Tony D sent this to me and there's some great stuff in here, so I think I'll just share the whole thing. I know it's been around a while but it's new to me. It's relevant to us as we figure out how to grow without compromising on the quality of what we do. And to anyone else in the same situation. It was found here.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth
Bruce Mau

01 Allow events to change you. You have to  be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
02 Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
03 Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
04 Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
05 Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
06 Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
07 Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
08 Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
09 Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10 Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11 Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12 Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13 Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14 Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15 Ask stupid questions. Growth is fuelled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16 Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17 ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18 Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.
19 Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20 Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21 Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22 Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23 Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24 Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25 Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26 Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27 Read only left–hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our ‘noodle’.
28 Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29 Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device–dependent.
30 Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between ‘creatives’ and ‘suits’ is what Leonard Cohen calls a “charming artifact of the past.”
31 Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32 Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33 Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object–oriented, real–time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
34 Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea—I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35 Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36 Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else… but not words.
37 Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38 Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old–tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39 Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces—what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference—the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals—but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40 Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41 Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42 Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43 Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

Good stuff – thanks, Bruce.

I don’t go to many ‘industry’ get-togethers, but when I do I’m always struck by the relentless positivity of people in this business. Even when Soho’s burning, there are sten guns in Shoreditch and hungry wolves are running wild in the streets, the happy folk of adland talk about what a great year they’ve had, how business is booming and how they’ve never been busier, ha ha. But not so much this year. Most of the people I’ve spoken to over Christmas drinks admitted that 2011 was a tough year and that 2012 looks like being a slog too. People are tired. ‘Roll on Christmas and a few days off,’ seems to be the popular sentiment. And to be honest, here at W+K we too had a tough year in 2011. After a number of years of steady and even rapid growth, 2011 saw the agency contract as a result of economic factors and the parting of ways with Nokia, which had been our largest client. Of course, we’re still optimistic here at W2O and we’re hoping for a prosperous 2012. We recognise that we’ll all have to work hard next year to achieve that success.

In the meantime, here’s a summary of the year that was 2011 for Wieden + Kennedy London.

Creative highlights

Our ‘The Milk Matters’ campaign for Cravendale launched with ‘Cats with thumbs’. This was named one of the top ten ads of 2011 by Adweek and nominated for campaign of the year by ITV and Campaign magazine.

The thing that really made this campaign special was the integration of TV and social media, with Bertrum Thumbcat facebooking, tweeting and generally getting his polydactyl paws all over the internet.

The ‘Milk Matters’ campaign continued with ‘Milk me Brian’, a spot that asked the question, ‘Who first thought to milk a cow?’

The latest execution in the ‘Good food deserves Lurpak’ campaign was called ‘Kitchen Odyssey’. This suggested that even the humble omelette could make for an epic meal if done properly. (Properly, like with Lurpak.)

The TV ad was supported by posters celebrating the greatness of simple food and a range of on-pack foils following the theme.

There were a few interesting things for Honda this year. We launched the Honda Jazz across Europe with the ‘This Unpredictable Life’ TV campaign.

The campaign also included an innovative mobile app that enabled you to interact live with the TV ad.

And we did our first ever Motorshow stand for Honda at the Frankfurt show.

Most recently we launched the Honda Experiment HTML 5 game, which has been getting lots of positive buzz online and was named FWA site of the month.

Our Kaiser Chiefs bespoke album creation thing turned the concept of an album on its head and allowed fans to create their own version of the Chiefs’ new LP ‘The Future is Medieval’ and promote and sell their version. It was named ‘Best artist promotion’ of 2011 at BT Digital Music Awards.

Kaiser Chiefs The Future Is Medieval Case History from Wieden + Kennedy London on Vimeo.

Following on from ‘Dot’, the record-breaking world’s smallest ever stop frame animation, we created for Nokia ‘Gulp’, the world’s largest ever stop frame animation, entirely shot on a Nokia N8.

You can see how it was all done here.

Our campaign to support The Guardian’s Book Season contained lots of fun and thought-provoking elements, with the Big Book Swap at its heart.

The campaign even made it onto Russian TV.

Our campaign for soft drink brand Nestea rolled out globally.

Wales Wants Piers was an innovative campaign that used social media to get the people of Wales to create a proper holiday for one man (and his girlfriend).

We wanted to help shift entrenched perceptions of Wales by acting in a different, more progressive way. This campaign aimed to open up the conversation about Wales by giving the people of Wales and lovers of Wales a platform to talk about the stuff that they do or love best.

More info here.

Loads of work done on Nike this year and a ton more in production now for 2012.

Awards

Yeah, yeah, awards, blah, blah, etc. But we entered them and won some, so here they are.

– 5 x golds at BTAA (more than any other agency, er, I think)

– Nike Write The Future topped the Creativity League Table as most awarded campaign of 2011 (including Cannes Grand Prix + 2 gold lions)

– Webbys Agency Of The Year 2011

– Blades Digital Agency Of The Year 2011

– Creative Review Agency Of The Year 2011

– Marketing Week / Engage – runner-up Agency of the Year 2011

– APG Awards 2011 – gold, silver and special award

– Campaign BIG awards – 6 silvers

New biz wins

2011 was a tough year for new business. There wasn’t much around and what there was, was harder than ever to bring in. For the first year in a long time we lost more pitches than we won. (Must try harder in 2012.) But we’re very proud of the ones we did convert. We won the business for mobile network Three.co.uk earlier this year. We also picked up the Lurpak global account. This one was particularly sweet: we lost out in the pitch a couple of years ago, so it was nice to have the client come back to us, based on our work for Lurpak in the UK, and ask us if we’d extend that relationship.

And we’ve just picked up the US account for Kraft’s gum brand Stride. This will run out of WK London and will be our first work for Kraft.

Setbacks

It was not an easy year. After a turbulent time in which they faced unprecedented competitive challenges and went through massive upheavals, we parted company with our largest client, Nokia. There’s probably a book to be written about that whole story. We did some great work with them, sometimes, but we just didn’t seem to be able to implement the across-the-board reinvention and relaunch that the Nokia brand needed. We wish all our friends at Nokia the very best for 2012 and hope that they settle with an agency partner to do the work that this brand deserves.

As a result of parting with Nokia, we had to lay off a significant number of people. That was as tough and shocking as redundancies are at any company, and it perhaps felt even more difficult at somewhere as tight-knit as W+K.

The Guardian is another client that’s been through well-publicised commercial challenges. Like Nokia, they have seen many recent changes of structure and personnel in a time when technology is causing huge upheaval for their business. One result of this was a brand relaunch project that they decided to brief out. We held on after the first pitch, but a second pitch was called immediately after the first and we lost out that time round. That was a blow, I must admit.

Optimism

2011 is pretty much done. It wasn’t totally an ‘annus horribilis’ but it certainly wasn’t an ‘annus mirabilis’. Economic forecasts suggest that, despite the Olympics, 2012 will be another commercially challenging year. But difficult times are the times in which brands rethink what they’re doing and look to agencies for fresh ideas and new approaches from which to gain competitive advantage. We just need to make sure we are smart and responsive so as to take advantage of these opportunities when they arise. So, here’s to a happy Christmas and a prosperous 2012.

Have a good holiday break. See you back here again in the new year, rested, refreshed and ready for whatever 2012 holds, with an optimistic attitude, of course.