Welcome to Optimism

Harriet Minter talk at W+K

It’s International Women’s Day today! This morning, we welcomed Harriet Minter, journalist and broadcaster, at W+K. Harriet founded and edited the Guardian’s Women in Leadership section. She now writes a column for them on Women in Tech all while hosting The Badass Women’s Hour on TalkRadio. She’s written for publications including The Times, Huffington Post and The Pool.  She regularly speaks on the future of work, digital media and women’s rights.
Today at W+K, Harriet gave us a talk titled ‘Proceed until apprehended’, she looking at the links between failure, creativity and success. In 2012 she founded the Guardian’s Women in Leadership section, six weeks later it looked like it was going to close. She explained how she used her mantra of “proceed until apprehended” to convince an organisation to back her idea, why she takes an hour a week to practice failing and what we can all learn from a toddler. She also talked about how people approach failure differently, and why the greatest barrier to creativity isn’t failure but inertia.
Happy International Women’s Day!

‘Up’ – Our latest campaign for Honda

We’ve just releases a new campaign ‘Up’ for the new Honda Civic, featuring Imogen Horrocks, rising star of the climbing world and a member of Team Great Britain. ‘Up’ is a metaphorical film about the challenge that Honda faced, and embraced, in the creation of the all new Civic.

It’s a story about the struggle of bringing an idea to life, the young woman and her heroic ascent representing Honda and their own daring engineering journey. The clay mountain is based on the clay used in the design process of the car. Designers and engineers spent years developing the shape of the Civic to give it its new advanced and sporty style. Similarly, W+K worked closely with artists and designers at MPC London to develop and craft the world you see.

Long ago, Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda, uttered simple but extremely powerful words; “Instead of being afraid of the challenge and failure, be afraid of avoiding the challenge and doing nothing”. Unsurprisingly this quote has been the driving force behind everything Honda has done ever since. Today, when it seems that iteration has become the norm. Where it has become acceptable to settle for ‘OK’. Where tweaking rather than radically changing is the way things are done. This attitude has never been more important.

Loading