herding cats

Remember the commercial? Rugged cowboys struggling to herd thousands of cats. A very creative commercial – although most people don’t remember the product (Lotus Notes), which makes the spot, technically, a “fail".

I am reminded of that commercial often – not because I ever ended up using Lotus Notes, but because the image was so compelling. Herding cats – each with a mind of its own, clearly – would of course appear to be an impossible task. But I think I can imagine what such a task might feel like. It’s kinda like trying to rally an immense bureaucracy behind a single idea. Take an enormous staff, throw in a little mis-communication, a pinch of dysfunction, and poof, you are herding cats.

This is one of the many reasons I’ve become convinced that people should not join the public service until they have got a little seasoning in them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about La Relève, but being a kitten in a herd of confused cats is not the way to start your career.

For one thing, one needs immense quantities of patience. For another, the ability to keep in perspective the complexity of the System in which we’re working – and that, by its very nature, it cannot turn on a dime. Nothing happens quickly and, more often than not, one spends more time managing the process and the people involved than actually doing the work.

If I were 20 and just starting my career as a PR practitioner, I would be driven mad within about six months. My confidence – and nerves – would be shot, whittled down by the endless hours of docket chasing and quibbling over semicolons. The dozen-deep approval chains alone are enough to send you into shuddering nightmares when you’re staring down the barrel of a looming deadline.

Ah, and that’s truly the crux of it: the deadlines. The silky, slinky, slippery little things that seem to appear and disappear at the whim of an executive’s calendar, are the toughest to wrap your head around when you’ve been taught that the word “dead” rightly belongs in that word – to miss one is to cause irrevocable damage your reputation as a practitioner.

Unless you work for the System. There, all is forgiven. Deadlines move, projects get dropped, priorities shift – and deadlines disappear. Now wrap your brain around that!

No, before we join the Herd, we need time to establish ourselves, build a range of experiences and a portfolio of work which will help to anchor us to who we are. We need the maturity that allows us to stop, breathe, and not take it personally – it is, after all, just the way the System works. What 20-year-old can do that? What 20-year-old should?

No – get out there, work for an NGO, promote your favourite cause, start up a business – do whatever you can, to work as fast and as hard as you can, in a lean mean environment where the buck stops with you. Feel the thrill of personal accountability – and nothing beats that sense of accomplishment when that ribbon is cut and you know you helped make it happen.

Do that: build businesses, launch good works, make great art – then come to the System and bring that energy and those ideas to us. Renew not only our human resources, but our creative ones as well. But most of all, come ready to herd cats.