On Design Kingdom – Leo Burnett, “When to take my name off the door”

If I had to choose the two greatest speeches I’ve been priviledged to read, it would be a tie between Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech and Leo Burnett’s “When to take my name off the door” speech.

I have talked about Steve Jobs’ speech before, but had always forgotten to talk about Leo Burnett.

This morning I was going through Facebook and saw a friend’s status message that had another great quote by Leo Burnett, and I remembered that I badly needed to share this speech.

However, since it’s more pertinent to creatives/designers/advertising agencies, I posted it over at Design Kingdom. But I would recommend you read it, even if you’re not in the creative/advertising industry. He may be talking to advertising agencies, but the wisdom applies to all facets of life (in context, of course).

Enjoy.

—

Offtopic:

“I have always taken the attitude that no account is a ‘problem account’ but that all accounts have important problems attached to them – that you can waste more time and burn up more nervous energy by fighting a problem than by taking a positive attitude and solving it.” - Leo Burnett

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mad props to the Node Six and Elemental Edge family!

For more reasons than I can possibly list, about 50% of all businesses fail before their first anniversary and about 30% fail before their third anniversary.

On 1st August 2009, Node Six and Elemental Edge made 3 years and 4 years respectively. Both these companies were started with next to zero, in my two spare bedrooms and lots of Abba’s grace, and guess what? We’ve survived becoming one set of statistics, and entering our fourth year as Node Six and fifth year as Elemental Edge, we’re looking to becoming another set of statistics, the ones that begin with “The Best….”

It’s a mean playing field out here, and survival can be for the strongest, or the fastest, or the most cautious or the bravest or whatever, really. There’s no formula, no “magic trick”, no set of carefully balanced equations. There is only a wicked combination of common-sense, poor sleep habits, tonnes of hard work, gut feeling, luck, faith, idiocy,  management lots of money (if you’re lucky) and lots and lots and lots and lots of mistake.

And if you’re like me and dropped out of University in your first semester, with no credentials to your name other than being Abba’s son and wearing geeky glasses, then you need all the prayers you can get.

But…

Through all these years, I have been blessed and honoured to work with some of the most brilliant, hardworking, self-sacrificing people I know.

This post is dedicated to all of you. Yes, the whole lot.

I will make this personal because, a) it’s my blog and b) this is about the blessings I have had working with y’all. [ The rest of you can go home now, read the stuff below, or skip to where it says "Moving On" ]
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you. yes you. you’re a wuss.

Yes. You are.

Allow me to explain.

First, the general description of a wuss is; “a person who is physically weak and ineffectual”. It has been used more recently however, to derogatorily  describe a man who is weak, ineffectual, effeminate and wishy-washy, especially when it comes to the ladies.

Some friends and I have a long running joke about wusses, sometimes even dissing ourselves in the process. Don’t sweat it, it’s a guy thing.

So, couple of days back, at the week-long peak of this joke, we’re in an informal meeting discussing a way forward on some project and because someone was being indecisive about a certain action, we jokingly called him a wuss. We laughed it off and eventually forged a way forward.

That night however, those same words came back to torment me during my quiet moment of self-reflection, and the reality hit me hard;

I realised that I was being a (business) wuss in so many ways.

It was a very painful blow to the gut.
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when to stop reading

I spent the better part of the weekend reading a very fascinating book: The Knack, recommended by Mr. bDawg (thanks dawg). The Knack is authored by two columnists for Inc Magazine, Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham.

I very highly recommend it for anyone who wants to step into the murky and very turbulent waters of entrepreneurship, or even simply being self employed. Even seasoned business owners will benefit from the wisdom in its pages. It’s refreshing because the advice is dished out in a very non-assuming way and does not get too technical (well, some parts are inevitable, like finances, but that’s about it.)

While reading it, however, one thought kept crossing my mind: “I know this stuff. I’ve read it and experienced it before.” Now, before you write me off as another charlatan, let me explain.
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It’s Monday! Thank God!

Can you believe it? It’s already Monday. How cool is that?

A fresh new week.

Seven more days of exploring ways to help our clients harness the internet!

Seven more days of rediscovering passion.

Seven more days of finding ways to change the world.

Seven more days of being me.

And I just read something awesome a few minutes ago:

“Being average is for losers.”

Well, here’s to not being average!

Have yourselves a brilliant week!

—

Rogue FM: The World’s Greatest – R Kelly

—

Offtopic:

The mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools.
- Confucius

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on making mistakes

The year is 2003. Month, June. Day, 6th. Time, 9:01.

I’m sitting at my desk. Staring at the computer.

I log on to True African, and send myself the following SMS. Yes, I sent myself an SMS. No, I wasn’t mad.

No, I wasn’t.

The SMS says:

“Over six months I have called this place home.
And so it ends.
The future beckons.
Shall we proceed?
After all, it is only Destiny“

I still have the SMS to this day.

That day was the last day of formal employment for me. I was stepping out into the brave new world of being self-employed. You know, doing my own thing.

I was 20. I had fulfilled my dream of of owning my own company by 21. And I had beaten it by a solid year.
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Six (6) sites that give you solid business advice

Hello world.

First, I need to announce this again, Global Voices is in need of a Ugandan correspondent to provide regular wrap-ups of what’s happening in the Ugandan Blogsphere. If any of you bloggers are interested, let me know and I will provide the contacts.

Now.

I promised sometime back that I’d start sharing some of the websites in my bookmarks and RSS feeds. My bookmarks folder has literally thousands of sites, sometimes I completely forget about a website right after bookmarking it.

But there are some websites that I visit on a fairly regular basis, almost daily. They’re like tiny cyber treasures. Like the ones I mentioned that offer free ebooks for download.

So, in keeping with my promise, I figured I’d next share the websites I visit almost daily when I need tips and fresh input on business issues.

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Public speaking 101 – The power of experience

Last Friday, 27th Feb, between 2pm and 4pm, I gave a small career guidance talk / presentation to the third year students at Makerere University Faculty of Information and Computing Technology. It was titled “Careers in Today’s Online Landscape”.

Node Six, through The Design Kingdom is working on a series of free lessons design, visual effects and multimedia for the general public. There’ll be announcements on that later. Since University students are the first target for things like this, and they have the facilities, the Node Six team decided this would be a good starting point for the free lectures. We met the ICT Corporate Relations Officer and we got talking, discussing, sharing ideas and next thing I know, I’m infront of a group of about two hundred students talking about careers.

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yes i can! – changing my routines

For the past week, I’ve been feeling massively energetic and I’ve completed many things I’d been procrastinating and lamenting over for ages. It feels absolutely rewarding to know you can reach noon and you’re major projects for the day are done!

It started last week. I decided enough was enough. I was constantly too stressed or too tired or too exhausted to do some of the things that were high on my priority list.

I’d been doing lots of kaizen (small continous improvements) but it was time to tie it all together. So made up a small tentative 7 day experiment to see how effective or how useless it was. I told myself I’d give it one week, see how well it worked and if it needed any adjustments or a major overhaul.

The 7 day chunk test worked great! So I’ve extended it indefinitely. I know it will not be perfect everyday, but I can live with that, because now I feel less tired and I am able to do more.

Here’s my little experiment, in the three major February/March focus areas, Work, Sleep and Tasks.

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the power of a moment

My first introduction to the Dove Awards was in high school, Senior Six. I was fixing someone’s walkman (yes, I had a wicked tech-guy reputation in school), when I asked for some tapes so I could test to see how awesome my work was. He handed me two Dove Awards tapes, and therein began my obsession with contemporary Gospel music.

I discovered the Veggie Tales, Michael W Smith, Twila Paris, Third Day, Fernando Ortega and Chris Rice.

Chris Rice has turned out to be one of my favourite Gospel artists. His lyrics are so simple to the point of being almost childish, but the messages, while simple are amazingly profound. The first song I listened to on those Dove Awards tapes was “The Power of a Moment” and the message stuck with me to this day.

Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics [emphasis mine]:

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