I want to liberate my agency

A mission statement, by definition, is a short formal statement description the purpose or direction of an organization. Until I read Winning by Jack Welch, I had not seen a mission statement that made sense to me.

During his time at GE, his mission was to have each of GE’s businesses be #1 or #2 in every market that they competed in. That is a mission I can get behind as it has direct implications in every day business. Have an under-performing business? Can it. Why? Because it doesn’t live up to the mission of the company. Have an under-performing business with potential? Pour your heart, soul and cash into it to make it the best in the world. Why? Because that’s how you live up to the mission statement of the company.

The goal of Leo Burnett Toronto is to be the most talked about agency in town, bar none. It said it right on our creative brief. We could live it and fight for it everyday we came to work. And it’s an easy thing to measure for my fellow foot soldiers as all you have to do is read the industry rags.

This year Leo cleaned up in Strategy mag (as well as a few others) which further proves that we’re living up to our mission. But early in 2009, word began to spread internally that Leo wanted to not only be the most talked about agency in town but also one of it’s most competitive. While the goal of being competitive is more of a value than a mission statement, some of what Welch applied to GE can be applied to Leo.

If you’ve worked in our industry for any length of time, you’ve probably heard war stories about MacCann being an incredibly tough place to work. Especially in New York where the toughest of the tough go to fight in the trenches, spending half their time shooting down their own line instead of at the enemy. While you might call them competitive, I’m not sure Uncle Leo would want to follow the same path.

Since the goal of being competitive has been all but forgotten, I’ve taken it upon myself to draft a few goals for the agency that I’d enact if I was CEO.

1. Every person from Assistant Account Exec to ECD is an ambassador for Leo. They should always be on the lookout for new business large and small. There is no reason why, if their brother-in-law is an electrician, that he should advertise with anyone else but us.

2. We need to ramp up the internal training of our employees. Having senior people give talks to the rest of the agency on their topic of choice isn’t enough. Once a month, we should learn something that can be practically applied to our accounts.

3. We need to send people from all levels out to colleges and universities spreading the gospel of advertising and of Leo. I once gave a talk at Durham College and got 20 resumes in return. Give an inspiring talk and you’ll win the hearts of the brightest young minds out there.

4. Encourage all levels of the agency to network with other agencies in town. We need a finger in every pie in order to know what’s going on. Someone pitching a new account? We should have 5 people that know the guy running that pitch.

5. We hire a lot of smart people at Leo. Having a tough time cracking a brief? Get the whole agency in a room and get fresh eyes on it. Have a new pitch we have to win? Do the same. New business doesn’t have to just fall on the shoulders of the executive club. Just think of how persuasive our pitches could be. And how tight knit the agency would become.

6. Do reviews twice a year. If you can’t get better in 6 months, we need to know so we can bring in someone new.

It’s a short list but that could be enough to get people up and moving. Being competitive means we have to shake things up. To compete in this market, as overexposed as it is in T-dot, we need to be everywhere and in front of as many people as possible. One of those people will be a CEO one day. And one of them will call us up.