I have a low tolerance for people who complain about things but never do anything to change them. This led me to conclude that the single largest pool of untapped natural resources in this world is human good intentions that are never translated into actions.
When I give talks like the one I'm going to give at the Changing Advertising Summit, one of the points I often make to the audience is that I'm not one of those speakers who stands in front of the audience and pontificates - everything I talk about I'm actually doing myself. I'm living it.
The single biggest lesson I learned was when a hire isn't working out fire them fast. My biggest mistakes, and where I've seen the worst results, were when I gave someone too many chances, or let a situation drift on for too long because I couldn't bring myself to terminate it.
Client companies and advertising agencies are old-world-order places. The systems and processes and structures come from a time when you shot the TV commercial, then you did the print ads, then you did everything else - including the website. Everything has changed, but the systems haven't.
If I ran the world, I would find a way to bring the wealth of human good intentions and corporate good intentions together - to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that produces shared hard, tangible results.
When we launched If WeRanTheWorld, I said to my team, I want us to innovate in every aspect of how we design and operate this as a business venture, as much as the web platform itself - because I want us to design our own startup around the working lives that we would all like to live. Women and men alike.
Despite their good intentions, today's businesses are missing an opportunity to integrate social responsibility and day-to-day business objectives - to do good and make money simultaneously.
