The third week of our global consulting project is coming to a close, and for the past week and a half, it’s pretty much been all interviews, all the time. As we work to squeeze the financial data that we need from our client to address the cost efficiency problems we’re investigating, we’ve started a series of interviews that provide us many perspectives that have given us a clearer view of the value chain in advertising production.
We’ve had the opportunity to interview executives and managers across different industries that struggle with the same problem as our client, and have been helpful providing insight about the key success factors and challenges in their solutions. From the CEO of a major TV production company in Brazil to a creative director for a global advertising agency, the lesson has been consistent: our problem is not unique, but the solution has to be.
However, the biggest challenge so far has come from a somewhat unexpected source: our client. As with any large organisation, there are endless stakeholders and individuals who hold small but critical pieces of data that we need. With the stakeholders come the conflict between individual interests and priorities versus those of our project – everything that Professor Stiles talked about in Organisational Behaviour has come rushing back as we navigate our way through the complex internal maze of our client’s organisation.