I’m not talking about annual reviews (which are stupid). I’m talking about how you work as a client for a project that needs to make something.

It might be an internal team developing a website or it might be an outside designer working on a logo. Regardless of the team’s make up, as their client, you walk a fine line. On one hand, you want their best, most creative insight, delivered with passion. On the other, you want the people you represent (your boss, the customers) to be happy with what gets made.

Which leads to the feedback part. (Not criticism, feedback).

If you own a lot of acres but just have a few bags of seed, you might be tempted to spread out what you’ve got and cover as much territory as you can. Farmers tell me that this is wasteful and time consuming. You end up with less yield and more work.

Marketers face the same dilemma.

The number of media channels available to you keeps growing. The number of places you can spend time and money is almost endless. Yet your budget isn’t. Your time certainly isn’t.

There are two reasons joint ventures fail. The joint part and the venture part.

All ventures are risky, because they involve change and the unknown. We set off on a venture in search of something, or to make something happen–inherent in the idea of a venture is failure. It’s natural, then, for fearful people on both sides of a joint venture to back off when it gets scary. When given a choice between a risk and sure thing, many people pick the sure thing. So any venture begins with some question marks.