Torture the Process Until Truth Rings

“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.”

“Out of my blunt nature came my most defining aspect of management: I encouraged and insisted upon extreme argument in every creative area. It was loud and it was something of a free-for-all, and every voice got attention if that voice had passion. I was like a bandleader conducting lots of dissonant instruments clanging together. But if you listened, really listened to this cacophony, out would come, after exhaustion and sometimes late into the night, the refinement of an idea into something actionable. I called it “creative conflict,” and since then I’ve prized it as the best process for decision-making. It was sometimes tedious and often more than boisterous, and it was certainly not for everybody, nowhere near politically correct by today’s often oversensitized standards. But I learned to use it to tease out the base truth of whatever was up for discussion, because at some mostly tortured point the truth rang out in my head and I knew what to do. Eventually, I adapted it to fit into almost all my business decisions, and it’s this process that has since guided me more than anything else. I’ve never thought decision-making should be peaceful. Despite today’s standards of enforced and usually dull civility, I still believe passionate, argumentative debate is the best way.”