Wednesday evening, back corner of Ovation, third book of the night. The kid across from me had done everything right. Clean case studies, tidy typography, a research section with real quotes in it. Then he turned to the page where he explained what he had actually contributed, and it said: led positioning workstream, informed creative direction.
I have written that sentence. Everyone in this job has written that sentence. It means nothing and we all keep writing it, because the alternative is a blank page.
Designers have it easy in exactly one way. The work is the artifact. You look at the logo, you look at the packaging, you know within four seconds whether this person can see.
Strategy has no artifact, which means hiring for it is a judgment about a person's thinking made almost entirely on the basis of how well they describe their thinking.
That gap rewards the wrong candidate constantly. The person who narrates confidently outranks the person who was right. I have been in the debrief where a team hired the smoother book and spent the next year discovering that the smoothness was the whole product.
So I stopped asking to see the work. Now I ask three things, and I ask them in this order.
One, what did the client believe on day one that they did not believe at the end. If the answer is vague, the candidate was in the room but not in the argument. Two, what did you get wrong. Real strategists have a graveyard and they can walk you through it without flinching. Three, what did you kill. Anyone can add a slide. The job is subtraction, and a person who has never removed anything from a plan has never had to defend one.
None of that fits in a PDF, which is why I would rather read one honest page about a project that failed than forty pages of finished decks that someone else art directed.
Anyone can add a slide. The job is subtraction, and a person who has never removed anything from a plan has never had to defend one.
If you are the one being reviewed this spring, my practical advice is unglamorous. Write your contribution in verbs a stranger could picture. Not led, not informed, not partnered. Interviewed nine store managers. Cut the audience from six segments to two. Argued against the rebrand and lost. Specificity reads as competence because specificity is competence, and it is the only signal that survives a PDF.
I sang Total Eclipse of the Heart very badly on Friday and the host, who calls everyone baby, told me I had commitment. That is the most accurate performance review I have gotten all year, and I could not put it in a portfolio either.