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AGENT: "A person who WORKS on behalf of SOMEONE OR SOMETHING ELSE." Whiteboard was founded as an agency because our mission—to empower visionaries to lead meaningful brands—is fundamentally an orientation of agency. And through that work with more than 400 clients over the past decade, we’ve uncovered a simple rubric to ensure we leverage our agency capacity to build a Brighter Future. We’ve learned that in order to be effective agents, we must hold two tensions in perfect balance: Self vs. Others & Mastery vs. Mission And we’ve discovered that if you plot these two spectrums on a simple two-by-two, some interesting insights surface. At the extremes of these two tensions are the cornerstones of true agency: ambition, advocacy, purpose, and expertise. Self (Ambition) vs. Others (Advocacy) While agency is ultimately the work of advancing others, we cannot effectively do that, especially for more than short bursts of time, without tending to our own human needs as part of the work. We must remain physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy in order to meaningfully advance others. Simply put, you must put your oxygen mask on before helping your fellow passenger, but you don’t take the whole oxygen bottle for yourself. But if we over-focus on our own self-health without engaging others, our capacity for empathy diminishes, and we become alienated from those we have a responsibility to advance. Mastery (Expertise) vs. Mission (Purpose) To be effective agents, we must willfully submit to the mission of those we seek to advance (and in turn, we must take the time to define and understand that mission). But without a level of mastery of one or more skills, it is impossible to contribute to the advancement of any mission. Conversely, if our focus is too heavily weighted on developing our own mastery, we lose touch with the mission of others and may end up with powerful talents that are irrelevant to advancing others within our purview. True Agency can only manifest when purpose, advocacy, expertise, and ambition are held in perfect balance. If we fail to hold these tensions in balance, we can end up in what we believe are the Four Temptations of True Agency, found in the four extreme corners of the True Agency Axis: - Ineffectiveness - Burnout - Isolation - Vanity We cannot build a Brighter Future without a healthy understanding of the individual and collective aspects of our agency. We believe that by using the True Agency Axis as our lens, we can keep ourselves and our company centered and more rapidly advance a Brighter Future… without leaving a wake of cultural debt that those after us will have to pay back.

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