When William “Doc” Carver was crossing the Platte River in 1881, there was a bridge collapse and his horse took a dive into the water. That experience led to a crazy big idea—girls on diving horses.
Years later Doc’s son, Al Floyd Carver, built the first ramp and tower for diving horses. Then all they needed was the girl.
Ad: “Wanted: Attractive young woman who can swim and dive. Likes horses, desires to travel. See Dr. W.F. Carver, Savannah Hotel.” Sonora Webster answered the ad in 1923 and earned a place in circus history. She loved the idea of a diving act, and she wanted to be the one who dazzled the audiences.
To achieve the stunt, the horse was run up the ramp and as it reached the top, Sonora, wearing a red bathing suit, jumped on its back and dove into the water. She was a big hit and soon became the lead act and a huge cash cow. She married Doc’s son Floyd in 1928. In 1931 Sonora’s horse, Red Lips, dove straight into the water but hit the water off balance. Sonora’s eyes were open when she hit the water and she was blinded by retinal detachment. She was blind eleven of the nineteen years of her career and kept it a secret until 1942. She died in 2003 at ninety-nine.
Cowgirls know that you can teach an old dog a new trick. They are always improvising and working on new ideas, ways to enhance their performance, ways to stand out. Cowgirls are creative, fun, full of life, and always trying to move everyone forward. Cowgirls are unafraid of being the center of attention, out in front. They relish applause.
Our business at T3 is to make ideas. Every idea has to be new, unique, and powerful. We make them, release them into the world, and then do it over and over again, year after year. I used to worry that someday the creative juices might slow down or grind to a halt. But the fascinating thing I have seen develop over the last few years is that our creative prowess has actually accelerated, largely because of teamwork. As those teams have developed, matured, and become so empowered, we have seen the quality of our ideas improve again and again.
Ask for ideas. Trade them around. Teach your people that ideas are like dreams. When you are making ideas, put reality aside. Don’t worry about reality because it will present itself soon enough. Cowgirls like to lie on their backs in a field of green grass and let ideas float around like clouds in the sky and morph in the summer breeze.
Ideas don’t give a damn about gender. But a smart, attractive, confident woman with a big smile on her face because she knows her team “knocked it out of the park” with a big idea is simply irresistible.
An idea can be a very simple thing. It usually comes from an insight. Years ago we had an opportunity to do a small project for UPS. They were trying to reach out to more diverse suppliers and were looking for better ways to connect (which is why we were talking to them). They were scheduled to attend a supplier diversity convention in a few months and asked us for ideas on how to make their booth more effective in attracting people. It was both a small budget and a huge opportunity.
Our conceptual teams worked on all kinds of ideas and finally settled on one. As you know, conventions involve lots of walking on concrete floors. And women, as crazy as they are (me included), often forgo comfort for more stylish shoes. We capitalized on this simple insight and built an entire campaign about the idea that by the middle of the day most of the women at the convention wished they had gone for comfort instead of style. When women passed by the UPS booth, we offered them a pair of comfy brown slippers with the UPS logo embroidered in pink on each shoe—all each woman had to do was share her e-mail address and sign up for an account, which she gladly did. (Note: It practically took an act of Congress to get UPS to let us use pink logos instead of the standard UPS gold color, but we prevailed.)
Before we knew it, about a third of the women at the conference were wearing the UPS slippers. One panel discussion started with a presenter proudly wearing her UPS slippers on the stage. She threw style out the window and felt empowered by how bold she was. During the panel discussion, the other panelists asked for slippers to be brought up for them. Home run! We knew we had a winner. Several weeks later we saw the results of the e-mail campaign, and it was amazing. A couple of cowgirls on our team had the audacity to see a big idea in a simple insight. Today, UPS is one of our largest, most valued clients, and it all started with a pair of fuzzy, comfy brown house slippers.
Think about your business, your teams. Do they know the folklore of pivotal points in your business? Do they understand how small things turned into big things? These stories provide invaluable lessons and empower teams to follow successful themes. Do you have a way to tell these stories to new employees? Do you have a campfire where you sit around at night and spin these tales? If not, you should.
When we are in free-form idea generation mode at T3, we have a cardinal rule—there are no bad ideas. Ideas are respected, documented, and put safely away. We never shoot down an idea when it first appears. Do that and you quickly slow the flow. Ideas want to go to happy places. They do not want to be judged, because even a bad idea can easily spark a great idea.
Years ago H-E-B, a major grocery store chain in Texas, was opening a unique store in Austin called Central Market. It was a concept that took a grocery store to an entirely different level. It was a store for people who were obsessed with food—we know them today as foodies. We were doing some advertising work for H-E-B, and they called us in a panic. The store was scheduled to open in three weeks but they were way behind their hiring goals. The problem was that they were not just looking for employees, they were looking for “foodies” who were food experts. They had run all of the typical recruitment ads and nothing was working. We assembled a team and started brainstorming. After about an hour someone said, “Let’s put people on street corners with a sign that says, ‘We Work for Food.’” Everyone laughed and the meeting continued. But we all kept coming back to that quirky idea. We pitched it to the client and they bravely said yes.
Within a day we had enlisted some Central Market employees and hired a cast of characters. We hand made signs, printed employment applications, and bought crates of oranges. We deployed them before dawn on all of the major street corners in Austin. As the morning traffic stacked up, our people would wave their signs, hand out applications, and give everyone an orange. It was on all the television channel news programs at 6 and 10 p.m. It was on the front page of the Austin American-Statesman the next morning, and Central Market was flooded with applications. The store opened with a vibrant “foodie” culture that delivered on the promise. Central Market made a big contribution to the local food bank that helped homeless people often seen on those same corners, and continues to do so to this day.
Don’t discard crazy ideas. Put them up on the wall and watch them for a while.
At T3, we want the team, not individuals, to always own ideas. Everyone is encouraged to freely build on top of each other’s ideas in something we call iterative development. The team has to feel that ideas are a collective work product. That collective ownership gets ego off the table. Collective ownership is why we have seen superstars disappear. Collective ownership means that there are no good and bad ideas. Some ideas are more appropriate for a specific situation, but we cherish and honor all of them, because we have all seen what seemed like a terrible idea morph into something wonderful with just one or two little tweaks.
Cowgirls know that being part of an idea-generating team takes equal parts of bravery (to put your idea out there) and open-mindedness (to listen to and build on other ideas). Our best leaders are orchestrators. They encourage discussion. They create a comfortable place for introverts and younger members to talk. Many times, they are first to throw out silly or incredibly personal ideas to encourage others to share openly without fear.
One of my clients hired us four different times as he rose through the ranks of four pharmaceutical research companies. He was smart and bold. He wanted his brands to stand out in categories that tended to skew to the staid. He could be rough on our creative teams during his first review of our ideas and would almost always send us back to the drawing board. The creative department called him Hurricane Glenn because he would leave our initial thinking in ruins. But they called him that out of respect. He challenged their thinking and brought out their best. One of our writers (who had worked with him in the past) suggested that we simply give him preliminary thinking in the first round, knowing too well that it would never see the light of day. But we never did that. We loved the intellectual sparring, the give-and-take, and the twinkle in his eye when he laid waste to our first campaigns. We always came back stronger in our next round. When he finally said, “that’s the one” we knew that he would give our work his full support.
We did one of the boldest campaigns of my career for one of his companies. The campaign focused on how critical relationships and trust played in the decision-making process of his buyers when choosing a pharmaceutical research partner. We used National Geographic–style photography to show people from many different cultures who had earned their community’s trust. We actually recruited people on the streets of New York to find the interesting characters to photograph.
When his CEO asked to see the print campaign before it was shipped off to publications, our client was afraid that the CEO might kill it because it was so bold. He hid the artwork in his red Corvette and sped out of the office parking lot, not to be seen again for several days. The CEO saw the campaign for the first time when the ads were published in the trade magazines, when it was much too late to object. It was more than disruptive in the industry, and my client became both famous and infamous as a marketer who knew no fear. He is a dear friend to this day.
Think about your organization and how it treats ideas. Being a champion for ideas, and championing healthy, passionate, high-functioning teams with passion for what they do is a powerful role for cowgirls to take on.
Ideas provide an amazing pathway to power. Cowgirls respect how different people contribute to an idea’s success in radically different ways because they understand that ideas need support to come to life. This sixth sense, this intuition, is the “secret sauce” that holds teams together.
These contributions can be radically different from each other. Cowgirls know that some people are great at developing amazing new ideas. For others, their power comes from nurturing ideas out of other people and then fiercely protecting them from being shot down too. Others contribute by smashing two seemingly unrelated ideas together into something entirely new. Some find their power by waiting until all the ideas are collected and then leading the team through a thoughtful evaluation process to pick the very best one. Some excel at going out and selling the idea. And others contribute by sending out the bill for the idea and collecting the money. Very different talents, but all critical to producing the best work.
I was talking to our youngest son, Sam, about women’s intuition the other day. He totally agreed with me and told me a story about running a marketing meeting and having a woman on the team slip him a note that someone in the meeting was crying. Sam said, “I had no idea.” They stopped, addressed the issue, and moved on, but without the female staffer pointing out the problem, Sam would not have even noticed. Sam has many talents, but being a big “feeler” is not one of them.
“Leave it” is a traditional command for herding dogs. I never understood this terminology until we started hanging out with Henry and our Border Collies. For them, this command means that the job is over. They can be frantically herding sheep or goats and if you say “Leave it,” they will calmly turn and walk away from the excitement of herding. For me, it means, walk away, take a break, and give yourself time to get a fresh perspective. Border Collies teach us a lot about being focused, but stopping the pursuit for a bit to regroup is an important skill as well.
When time permits, we like to generate ideas and maybe group them into big buckets and then walk away from them for at least a day. This step tempers the excitement and gives both the head and the gut a chance to mull things over.
We cherish good ideas because of their potential power, but without the ability to execute them, they languish as just ideas. Only when an idea is well executed does it become powerful, even brilliant. Ideas are lofty things. They know no bounds. They float around on the wind currents like dreams. Until they are sold.
Suddenly those big white fluffy ideas have budgets, deadlines, technical specifications, strategic implications, legal implications and compliance issues, and have to work flawlessly on millions of big and little screens. In our business, this is where dreams intersect with reality. And cowgirls are often the ones that pull it all together and make it work.
At T3, our first responsibility is to do no harm to the idea. If you do not fiercely protect it, it will get pushed and shoved around and, when it is finally complete, you won’t even recognize it. Ideas must be protected at every step along the way.
We have always excelled at execution. Our company is built to support big companies that need high-end marketing solutions. We are built for big, ongoing programs. We have developed systems, processes, checklists, technical expertise, and infrastructure to do work on a massive scale. When a project moves into execution mode, we run it very much like a software company does with bug tracking software: agile development methods and project management teams that watch it every step of the way. It is one very well-oiled machine, and it is awesome to see it work every single day. Our clients consistently tell us how well we do at getting the work done. We literally release new work every day.
As we do the work we hold ourselves to two standards. First, is it as innovative as it can be? Have we pushed the envelope? Have we looked for unexpected connections? Second, does it have humanity? Does the work speak to people emotionally, does it inspire people, make them laugh, or challenge their thinking?
Every person at T3 understands both of these standards. If during the execution process anyone feels we are missing either one, they are obligated to raise their hand and express their concerns. The cardinal sin at T3 is if you do not raise the red flag the moment you see something going awry. We can fix almost anything if we catch it early on.
When a big job is finally launched, we celebrate—with our clients, with our staff, and with our partners. We have a Slack channel called “#proudofthis” where all new work is immediately shared with everyone in the company. People are recognized and thanked. And each time a job is launched, our people raise the bar and create higher expectations for themselves.
Be sure to celebrate the good work you do. Recognize the skill, hard work, and team effort when something good happens. Cowgirls know that a thank-you goes a long way. And when things don’t go well, cowgirls look it square in the eye. If we lose, how can we learn from it and win the next time?
One time I was talking to a really smart CEO who had a successful tech start-up. We talked about business for a while, but then he asked me a rather interesting question. Apparently, he had admired a strong, beautiful, successful woman from afar for quite some time. Turns out they had a mutual friend, so he had attempted to use the name of that friend and sent the woman an e-mail as an introduction. It was a plain and simple e-mail about how he would like to invite her to have lunch or a drink.
He sent that e-mail and waited, and waited. A few weeks had gone by and he got no response from her. He was stumped but determined, and asked me how in the world he could get her to talk to him.
The next afternoon I drove out to the ranch and posed this question to my husband, Lee. So, as we always do when we get a request, we started brainstorming creative ideas on how this guy could break through. After all, being in the advertising business, that is what we do. Help clients break through the clutter and get results.
In about an hour, we crafted an e-mail for my CEO friend to send the woman he was interested in. Leaving it up to him to put together the final wording, based on his own preferences, the e-mail went something like this:
Hello,
I have been wanting to ask you some burning questions.
1. How many angels can fit on the head of a pin?
2. Have you ever killed a deer?
3. When was the last time you ate at Dan’s Hamburgers?
He continued with a list of at least twenty of these questions and then closed with:
It is apparent that we have a lot to talk about. So, please meet me for lunch on [date] at [you pick the place].
He sent it, and guess what? He got a fast response and a date. He was blown away. The whole point of this is that you should try to take a creative approach in everything you do. Go try this on something you think is mundane today!
When I speak about many of these concepts to various groups, a question I frequently get is from people who do not feel like their organization is open to new ideas. My first response is always, “Well, that just sucks!” It usually takes the negative spin off the question and lets me respond with a better answer.
I tell my audience that if you find yourself in one of those situations, be a cowgirl, blaze the trail, and teach idea making. I ask them to think of themselves as members of British naval intelligence in World War II. Members of MI5 were masters at deception. They ran Operation Mincemeat, where they put a corpse ashore on the Spanish coastline with clues planted in pockets that were designed to mislead German intelligence. It was crazy, bold, and completely unorthodox. It worked and, just perhaps, helped win the war.
Brace yourself, because you are going to need that kind of courage and creative energy if you are going to open your company to ideas. Go change the culture, but never tell anyone what you are doing. If you are working in a low-idea culture, your idea about ideas won’t be very well received. Go get a small whiteboard and a pile of sticky notes and start putting a few ideas up on the wall. You have baited the trap, now just wait.
Someone will ask you what you are doing. You respond by saying, “I’m just trying to figure out which of these choices is best. What do you think?” Boom! You have set the hook. Go slow. Be patient. If they accuse you of promoting ideas, deny it! Never admit to anything.
Remember, success is never a straight line. Here is a story that started when I was two years old and my mom handed me a paintbrush. It played out over the next fifty-eight years. It happened because I built buckets and buckets of goodwill along the way that enabled so many connections to happen. You never know what magic and miracles are in store, if you value your network and do interesting things.
It continues with my relationship with my wonderful high school art teacher Carolyn Hayes. She was a real cowgirl and a great artist, but also an even greater teacher. She helped me push and explore my artistic abilities and introduced students in our small town of Liberty, Texas, to the likes of Van Gogh, Chagall, Monet, Rembrandt, and modern artists like Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder. I was intrigued by their techniques and explored with my paintbrush and drawing pencils. Carolyn was the reason I decided to major in art in college. My art was featured at local banks and businesses with blue ribbons hanging on my work. A shot of confidence to be sure.
Yes, Carolyn was a cowgirl. Not only did she have a lifelong love affair with horses, but she was always honest in her critique of my work. Never pulled punches. She was my horse trainer, but in art, if I needed to work harder on something or rethink an approach, she gave it to me in straight-shooting language. I took it because I wanted to improve.
In 2006, a couple of years after I joined C200, I had the opportunity to go with some other members of the group on a State Department trip to the Middle East. Five of us met several days before the conference in Egypt just to see the sights. We all became fast friends, but one person in particular, Marcy Maguire, who was also a C200 member, became one of my best friends. Eight years later, that friendship led to an invitation that would change my life.
In 2014, I returned to my roots as an art major and began painting again. I explored a lot of different styles from realistic to abstract. I painted only outside in the elements at our ranch. My work was all over the place, but I felt like it had promise. Lee told me that he was glad I was enjoying painting again, but that I was never going to make one thin dime from my paintings—and that was OK.
That same year, Marcy invited me to a Harvard Business School night at the Curator Gallery in New York, owned by Ann Moore, the former chairman and CEO of Time Inc. I had met Ann Moore years before when she gave a speech, and we became acquaintances through C200. I reconnected with Ann and learned that she had bought the gallery because of her passion for art, and it was going to be act 2 of her career. Remember, it is never too late to reinvent yourself.
Also that night, I met one of Ann’s friends and popular curator, Rebecca Michelman. I was bold enough (yet a bit afraid) to ask Rebecca to look at my paintings and showed her a few pictures. She said, “All I can tell you is to keep painting and exploring techniques.” Several months later, she volunteered to come to our ranch in Texas, where I was doing all of my painting, and to critique my work.
She and her husband and children came and spent a wonderful weekend with us. Finally, when the kids were happily engaged in the swimming pool, she took a serious look at the work. She quickly began eliminating paintings, being brutally honest with me about what she thought. This went on for a couple of hours and she had eliminated almost everything, but there were two or three paintings left. These were abstract paintings of big dramatic Texas sunsets and sunrises, painted with sweeping horizontal mixes of color. “This is it. Paint like this and we’ll do a show in New York,” she told me.
I worked my butt off painting for almost a year, always outside (en plein air) at the ranch. Sometimes I bundled up and worked in freezing weather, sometimes it was hotter than nine kinds of hell. But I brushed the sweat off of my face and painted with determination and passion. It was a huge undertaking and I finished over fifty paintings in my “spare time” in the style Rebecca championed. My faithful dogs and loyal companions were always at my side.
So in April 2016, I ended up with a monthlong one-woman show at the Curator Gallery in New York. It has to be one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me! So many friends and colleagues visited during the thirty days of the show, and we sold paintings. Ann Moore told a group who visited the gallery a couple of weeks after the opening, “Those rowdy Texans came and just ravaged the show!” We broke all the gallery sales records.
I was a bit intimidated by the entire process. My curator, and the media for starters. However, one person in particular got my goat. She handled public relations for the gallery. Cool as a cucumber, svelte and attractive, she gave off a knowing air that had me on my guard. I got to know her, and found she is a lovely, caring mother and now a friend. She just knew things about getting PR for an art show that I knew nothing about. She taught me a lot.
No one was more proud of me than my high school art teacher, Carolyn. When I opened the show in NYC, I sent her a text message. She was thrilled and so encouraging. I also asked her what she was working on and she simply said: “A sculpture of my horse.” She was one of those people who sometimes magically appear in our lives providing the right influence at the right time.
I continue to have exhibits and sell my paintings. When I got my first check for my art, I called Lee and told him he had to eat crow. I made more than one dime as an artist.
Success is not a straight line.