Above, land artist Michael Grab creates sculptures of perfectly-balanced rocks. Here’s this week’s list of articles we found worth reading.
If you only read one thing.
- Bigger big ideas: “There is no lead agency anymore, there’s only a lead client” | Contagious Magazine
Management.
- The bias against creatives as leaders | 99U
- Fortune has a big one-on-one interview with Google’s Larry Page. Like with Businessweek’s interview with Apple’s Tim Cook, it’s fascinating to see how frank leaders are, and how eager they are to embrace complexity, compared with their acolytes and spokespeople.
- Why leaders should constantly reiterate what’s important | 99U
Innovation.
- Too much efficiency can be just as deadly as too little, if it leaves an organization unable to cope with change — either because it’s too fragile to survive a crisis or too rigid to adapt to industry changes. So the goal should not be greater efficiency, but rather efficiency where it makes sense. | Harvard Business Review
Data.
- Planning for small data (with Ogilvy’s Share a Coke used as an example) | Planning for networks
Technology.
- How many times have you said: “Oh yeah, I forgot about that requirement…” or “I think we talked about that a couple of weeks ago, but nobody added it to the project tracker?” | 22 Idea Street
Insights.
- Have we become too assertive? | FT.com
- Film culture isn’t dead after all: 2012 shows people love movies | NYTimes.com
- Hollywood’s year of heroine worship: rise of the female, active protagonist | NYTimes.com
Creativity.
- The dark side of content marketing | Tom Webster
- What I’m looking at when I’m looking at your portfolio | Zeus Jones
- Put off for some stupid reason by the title, it took seeing multiple recommendations to read this article until we finally got round to it. It’s like a manifesto for publishing on the web: if you were starting a magazine today, this is what you’d do. “Subcompact publishing” | Craig Mod
This week on Nextness.
- It used to be so easy to be interesting.
- Nextness Visual Diary | Living off the grid, Twine, Louis CK, Christmas gifs, selfies, cats, bokeh.
STW Group news.
Don’t forget to tweet us if you’ve got something you’d like to include in this section!
- DT formally recognised at the Campaign Asia-Pacific Agency of the Year Awards.
- Field-marketing specialist Smollan Australia has appointed David Pollock in the newly created role of CEO.
- Mobile payment: Few technologies are as hotly contested right now as mobile payments. Financial institutions, telcos, retailers and even Google are all attempting to crack the market. Yet for now the technology is immature and adoption remains low. So who will win the race? | Ogilvy
- Ikon Melbourne looks to L’Oreal and JetStar for new staff.
- OgilvyOne Melbourne hires Andrew Pink to lead strategy.