Rigorous Magic

One of the most beautiful buildings in the American Mid-west is the Milwaukee Art Museum. It is a fantastic piece of modern architecture, and from a distance with its winged roof, it looks like a great bird perching on the shores of Lake Michigan. Inside it's no less impressive. Walking around it you get the distinct feeling that you're entering into another world, a world combining both rigour and magic. The picture of the corridor shown on the front cover, taken inside this amazing museum by photographer Kieran Negoda, brings this to life. But to Steve and Jim the picture is more than just a visual metaphor for the name of the book. It's also a place in which they've experienced a lot of the issues that are dealt within this book as it's here that they've run several idea workshops for SABMiller - the global brewer that has its North American headquarters in Milwaukee. And in many ways, the building represents the business of creating ideas - inspirational, visionary and yet, at times, utterly frustrating. Steve and Jim both have both spent their careers working separately - Steve at BMP and PHD, Jim at McCann, Ogilvy and Nota Bene - but they have now both have found a natural home for themselves at the WPP media agency, Mediaedge:cia - Steve as joint Managing Director of Mediaedge:cia in the UK, and Jim as Global Director of Communications Planning and also Regional Director of Retail for Europe Middle East and Africa. They have increasingly overlapped in their careers on the SABMiller business; a business which has taken them all over the world. This journey hasn't been one of sterile airports and hotel rooms, rather it's been one in which they've really experienced the different markets.from working at the Praha hotel in Prague, a bastion to communism designed to be the place for 'the last stand' (with the tanks on the lawn) when capitalism came rolling into town, to going to saunas in the Russian countryside in -30 degree conditions, to talking to hostel dwellers in the townships of Johannesburg to arguing with unscrupulous cabbies at 2am in Bucharest. Most importantly, it has afforded them some of the most interesting planning work that you can imagine and given them a huge experience in the world of ideas. As a result, they've become fervent believers in the role that communication ideas play at the heart of modern marketing.