NORTHERN PLANNER

Following on from this post about need to ask advice no matter how good you think your are, here's an excellent (old) article from the New York times about the danger of praise.

As a father, it's good to know that praising a child's results makes actually harms them in long term, creating unrealistic expectations for themselves and eventually making them lazy – while praising effort means they never feel demolished by doing bad and learn to love trying hard.

This has something to teach our industry's star system. Most agencies has a few untouchable golden children who cannot be questioned – usually because they've won an award – something that praises how clever you were, not how hard you tried, and end up over indulged, un-collaborative and intellectually lazy.

Star systems work against true success, which usually comes from a shared, communal working environment (think Ghana's football team V England's Golden generation)- to quote Gladwell in this article which you should read, about how the talent system brought down Enron, "If you always have to think outside the box, it's time to fix the box"