What if there was no one to tell you no? How would that change your job? What would you different? What if the way things ran in your business/department/division was your call? What if there wasn’t the excuse of someone telling you no to hold you back. What would you do right now? I’m betting that for most of you it’s different then what you’re doing right now. It’s probably more interesting and exciting as well. It probably pushes the envelope and redefines the way your company thinks about itself and how it interacts with your customers.

It’s probably a really good idea. It probably won’t get the thought it deserves.

I think we’re often too quick to kill our most creative ideas. It’s easy to look at how the corporate bureaucracy grinds down true innovation and give up before you even really get started. Why waste time and energy even thinking about an idea when time and again you’ve seen exciting ideas replaced with middle of the road compromises that feel and look safe? Why try, when it is so clear that your idea faces long, long odds? It’s easier to just go with the flow and shelve that idea for another, safer time.

This is a grave mistake.

As marketers it’s our job to continue to not only got to the well for great ideas time and time again; but it’s also our job to fight for our ideas, to champion new ways of doing things that make our businesses better and our customers happier. It’s our job to keep envisioning what it would be like if there wasn’t anyone to say “no.”

When an idea dies or gets watered down it is not an occasion to give up on innovating – it is a call to push even harder.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the highly-regarded ad agency sums it up best in their employee handbook:

It takes a special person to succeed here, one who has a passion, confidence and work ethic to believe in their ability to come up with more great ideas if and when their original great idea dies. And ideas do die here. On every account. In every department. Great, groundbreaking ideas die horribly sad deaths. But what makes us better than most is our ability to go back to the well and come up with more, better and even greater ideas.

This is the charge of every marketer. Keep the innovative ideas, the ones that would see the light of day without the naysayers, coming. Over and over again. In the face of probable defeat, that is the job of the great marketer. Because the next idea may just be the one that changes everything.