Denial as Quality Control

““This is not an easy man to be friendly with. But then some people say I’m not easy either. Understand one thing, he always grumbles. He wakes up, he grumbles: this isn’t good enough, that isn’t good enough, you don’t know how to run a hotel, you don’t make enough money for me, it’s Thursday. I tell him this and he laughs but it’s Leng Beng way of operating.””

“Kwek often expects near instant results, delivery or products. His favourite phrase is “quick, quick, quick.””

“I couldn’t understand why opening a picture nationally, using television, wasn’t a better idea than what they’d been doing. I had learned long ago that ad making was mostly about saying no to the ad makers. As in, “No, it’s just not good enough,” and “No, you can’t go home until you make it better.” The standard process at Paramount was to review three or four concepts that the ad department corralled from outside vendors, toss them around for a few minutes, and pick one.”

“I came to understand that denial—refusing to accept an ad that didn’t jump off the page and resonate—was the only thing that mattered. I’ve always believed that if you push people past their endurance, good things come. Rarely does a great ad or a great TV spot appear on the first try, and when it does it’s clear instantly and you don’t have to talk around it. What I call “torturing the process” works. Saying “It’s okay” or “It’ll do” is repellent. Never compromise. There wasn’t an idea for a movie or an ad or television spot I didn’t torture: we had the noisiest, rowdiest sessions that lasted into the night, trying to come up with ideas for movies, with the best advertisements, and it was usually after some exhaustion that original ideas emerged.”