We hear the general complaint rather often recently: apparently, there seems to be a lack of strategic competence with certain agencies in China. Although, what exactly it is that’s missing depends.
With some, what seems to be missing is not so much “boardroom strategy thinking”, but creative brand strategy: the insight and proposition that distinguishes otherwise similar business and marketing strategies as well as GTM tactics from each other to make a brand stand out in the minds of consumers.
With others, the missing piece seems to be exactly that “boardroom strategy thinking”: the concepts that connect different elements like initiatives, plans, tactics, and executions with the actual business objectives of a client to result in something that deserves the name “strategy”.
With a lot of Chinese agencies, it seems to be a little bit of both: the ability to build brands beyond single executions as well as connecting executions with business objectives.
The reason for those discrepancies is mainly cultural: agencies that built their success on analysis and logic have a hard time to find interpretations of their proven successful solutions that differentiate enough to build distinct brands; agencies that built their success on the optimization of details have a hard time to look up from their spread sheets and see the “bigger picture” to facilitate long-term success; agencies that built their success on seamless execution have a hard time to understand the value of strategic friction at all.
Most of those agencies are aware of the issue, some of them try to address it by either buying or building the capabilities they feel missing. But since the issue is rooted in agency culture, not many are successfully doing it so far.
The solution most likely does not lie in either buying or building capabilities, but a more holistic approach to learning which helps you to get new kinds of jobs done, train your people on the job and change your agency culture.
To be successful in the short run as well as to signal clients and prospects that you are changing, you’ll of course need to buy (read: hire temporarily or permanently) resource that has the capabilities your agency is missing. However, if those guns for hire just get the job done for you, you are missing the chance to train your people and improve your agency culture. To achieve long-term success, each project that demands new capabilities has to become a training ground for your people too: the people you hire to get a certain job done have to be players as well as coaches here.
But if you think this is all that’s needed, think again.
Even though we people learn by observation as well as by doing, some formal training will be needed to accelerate the process: you need to give your people the tools and practice how to use them if you want them to succeed. Your guns for hire must step back and refrain from bringing themselves on, their objective now needs to be making themselves redundant on the playing field.
And this is it then, isn’t it? No, it is not!
Even though people know change is inevitable, you don’t change the way how people do things easily, you don’t change people’s mindsets easily, you don’t change people easily. Especially not if they are still successful with how they are doing.
So, if you don’t want to wait until there is no success, you have to create an appetite for change amongst your people. You have to develop a clear idea of why it is worth changing, share it with your people and take your people along on the journey. Your guns for hire here need the be your scouts guiding the way into bright future you have been imagining for your agency.
Back then in Germany, when we turned DDB in Dusseldorf from a rather low-key agency to one of the most creative and innovative agencies of the country, we did all three things in parallel as well as consecutively:
- We let coaches help us to develop a clear vision of our agency’s future – they helped us even more with creating commitment amongst our people for this vision and the inevitable change that comes with pursuing it.
- We hired people for what we were not capable of, making sure that those people trained our people while doing the job – some of those people happily became part of our people over time.
- We launched a series of trainings to improve those capabilities – people felt invested in what reinforced their commitment.
What are your experiences with readying your people for a necessary change?
How do you plan to add the strategic competencies your agency is still missing?
Let’s talk.
Just Thinking Aloud 