Large corporations accept certain beliefs at face value. Among them is the myth that in-house organizations can never be as good or as responsive as outside agencies/vendors, particularly creative services groups. It is a daily battle to overcome the built-in prejudice against internal creative organizations.
As with most corporations, internal support groups are under intense scrutiny [...]

Across the past few weeks, creative executives from more than 40 in-house creative departments from the Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Atlanta metropolitan areas joined us at CreativeExecs Roundtable meetings to discuss measuring, reporting, and structuring for effectiveness and efficiency…

Discussion topics for the CreativeExecs Roundtables are based on polling of attendees and prospective attendees. With three out of five of the summer Roundtables complete, we are seeing demand to discuss an omnipresent challenge of Creative Services leaders: career paths for creative staff. This common challenge pulls at the heart strings of creative leaders, because [...]

Sharing information with people is an everyday event in the business world.  The challenge for most Creative Executives is to communicate in a way that allows their team to hear and understand. Business folklore has it that communication can be broken into three creative categories; the dance, the music and the lyrics.  No one knows [...]

Whether you’ve recently inherited a team or you’ve been working with the same core group for several years, it’s likely your team is a mix of rock stars, steady performers, and underperformers—otherwise known as “A”, “B”, and “C” players. It’s important to have a healthy mix of “A” and “B” players on a team [...]

One of the hardest balancing acts in any creative organization is maintaining the right balance of seasoned veterans and “new blood,” creative directors and lightning-fast production artists, specialists and generalists, and new media and traditional media gurus. This is especially true in environments where the volume and nature of the workload is relatively low or [...]

Cost management, flexibility and cutting edge expertise……one if not all of these reasons have led you to use consultants and/or temporary associates on your latest project or proposal. The Microsoft case in the 90’s drove awareness around co-employment issues. Since then, many companies have adopted practices such as term limits to help mitigate [...]

You can feel it… the economy has regained a heartbeat. It may not be ready for an Ironman competition, but at least we can find a pulse. And I am wondering how this will affect all our plans and budgets for the upcoming year.
Before we just submit a modest increase across the board (or even [...]

I just returned from the very successful 2009 In-HOWse Designer Conference, sponsored by HOW Magazine, where I heard lots of perspectives and predictions.
I was particularly intrigued by one data point gleaned from Megan Slabinski’s presentation on “Managing Through Uncertainty and Change.” She cited a recent survey that asked designers what trends were going to have [...]

Several people have been telling me that they need to re-evaluate their staffing mix in light of the current economic situation. Customers are relying more and more on their in-house organizations — meaning that more work is coming in-house and more complex work, to boot.
More work often translates into adding quick turnaround masters — production [...]