Culture is built on Tuesdays
There is a specific kind of career damage that comes from working at a great creative agency. You start thinking this is normal. Then you spend the rest of your career chasing it.
This is where I should clarify that this won’t be one of those nostalgic pieces about how one agency, at one very specific moment in time, just “had it,” everyone was brilliant, the work was pure and everything has gone downhill since. Nobody needs another former employee explaining that you really had to be there. There is a point to this. Bear with me.
For a while, I worked at a place where a suspicious number of things aligned. The people were talented. The work mattered. Ambition wasn’t something you had to smuggle into a meeting under your coat. You could put an idea on the wall that was difficult, expensive, technically ridiculous and possibly impossible, and instead of someone immediately explaining why it couldn’t happen, people would start figuring out how it could.
Even worse, everyone expected this from each other.
That place was FCB New York.
At the time, I thought I had joined a very good agency. What I understand now is that I had walked into the result of hundreds, probably thousands, of decisions made long before I arrived.
Creative cultures are often talked about as if they are weather systems. Somehow a good one “happens.” The right people find each other, the energy shifts, everyone develops excellent taste at exactly the same time, the universe opens a small portal somewhere near the creative department and six months later you have a Grand Prix.
But culture is much less mysterious than that. It is training.
People who practice martial arts repeat the same tiny movements thousands of times until the body stops having to decide what to do. A great creative culture is built the same way. You train an organization, one small decision at a time, until what it believes becomes instinct.
You could see that training everywhere at FCB. In how people talked about work. We had shared rituals, shared references and, more importantly, a shared understanding of what great looked like. You saw it in what got praised and what didn’t. In whether “good enough” actually was. In whether the first reaction to an impossible idea was “no” or “how?” In who got hired, who got promoted and what they got promoted for. In how juniors were treated. In whether a bad review meant lowering the ambition or going back to work. In whether people protected an idea when it got difficult. In whether someone else's great idea made you defensive or made you cancel dinner and make yours better. In whether the most ambitious person in the room was considered inspiring or slightly annoying. In whether caring too much was something you had to hide.
There were reviews where you walked in feeling quite pleased with yourself, then somebody put something brilliant on the wall and suddenly your evening plans disappeared. That was the competition. Not “I hope you fail.” More “I love this and deeply resent what it has done to my Tuesday.”
And there were reviews where nothing was good enough. Strangely, those weren’t always the bad ones. “You can do better” can be one of the more generous things a creative leader tells you, because hidden inside the rejection is the belief that you actually can. Nobody lowers the bar for someone they think can jump higher. Of course, at the time, you mostly just heard the part where all your ideas were dead.
That was part of the culture too. High standards weren’t punishment. They were a form of belief. The expectation that you had something better in you, even on the days when you were becoming increasingly convinced that you did not.
Eventually, ambition becomes normal. Nobody needs to tell you to care. The room has already taught you how much you're supposed to care.
This is rarer than agencies like to admit. Almost every agency says it wants ambitious creative work. Nobody has yet launched an agency promising “competent work delivered with minimal resistance.” Although there is probably a huge market for it.
FCB showed me how a great culture gets built. It also made me think a lot about the inverse.
Because the interesting thing about training is that it works both ways.
You build the wrong culture exactly the same way you build a great one: one small decision at a time.
No leader walks into an agency on Monday morning and sends out an email saying that the work has to be mediocre.
It happens much more quietly.
You choose the sensible idea instead of the brave one. You kill something ambitious slightly too quickly. You hire someone because they make your life easier rather than because they'll make the work better. You reward people for identifying risks rather than taking responsibility for overcoming them. Someone fights for an idea, realizes fighting changes nothing, and fights a little less hard next time. A leader makes someone feel slightly foolish for caring too much.
Each one is another repetition. The muscle is still being trained, just in the opposite direction.
People start understanding what survives. And creatives are exceptionally good at reading the room. Give us enough meetings and we'll eventually reverse-engineer the exact level of ambition an organization can tolerate.
Then we'll start bringing that.
The ideas that make for suspiciously good client meetings. The idea that gets twelve nods and zero heartbeats. The idea everyone likes enough to approve and nobody loves enough to remember. Something involving a museum. Something involving a pop-up. Something everyone can live with.
And slowly, the range narrows. The impossible ideas disappear first. Then the difficult ones. Eventually even the mildly inconvenient ones. Meetings get shorter. Everyone agrees more. The agency becomes wonderfully efficient.
And somehow the work gets worse.
Six months later, somebody schedules a workshop to figure out what happened to the creative culture.
There will probably be Post-its. And a PowerPoint deck from the CCO with big words like BRAVE, FEARLESS and UNREASONABLE, presented in an extremely reasonable way.
That's what FCB taught me. The work isn't the culture. The work is evidence of the culture. The real culture is everything that happened before: years of tiny signals telling people to go further, try again, take the strange idea seriously for another ten minutes, hire the person who raises the standard and mean it when you say you want great work.
I was lucky enough to arrive after other people had already done thousands of those repetitions. I benefited from standards I hadn't established and battles I hadn't fought. At the time, I mistook all of that for normal.
That might be the cruelest part of experiencing a culture like that. You only get to think it’s normal once.
After that, you spend the rest of your career recognizing when it isn’t there. You walk into reviews, agencies and jobs carrying around an annoyingly specific memory of how good a room can feel when everybody in it wants the work to be better. You become difficult to impress. Possibly difficult in general.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to spend my career trying to find the exact same place again. That would be nostalgia, and nostalgia is not much of a leadership strategy.
What matters is knowing that it wasn’t magic.
People built it. Decision by decision. Hire by hire. Review by review. Mostly on completely unremarkable Tuesdays.
The most important thing I took from FCB might be this: I can feel when the culture isn't there. It annoys me. I start poking at it. I want to fix it. Because once you’ve been in a room where a group of people genuinely believes in the same thing, it becomes very hard to sit quietly in one where nobody quite does.
That experience changes your standards.
Not just for the work you want to make.
For the place you want to make it in.