Jan
2007
The Pursuit of Perfection in PR: Lessons from Toyota
“The pursuit of perfection is not focused on achieving perfection, it’s focused on chasing it. Perfection is unachievable… it’ll never happen. Unless you’re Buddha I guess.”
From Andy Lark via Guy Kawasaki comes this remarkable document: Elegant Solutions – Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way, by Matthew E. May.
Chockablock with thoughts and ideas that are relevant to just about any industry, my attention was initially side-swiped by this particular gem around perfection, and the pursuit of it. I’ve read a lot of PR plans – client-side and agency – in my 10 years of doing this stuff. And one thing I’ve discovered is that we sometimes try too hard to be ‘perfect’…
We write ‘perfect’ plans. You know, the ones that rarely take into account all the possible issues that could potentially derail it. We write ‘perfect’ messages that stroke our clients’ egos, yet fail to reflect the real needs and perceptions of their target audiences. We devise ‘perfect’ tactics that we know will work because they don’t deviate from the tried and true. We apply metrics that perfectly quantify the hits, visits, impressions, bums-in-seats, and AVE’s, yet fail to reflect whether that program actually resulted in any tangible behaviour or perception change. And we craft ‘perfect’ objectives that go to the heart of our clients’ businesses, but which are ultimately impossible to achieve.
A while back, Caterina posted an inspired quote from Alan Watts:
Perhaps it’s time to challenge our clients’ thinking about what constitutes the ”perfect” PR campaign: to understand that no plan is perfectly linear, that course corrections are a fact of life, and that getting from A to B is never a straight-line effort.
