Big Spaceship: Right Now Better Now Go Big

Big Spaceship: Right now better now go big

Concerning the size of the company in the future, I am with CEO Michael Lebowitz, who asserted his stance on the issue when giving a talk to New York University graduate students that he will not grow the company until he has a clear intuitive sense of how they are going to preserve the quality of the culture at this size (Business Day, para. 2). This operation strategic decision is made under thorough consideration of both the external factors— its clients together with its targeted market and of course the internal ones— its deep-rooted and time-honored culture.

Though Big Spaceship is a relative small agency in size, it has worked for big-name corporations across different industries, for instance, Miramax, Nike, Gucci, Home Box Office and etc. However, it should be mentioned here that actually the client acquisition process of Big Spaceship was ‘self-selecting’ (p.7) in nature. Expected attributes from the prospective clients served as a filter. At its peak periods, Big Spaceship turned away about 80% of the incoming inquiries simply because those prospects did not meet their criterion for an ideal client, nor did they see any potential in those companies to become so. Dozens of companies flooded to Big Spaceship just in search of a similar solution that Big Spaceship have done for other companies in the past. As a result, they were filtered out by Big Spaceship side. From here we can see that Big Spaceship has set the tone from initial that it only catered for clients who were in alignment with the company’s value proposition. Big Spaceship only targeted at those clients who could understand their need to provide unique creative solutions and also who were open to a strategic engagement.

As a provider of solutions in all manners, just like the Chinese old saying goes ‘good wine sells well even deep in an outlying lane’, Big Spaceship always has great confidence in the creative and innovative solutions being offered to their prospective clients, and they feel the most comfortable when working with clients who are willing to take the innovation adventure along with them. “A big part of the Big Spaceship value proposition involved taking clients on a journey that carried the risk of going beyond their comfort zone.” (p5), and this can be evidenced in Nike Air Max case where they came up with brand new ways of connecting consumers with digital space. Also in the “Voyeur” project for HBO where they exceeded people’s expectation. Big Spaceship broke the stereotype of digital marketing and advertised in a multi-channel approach. No doubt, these were all successful cases in which Big Spaceship outperformed its competitors and as a result greatly impressed both clients and consumers.

However, it is invariable that Big Spaceship only caters for such a niche market. For Big Spaceship, they aimed at promoting not only specific project or a product. Instead, they aimed to create an engagement with the potential customers of its clients and goes beyond advertising (p.6). While at the same time, the clients are expected to be willing to spend the time and effort required for the same. CEO Lebowitz is always leery about the future demand for this niche market. Even though at present stage, “Big Spaceship was in a position to turn away business” (p.19), there is possibility that “the market for its work could soften” (p.19). If the agency recklessly expands its size, it may result idle capacity in the end. Obviously, it would worsen the financial situation of the whole company. Apart from that, for a company with tremendous focus on innovation (p.6), such scenario would significantly undermine the employee’s passion as well as company’s morale.

From Lebowitz’s statement we can see that he is placing the company culture as the first priority, even at the cost of economies of scale.

As the size of the company expands, Big Spaceship had to alter the way how they organized its people. In the early days, Big Spaceship conformed to an “organic structure” (p.15), in which people were grouped by “disciplines” or in other words “functions”. With reference to this structure, correspondingly Big Spaceship even divided and arranged its physical working space in the same manner. That is to say, “all the designers sat together and all the developers sat together and all the strategists sat together and all the producers sat together.” (p.15). This structure enabled intimacy between colleagues serving in the same disciplines thus provided a good platform for efficient sparkling communications and immediate information sharing.

However, when client volume reaches a certain scale, this mechanism became dysfunctional, mainly due to the “communication breakdown” (p.15) occurring within different phases. It was like all in a sudden, people involved felt that they did not know each other or each other’s current work as well as before. We can try to imagine: under the assumption that effective communication is hampered, once the desired outcome coming from the client happens to be distorted or misinterpreted in the half way, it takes a multiple amount of time to figure it out, not to mention to fix the problem. Though Big Spaceship later updated its organizational culture and turned it into a team structure, I consider this course of action not enough and can not tackle the problem at its source.

First, Big Spaceship is a creativity company that claims to differentiate itself from its rivals based on innovation, but now there is even clear quota on the number of team members for each project. Employees used to have autonomy over which project to run but now they are locked in a fixed 7-member team. Under this rigid division of labor, the final project is more likely to be standardized products coming from the same production line— same recipe, same taste. No more mix and match, no more innovation. These facts are a real slap in the face for Big Spaceship’s executives because they are gradually deviating from their original idea, simply due to the pressing size problem. Side effects of team structure also obstructed the interactions and knowledge exchange within the same discipline, which according to Harvard Business Review is critical for such a cutting-edge company to maintain its leading position (p.17). Prohaska once compared the interdisciplinary communication to people cross-pollination (p.17), he also conceded that now the communication is “a little segregational” and not “organic enough”. If these