“Progress not perfection.”
I can remember the first time I heard these words. I had just left a corporate marketing job I had been in for 16+ years and joined a start-up.
Quite frankly, I couldn’t believe my ears.
At my corporate job, I had been conditioned to comb over my work repeatedly, pass it through multiple reviewers – including the legal team – and release a campaign hoping that no one internally would feel slighted or out of the loop.
It wasn’t about the audience.
It was about internal processes and egos. It was about control.
This meant that projects moved at a snail’s pace, and the creativity was beaten out of them by the time they launched. Everything was just vanilla.
And it was exhausting.
I quickly learned that life at a start-up was much different. We had limited time and resources, so we just needed to get campaigns out there and see how they did. Then we would iterate, refine and re-release.
We could be fun.
We could be edgy.
We could push the boundaries a bit.
Initially I would ask, “Is there an approval process for this.” (It was akin to the former prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption who kept asking his boss if he could go the bathroom.)
Finally, I stopped asking. The answer was always “no,” or “just do it and then make one.”
Ahhh…I was a marketer who had been liberated.
What happened next was truly amazing. I found myself sharing new ideas without fear of being shut down. I was unafraid of being ‘foolish’ or ‘wrong’ because there was no such thing at a start-up. There were only ideas, good ideas, and better ideas.
We didn’t kill an idea because a random VP didn’t didn’t like it. We tried ideas and let our prospects decide.
We were collaborative because it was cheap and effective. Lines of communication were always open.
Were there occasional mistakes? Yes. But we admitted them with a combination of humor and self-deprecation.
And you know what? Our prospects ‘forgave’ us and we launched the next thing.
I know people have different priorities in their work and that corporate settings bring with them a lot of stability. If you choose that route, I won’t judge.
But I do hope that all marketers have the opportunity to experience an environment where done is better than perfect, where you can MVP an idea and flex your creative muscle away from the confines of a corporate hierarchy.
Or better yet, perhaps corporate marketing teams can carve out a safe space for ideas and innovation.
It’s the space that marketing needs to thrive.
It’s the space that all marketers deserve.
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