Meet the Author

Successful people have been studied and written about for centuries. We all wonder what qualities and habits enable greatness. Malcom Gladwell surmised that greatness was an output of practice—and a lot of it. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice seemed to be the magic number in his best selling book, “Outliers.” But like most things, it’s more complex than simply logging 10,000 hours.

A quick search on Google demonstrates how much has been written about the topic. As you can see below, when searching for “leadership qualities” over 40 million results are found.

These days, everyone wants to talk about strategies for motivating employees. The topic has exploded over the past decade or so because our understanding of motivation has evolved. Decades ago, people thought we were motivated primarily by compensation. Pay people more and they’ll work harder, right? Fortunately, we’ve come to understand that human beings are more complicated than that.

Now, culture is all the rage. Thought leaders across every industry preach the effectiveness of building great work environments and weaving perks into the career experience. Article after article, blog post after blog post, headline after headline. The same talking points—largely repackaged.

What is culture? According to the experts, it’s a magical confluence of work and fun that improves performance across the board.

But the culture peddlers are missing the point. Yes, it’s important to create an atmosphere that drives and inspires great work, but are employee happiness and performance really as simple as a few perks and a pinch of autonomy?

We don’t think so.

Over the past few years, we’ve talked quite a bit about Nebo being a human-centered agency. About our purpose, trying to bring humanity back to digital. About being more revolution than business. About making our culture our competitive advantage. About putting people before profit.

And every now and then – during those transformative times in our lives – our purpose, our fight, and our vision becomes even more meaningful. One of those moments occurred Wednesday night when our Co-founder and President, Adam Harrell, welcomed his first child into the world, baby Adeline.

Direct response marketing doesn’t work. In fact, it doesn’t really even exist. Many marketers have suspected this for years, but haven’t really had the analytical tools to back up this sentiment.

Now, I know many will argue with this post and this assertion. There are probably litanies of “success stories” that showcase amazing direct response campaigns. But they’re all BS.

We don’t exist in a vacuum. There can be a direct response component to a larger campaign, but too often we hear clients (and less savvy marketers) say, “let’s just focus on direct response.”

Really??

Everyone who knows Nebo knows we take our donuts seriously.

So, for National Donut Day, we filled the office with dozens of treats from the best spot in Atlanta - Sublime Doughnuts (not that we needed a holiday as an excuse). But that was only the beginning of the celebration here at Nebo.

After the grazers of the office got their fill, two of our bravest and most confident eaters stepped up to the plate for a gut-busting, winner-take-all donut eating contest.