Picasso, the Lion and the Lean Movement
A man walked into Picasso’s studio one day to see how the great man worked.
Picasso was smoking a cigarette looking at a large stone. After walking around it once or twice, Picasso declared that it would become a wonderful Lion.
The visitor to Picasso’s studio asked how he would create the Lion from the stone.
Picasso replied, “I’m going to chip off every little bit that doesn’t look like a Lion”.
We love this story. We like the sentiment you should keep on going over, and over things, until they are right.
We also like the thinking of the “Lean manufacturing” manifesto, popularised by Eric Ries in his book the Lean Startup. In it, he talks a lot about having lots and lots of “iterations” of a product or service, learning from each.
Much of marketing doesn’t work like Picasso and the Lion, or “Lean”. Instead there tends to be a linear process that leads to a “TA DAH!” moment and everyone hopes that everything will work as intended. Is this how your process works?
We run our company using a simple DEFINE -> DECIDE -> DO cycle, that repeats over, and over. That means by the time you’ve read this, we’ll have checked it, tested it, and, done it again, at least twice. We think this will improve our product faster than crafting a blog post (for example) for a long time, only to find out that no-one liked the concept!
Having an agile process and culture, that feeds from smart data and analytics to help drive the learning, is critical to success in today’s fast moving climate.
Have you upgraded your processes, and those of your agencies to reflect the demands of modern marketing?
If you’d like to see how we work, then give us a call, we can’t promise a Picasso-like Lion, but we can promise a beautiful work in progress, and perhaps the chance to win a Lion of your own..
