Vulgar Creativity

“Companies constantly tell us about their commitment to excellence, implying that this means they will make only top-shelf products. Words like quality and excellence are misapplied so relentlessly that they border on meaningless….To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.”

                                                --Ed Catmull (with Amy Wallace) in Creativity, Inc.

Catmull and Wallace’s recent account of Pixar’s decades-long journey is an impassioned call for individuals and organizations not just to speak their core beliefs and values but to act on them consistently and imaginatively.  Many of these beliefs, from quality and excellence to “trust the process” and “story is king” are familiar invocations of business intent and purpose.  Yet running through Creativity, Inc. is the crucial insight that repeating such words and phrases can actually provide false confidence and be counter-productive if they ring hollow and are not put into practice.   

Probably the word with the most potential to mislead is “creativity” itself and Catmull and Wallace’s book can be read as a 368-page illustration of how an ongoing, collective, and enacted focus can make the commitment to that value real and dynamic.  At a time when “creativity” and “innovation” appear everywhere in corporate pronouncements, doing more than parroting the words is a consistent challenge for leaders and organizations.  I have written about this elsewhere, as have others, like Shane Snow, who goes so far as assert, “If you have tocall yourself innovative, you’re probably not.” 

Beyond taking care with one’s own usage of these basic terms, a question arises about the recognition by others of a given individual’s or firm’s creativity or innovation.  These are enormously slippery concepts, varying across cultures and industries and markets.  The novelty, freshness or utility celebrated in one situation or context can be viewed as familiar or even clichéd in another.  As a result, we might reasonably ask, How can creativity become an “earned word, attributed by others to us”?

One answer is to consider what I call “vulgar creativity” in assessing and practicing imaginative activities and production.  The qualifying word, “vulgar,” has several meanings and historical resonances that are vital to approaching that process.  While not one-dimensional, the term can nevertheless help to orient our thinking and actions around creativity in businesses and elsewhere. 

“Vulgar” derives from the Latin word for “common people” and originally was used to describe their ordinary, everyday uses of things or ideas.  A “vulgar tongue” in the Middle Ages thus meant the actual or vernacular language of a people as opposed to an official or elite one.  Over the last century, sophisticated social and cultural theorists from Walter Benjamin to Terry Eagleton have criticized “vulgar Marxism” for reductionist readings of Marx and Engels that claim ideology (including art and creative work) is simply determined by economic structures.  There’s irony, for some, in such bemoaning of a common people’s understanding of Marx, who, after all, sought to empower them.  More importantly, though, the example casts in relief two distinct (if often overlapping) meanings conveyed by the term, vulgar – namely, of being of the people and ordinary and of oversimplification, edginess, and even crudeness.   

That everyone is, or has the potential to be, (more) creative has become an article of faith for many in the twenty-first century.  Sir Ken Robinson is a persuasive and much-admired exponent of this view.  He concentrates on how schools “kill creativity” in order to illuminate alternative ways that they, and other organizations including businesses, can cultivate and liberate individual imagination.  By helping unlearn the standardized “command and control” approaches to learning that predominate in education, he calls instead for a diverse, individualized and organic approach to encouraging students to thrive.  Rather than a select, chosen creative few, Robinson’s presumption is that these changes will foster the curiosity and unleash the ability to experiment existing in us all.

It is here, however, that the second meaning of vulgar can re-emerge and complicate our celebration of universal creativity.  Conventionally, creative activity involves plunging into the unknown, engaging unorthodox thinking, experimenting continuously, and incorporating a bit of irreverence (to use advertising legend Sir John Hegarty’s term).  Yet those drives, particularly in business, are often reduced to simplistic taglines or formulaic processes.  Even worse, the admirable goal of nurturing greater creativity too often turns merely on unfettering individual free thinking or expression.  Supporting creativity, in other words, becomes about removing as many filters, structures or other constraints as possible rather than building a diverse, stimulating, and organic environment that cultivates individual and group learning and imagination.     

Simply unfiltering individual expression or behavior may have individual value in terms of personal fulfillment or happiness (or other indirect benefits to organizations or groups), but it does not necessarily provide the makings of a wider and more sustainable creative culture.  The British scholar of creativity, Margaret Boden, once distinguished personal from historical creativity by observing that what is novel to one individual at any given moment is often not to the wider society or across history.  While that personal creative expressiveness should be nurtured, it also needs to be differentiated from what is new, surprising or useful for larger communities, markets or societies. 

To be mindful of vulgar creativity is to recognize both the ordinary, democratic potential of creativity and, in business, particularly, its social or organizational reality and dynamics.  The point is not to judge worthy those efforts at fostering creativity affirmed by crowds or markets and dismiss others.  However, it is to acknowledge that, too often in business, attention to creativity and innovation is reduced to celebrating novelty without value or facilitating individual expression without wider purpose.

In 1982, film and cultural commentator J. Hoberman published “Vulgar Modernism,” an article in which he argued that many popular, even apparently tasteless productions like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedies, Tex Avery cartoons and Mad magazine, engaged some of the same mid-twentieth century aesthetic, institutional and social questions as the Modernist art of Picasso, Manet, and bebop.  Hoberman was seeking to make sense of the post-World War II years in which a fraught relationship between popular and “high” cultures was being renegotiated.  Invoking the “vulgar” became a way to approach the rich and productive tensions marking the practices of mainstream media and audiences.

Only a few years later, pioneering adman Bill Bernbach observed, “Is creativity some obscure, esoteric art form? Not on your life. It’s the most practical thing a businessman can employ.”  For Bernbach then, and continuing in business today, the successful approach to creativity should be similarly broad and shaped by productive tensions – between espoused beliefs and substantive actions, customer needs and firm purpose, and organizational processes and individual imagination.  In its embrace of such crucial tensions, “vulgar creativity” can provide another reminder to leaders of the value of empowering more universal creativity while always grounding that effort in the world they see and aspire to change.     

Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders for Fall 2014

Thus far in 2014, we have seen at least two additions to the short bookshelf of essential readings for creative leaders: Pixar CEO Ed Catmull’s account (with Amy Wallace) of building and sustaining a successful creative culture, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration; and Harvard Business School Professor Linda A. Hill’s masterful guide to leading successful innovation across organizations, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (written with Greg Brandeau, Kent Lineback, and Emily Truelove). Other recent highlights included Connected by Design: Seven Principles for Business Transformation through Functional Integration, the outstanding work about new ways to create value through brand ecosystems, by Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman of the legendary creative agency, R/GA; Stanford professors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao’s major study of how to build up businesses successfully, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less; and Arianna Huffington’s manifesto for re-defining well-being, work and success, revisionist study of talent and creativity, Thrive: The Third Metric and Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom, and Wonder.

The fall book season is now upon us and promises further new and relevant titles. These will include analyses of marketing, China, and Google, a handful of titles on innovation, ranging from practical implementation guides to a longer history, and, perhaps most far-reaching, reflections on the changes wrought by digital technologies to individuals and society. All contain insights valuable to the work and lives of creative leaders.

1) Ulrich Boser, The Leap: The Science of Trust and Why It Matters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/New Harvest, September 16)

Traveling from rural Rwanda to corporate America, and from paying taxes to using technology, Boser argues that individuals are hard-wired for trust and trustworthiness and that emphasizing and restoring trust can benefit us as humans as well as our institutions and communities.

2) Richard Branson, The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (Penguin/Portfolio, September 9)

The iconic CEO and entrepreneur, already author of a best-selling autobiography and books on business, here describes his key leadership principles like good listening, keeping things simple, remaining iconoclastic, motivating people, and having fun along the way.

3) Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (Norton, September 29)

Carr, the consistently trenchant analyst of technological change who wrote The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, here offers a thoughtful and sometimes disturbing account, grounded in science and poetry alike, of the ways that our increasing reliance on technology is affecting our happiness and re-shaping our humanity.

4) Lawrence A. Cunningham, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values (Columbia Business School Publishing, October 21)

An extraordinary portrait of the fifty direct subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway, investment guru Warren Buffett’s $300 billion conglomerate, told through the companies’ distinct stories and the vital values like integrity, autonomy, entrepreneurship and a sense of permanence that they, and Buffett, share.

5) Tom Doctoroff, Twitter Is Not a Strategy: Remastering the Art of Brand Marketing (Palgrave MacMillan, November 11)

The Asia CEO of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, Doctoroff uses characteristic wit and decades of experience to take on the twin hypes of digital media and the China market and to offer insightful principles for successful customer engagement and integrated brand marketing.

6) Stewart D. Friedman, Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press, October 7)

Wharton professor Friedman, building on his excellent study, Total Leadership, uses examples ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Bruce Springsteen to move from familiar calls to balance competing work and life commitments toward taking steps, instead, to integrate our passions and values across the domains of work, home, community, and the private self.

7) Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer, The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Startup into Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, September 9)

How can business leaders better manage the uncertainty intrinsic to prototyping and experimentation? Picking up from Dyer’s bestselling guide to generating ideas, The Innovator’s DNA (written with Hal Gregersen and Clay Christensen), this new volume focuses on proven techniques that allow start-ups and established firms to commercialize ideas successfully.

8) Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster, October 7)

Isaacson, the biographer of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and most recently, Steve Jobs, has penned a sweeping history of digital technologies, the computer and internet, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with Lord Byron’s daughter, and tracing the innovative thinking, creative leadership and energetic collaboration to the present day.  

9) Langdon Morris, Moses Ma and Po Chi Wu, Agile Innovation: The Revolutionary Approach to Accelerate Success, Inspire Engagement, and Ignite Creativity Hardcover (Wiley, September 22)

Two leading innovation thinkers and consultants (Morris and Ma) and an engineering professor (Wu) have written an excellent (and overdue) guide to how agile techniques, like process acceleration, risk management, and fuller team engagement, have fostered successful innovation for leading businesses and can be put into practice elsewhere.

10) Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Wiley, October 20)

Using the same engaging visual approach as their groundbreaking Business Model Generation, which pioneered the business model canvas, Osterwalder et al focus on the most important of the canvas’ building blocks, the value proposition, and enable readers to work through seven key principles for better designing what matters to customers. 

11) Shaun Rein, The End of Copycat China: The Rise of Creativity, Innovation and Individualism in China (Wiley, October 20)

A leading consultant and commentator on the Chinese society and economy, and the author of The End of Cheap China, Rein analyzes current large-scale shifts in China from investment toward consumption, and from copying to innovation, that require a strategic re-thinking by investors and creative leaders doing (or wanting to do) business there.

12) Paul Roberts, The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification (Bloomsbury, September 2)

A troubling, cross-disciplinary account of how individual pursuits of consumption, pleasure, and immediate rewards, advanced by new technologies and compromised ethics, have evolved in a new and pervasive ‘culture of narcissism’ — that journalist Roberts nevertheless closes on a hopeful note of how we can pull back and change.

13) Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt, How Google Works (Grand Central/Business Plus, September 23).

Google’s former SVP of Products and ex-CEO reveal how the global tech company has grown by doing things differently, like hiring multitalented ‘smart creatives’ and leading with the recognition that ‘consensus requires dissension,’ in order to continually create new products and serve consumers in a fast-changing environment.

'Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration', by Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace (Random House)

At first glance, the new book about Pixar, Creativity, Inc., seems like a deluxe version of the account of creative enterprise and management with which we have become increasingly familiar.  With war stories of perseverance and eventual success in the market, hard-won advice on how to overcome obstacles to creativity (as promised in the subtitle), and a concluding set of leadership principles, my first impression was that this would be an entertaining if inspiring victory lap for a storied creative organization.  

Pixar President Ed Catmull, with Amy Wallace, has produced something much, much more.  It’s one of the half-dozen best books that have been written about creative business and creative leadership.  Ever.

The “Thoughts for Managing a Creative Culture,” which close the volume, themselves offer a master class in creative leadership.  From managing fear and failure in an organization to protecting new ideas and imposing productive limits, these are 33 gems.  Yet with characteristic sagacity, Catmull makes clear how these principles should be viewed as starting points rather than ends to be achieved.  Indeed, the book’s last words are to avoid confusing the process with the goal and always to remember that that goal is “making the product great.” 

Particularly impressive here is an insistence on linking ideas about creative work to behaviors (even ones that ultimately fail).  Many of the ideas here, from fearless ideation and collaboration to tireless communication, are not surprising.  However, they are made compelling through tales of their implementation.  The tenet of intensive, democratic collaboration appears here as the belief in anyone being able to talk to anyone else at Pixar about their work, for example, and Catmull conveys it in his memorable recounting of how Toy Story taught him the value of bringing together product managers with artists and technicians.

That specific lesson and value also highlights a feature of Creativity, Inc. that is unusual in today’s surplus of writing on creativity and innovation across industries and markets.  With product managers, computer engineers and programmers, filmmakers and artists, Pixar has been blessed but also burdened with the necessary coordination of distinct creative cultures.  Catmull’s open and supportive leadership, evidenced throughout the book, has surely been a crucial factor in the success of this ongoing collaboration of different kinds of workers.  But his account, which consistently celebrates Steve Jobs and John Lasseter (among others), underscores how leadership among partners with complementary if distinct capabilities and even creative backgrounds can add value to a creative organization.

The overall arc of the book, tracing the development of Pixar through nearly four decades, foregrounds a daunting challenge for all leaders: how to sustain creative vitality and excellence over time.  Catmull separates his book into four parts: “Getting Started,” “Protecting the New,” “Building and Sustaining,” and “Testing What We Know.”  The third section begins with a thoughtful summary of several “models” employed by people at Pixar as their bases for successful creative work.  The section then concludes with his recollection of the first days after the 2005 merger with Disney and how Pixar’s creative culture evolved.  Drawing together the personal and organizational aspects of creative work in this way is itself instructive; describing how he led this evolution over years yields even more valuable insights.

Reading Creativity, Inc., one can easily appreciate Catmull’s gifts as a leader whose style – deft, open, humble, caring, trusting, purposeful – has built, shaped and sustained an exceptional creative culture.  At the same time, his account of Pixar’s ongoing success demonstrates the importance of having brought creative analysis and implementation to the dynamic complexity, of shifting markets and changing technologies, facing all organizations today.  That combination of effectively bringing creativity to his leadership challenges and leadership to his firm’s creative work is rare.  So is Catmull and Wallace’s exceptional new book.

Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders for the First Half of 2014

The new year has seen the publication of another crop of probing and provocative titles on economics, business and society.  Driving the most sustained public discussions thus far have been works on the inequalities driven by and increasingly defining the current economic system.  Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap Press) is the magnum opus here, focusing on economics, with Matt Taibbi’s The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (Spiegel & Grau) looking also at the social ramifications of inequality in the United States.  Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Norton) arguably looks at one source of this growing disparity by examining the seeming advantage of professional, high-frequency traders over the rest of the public in financial markets.   

On the specific topics of creativity, leadership, and organizational and business success, 2014 has also already yielded some helpful titles.  Some of these are narrowly cast, for example, Ben Horowitz’ The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers (Harper Collins), which offers sage if targeted advice on starting a business, or Nick Udall’s “creative rollercoaster” model presented in Riding the Creative Rollercoaster: How Leaders Evoke Creativity, Productivity and Innovation (Kogan Page).  Others speak more generally to leaders across creative businesses and industries.  Following my listing last fall of useful books (http://onforb.es/19CsYft), here is another baker’s dozen of recommended reads from the start of this year that speak to the work and lives of creative leaders.  Once again, they comprise a diverse list, written by industry voices, journalist or academics and providing a wealth of insights, models and concrete advice.

(1) Julian Barling, The Science of Leadership: Lessons from Research for Organizational Leaders (Oxford University Press)

Barling, an organizational behavior professor at Canada’s Queen’s University, explores some central debates about leadership – whether leaders are born or made, the relevance of gender, the import of followership – by reference to mostly psychological research conducted over the past two decades. The result is an accessible and frequently illuminating tour of the evidence shaping and underlying popular if often superficial debates. Perhaps most directly relevant to many readers will be the question (and layered answer) about the effectiveness of leadership development programs.

(2) Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question (Bloomsbury)

What if companies had mission questions rather than mission statements? Looking closely at some of our most creative organizations, including Google, IDEO and Netflix, journalist Berger (who wrote the excellent Glimmer on design thinking) describes the importance of generating a culture of inquiry and learning. The result is potentially paradigm-shifting: rather than assuming great leaders, creatives, innovators, and entrepreneurs possess the distinctive ability to provide clear answers, the book proposes that asking the right questions might be a more fundamental skill.

(3) Adam Bryant, Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation (Times Books)

Offering consistently insightful glimpses of today’s leadership challenges and innovations, the New York Times ‘Corner Office’ column of interviews with executives appears twice weekly. In the second book drawing from his work on the column, Adam Bryant highlights lessons in innovation, change and, especially, building creative cultures. The result is a crisp summary of current leadership practice illustrated with helpful real-life examples of effective teams, increased respect, better conversations, and ongoing learning by leaders and organizations alike.

(4) Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (Norton)

How are digital technologies – from hardware and software to networks and data sets – fueling exponential growth and profound social and economic change? Two leading thinkers from MIT explore the forces reinventing fields as diverse as medicine, retail, and transportation and having far-ranging implications for creative collaboration, business leadership and policy-making alike. Maybe most importantly, these dramatic changes will enable and necessitate a revamping of our educational system in ways that both leverage new technologies and prepare people for the transformed economy. 

(5) Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Random House)

Catmull, co-founder and President of Pixar Animation Studios, one of the world’s most admired creative businesses, shares insights and proven techniques for harnessing talent, forming teams and structuring organizations, and producing fresh and original work. Mining his company’s illustrious production history for instructive episodes and helpful examples, he and Wallace devote special attention to the challenges of building and sustaining a creative culture.  Their closing list of principles alone constitute an essential master class in creative leadership.

(6) Lynda Gratton, The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problem (McGraw-Hill)

Professor of management practice at the London Business School and founder of the Hot Spots Movement, Gratton has produced a fresh model for scaling impact and innovating for good. ‘The Key’ is to coordinate the latest approaches to organizational design and talent development with purpose-driven support for broader communities. The outcome, she argues, is business organizations capable of confronting and solving global problems like rampant unemployment and climate change.

(7) Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom, and Wonder (Harmony)

Exhausted and sleep-deprived, Arianna Huffington fell and injured herself in 2007.  Amidst a battery of medical tests and soul-searching, she came to realize that there was more to success than money and power and that she – and we – needed a third metric for celebrating our lives, maintaining our sense of wonder, prioritizing our relationships, and remaining compassionate and generous. Combining personal details of her own journey with the latest psychological and sleep research, Huffington has produced a manifesto for redefining well-being, work and success.

(8) Keith Reinhard, Any Wednesday (Any Wednesday)

An original Mad Man, Reinhard was an advertising creative legend before orchestrating the merger that formed Omnicom and becoming the CEO of DDB Worldwide. For more than two decades, he penned brief weekly memos filled with wit, wisdom and advice to all his employees. This collection of 104 of those pieces both shares some of his favorite insights for inspiring creative excellence and demonstrates one way he put consistent creative leadership into accessible and effective practice.

(9) Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t (Portfolio)

Sinek is the perceptive, best-selling author of Start with Why (your company exists and should be meaningful to your customers and society…).  Here, he turns to the crucial questions of how leaders can foster and support safety, trust and cooperation inside that organization as well as greater kinship with customers. While citing evolutionary biology and brain chemistry research, the book ultimately argues for the fundamental leadership values of hard work, empathy and sacrifice as bases for providing a safe environment for people to grow and succeed.

(10) Biz Stone, Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind (Hachette)

The co-founder of Twitter offers a creative memoir of his career in Silicon Valley (thus far), starting at Google, helping to pioneer both blogging and podcasting, and then launching the social media platform.  In the process, he explores the nature and potential of ingenuity and imagination, reflecting through his personal experience on vulnerability, failure, empathy, ambition, collaboration, and creative culture.  The result is an enjoyable and inspiring read that both reveals Stone as a genuine creative leader and summarizes many of the key lessons of building successful business enterprises today.

(11) Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Viking)

The authors of the invaluable Difficult Conversations take on an equally challenging aspect of work and life in this new volume: how (well) do we receive feedback? Extending some of the principles of their earlier work to being less defensive and building richer relationships to engaging the feedback of others, Stone and Heen also show how to gather and process honest insights about oneself.  The result is a book that very practically enables the development of greater self-awareness and deeper learning so helpful to becoming more effective leaders.

(12) Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva Rao, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less (Crown Business)

This is a major work based on a decade’s research by two Stanford professors on the pervasive challenge of spreading and multiplying success in organizations. Looking across industries, and from small start-ups hoping to grow to mature large firms seeking to avoid stagnation, Sutton and Rao offer insights and proven practices for ‘scaling up’ farther, faster, and more effectively. In the process, they provide actionable advice on such vexing issues as balancing individual and organizational needs, replicating successful mindsets, and eliminating destructive behaviors.

(13) Barry Wacksman and Chris Stutzman, Connected by Design: Seven Principles of Business Transformation (Jossey-Bass)

R/GA is one of the world’s most consistently successful creative digital agencies. Wacksman, its Chief Growth Officer, describes how the agency has been a pioneer in helping develop new business models featuring highly interactive eco-systems of interrelated products, digital services, brand loyalty and continuous customer engagement. He then goes on to identify how such ‘functional integration,’ achieved by valued firms like Apple, Nike, Amazon, and Activision, can be understood according to principles ranging from ‘Utility is Relevance’ to ‘Lead like the world depends on it.’