In every part of life outside advertising, we accept a simple truth: the best teams win because they do the hard work to become the best teams. They share a common goal, know what position each person plays, know what’s expected of them, and know how to bring out the best in each other. Look at last year’s champions—the NBA, college football, the World Cup. In every case, it was the team, not any individual, that made it happen.

Yet in advertising, we keep expecting success to come easily, without investing what it takes to earn it. “We’ll find a way.” “Just get it done.” That resolve is real, but it isn’t producing the results we expect. Across the industry, the work is suffering. The people are suffering. We’ve gotten to a place where we’re getting less than the sum of our parts.

Lately, our answer has been AI. Agents. New processes. New org charts. They’ve made advertising more efficient—no argument there. They’ve raised the floor. But in raising the floor, we’ve lowered the ceiling. The tools that make average work easier have also crowded out the conditions that produce exceptional work. It’s become a race to the middle: ultra-processed, commoditized advertising.

We all know what it looks like: campaigns that have no edge, pitches that answer the questions but sound like all the others, fewer creative surprises, strategy built on facts but not on human truths, and a staff that doesn’t know enough about each other to bring out each other’s best.

I think there’s a better way. It isn’t new, and it isn’t flashy, but it’s proven—and it opens the door to raising the level of work in every direction, not just the efficient one.

The path I see is doubling down on building stronger teams. Not just lip service, but with the actual work. I believe a high-performing team is how advertising breaks out of the middle.

What does that look like in practice? A common goal. Knowing how to work together—really together. Critical thinking, real collaboration, better communication, knowing when and how to take chances, knowing how to bring out the best in each other. None of this is new. These are just skills the industry has let atrophy.

I’ve decided this is what I want to spend my time on: helping agencies and marketers build better-performing teams. I’ve spent my career doing it for the best organizations in the business. Now I want to do it for others. That’s the premise behind The Wisdom of Teams—a name I’m borrowing in the spirit of Katzenbach and Smith’s original book by that title, because the argument for team performance still holds thirty years later.

Over the next few posts, I’ll get specific about what the most successful teams do differently, and how to build one from where you’re sitting today.