Managing Creative People E-Book

Gordon Torr

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 592

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A clash between the ideology of growth and the growth of ideas, between control and creativity, between measurement and the immeasurable, between predictability and the fickle muses of inspiration in engulfing our boardrooms. In this scathing swipe at the institutionalised idiocy that is stifling creativity just at the time the world needs it most Gordon Torr draws from the leading lights of creativity research to demolish the myths that surround the generation of ideas in the modern organisation. The curse of the brainstorm, the commoditisation of creative talent, the deskilling of the imagination, the startling inadequacies of management theory - these and the many other horrors of idea-assassination that run rampant in creative sector companies are dissected and disembowelled in this hilarious expose of the drama that unfolds every time a new idea slides across the boardroom table. This book sets out to address the black hole that surrounds the management of creative people, debunking many myths of creativity, and outlining a revolutionary approach to the pressing issue of creative productivity in the contemporary creative sector company. A handbook of tools, techniques, methods and practical ideas whose USP is a framework for thinking about efficient creative management - how to extract value from creative time. Gordon Torr presents a logical argument that puts in place the building blocks of the author's knowledge and experience towards the final architecture. "We need them as never before. And we know that they're somehow different. Yet the productive management of creative people is an almost totally neglected science. I doubt if there's a single industry that wouldn't gain immediate advantage from Gordon Torr's scrupulous and enlightening detective work." - Jeremy Bullmore

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

PART I - THE CREATIVE INDIVIDUAL

CHAPTER 1 - The day the world ran out of ideas

CHAPTER 2 - The problem with creative people

CHAPTER 3 - Two guys in a garage

CHAPTER 4 - 21st century snake-oil

CHAPTER 5 - The biology of inspiration

CHAPTER 6 - The creative personality

CHAPTER 7 - The survival of the weirdest

CHAPTER 8 - Towards a formula for genius

CHAPTER 9 - The barbel and the breadboard

PART II

Introduction to Part II

CHAPTER 10 - The muse’s ransom

CHAPTER 11 - Poison in the water-cooler

CHAPTER 12 - Podsnaps and ponytails

CHAPTER 13 - Structures and strictures

CHAPTER 14 - Place matters

CHAPTER 15 - The road to Exit Five

CHAPTER 16 - The maze

CHAPTER 17 - The guardians of the maze

CHAPTER 18 - The new patronage

Bibliography

Further reading list

Index

Someday someone will write a book explaining why so many pioneering enterprises, including Walt Disney, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple, were born in garages.

Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biedermann

Copyright © 2008

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Torr, Gordon.

Managing creative people : Lessons in leadership for the ideas economy / Gordon Torr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-72645-7 (cloth)

1. Creative ability in business. 2. Management. I. Title.

HD53.T67 2008

658.3’14 — dc22

2008007639

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in 11/15 pt Times by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall, UK

For Bruce

Preface

This book is about how a few very bad ideas have got in the way of our ability to produce a lot of very good ones.

Those bad ideas have been accumulating slowly but steadily over the last hundred years or so, like lime-scale in the plumbing of an old building, and now they have reduced the free flow of new ideas to a tiny trickle.

In some areas, such as in the kitchen of popular culture, the faucets have run completely dry. You’ll get a few drops out of them if you hit the pipes very hard with the heel of a heavy boot. Then you’ll hear them grumbling and squeaking and in the attic, and the water that coughs and splutters into your cup will taste foul and bitter.

In the annexe at the back, newly built to accommodate the emerging sciences, the water still runs bright and clear. But the lime-scale will get there too, soon enough, unless we are vigilant and well equipped with the remedies for its removal.

The larger part of this story is devoted to identifying and understanding those bad ideas: where they came from, how we were seduced into taking them for granted, and why they have such a constricting effect on the free flow of creativity and innovation.

While many readers will be anxious to race ahead to the last few chapters in search of ‘seven simple steps for the removal of creative lime-scale’ they are urged to be patient, not because I wish them to hang onto my every word, but because the tonic that this book offers for the revival of the innovative spirit in creative sector organizations will not be easy to swallow without the sweetening palliative of understanding why we need it in the first place.

Some readers will find this book mildly upsetting. Some will find it deeply disturbing, very dangerous or profoundly threatening. With any luck, all readers will be provoked.

It is written for people engaged in creative businesses, or, more precisely, in that booming part of the economy that has come to be known as the creative sector. This describes the 15 major domains, from advertising to video games, that now employ as much as 30% of the workforce in the world’s most developed nations. It includes the music business, film, fashion, publishing, broadcasting and software development. But it also encompasses those nominally ‘non-creative’ businesses that rely for growth on a constant stream of innovation from R&D or from new product development.

It is aimed specifically at that rapidly expanding cadre of executives, managers and agents who depend for their success on the performance and productivity of creative people, or who are in some way beholden to creative people for the furtherance of their individual or corporate ambitions. They could be marketing directors or brand managers seeking better ideas from their advertising agencies or their other communication partners. They could be film producers, commissioning editors, game designers, A&R executives, innovation managers or fashion buyers. They could be gallery owners, museum curators or sponsors of the arts. They could be editing houses, theatre directors or government ministries involved in furthering the creative industries in general. They could be publishers, newspaper editors, magazine owners or design agencies. Or they could be the human resource managers in any of the myriad businesses engaged in the creative sector. Anyone, in short, responsible in one way or another for developing or managing creative talent, or for commissioning, funding or selecting products of the imagination for commercial exploitation.

Shortly before going to press I happened to pick up a copy of What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, a collection of highly explosive views and observations by some of the world’s leading scientists, psychologists, sociologists and philosophers, assembled by the legendary John Brockman, editor of Edge, and one of the most radical thinkers of our age. I mention this for two reasons: first, because it’s such a bracing read, like an ice-cold shower for a mind made sluggish by too many warm layers of cosy assumptions, but second, because it reminded me just how difficult it is to have to reframe your thinking when confronted with compelling ideas that are not in accord with your own, or — worse still — with ideas you didn’t think of first.

Keeping your mind open to new ideas is hard enough in relationships, politics and religion. It’s harder yet when those ideas demand an immediate and drastic reappraisal of how you’ll go about your business at the office tomorrow morning.

So here’s the health warning ...

If you’re serious about making a significant, positive difference to the quality of the creative work or the creative thinking currently being generated in your organization or your business, be prepared to give up your most cherished beliefs about the way good ideas happen.

Be prepared, for example, to let go of the commonly accepted notion that we are all creative. Be prepared to forsake forever the counterproductive practice of brainstorming. Be prepared to give up the belief that teamwork is good for creativity. Be prepared to accept that good ideas don’t sell themselves. Be prepared to reject once and for all the assumption that creative problem solving and creativity are one and the same thing, and along with it, the misguided idea that creativity can be taught. Be prepared to question whether your organizational structures are facilitating the production of good ideas or actively suffocating them to death. Be prepared to discover that the free market mechanisms of supply and demand, which are so good at driving up the quality and driving down the costs of everyday goods and services, like electric toasters and holidays in Jamaica, have the counterrintuitive effect of driving down the quality and driving up the costs of creative products. And be prepared to learn that every single one of the management techniques commonly used to motivate the productivity of workers in the traditional commercial and industrial sectors has precisely the opposite effect on the productivity of creative people.

If a root-and-branch revision of everything we know about managing creativity is not dangerous enough, my really dangerous idea, the one that keeps me up at night in a state of frenzied foreboding, is that the bad ideas that are killing the good ones in the marketplace may also have begun to rot the foundations of art and culture, of our political and social aspirations, and of the values that prop up the entire edifice of our western liberal democracy.

Before you dismiss it as implausible, melodramatic or absurd you might want to remind yourself that all ideas, if they are to be of any significance at all, will appear at first glance to be implausible, melodramatic or absurd.

Just as fresh ideas are the lifeblood of healthy, dynamic organizations, fresh ideas in art, culture and politics are the lifeblood of healthy, dynamic societies. If, as I firmly believe, the mechanisms of libertarian economics are conspiring — quite paradoxically — against the origination of more, better ideas in creative sector companies, how long will it be before that same invisible hand moves on to throttle the imaginative life out of the body politic?

There was a time, not very long ago, when creative people pursued their ambitions outside of the commercial mainstream. If they were brilliant enough — and lucky enough — they were drawn into the mainstream by wealthy patrons, or by the fortune of commercial popularity. We would never have heard of most of the great artists and writers of the past few centuries if they hadn’t been born into money or, at least, into families prepared to support their talent.

That is no longer the case. Ever since Hollywood turned creativity into an industry there has been an increasing commercial demand for artistic talent in almost every imaginable form. By the end of the 20th century there was hardly a single expression of creativity that could not usefully be exploited for commercial purposes within a recognizable and respectable business sector. Who would have thought, just a few short decades ago, that an aptitude for animating digital dinosaurs, for example, could lead to a viable, fulfilling and lucrative career? For the first time in history the majority of people with creative aspirations have become wage-earners, just like everybody else, and the romantic view of the artist-as-outsider has been almost entirely dispelled.

On the face of things commerce and creativity have now become comfortable bedfellows, and we shall see just how profitable a partnership it has become. But strip off the duvet and you’ll discover a perverse and dubious coupling that is irrevocably damaging their offspring at conception.

For all of these reasons it is no longer possible to critique creative outcomes without reference to the commercial environment in which they were conceived, just as it is no longer possible to discuss creative businesses without reference to the way in which they harness the creative spirit. So while I have been at pains to make this book as useful as possible to managers of creativity and innovation, hoping to improve the productivity of their creative resources, I will not be apologizing for drawing the reader’s attention to the broader social and cultural implications of my argument.

The texts are intertwined throughout, just as our experience of creativity — on TV, at the movies, in the books we read, in the buildings we use, in the new products we buy — is intertwined, for so many of us, with the experience of making creative products or of managing them. We have become viewers and producers simultaneously. We are publishers of content and consumers of content at the same time. We live in a very different world, and it needs a very different perspective if we are to make out of it any meaning or magic.

Whatever other ambitions I might have for this work, not least of all the fervent wish that my children grow up in a world significantly more imaginatively fertile than the one they were born into, its principal objective is as clear as the title suggests, that is, to provide a simple and workable guide to getting the best out of creative people.

Acknowledgements

My thanks, first of all, to those friends and former colleagues at J. Walter Thompson who shared my belief that we were doing something more interesting than enhancing shareholder value. My thanks to John Furr for challenging me to shape my early convictions, to Teresa Amabile for lending them substance, and to Jeremy Bullmore for giving me the courage of them. To Jimmy Evans for embodying the new patronage, to Basil Mina and Eugene Strauss for keeping me honest, to Richard Block for making me think so hard, and to dennis Ryan, Derek Day, David Lamb and Jon Steel for their unhesitating support when I needed it most. Heartfelt thanks to Charity Charity who knew exactly what I meant when no one else did, and who introduced me to exactly the right people and exactly the right books at exactly those times when I didn’t know where to turn next. To Rae Burdon, prince among men and king among suits; to Harry MacAuslan, who stood for everything that was best about JWT; to Mark Murray, the rarest of advertising animals, an account planner who is simultaneously brilliant and humble. To Miles Colebrook, my mentor. To my Mexican creatives for la vida loca, especially the magnificent Gloria Lopez, and to Rocio Fernandez for teaching me how to conjugate ‘rain’ in Spanish. To Rosemary Morton, Juliet Dewhurst and Jane Arton who knew what was coming and supported me anyway. To Jo Mawtus and Nigel ‘Grubby’ Foster for being right there. To my sisters Deborah Evans and Helen Field, the former for making sense of the text, the latter for making sense of my feelings. To the delightful people at Langland for the shelter from the storm. To Claire Plimmer at John Wiley & Sons for understanding how much it matters. And most importantly of all to my wonderful wife, Karine, without whose unconditional love and belief none of this would have any meaning at all.

The authors would also like to thank the following for material used in this book.

Extracts from Source Book for Creative Problem Solving edited by Sidney J. Parnes. Reproduced by permission of the Creative Education Foundation.

Extracts from Cities in Civilization by Peter Hall. Reprinted by permission of SII/Stirling Lord Literistic Inc. Copyright by Peter Hall.

Extracts from Managing Creativity by Howard Davis and Richard Scase. This material is reproduced with the kind permission of the Open University Press/ McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.

Extracts from Lights! Camera! No Profits! in The Economist. Reproduced by permission of The Economist Newspaper Limited, London, January 2003.

Extracts from Skunk Words, an article used in Popular Mechanics website.

Reproduced by permission of Popular Mechanics.

Extracts from How to Kill Creativity by Teresa Amabile. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review.

Extracts from Creativity Under the Gun by Teresa Amabile. Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review.

Extracts from Twelve Songs II, One Circumlocation and In Memory of W.B. Yeats from Collected Poems by W.H. Auden. Copyright 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, executors of the estate of W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

Extracts from The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig. Reproduced by permission of Random House, Inc.

PART I

THE CREATIVE INDIVIDUAL

Creativity is its own punishment.

Anon

CHAPTER 1

The day the world ran out of ideas

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Opening lines of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Along with several million other people I was in Manhattan on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

Ever since Friday evening, when my taxi dropped me off at the New York Palace Hotel in Madison Avenue, a small crowd of people, mostly young women, had been gathering on the kerb directly opposite the hotel entrance on 50th Street. They were bored and restless, as though they had been there for some time. A couple of NYPD officers hung around to make sure they respected the flimsy tape barrier that kept them away from the traffic.

My room on the 15th floor looked directly down onto the nave of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

On Saturday night I was scheduled to meet up with an old friend from Mexico, whom I had met while working there as creative director of J. Walter Thompson in Mexico City.

The moment the elevator doors opened in the lobby I could hear the hysterical screaming of the crowd. I ran outside to see a white limo turning into the vast concrete cavern of the delivery garage. The police and several bodyguards were struggling to keep the crowd from streaming inside. A slight figure in an iridescent black suit was being hurried from the limo into the service elevator. I caught a glimpse of a single white glove.

‘Wow,’ I said to Chris when we met up at the Thai restaurant somewhere on the Upper West Side. ‘Have I got something to tell the kids when I get back home!’

On the Tuesday morning two planes appeared out of a clear blue sky and demolished all our certainties. Fukuyama was wrong. Far from having ended, history had been rewound to the beginning of the Crusades.

In the week I spent in a deserted Manhattan waiting for a plane to take me home to London I had plenty of time to think about how it could have happened, how we had been so tragically blind to its inevitability, and how the best brains in the world now seemed so bereft, not only of plausible explanations, but of the ideas we would need to take us forward.

The emptiness of the air above Ground Zero came to stand for that, the space where our ideas should have been.

A few weeks later I got a call from the Wall Street Journal asking me whether I thought advertising would ever return to normal. I said that I thought it would, and in due course it did.

But the emptiness stayed with me, and burrowed into my imagination like a worm.

As one of the global creative directors for J. Walter Thompson I had travelled regularly and extensively on behalf of my multinational clients, seeking out advertising ideas from our many international offices, or striving to manage the consistent application of those occasional few that originated from the global centres in London or New York. The first year or two were wonderfully exciting. The job was challenging, I was being very well paid, and I was visiting many extraordinary places and meeting some extraordinary people.

But after my seventieth or eightieth international flight things began to change. I grew numb to the novelty of each succeeding trip. Not jaded, just numb. I was staying in the very best hotels and eating in the world’s finest restaurants. I was conferencing at the world’s most exotic resorts, and getting front row seats to the world’s hippest events. Perhaps there was a moment when I could have stopped and rebooted my numbing brain. But I was tired and stressed and carried along by the momentum of commitments like a straw in the wind.

The exciting cosmopolitan cities began to merge into one generically cosmopolitan city. The hotel rooms began to merge into one generic hotel room. The restaurants began to merge into one generic restaurant with the same generic menus, wines and waiters. The conversations at the generic restaurant began to merge into one generic conversation, and the people into shadowy archetypes entirely bereft of individual features, characters and points of view.

When once I was alive to the subtle differences of the locations and languages that surrounded me, I now was seeing only the similarities between things, the stereotype, no longer the thing itself. All the airports seemed to be the same airport. The stuff in the Duty Free was all the same stuff. The New York taxis were still yellow, of course, and the London taxis were still idiosyncratically black. But there seemed to me to be only one universal taxi driver, with the same-shaped back of the head and the same conversation. I went to crafts markets in the hope of finding interesting and exotic mementoes for my children.

I was excited, in Sao Paulo, to find a quaint wooden frog that struck me as truly original. It had a wooden stick, stored for convenience in its backside, which prompted an authentic ribbit, ribbit, ribbit when you ran it down the ridges of the frog’s spine. A week later I found the same frog at Apt, in France. Then in Hong Kong, and later in Istanbul.

If this wasn’t disturbing enough, the advertising ideas I was seeing from our network agencies began to take on an uncanny resemblance to one another. Here was an idea from Chicago that looked exactly like an idea from Singapore, an idea from Dublin that looked exactly like an idea from Amsterdam. Through exposure to the same sources of inspiration — the D&AD Annuals, the Cannes showreels, Archive magazine, the internet — the once rich diversity of local thinking had been replaced by the shallow homogeneity of globalism.

And that is how this feeling began; how I came to believe that there were no more ideas left in the world, and that the imaginative capacity of the whole planet had been infected too.

Down at Blockbuster, the special offer bins were full of DVDs that nobody wanted. I looked through them and I could see why. There wasn’t an original idea among them. The movies that weren’t remakes of old movies were part twos of box office hits or B-grade versions packaged to look like box office hits of the past. I wondered how Pirates of the Caribbean had become Hollywood’s hottest property, and why it warranted not just one but two sequels.

Every movie seemed to be based on exactly the same plot, every book on exactly the same premise. In politics and in business, in sport and in the arts, the same handful of familiar tropes appeared and reappeared in transparently thin disguises, in the newspaper headlines, in magazine articles, on the radio, across the internet and on TV.

When I did see a good film, or an interesting one, I scrutinized the credits in search of the source of inspiration. Most of them seemed to be based on stories by Philip K. Dick.

Of course there were others, brilliant gems that gleamed in the dross. Almost without exception they were foreign films, small budget films, or films sponsored by independent studios.

Were there no more stories to be told? Or was it that interesting ideas for new scripts were being buried by nervous actuaries working in the bowels of the Hollywood machine?

There was another possibility, of course. Perhaps the new audiences, grown up on the schlock of poor TV, no longer cared whether they were watching something interesting or not.

I turned to the West End in the hope that Hollywood’s apparent allergy to new ideas hadn’t infected London’s best and brightest.

Billy Elliot, Blood Brothers, Chicago, Dancing in the Streets, Guys and Dolls, Les Misérables, The Lion King, Mamma Mia!, Mary Poppins, Phantom of the Opera, The Producers, The Rat Pack Live from Las Vegas, Sinatra at the London Palladium, We Will Rock You, Dirty Dancing, Daddy Who and Evita.

The most popular of the lot was Mary Poppins, sold out for months. Only a couple contained material written in the past two decades. Music of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was obviously still in huge demand, Abba, Diana Ross, Queen, Sinatra (going as ‘live’ but dead these 15 years) and the rest were tired old remakes of remakes of remakes.

Somewhere out there, in dark basements or dingy attics, in abandoned warehouses or unused cellars, the various muses of originality were being held hostage by unknown captors, for inscrutable purposes.

As for music itself, the crisis of originality was so public and so loud it was impossible to ignore. During their battle against Napster the big corporations that owned all the music almost succeeded in convincing us that they were the good guys, protecting musicians from the rapacious pirates of the internet. History proved otherwise.

Instead of anticipating the opportunities that the burgeoning internet would provide, the music companies had clung desperately to the tried and tested model that was making a mint out of the back catalogues. Instead of taking a chance on new music, or investing in new talent, they tried to shore up the crumbling walls of their entitlement in the copyright courts.

It took the Arctic Monkeys to prove, once and for all, that the old model was dead. The collapse of the rapaciously expensive CD system saw Warner Music and EMI dancing to the tune of the marketplace, where buyers eventually get what they want at a price they’re prepared to pay. It used to cost £12.99 to get the track you wanted together with 19 tracks you didn’t want. Now you can download the track you want for a few pence.

But it was a damaging war, and it left an entire generation without any music they could call their own.

Things were no different on the political front. The ill-conceived foray into Iraq had ended in a bloody stalemate as sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite mocked the optimistic plans of Bush and Blair.

The intention was clear enough — to create a capitalist paradise in the oil-rich centre of Islam. All of the major corporations were lined up in advance. There were going to be Wal-Marts from Basra to Kurdistan. All the Iraqis needed to come round to democracy were Pantene and Coco Pops at really keen prices.

Among the collateral victims of this unfolding tragedy were ideas good enough to resolve it.

I began to see the same pattern in the business pages.

Skype was — and is — a brilliant idea. Free telephony across the internet. Why didn’t BT think of that? I loved Skype, the simplicity of the branding, the ease of use, the free phone calls to South Africa. Skype proved what we’d always suspected — you didn’t need to pay £100 a month to use the phone. The telecoms companies had been having a laugh all these years.

When Skype sold out to eBay for $2.6 billion many users feared the worst. Fresh and surprising new ideas like Skype don’t come along very often. And no sooner had they arrived than they were snapped up by monster companies whose financial advisors identified them as opportunities for growth. What the critics forgot, of course, was that eBay, too, was a fresh and surprising idea when it first appeared.

eBay, Skype, Google, YouTube — the pattern was clear. The really good ideas were coming from individuals or small groups who worked independently of the major players, outside of the corporations or the existing business structures. The Arctic Monkeys, Brin and Page, the Skype guys, the auteurs, Berners-Lee himself.

The big companies seemed to be very good at exploiting ideas once they’d bought them, but pretty awful at coming up with them themselves. When was the last time you saw a good idea from an oil company or a bank? Why couldn’t Microsoft have invented Google?

In film, theatre and music, in broadcasting and in advertising, in publishing, software development and now, apparently, in business in general, the organizations with the most resources, with the most talent and the most money were consistently failing to deliver the one thing their CEOs claimed to covet above all else, the ideas and innovations that would translate their steady curves of growth into quantum leaps of fortune and fame.

It would be easy enough to blame their risk aversion on shareholders who preferred steady growth to the chance of failure — even glorious failure. But the lack of imaginative adventure has somehow infected the non-commercial creative sectors, such as public broadcasting and state-sponsored cultural endeavours like the theatre, ballet and those other arts in the UK and elsewhere that benefit from public coffers.

In July 2007 that most venerable of creative public institutions, the British Broadcasting Corporation, was accused in a nationwide poll of viewers to be failing to deliver fresh and original programming. Rather than being sheltered by public money from the cold winds of commercial pressure, the BBC had become a bellwether of a steadily cooling creative climate. The BBC is a special case that we will go into in more detail a little later. It is the case that will prove that the imaginative malaise of almost all of the world’s large organizations, including governments and the larger NGOs, goes deeper than a conservative regard for the bottom line. We shall see that it is rooted in a profound misunderstanding of the nature of creativity, and the way creative people have come to be managed.

Ever since 9/11 I had been marking the days when it seemed as though ideas had run out forever. The day that Leo Sayer’s ‘Thunder in My Heart’ got to number one on the UK charts. The day that James Blunt got to number one in the US. The release of Pirates of the Caribbean III. The beginning of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? on the BBC. The Harry Potter phenomenon for proving that there were no other books to get excited about. The sale of YouTube. The day Google sold out in China. The UK advertising industry’s disastrous performance at Cannes in 2007. The bill to cut PBS funding in the US. The Danish cartoon madness. The ‘surge’ in Iraq. The Hamas debacle. The war in Lebanon. There were too many to count, and I gave up in frustration.

But then there were the exceptions that proved the rule: breakthroughs in genome research, extraordinary new drugs — if only for people who could pay for them; advances in astronomy, physics and technology in general. And the exceptions had a pattern, too. In every instance they were achieved by individuals or small groups whose specialist knowledge protected them from the organizational idea-killers. Or, in the case of exceptional consumer brands like Apple or Dyson, they were driven forward by CEOs with an emotional stake in the success of the company.

It wasn’t, I realized after all, that the world had run out of ideas. It was simply that the world had forgotten how good ideas were created in the first place.

CHAPTER 2

The problem with creative people

I think the problem of the management of creative personnel is both fantastically difficult and important. I don’t quite know what we are going to do with this problem because, in essence, what I am talking about is the lone wolf. The kind of creative people that I’ve worked with are people who are apt to get ground up in an organization, apt to be afraid of it, and apt generally to work off in a corner or an attic by themselves. The problem of the place of the ‘lone wolf’ in a big organization, I’m afraid, is your problem and not mine.

A.H. Maslow (from a speech delivered at a Creative Engineering Seminar for the US Army Management School, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 1957)

The job of creative director in an ad agency is very much like the job of a football manager; you buy the best talent you can afford and you strive to get the best performances out of the rest of them. Unlike Roman Abramovitch of Chelsea, I could usually afford to buy only a handful of A-list players, so the second part of the job became much more important to me. I began to wonder what the conditions were that made nominally average creative people perform so well at certain times and so badly at others.

It’s fair to say, as the years wore on and the hiring budgets failed to improve, I began to obsess over it. I wanted to know how it was that you could buy a proven superstar from another agency and he or she would fail to perform in the new environment. Conversely, how could a certain creative person, regarded as average in one agency environment, move to another agency and suddenly perform miracles? I began to wonder whether it had anything at all to do with talent; and whether talent, perhaps, was the least significant of all the possible variables.

I began to experiment. I employed young people fresh out of universities and art colleges. I employed hacks whose careers were almost over. I put teams together and pulled them apart. I had them working in bigger groups and working singly. I put some teams in offices behind closed doors, and I put some teams into open plan areas with no privacy at all. When the money was available I hired people with sparkling reputations and gave them the toughest assignments in the agency. Then I gave them the softest and the juiciest.

I continued these experiments when I was transferred first to Mexico and later to London. As I began to move upwards through the agency ranks I found myself confronted by new challenges, managing multinational brands around the world, and overseeing some 50 or 60 regional offices for the agency network. I discovered that some offices produced consistently better creative work than others did, with the same brands, the same systems, and the same agency culture. I determined to find out why.

As my responsibilities increased in scope and complexity I began to take a more global view. I found myself being forced to look for patterns that made sense beyond the idiosyncrasies of culture and geography. When it became impossible to manage the detail for the sheer abundance of it, I realized that I needed strategies, not tactics.

I had to redefine my remit. I could no longer hold hands with clients on specific projects or intervene in the development of creative work in specific locations. I had to look at it — that is, the quality of the work coming out of the various offices around the world — the way a manufacturer would look at the quality of goods being produced in a hundred different factories. I could move or change people, I could rant and rave, I could philosophize and theorize, I could motivate and humiliate, but what I really needed was a total quality programme, like the ones our clients were using, to legislate a sea-change in our worldwide creative output.

Desperately, madly, and very secretly, I began to read management magazines, the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company and the Economist. I read HR books like Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, coaching books like John Whitmore’s Coaching for Performance, books on leadership like Jaworski’s wonderful Synchronicity, and books that people said I should read, like David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused. I read Drucker and Covey. I scoured the internet. And to my enduring shame I even bought a book by Tom Peters.

The more I read, and the more deeply I puzzled, the more I began to realize that traditional management theory had very little to say about managing creativity in organizations. There was plenty on innovation — absolute masses on innovation — but oddly, given the subject, nothing on talent, nothing on identifying talent, and nothing on managing talent. Everyone wanted innovation; the CEOs of major companies talked of little else. Innovation experts were in huge demand, and the territory was quickly claimed by the management consultants who flooded the business press with hastily written papers on the subject, interweaving quotes from Christensen with glowing case studies about Microsoft, Amazon and Enron. Innovation, it seemed, was code for exploiting new business opportunities, which allowed it to fit neatly into the conventional discourse on managing for growth.

Quite amazingly, or so it seemed from my first round of research, in the 50 years that had passed since Abraham Maslow first identified the problem of managing creative people in large organizations, not a single management theorist, academic or researcher other than Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School had done anything at all to take up Maslow’s challenge.

Given the extraordinary amount of literature on creativity and the extraordinary amount of literature on management, I found it hard to believe that only one person on the planet was interested in the intersection of the two.

I can’t remember exactly when the horrible truth began to dawn on me. It took as long as it did, I suspect, because I found it inconceivable, like discovering 10 years later that the headmaster of the parish school is a paedophile, or that all those nice people at last night’s dinner party voted for George Bush.

The reason why no one other than Amabile and myself were concerned with the problem of managing creative people was that no one believed creative people were any different from anyone else. The revelation was staggering.

Clearly if everyone is potentially just as creative as everyone else is, there is no need for a special class of theory devoted to managing them. If everyone is potentially just as creative as everyone else is, all one needs to do is train them to unleash that potential. If everyone is equally creative then Maslow’s ‘lone wolf’ is a fiction and you can manage advertising agencies and film production companies the same way you manage a baked beans factory. It defied logic, it defied my own experience, and I was determined to discover the truth.

I plunged into the literature on creativity, the formal and the informal, the popular and the deeply academic. I trawled the internet, I spoke to experts in the field, I experimented in the laboratories of the ad agencies I worked with. I began to connect the dots of creative performance from advertising to other creative sector companies, and I began to understand how the commoditization of creativity was conspiring to limit the variety and quality of expression across all 15 of the creative sector industries.

This book is about my findings.

The truth is that creative people are different from other people — special, for better or worse, in a way that we’re only beginning to understand. And everything we know about them suggests that they’re creative because they’re different, not that they’re different because they’re creative. It’s a vital distinction.

Believing that everyone has the capacity to be just as creative as the next person is as ludicrous as believing that everyone has the capacity to be just as intelligent as the next person, yet it has become almost universally accepted as a truism. It’s also relatively new, taking root only in the last 30 or 40 years, coinciding much too precisely to be accidental with the popularization of creativity as an essential ingredient of social and business success.

Before that, from the Palaeolithic era until the early 1950s, which is to say for almost the entire duration of human life on earth, the popular conception of creative people was that they were born that way, with unique gifts that obliged them to seek out and fulfil the singular vocations of their destiny. Ever since the first sangoma scratched out a picture of an eland on a cave wall, individuals with creative skills were treated with circumspect reverence in their communities. Often they were accorded magical powers of one kind or another, or given a special dispensation to behave as madly as they liked without regard to the traditions and taboos of the rest of the society.

They were shamans, priests, prophets, storytellers, poets, witches, troubadours, jesters, Giottos, da Vincis, romantics, lunatics, misfits, outsiders, strangers, village idiots, inventors, novelists, artists and, eventually, advertising people. They were vilified as often as they were revered, and reviled as much as they were respected.

Throughout this time no one bothered to question why they were different or how they were different. It was simply a matter of fact, as natural as the unpredictable markings on a cow. Psychology began to take a serious interest in creativity only in the 1950s when Maslow began to ask some difficult questions about the role of creative people in the workplace, and as the very first creative assessment tools were being drafted by people like Guilford and Torrance.

We will look at some of this research along the way, and examine the evidence on both sides of the argument about the distribution of creativity across the population. Even today the very best studies remain sketchy. But the rhetoric is becoming increasingly shrill, especially on the side of those who train creativity for a living and in whose interests it is to promote the idea of the creative genius lurking in all of us.

There are compelling social and political reasons why we cling so fiercely to the belief that we are just as creative as one another, or — at least — just as creative deep down inside of us if only we were given the opportunity, the training, or an expensive box of oil paints. The first and most obvious of them is that the word ‘creative’ has no socially acceptable antonym. If you are not creative you can only be ‘uncreative’, which is possibly even more taboo in today’s politically correct climate than calling someone fat, short, ugly, old or stupid.

The really odd thing about this is that the word ‘creative’, when used to conjure up the stereotype of someone who spends his or her life with their head in the clouds, has strong shades of the pejorative. Then it suddenly becomes the opposite of rational, orderly, organized, deliberate, methodical, reasonable, disciplined and a hundred other adjectives used to describe decent, hard-working citizens whose feet are planted firmly on the ground.

This is especially true when we talk about ‘creative people’ (or ‘creatives’ as they are called in advertising and, increasingly, in many other business sectors) as a class. And here are some examples of what the raised eyebrow that accompanies that expression really means.

The problem with creative people is that they’re unpredictable and unreliable. The problem with creative people is that they’re morose, arrogant and impossible to manage. The problem with creative people is that they think they’re always right. The problem with creative people is that you can’t rely on them to get things done. The problem with creative people is that you can’t tell if they’re any good until it’s too late. The problem with creative people is that you can’t replace them with machines. The problem with creative people is that they think they’re indispensable. The problem with creative people is that they don’t know the meaning of money. The problem with creative people is that they won’t listen, they won’t cooperate and they won’t toe the line. The problem with creative people is that they’re impulsive, hostile and out of control. The problem with creative people is that they live in a dream world. The problem with creative people is that they think they’re so different from the rest of us. The problem with creative people is that they think they’re the only people who can be creative. The problem with creative people is that most of them can’t even tie their own shoelaces. The problem with creative people is that they’re anxious, unreasonable and antisocial. The problem with creative people is that they would rather be living on a different planet. The problem with creative people is that they have to be stimulated all the time. The problem with creative people is that there are so many bad ones and so few good ones. The problem with creative people is that they think they can change the world.

We all want to be creative. We just don’t want to be creative like that.

None of this used to matter very much. Children who persisted with wild and uncontrollable imaginings even after a good Victorian education could be packed off to the country to live with Uncle Eric, or sent to fight Napoleon, or locked up in the attic.

Things began to change at the beginning of the 20th century. It was at about this time, while Edison was tinkering around with electricity and Henry Ford was tinkering around with the Model A, that the very first notions of productivity were postulated by one Fredrick Winslow Taylor, the father of ‘scientific management’. Taylor’s astonishing idea, which to this day informs all our thinking about efficiency in the workplace, was that businesses could be substantially more productive, and hence more profitable, if they could identify and replicate the ‘one best way’ of organizing the various tasks required to manufacture any given widget.

The famous management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, ‘I do not think it extravagant to consider Frederick Taylor as the one relevant social philosopher of this, our industrial civilisation’.

Armed with a newly invented stopwatch that could record units of time to the accuracy of a second, Taylor began to measure how long it took a worker with a broad flat shovel to unload a ton of iron ore into a foundry cart, and then compared it to another worker doing a similar job with a small pointy one. Whichever method was found to be most time efficient was recommended to management as the optimal procedure. These ‘time-and-motion studies’ were soon recognized around the industrial world as the defining approach to worker productivity.

Among the other eminently logical recommendations of scientific management was the principle that all tasks that required any thinking should be allocated upwards to the management class, while all tasks that could be routinized should be delegated down to ‘the lazy oxen’ on the factory floor.

One of Taylor’s greatest admirers was Joseph Stalin who was so struck by scientific management that he went on to formulate several Five Year Plans for Soviet workers based on its principles.

History has given Taylor a less glowing legacy than Peter Drucker thinks he deserves. Today we find Taylorism distastefully mechanistic. But we should remind ourselves that it was Taylor who first suggested that workers be given occasional breaks from the production line after being able to prove scientifically that a short rest did wonders to restore their appetite for rivet-bolting.

Taylorism and the mass production methods of Fordism combined to give us the dominant paradigm of productivity in the 20th century, and with the help of people like Drucker, conspired to pulp a forest the size of Bolivia into books on management theory.

But an interesting thing began to happen towards the end of the century, the phenomenon that has come to be known as the rise of the creative class, widely celebrated in Richard Florida’s eponymous book. For the first time, at least in the post industrial world, as more and more people were becoming so-called ‘knowledge workers’ and the creative industries were becoming increasingly attractive engines of profit and growth, managers were confronted with the unexpected challenge of having to squeeze more productivity out of the human imagination.

It was only then that the problem with creative people became anything more than a curious social phenomenon. It became a management problem.

Without that new-fangled stopwatch Frederick Taylor could not have converted scientific management from theory into practice. The distinguishing feature of Taylorism and subsequent theories of management throughout the 20th century have been characterized, above all else, by measurement — measurements of time, of mass, of efficiency, of skills, of productivity, of motivation, of units, of value, of targets and of every other facet of production that is amenable to measurement or for which a unit of measure could be invented.

It is common practice today to bundle several of these measurements together into KPIs, or key performance indicators, which, when combined together, become the measurements of growth, and hence, without too much deduction required, the measurement of how long you are likely to stay in your current job.

As a logical corollary to the advance of measurement into every aspect of the workplace, underlined by the obvious performance benefits that were beginning to accrue to practitioners of the ‘one best way’, a belief began to emerge among the measurers that things that couldn’t be measured accurately were probably of little importance, and that things that couldn’t be measured at all probably didn’t exist.

Unsurprisingly, one of the many things that turned out to be somewhat tricky to measure, as the management consultants turned their attention to the booming creative industries, was the size and shape of creative talent. It seemed, frustratingly, that the value of ideas could not be measured until after they had been realized. Even more alarmingly the likelihood of someone coming up with a good idea could not be measured at all. These findings suggested, according to the corollary above, that creative talent was either less important than it appeared to be, or simply didn’t exist at all.

For those who were already deeply suspicious of the value of creative people, this latter conclusion clearly gave scientific credence to the view that creativity was a commodity as widely distributed across the population as hair, teeth and 10 fingers. And yet, with an obstinacy that they had come to expect from so-called creative people, the de facto evidence that good ones produced better and more valuable ideas than bad ones continued to stare the measurers in the face.

The inexorable march of measurement had come face to face with the unyielding truth of creative performance.

The resultant clash was keenly felt in all of the creative industries, but no more so than in advertising, which is where I happened to find myself at the time. By then the insidious myth of creative equality had become firmly established, so there was no better place to witness the collision between Taylorism and creativity than in the gleaming corridors of one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies.

Taylor had nothing at all to say about creativity so it is probably unfair to accuse him of causing the current catastrophe in the imaginative life of the planet. But it is abundantly clear, even from the most cursory reading of his recipe for a more productive world, that he would have lumped today’s creative workers together with the lazy oxen of the smelting plants. There is no room in Taylorism for anyone other than the managers to have ideas. How he would have reacted, therefore, to the challenge of managing workers for their ideas is a matter for speculation.

This is not a book about advertising, but readers will forgive me if I draw on my experiences in that business to illustrate how, in Maslow’s words, creative people ‘get ground up in an organization’. If I had been a shoe designer or a music producer I would have drawn my examples from the fashion business or the music business. I have compared notes with creative people in other industries and it is clear that they are confronted with the same issues and the same challenges as those that began to beset Madison Avenue and Berkeley Square as the 20th century drew to a close.

But advertising would be a particularly good laboratory in which to study creativity suffocating to death even if I didn’t have an intimate knowledge of its labyrinthine ways.

It’s at the sharp end of the claws of commerce and at the tail end of those pursuits with pretensions of artistic integrity. The pressures are intense, the stakes are high, and the pickings are getting leaner by the day. Most creative people who work in ad agencies are salaried functionaries with little or no claim to the profits made by the agency owners, especially since the recent consolidation of the network agencies that has concentrated management power in three of four holding companies. The exceptions prove the rule. Those creative people who have been brilliant enough or lucky enough to get their names on the front door lead lives of fame and fortune. But it’s a short list, and getting shorter: David Abbott, John Hegarty and, uh…

Meanwhile, the names of the great luminaries of the past — Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, J. Walter Thompson, Bill Bernbach, Young and Rubicam, McCann Erikson — have all been subsumed into the faceless corporate monoliths with names as meaningless as Accenture, Altria, Consignia or Omnicom, as is the current fashion with companies who don’t care much whether we know what they do or not. At least WPP still stands for something.

All of this has had the effect of disempowering the creative voice within agency management, relegating creative people to the factory floor of idea production. It’s taken a while, but the proper division of labour has been restored, just the way Taylor would have wanted it.

Advertising draws the elite stormtroopers of capitalism, the marketing people, into hand-to-hand combat with the Bolsheviks of business, the advertising creatives. This is always fascinating to observe though it’s definitely not for the squeamish. Here the clash between the venal and the visionary is illuminated in graphic, slow-motion digital HD as every ringing thrust and parry echoes into the bitter divide that separates them. The marketers fight under the banners of predictability, precedent and profitability, the three handmaidens of the great god of growth. The creatives fight under the ragged flags of chaos and lost causes, of insight and inspiration, of romance and rhapsody, and they serve no gods but their own.

Stop the movie and examine it carefully frame by frame and you’ll see, cleverly concealed by the magic of smoke and mirrors, the leashes that restrain the creatives from delivering the fatal blows.

As desperate as they are not to lose these battles, the agencies can no longer afford to win them. That would mean firing the client, walking out of the room, and looking for one with the balls to back the agency’s brilliance. It used to work like that, and still does with those agencies with reputations big enough to sustain the courage of their convictions. But for the most part, local agencies and local businesses aside, client/agency agreements are negotiated between the procurement managers of the multinational clients and the management heads of the network agencies in chilly, smoke-free offices at the top of tall, glass-clad buildings a long, long way from the blood and thunder of the battlefields. Increasingly, these contracts will have to be sanctioned by the agency holding companies who must ensure that the Chinese walls they build between competing clients in the same network alliance are at least as robust as the emperor’s outer garments.

This has served to concentrate even more power in the hands of the global procurement managers who can now negotiate for sizeable discounts from their suppliers because of the huge volumes involved. Procurement managers, or buyers as they used to be called, don’t make much of a distinction between chassis components and advertising ideas, as long as the price is right. The pressure to discount goods and services is manageable only if the holding companies themselves have the scale to cope. From their centralized point of view a small discount on a massive number can easily be distributed across three or four agency networks and their seven or eight hundred offices. Of course, more funds are needed for the central bureaucracy that has to manage the individual network profitability, which means that more money is needed to fund the bureaucracies and network headquarters. So by the time it gets down to the office level, let’s say to the office manager in Bucharest, the margins for servicing the relevant multinational have all but evaporated.

The same corporate take-overs and mergers have happened across many of the global industry segments, and the corporate agglomerates that have emerged are faced with the same issues and opportunities. But for most of them there are still costs that can be wrung out of areas like logistics, distribution and increasing mechanization, and the cascading effect of the margin squeeze can be compensated for in the kind of production efficiencies that Taylor recommended.

As we have seen, Taylorism recommends a clear division of labour between thinkers and doers, or, more precisely, between jobs that demand discretionary skills and jobs that don’t. This idea has found its way into the lexicon of contemporary management thinking under the clumsy banner of ‘deskilling’.

You can apply deskilling to any job that can readily be broken down into several different routines, especially those in which the thinking role can easily be divorced from the doing role.

In the creative industries these strategies are not an option, though it’s highly likely that there are some procurement managers out there with dreams of mechanizing the creative process. When your basic unit of production is the imagination of a single human being, the savings to be gained from deskilling come to a sudden and abrupt halt.

As Davis and Scase put it:

... personal creative abilities are difficult to bureaucratise and are highly resistant to managerial attempts to “deskill”. If ... the development of modern industry is characterised by a transformation in the nature and organisation of work, such that the all-round skills of craft workers have been subdivided into specific tasks that can then be executed according to routine procedures by deskilled employees, this is difficult to achieve with the work of creative employees.

If this doesn’t explain everything, it certainly explains a lot.

It explains, first of all, why advertising agencies that prize ideas above service are prepared to pay for brilliance, put up with the vagaries of the creative temperament, and resist the temptation to routinize the creative process. By valuing the unpredictable nature of creativity these agencies continue to produce astonishingly good work year after year, attracting clients who themselves prize ideas above service, and defraying thereby the loss of margin from procurement pressure.

It explains, by contrast, why those agencies that adopted the Taylorist agenda and succeeded in deskilling their creative employees must now rely on speed, lower margins and efficiency of service — especially through global network structures — to compete. And as long as there are enough clients out there who are prepared to settle for the workable in lieu of the wonderful, compete they will.