a chicken salad sandwich, hold the chicken...

Order Takers. Sigh.

The bane of any agency. The reason why a lot of good work becomes, well, less good. The reason why a lot of agency-client relationships become, over time, much less good.

You know who Order Takers are, or at least you've dealt with them. They're the people who don't think; the people who participate in this thing of our ours often with a smile, with enthusiasm, without hesitating – and without thinking. There are several key traits of the Order Taker, but you only need to possess one to become one.

They're people who are in over their heads; without understanding or confidence, they have no choice but to parrot things they've been told to say. They're people who have no sense of perspective, and who are never going to grow one. They're people that do the minimum asked, without regard for consequences. Or, not trivially, they're people with no sense of humour.

Emphasizing that the people I currently work with are not Order Takers (we've built an exceptionally good team) here are a few actual examples, with the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

On the client side: We once got feedback from an assistant marketing manager that her boss, the relationship marketing director whom I'll call J, wanted the piece we'd presented to be yellow. Now, yellow wasn't a brand colour. It had no relationship to the concept, or to the consumer. We just couldn't understand it. We politely tried to dissuade the junior client during the call, then after the call we becme slightly more vocal. Tired of our swearing, our account team tried again, but there was no appeal. J was now out of town/in all-day meetings/whatever, and this Order Taker was standing firm on J's final word.

Now, J was (and is) a smart guy. He's consistently been a champion of good creative. And as we have several friends in common, we have also become friendly outside of work. Weeks later, I was able to ask him point blank: J, what the hell was up with the yellow?

"Oh my god," he said. "I was joking." And because he was being a good manager, giving input but letting his people run with their projects with a high degree of autonomy, he had no idea that his minion had mindlessly executed his joke. Autonomy is useful only for those who are autonomous.

On the agency side, there's the irritating account Order Taker: The person like A, a junior suit, who emails you the client feedback as a fait accompli. There is no discussion; his tone is simply, "You will do this." Except that, for me, there's always discussion if I don't agree or see issues. Questions to A about this feedback get the response, "I don't know, I'll have to ask the client."

Now, A should know. But he has simply taken the client's order, without asking questions, without being curious about the client's business, or even other projects within the agency.

When you say, great, if you have to call him/her to ask, why don't I come to your office and we can chat to him/her together, it turns out that before you were able to send that email, A has already managed to call the client and gotten an answer to your question. Except it isn't actually an answer to your question, it's an answer to what he thought was your question, which actually isn't right.

So, apart from cursing A's basic level of intelligence, you have the choice of: a) just doing the damn feedback; or b) involving A's boss and calling the client and finding out what the real situation is and what you can do about it. Unfortunately, you have to judge for yourself whether the feedback warrants this kind of intervention. You can't piss everyone off on every single one of A's projects, or suddenly A isn't the problem, you are.

However, also agency side, there is the even more irritating creative Order Taker: A good writer, X, brought me a deck of hers that had been marked up by client with their first round of feedback. She was cranky. The client feedback was stupid. Did she really have to deal with this? Couldn't I do something about it?

I went through the changes and, while more extensive than any creative might ideally like, found that they were actually workable. I went through them with X, telling her that I was confident in her ability to handle it. I got her attempt back 24 hours later; she had done all the changes literally, and had killed off the spirit of her concept. I gave it back to her with lots of suggestions about how to bridge the gap, as they say. At the end of that day, with the account team clamouring for the now late revision, I took a look at her second attempt. It managed, somehow, to be equally pathetic.

With a view to the timeline, I had her send me her Word doc and quickly did what I could to keep her concept alive, and shipped it off to the account team. Inevitably, more changes came back a few days later, from more senior managers and lawyers. X continued to flail away with growing hostility. Any time I tried not to intercede, the account team found her work impossible to pass on to client, not because she couldn't keep the concept alive in her copy, but because the sentences were disjointed. Feedback was inserted as asked, without thinking if it made any sense.

X didn't last much longer.

As much as you'd like to say that Order Takers can still have a role in marketing (as, say, project managers, editors or accountants, because those are more detail-oriented roles), there's just no room for people who don't understand marketing or their part in it. Those detailed jobs like project management and the others all require thinking and judgement. There should be no room for people who, really, just can't do their jobs.