A creative director I worked with at my old agency kept a folder on his desktop called GRAVEYARD. Forty-something decks for campaigns that never shipped, nearly all of them killed by him, most of them his. He was the sharpest thinker in that building, and he got passed over twice in the two years I sat near him.
I think about that folder every spring, because spring is when the reviews land.
A performance review rewards one shape of story. You launched a thing. The thing moved a number. You can screenshot the number and paste it into a form. There is no field on that form for the campaign you talked a client out of in February, the one that would have burned six hundred thousand dollars and two weeks of being a screenshot people passed around Twitter.
Which is the whole problem.
The most valuable work in strategy is subtraction, and subtraction leaves no artifact.
This year the pressure is sharper. Layoffs have been rolling through tech and through agencies since the fall, and everyone I know is quietly assembling a case for their own necessity. Those cases get built out of launches. Nobody puts the word prevented on a slide.
So I have started doing three things instead.
One, write the kill down. When a bad idea dies in a room, I send a short note afterward. Here is what we considered, here is why we stopped, here is where the money went instead. It is dated evidence for the version of me sitting in a conference room eleven months from now with nothing to screenshot.
Two, kill early and kill cheap. By the time most of us speak up, six departments have touched it and someone has already told their boss it is happening. Objecting in week one is a question. Objecting in week nine is an accusation. Say the uncomfortable thing while it is still cheap for the room to hear.
Three, name the tradeoff, not the flaw. Telling people an idea is off brand gets you a defensive room and a taste argument you cannot win. Telling them it spends the entire Q3 budget reaching an audience that already buys from us gets you a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets end arguments faster than taste does.
The brands I admire most are built out of restraint. Patagonia does not ship nine things a quarter. Salt & Straw kills more flavors than it releases, and the killing is exactly why the case looks good when you walk in.
Objecting in week one is a question. Objecting in week nine is an accusation.
Truffles knocked my notebook off the desk last night, the one with the February kill list in it. Barnaby supervised. Neither of them has ever launched anything and both of them seem entirely at peace. I picked it up and kept writing in it anyway.