Lesson Forty-Five: Tricks to Avoiding Committees

My friend Dominic is utterly unemployable.He’s terrifically smart, insightful, funny and well-educated, but what continually gets him fired from every job he gets is his inability to restrain from telling the truth.

“This woman I work with—Kathy—is a complete moron,” he tells me in his booming voice, thrashing his arms in exasperation. Dominic is like my two-year-old, his enthusiasm cannot be contained by mortals. “During a brainstorming meeting—which I hate, anyways—she throws out these useless ideas. Not just one, but terrible idea after terrible idea. I mean, remarkably bad. Unforgivable. Everyone in the room is trying to ignore her and just push through, but she won’t relent. Finally I say, very politely, ‘Kathy, your suggestions are not helping us.’ She shoots back, ‘No idea is a bad idea when you are brainstorming.’ So then I say, ‘Why is it only the truly stupid who say that?’ I think I crossed the line because after that they fired me. Turns out Kathy filed a complaint.

“It’s OK, I made sure I had a good severance package when I took the job.”

Dominic has developed a brilliant formula for gauging the collective intelligence of a committee:

“Take the lowest IQ in the group, divide that number by the amount of committee members and you have the Committee IQ. The more people, the worse the group,” he explains.

I think he’s on to something.

Good marketing—hell, good business—requires intelligent and occasionally risky decisions. It takes a bit of the maverick spirit to say, “Screw what everyone else is doing. If they’re going left, we’re going right. If they’re going down, we’re going up.”

Rarely will a committee take this kind of collective risk.

I will often tell clients, “We can do good work for you, or lousy work. The cost is the same, but it is completely up to you.”What I mean is that for marketing to be effective, it must be interesting. You can’t bore someone into buying from you.

Having the courage to make decisions against the grain will always be tough. And while sometimes those decisions will fail, the successes will more than make up for it.

Did you know that a committee of America’s best adverting and programming reps unanimously concluded that the Charlie Brown Christmas Special—the longest-running cartoon special in history, airing every year since its debut in 1965—would fail dismally because it had no laugh track, used amateur voice actors and had an obscure jazz soundtrack?

As it turned out, the debut was seen in more than 15 million homes, capturing nearly half of the possible audience. It won critical acclaim as well as an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program and a Peabody Award for excellence in programming.

Imagine if the head of the network had listened to that committee.

If you’re not sure whether you’re making good decisions, I know a great guy who needs a job. I guarantee he’ll tell you the truth. Fear is contagious. Beware of committees.