Roger’s Rule #2: Adrenaline Can Become a Powerful Opiate

Rule #2: “Adrenaline Can Become a Powerful Opiate”

 I have to begin this one with a caveat: I was never a crammer in college. I hardly ever began studying the night before an exam; usually I would give it three or four days or, with a big exam, even a week.   However, I still believe this rule is scintillatingly valid and perhaps the most important of all new business rules.  

Here’s why.  

To actually win a new business pitch, you have to prepare yourself (see Rule #3). What does that mean? It means understanding the client’s product, consumer, competitive environment et al as thoroughly as you possibly can (and that’s just the first step). Then you and your smartest people have to spend time strategizing – how can we make our client’s product stand out and be desirable to its target audience against its given competitive frame? Then the fun begins: creative development.  

There’s no way this can be done in one night, nor one or two days, nor even really in one week. It takes time, it takes concentration, it takes discourse.  

There are many reasons this all can get crammed into one or two nights. It could be the agency is extremely busy and manpower is tight. Understandable, but then you should realize you’re just rolling the dice. It could be that, despite your best efforts, time just slips away. Poor planning. Or a myriad of other reasons, none of which hold water.  

The worst possible excuse for cramming? At the last minute a senior exec comes in and kills – or changes — everything. Believe me, it happens. During my days at Y&R it was a common occurrence. Each time that happens, you might as well just cancel the meeting the next day. You don’t have a chance.  

The problem is, even under these trying circumstances, you all get hyper-motivated. Your adrenaline takes over and it turns into an opiate, a quite powerful one at that. What seems brilliant at 3AM in the morning most usually turns into a pumpkin at meeting time. It’s almost like the “Emperor Has No Clothes.” You can’t look at anything objectively at this point and see the flaws in what you’re doing.  

In the meeting the next day, you suddenly discover that the presentation doesn’t hold together. The brilliant strategic analysis from the night before may still be brilliant but it has nothing to do with the work soon to come. The positioning which was properly strategized over for a week or so and set in stone– and unfortunately rewritten countless times over the previous night due to senior management intervention – now makes no sense. The creative has a spark of an idea, but ignores one of the most important points made during the briefing.  

And the worst thing? You don’t begin realizing this until you begin presenting. And when you do, the sweat starts poring down your face and your eyes begin to bulge like Ralph Kramden’s on that episode when he appeared on “The Sixty Thousand Dollar Answer”  

The best way to avoid this is to involve senior management early (Rule #8 which I’ll cover in a few weeks). If they want to be involved, they have to be a full-fledged member of the team, involved in the process throughout an elongated period of time. There are many reasons why they try to resist this – which I will cover soon – but, no matter how high and mighty this senior exec is – or thinks he or she is – if  they choose to act in this egotistical, self-flattering manner they will be violating an important corollary to this rule: “There is no such thing as a midnight genius.”