My husband’s family history of heart disease reads like a funeral requiem: his father had a heart attack at age 35; his mother, multiple cardiac surgeries; his brother, two stents by age 40; his uncle and cousin both died of heart attacks by 55. And so on and so forth throughout the branches and leaves of his family tree. Only Rich had escaped the cardiac firing line. But one afternoon this February, I finally heard the words I’d been dreading in our eleven years of marriage: “Honey, take me to the emergency room.”

Rich’s first EKG was normal. So was his second one. Still, the doctors wanted to give him a more conclusive test… “just in case.” Worst case scenario, he’d get a relatively minor procedure to open an artery. Rich blew me kisses as the nurses wheeled him away to his test.

Rich and I had recently moved back to my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida. If I’d ever regretted trading fabulous LA for a life with my family nearby, this moment put any doubts to rest. My father sat with me at the hospital, holding my hand, awaiting the results of the test.

As we waited, a doctor walked over and greeted my father warmly. Dad is retired surgeon, and for 30 years he practiced in the same hospital where we now sat in the waiting room. As my father introduced me to Dr. Still, he explained that they’d operated together years ago and that tonight Dr. Still was “on call” for cardiac emergencies. My dad quipped, “Great to see you… hope we don’t see you later in surgery!” We all smiled.

But a few minutes later, Dr. Still returned with a very different look on his face. We would be seeing him later for surgery.

My father asked the question I could not: “How bad is it?” The surgeon blinked a millisecond too long for my comfort and replied, “All five.” I had no idea what that meant. All five? Five what? I looked from one man to the other, trying to interpret their expressions to figure out if that was good or bad.

Well, yeah, that’s bad. The worst. His heart was shutting down and they needed replacements on all five arteries in the next 12 hours. Trying to understand what was happening, I stammered, “Is this like a bypass?” My dad said gently, “Rich is getting a quintuple bypass.” Not double, not triple. Quintuple. My first thought was of our two small children, Quinton and Azalea, at home asleep. Then I wondered if we’d paid his life insurance premium.

I immediately peppered my dad with questions… What were Rich’s chances of survival? What would his life be like after the surgery? Would he be an invalid? Would he be the same person? My father answered every question academically, until at one point he stared down at his shoes and broke down into tears.

Not me. I refused to go to the bad place. At least, not yet. I play a little game when bad things happen: I ask myself, “How can I turn this into the best thing that could possibly happen?” I’ve played this game during all kinds of cloudy situations, and found that sometimes, silver linings can stretch across the horizon.

It was getting late, but I called our best friends, Chris and Rona, to join me at Rich’s bedside… to celebrate. Together we laughed and told stories, giving his old heart a going-away party. Rich was all doped up on truth serum-like drugs, so we asked personal questions and giggling until the night nurse shooed us out.

I drove home by myself, and this fact struck me as totally bizarre. It was a sort of evil-twin opposite of the last time I’d left a hospital: after having a baby. When having a baby, Rich and I drove to the hospital as two, and left as three. Today we drove as two, and I left by myself.

Seeing the kids asleep at home was the hardest part. I kissed them each twice: once for me, once for Rich.

A few hours later, before sunrise the next morning, Rich’s operation began. Sitting in the waiting room, I realized I had no idea what exactly was going on in the surgery being performed in real time on the other side of the wall. I Googled “quintuple bypass.” This is insane, I thought: I’ve researched car seats and blenders more extensively than the consent forms to have my husband’s ribcage cracked open, his heart pulled out from his chest, and the five lifelines of his body cut and replaced.

At last, many hours later, Dr. Still came out from surgery. He smiled. I burst into tears.

The novelist Anna Quindlen once wrote, “Think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.” Rich had a terminal illness, heart disease, ticking down towards detonation. We feared it. It was the worst that could happen, and it happened.

But really, it was the best thing that could have possibly happened.

The man I’m married to today is very different than the one who went into surgery. He’s stronger, healthier, and more alive than ever. He is, quite literally, a new man. His skin is brighter, his laugh is bubblier, and his eyes sparklier. Unbeknownst to us, for several years, his heart had been deprived of blood and that showed up in his behavior and activity level.

This blog post is far more personal than my others, I realize. I share this story because it’s a parallel to all the other things I write about… surviving a chaotic situation, consciously creating a new point of view, and changing your life (by choice or otherwise).

We all walk around with a few “worst fears.” Some are logical, others, entirely unfounded. But sometimes, the (supposedly) worst thing that could happen turns out to be the absolute best. Sometimes, we have to go through what we dread in order to live our best life. That mean be getting fired, or losing a cherished  relationship, or not getting something you passionately hoped and prayed for.

When you don’t have control over a certain situation or result, focus on the pieces within your grasp. If you’re laid off from a job, you can’t necessarily get that same job back, but what can you do? What knowledge or experiences or relationships will you take and use to your advantage? What opportunities could arise from getting laid off, which might not have been possible before? What actions can you take that will use this layoff as a stepping stone to your next success?

In my book, I wrote about experiencing the most scary, and difficult, and painful moments in life. These words, which I wrote in 2005, I now believe more profoundly than ever:

The scary and difficult and painful don’t have to stop you. The scary and difficult and painful are the very things that transform you into your best self.

One last thought. Is it just me, or is it news that the heart has five arteries? Who knew??

Six Tips to Help Develop and Sell Your Best Ideas

At one point in your life, many years ago– approximately nine months before you were born, in fact– you competed in your very first new-business pitch. You were competing against a few hundred million others, but apparently you won, because you’re reading this today.

The principles of fertilization offer a handy reminder that in chaotic or competitive situations, many must die in order for one to live. So it goes for spawning ideas.

It wasn’t always this way. I remember watching a famous, award-winning creative director describe his philosophy on idea development. His agency would present only one idea — the big idea — and if the client didn’t buy it, the agency would go into hiding for two weeks before returning with another (single) idea.

That agency has, regrettably, since closed… surprise surprise. In the hope of avoiding the same fate, I’ve spent the past few years trying to get the idea of THE idea out of my head.

As time goes on, I realize that successful careers, like successful agencies, are built upon the rules we learned back when we were swimming upstream with a few hundred million of our would-be siblings:

1. There is no such thing as THE idea.

If you can break out of the mind-set that you have to create that one almighty concept, you can stay more open to client feedback, integrate other media platforms and forage outside of your comfort zone for creative thinking.

2. Beware your ‘brilliant’ ideas.

Truly brilliant ideas are dangerous. They can quickly become the idea. They let people off the hook to beat those ideas with something fresher, smarter. Instead of clinging to your most brilliant idea, keep yourself open to the possibility that there’s a better one.

3. Spread your bets around.

Think like the movie-studio executives, who have stopped putting all their bets on one or two blockbusters, and instead back a multitude of movies that are all little bets. Many will fail, a few will break even and one or two will become massive hits.

4. Start profusely and finish brutally.

At the beginning of a process, stay open to everyone’s comments and all possibilities. But as time goes on, focus on your winning ideas and kill the rest without sorrow or sentiment. Why? See rule No. 5.

5. Ideas are not precious; opportunities, very much so.

There is no limit to the number of ideas you could potentially generate, but there is a definite limit to the number of opportunities you can take on and succeed with. Focus your resources on winning ideas.

6. Fight to the death for your ideas.

This might sound counterintuitive to the above. Here’s the difference.

Ideas are our raison d’être. Yet once you’re willing to create more of those ideas — and watch more of those ideas die — your career will survive and thrive.

This article was published in Ad Age May 12, 2008 (and amended with a wussy title): Sacrifice Many for the Sake of One Brilliant Idea - Advertising Age - Hogshead On Six Tips to Help Develop the Right One

For authors, it can be slightly less pretty.

I started researching my second book In September of 2006. Finally, 26.2 miles later, I just sold it to HarperCollins. My new editor is Ben Loehnen, who was Dan Heath’s editor for Made to Stick.

The sale was between two publishers: HarperCollins, and Penguin Portfolio, with the team behind all of Seth Godin’s books. I would have been thrilled either way.

My very wonderful literary agents are Larry Kirshbaum and Jud Laghi of LJK Literary Agency. I can’t say enough incredible things about both. Larry is the former CEO and Chairman of the Time-Warner Book Group, publishing authors such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jack Welch, and was the 2005 Publishing Person of the Year. Jud has represented bestsellers such as Why Do Men Have Nipples? and The Hipster Handbook.

I’d offer more details, but I’m still chugging Gatorade and working through the shakes. More to follow.

Think You Don’t Work in Digital Media? Guess What: You Do. Here’s Your Guide to Translating Your Skills From Traditional to Digital

In the next year or two, you’ll be interviewing for a new job. So will I. So will your coworkers. So will your boss, your client and your competitors. Digital media is changing advertising so quickly, so radically, that we’ll all have new jobs in a couple of years, and our careers will depend upon our ability to use digital media to our advantage. It’s not just the creative department or media; it will drive how every person in the company creates and operates, from human resources to accounting. Today, digital is not a department — it’s a competitive advantage.

Bad things happen when people don’t upgrade their skills. About 15 years ago, when computers entered the creative department, most art directors quickly adopted them. But some resisted, especially “senior” ones (read: those over 40), who continued to rely on the studio. Their argument — quite noble in theory, actually — was that they should be hired for their brains, not their wrists. Unfortunately, nobility doesn’t live long in agencies. Within a few years, most had been replaced by younger (and cheaper) wrists/thinkers who’d never dream of art directing from the back seat.

Let’s avoid that unpleasantness, shall we? Translating your skills and experience from traditional media to digital isn’t as hard as you might think (at least, assuming you had strong ideas and strategy to begin with). Below, your guide to navigating this transition.

STOP RESISTING IT

It’s happening. Or should I say, it happened. No longer is digital a “department” within an agency — it’s an essential competitive advantage for everyone in the company. Time to get on with it.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE, YEAH, BUT YOU STILL NEED A MESSAGE

It’s not enough to slap up content and expect it to get hits. For every Dove “Evolution” there’s a burial ground of failures.

EXPERIMENT MORE

Digital marketing is written in code, not stone. Constantly try new things, tweak formulas and take more risks.

GET READY FOR OBSOLESCENCE

Even as you launch a digital project, the clock is ticking on its countdown toward clichédom. Things change so quickly in digital space that 2008’s breakthrough will be 2009’s yawn.

QUIT BITCHING ABOUT FASTER TURNAROUND TIMES

Immediacy is a key advantage for clients. Make it your advantage, too.

STOCKPILE NEW SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Collect as much digital understanding as possible. Boost your learning curve by attending conferences (and not just for the boondoggle). The best way to turbocharge your worth in the digital marketplace is to work alongside the best, so work with digital superstars even if you don’t get paid for it. As someone once said, “Aspire to be the dumbest person in the room.”

LIMBER UP YOUR BRAIN

The most successful people in digital marketing can mentally multitask. Stay flexible. Don’t get married to any one solution.

BE CONVERSANT WITH A VARIETY OF TECHNOLOGIES

It’s always a bad sign when someone on a digital assignment isn’t familiar with Facebook, SMS, Skype and other key digital technologies. Learn about the main players and understand their implications. You don’t need to read the TiVo owner’s manual to understand the implications of DVRs.

DON’T WORK IN A COMPANY THAT DOESN’T EMBRACE DIGITAL MEDIA

Your career will take a hit in a culture of Luddites. Digital media mirrors a modern career: Constantly changing, fast-paced, occasionally frenzied and always filled with new possibilities. If your company becomes outdated, your work for it will, too.

PERFECT THE ART OF THE SELL

As if selling great work to clients wasn’t difficult enough before, now there’s the added complexity of explaining unfamiliar media. If your client isn’t fully versed in a recommended form of media, boost your odds of selling the idea by boosting his or her learning curve in advance of the presentation.

CREATE A “FIRST”

It was easier to discover new lands back in the days when guys like Christopher Columbus could accidentally bump into continents. Today, countless uncharted digital territories still await. Now’s your chance to conquer one.

DEMONSTRATE DIGITAL PROWESS THROUGHOUT ANY JOB SEARCH

Find new ways to sell yourself. Describe case studies you’ve been part of. Have a website built and become active on LinkedIn and other professional social-networking sites. Creatives should have a DVD with examples of all forms of experience, including traditional media.

GET OUTSIDE YOUR COMFORT ZONE

The best way to get smart about the digital space is to constantly expand into new forms of media by actually working with them. Take on assignments outside your area of expertise. Become a generalist in thinking, with specialist application as needed.

EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE

You shouldn’t spend life tethered to a BlackBerry, but you also don’t want to become known as the slowpoke who can’t access e-mail out of the office. Don’t allow personal resistance to technology to become a pain in the ass for the people you work with. In this case, it’s not OK for the cobbler’s child to go barefoot.

FINALLY, KNOW WHEN TO SKIP THE DIGITAL AND GO OLD SCHOOL

When sending a thank you, skip e-mail in favor of handwritten note. When giving a presentation, don’t read PowerPoint slides verbatim; instead, tell stories. Get up off your butt and go talk to people across the office. Be a human. Not an avatar.

During a frenzy of Spring cleaning (a millennial event in my office), I found a stack of press clips. The one below, which originally appeared in Communication Arts Illustration Annual, could have published yesterday and still be relevant. A little sad, no? Have agencies changed for the better or worse in the last three years? What do you think?

Slaughter the Sacred Cows

Somewhere in your agency, sacred cows lurk in the hallways. They’re wandering through the HR department, or chewing cud in CEO suite. You might even have one curled up in your own office.

Sacred cows are the unquestioned rules, dogmatic systems, and ways of working that seem off-limits to change.

The problem is, sacred cows block potential. If you blindly accept a pattern, or worse, feel forbidden to challenge it, then you can’t improve it. You become stuck. And stuck is the antithesis of everything we stand for.

Only by testing the legitimacy of a sacred cow can you create the best solutions. Here’s an example. In our industry, the following statement is accepted fact:

Advertising agencies are creative.

We share a vested interested in maintaining this reality. We don’t even think to question it.

Yet this statement is only partially true. Yes, we are the most innovative group around– when it comes to our clients. However when it comes to our own companies, we’re remarkably unimaginative. Rarely do we stop, look around, and reinvent the way we work.

The reality is, certain agency practices are ineffective, obsolete, or even unfair. Yet they remain standard policy.

I say, we should turn our exquisite insight upon our own agencies, identify the sacred cows, and usher them out the door.

I say, we accept too much, and question too little.We buy full-fare plane tickets without hesitation, then eliminate microwave popcorn due to budgetary constraints.

We centralize agency ownership into a few holding companies, then wonder why the work feels homogenized.

We ask clients to approve ideas that make their palms sweat, but rarely have the nerve to present just one campaign.

We leave weeks to research a strategy, and three days to create the campaign.

We always have time for revisions, but never enough time to get it right the first time.

We water down ideas to avoid conflict, then end up with ideas that lack passion.

We compromise too much on our work, and compromise too little on the sick day policy.

We spend so much time putting out fires that we’ve become better firemen, and lesser architects.

We search for fresh options by scrolling down the Fonts menu.

We request “real people” from Central Casting.

We create TV spots for a living, then fast-forward through them on Tivo.

We recommend an honest “veritae” style of photography to clients whose ads might not necessarily tell the whole truth.

In new business, we try to seem bigger, unless we’re a big agency, in which case we try to seem smaller and more boutique-y.

We kill ourselves to build revenue, then miss the good ol’ days when it was all about the work.

Our job is to develop unique identities for brands, yet we ourselves have virtually indistinguishable mission statements.

We’re communication experts, yet often communicate quite poorly among each other.

Our work requires inspiration, but leaves little time to find it.

We entice new hires with a big jump in pay, but reward loyalty with a minimum annual raise.

Creatives who win awards on glamorous clients get a raise, but creatives who take one for the home team by producing mediocre work on difficult assignments end up with a lower market value.

We hire individualists who are just conformist enough to be presentable to the client.

We promote some of the most talented creatives into positions where they no longer create work.

We pour our hearts into nurturing young talent, but if we do our job well, they’ll leave the nest for another agency.

We squeeze people out of the business by age 50, then lose our way without mentors.

We have miles of spreadsheets analyzing precisely what people want, but often don’t realize how to make employees happier.

We treat color printers more carefully than employees. Computer viruses are an emergency, but diseased morale is status quo.

We spend $10,000 on recruiting an employee for whom we can’t afford a $1 birthday card.

We forget to tell clients, “Yes it’s now technologically possible to assemble and email a concept in less than an hour, but the human brain’s timeline for brilliant ideas hasn’t changed.”

Do you recognize any of these sacred cows roaming around your office?

Stand back, and take a big picture look at the way you do business. Challenge each practice to see whether it’s a smart way of doing business, or a sacred cow. Poke it. Test it. Make it uncomfortable. Make it prove itself.

If a practice still seems right after being challenged, then great. Keep going.If you find a cow, get right to the core of the problem. Usually it’s benign neglect, but sometimes it’s complacency, or myopic accounting, or ego, or something equally awkward to bring up.

At that point, start talking about it.

Over dinner.

While eating a bloody rare steak.

Or: Why being an entrepreneur ain’t for wussies.

My heart ka-boomed in my chest as we stood outside the building, preparing to sign the lease. I turned to my business partner, took a breath, and nervously said I couldn’t go through with it. Not because the building’s recent remodel from a mechanic’s garage left much to be desired, or even because the office sat smack dab in the hotbed of Venice Beach gang activity. No, it was because in that summer of 1998, the $2,000/month lease was literally higher than my salary had been only three of years earlier.

Jean Robaire, my then-partner, had a decade more experience and an extraordinary business track record. He turned, looked me in the eye, and told me something I’ll never forget: “I know how you’re feeling. But if you want to be successful, you’ll have to get used to this feeling. This is risk. And if you ever want to take big steps in your career, you’ll have to get used to risk.”

Needless to say, we signed the lease the very next day. Robaire & Hogshead was born, and with it, my first step in a career of running my own business.

I soon learned that working for yourself isn’t quite the sexy gig it appears. No longer can you enjoy the thrill of stealing from the supply cabinet (since you pushed the cart through the Office Max aisles yourself); suddenly, the bills arrive in envelopes addressed with your name on the front. There is no benevolent “sick day policy” that covers your salary when you can’t work, and for that matter, no health insurance.

Yet despite the grim realities, there must be some nifty rewards because I’ve spent much of my career in one version or another of entrepreneurialism. For me, the rewards have less to do with money or freedom, and more to do with controlling the type of assignments and responsibilities I’m juggling at any given time. My company does three things: freelance copywriting, corporate speaking, and innovation consulting. By working for myself, I can handpick the best opportunities of each.

But back to you. Under what conditions should you depart the mothership? The answer depends: is your intention to freelance, open your own shop, or develop a different type of business model? Is your ultimate goal to make more money, enjoy more autonomy and set your own schedule, or have your name on a door of some sort? Will you have partners and/or employees? Will you work on the basis of project scope, billable time, percentage, or traditional AOR agreement? Your decision to strike out on your own can’t be based on a temporary “screw you people I’m outta here!” mood; it must be a carefully considered business decision.

Leaving agency life is easy. It’s the day-to-day “earning your own living” part that’s hard.

So when to give the middle finger to “The Man” and embark on your own? If you meet all or most of the eight circumstances below, it might be time to turn away from the milky, warm teat of corporate life.

1. The entrepreneurial flame burns within. You feel a need to fulfill an ambition to create and develop something of your own. You’re willing to roll the dice, staking yourself on the bet.
2. You’re ready to live or die your own rules. You’ve been frustrated and limited over a period of years, feeling forced to march in lockstep with hierarchical structure.
3. Your talents and skills demand new challenges. You want to grow into a new area, such as branded content or mobile media, and you’re finding that a traditional agency can’t give you these opportunities to flourish.
4. You can subsist without a steady income. You’ve managed to avoid burdening yourself with little details, like a mortgage or private school tuition, or you have a nice little trust fund. Running your own place means that you might have to pay employees out of your personal checking account, or worse, suck up to clients you seriously dislike so that you can avoid paying employees out of said personal account.
5. You have a sugardaddy client. Ideally you’ll have a client waiting in the wings, ready and waiting to hand their account over to you (think United Airlines and Barrie D’Rozario Murphy).
6. You have a sturdy stomach and appetite for risk. You can balance the terror of an un-ringing phone with the grunt work required to make it ring.
7. You can gracefully exit without burning bridges. Otherwise the stench of smoky ash will follow you wherever you go.
8. Get on the speed dial of several Fortune 500 CMOs. Hey, that shouldn’t be too hard, right?

The list goes on and on. But here’s the thing. You can always go back to agency life, (and if you do, you’ll probably return with skills and experience that only make you more valuable). What you can never return to is a time in your life when you wished you could create your own company, and your own career, on your own terms. Wussies will never know the adrenaline rush of a client saying, “I have faith that you can take us to the next level,” thereby allowing your personal checkbook to stop playing shortstop to your new venture.

One last thing. When you are ready to go it alone and signing that lease, make sure the fine print includes exterminators because creatives are not good at cleaning up crumbs.

Or: The difference between a great career and “I coulda been a contendah”

Sitting in LA morning traffic, I felt like an antelope being digested by a python. The painfully slow constriction finally deposited me at my client’s doorstep approximately ten seconds before the start of the new business presentation. It was still early in my career, but we’d worked for weeks on the work, so I felt confident about the outcome. At least I felt confident until I reached into the back seat for the portfolio

Wait. The portfolio case. …Where’s the frikkin’ portfolio case?!! As the ice water flushed through my blood, I realized exactly where the portfolio case was: on the kitchen counter. Um, yeah.

Lesson #1: Don’t forget the stuff you’re there to present. (Okay, let’s move on now, shall we?)

Most of us spend a lot of time on the material in the presentation, and very little on the presentation itself. But dumping your notes into PowerPoint slides is akin to serving Bobby Flay cuisine on dirty paper plates.

For anyone working in an idea-based business (such as you and me), coming up with ideas doesn’t mean squat if you can’t sell them. We sell ideas in presentations — whether those presentations take place in a boardroom or a co-worker’s cubicle — which means that presentations form the very building blocks of our careers.

In today’s marketing environment of chaos and insecurity, you have to fortify your ideas to face the most hairy decision-making moments. Below, a few tips for turning between great hypothetical ideas and great produced ideas.

Think of the client’s concerns before they do.
Ahead of the meeting, be brutally honest with yourself and your team in pinpointing the weak spots in your ideas. That way, you can address those if the client brings them up. Consider all aspects of your client needs, concerns, insecurities, politics, and biases that you’ll have to overcome in order to earn their genuine consideration. The point isn’t to defensively fight for your work, but rather, to avoid being caught flat-footed by a tough question.

Be able to articulate every element of your recommendations.
Don’t send your ideas out alone and defenseless into the meeting. Be able to clearly explain every element of your work, why you did things the way you did, and the reasoning for it. Odds are that you didn’t develop your recommendations by randomly shooting darts at a spreadsheet; make sure the client knows that too.

Have “Plan B” ready if your work isn’t approved.
Decide what elements of the work you’re willing to compromise, and what you’re not, so that you can pick your battles.

Help your audience support your ideas.
Give your client all the tools he or she needs to then turn around and sell the ideas internally, even when you’re not present. Whether or not you have a “leave-behind,” make sure they can articulate and defend in your absence.

Remember that no presentation is more important than the relationship.
When you’re passionate about what you’re working on, that passion can be a fantastic selling tool because it shows you believe in the work. However, there is no single idea that’s good enough to trash the overall relationship over it. The reality is that there are more good ideas at your disposal these days than there are clients.

If the presentation starts sucking wind, don’t wait to find out what’s going wrong.
Instead of nervously pushing forward to make it out alive, try to rustle the pink elephant out of the bushes. Acknowledge the situation with a little diplomatic honesty: “I could be wrong, but by those veins throbbing in your temples, I’m sensing that this isn’t working for you.” Only once they express their concerns can you then redirect attention to solving them.

Finally, check the kitchen counter before you walk out the door.
(Just in case.)

If You Want to Make It in this Business, Bring on the Big Ideas

The world headquarters of TBWA Advertising was located at 292 Madison Avenue, back when a Madison Avenue address was still de rigueur for an agency’s letterhead. It was the summer of 1991, and TBWA was in full swing with the iconic Absolut campaign, now polishing its fame to blinding perfection. The agency exuded the untouchable cool of an international catwalk model: aloof, poreless, slightly bored, altogether intimidating. If advertising had paparazzi, they would’ve camped outside the door. Entering the lobby made one feel suddenly self-conscious, acutely aware of some otherwise irrelevant detail, such as the fact that the dry cleaner’s seamstress had recently re-sewn a button in a slightly off-color thread. Yet on the first day of my unpaid summer internship at TBWA, walking into that lobby, I felt no intimidation whatsoever. Not because I possessed that same unattainable cool, but quite the opposite. I was too clueless even to have a clue of how clueless I was. Just two weeks earlier I’d graduated from college wearing my new $29.95 Thom McCann white pumps that coordinated with my Laura Ashley hair bow.

During my first week, I discovered a most startling fact: The creative department staff locked their file drawers at night. Why? So no one could steal their ideas. This, as you might imagine, intrigued me entirely. What was this intellectual bullion? These same employees unthinkingly left personal valuables such as watches and cameras on their desks at night, yet locked their file drawers? Whatever lay inside those OfficeMax treasure chests, I wanted some of it.

Locking up the ideas was a little extreme. Perhaps. But actually I’m beginning to wonder if our industry knew something back then that we’ve since forgotten: Nothing in an agency is more valuable than ideas.

Until fairly recently, clients and agencies shared a reverence for ideas. For those of you who got into the business recently and have only seen the near-extinct species known as a print ad trapped in amber, here’s a flashback. Computers were a novelty (a spiffy little number named the Mac Classic had just been introduced). Type was still hand-lettered for meetings, then, once approved, sent out overnight to be set. Brands didn’t have to compete for attention with iPods, BlackBerries, YouTube, Wii video games, Facebook or Netflix. They barely had to compete with cellphones, websites or a newfangled thing called e-mail. Media options were so limited (single page or spread?) that we didn’t have to deal with an entire range of variables, which meant that if a timeline was a week long, six-and-a-half days were spent developing the strategy and idea.

Advertising has changed since then — and decidedly for the better. We’re entering a new renaissance, one with more creative opportunities than ever before, a time when “idea” is no longer synonymous with a 30-second TV spot. Yet in our rush to conquer new media, true insights are often becoming an afterthought. Especially among clients. We’re at risk of going to an opposite extreme, throwing out the baby with the 30-second bathwater. As we’re exploring various mobile-platform-this and Facebook-application-that, there’s only a fraction of time and energy left over to spend on a little thing I’ll nostalgically call “the concept.”

Caveat: Lest you think I’m a cantankerous old-timer with a “those were the good ol’ days” chip on my shoulder, please know that’s not the case. I’m not romanticizing the sepia-toned days of traditional media or suggesting we return to churning butter by hand. New media is very cool and very necessary, and unquestionably the future of our business.

To be successful over the long haul, your career can’t be founded upon trendy epiphanies or shiny new executions. Just as a pun wasn’t a concept in the late 80s, a typographical treatment wasn’t a concept in the mid 90s and shock value wasn’t a concept in the late 90s, so does new media need a core idea in order to reach its full potential. Most new-media revelations will seem laughably quaint in a few years. But true human insight will never go out of style.

Our greatest value — as employees, leaders and entrepreneurs — will come from the substance of our ideas. The people who have the most job security, make the most money, carry the most prestige — at all levels, in all departments, across advertising, marketing, film, PR and every other communication profession — are idea people. They can consistently do the heavy lifting of solving problems with new solutions. These stars do much more than merely sell; they have the horsepower to expose something so incredibly potent about our needs, values and ambitions that they can incite a change in behavior. Think about that. In a cynical and jaded world, few governments have enough juice to voluntarily change behavior among millions of people the way Apple can.

The reality is that now there’s less time for big ideas, and depressingly, in an age of fear and uncertainty, often less client appetite for those ideas. We’re all running in a million directions at once. On many assignments, the process is so pressured and frenzied that we’re forced to skip a stage of mental heavy lifting: that amniotic mess when a brand engages deeply with the messy and difficult question of what it actually wants to say. Even presentations to clients are starting to showcase forms of media in place of concepts:

Agency: We’re proposing a new concept: a series of webisodes.

Client: Interesting. What are they about?

Agency: Ah, don’t know yet. We’ll figure it out later.

When authentic insight starts to lose currency in the client equation, we devalue our raison d’etre, thereby leaping to the slippery slope of commoditizing who we are and what we do.

Call me retro, but I miss the craft. Increasingly, our process has been crushed to the point that it no longer includes those magical steps in which we sort through a litter of irrelevant data to discover a single, glittering truth, to polish that truth into a meaningful message, then finally to adjust this message through countless mental Rubik’s Cube variations until it clicks into the perfect combination of thoughts and emotions.

There are countless fantastic exceptions — hellooooo, Dove “Evolution”! — that have an awesome concept in which brand message is intrinsically born out of its media. Yet in and of itself, “YouTube” is not a concept. “Second Life” is not a concept. “SMS text” is not a concept. These are forms of media and they still need a killer concept to be used to their fullest potential. The medium might be the message, but it’s still no substitute for a concept. As our media gets cheaper, faster and shorter, don’t allow your thinking to get smaller.

Now, back to the internship. By the end of the summer I’d realized two things with utter certainty: Ideas are the most valuable currency in a career. And more important, I’d stop buying shoes at Thom McCann.

A field guide to your local virtual office

You know all those people who use Starbucks as their office? The ones with laptops, powercords, cell phones, and papers spread out, holding meetings across tiny wooden tables? They used to annoy me. Until I became one.

I began with great disdain. Starbucks is the white-collar lowest common denominator. Like buying an entire wardrobe at The Gap, or a complete living room set from Pottery Barn. In my mind, that’s cultural ebola.

But the truth is, working at Starbucks… works. The comfortably pre-packaged vibe, the familiar music, the Everyman clientèle, they allow you to focus on your job at hand instead of the environment. When I was writing Radical Careering, Starbucks was my office for six months, every workday, up to 8 highly caffeinated hours a day. I had each of the CD memorized in order of rotation. If you were to call my house, my husband would tell you, “She’s at the office.” That’s what we called it. The Office. Eventually, our son thought all mommies worked in offices with racks of baked goods.

Over the course of those months, in addition to learning how to say “barrista” with a straight face, I learned all the unspoken house rules. Rules? Oh yes my friend. Rules. Like all workplaces, Starbucks has its own code of behavior, and god help the rookie who commits a gaffe like stealing a regular’s newspaper. If you’re going to work in this office, do us all a favor. Learn the protocol.

These days I travel constantly, and the world is my corporate headquarters. With so many people consulting, telecommuting, traveling on business, unemployed, Starbucks has create a new form of cubicle-land. Every location glows with laptop screens at any time of day, in any city. Chairman Howard Schultz once envisioned that Starbucks would become the “third place,” behind home and work. For many of us without offices, however, Starbucks has become the second.

What follows is your handbook to the Starbuckian workplace, as well as other virtual workspaces like airports or hotel lobbies.

Rule #1: Establish a favorite Starbucks location.

My primary location (I use several in rotation) was originally a Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s a thinly disguised remodel. Starbucks got rid of the Colonel’s famous recipe and “sporks,” but kept the plastic tiled roof and drive-through. After careful consideration, I did decide against business cards with the address, “Starbucks at the corner of Riverside and Margaret.”

The advantage of frequenting the same location is that you get special treatment from the employees and respect from your fellow regulars. Barristas offer free leftovers from the frozen cappuccino machine. After a while, if I was out of the “office” for a few days, they inquired about my condition with concern while handing me a nourishing sample of marble cake.

Rule #2: Avoid turf wars.

Like most Starbucks, mine comes with precisely TWO purple velvet chairs. If they’re both filled, customers circle like sharks. They eye each other warily over the foam of their lattes, calculating dibs. One guy arrives every morning at, seriously, 7am to get one of the velvet chairs. He knows I prefer the same chair, and we wage an unspoken zoning battle. He usually wins by arriving first, and I swear he taunts me. While I’m uncomfortably shifting positions in my torturous hard-back chair, he stares pointedly at me and settles into his cushy purple fiefdom with appalling self-satisfaction, not even using the three-pronged outlet beside him. Bastard.

My husband suggested I open my own Starbucks franchise so I could sit wherever I damn well pleased. I nodded, envisioning an engraved brass name plaque.

Lucky for us Starbuckians, four new locations open each day, offering us new branch offices. One guy has made it his mission to visit every single location, and he can’t keep up.

Rule #3: Pay for your real estate.

Legally they can’t kick you out once you’ve purchased one item, but squatters are frowned upon. The longer you sit, the more you should buy. Consider it rent.

During a particularly intense project, I loaded up my Starbucks debit card $100 at a time. My husband confessed that he was sick of my clothes smelling like freshly ground beans.

Rule #4: Diversify your diet.

Yes the frosted pumpkin scone is really tasty, but soon it becomes about as appetizing as a shot of tequila after college spring break. Learn from my mistakes. Avoid the palate-numbing effects of daily lunch from the bakery racks. Even Starbuckians cannot live by bread alone.

On a business trip to Hawaii recently (”Honestly, Mr. IRS Auditor, I swear it was for business!”), I was thrilled to see that their Starbucks have expanded beyond the bakery racks, offering innovative yummies such as egg-and-spinach breakfast sandwiches.

Rule #5: If you’re going to sneak food in, be discreet.

I’m not here to judge; I too smuggle in the occasional combo meal. Just be smart. Don’t insult your landlord by flashing your McD’s styrofoam cup of coffee.

On the down low, I can tell you that it is possible to have a pizza delivered to a Starbucks. For this, I recommend the outdoor seating.

Rule #6: Keep your cell phone calls to yourself.

We all know how it goes. You get a call, and suddenly you’re so focused on the caller that you don’t realize you’re speaking louder than the espresso machine. However your fellow Starbuckians sit within a 5 yards radius. We don’t need a meticulous rehashing of your weekend exploits.

Rule #7: Observe airplane etiquette on conversation.

Many Starbuckians enjoy a rousing chat about the weather. Many don’t. Just because you and the person sitting next to you are both drinking coffee, that doesn’t mean you’re out having a cup of coffee together.

Rule #8: It’s not okay to put your bare feet up on a stool.

No matter how much Starbucks feels like a living room, no matter how soothing you find James Taylor’s “Fire & Rain” on the CD cycle, do not take your shoes off.

Rule #9: Avoid Starbucks on legal holidays.

President’s Day, Washington’s Birthday, and all those other so-called “holidays” are a Starbuckian nightmare. Swarms of worker-bees are freed from their brick-and-mortar hives and descend en masse on our workplace. Sure, we’re happy to share our ottomans with “civilians.” as long as they don’t raise the sunshades without asking first.

Rule #10: Befriend your fellow Starbuckians.

Each Starbucks has a high percentage of regulars, and they become your community of co-workers. They’ll watch your laptop while you dash to the bathroom, or offer to switch places if you need to sit closer to the outlet. It’s the Starbuckian way, to respectfully smile and nod before returning to our venti chai lattes.

Hey, I’m a regular. I’m allowed to use words like “venti.”

Or: Why You Have Millions of Che Guevaras Running Through Your Halls

They’re lighting the town square ablaze, running amok through the embassies, yanking down statues and looting the stores.

Who? Your consumers. And if you’re smart, you’ll grab a torch and join them.

Anarchy is the breakdown of formal, traditional structure toward an egalitarian system. Think of the power shift from established forms of information to consumer-directed content. From encyclopedias to Wikipedia. From publishing to blogs. From movie theaters to iPod screens. From retail locations to pop-up stores. And in case you hadn’t noticed, from traditional paid media to all those new forms of digital media spawning like bunnies.

And if you think you’re avoiding those Molotov cocktails, duck again. Sometimes even the full array of Web 2.0 weaponry can’t protect you. When Fortune 500 media plans look like they’ve been through a Cuisinart, when agencies don’t know how to use the new forms of mobile media let alone how reach consumers with them, when Nike transfers its shoe account to Crispin Porter, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Anarchyland.

Anarchy isn’t a new concept. The Declaration of Independence once was considered a document of anarchy. A couple hundred years later, in “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman described the internet’s role in rebellion: “Consumers were getting a taste of power, and once they tasted it, things went from companies being in control of consumers’ behavior to consumers being in control of companies’ behavior.” However, many companies don’t much like consumers having the control over their brands. They still think of a brand as something the company says about itself, rather than what consumers say about it. But trying to impose a brand upon consumers works about as well as fighting barbarians at the gate with an invitation to high tea.

An example. Companies are coming to terms with the need to be “transparent” with consumers, realizing that poor service, shoddy products, and old-economy weaknesses can’t be shellacked with a fresh coat of PR. But instead of genuinely fixing problems and being transparent about it, they’re trying to “do” transparency, managing their image via corporate blogs and videos. Transparency is not a strategy. Strategies are voluntary and optional, and transparency is neither. Like it or not, consumers will pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

In 1993, I heard Neil French’s then-unthinkable assertion that an ad did not require a headline or tagline or body copy or visual or — hold on to your seats, folks — a logo. Whoa. No logo? In a post-David Ogilvy world, that was considered revolutionary. But for today’s clients, logos and ad agencies are both entirely optional.

On the bright side, marketers have it good compared to movie studios, record labels and those poor TV networks. As The Wall Street Journal declared, “American Idol has single-handedly changed the television’s revenue model and viewership habits.” While TV content has always been formally scripted and controlled by networks, once again, control moves over to consumers. Oh and by the way, have you heard of this thing called TiVo?

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to glorify the old days. Today we can be creative in the truest sense, inventing not just new scenarios for TV campaigns but entirely new ways of thinking and communicating. That’s cool. Everything is fair game. Nothing is off limits. Anarchy allows brands to play and experiment as never before.

You can’t manage anarchy, but you can use it to your advantage. Better yet, become an anarchist yourself. The point isn’t to merely survive the craziness, but flourish within it. Incidentally, how do you look in a beret?

Anarchy loves the underdog. The smaller the budget, or the lower your awareness, or the newer your brand, or the more apathetic your consumers, the more anarchic your concepts can be. Must be. Being an underdog is a mind-set rather than a balance sheet, as proven by Google and Apple.

In anarchic economy, ideas are more valuable than execution. If you’re only making money on production and media buys, as most agencies do — ah, how do I say this delicately? — you’re screwed. Say you create a YouTube video that costs $1,000 in production and $0 in media, yet is viewed by over 1,000,000 consumers. How do you bill for that? Fundamentally changing the types of ideas we create requires us to invent a new compensation structure that rewards the power of the idea.

Create ideas that unite hearts and minds. Brilliant advertising from Dove and Skittles don’t rely on newfangled media to get noticed. Alternatively, for some of the best ideas going, the media is the idea. Think of Calvin Klein’s living Times Square billboard, JWT’s “Lovebites” series for Sunsilk, and Mini’s new Hammer & Coop campaign.

Demolish your ivory tower. Award shows struggle to create new categories that reflect current forms of media (does anyone really do black-and-white magazine small space anymore?). In the same way, we all need to find ways of looking beyond our own categories, departments and industries to borrow/steal best practices. Advertising agencies does this very, very poorly. But that’s another column for another day.

On your way out, don’t forget to take a brick from the wall as it comes crumbling down. Not for posterity. For selling one day on eBay.