I’ve been thinking about my work plan for 2015–things I want to change, things I like, and so on. Part of that process is figuring out what I’m doing wrong and what’s out of my hands. With consulting, what’s out of your hands can be anything from nearly all of it to almost none of it, depending on the client and the extent to which they give you the necessary authority to manage the project. In the last few years, I had one (very big, epically bureaucratic) non-media corporate client that seemed to actually relish doing the opposite of what I told them they should be doing, and 90% of my job was triage after they went off and did exactly what I told them not to do. But that’s actually pretty rare.
The bigger problem with larger clients is that when you have forty stakeholders at every major decision point (and you’re not one of them, by the way), you’re going to end up with a publication that looks like it was produced by forty people who couldn’t decide on a cohesive strategy. And in many cases, that problem is compounded by the fact that none of those forty people have any experience producing a media product. There’s a lot of risk-aversity; they don’t necessarily understand the media environment; and the decision making process is driven as much by internal politics as it is rational considerations about resource allocation and expected returns. Those are structural problems and if you’re working in one of those companies, I think the best thing you can do is find a group or a project area where you have some autonomy–a skunk works situation where you can carve out the space to take calculated risks and do it quickly.
It’s actually more frustrating to me when smaller, more agile companies make mistakes because I think they’re better set up to learn and adapt. So here’s some advice for them:five launch mistakes to avoid. I mention these five specifically because they happen so frequently.
