Lots of agencies used to throw a summer party for clients and new-business.
At GGT, Mike Greenlees would hire a luxury tent at Henley for a week.
Each day a different set of clients would come along, sit in the sun, watch the boat races, drink champagne and eat strawberries.
Frank Lowe used to do a similar thing at Wimbledon.
JWT’s version was a party in Berkeley Square.
I’m not an account man, so I never really saw the point.
I didn’t understand about building relationships.
All I knew was it wasn’t anything to do with the ads.
It wasn’t anything to do with what made us different as an agency.
Eventually, Mike Greenlees went off to run the PLC and made Paul Simons MD of the agency.
I said to Paul “Why can’t we do something different?”
Paul said “Like what?”
I said “Something that would at least be about the work.”
Paul said “Like what?
I said “Okay, how about Edward de Bono, the founder of Lateral Thinking?
How about if we spent that money on getting him to lecture for a day instead?
We could rent a large lecture hall and have him do a talk, and exercises, on lateral thinking.
He could talk to existing clients and new-business in the morning.
He could do the same talk to the entire agency in the afternoon.
Clients would know what makes us different, and how we want to be judged.
New business would see whether their existing agency could measure up against those criteria.
And everyone at our agency would know what we think advertising ought to be about.”
So we got Edward de Bono to give a 4 hour talk, with exercises, to our clients and new business prospects, in the morning.
Then, in the afternoon, to do the exact same thing for the entire agency.
And it worked brilliantly.
Suddenly we were all singing from the same song-sheet.
And the part that worked best was PO.
PO was what might be described as ‘intelligent naïveté’.
Which is where de Bono felt true creativity sprang from.
Because he thought ‘creative’ was an adjective not a noun.
It wasn’t inherent in any particular job.
It was a quality you brought to your job.
Whatever your job.
As he said “There are a lot of people calling themselves creative who are merely stylists.”
PO is meant to release us from that trap.
To jolt us out of our mental rut.
He felt that the problem with conventional thinking was the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’.
Either of these was the end of thinking.
As he says “A conclusion is merely a place where you stopped thinking.”
For instance, supposing someone showed you an idea.
If you said yes, they stopped thinking, went away and did it.
If you said no, they stopped thinking, went away and did something else.
Either way they stopped thinking.
He wanted a response that said “Let’s keep thinking and see where it goes.”
So he chose PO, short for ‘possible’.
The purpose of saying PO, was to always move an idea on.
That was creativity.
It made everyone free to have seemingly ridiculous ideas.
No one could look silly.
In fact, the only way to be wrong was to be negative.
Because that shut down thinking.
PO forced us to have ideas we wouldn’t have dared to have without it.
PO forced creativity.
For a year or so after that event we had our most creative period, and our best new business run.

PO a different sort of client event is a good idea.