Good Ideas Need Care

If I really get to the heart of it, creativity is the reason I joined this industry twenty years ago…the quiet, obsessive pleasure of making something work.

I remember being 22, working on a McDonald's tray mat back in Singapore. A tray mat. Disposable. Read once, maybe twice. And yet everything mattered. The symmetry. The way the eye moved across it. The small games and stories designed for one person sitting alone with a Filet-O-Fish, or stuck on an awkward blind date, or a child looking for sparkles anywhere they could find them. That tray mat taught me something I didn't yet have language for: creativity lives in care. It shows up when someone has thought deeply about the person on the other end. That instinct, that delight is what kept me in this industry.

Where Ideas Flourish

Years later, I saw it in full flourish at Fred & Farid Shanghai. It was 2014. A beautifully designed office overlooking the Pearl Tower. Around ninety people, average age about twenty-seven. Half were Chinese, just discovering what this industry could be. The other half a mix of French and Southeast Asian talent - Thailand, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia. Hungry and brilliant.

The creative department was the biggest in the agency, something you almost never see now. Not every head was "accounted for" in the modern sense, but every creative had a real, physical book of ideas. They ran creatives-only round tables twice a week in the glass boardroom, for everyone to see. The juniors learned how to present to their peers. The seniors learned how to give feedback that made the work stronger, and how to receive criticism without defensiveness.

Better didn't mean safer. Better meant it made you feel something. Discomfort. Disbelief. Laughter. Excitement. Ideas with legs able to grow into whatever the work needed to become. Selling those ideas was sometimes a challenge - but always a thrill. A petting zoo with handsomely coifed llamas outside a salad bar. A fake vacation to Paris. A fashion show on Baidu (China's Google) Maps.

Getting marketers excited, seeing them fall silent and then lean forward, believing something special could happen. That was the job. Context mattered enormously. There was a safe space to create, peer support to sharpen the work, and leadership that backed the ideas whether they sold immediately or not.

That safety didn't make people lazy, it made them bold.

Making The Business Work

My role in that environment was to nourish creativity and make the business work. Those two things were not in conflict, it just took a little operational creativity. We moved to value-based billing and sold our menu to procurement teams in Shenzhen, Melbourne, and Munich. We offered clarity to clients who wanted to know what they were paying for, when they'd get it, and how it would show up in the world. We built rotating teams of people who genuinely worked well together, not just on paper. It took effort to operationalise, but it kept energy high and drama low.

I saw this same pattern at work years later, in 2022, with Team Mars at DDB Chicago. We operated like one of those jazz ensembles - independent, embedded, effective. Our core focus was the work, the brands, and moving the business. With leadership support and freedom within a framework, some of the strongest work of my career was made. I'm particularly proud that every award we won during that period was rooted in briefs with real commercial impact.

All of this has shaped how I think about the industry's forgotten product now.

Designing For Ideas

Creativity isn't born from chaos, but from a place where chaos is invited and held. Designed environments don't tame ideas, they give it permission to take shape. With clarity and trust in place, these ideas are free to wander, provoke, and surprise, before being shaped into something that can travel - an image, a story, a reason to believe. Looking back, the moments where creativity truly flourished weren't accidental. They were designed with care, intent, and trust. This is what gets lost in the merger decks. The operational creativity it takes to build a place where ideas thrive.

You can't consolidate your way to culture. You can't integrate your way to trust. These things are designed, protected, fought for. And when giants merge, the first thing to go is usually the very conditions that made the work worth doing in the first place.

Not every idea will land. Not every story will sell. But when the conditions are right, the work carries more than a message. It carries belief. And belief, more than anything, is what makes creativity travel. The question is whether the industry still has room for the people who design for it.

I'm betting it does. I'm betting on us.

Tags: Craft, Philosophy, Leadership