Professionalism is killing creativity

I always try and get myself along to as many APG events as I can, but the talk from Jon Steel was one I wasn’t going to miss. Jon’s first book, Truth, Lies and Advertising, is probably in every planner’s bookcase. It’s the first book I ever read on the subject and I would recommend it to anyone interested in communications.

However, Jon’s got a new book out, The Perfect Pitch. There’s a clue for the theme of his presentation in the title. I had already read the book before the talk, so I knew what to expect, but there’s nothing better than hearing it from the horses mouth so to speak.

Even if you aren’t directly involved in pitches, it’s still a must read. Probably the most important point I took away was the concept of ‘professionalism’. Ultimately the agency environment has become too professional. It’s killing creativity and the development of ideas. We’ve all become too busy, too corporate, too logical and too analytical.

I was lucky enough to be involved in getting our agency’s planning team off the ground and I can really relate too this. Until you actually spend some time really looking at an agency’s processes you don’t realise how unproductive they can be. It’s easy for people to spend too much time organising and not enough time solving problems through simple observations, conversations and even intuition. Jon’s talk was full of common sense, but as they say, common sense isn’t that common.