Some of the best marketing and advertising campaigns in the last 50 years came from one epicenter. Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Oregon. 

“Just Do It.”

“Bo Knows.” 

“Air Jordan”

“Livestrong”

“This is Sportscenter”

“Coke Side of Life.”

All Wieden & Kennedy or their associates. 

Dan Wieden and David Kennedy met while working together at another ad agency. After a few twists and turns in their career paths they banded together to form their own operation. They were the leaders of a two person ad-agency, trying to figure out what an ad agency actually does.  From the basement of a rundown building in Portland, Oregon they would field calls, not from their office phone, but the payphone down the hall from their $1000 a month rental space. Widen forked over $500 and Kennedy forked over $500 and they became “partners.” When the payphone rang they would run down the hall, clear their throat and answer “Widen & Kennedy, how can I help you.”

From the $1000 a month makeshift ad agency would come some of the world’s best marketing campaigns. A meteoric rise from the basement of a rented building to locations all over the world and a global team of over 1,500 people. In the early days of Wieden & Kennedy, a newly hired Chief Financial Officer forced the two partners into a room to define some key elements of culture, mission, values and the like. The kinds of things all leaders concern themselves with.

What emerged from their cultural intervention became some of the bedrock elements that allowed Wieden & Kennedy to become a global force and leading ad agency in the modern world. 

“Wieden and Kennedy exists to make strong and provocative relationships between good companies and their customers”

What is it that allows Wieden & Kennedy to make such provocative ads that drive the relationships between companies and their customers?

According to the late Dan Wieden it’s one thing - culture.

Now, culture has unfortunately become a Human Resource buzzword. It’s talked about in all industries. We’ve heard enough sports press conferences to appreciate the idea of culture and its impact on high performance. But to actually shape culture and establish culture is an entirely different thing. It’s messy. It’s hard. It’s unpleasant. It is finding the hills a leader is willing to die on.

For Wieden + Kennedy, culture wasn’t just slogans on the wall. It was their lone competitive advantage. As a small ad agency that was gaining notoriety, larger more established agencies with larger financial backing came and poached much of Wieden + Kennedy top talent. 

Realizing they were never going to be able to match the larger financial offers, Wieden + Kennedy doubled down on creating the kind of culture that would appeal to their team to stay. 

Is it possible to create a culture as a leader in which people find it painful to leave? For Wieden + Kennedy it was the only way to survive.

“We’ve got to create a culture that’s so weird and wild and sticky that it would hurt your very soul to leave the place.”

It’s the culture that lifts the people

It’s the people who make the work

It’s the work that makes the relationships between good companies and their customers.

As we explore the cultural principles that allowed Wieden + Kennedy to become the epicenter of some of the best marketing and advertising elements in the world we must create the connection that team culture is formed out of personal culture. 

We all fully understand the concept of team culture. 

Team culture is the normative behaviors of a team or an organization. “How we do what we do.” 

But few drill deep enough to make the connection that as leaders we spend far more time operating and shaping our personal culture than we do the culture of the teams we lead.

Personal culture is the normative behaviors and mindsets you operate in. It’s how you do what you do, daily, weekly, yearly. 

Our personal culture overflows into how we shape and lead our team or organizational culture. As we’ve said many times at Stay The Course Leadership Co. Leadership is the overflow of your lifestyle. So in essence, team culture is the overflow of your personal culture. 

Here are the three bedrock fundamentals of creating elite culture from the historic ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy. 

1.) Permission to Fail

In the days leading up to the launch of the world’s most successful advertising agency, Dan Wieden was fired from his job. A husband and a young father of three young children, Wieden drove his car home after being let go and was nearly paralyzed with fear, shame, and embarrassment. He struggled to comprehend how he was going to deliver the news to his wife that he was out of a job and it was going to get bumpy for their young family. 

He parked his car in the driveway and walked in the house. His wife was changing a load of laundry when she heard him enter. “What are you doing home so early?” She asked.

With a shaky voice he revealed that he was fired and had been let go of his safe and secure job. Her response without even looking up from her task:

“Well, something will work out.”

In a moment, Dan Wieden felt perturbed, confused and… relieved. 

She gave him what he could not give himself.

She gave him permission to fail.

Most high achievers and driven people are living out of a fear of failure. At face value, failure seems to be the worst case scenario. The idea that we will put in effort and discipline and commit to a journey for months and years and in the end, come up empty. That doesn’t sit well with most of us.

Most leaders driven by avoiding failure can’t help but create an environment that avoids failure all together. (Personal culture overflows into team culture).

Speaking on this experience years later at a conference, Dan Wieden recognized the inherent truth around failure. Regardless of how much we want to avoid failure, the relationship with failure will always have to exist. 

You have to be willing to fail if you’re going to do anything worthwhile. 

Out of this experience with his wife and safe haven, Wieden was able to sow this concept into the bedrock of Wieden + Kennedy as their team began to expand. It became not just a concept to make himself feel good when things were going poorly, but instead a foundational convicted belief of the role failure must play in doing significant work. 

“Wieden and Kennedy exists to make strong and provocative relationships between good companies and their customers”

To make strong and provocative relationships between good companies and their customers, they had to fail.

In fact, they had to entirely redesign their relationship with the concept of failure. Instead of something they would “try to embrace” it became the charge of every designer and creative employed at the agency. 

Fail harder.

The collective team culture was centered around failing harder. Doing it harder meant explicit feedback sooner. Feedback sooner meant version 2.0 could be created quicker. We begin to see how this fundamental core value created an extraordinary culture.

Imagine working in an environment where you were told you need to fail and fail harder and faster than you ever had before. 

Imagine having full freedom to fail. To try new approaches, strategies and to avoid playing it safe.

2.) Walk In Stupid Every Morning

The first client of the makeshift ad agency in Wieden + Kennedy was a small shoe manufacturer struggling to find its own way and struggling to figure out what to do with Wieden + Kennedy. 

This arrangement between these unproven startups was made more difficult as each small company had no clear set understanding of what in the world to do. When we look back on the trajectories of titans in industry and successful personal journeys it always looks so linear.

Point A. Straight line to Point B. Two year gap. Point C. It all looks neat and proper. Great growth overtime. 

Have you ever felt like you were “Just trying to figure it out?”

What we often fail to realize is the hidden chapters in which these leaders were also just trying to figure it out. What do we do? How do we make this work? What do we need to tweak and change to gain traction? 

Just trying to figure it out.

In the early 1980’s with their lone client, “Nike”,  Dan Wieden and David Kennedy were just trying to figure it out. (So too was Nike CEO/Founder Phil Knight.)

The two young, unproven, chaotic startup companies were just trying to figure it out. And in this process Dan Wieden reveals another strategic cultural advantage.

They found the value in showing up stupid every day. 

“When you think you know everything, you’re dead. You’re no longer curious.”

In another talk Dan Wieden gave in 2016 Wieden had to say this. “We were struggling to figure out what an ad agency actually was - our only client was trying to figure out what to do with us. When you don’t know you try desperately to figure it out.”

In desperately trying to figure it out, Wieden realized staying curious was at the center. How can you create a culture in which you are encouraging everyone to be utterly themselves? 

You encourage them to stay curious. You not only allow them to be stupid from time to time but you make it a requirement to walk in everyday with a fresh slate. You can’t take yesterday with you.

Imagine working in a culture in which you were given permission to fail. And you were required to walk in everyday, stupid. Curious about what you could uncover for a day.

3.) Inspiration out of chaos

“I love this agency the most when it’s off balance..”

Chaos asks stuff of you that order never will.

Everything about leading is chaotic. There are demands for every leadership role that can be so confusing and frustrating to deal with. 

Chaos is complete disorder and confusion. The truth is we are all wired to shy away from chaos, but it may just be the very thing that allows us to continue to grow. Your comfort zone is never in chaos. 

Dan Wieden believed that chaos is the only thing that wants you to grow. Chaos wants you to be creative and look for solutions. Chaos demands that you are creative. 

In many static cultures, leaders and the like will exclaim that we need to be creative and look for the solutions to our problems. Leaders say this at the same time clenching to order. 

It is the system of bringing chaos to order that allowed Wieden + Kennedy to thrive. In 1993 they opened their first European location in Amsterdam. They had expanded and were in Portland and Amsterdam. A few years later they opened a New York City office. Then London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Delhi, Sao Paolo. Their team expanded to over 1,500 people.

They generate over $3 billion in billing each year. In the process of scaling, Wieden recognized that chaos is shown the door in favor of process and order in favor of comfort.

I don’t know many leaders who would say they love chaos. I do know many leaders who recognize that chaos is necessary for change and growth. How can we live in a way that doesn’t avoid chaos or crumble under chaos, but rather - invite chaos, because we know it’s redemptive power in helping our culture (both team and personal culture) become better. 

Chaos to Order

In 1977, a Russian-Belgian chemist named Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in researching thermodynamics. In researching in this field, he came up with a term - “dissipative structure”.

A dissipative structure is like a whirlpool that takes in information and creates order from it. 

In creating order it creates equilibrium, not chaos. 

It's a dissipative structure that takes chaos and creates order.

But we need both order and chaos. And we need a system for bringing chaos to order.

Every leader in the modern era must realize the value in chaos in creating the type of culture necessary to do transformational work. We must all find our “dissipative structure” to allow our personal culture to find inspiration from chaos. 

If everything is ordered. Everything is static. 

Anything static is the enemy of creativity. 

No great culture, (team or personal) is static.