There aren’t enough people here who shouldn’t be.

I received a message on LinkedIn last week from someone I had the fortune of managing in my previous role. The inimitable Timanni Walker was letting me know that she’d decided to leave, she wasn't just moving on from the agency we worked at together, she was abandoning advertising full stop.

I am of course very happy for Timanni, but at the same time I am absolutely gutted for the rest of us.

Timanni is leaving adland quite literally in pursuit of a bigger dream. That’s admirable, it’s very cool, and it was always kind of inevitable because Timanni shouldn’t be working in advertising. She should be an entrepreneur, doing speaking gigs on stage, regularly popping up in your social feeds with her unique perspective on running a modern business.

The problem is that people like Timanni, the people who shouldn’t be working in advertising, those are precisely the type of people we need working in advertising.

I was once one of them myself, I desperately hope I still am one of them. Mother London poached me as a kind of wacky communications and data boffin from a media agency, the media agency had hired me as a “creative wildcard” (their words) because i’d impressed them with the SEM/SEO skills I’d picked up copywriting for an eCommerce site (and because Jon the guy who was going to manage me was also from the midlands), before I did the eCommerce gig I was working as a ‘bin man’ (garbage collector for any Americans reading) in a period of post-graduation cluelessness.

I’d got the idea of working in advertising because I loved Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, and John Berger. I always wanted to be like those guys, they seemed to earn their crust by critically understanding culture, and ads were a big part of that. I suppose really I just wanted to be a kind of flaneur - nonchalantly wandering the streets of 19th century Paris drinking brandy and idly opining on contemporary life.

Clearly other people saw that in me too, when I left Mother (the first time) they printed a photoshop of my face on picture of Camus smoking a cigarette with the title ‘L’Philosphe Du Derbyshire’ for my leaving card, when I left BBH they used midjourney to create an image of a sculpted bust of a classical philosopher vaping to similar effect - the people I work with have got my number, maybe it’s teaching a course on metaphysics at a former polytechnic, it definitely involves nicotine consumption.

I wasn’t a lonely misfit when I joined Mother. It was absolutely rammed to the rafters with people who shouldn’t be working in advertising, not unrelatedly it was also the best advertising agency in the world.?

There were strategists who should have been shamans running hallucinogenic mushroom retreats, others that would have been a better fit at McKinsey, some that should have been editors of a fashion magazine. The same goes for the creative department; you’d look around and ask ‘why isn’t this guy doing stand up comedy?’ ‘Why isn’t she installing conceptual art at the Tate?’ In the case of two handsome Swedish creatives the most common question was ‘Why aren’t these guys models?’ Account management was just as well furnished with atypical folks too, account directors I worked with have gone on to become successful artists and illustrators, others are getting into politics.

That was always the real brilliance of Mother, I’ve heard a few people say that the best idea Mother ever had is Mother. An ambition to be the destination for creative people - no matter what their job title or their background or any of banality. It really is amazing how well that works, in an agency where every department is chockablock full of highly engaged highly creative people who leave their titles and egos at the door, the magic flows.

Ironically, keeping people too talented and creative to be in advertising engaged with making advertising should be dead easy - because making ads is fun and there's good money in it. All you need to do is sit a suit, a planner, and a handful of creatives down on some sofas and leave them there for a couple of days and guess what? They’ll have produced some brilliant thinking and probably had a good laugh doing it. No matter what their true calling is, advertising can be an pleasant and well remunerated diversion along the way, and you get to be surrounded by other cool and interesting people solving interesting problems.

The hitch?

Making brilliant advertising is simple, but making advertising simple is the hardest thing there is. I’m borrowing from one of my ‘strategy heroes’ Johan Cruyff here a bit, but I really do think it captures the central challenge agencies need to conquer. It’s not the ‘making the advertising’ bit that is a deterrent to brilliant minds, it's all the processes and structures that seem to end up getting in the way of that.

Advertising is unique as an industry because it exists as an antidote to the managerialism of it’s clients. Managerialist practices like organizational layers, departmental silos, authoritative hierarchies, rigid processes, all of that is really great at creating incremental efficiency gains in a widget producing organization. If you run a cardboard box factory then adopting managerial practices will let you make more cardboard boxes, that are perhaps slightly better boxes, more cheaply - that's a good thing. You don’t want your cardboard box makers creating origami, you want them making boxes.

Most client businesses are in some sense like that, managerialism makes them more successful at what they exist to do. But managerialism is anathema to the creativity required to make brilliant effective advertising, that's the whole reason clients need agencies. The most talented and creative people hate bureaucracy, they hate hierarchy, they hate predictability, and they really don’t like being told how to do things.

Agencies have to build an environment with enough systematic structure to operationally service clients without becoming overtly managerialized to the point they scare away the exact people who can produce the creative product they sell to clients. At Mother the process was ‘put the problem in the middle then bring the right people around it’, recently I read a piece on how Mischief’s briefs contain just two things ‘What do we need to say’ and ‘how do we need to say it’, the thing that drew me into Quality Meats (other than working with the delightful Paola Ortega again) was the mission to ‘get away from the bad stuff that gets in the way of the good stuff’. Obviously theres more complexity in the real world, but as a rule it seems like the simpler the process the better the output.?

Unfortunately, as an agency grows, it gets bigger clients, it gets more headcount, maybe it gets acquired by a holding company, it faces greater commercial pressures and then maybe there's a downturn in the marketing sector now and again. The instinctive response under those conditions is to increase the amount of managerialism within the agency, to make things more structured, streamlined, and efficient. That managerialism then renders it less capable of generating the fundamental things it exists to provide; creative thinking, innovative ideas, access to brilliant talent, diverse perspectives, honesty and integrity.

So like the shifting of tectonic plates, great agencies grow and grow and then succumb to a creative atrophy until they are slowly acquired and merged and subsumed into the mantle of managerialized mediocrity… At which point newly minted independent shops pop up to attract the best talent and the best clients and make the best work. The very best agencies, your Mothers, and your Wiedens, manage to escape this cycle.

Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball is a great book that everyone in an ad agency should probably read, it’s central premise is that to be a creative person in the corporate world you need to find what Gordon describes as ‘Orbit’; the altitude that lets you stay moving around the tangled bureaucratic mess of a corporation, without ever drifting so far that you escape its gravity and fly off into the endless untethered creative expanse of space. I think the lesson is applicable to agencies too. The best agencies manage to find an orbit around their clients, systematic enough to attract and predictably service them, innovative enough to attract the talent that’s too good to be working in a highly systematic and predictable environment.

If you have any direct reports in an advertising agency that makes your job a strangely ironic one, your role is to manage people by protecting them from managerialism. When Timanni reported into me, that's how I always tried to approach her. I felt like having an entrepreneur on the strategy team, someone who was fundamentally different to your common or garden brand planner was something really valuable and cool even when it rubbed up against having the most predictable and managerialized ideal.

The kind of questions I would ask myself were things like ‘How do we make this job feel like an apprenticeship in business?’ ‘How do we make sure we’re giving her useful tools to use, not frustrating processes to follow?’ ‘Can we work out a way to give her enough time to manage their growing business and be a part of the team?’ ‘Hell why don’t we invest in her business and help it grow?’ I wanted to keep Timanni in orbit.

I’m gutted that Timanni is leaving advertising because the more the people who shouldn’t be working in advertising leave the industry the more we as agencies get pulled closer and closer into those giant hairballs. I'd hope there would be agencies out there clamoring to offer her flexible contracts and investment in her business and whatever it takes to keep a misfit in their orbit.

Right now the industry is a bit of a gloomy place, clients want more for less, and the temptation for a knee jerk shift towards greater managerialism appeals to our scarcity biases even if all good reason and all the evidence suggests that it does far more harm to an agency than good. We have to resist those instincts otherwise we’ll end up losing more people like Timanni, and then who will we have left to come up with all the brilliant ideas??