Everybody works different. Here are some of my thoughts on being an ethical human being while participating in capitalism.Don't suckMake tools, not rulesFast needs slow
Don’t Suck
Capitalism is bad. Its fundamental structure is to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer. However, some capitalist enterprises suck more or less than others: there are some areas that manage to right that balance despite everything, and a few that I cannot support in any way.
I am particularly interested in working with clients who:
✅ Have taken action to reverse climate change
✅ Work to create a fairer and more equitable society
✅ Work to protect and improve the mental health of their employees and customers
✅ Are owned by LGBTQ or racialized people
On the other hand, please do not contact me to work on anything directly involved with:
❌ Arms (and ‘defence’)
❌ Fossil fuels
❌ Gambling, NFTs and crypto
Make tools, not rules
The final form of many brand strategies and their derivatives is a set of rules. They might be called “guidelines” or “standards”, but their function is the same: tell people what they must do, and what they cannot do.
You know what people really hate? Being told what to do, especially by someone who doesn’t have the job that they do. And you know what’s the first thing to break when the unexpected happens?
Instead, I try to shape my strategies into useful tools. I think of my audiences (designers, writers, planners) as users, and what I’m making as a product for them to use. I think about what they’re trying to do, and how I can frame my strategy as something that will help them get that done more easily or effectively. That way, I can persuade my audiences and turn them into natural allies.
By persuading them—by explaining my idea and why I think it’s useful, having a conversation, and updating the tool with user feedback—I also make my strategy future-proof. Rules shatter when they come up against edge cases or other unforeseen scenarios, whereas tools make clear whether they were meant for this situation or not, whether a new tool needs to be made.
That both makes my strategy more effective, and frees me up from enforcement to focus on the work that really needs doing.
If you give a carpenter a hammer, you don’t have to forbid her from driving nails with a wrench.
Fast needs slow
Most agencies and consultancies, and many marketing departments, work under a model I call ‘the marathon of sprints’. Projects are treated as high-speed races with tight deadlines, but they’re all treated this way. People have no time to figure out where they’re going, or see where they’ve been so far: they just run whichever way they’re facing, as fast as they can, until they burn out, having never gotten near their goal.
I try to slow things down, or at least make velocity easier.
First: I’ve taken the time to learn what works. I’ve spent my career trying to learn what works and what doesn’t, and invent new ways of thinking and doing when I found that nothing worked. This is where my naming system came from: the industry standard system was broken, so I took the time to see what was going on in the world, where past naming projects broke down, and build a new system that addressed those challenges up front. Some people are allergic to the word ‘process’: those are the people that need me most.
Second: I take the time it takes. My naming services packages have timelines associated with them, because I know that’s the time it takes me to reliably deliver. Some of those times are pretty fast, because of point one: I’ve figured out a fast and effective way to do things. But I won’t try to take less time. I’ve been on so many projects that should have taken six weeks, but were ‘ambitiously’ cut down to two in project planning. And you know what happened? We were forced to cut corners in research and analysis, leading to sloppy under-supported strategy, leading to creative that didn’t deliver, time and again. The project that should have taken six weeks ended up taking twelve, as creatives revved hopelessly through round after painful round, because we didn’t take the time we needed to lay a solid foundation.
Never again. As they say in film, “you can’t fix everything in post.”
Third: I make tools. As I talked about in the last section, I try to make my strategies useful. They should help you move fast in the future, because the decision is already made, or at least half-made, and everyone’s already on the same page about it.
It might take a long time to blast a tunnel through a mountainside, but that’ll make every future trip along that route far easier.
Sound like someone you want to work with?