Many years ago I was sitting through one of those classically horrible meetings where the client was shredding all the work, the account person was not saying any of the things you’d want a good account person to say, the creative director was oddly silent and I was going to have to tell my girlfriend that I wouldn’t be going skiing that weekend because I was going to have to work.

The account person, seeing the dismal look on my face, scribbled “It could be worse” on a corner of the meaningless brief. I pulled the page over and wrote “Yes, we could be on fire.”

The point is that things can always be worse. But that’s not really the goal, is it? The goal is to make things better. And I think the thing that separates the good places I’ve worked from the not-so-good places is on which side of this divide they fall. Bad agencies are OK with having good ideas killed, or watered down. After all, it could be worse, they think. Good agencies aren’t OK with this. They insist things could, and should, be better. It doesn’t really get any more complicated than that.

- James Brown