the rise of publically traded companies. He explains, the struggle has always been that as managers are put in charge of running organizations in the best interest of owners (shareholders), who agree to give managers day-to-day control of operations, there needs to be a way to monitor (audit) those managers. The audit, then, becomes the measure not just of an executive’s success, but the success of the entire organization.
Historically, the measure of an executive’s worth was the company’s size. This, however, encouraged managers to build up huge organizations, ignoring profitability and competitiveness. In the 1970s that changed with a new idea that, “The Most important people in any company are not the employees or the managers, but the owners – the stockholders and bondholders.” The measure changed and shareholder value suddenly became the objective (Cassidy “The Greed Cycle”).
The problem, however, remained. Just as with tying executive pay to the size of the company, tying pay to shareholder value meant that there was essentially one measure (one audit) of an executive’s performance. What mattered was that number.
McIntyre eloquently states this concept as “Goodhart’s Law: What’s counted counts.” This summarizes precisely how, even in an auditing culture, auditing can fail. The number becomes the goal; not the means of obtaining it.
As managers’ salaries were tied to shareholder value, their focus on the company’s long-term sustainability became less important than the value of their stock options. This has led to a number of accounting practices that could be categorized anywhere along the spectrum of gimmicks to outright fraud. The executives, by the simple act of auditing their success in one specific way, were given an incentive to mislead investors, either by overstating revenue or understating costs (Cassidy “The Greed Cycle”). What makes sense from an individual point of view (maximizing pay), leads to “rationally irrational” behavior (Cassidy “Capitalism and Financial Crises”).
Furthermore, as Cassidy points out in “The Greed Cycle”, the very institutions, which were supposed to be auditing the actions of these executives (Boards of Directors and accounting firms), fell into the same trap. Boards were closely aligned with CEOs, who often times served as Chairman. Meanwhile, auditing firms chose to rubberstamp financial statements, rather than risk losing a major client, as they were also seeking shareholder value.
During the recent financial crisis, focusing on one number (shareholder value) blinded top executives to their increased exposure to toxic assets. It encouraged risk-taking that enhanced short-term value, while over-leveraging firms. The way in which success was audited played a major role in creating the problem. By auditing an executive’s success using one measure that executive will strive for that measure. Meanwhile, if the institutions responsible for checking those executives are equally focused on that measure, then any substantial oversight cannot be expected.
Implementing protections at the foundation level is the only solution when faced with this collective irrationality (Cassidy “Capitalism and Financial Crashes”). Shareholder value can no longer be the only number that matters. Auditing must take into account that no matter what it measures, actors will focus on those measures. Therefore, new, broader measures with multiple levels of implications for the executive and the organization, as well as a focus on the long-term success of an organization, including the sustained protection of shareholders, competitiveness, and the organization’s impact on society, must be used. Only by recognizing that measurement has limitations, can a society see what those limitations may be, and protect against them.
Works Cited
Cassidy, John. “Capitalism and Financial Crashes.” The New Yorker 5 Oct. 2009. < http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/05/091005fa_faact_cassidy>.
Cassidy, John. “The Greed Cycle.” The New Yorker 23 Sept. 2002: 64. < http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/09/23/020923fa_fact_cassidy>.
McIntyre, Michael E. “Audit, Education, and Goodhart’s Law Or, Taking Rigidity Seriously.” 14 May 2002. <http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/mcintyre/papers/LHCE/dilnot-analysis.html>.
Raymond, June. “Avalanche of Indicators in Global Governance.” Anthropology News 51.7 (2010): 25-26. Web. Oct. 2011.
Wolf, Gary. “The Data-Driven Life.” The New York Times 2 May 2010: MM38. 28 Apr. 2010. < http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?pagewanted=all>.
How excited am I? THIS EXCITED! Bruce Springsteen’s new single - We Take Care of Our Own
We're Just Temporary Ma'am by White Whale
He answered, “Nothing here is permanent We’re just temporary ma’am.”
Kelly Sildaru is one of the smoothest skiers I’ve ever seen…and she’s not even 10.
Source: vimeo.com
