The headline is mine but the story is about Biodun Shobanjo, the iconic adman and founder of many companies all under the Troyka Group. If you are dealing with an advertising guru like Shobanjo, you just have to be creative because advertising is all about creativity. The following piece is an excerpt from my latest book, ‘50 NIGERIA’S BOARDROOM LEADERS—Lessons On Corporate Governance and Strategy’—a book that is not just about the board but is filled with business anecdotes, wisdom and leadership lessons. Here, Shobanjo recounts some life-changing experiences worth mentioning in his autobiography—which I hear is in the making:
THE MACHINE IS IN OUR HEAD
Life is full of risks. Many risks. Many known, many untold. In the nature of our business, one risk is easy to figure: people. The creativity of our work is not dependent on physical machines. The machine is in our head, the intellectual capacity. That informs the need to invest in people. We have a very strong human resource department that looks after all aspects of personnel, particularly manpower development. The department is concerned with questions such as: How many people are we training? Where are they being trained? What kind of training are we exposing them to? More importantly, how are we protecting these investments? To send staff on training programmes locally and overseas is very expensive. How do we ensure that individual does not walk out of the door six months after he returns? It is a very vexing issue for us here when we hear that one of our staffers is leaving. We count it as a loss. That is the risk we have to manage.
The way to go about it is to have a competitive reward system. Firstly, we have them believe strongly in what we do, such that if poachers from lucrative sectors, say, the banks or oil and gas, try to lure them, our employees will think twice and say something like: “Hey, I think I have a future here, it is not about what somebody pays me tomorrow.” We make them see themselves as part of the enterprise. We give them a sense of belonging. Besides treating our staff with utmost respect, we compensate them as best as the business allows us. We have a gain-sharing scheme that involves every staff member. If the company does well, employees are also likely to get some bonus in addition to regular remuneration. The profit trickles down. It doesn’t matter whether the amount is N50 or N5000. They must feel a part of the business. We do this to motivate our staff. And this stems from the board’s guiding philosophy: that we are a people’s first business. That way, we take care of the human risk factor.
The second risk has to do with quality of service delivery. Are we giving our clients what they want? If yes, how do we judge that? In marketing communication business, it is easy to tell. I am driving on the street and I see a poster or a billboard. I look at the design. I study the message on it and ask myself the question: Does it follow the principle for designing good impactful advert? If the answer is no, straightaway, I send an email to the company: “Guys, I saw your board at so-and-so place. I looked at it. I couldn’t get the message. I couldn’t even read it. The words are too small. The images are too clumsy.” If it is a press ad, I’d do the same. If it is television commercial I watched, we will discuss at board meetings and we’d say: “Have you seen what Company A is doing there? Why are we not doing those kinds of things or something better? That’s why we are here, isn’t it? A client that has hired us wants us to be the best that he can.”
ENCOUNTERS WITH
GLOBAL ADVERTISING ICONS
Working with multinational organisations brought me in contact with various men and women in global advertising. Each of them had their ways and their styles. All of them (with the exception of one) are really advertising people. Aside, this common denomination, one thread runs through them all: their hearts are sold to the business. One of my favourites is Ed Meyer who at the time was the Chairman-CEO of Grey Advertising worldwide. He owned 30 percent of the company globally. He was a very wealthy man. That was not the point. The point is his heart and soul was in the business. I used to wonder (then I was much younger) why Ed Meyer would go to see clients at the age of seventy-eight. Meyer knew and worked for generations of owners of the world-famous Mars chocolates. He had personal relationship with the Mars family. Those days, he would fly from New York to London to attend the meeting at over seventy-eight years! Given the time difference between the two continents, his flight probably would arrive late. He could doze off at the meeting. It was permitted. But each time he opened his mouth and spoke, clients took note. Meeting someone like Ed Meyer was gratifying.
Once we went into partnership with Ted Bates. When we signed the agreement in 1981, I met the man who ran the business. He was the chairman. A very unforgettable man; very smallish, very stylish. In his pocket, you would find cigars. But really, his life was about his clients. I also learnt valuable lessons from him. Then I met Americans the branding guru Bill Baker and Carl Spielvogel, another guru. I met them many years ago at an international conference when Grey bought Ted Bates. Carl was the Chairman-CEO; Bill was the creative person. This was in the early 1980s.
When Bates was acquired by Grey (the latter had a resonating reputation of not being a very creative agency), we went to a conference in New York, my first conference. Apart from the African-Americans from a Black-American agency, I was the only black person there. At the conference, they spoke about everything. Everybody spoke. I raised my hand and I said: “You know what, you guys have been talking. You have all spoken of wonderful ideas about how you want to grow the business. But I didn’t hear anybody say anything about creativity. Does that explain why you are called Grey by name, grey in creativity?” The hall went silent. Who the hell is this black guy who comes here to say all these things? That marked me out.
The chairman apologized. He said: “We take creativity very seriously, that is why we just started a process where every quarter, every Grey office around the world must submit three of its best creative works and we judge it globally.”
During that period, when we were still with Grey, I am delighted that somebody’s work that we sent from here in Nigeria was adjudged one of the best ten. For us, that was a major achievement. The point is, these guys were very open to views, not averse to suggestions.
(Culled from 50 Nigeria’s Boardroom Leaders—Lessons On Corporate Governance and Strategy. Enquiries: [email protected] 08033445125)