When I started at SapientNitro (now Publicis Sapient), I uprooted the family and moved to LA to be co-ECD of the West Coast. Six months in, I was asked to consider moving back to Chicago to transform an office that was all tech into a diversified agency-like object. I liked that it was housed in a landmark midcentury building, but when I stepped into the office, this is what I saw.
The morale there was low. The space was a dump. And there was no recognizable form of creative expression coming out of it. That, to me, was the acrid smell of opportunity. So I uprooted my (tolerant) family again and moved back to see what I could do.
My new partners and I doubled the revenue, tripled the creative department (art, copy, UX), won awards for the work and the workplace, and picked up almost everything we pitched with our unique approach to building brand ecosystems. It took a new space, a new culture, and the expectation that our talented new people fuse their brains in ways they never had before. And accounts like Hyatt, John Deere, and Abbott had global footprints that kept our peers busy in other parts of the world, too. Eventually I moved on and sold my stock, at which point a certain holding company acquired it and the stock price doubled. Oops.
Here are a few highlights of the building process, starting with the space, which entailed some fights with the company’s value engineers. As one of the designers put it: “John’s yelling about chairs again.”
We engaged our people in fundraising efforts, friendly competitions with other offices, and the assembly of our new guiding principles.
And in our annual "party experiments" during Social Media Week, we invited potential candidates to drink our alcohol while they explored the human factors of a digital society. For example:
WORK GALLERY
