Years ago I participated in a 360-degree assessment. Peers, colleagues, management and direct reports all had the opportunity to anonymously tell me how I was doing. And based on their responses, I was doing pretty well. But there were a few comments that I didn’t expect and one in particular that stopped me in my ...MORE
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Tips on How to Manage Outside Agencies By Shannon Stull Carrus I often get questions about how to manage outside agency relationships effectively. Surprisingly, the issues are often unrelated to the agency and are sometimes a result of in-house team road blocks. In other words, people are asking me: "How am I supposed to work ...MORE
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Turn the mundane into opportunities. Grow giant ears. — Bob Calvano, Director, Global Creative Studios at Merck Bob Calvano manages a huge team of multidisciplinary talent for Merck. Merck's global vision is to make a difference in the lives of people through innovative medicines, vaccines, biologic therapies, consumer health and animal products. Bob believes that ...MORE
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By Jackie Schaffer Most in-house creative teams suffer from 80% of the same challenges—just some suffer these challenges more so than others. Some of those common challenges are: Projects that never reach completion Unreasonable rounds of revision Projects with questionable business impact Ill-defined or short career paths Not enough staff “Hurry up and wait” periods Little ...MORE
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Lunch With ... A New Interview Series Debuts This Week By Ed Roberts “Lunch With … ” is a new series of interviews featuring interesting people who have experience working in-house and are working on projects they are incredibly passionate about. The inspiration for this series came from two sources: “How to Think Like a ...MORE
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It’s no secret that companies are feeling increased pressure to do more with less these days – and this includes keeping staff inspired on a tight budget. While the economy may be improving little by little, raises and other rewards are still hard to come by at many organizations.
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Our Pursuit of Fearless Leadership by Ed Roberts Many organizations are quickly coming to the realization that the strategies and core values they adopted decades earlier are no longer valid and are potentially detrimental to their success. Organizations seriously committed to pruning their hard-edged traditions and adopting more adaptable strategies are emerging stronger and ...MORE
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Posted in Andy Epstein, In-house Issues on Sep 12th, 2011
“Conventional wisdom suggests that pressure enhances performance; our real-time data, however, shows that workers perform better when they are happily engaged in what they do. … Workers’ well-being depends, in large part, on managers’ ability and willingness to facilitate workers’ accomplishments — by removing obstacles, providing help and acknowledging strong effort…of all the events that ...MORE
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by Emily Cohen Two of the most important functions to consider when developing your department’s organizational structure are those of leadership and management. In a small department, and even sometimes in larger departments, one person is often thrust into the role of both leader and manager. Yet, there is an inherent difficulty in blending and ...MORE
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