Told you so.
April 23, 2019
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director / LMMiami.com
- You’ve played the part.
- We’ve all played it.
- I hate to admit but I’ve done it myself more than once.
- Unconsciously.
- One tends to realize it after the fact.
- The naysayer.
- The devil’s advocate always looking for the cat’s fifth leg, to paraphrase a popular saying in Spanish.
- If you look around the room and you can’t spot him or her, you might be it.
- Large organizations are littered with these individuals.
- Smaller orgs are not foreign to the type.
- They populate legal departments, HR, procurement.
- In the ad world they tend to gravitate to the account services dept (don’t shoot, I’m just the messenger).
- The so-called “brand Nazis” in charge of overseeing the corporate id guidelines are notorious naysayers.
- They’ve convinced themselves that they are protecting us from ourselves.
- They are the opposite of the Silicon Valley truism -now slightly tabooed- “move fast & break things”.
- They would’ve never allowed Google to change its logo every single friggin’ day with the aptly named Google doodle.
- Why do we do it?
- I mean, why do we play the devil’s advocate?
- Is it the schadenfreude of uttering the phrase “I told you so”?
- Sometimes it is just jealousy.
- A tantrum.
- In some cases, the naysayer believes he/she is writing themselves an insurance policy to cover his/her rear end in case things don’t go as planned.
- A prenup of sorts.
- Sometimes it is just a way to try and stand out, to command the room.
- More often than not it is an inability to understand leadership.
- Great leaders -Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, Lee Clow- are not obsessive micromanagers.
- They inspire the troops and get out of the way.
- Not for lack of ego or desire for prominence, mind you.
- It is pragmatism.
- Great leaders are quickest to cut the ribbon, smile for the cameras and lead the victory lap.
- Great leaders are masters of the art of stealing the limelight from other people’s accomplishments.
- I’ve learned from experience that the best creative directors are those who get out of the way and then just “take the credit”, so to speak.
- Sure, robbing other people of their medals creates lots of chagrin in the workplace too but we’ll leave it for a future column.
- Anyhoo.
- Next time you walk into a meeting, try and repeat the old Hollywood mantra -George Clooney’s favorite line, BTW-: “nobody knows anything”*.
- The bitter awareness that a studio can line up the best screenwriter, the best director and the best cast and the movie can still be a flop.
- Hopefully, this will help you avoid being the naysayer.
*The line was allegedly coined by legendary Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman.