(really) entrepreneureal

As the global economy tanks, I’m struck by the number of clients and partners who express frustration with their inability to alter the status quo of their business environment, due either to bureaucratic inertia, lack of motivation, or perceived general helplessness.  This is an issue that is particularly poignant for small companies, because they often intersect with much larger organizations on a regular basis and are forced to deal with the momentum and weight of the “status quo” each and every time.

This sense of frustration isn’t new.  Business tales abound of the small contractor/company/consultant fighting to get things done for a large(r) client, and the endless frustration that usually follows.  Indeed, there are thousands of companies that make a great living by challenging the internal status quo of larger institutions (these folks are generally called “consultants”, which elicits much the same sentiment as that other term, “lawyers”) because these larger organizations grew at the expense of what (I assume) made them great to start with.

My advice is usually this: give yourself the freedom to make choices that stay true to your identity as an individual or company.  Because at the end of the day, if we don’t own the freedom to make the right/best/most creative/most effective/game changing choices, then we’ll never be able to say that we’ve done enough and truly tried our best.  This could mean something as simple as choosing a different tack with a client, or on the extreme end, even turning a client down.  Whatever the case, it simply isn’t helpful to point to the bureaucracy, or the “higher ups”, or the “status quo”, as reasons for not trying something new, or making sure that you get the job done to the ultimate satisfaction of the number one client – you.

On the positive side, that people are expressing frustration at all means that they are re-evaluating things, and perspective can never hurt.  It is funny to see, though, how many people are quick to shrug off the advice of “owning freedom” as trivial.  Sure, it certainly isn’t easy and will take a load of practice, but the end result in more than worth the effort.  It’s almost as if feeling free to live the business and life that we want has been drilled out of us.

Time to get it back.

I found out something fascinating today about the U.S. government.  For a lumbering bureaucracy long criticized for its impregnable walls, poor internal communication, and miles and miles of cubicle heaven, there is one office within the fortress that would seem to have a step up on the others: LPA.  Since LPA refers to a current client of mine I certainly can’t disclose the full name here, but if you did a simple Google Search you might be able to guess at which office I have in mind.  For the time being I’ll call it the office-that-shall-not-be-named.

How did I figure out just how powerful this little backwater of the U.S. federal government is?  Well, I have previously referred to an ongoing design project, replete with its hiccups and speedbumps, and was – until this morning – under the impression that the main management team had agreed on a color schema for a core piece of the project (rhymes with “no-go”).  Turns out that the office-that-shall-not-be-named took offense to one of the colors in particular because it did not fit in with the ‘branding guidelines’ of the overall organization.

This in spite of the fact that the explicit mission of the project was to remove it far as possible from the main organization in terms of content, voice, branding, and identity – and the color schema was designed precisely with this in mind.

Of course, there is a certain logic to having LPA oversee branding and marketing materials: because if every project needed its own identity, the main organization would soon look like a horrible Frankenstein of mix-and-match parts, held tenuously together by little more than duct tape and accountants.

Or would that really be the case?  Maybe LPA has authority over visual branding because it’s the easiest (read: only) aspect of the thousands of projects in the ether that it can possibly hope to control.  But does it really make sense to link projects by color scheme?  Does it make sense to link them at all?  Maybe the strength of the organization should come from a core ethos that is translated through every project, regardless of what colors it flies under.

One can dream…