| Why counsel is critical, but advisors shouldn't run your business... | | Date Created: Jul 05, 2006, 12:45 PM |
As a business leader, you are running blind without getting outside opinions, ideas and counsel from time to time. But, there are limits to what an advisor can bring to the table.
I'm reminded of this when reading one of the pioneers of modern advertising. Among other things, E.T. Gundalach invented the coupon as we know it today, ran the advertising and propaganda for WW1 and was the first to discern the conditions when a business should be running immediate action advertising and what we call brand or image advertising today.
Smart guy. Here's some of his thoughts on getting and using advice. Notice he takes a shot at his own industries advisors...
"There is a vast difference between 'counsel' and 'judgement', between 'advice' and 'decision.' An advisor may bring brilliant ideas, keen analysis, many valuable suggestions... the mentality that can evolve all that is rarely also of the type that knows how to select among many suggestions... So an advertising man may be be highly valuable in telling another man how to run his business, provided he never gets a chance to run it."
On the importance of another viewpoint to a business leader...
"Three years ago, I tried again and again to write the publisher's advertisements for a book I had written, but it was not until an outsider, Mr. Emil Farkas, outlined a basically different appeal that results became satisfactory' in fact, they doubled. The reason? The outside viewpoint, the grasp of a proposition by a man who was not himself in the grasp of the proposition.
And...
"There are two things that most of us humans can do better than any on else – to run the United States government and to criticize advertisements."
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