I've just viewed a video clip of Coca Cola's "Open Happiness" commercial and found it most enchanting! The ideas behind Coke's marketing campaigns, which are always so refreshing and memorable, must come from the ingenious "jeans" the industry term for people who work in the creative departments of advertising agencies. Account management personnel, on the other hand, are called "suits" because they have to dress smart to make a good impression on clients.
The reason why creative people are allowed to wear jeans is that they will be able to feel more relaxed, and therefore less constrained when churning their creative juices to produce unconventional ideas. A company that obviously believes in this line of thinking is Google, which has broken all boundaries by according its employees the trust and freedom all other employees in the world can only dream about!
Creativity is so rife in this company that even the chefs running the dozen or so eateries at its headquarters compete with each other daily to come up with the most creative menus to entice as many of the employees as they can! Google's radical management style must be working well because for a company that released its IPO only five short years ago, its share price has risen very sharply and stayed on top during the financial crisis, and it has secured its position as one of the world's most iconic companies today.
Finding new approaches to success
The global marketplace now is a very different creature from before. Many of us are still coming to terms with the invasion of new-age concepts and trends like twittering, cloud computing, publishing, carbon trading, sustainable development, mobile labor pools and silver tsunamis.
Our human instinct has always been to follow the heard, but in a world seeing so many upheavals, it is necessary for us to break out of the mold. We have to take more radical approaches to keep pace with the changes in our environment. The natural, social and economic structures around us will keep evolving, and so must we, to survive.
For instance, in view of the portable new media technologies and mobile workforce, we should rethink the way we organize our human resource strategies. In certain industries, it might be feasible to restructure the age-old "nine-to-five" work routine into something more flexible, to fully harness the experience of older workers, the know-how of IT-savvy, younger workers and the skills of foreign workers, and ultimately satisfy our customers' needs.
Break out of the mould!
