I stumbled across this speech from Kevin Roberts in a speech to the Tuck MBA Program at Dartmouth. Check out this paraphrased speech…“Emotion in Motion’ from November 2, 2004. I’m actually read over this again. He makes some great points.
Especially with his ‘Calls to Action’, that I have listed below. If there is a theme that I have to work on right now, it’s how to deal with loss and failure. It’s all about how you bounce back the following season…Right kid?
1. Pursue Failure – Avoid moderation. Be hot, or cold, but not lukewarm. I’ve always ignored warnings against enthusiasm. Fear and caution strangle ideas. As Ice Hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky once said “you miss 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take”!! So be in over your head. Don’t be afraid to lose because then – and only then – will you know what you’re made of. You discover your limits when you crash up against them. When you experience failure you bounce back harder and smarter. Just remember, a genius is a person who makes the same mistake. Once!
2. Fall in love with ideas – Knowledge is a table stake. Ideas make stuff happen. Act like a technician or expert and that is how you will be treated. Act like an ideas person and the world will open up before you. I work with ideas and ideas people all the time. Saatchi & Saatchi is global but we don’t play the usual global game. Marathon manuals and meetings. Endless consultation. Bloody nightmares. Instead we focus on the ideas that make a difference.
In my business great ideas are killed every day by market researchers. I call them the research vampires. For all their percentage point certainty, they are still baffled by emotion. Trying to work out what consumers want through better data gathering, tighter segmentation, sharper data mining adds up to more analysis, not better understanding. The vampires can track brain waves but not big ideas or deep emotion, because they don’t have them. Usually.
3. Follow your heart – Feel it, don’t just analyze it. Scary? Sure, but that’s the way to make the best decisions. When my head bullied my heart I’ve made mistakes.
In all things you do, stay open to love. Once you accept the power of Love a whole heap of stuff drops neatly into place – or right out of the picture altogether.
#3 is a clean-up hitter, and I’ll go with #1 as a theme to recognize throughout the rest of ’04.
Callin’ Out to the edge of your Town,
IronDog