Good Execution Is Boring (That's the Point)

This post originally appeared in my Substack newsletter, The Work Behind the Work. Subscribe here.

No one ever makes case studies of a campaign that came out when it was meant to.

There isn’t a convention speech called “How We Stuck to the Instructions, Met All Our Dates, and Provided Steady Work on Eight Platforms for a Year and a Half.” No one takes a picture of a neat content schedule and puts it on LinkedIn, saying, “This altered everything.”

However, if you’ve been in a marketing group that actually did all those things, you’ll understand the impact. You’ll know how it is when the system is working. When social media goes up when it should, it’s the same as the email sent that morning, the salespeople have the correct materials, and the webpage is up before the advertisements start, when nobody is rushing around, when the work gets done.

That is execution. And it’s dull. And it’s what tells apart marketing that grows, from marketing that makes people tired.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

The worship of the great thought

Marketing society prefers the amazing. The campaign became popular very quickly. The brand change in AdAge. The unusual trick that brought the internet to a standstill for two days. These are the stories people tell, and they make an unspoken order: planning and invention are best, and getting things done is the not-attractive work that is under that.

The trouble with this view is that most marketing is not amazing. Most marketing is on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s in the weekly social list, the monthly email, the three-month campaign, and the always-there content that slowly brings in visitors for years. The amazing gets noticed, but the steady is what makes a brand.

I’ve been in places where the need to make something “large” made teams ignore the basics. The new product had an attractive design concept, but no follow-up series. The trade show stall looked great, but the team didn’t have a plan for what to do with the people who showed interest after the show. The social media campaign got a good reaction on the first day, then fell quiet for a fortnight because no one had thought past the start.

In each case, the issue wasn’t a shortage of ideas. It was a shortage of doing infrastructure – the dull, repeating methods that make a good thought into continuous production.

What really good work is actually like

Good work isn’t about how quickly it’s done, or how much gets done; it is about doing things the same way each time. Let me explain:

The work has to fit the original request. This seems obvious, but it doesn’t happen as often as you’d think. Good work means the thing you finally give to people is what the strategy everyone agreed upon was – not a take on it, not how someone understood it, but the strategy itself. This takes self-control away from the people doing the work and from those who check it over.

The work gets sent out when it’s supposed to. Dates in marketing aren’t just picked out of the air. They are linked to when things are released, events, when sales go up and down, and times of year. When work is late, it doesn’t just miss its chance – it makes problems for everything else. The email goes out before the webpage is up. The social media push begins before the salespeople have been informed. Good work respects the calendar.

The work looks the same, no matter where people see it. This is the part that gets most difficult as groups get bigger. When the brand looks and sounds the same on social media, the website, in what the sales team shows, and at a convention – that’s not luck. That is work. It needs forms, rules, people checking it, and someone who cares enough to do the checking.

The work can be done again. What shows really good work isn’t one great campaign. It’s a team that can do it again the next month, and the month after that. Being able to do it again means having written-down ways of doing things, clear roles, and times that make sense – not needing someone to do something amazing.

Work in times of high pressure

Most of the time in my career, I’ve been in businesses where you can’t just make things up as you go. Businesses that are controlled by rules. Convention dates that won’t change. Releasing products which are planned with sales, the people who make the products, the lawyers, and the leaders – all of whom have ideas, all of whom have to say it’s okay, and all of whom are on different schedules.

In those businesses, you learn something quickly: a fancy idea that can’t get through the checking process is worth less than a simple idea that is sent out cleanly. I don’t mean you should stop being creative. I mean, you learn to be creative within the limits – and you learn that limits, if you handle them well, actually make work better.

You also learn that work is a team thing. The best marketing I was part of wasn’t from one clever person having one clever idea. It was from a team with clear roles, agreed-upon times, and enough trust in the process that they could focus on what they were doing without worrying about whether the other parts would be ready.

The effect of things building up

Here’s the part people don’t usually talk about: good work builds up.

When the team sends things out consistently, the group’s knowledge grows. Forms get better. Checking processes get faster. The second product release is easier than the first. The third is easier than the second. Each campaign teaches the team when to do things, what to say, and how well a channel performs, making the next one better.

But when work isn’t consistent – when every project feels like starting over, when processes exist on paper but not in real life, when how good it is depends on whether the right person was free that week – nothing builds up. The team stays in a reactive state, and every three months feels just as hard as the last.

This is the hidden cost of trying to find the big idea instead of the basic things. You might get a great campaign once in a while, but you never build the system that reliably makes great campaigns happen.

Making a case for being plain

I’m not against creativity. I’m saying that creativity without a way of getting things done is just thinking of ideas. And thinking of ideas doesn’t get things sent out.

If you’re a marketing leader, the most useful thing you can put money into isn’t a new tool, a new channel, or a new campaign idea. It’s the way work gets done – the systems, processes, and habits which let your team do good work consistently, without needing someone to do something amazing, and to real dates.

That isn’t exciting. It doesn’t make for a great post on LinkedIn. But it’s the thing that makes everything else possible.

The campaign, which went out on time, to the request, and did exactly as planned? Nobody talks about it. But it’s the one that builds up.