UNMANAGED: The winning agencies that inspired it

“In the year that followed the Project on Fire (at Blitz Agency), I started our consultancy, AgencyAgile, which today has worked with well over two hundred client organizations, helping shape and refine their managerial mindset using the principles now in this book. That’s saying it backward though. This book is the product of what we learned. Our two-hundred-plus clients have been a learning laboratory. Theory is great, and even useful, but practice is how we can verify our actions as managers.”

• From my book, Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations, launching November 1st, 2023, on Amazon.

My father, a lifelong college professor and researcher, told me that being a teacher is a great way to learn. Better than anything I could teach is what our many clients have taught us through the years, and the gift I can provide is to roll up these learnings into insights, frameworks, and actionable techniques that can enable you and your organization to better manage. That's the book.

Everyone likes the idea of better managing and being better managers, yet it is really hard to do, the biggest challenge is one of mindset shift that must happen at the personal, process and organizational level. When mastered, then the magic is profound. Credit for mastery goes not to the inventor of the game (who remembers the person who invented chess?), but to the great practitioners, the ones who made it work, who put in the work and had the discipline required to create truly amazing results. So, here, I honor them. Thank you.

The Most Profound Shift Award

The Most Profound Shift Award goes to TSC | Previously The Starr Conspiracy (TSC), including several of its leaders, starting with the visionary CEO Bret Starr , who just released his own book a few weeks ago. Bret called us in 2014 when his agency was on the brink, and as you might guess, very over-managed, and even over-leadered.

The profound shift was that Bret flattened his organization, and in brave move, got rid of 1-2 layers of hierarchy. I'm always surprised how rare this move is amongst our clients. It worked. Productivity literally doubled. We, of course, enshrined them in an AgencyAgile case study very early on. So, it would be no surprise that The Starr Conspiracy gets some attention in my book. There, I describe another super-power of theirs, an ability to reclaim the AgencyAgile magic when it gets again-buried by the business world's relentless push of people and systems that want to over-manage. Shout-outs to key peeps there include: Jonathan Goodman . Ashley Bernard , Dan McCarron , Nancy (Pummill) Crabb , Bailey Blanchone , and Erin Swan, CDE?

Lastly, my book would not exist without Bret's nudge to me during one very long Fort Worth lunch, "Dude, you gotta write a book about this." Thank you, Bret. He and I started a book about their journey (The Agency Cure) several years ago, but we all got too busy doing good work to finish it. Maybe we'll publish that first section of the original draft, eh, Bret Starr ?

You can read a preview of Section 2, "Understanding and Alignment", where we explore the key shifts that leaders and managers must make to unlock the innate talents within their workers and teams, on the Unmanagedbook.com website, here.

The Star Trek Award

The Star Trek Award for the most thorough extrapolation of our methods goes to Starmark , a Ft. Lauderdale full-service agency led by the amazing Jacqui Hartnett . We trained them well-prior to COVID, but when COVID struck, they took their mastery of our concepts and methods and doubled-down, proving that what works well for in-person, can work even better without. They have taken the enablement of teams through the shift in control (as you can read about in the Section 2 sample above) with "Orbits" a top-down work policy model that shows Jacqui's leadership talent probably matches that of another exec that I idolize, Ricardo Semler. You can read more about them in their AgencyAgile case study. none of it would not happen without the deep alignment she has forged with her leadership group, including Brett Circe (who is the man behind the curtain and more), Katy Gewartowski , Dale Baron , and Jacob Edenfield . Oh, in case you're still a bit puzzled about the Star Trek reference, it is the A Piece of the Action episode.

The Genius Pivot Award

The Genius Pivot Award goes to EY Future Friendly , fka Mentally Friendly, of Redfern, NSW (Sydney), and their amazing founders and leaders, Jon Christensen and Nick Gower . As you might guess, they recently sold to 安永 -- congrats guys. They were early adopters of our methods, and Nick recently noted in their announcement post that AgencyAgile's guidance "...was a turning point for us." The simple story is that they were pioneers in the digital agency space in Australia, even starting Tractor Design School to "...produce the most sought after industry ready graduates." Yet, despite their great success (they pretty much grew on ONLY inbound leads and referrals) after our AgencyAgile trainings, Nick and Jon decided to walk away from the digital agency space and pivot to a squad-based digital product and service design business, which would rely upon autonomous 5-person squads. They were ridiculously successful, of course. God, I love these guys. They have an amazing team of course, including Emilie Browne , Chris Bear and Johnny Rogers .

The Can't We All Get Along Award

The Can't We All Get Along Award goes to LT (LT) and its awesome executive team led by Beau Lane , Chris Johnson , Andy Parnell , and (back then) our own David Foster . At 100-plus people in size in 2015, LT had recently been formed through a merger of E.B. Lane, a "traditional" marketing agency and Terralever, a "digital" marketing agency. The idea, as with so many mergers was "synergy" but the reality was that it had been a challenge to bring the agencies together. Beau and Chris brought AgencyAgile in to create two 40+ person pods that were a mix of people and accounts from both agencies. We implemented our Workstream training model, and they created the results. You can read about the 20% increased in billings capture and the 50+ growth in Client NPS in their case study (here). It was work, but they are more integrated as an agency than many that were never divided, and they continue doing great work to this day. So many other people were so key to their success, including Kim Johnson , Raj Dubey , Eric Doolan , and Gary Serviss (welcome back, Gary!)

The Cinderella Award

The last award, at least for the moment, is the Cinderella Award, and goes to an agency, (fka) HelloWorld, now Merkle 's Promotion & Loyalty Solutions group. As you can read in their case study, the 200+ HelloWorld team was really two different businesses, one side of the house maintained the "loyalty engine" and was very happily running SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprises) and the other part, the agency, well, they tried but it didn't work. Not so happy, of course. And big projects were killing them.

In case you haven't heard me say it like five million times, Agile wasn't built for agencies (especially SAFe), so we built something better. HelloWorld hired us, killed it, scaled it, grew large, and were bought. Cinderella ending.

We were brought in by Deana Derocha (now a Global COO! at Merkle) Chris Locke the then COO, and Chris Mathews , and were backed by their industry veteran CEO, Peter DeNunzio , who was on a mission to, well, grow and sell them. He noted that we helped them, "...achieve the promise of Agile."

"This book is a must-read if you want to learn how to deliver projects brilliantly."

Use the form above to stay tuned as our early November launch draws closer!