♦ Interactive Case: Weigh in with your solution to this dilemma and vote on the experts’ advice. EEEEEeeeeeeeee. The braking Boeing had barely ceased its banshee wail before Barton Brady’s cell phone piped up. “Viva Las Vegas”—the king of ring tones—belted out of its tiny speaker just as the flight attendant announced their arrival at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport. Brady glanced around, acknowledging the amused appreciation of his fellow first-class passengers, whose own phones soon joined in to create a cacophonous chorus. Brady unzipped a rhinestone smile to give his voice its trademark winning tone. “Shoot,” he sparkled, working the smirk as if his life depended on it. “Bang, bang. You’re dead.” It was his colleague Yasmin Buonarroti, Serendipity Associates’ hard-nosed, hardheaded, hard-boiled, hardball pitcher-in-chief. Brady relaxed his jaw. He’d smiled practically nonstop for 72 hours, throughout the star-studded conference in Germany he’d attended. Brady was a salesman to his back teeth and well accustomed to serious incisor action, but even he had his limits. “Hey,” he said. “We just touched down. Good to be home.” “Anything interesting in Nuremberg?” Buonarroti inquired. “It was completely crazy,” Brady laughed, despite his exhaustion. “The conference began with a fistfight, continued with a full-blown riot, and ended up—” “Cool,” Buonarroti cut in. Brady could detect the tension in his colleague’s voice. “What have I missed?” he ventured. “Pixar said no to Rémy’s Ratiocinator,” Buonarroti said flatly. “And the Dan Brown assignment is on hold. I’m telling you—there’s something going on. Rosenkreutz reckons we’re being underbid.” Brady frowned. Pixar and Dan Brown were two of Serendipity’s long-standing clients—clients who appreciated the power of language, the worth of words. The price-war theory didn’t make sense to Brady. The management-metaphor boutique he headed was the hottest of hot shops, and the rarefied service it dispensed was as far from a commodity as Saks was from Sears. Serendipity Associates had a lot of things to worry about—talent retention, client confidentiality, and rustling up sizzling similes, snappy sound bites, and synapse-seizing slogans—but margin pressure wasn’t one of them. SA had always worried about sound bites and slogans—not price wars. “I’ll grab a cab to the office,” he said. “Rosenkreutz is already outside baggage claim, waiting to pick you up.” As he flicked the phone shut, Brady couldn’t help noting, as he always did, its sleek lines and perfect heft. The Vertu Vainglory was the most coveted device on the planet, with good reason. There was no mistaking the Frank Anderson Smith touch. Who knew where the thing was assembled—probably somewhere in Asia. But the design? Definitely Californian. Badder than Badinage On any ordinary day, Brady relished striding through the marbled, palm-peppered halls of McCarran International, grabbing glimpses of his reflection in its mirrored surfaces. He reveled in the ringing ranks of slots, the gaudy ads for glitzy attractions, the pheromonic, phantasmagoric atmosphere of winning big. It may have been tacky to the tenth degree, but he loved the smell of gaming in the morning. Unfortunately, this was not shaping up to be an ordinary day. Ignoring the phantasmarama, he hurried toward the Russell Road entrance. Sure enough, he spotted Rosenkreutz pacing by the curb. An SA mainstay, Chas Rosenkreutz was a Vegas original. He styled himself a bagman, bruiser, and big-time bad guy, a consigliere’s consigliere. No surprise: Rosenkreutz specialized in competitive intelligence. As he loved to remind people, he’d been on the front lines of some of the biggest marketing battles in recent memory. If decorations were awarded for such action, he’d have collected the New Coke Cross, the Segway Star, and the Ronald McDonald Medal of Honor. He’d even done a tour of duty in ’Nam. Pan Am, that is. Rosenkreutz was not a handsome man. He had a face like a Botoxed warthog’s. Worse, he was wearing a shiny Valentino suit with lapels the size of stealth fighters. As Brady approached, Rosenkreutz shrugged his shoulders in that bada-boom manner, placed a protective palm across his double-breasted midriff, and nodded curtly to his boss. “Whadja find out, Chas?” Brady asked apprehensively. “Is the Danster really ditching us?” Rosenkreutz’s cocked eyebrow reminded Brady to be extra careful. Espionage was rampant in the management-metaphor business and eavesdropping an everyday occurrence. In a world where words were bearer bonds and coinages were coinage, a good-to-great metaphor was worth its weight in Fortune 500 gold, particularly if it was built to last. Sliding into a saber-toothed SUV, Brady shifted deftly into SA’s code-word protocol. The corporate equivalent of Defcon One to Defcon Five, it used the names of local casinos to signal the threat level. “Tropicana” flagged a little local difficulty, “MGM Grand” meant a fairly major problem, “Bellagio” translated into very, very big trouble, and “Caesars” was a raging inferno at SA’s Fremont Street HQ. He rephrased his question. “How are things on the Strip?” “Serious, boss.” “Caesars serious?” “Worse. We’re in a Wynn-Wynn situation.” Sentenced to Death The pitcher-in-chief was waiting in the boardroom when Brady arrived. Surrounded by Styrofoam cups and half-eaten doughnuts, she was hunched over a Sony Vaio laptop, the one with the built-in fire extinguisher. She looked up as Brady strode in. “Welcome home, handsome.” “Good to see you, Babearroti. Something bothering you there?” Buonarroti spun her Sony around to show him—albeit with difficulty because of its big red canister of USB foam. “At least four people here at SA have already been sent links to this. By their clients. Check it out.” The superbright screen was filled with a blog post in a format Brady knew well: It was GoneWithTheWindows.com, a sulfurous site dedicated to exposing corporate shenanigans and mocking the business world in general. Brady spotted a spoof of SA’s logo and realized his company was the target du jour. The post was by the site’s snarkiest blogger, Rhetorical Butler, and titled “Mixed Metaphormatosis.” Butler started out tamely enough, reminding his audience that the aptly named Serendipity Associates had had the good fortune to be founded in the mid-1990s, just as management teams began relying on consultancies for creative thought leadership. Soon, its offerings had evolved from matrices and frameworks to acronyms and analogies (and even, for a brief time, anagrams—it was SA, for example, that had famously reshuffled “Michael Porter” into “Polite Charmer” and “Rather Polemic,” although, sadly, it failed to find a market for the discovery). Since the turn of the millennium, it had moved into management metaphors. According to Butler, SA had become a “postindustrial Ponderosa, breeding ideas, herding narratives, and rounding up rhetorical devices for the management rodeo, where they compete against purple cows, black swans, scampering squirrels, anguished penguins, indignant mice, disembodied long tails, fluffy-bunny customer care programs, the seven secrets of silverback gorilla leadership, and the rest of the benighted executive-education bestiary.” Luckily for SA, he added, “anthropomorphic allusions don’t live long in corner office captivity; thus, the demand for its free-range figures of speech is incessant.” The malevolent motormouse did pay the firm some grudging respect: “If metaphors are the bits, the bytes, and the binary code of the imagination—if metaphor is the new math—then Brady and Buonarroti are its Fermat and Fibonacci.” But he concluded with a chilling call to action. There was a serious oversupply of management metaphors, and a culling was called for, Butler wrote. “Metaphors look cute, but they are pests, weeds, the kudzu of commerce, the cane toads of thought. It’s time to pick up the red phone and declare war—and Serendipity Associates is ground zero.” Brady grimaced. It would have been easy to mock Butler’s penchant for the very mixed metaphors he disparaged. But Brady knew that mixing metaphors was a surefire way of attracting attention. Figurative mash-ups might be aesthetically unappealing, but they could have a major-league impact. Judging by the feedback pouring in, Rhetorical Butler’s rabble-rousing rant was already triggering Richter-scale ripples throughout the management community. It was beginning to look as though SA’s house was sitting on dangerously shifting sands. All its eggs were in one basket, and the basket was holed below the waterline. Mixing metaphors was contagious, dammit. “We need to respond, don’t we?” Buonarroti asked. “We can’t just ignore this, can we?” Brady had rarely heard his colleague sound so tentative. Buonarroti had the drive of a dump truck, plus the chassis, but even dump trucks have their tipping points. “We’ll respond,” he assured her. “But let’s be careful. This reminds me of the metaphor war of 1999.” “Me, too,” she whispered with a shudder. They looked at each other. Both knew only luck had saved them the last time. The Pluperfect Storm The great shakeout of 1999 had begun innocently enough, when Peter Tompkins, the evangelical management guru behind the 1980s blockbuster In Pursuit of Transcendence, wrote an unusually thoughtful article. In it, the man who’d given the world such timeless slogans as Stick to the Spaghetti, Betty and Close to the Customer’s Pocketbook outlined the three stages in the evolution of management phrasemaking: ornamental, when buzzwords were considered vulgar add-ons to research-based prose; elemental, when the realization dawned that figurative thinking was not only unavoidable but invaluable; and detrimental, when every wannabe management swami was selling a verminous collection of moth-eaten, fly-blown, rat-tailed, cheese-please concepts. Tompkins’s critique, unfortunately, coincided with the arrival of a major new competitive threat in SA’s business. Fashionably late as usual, accountancy firms, full-service advertising agencies, and the upper crust of the pie-chart contingent had decided it was time to get a slice of the strategic-rhetoric action. Competition turned cutthroat at the very moment when boutiques like Serendipity Associates were on their collective back foot. If it hadn’t been for SA’s sideline in TLAs (three-letter acronyms), which allowed it to offer a different CVP to MNCs, its AOK organization would have been in VDS. The day was saved by the arrival of a Hannibal in the shape of Harvard’s Bethany Kando, whose troupe of giant dancing elephants cut the threat off at the pass. Elephants are the bulwarks of the strategic-rhetoric industry; they invariably shore up confidence. Just as Wall Street turns to gold in times of crisis, consultants revert to tusker tropes when the metaphor market wobbles. True, these turns invariably lead to the unedifying sight of blind men palpating bemused pachyderms. Brady sometimes wondered what would happen if the sightless seven groped an ornery hippo in error. The carnage would be indescribable. There might be a reality TV show in it, though. Trope Surge Brady’s musings were interrupted by the rumbling arrival of Rosenkreutz, back from a reconnaissance mission around the neighborhood. Brady looked up hopefully, knowing that Rosenkreutz’s ear to the ground, nose for a story, and eye for the main chance were a formidable combination. Elephant Mannish, yes, but formidable all the same. “What’s the word on the street?” Brady asked. “Fire lane?” Buonarroti suggested anxiously. “Left only? Merge?” When stressed, she was inclined to take every metaphorical expression literally, which was a bit of a bummer in SA’s business. Once, when Rosenkreutz yelled at her for not having a Chinese wall between two beverage-industry account teams, she acidly pointed out that the office decor was Scandinavian. Her reaction was even stronger when a strategic partnership was going nowhere and Rosenkreutz suggested some opening of the kimono. It annoyed Brady, frankly. At times like this, he needed lateral, not literal, thinking. Rosenkreutz ignored her interruption. “It’s Hank Wittgenstein,” he announced. “That’s who’s been poaching our clients.” Brady had never heard of him. “Who?” “Wittgenstein!” Buonarroti spat, determined to show that she, too, was streetwise. “You know him, Barton—he runs that low-rent simile operation outta Reno, Tropes R Us. Calls himself the categorical-imperative killer. Claims he’s a rogue philosopher.” “A rogue philosopher?” Brady repeated with asperity. “What’s with the whole rogue thing these days? There are rogue traders, rogue Realtors, rogue economists, for goodness sakes. What’s next—rogue geologists? Rogue librarians? Rogue veterinar—” Buonarroti cut him off. “He comes at language from a logistician’s standpoint. It’s all high-volume rhetoric, no slow movers. His turns of phrase are three times the industry average. He’s Oxford educated, apparently.” “Ah, that explains his focus on low-rent stuff,” Brady the Yalie said with supercilious satisfaction. “He’s just a bottom-line bottom feeder, someone whose figures don’t add up.” “Whereof one cannot speak,” Rosenkreutz added darkly. “Thereof one must be silent.” He paused for effect. “The word on the street is that Wittgenstein’s moving up the stack…and offshoring his production. He’ll soon be flooding the market with high-quality, low-cost metaphors.” “But they’re bound to be second-rate conceits,” Buonarroti said in a measured tone that betrayed her concern. “Look, every company we know has shifted activity to India, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and so forth. But it’s all left-brain work, like manufacturing and information processing. When it comes to right-brain strengths like conceptualization, imagination, and metaphor making, it’s a different story. You can’t just ship that from some gimcrack factory on the festering outskirts of Sweatshop City.” “Yasmin, you know I agree with you, but let’s think about this for a minute,” Brady cautioned, as his inner bulldog growled a warning. “All Wittgenstein has to do is destabilize a market that’s already twitchy, thanks to Butler’s trash-talking. If Tropes R Us scores a few major projects, intellectual offshoring becomes a reality. And if it succeeds, the entire management consultancy industry could be Y-K-W, W-A-P.” Rosenkreutz raised a ragged eyebrow. “Y-K-W?” “You know where,” Brady explained. “W-A-P?” “Without a paddle.” As Buonarroti continued to remonstrate, rehearsing the differences between good metaphors and great metaphors, between long tails and tall tales, between tipping points and tripping points, Brady rubbed his rugged chin thoughtfully. At Yale, he’d specialized in postcolonial theory; he knew that the most imaginative writing in the English language came from places that had once suffered under the yoke of empire: India, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and—in the days of Poe, Stowe, Melville, and Emerson—America itself. He also knew that if U.S. cultural hegemony continued to wane, as it had been doing in recent years, the country’s creative industries could prove susceptible to outsourcing, downsizing, and undercutting. He was well aware that in the real world IP stood for “impossible to police.” What if Wittgenstein’s move was a whisper on the wind? He raised his head and looked into Rosenkreutz’s porcine eyes. “Where’s he moving his operations, anyway? Do you know?” Rosenkreutz grunted the answer: “Ireland.” The Pluck of the Irish Clutching his chest, Brady gasped at the heinous implications. The most creative right brains on the planet were about to eat SA’s lunch. The country that had constructed America was plotting its deconstruction. Suddenly, Brady had to confront his worst fear, hair loss aside: that the much-vaunted creative economy might not be the salvation of his livelihood, his business, and his country. Even Buonarroti looked spooked. With an exaggerated effort, Brady pushed his chair away from the table, stood slowly, and, after checking it carefully for creases, slipped on his immaculate Zegna jacket. “Look, guys—I’m going for a walk. I’ll be back…at some point.” Buonarroti rolled her eyes. “We don’t have much time, Bart. We should reply to the Butler blog before it builds momentum.” “I need an hour or so. I’m sorry, but I have to think.” Brady headed toward the door and out into the heat of the day. As he made his way along the trash-strewn Strip, past topless shows of bottomless depravity, he wondered what on earth was happening to America. Once the world’s workshop, it had turned into the world’s wordshop. It had become the Willy Loman of the global economy, riding on a simile and a shoeshine. Having just returned from Germany, where manufacturing was still a force to be reckoned with, he feared that America’s ever increasing reliance on right-brain-led innovation was a chimera, a national rationalization, a head-in-the-quicksand scenario, a one-way ticket to postindustrial Palukaville. Would it were otherwise, but it would take more than Pixar, Dan Brown, and the delights of Las Vegas Boulevard to turn the country around. The Mirage was aptly named. Brady glanced up at Caesars’s JumboTron: Breaking news…new hotel-casino for Strip…Winthrop Inc. announces Shining City…more later… Are Brady’s worst fears justified? Daniel H. Pink (dp@danpink.com) is an author and consultant based in Washington, DC. His books include A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future (Riverhead, 2006), Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working For Yourself (Warner Books, 2002), and The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need (Riverhead, 2008), the first American business book in the Japanese comic format known as manga. As zany as this story is, it raises all kinds of serious questions: Does the United States (or Ireland, or any country) hold a sustainable advantage in a conceptual economy? Are high-end knowledge workers immune to globalization’s wage pressures and job displacements? How can a creativity-based business like Serendipity Associates keep its edge? Start with the last of those questions. SA must do what it has always done: Move to higher ground. We’re told about its evolution so far, from matrices to analogies to metaphors, and we infer that its profit margins have expanded along the way. Barton Brady’s new challenge is that the high ground has gotten even higher and the urgency of reaching it even greater. Faced with rising ranks of overseas knowledge workers and powerful advances in software, SA must continue to differentiate itself on the basis of hard-to-offshore and hard-to-automate right-brain abilities: design, narrative, empathy, synthesis, and the iteration of irresistible new offerings for its clients. This approach requires not simply a sound strategy but also a large leap of faith. Growing up in Ohio in the 1970s, as the Rust Belt was rusting, I remember my own father (a smart guy) dismissing the notion that the United States could or should make the transition to a service economy. “We can’t have an economy where everyone is running around giving one another haircuts,” he said. “That will never work.” Alas, neither he nor anyone envisioned social media consultants or personal trainers or search engine optimizers. Although it’s tempting to see what look like natural barriers to progress, the present often blinkers our vision. Does a new higher ground exist for SA and for America? I’d bet my mortgage on it. What precisely does it look like? I don’t know. But higher is the direction successful companies and thriving nations have always moved, and nothing indicates that this historical pattern has been interrupted or repealed. What might steer Brady in the wrong direction, though, is his belief that certain nations hold deep-seated (call them quasi-genetic) advantages when it comes to conceptual and inventive abilities—and that we ought to fear the Irish, in particular. Sometimes research seems to confirm such beliefs. (For example, a report issued by the Irish Management Institute found that in Myers-Briggs personality testing the Irish score significantly higher than Americans or Brits on intuition.) As much as I admire the Celtic Tiger’s economic growth, I don’t think it had to do with DNA. To the extent that any nation has an advantage, it comes from the choices the country makes, not its citizens’ inborn traits. The United States’ edge comes from laws, institutions, and cultural attitudes that encourage and reward risk taking. Strong property rights protect investments and enable future transactions, and bankruptcy laws are built, at least in part, around the notion of a fresh start, sometimes to the detriment of creditors. Great universities give young innovators a place to learn. Robust capital markets allow them to finance their ideas. A country’s advantage comes from its choices, not from the DNA of its people. At the same time, the United States puts its advantage at risk through its approach to elementary and secondary education. Think about it: If you were trying to prepare students for an economy that prizes novelty, nuance, and customization, would you have schools stress routines, right answers, and standardization? No. You might opt for a system more like Finland’s, in which standardized testing is minimal, students and teachers enjoy huge amounts of autonomy, and the focus is on real-world problem solving, not schoolbook exercises. For Brady, this suggests some perhaps counterintuitive advice: Don’t fear the Irish, but keep your eye on those Finns. For the rest of us, the point is broader. If we want our standard of living to continue to rise—at the personal level or the national level—we need to mine the right side of our brains. John Chuang (jchuang@aquent.com) is the chief executive officer and cofounder of Aquent, a Boston-based firm that provides marketing and creative talent to companies around the world. It’s interesting: Creative work has a long history of being “outsourced,” but we don’t usually talk about it that way. It’s much more common to speak of “partnering.” Whatever it’s called, though, it has always made sense, because companies realize that when creative talent is captive to a particular organization, it is hard to keep fresh. Two key developments in recent years have made partnering even more imperative. First, creative work has become more central to the strategic programs of many companies, in large part because manufacturing and technology are no longer the differentiators they used to be. Virtually all laptop computers, for instance, are produced by the same handful of Taiwanese firms. At the same time, the rise of the service economy has created new challenges, making creative design fundamental to delivering great customer experiences. The second, surely related, development is the increased specialization of design work. It used to be that an industrial designer working on a product would handle all the design tasks associated with it. Today a product or service might call for contributions from an experience designer, an interface designer, and an information designer. Look at a novel offering like Best Buy’s Geek Squad, and you see the handiwork of all kinds of specialists, from the transparent menu of prices to the cars and uniforms of the geeks. How does all this relate to Brady’s concern? It explains why creativity hot spots emerge in certain cities around the globe. Once talent separates into specialized disciplines, it seeks locales where demand for such specialties is concentrated. Just as water seeks the lowest ground, talent gravitates to the richest networks and greatest opportunities, so hubs naturally form. Today the hottest spots in the United States are New York, LA, San Francisco, and Chicago. In Asia, they include Singapore, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Dubai is an emerging focal point in its part of the world, especially for architecture. There is nothing fixed about these locales, however—and in the United States they could easily lose their “hub” status thanks to current immigration policy, which prevents companies from importing top talent. We’ve experienced this problem directly at Aquent. Four recent hires, all experts in the field of user-interface creation, were denied the visas that would have brought them to our Boston office. We’re housing them in London instead. On a grander scale, Microsoft was compelled to locate a major new research facility outside the United States. The 300 scientists it recruited from around the world now pay Canadian taxes and fuel the brainpower advantage of Vancouver. Creativity hot spots in the United States are threatened by current immigration policy. Could a Barton Brady, assuming he were real, do anything personally about U.S. immigration policy? Probably not. But he could direct his energy toward rallying (perhaps with a well-crafted metaphor?) a large group of citizens concerned with competitiveness. As for the future of Serendipity Associates, Brady should start by using his beautiful cell phone to talk directly to his clients, rather than relying on the mysterious methods of his intelligence chief. I suspect he might find that the Irish threat is less a matter of cost than of quality. To get back in the game, he and his partners may need to think more broadly about the business they are in. If they redefine it as being about communicating management ideas, rather than only about making metaphors, they might see opportunities for exciting new offerings that could draw clients back. Who knows—it might even be time for a Straight Talk practice. If so, Yasmin Buonarroti seems like a natural to lead it. Richard Phelps is the global lead partner in human resource management at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Based in London, he is a founder of Saratoga, which was acquired by PwC in 2003 and specializes in the measurement and benchmarking of human capital and business functions. I hope that Brady’s walk down the Strip does not yield any provocation other than a determination to take a hard look at the future of his business. In management cliché terms, the crisis it faces is “both threat and opportunity.” The prevailing view among Western executives has been that whereas workers in emerging economies are welcome to take on transactional work through outsourcing and offshoring arrangements, and are even able to perform some low-level knowledge processing, they are simply not equal to the demands of highly creative work. That, it is thought, will continue to be the domain of mature Western economies and indeed will be the salvation of their competitiveness. The facts suggest otherwise. We already see offshoring by the likes of GE, Apple, and Nokia of relatively sophisticated design and advisory services; by such publishers as Macmillan and Oxford University Press of content development; by Walt Disney of animation. Overall, the offshoring of knowledge work is growing by a startling 39% annually, according to statistics compiled by Evalueserve, and is projected to engage an estimated 390,000 professionals by 2011. By then, the number of Western companies offshoring knowledge work will probably exceed 5,000—up from about 900 in 2006. So far, India is the leading beneficiary of these jobs. It has been carving out huge swaths of knowledge work from Western economies for some years, including legal services, R&D, education and training, software development, market research, data analytics, equity research, finance, and advertising. Given the country’s investment in education and the English-language facility of the Indian workforce, India will most likely remain a favored region for some time. But China, Russia, Poland, the Philippines, Hungary, and former Soviet republics also provide increasingly high levels of skill at comparatively low cost. In short, the world of creativity is becoming flat. Innovative talent, like any other resource, will be exploited wherever it exists. Add to all this the fact that the creative industries have low barriers to entry (and the best clients and the best talent readily move to sources of exciting new ideas), and it’s clear that Brady does face a threat. It can be seized as an opportunity, however, if he changes his mind-set. He needs to think of the service he provides in terms of sourcing the talent required to deliver superior solutions to clients. It should be Serendipity Associates’ job to discover the best practitioners wherever they exist and then to align itself with them, whether by employing them, using them as consultants or contractors, or getting them to represent its brand in some other way. Rather than fretting about offshoring or outsourcing jobs, Brady should see SA’s mission as importing competitiveness. SA’s job in the increasingly flat world of creativity is to align itself with the best practitioners. It probably does not make sense for the firm to rush into an offshoring arrangement. Doing so successfully would require knowledge of the global marketplace—both the availability of relevant talent and the existing global networks that could give SA access to it. SA does not appear to be so well informed. After all, Brady hasn’t even heard of Hank Wittgenstein, who has been poaching his clients! Luckily, the threat may not be terribly pressing. Tropes R Us is taking a big risk by moving so fast to offshore work at the most creative end of the knowledge work spectrum. Metaphors are socially sensitive and require not only idiomatic language skills but also a localized appreciation of the moment: the things one can laugh and joke about, the things one currently reveres, and the things one never mentions. If Tropes R Us were to fail by overreaching but still manage to shake Brady out of a too-common complacency, that would truly be serendipity. Charlie Wrench is the chief executive officer of Landor Associates, headquartered in San Francisco, a strategic brand- and design-consulting firm with 24 offices in 18 countries. Stephen Brown’s tongue-in-cheek story depicts an extreme form of right-brain work, but it is true that creative companies—like Landor Associates, my own company—must learn to operate in an increasingly flat world. Certainly, some of the work we have traditionally performed for clients is now vulnerable to lower-cost competition. The best example is artwork production. It used to be that if we helped design a new branding opportunity for, say, Frito-Lay, we would create the entire package system, delivering hundreds of permutations to cover all the sizes and flavors retailers would stock. Nowadays, our largest clients tend to have global procurement departments looking for lower-cost solutions, and they often turn to volume producers who specialize in exactly that kind of iterative, logistical work. Happily, while that trend is affecting one end of our business, the other end is also changing. The world is recognizing that an enormous percentage of market capitalization in consumer-facing companies is attributable not to the capacity or inventory value of the products made in the factory but to the goodwill and future leverageability of the brand that exists in the mind. And so, at the high end of our service offering, we see increasing demand for more strategic brand-development services. For instance, a client such as Procter & Gamble might ask us to refresh its oral-care portfolio, finding ways to reposition products and brands in light of changing attitudes and emerging customer segments. The growth in this type of work, as well as in innovation (finding new platforms for clients) and brand engagement (helping clients infuse brand purpose into their employees’ actions and attitudes), more than offsets the lower-value-adding activity we have ceded. So far, it’s been a fairly healthy equation for us. Do I think that Landor’s ability to stay ahead has been a function of our U.S. origins? Yes—but not because I believe the Western world has some genetic hegemony when it comes to creativity. What we have is 60 years of postwar experience in applying right-brain skills to the challenge of brand building—and the lion’s share of the world’s biggest brands demanding those skills. As a result, we represent where best practices, best platforms, and best opportunities are found, and we continue to attract a disproportionate share of creative talent from around the world. Brady clearly worries about whether the United States can sustain its creative leadership, but I doubt that his big global clients do. The corporations on whose behalf these skill sets are exercised are rarely nationally driven. Indeed, most would see more value in distributing creative capabilities across the world so that they could be leveraged in emerging markets. I suspect, however, that the dynamics of supply and demand will come into play before any drastic shift of creative work from the West. That has been Landor’s experience. Over the past few years, we’ve experimented with moving some production to Mumbai, and even in that brief period the cost advantage has narrowed significantly, owing in large part to the cost of supervising an outsourced relationship and rising costs in Mumbai. Instead of pondering America’s fate, Brady should help clients develop differentiated offerings. Instead of pondering America’s fate, Brady should be attending to his clients’ real concern in a flatter world: their need to reach customers worldwide with differentiated offerings that feel globally consistent yet relevant to local culture. Multinationals need their creative vendors to manage work efficiently across a hundred markets, orchestrating the skill sets of perhaps 15 offices. That calls for a powerful combination of right- and left-brain skills, which Serendipity Associates must start building.
