Emperor of the New Bind

An advice for freshers in the creative industry

Over fifteen years now, we have been involved in recruiting designers and other personnel connected to creative industry. Every month now, at least a hundred resume and portfolios from fresh graduates land-up on our company email, seeking internship or employment. In a small company like ours, it sometimes becomes difficult even to acknowledge all of them. Surprisingly, in an industry that is 50 years old in India, it is difficult to find people with experience more than five years on a consistent area/platform. So the creative industry, especially designers, ends up employing a whole younger lot. I have been noticing that there has been a change in expectations from ‘fresher’ in the profession. Our own knowledge leadership in some areas has progressed from just 'product design' or 'graphic design' swiftly to ‘Design Research’, ‘India Insights’, ‘Megatrends & Foresighting’, ‘Productisation’  'Creative Engineering' etc. while speed of delivery, like any other field, has also gone up. I thought it would be good to jot down some of the basics that we struggle to inculcate in the freshers. Infact this may be useful to all ‘freshers in the service industry’ on how to prepare brace for the changing professional world around them.

1.      QUICK PRIMING:  Lead team goes and meets clients. Understands their business complexity and vision stages. Team also expounds the work done earlier at Onio at length and comes back charged with the mandate to be handed over to the creative team. At this juncture, seniors in the team are looking for quick resonances of the though process within the team. A classical mind suggests “this is just the beginning of the assignment...just collecting information right now”- While the new mind actually puts the project on the mental assembly line already. Mind starts searching immediate correlations, possibilities and some time even some preliminary thoughts on outcome, without getting attached to it.  In a days’ time, the new mind has actually chewed the content and it is now ready with a set of some important questions for the client. New mind’s best tool is Google and the best friend is solitude. New mind is absorbs fast and tries to run concurrently on conception and delivery.

2.      STRUCTURE IT: Sun Tzu says in the ‘Art of War’- “that army shall win which arrives first and waits for the enemy”. In the era of downpour of information and reducing attention span, it is stupid to let the audience /boss/client structure the content pushed down to them. People want to grab the sense of everything you are saying, top down i.e. they quickly want to understand the macro-context and then a ‘bit’ of micro. Rarely someone wants to go whole hog in your presentations. We work with European clients as well with Asian clients. Koreans would insist on putting complete story on one slide, with top five conclusions/actions also. While Europeans would call it kitsch and would go in a more story telling way. However, our experience shows that the world is tilting to East now. How fast a person can assimilate thoughts and how smoothly one can put them in visual hierarchy, gets the cake.

3.      HOT FRONT SEATING:  It is usually cozy back there. The one on the front has to go through the grill of handling comments and expectation on the opposite ends. Sooner one gets the taste of being there on the front, the faster his/her personality gets the boost. Those who let themselves fall in the background, remain untouched from the brutal shocks of ‘prim and proper communication’, tight deadlines, negotiation on the delivery front etc., but they also lose all the glamour of meeting high & the mighty, travel to far off places and also building a personal brand.

4.      10000 HOUR RULE STAYS: Well this is not my proposition. Malcom Gladwell already proposed it in ‘Outliers’. I am just copying it for the sake of validating his point of view and supporting it with my experience. We have seen how smooth talkers with no-substance winning the first chance, but sooner or later, they fall like a dry leaf. Getting a good command on any domain and any skill is going to take years. More than often, you would need a good guide and a mentor in the initial years, who could happen to be a tough boss. Persevere it. People who found their way inside Onio by being street smart were also shown the street soon Organisation has its own mind. System, sooner of later, ejects a person not really fitting in. On the contrary, those who began humbly; built their skills brick by brick and remained honest about it, proved to be the winners and became a darling of the team.

5.      POSITIVITY MEETS POSITIVITY: As one enters the organization, one comes across a variety of people and a variety of vibes. A happy lot will be envied. A disgruntled lot will try to increase their clout. The neutral lot will try to see the newbie with indifference and “let’s see” eyes. It is up to the new entrant, to pick up the right side of the situation. No system can hang in negativity for long. It resolves itself one way or the other. So make sure to listen to those who are still anchoring positivity. There must be deeper reasons. 

6.      CURATE YOUR WORK: Care for your work and your work place like ‘painting of the Monalisa in Louvre’ respectively. However ordinary the job and the work place is, it must be taken just about a little less than the worship (equating the daily work to worship, denigrates the spiritual realm, in my opinion).  People who forget to close the door behind or to put the chair back in place when they leave, are actually the people who can’t find the document in time or can’t recall an important conversation with the client. People who were found to be careless in communication were also the people who were careless in their work. Though there are exceptions everywhere. Seniors are always looking for a person whom they can trust for full delivery of a task assigned. People who are half committed to themselves, are also half committed to the work and the company they are working for.