I am working through the 3 skills of waggledancing: location, motivation and inspiration

Here's a note I got from someone who had worked for 6 months in a planning role:

"Isn't account planning as beautiful yet humanly impractical as communism?

I mean, I joined account planning after studying the job description and fell in love with its theory. In reality, it's a job that nobody else than planners respect therefore nobody cares, therefore it's useless."

I recognise a lot of myself in these comments. Planning is a great job - why does nobody else get it?And it started me thinking about why waggle dancing is so different from solitary strategizing.

I have heard other choice quotations about getting enough just experience in a planning department to be able to go freelance. The ultimate is to be a top gun planner admired by all and taken seriously. What better place than sitting in a coffeehouse waiting for the next agency to invite you in to ask your advice?  It is true that planners do tend to go freelance eventually. But the idea of the freelancer as the archetypal planner is misleading. I'll tell you who the archetypal planner really is - you can tell because it is at this stage they get the biggest % hike in their wages. It the 2-3 year old planner, with a solid grounding having worked on accounts where there is a strong marketing and branding background who can run an account on their own with minimal supervision. At that stage in your career (though no one will tell you this) you are most valuable. Because you are still relatively cheap to hire but can still ask and answer the big questions which senior people ask who are much too expensive to invite to meetings. After this point your value diminishes because your salary will increase steadily. And as you gain experience you will converge with experienced creatives, account handlers and all the rest. By the time you are at board level your value comes from how you manage people or guide the company. For planners to get senior and still be useful you have to work harder know more and think faster. But I don't think you will ever beat the 2 year old.

The power of the self starting, responsible planner comes from being bright, cheap and available in a way that senior people aren't. And this means being available to the rest of the team to challenge, inspire and listen. You will probably get to the answer first. In which case its your job to help the others catch up and to take them with you. You have a major role as a motivator. Not from above or from the front but alongside. If planning only works when you have more than 10 years of experience and can out talk and argue everybody then you will still fail to take people with you and you will cost a ton of money.

The tough thing is to earn the respect when you have no authority. So you have to use brains, persuasion and character to win the day. This is the real deal. It ain't communism. That's the kind that gets talked about in coffee houses. All the brilliant strategies that nobody else understood that no clients bought. All that is is sour grapes and the measure of our failure.   

 Have this motivated you or demotivatied you?