The Kitchen Table

Goodby, Berlin,  & Silverstein in Graphis,  just after winning Agency of the Year in Ad  Age, 1989.  As you can see, little has changed.

This is part of a talk I gave to the company at a retreat in Tiburon in 1998. It’s a liberating read, I think, and I don’t think any of it has changed today.

We should talk like this more often now, all of us.

Here’s the text:

The really important part about the history of the agency, I think, is that it was built on the act of quitting, taking a big chance, and being free. The details are not important. It’s the feeling I want you to know about.

I guess this happens to everybody in a big way a few times in life, but it was a feeling of running off a cliff with your legs still moving, like Wile E. Coyote. You didn’t know what was going to happen. The next day was an absolute blank slate.

This feeling was coupled with a whole bunch of realities that kept tugging: it was 1983. Rich and I were quite happy working for Hal Riney at Ogilvy & Mather. We were his favorite creative team and may well have gone on to run the place. I had bought a house in Oakland about two years before this, so I had a mortgage. I just had my first child six months earlier. But somehow, the god of new businesses just lifted all that from my mind. I didn’t even think about it.

This was a great gift.

I can remember this feeling quite distinctly because it struck me while I was taking a pee in the driveway outside Andy Berlin’s house on a night about two weeks before we actually quit. We had been talking all night about this, and it finally sank in that we were going to do it. I drove to a telephone booth and woke up my wife Jan and said, “We’re all going to quit our jobs and start a company.” She said, “Oh. Great.”

But it was that feeling I want you to focus on as the core of the history lesson here. It was a great feeling, the feeling of making it up as you go along.

I was thinking this morning that if I could just get you all to have that feeling every day, the history lesson would have worked. It’s easy not to have it these days. After all, you come here, and the place is already a certain way. We own a whole bunch of furniture. We have policies and leases and rules about dogs. It’s here.

It’s got all the trappings of another jail to escape from.

I don’t want it to be that.

Happily, something occurred to me just as I was obsessing about this. And that is:

Everyone quits to come here. Everyone comes here with that feeling intact. This makes our newest people, in a way, the most connected to the true spirit of the company. They are the ones starting new. The ones with the clean windshields.

The failure of the Soviet Union was a failure to embrace this feeling. Lenin talked about how his revolution would be overtaken by subsequent counterrevolutions, but he could never handle the idea of that happening.

I would like to invite that idea here today. To all the new people, see this place with new eyes. Tell us what you think. Start here today. Keep us honest.

To everyone else, let’s all try to think of the things that will bring us this feeling. Because, believe me, it should be there. We are still making it up as we go along—I can assure you. And despite the cool lobby and the computers and the phones, we’re only as good as what we did last month. A year from now, who knows?

I want to fly every day like Wile E. Coyote. Help me remember to do that.

That’s the history lesson. That’s all I think you really need to know. The rest is drinking stories.

The creative philosophy.

What people think they want to know is:

I think the creative philosophy is related to the Wile E. Coyote thing. Make a place that will support people running off cliffs. A place that will catch them and try to use the news they bring back.

What you should really know is:

I read a letter in Adweek from some guy in New York. You see this letter all the time. It was in again this week. I’ll read you some of it:

“Advertising’s primary job is to make the cash register ring. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter how many plaques or statuettes it wins, the ad is no damn good. We often forget that awards don’t make payroll or pay the rent. It’s quite simple: make the client’s cash register ring, and the client will, in turn, make the agency’s cash register ring.”

I particularly like the venom in the selection of the word “statuettes.”

I hate this letter. I hate all the venal, profit-taking stuff it represents, but I particularly hate its distrust of everything I’m in this business on account of. I would hate for my children to read this letter and think this was the business their father was in.

It’s not popular to say this, sometimes not even around here, but I think advertising can be art. I think it has to work only insofar that clients will fund us when we go out to make more of it. But first and foremost it is art.

I make art. I’ve made a lot of it. And I know that making advertising well is exactly the same feeling. The feeling of doing something totally new, totally ingenious, that people will see right away has never been done before.

In fact, the word “art” comes from the same roots as “artifice” and “artful” and “artisan.” It presumes that there’s a goal to the exercise. It’s not just screwing around. It’s being carried out for a particular effect. To get a rise out of people. To get them to think.

I wouldn’t say this to all our clients—I’d say it to some—but I wouldn’t be here if this weren’t art. When I get the feeling that it isn’t, and I do now and then, I want to go home and hide.

Please know and remember that no matter how established it all looks, this is a place capable of going out of business in the name of art. Don’t kid yourself that it’s not.

Jerry Barnhart lives in fear of this every day.

1986: THE 11 MOST IMPORTANT THINGS.

Yes, it’s another piece from long ago. But come on, you want to know this stuff.

This is an excerpt from the first employee handbook, “How To Work Here.”  I don’t see much that has changed. Just wanted you to know:

THE 11 MOST IMPORTANT THINGS ABOUT

GOODBY, BERLIN & SILVERSTEIN

1. The Work

We start and end with the work. The work is the product of all our labors. It is what sets us apart from other agencies; from people who talk about the values like ours but who don’t really mean it. The work is our truth. It is, more than anything else, who we are.

2. Results

The work without results is vanity. We do the work to get results. Clients trust us because of results. Doing work that gets results is hard. Doing great work is harder. Doing great work that gets results is hardest of all. But it’s what we’re all about.

3. Innovation

Much as we might like to believe otherwise, the world doesn’t need another advertising agency, let alone one in San Francisco. Even if we do great work that gets results, we will be bypassed by the marketplace unless we offer something that cannot be had elsewhere. If we can become known as the most innovative and imitated agency in America, we will prosper.

4. Desire To Be the Best

If we don’t want it, we won’t get it. It’s as simple as that.

5. Clear, Hard Thinking

People hire us because we’re smart. People will hire us and take our advice on advertising because we’re more often right, not because we think we’re right. We cannot afford to delude ourselves into believing we’re better than we are or right when we haven’t thought things through.

6. Respect

We respect our clients. We recognize that they are 51% partners in their relationships with us. We respect them for the risks they take by taking our advice. We respect our clients’ consumers. We put their heads on to do our work. And we respect one another, even when we’re advocates of differing points of view. Allowing for the dignity of others gives us our own dignity.

7. Hunger

Nothing great was ever accomplished without passion. And we cannot become the best advertising agency in the world without a deep, constant desire for that distinction. Will our lives be better if we’re the best agency in the world? Let’s find out.

8. Confidence

None of us has ever done before what we need to do to achieve our ambitions. This is good! We can avoid other people’s mistakes as we make our own and learn from them. Failures are to be encouraged, as long as they’re not repeated. We can do this. Making it up as you go along is the way that all great, innovative ventures have happened. If we’re monstrously successful, people will look at us and think we really knew what we were doing. They’ll be wrong!

9. Fun

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” We can do all this stuff and have fun doing it. Misery and suffering are not valid indicators of hard work.

10. Grace

If we are gracious in success, we will have many friends in this business. If we are mean, small-minded and arrogant, our success will make us enemies. We will become a target. And then, regardless of our accomplishments, we will be attacked. People will say bad stuff about us, take our ideas and ideals, even tell lies about us. But if we are gracious in spite of all that, we’ll gain the respect of our peers. And our opportunities for betterment and growth will not be curtailed by jealousy.

11. Profit

The result of doing #1 through #10 will be profit. Lots of it. It will be an objective measure of our success, and, to the extent that material things matter, a reward.