My friend Edward Boches is part-time chief innovation officer at Mullen and also Professor of the Practice, Advertising, at Boston University College of Communication. He worked with the super-smart students in his Strategic Creative Development class to write, design, and publish an ebook Get out of your minivan and into our spaceship in just three hours.
“Three hours,” Edward says. “That’s how long it took to conceive, write, edit, document, draw, and design this book. OK, the finishing touches went a little over the third hour. But the point is, this book isn’t about talking. It’s about creating. Or as we like to say ‘making shit’. It’s also about speed, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, decision making and expressing one’s self. Yeah, that’s what we do here.”
Direct link to Write the Book in Three Hours: Mini-Case on YouTube.
There are a lot of things to love about this ebook.
It was created quickly.
In a typical corporate environment, such an ebook would require endless meetings, revisions, and approvals and would likely take months to create. The students did this in three hours.
It was a collaborative effort.
The students figured out how to organize themselves to complete the tasks and everyone had a job. In a corporate environment, I often see situations where one or two people do all the work and a dozen offer their opinions but do no work. This true collaborative approach is refreshing.
There are some great ideas here.
It is encouraging to see what people who are entering the workforce can do. As a result, I am enthusiastic for the future of marketing. I learned a lot about how young people think about advertising by reading the book.
The ebook should help students in their job search.
As I’ve said many times, web content sells all sorts of ideas, including people. What’s better for a new graduate? To send a dusty old resume? Or a link to this ebook and other content they have created? As a member of several advisory boards of companies like HubSpot, I always like when the people getting hired are those who prove what they can do via content rather than say what they can do via a resume. Now many companies are hiring this way.
To the BU students of CM527: Great work! You have exciting careers ahead of you. Keep doing work like this and you will thrive. Find a first job where they value the ideas like in your book. Don’t start your career at an organization living in the past.
