I’m a strategist. I tend to have a plan for most things. I’m the kind of person who sets objectives when I go on holiday, and then has a spreadsheet of what I’m doing each day.
So it was that one weekend in the Blue Mountains in early 2009 I found myself strategising my next career move. Back then I was national strategy director of media agency OMD which had been on somewhat of a role and was a great place to work. But I wanted a plan for my next step.
Strategists like insights, so I framed my plan with the idea that there are plenty of people who are good at strategy, and plenty of people who are good at digital, but very few people who are good at both. I figured I had to supercharge my somewhat middling knowledge of digital.
Fast forward six months and I had landed in a strategy role in the sales team at News Digital Media (NDM). Not content with just changing from strategy to digital strategy, I also went sales side, and went from a company with 300 Aussie employees to one with 10,000.
I learnt even more than I expected: the highlights of my 2.5 years at NDM were some career defining insights around people, and around strategic thinking.
In my time in agencies I had been guilty of thinking a first interview meant coffee and a chat, and a second interview meant beer and a chat. Working in a bigger organisation meant access to an HR team to advise and train on topics like hiring and firing. NDM also had a strong culture of feedback and self awareness. If you did a great job, you were recognised. And people were brave in giving feedback when work wasn’t so good. This fast tracked your development. You could practically see people growing and developing before your eyes, like shoots of bamboo.
On strategy, I remember the first presentation I gave to my new boss, making a strategic recommendation on some aspect of the business. I recall a look of vague horror as I presented the agency classic, a series of pictures accompanied by one or two words. After that I came to learn the value of different approaches to strategy, especially sales strategy and business strategy. I had actually never worked at an agency which had a strategy for itself - beyond financials.
I’d seen a few big hairy audacious goals in my time and the odd aspiration (we want to be the apple of the media industry!). So to work at a business which expected each division to have a clear strategy and financial targets and trained its managers in these skills – this was a valuable broadening of my strategic experience.
Of course I did achieve my goal of immersing myself in digital media too, although I still couldn’t tell you the exact benefits of HTML5, or average CPM of that oxymoronic ad product, the south leaderboard.
Six months ago I spotted an exciting opportunity to move back to media agency land – we’re working hard on Initiative’s next growth stage by challenging some conventions of the media agency world. And by using some of the ideas from my “journey to the other side”. There are so many similarities between media agencies today that stepping outside and then coming back can be a valuable play to create competitive advantage.
Rob Pyne
Chief Strategy Officer
Initiative