Things like group cheers, crazy hats and other “tribal” identifiers are great at building social cohesion among like-minded individuals, and can be powerful tools. However, social cohesion is not a great predictor of a successful outcome.

If you want to succeed in a difficult task, the most important step you can take is to get everyone committed to it. In the military this is called “Task Cohesion”, and studies have shown it’s the most important factor in determining whether or not a difficult mission gets completed.

So, how do you create task cohesion? It’s not easy, but it’s relatively simple. The key aspects are:

• Define the task in realistic and concrete terms. Make it memorable and inspiring.
• Create a sense of significance. Allow them to understand the “why” behind the mission.
• Encourage communication from the bottom up and leverage heterogenous skill sets.
• Emphasize “getting the job done” above all else.

This isn’t ground breaking advice, and you’ve probably heard a lot of it before. But, it’s worth remembering. Work is about accomplishing what you set out to do. If you’re leading a project team, the best thing you can do is set a clear goal and get everyone’s buy in. It’s great to have fun along the way, but if the mission fails. It won’t matter.

Don’t get me wrong — educating your client base can be a great tactic — but there’s a big difference between teaching your audience things they care about and teaching them everything you know.

For example, if you’re an art gallery catering to the middle class (i.e. not super wealthy collectors), your content would probably better serve you by focusing on how a customer should choose art for their home — lessons in color theory and stories of interior design — than by focusing on the frontier of modern art or details of art history, things that only collectors and academics care about.

Next time you’re creating content, think about your audience. Are they mothers? Are they business owners? Are they cogs in a corporate machine looking for a way out? Instead of ladening your content with jargon, industry references, and minutiae, it’s a lot more effective to create content that people will enjoy reading because it’s interesting and resonates on an emotional level.

Craftsmanship takes practice, observation, and patience. The road is long and paved with repetition, repetition, and more repetition. But, the end result is a product you can stand behind — something you can point to with pride and say, “I did that.”

When you’ve reached that point, people won’t say “Oh, that’s neat.” or “Hmmm, interesting.” The only thing they’ll be able to say is “Damn. Good job.” And that’s the sort of thing that’ll put a grin on your face when a lot of other things won’t.

“They give up for all kinds of reasons. Starting too early, heavy rains and snow, a schedule that is too ambitious and leads to injury, unexpectedly rugged terrain, overspending a meager budget, poor physical shape, ill-fitting and overly heavy equipment, or a lack of humor—all contribute to an ill-fated expedition.”

I could take this paragraph and slice it into a million different metaphors. For clients, for agencies, for life. But what really struck me in the long list of reasons people give up is near the end — a lack of humor.

Prospering in the face of dreary circumstances requires more than simply skill, or even determination. Sometimes the shit hits the fan and the only thing that will help you move forward is laughing about it.

So if work really has you down, if you don’t have any work at all, or if you’re just going through hard times, don’t give up. Go look for your sense of humor and it will lead the way out.

If you’re predictable and boring, and you ask an agency for cool, what you’ll get instead is slick.

Cool requires only one thing: Be unique and do interesting things. Companies that are cool embrace their quirks. They don’t find the latest trend and hop in front of it like a dude desperate to lead the parade. They add to the culture and remix it; they don’t exploit it. The more you learn about a cool company, the more interesting they are.

Slick is different than cool. Slick looks like cool from across the room, but as soon as you talk to it, you realize it’s just a veneer. Slick companies are the farthest thing from interesting. They’re more concerned with appearing cool than being cool. It’s a short term gimmick, and it never works for long. Once the veneer cracks, you’re back to square one. Like Mitt Romney saying, “Who Let The Dogs Out”, your customers can smell the inauthenticity.

So if you’re a boring company looking to become cool. Don’t expect that a slick flash website or cutting edge social media campaign will do the trick. You’ll be slick, but definitely not cool.

In James Webb Young’s tried, true, and excellent little book A Technique for Producing Ideas, he describes a five step process for creating ideas. Steeping, or digestion in Young’s metaphor, is the third step, and one of the most frequently overlooked. You see, some things the subconscious mind can process better than the conscious mind. However, our subconscious is rarely able, if ever, to engage with something while it’s still attracting our surface-level attention. So, we need to learn to let things go.

This isn’t to say that good ideas appear out of thin air; ideas can only be processed subconsciously after you’ve done the hard work of research and exhausted the conscious mind by gathering facts and digging frantically. But when you’re tired, worn, and ready to call it a day, stop beating your head against the wall. Walk alway. Sleep on it. Do anything to get your mind off the problem. That’s when your subconscious will work its magic, and the right idea will come to you when you least expect it.

Advertising history generally espouses the “Great Man” viewpoint. In advertising lore, these giants of advertising (think Ogilvy, Bernbach, or in modern-day, Bogusky) shift the course of advertising history, and, through sheer charisma and willpower, they change the paradigms of the industry.

This leads me to the core question of this post: Does interactive need a Bill Bernbach to lead us into the next generation of digital marketing?

The short answer is yes. Digital marketing is ripe for the right person to take the mantle of creative leadership and drive the industry forward. This person’s agency will move beyond the execution/production role that so many interactive agencies have been relegated to, and realize the opportunity that presents itself to the agency that can master the art of interactive narrative, culture crafting and customer persuasion.

But, there is a caveat. Bernbach wouldn’t have thrived to the degree that he did without the social and cultural context of his time-period. So, you can’t underestimate the impact of external factors on world events.

That being said there are several external factors currently driving our industry:

• Tactical Execution Is Becoming Commoditized.

  Interface design, search marketing, and development are all facing downward cost pressure as crowd-sourcing and in-sourcing eat away at the margins. The top 10% of talent will always be valued, but the bottom 90% are worth a fraction of what they were in the past. Mediocre work will not be rewarded.

• Digital Agencies Are Evolving.

  Digital agencies are either evolving into “production” houses, or “idea” agencies. The few and lucky might become both, and that is where the next Bernbach will come from.

• Traditional Agencies Are Creating Digital Capabilities.

  The idea that you have to hire a “digital” agency to create interactive marketing will become less and less common. Companies like Crispin Porter – Bogusky already have greater in-house digital capabilities than most of their digital counterparts.

So, how can someone become the next “Great Man” of interactive?

The answer is simple, but it won’t be easy. This person must create a digital agency that is more than technicians; they have to master the art of interactive storytelling and persuasion. They have to develop a capacity and a passion for creativity that pushes the industry to create work on a new level. And most importantly, they have to figure out a way to use the medium to create and effect culture on a larger scale.

But now I’m preaching to the choir. Let’s talk brand by committee. It’s just as deadly as design by committee, and it’s just as prevalent.

Strong brands are defined by a clear, singular vision. There’s no question in the customer’s mind as to their position. When you have a brand whose vision is defined by one person — think Apple and Steve Jobs — the result is a brand that’s more consistent, and therefore more clear, than brands created by committees.

Branding and design have alot in common. They’re both frequently mistaken for a mysterious, intangible, hit or miss practice. But branding is anything but mysterious. Good brands have personality, vision, and the will to bring those to life in their products. Everybody knows this. Sadly, many companies still spend millions on brand research and then filter those insights through a committee, who then grinds away any valuable insights and removes all hints of an authentic personality. What’s left is a stale, boring brand reminiscent of a thousand others.

“A round is not a round, and not all miles are created equal.”

There’s a huge difference between merely going through the motions of your workout, versus attacking your workout as if you’re life depended on it. Two people can do the exact same workout, but the amount of blood, sweat, and tears they put into it can be entirely different. It’s simply a matter of intensity. A mile is as hard as you make it.

The same is true of your day-to-day work. The amount of effort you put into it is directly proportional to the end result. You can’t expect to become an exceptional designer/writer/programmer without exerting exceptional effort. Sadly, there are no shortcuts. The road to success is paved with intense, focused, hard work over an extended period of time.

Exceptional people make exceptional effort. It’s rarely about talent; it’s almost always about intensity.

The heart of creativity is discipline.

- Bill Bernbach

Misconceptions concerning creativity abound, but one of the most widespread and harmful is that there’s some magical vein of creative thought lurking in the mysterious reaches of our minds. The myth is, those of us who aren’t creative types will either never be privy to these lofty thoughts or should jump through a series of quirky, “outside the box” hoops to attain them: brainstorming, creativity training, and hipster culture to name a few.

The reality is, creativity is an applied utility. Bill Bernbach, one of the creative giants of advertising history, once said, “Is creativity some obscure, esoteric art form? Not on your life. It’s the most practical thing a businessman can employ.” Being creative in some intangible, general way isn’t an asset; applying creativity to your work, whether it’s “artsy” or not, is.

It’s true, illustrators, designers, and art directors are regularly expected to be creative, but so are strategists, developers, and a slew of other individuals in the interactive space. What creative individuals have in common is a certain level of mastery, a sufficient understanding of the fundamentals to be able to bend them appropriately, combined with the discipline to pursue new ways of doing things.

The root of creativity then, in fact, has nothing to do with living a creative lifestyle or being a creative type, and everything to do with practice, the art of perfecting your skills so that you can use them in new, innovative ways.  I know this probably isn’t the most exciting or easy advice to read, but it’s the truth. The old cliche “practice makes perfect” might as well be “practice makes creative.”