My Biggest Lesson: Kevin Gammon
Kevin is the managing partner and creative director of Teak in San Francisco. He started his advertising career as a junior creative at FCB/Chicago, then later moved west to work at FCB/San Francisco.
Following that long stint at FCB, he spent six great years as a creative director at McCann/SF. He left McCann to start SA-5, a branding studio whose initial clients included Yahoo, Logitech and the San Jose Earthquakes. He merged SA-5 with Teak in 2014. Kevin has become incredibly passionate about the future of mobility and transit. He’s a board member of the Marin Bicycle Coalition and a member of the Pedestrian & Bicycle advisory council for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District.
A very common phrase in our industry is: “it’s all about the work.” A personality test helped me understand that it’s actually not all about the work.
I joined McCann/San Francisco in 2003. Microsoft accounted for what I’m guessing was about 90% of the agency’s revenue, so I spent the majority of my time working on the giant tech brand. Not the point of this story, but it was one of the highlights of my career.
About a year into this job, leadership put together a summit with the people at McCann working on Microsoft, along with some of our respective clients.
I have a vague memory of the details of the day. It took place in the Presidio of San Francisco on a nice day. And the idea of a “summit” was met with a fair bit of cynicism.
We listened to an introductory speech about the process. We took a test, essentially a personality test. We probably had a nice lunch.
Later we received a packet that took our test answers and created a personalised profile. Then we broke off into small groups to talk and share these results with each other.
This is where things got interesting. With the report in hand, each of us had a shorthand way of explaining ourselves in a distanced manner (“this graph explains me!”). This quickly led to conversations that cut way below the surface. It got emotional. This was not, I imagine, what most of us expected.
What is it we learned from this experience?
Primarily, people don’t all process information the same way. We don’t think alike. Two of us can see the exact same thing, yet take something different away from it.
What did that mean for me, whose job was dependent on generating ideas and convincing others to go along with them?
Well, if someone has a hard time understanding or embracing your ideas, it’s probably not because you are a genius and they are an idiot.
It’s likely because each of you process information differently, and you’re not communicating in a way that connects with them.
Sure, it wasn’t revelatory that people think differently. For me, however, it was eye-opening to associate that concept with my job. A job where I could often get frustrated trying to convince others to see the value in an idea, or specifically, my way of thinking.
What I learned that day provided the tools to be more persuasive and effective with those that think in a different way than myself.
It turns out, this was just the beginning of my biggest lesson. Over time, as I was able to communicate more clearly and effectively with more people, this is what became clear to me:
It’s not about the work.
It’s about two things: people and experiences.
Great work is a by-product of connecting deeply with people and creating experiences with them.
To connect with someone who thinks differently, you learn to be a good listener. When you listen, you gain understanding. When you gain understanding, you build relationships. Relationships build trust.
For an idea to turn in something truly meaningful, it requires trust. It requires a leap of faith. If an idea feels comfortable or easy to say yes to, it’s probably not great.
“The work” we do isn’t the output of a lone genius whose magical creations everyone immediately applauds.
It’s the outcome of getting lots of people to believe in an idea, embrace it, and understand it clearly enough so that they can contribute, and make it even more powerful.
It’s truly rewarding when that rare thing happens and you create something great (define “great” however you wish). What I have found is that as time passes, what stays with me are the people and the experiences we created together. It’s those memories that remain, long after all our creations have faded into the past.
The work that we do, for better or for worse, is temporal. The people we do the work with, and the experiences that we share with each other, those memories last a lifetime.
