For me, being a creative director is similar to a football manager.
Spotting talent, making sure the team is balanced, keeping them motivated, beating bigger, more powerful opposition.
That’s why, three of our most successful football managers were Scottish.
Bill Shankly started in the coalmines.
Then he worked his way up, literally, via Carlisle, Preston North End, Grimsby, Workington, and Huddersfield.
When he started at Liverpool they were a tatty club in the second division.
He transformed it inch by inch, blade of grass by blade of grass.
Until he made them Second Division champions.
He got them into the First Division (the equivalent of the Premier League).
Under Bill Shankly they became champions of England three times.
And they won the FA Cup twice.
They also won the Charity Shield four times and the UEFA Cup.
All because a bloke who started in the mines knew what hard work was.
Another Scotsman who started in the coalmines was Matt Busby.
As manager of Manchester United, Busby won the league three times.
He built one of the most promising young teams ever assembled.
Then came the Munich plane crash.
The team was destroyed, Busby himself was given the last rites, twice.
But he recovered and gradually built another team.
They won the league twice, the FA Cup twice, the Charity Shield five times.
And they were the first English side to be crowned champions of Europe.
Some years after Busby, Manchester United had another Scottish manager.
Alex Ferguson was born in Govan, where the shipyards were.
He began at clubs like East Stirlingshire, St Mirren, and Aberdeen.
Under him, Aberdeen won the Scottish First Division three times, the Scottish Cup four times, and the Scottish League Cup.
Aberdeen beat Real Madrid in the UEFA Cup Winners cup final, and won the UEFA Super Cup.
And all that was BEFORE he went to Manchester United.
Under Ferguson, United won the Premier League thirteen times.
They won the FA Cup five times, the League Cup four times, the Charity Shield ten times, the European Cup twice, the European Cup Winner’s Cup, the Intercontinental Cup, and even the FIFA Club World Cup.
No British manager has ever been as successful.
Except perhaps one, the only one that wasn’t Scottish.
When Bob Paisley was manager of Liverpool they won the league six times.
They won the league Cup three times, they won the Charity Shield six times.
And they won the European Cup three times.
Liverpool also won the UEFA Cup, and the UEFA Super Cup.
So, if he wasn’t Scottish, what did Bob Paisley have in common with them?
Well, like Shankly and Busby, he started his working life down the coalmines.
He learned what the real priorities in life are. He learned what hard work was.
Bill Shankly put it in perspective, when he was asked about the pressures of football management, he said:
“This isn’t pressure.
Pressure isn’t the European Cup, or the Championship, or the Cup Final.
Pressure is working down the pit.
Pressure is having no work at all.
Pressure is trying to bring up a family on fifty shillings a week.
That’s pressure.”
If people in advertising learned that, they might stop whining.
Very true. To quote Kipling “like a book you speak.”
An agency MD loved hiring rich kids.
He thought these kids (whose family’s personal fortune far exceeded any agency’s billings) would swing some business across.
But most rich kids don’t care about the job.
They don’t need the money.
If agency fired em, they wouldn’t hurt financially. In fact they’d probably sue the agency and get more money.
The MD hired kids who came to work in a different car every day. Each bigger or sportier than the last. And all bigger than the MD’s company car.