Working in a professional environment that blends equal parts creative and business, conflicts are inevitable. And those conflicts don’t always have to be between partners and associates. No! In fact, often enough it is the conflicts we have with ourselves that cause the greatest agitation in creative enterprises.
In an agency such as the one I am building, every single day there are decisions to be made that effect the future of this firm. Right now we are in client acquisition mode because as we’ve grown our revenue requirements have increased, naturally. So in a week such as this, when more than 3 proposals are either due or their need has arisen, we are all under the gun.
Sometimes, it occurs to one of us to fix what isn’t broken. We’ve worked tirelessly to design and develop a template for our proposals that, so we thought, covered all our bases, allowing us to custom-tailor a strategy without literally rewriting our proposals from scratch every single time. When the time is right, I will share that proposal with the readers of the blog.
The proposals we know use to pitch clients and explain our clients’ objectives, the project deliverables, our budgets and timelines are an effective blend of creative coordination and business acumen. It should come as no surprise that I most enjoy the creative aspect of each pitch and prefer to leave the deliverables and logistics to my partner. That being said, we are both more than capable of handling each aspect on our own should that be the case.
But in the meantime we have the opportunity to work together on every single pitch and ensure that we are activating and selecting the best ideas no matter who or how they emerge.
What is stunning to me is that even when a process is not broken, it is the tendency of young, ambitious and stupidly arrogant people to continue tinkering. The other way of saying this is that sometimes you feel that no matter how hard you worked on a given project, you can always do better. Irrespective of the time you’ve put in, or the satisfaction with which you’ve previously felt about something, you may wake up tomorrow and just say to yourself, “you know what? It’s not done, and I am going to take another crack at it as soon as possible.”
It may not be broken, it may be working quite well indeed, but that does not mean it shouldn’t be fixed. Because “fixed” is not what you are doing. And that is why this business term, this cliche I used as the title of this post is so subtly dangerous.
To me this phrase totally and perfectly encapsulates the failure and fatness of the 20th century. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Really? Don’t improve, don’t strive for perfection (even with the knowledge that you won’t get there?)
I reject this cliche wholeheartedly. And even though I found myself arguing in favor of keeping our templates exactly as we had them, so that we could move on and handle other tasks, at the end of the day, I was wrong. Another evolution was required. Another evolution was processed. And today, not only are we not broken, we are functioning at an even high level.
Image courtesy of roch lasalle on Flickr
