In praise of the stuffed shirt

As I've gotten older and more battle weary in my advertisng career, I've become less and less tolerant of the account barons who seem to trouser huge amounts of cash for doing, well, I don't really know what. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've seen these guys on the creative floor for example, but they do seem to spend an awful lot of time looking at spreadsheets and talking about resource. Usually before some poor unfortunate disappears from the phone list.

Judging from the blogosphere, not to mention conversations with my firends, it would appear I'm not alone in holding this view. Recently however I've begun to observe a new phenomenon, that of the stuffed shirt who actually serves a useful business purpose. These guys are, for the first time, making my life easier rather than loading it up with the kind of useless rubbish that only they could think of. You know the kind of thing - "I think the client would really appreciate a cross tabulation of our profitability against the population of Syamese Cats in Birmingham".

They don't achieve results through actually doing the work, that responsibility still falls to the rest of us. But they do make things happen through sheer force of personalility and will power. And knowing that you've got that willpower on your side sure makes it easier to crack on with that spreadsheet.

For every one of these individuals there's a dozen of the old skool, resource heavy, productivity light stuffed shirts who mysteriously hover around success and are nowhere to seen when things get a bit hairy, but from now on I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, at least until you invite me to tabulise your resource plan in 172 countries by tomorrow.