In the article Culture Club, Andy Polaine combines his excessive agency experience with his curiosity to what makes some of these agency a success and other… less so.
The initial insight is that it’s not down to a process — many agencies have a same process and that it’s rarely unique. No, the assets that seems to set them apart is; a great company culture.
It’s lovely to see that Andy mentions POKE as an example. I had the pleasure to work at POKE for nearly 5 years, and during all those years I did have loads of fun as well as given the chance and opportunity to do good challenging work.
The quote below is polled from the article, and I think it highlights one important piece in the puzzle — diversity in personalities.
Simon Waterfall, ex- co-founder and creative director of Poke and founder of fashion label, Social Suicide, previously explained that Poke made a particular effort to choose its mix of staff. “You never want to have three people the same, because they can all do the same thing,” he advised. “When you see something that you can do, there are only two responses. One is, ‘Ooh! That’s better than I can do [it],’ or ‘Oh, that’s worse than I can do it’. When you see something in a completely new field by someone else, something in you goes back to that childhood experience of, ‘F**k me! How did you make that?!’ You’re allowed to be generous of spirit, you’re allowed to have that wonderment. Choosing the most diverse group so that they don’t step on each other’s toes and have enough goodwill to be able to work together – that’s great.”
The photo I’ve chosen to go with this post is taken by Marc Davies on a day when the POKE office decided to rename the company to the initials of the partners (RFB&H) and dress up as if they were an Ad agency in New York during the 60′s (Mad Men inspired). I had left POKE when they had this day, but this wasn’t a “one-off”. I remembered one week when the whole studio were color coordinated. If I remember correctly, the Red Day was rather intense.
