Awards for Creativity in Advertising We Should (Also) Be Giving

As Cannes Lions 2015 begins, my thoughts on some other needed awards for creativity in advertising.  To read, please visit my new website at http://jdavidslocum.com .  

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.     

Review of 'Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation,' by Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove & Kent Lineback (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)

The Introduction to Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation calls for a different kind of leader who creates organizations both willing and able to innovate.  From that innocuous opening, this new study quickly moves to engage the challenges and complexities confronting those wanting to enable innovation.  Much of the complexity is captured in six paradoxes – from “support” and “confrontation” to “bottom up” and “top down” – that create ongoing tension.  These are then summarized in a “fundamental paradox” between “unleashing” and “harnessing” the talents in an organization.  Through the dozen case studies that follow, these paradoxes demonstrate not only the potential of different kinds of leaders but the value of different kinds of thinking about leadership in fostering and driving innovation.

In less capable hands, such a reliance on paradoxes or tensions in describing leadership might reflect indecisive or incomplete analysis.  For Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback, it instead conveys with evidence and assurance the complicated realities of new organizational forms and behaviors.  In fact, despite its presentation of a series of individual leaders, the book establishes a category of its own that yokes together the best of conventional analyses of leadership and innovation.  The result is an invaluable guide to enabling collaboration and collective behavior at a time when innovation and creative problem-solving are increasingly the norm.

The first major section of Collective Genius addresses how leaders create a willingness to do the hard work of innovation.  There are three major challenges here:

• Purpose: Why we exist
• Shared Values: What we agree is important
• Rules of Engagement: How we interact with each other and think about problems

Defining these elements helps to create a context in which others can innovate.  Looking at Volkswagen and Pentagram, the design agency, the authors offer practical instances of encouraging risk-taking, trying new ideas, and building solutions together to form a greater sense of community.

The second major section takes on how leaders can create the ability to do the hard work of innovation.  It is also defined in three aspects: 

• Creative Abrasion: The ability to generate ideas through discourse and debate
• Creative Agility: The ability to test and experiment through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment
• Creative Resolution: The ability to make integrative decisions that combine disparate or even opposing ideas

Together, these organizational skills correspond to the major elements of the innovation process – collaboration, decision-based learning, and integrative decision-making.  Tracking efforts at Pixar, eBay in Germany, and Google, the authors offer examples of how practically these skills can be operationalized and also integrated with each other.  

Amidst all the discussion of innovation processes and organizational behavior, how exactly do leaders fit here?  They may be visionaries – but don’t have to be.  Even if they are, they don’t hold forth and inspire from the mountaintop.  Instead, the role of the leader is re-cast again and again in these pages.  Vineet Nayer, of HCL, is a “social architect”; Larry Smarr of Calit2, “a dot-connector extraordinaire”; and managers at Google, according to then CEO Eric Schmidt, “aggregators of viewpoints, not dictators of decisions.”  What is consistent in Collective Genius is that traditional formal authority gives way to nimble orchestration, informal facilitation, and contributions to community-building.

The real hero for Hill and her co-authors, as a result, is less the individual than the innovation eco-system.  Successful leaders, they conclude, work to create innovation environments “in which the unique slices of genius in their organization are rendered into a single work of collective genius.” Moreover, and this is ultimately the book's most illuminating lesson, that collective genius not only yields more sustainable innovation but transforms leadership itself. 

Saying 'Innovation' or 'Creativity' Is Not Enough

“What’s the opposite of innovation?,” the joke begins.  A tart punchline quickly follows: “Innovation consultants.”   

Since I teach, coach and sometimes consult on innovation and creative leadership, that cynical joke gives me pause.  Consultants of all kinds are easy marks, of course, whether they are from well-known global firms or one-person shops.  But it is innovation, as an idea and, increasingly, the basis of a cottage industry for consulting, advising, coaching and even counseling, that is the real target here.

Isn’t innovation good, though?, we ask.  Doesn’t thinking, designing, building and leading for innovation enable firms of all kinds to create and capture value?  Doesn’t imaginative collaboration, teaming, and organizing lead to breakthroughs that can transform businesses, industries and even markets?  Doesn’t innovation ultimately benefit individuals by encouraging and nurturing self-awareness, empathy, courage, and growth – human values that help contribute to personal fulfillment?

All true.  Yet that very sweep and sprawl of meanings is part of the problem.  Innovation is everywhere, from social and political agendas and corporate mission and vision statements to strategic positioning and brand marketing priorities to team charters and individual performance goals.  Likewise, creativity, often in adjectival form, has become a necessary qualifier for nearly all aspects of management and operations: leadership, strategy, talent management, organizational design, customer or client relationships, collaboration, and teamwork.  Even creative accounting has become a worthy aspiration (just not “too” creative…).

The expanded usage, to be sure, reflects some far-reaching and very real economic and historical shifts that have recently foregrounded aspects of creativity and innovation for individuals, firms and larger economies.  I myself often assert that “creativity is the new normal” to underscore the unprecedented opportunities, even necessities, facing businesses in a world where technology is transforming old and new industries alike.  My question here is whether the words themselves, asked to say so much in their varied and continual usage, increasingly end up saying little or nothing at all. 

There is no shortage of models, frameworks and typologies attempting to break out and define more precise and different meanings.  Classic distinctions of “innovation,” many well-drawn by some of our most astute observers and analysts of business and management, tend to delve deeply into specific areas.  We might think here of Clayton Christensen on disruptive innovation, Gary Hamel on management innovation, and Vijay Govindarajan on reverse innovation.  And so many other qualifiers of the word have become commonplace: incremental, radical, architectural, modular, technological, knowledge, product, process and so on.  Much more typically, though, both “innovation” and “creativity” are used generically by firms themselves, consultancies, the popular and business press, the blogosphere, and even some academic research to burnish a diverse but finally vague range of insights, tools and management practices.

Having an excess of overlapping and alternative tools and models is fine, of course, for leaders on the ground who use them to gain greater insights about, or to address directly, specific situations.  That assumes, however, a thorough familiarity with these different innovative approaches and how (or, more fundamentally, if) to apply them usefully to those specific situations.  Here we might return to the question of innovation consultants.  What is the precise form of expertise they offer?  Launching start-ups based on original ideas, developing new products or services for established firms, redesigning work processes, nurturing creative people or cultures, re-drawing business models?  Maybe all of those.  Or maybe none.  The challenge is finding the right fit of specific capabilities and experience from the growing constellation of offerings made using the same terms.

How did our usage of “innovation” and “creativity” spiral out of control?  From recent history, we might start looking in the 1980s-1990s.  The redefinition of creative work, industries and economies, began then in the UK and was furthered elsewhere by analysts like Richard Florida, who repositioned creativity as a driving force in the (re-)development of cities, societies and economies.  More generally at the same time, though hearkening back to the early 20^th century writings of Joseph Schumpeter, a doctrine of “innovation economics” emerged in the work of a diverse group of theorists and analysts to argue that knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship are not outliers but essential to economic growth and productivity. 

Yet probably nothing has had as great an impact as the profound developments that have occurred in Silicon Valley (and the larger technology economy to which it has been central).  Combining a mythology of individual ingenuity, a culture of business entrepreneurship, and a demonstrated potential for world-changing invention, Silicon Valley has become a vital source for popular and corporate imaginings of creativity and innovation.  Even as the technologies produced there have transformed lives, societies and economies around the world, the thinking and language of openness, risk-taking, start-ups, and innovation has spread as far.

Amidst the concern that tech firms are in the midst of another financial bubble, with unjustifiably high market valuations potentially ready to burst, I see another Silicon Valley bubble in play.  It involves the inflation of certain ways of thinking and talking about innovation that originated in and around tech firms.  This language bubble, or what we might otherwise see as an internally-referencing echo chamber, grows through a continuing series of blogposts, websites, magazine articles, and books that largely re-package the same practices, policies and behaviors as being conducive to innovation and creativity.

What would Google do?, we ask.  A loose grouping of ideas and beliefs and leading practices have come increasingly to represent current thinking about how all organizations, regardless of industry or market, can best cultivate innovative and creative work.  Much of this is enormously positive, both fulfilling for people and productive for organizations.  In the process, the larger popular and practical discourse around Silicon Valley-style innovation has grown and grown.  One consequence is what Bill O’Connor, of Autodesk, calls “innovation pornography,” in which too many people become voyeurs, rapturously watching others innovate without doing so themselves.  Another is the myth that creativity and original thinking can solve any problem or develop an idea the world will eventually embrace. 

While I do believe fully in that problem-solving and even society-transforming potential, my point is that the generic superpower of creativity or innovation will not be the force to do so.  Rather, it is by understanding how creativity and innovation, even with all their inherent messiness, disorder, and indirectness, need specific situations and contexts in order to flourish and effect meaningful change.  Innovation and creativity, writ large and generic, are not strategic silver bullets.

A challenge I regularly pose to executives is to ask themselves “the follow-up question” about key words they use to characterize themselves or their firms.  So once they’ve identified their core values, for example, they need to probe more deeply what those values mean to them and the situations in which they’re working.  Trust, growth, inspiration, and purpose are all admirable values.  Yet they can mean very different things to different people and in different leadership situations.  What do those words mean to you, I ask, and why are they so important?  Innovation and creativity, I contend, warrant the same depth of reflection and elaboration.

To begin, you might ask yourself such questions as:

·      What are your benchmarks or examples when you speak of innovation? How relevant are they to your existing situation – and your people, culture, industry, market(s), and customers?  Even the most inspiring general cases of innovation – think of Edison’s light bulb, the Manhattan Project, or the pirates at Apple who developed the Macintosh – may have no relevance to the innovation that’s right for you, now.  Choose your examples, the stars that guide you, wisely and appropriately.

·      Going further, which examples of successful innovation and creative work outside of Silicon Valley (especially the usual suspects like Apple, Google, and Facebook) do you reference and seek to emulate?  While there’s much to admire, learn and adopt from the tech firms that have over the last two decades been so successful, their policies and practices may not be directly helpful to firms of various sizes across industries and at different stages of growth.  Instructive examples are everywhere.  To wit, I recently worked with the leader of a tech start-up whose breakthrough thinking emerged, counter-intuitively, from the practices of a century-old manufacturing firm.

·      And if you’re in an established firm, how many of your benchmarks come from start-ups?  Yes, you can and should likewise learn and draw from the approaches and actions of entrepreneurial start-ups, and elements of models like Eric Ries’ Lean Start-Up, but only if they’re applicable to and align with your own specific goals.

·      Is your entire organization, from people and performance metrics to strategic goals and resource allocation, guided by the same fuller understanding of innovation – that is, what you’re pursuing together, how, and why?  Managing the language of innovation requires both thoughtful consideration and development across organizations and ongoing effective communication.  The only leadership work harder than creating a collective vision for organizational innovation is sustaining the shared understanding and motivation that will enable its successful execution. 

·      Once you’ve developed your own fuller understanding of what you mean when you say innovation, ask if this is the innovation you and your team unit or firm really need.  All leaders need to forge the future and all organizations need to change.  The question is how best to do so.  Aligning specific kinds of innovation with individual organizational needs, capabilities and situations requires careful effort but is crucial.

This isn’t just an academic exercise.  Thoughtful leaders have long recognized the value of auditing their current innovation or creativity activities, needs and capabilities.  As time has passed and both words have been used more and more, it also seems increasingly useful to conduct an innovation and creativity language audit.  What do you mean when you say that innovation is a core value or a strategic priority?  What does specifying creative talent development mean for the shape and orientation of a HR processes or organizational learning?  More generally, how does innovation or creativity practically differentiate decisions, behaviors and results?

More than five decades ago, Theodore Levitt wrote “Creativity Is Not Enough,” one of the most famous articles in the history of marketing management.  Today, the words of his title arguably resonate in distinct ways.  The ubiquity of “innovation” and “creativity” in the language of business and management is threatening to empty them of meaning.  Increasingly, neither is sufficient to convey the vision, inspiration, newness, value, and strategy that drive a given leader, unit or firm.  

How do we change that?  One use at a time.  By doing the hard work of understanding and clarifying the newness, utility, value and change that we really envision and seek in specific situations.  Each of us needs to help take back the power of the words.  Next time you say or write “innovation” or “creativity,” pause.  How would you qualify those key words?  Or how else, beyond using placeholders, would you make your point?   Most simply, what do you really mean when you say and act on “innovation” or creativity” – and are you making that important meaning clear to others?

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.’

Beyond Numbers of Doom: Effects of Film #Piracy, including Economic Benefits, Industry Re-structuring, and #Creativity?

Two fascinating pieces by @CarlBialik about efforts to better understand the effects of film piracy appeared in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.  

"Studios Struggle for Focus on Film Pirates' Booty," details how film studios, primarily through its industry association, the MPAA, is working to update the research basis of their insistent claims of the harmful effects of film piracy on the industry.  In recent years, the conclusions of two 2006 studies that estimated roughly $6.1 billion was being lost by the industry (and $20.5 billion lost by the overall U.S. economy) annually to piracy have been repeated and even used with multipliers to generate larger subsequent estimated losses.  The MPAA is pulling back from citing that number and seeking to collaborate with researchers, many academic, to assess more accurately the complex effects of piracy.  This is a welcome if guarded step by the industry, particularly in that it includes sharing some internal data with outside researchers.

"Putting a Price Tag on Film Piracy" is a separate blog post in the Journal by the same author, Bialik (their Numbers Guy).  In it, he delves more deeply into some of the challenges of trying to fix a single number to capture the effects of piracy on the industry.  These include the rapidly changing film and wider entertainment marketplace, the notoriously secretive nature of industry financial reporting, and the elusively varied practices of piracy itself.  Not surprisingly, identifying the financial costs of piracy remain the primary objective of much of this research.

Yet at the end of the blog post, several other "related research questions" are identified.  In many ways, looking ahead and more broadly, these have the potential to produce much more revealing insights.  For Bialik, they are:

• Potential economic benefits, such as boosting other industries like broadband or creating buzz around traditional film box office
• The relative success, or its lack, of efforts to mitigate piracy
• The effects of piracy on the supply of creative work

Without unduly embracing piracy, the first and third of these questions raise an important -- if, for the industry, unsettling -- possibility: namely, that there may be more to piracy than the MPAA allows in discussing the issue only in terms of declining revenues.  Underpinning both is the new reality, really the new media and entertainment eco-system, in which film is situated.  More research about the future of film and possible business models for film companies is crucial, and some would argue that it is pirates who are, in fact, most actively exploring those futures.  The relationship between piracy and creativity, especially, deserves more attention in a world where innovative productions and delivery strategies are celebrated (and later often co-opted by the industry).  Hopefully the industry will move beyond its halting steps and engage in more open-ended research on its own future -- a future, as it happens, that includes potentially far-reaching new opportunities that have been illuminated by pirates but that the industry itself could lead.

Essential Ideas about Creativity in 2011 (I): Steve Jobs - Perfectionism, Process, and Tweaking

One of the persistent themes of writing about creativity and creative leadership in 2011 has been that creativity is less about generating new and original notions, product or services and more about tweaking or associating existing ones in unfamiliar ways. That theme isn't entirely new itself, of course, but it runs against a fairly common conception of creativity as primarily being about novelty or originality. More unsettling to some is that the theme undercuts a kind of romance with creativity as the enchanted purview of a select group of individuals using their special gifts to produce momentous, paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. Instead, the values identified by various commentators and researchers as essential to creative success are keen observation, associational thinking, and dogged persistence in building processes that implement innovation.

This theme rose to prominence in various ways during the past year. In this post, I comment on how perfectionism and the tweaking of processes of innovation were highlighted in writings about Steve Jobs and Apple. In a future post, I'll cite several other recent writings that similarly focus on the promise of more efficient associating, re-working and even copying of existing ideas and products -- creatively.

The news story of the year in creative industries and leadership was the death of Steve Jobs. Yet even before his passing in early October, the practices that he and Apple employed so successfully were being closely parsed by analysts. Among many conclusions, two stand out. The first is evident throughout Walter Isaacson's masterful biography of Jobs, which tracks in often minute detail the CEO's obsessive control over product development even as Apple's ranks swelled over the last decade to tens of thousands of employees, many of them highly and often singularly skilled (http://amzn.to/uAcUVW). But it is even more apparent in Adam Lashinsky's controversial piece on the company's inner workings from the May 23 issue of Fortune, was Jobs' obsessive attention to detail (http://bit.ly/p1ciml).

This perfectionism was often exercised through a nearly dictatorial management style. All major decisions, and many minor ones, were made at Apple by Jobs himself and failures of underlings were greeted by thunderous, even disdainful critique by the CEO. In an era when quick, cheap, and smart failure is championed and the inherent messiness of creativity is recognized across creative industries and beyond, such a style is striking in its incongruousness -- and often left for us to explain away as an unavoidable by-product of Jobs' genius.

For leaders of creative industries, however, it was another journalistic piece, by Malcolm Gladwell, that spoke more directly to Jobs' success as an entrepreneurial virtuouso. Running in the May 16 issue of The New Yorker, "Creation Myth" celebrated Jobs as a second- or even third-mover whose true gift was envisioning how to apply or re-work existing technologies in unprecedented ways (http://nyr.kr/k7FKms). In other words, if one accepts that innovation, to be successful, must begin with ideation and completed with implementation, Jobs was an implementer nonpareil. While this begs the question of whether the associational thinking or insightful flash constituting implementation is itself importantly idea-driven, the argument positions Jobs less as a techno-wizard and more as a transcendant marketer. Citing the key example of the Apple co-founder's popularization of the mouse and graphical user interface following his visit to Xerox PARC, where he first observed prototypes for both, Gladwell ultimately holds "the truth of innovation" as occurring in the rough-and-tumble of business rather than the "messy world of creativity" in the research lab.

Months later, in his review of Isaacson's biography of Jobs that doubled as a obituary, Gladwell would put a finer point on his remarks about innovation by calling Jobs, with admiration, "The Tweaker" (http://nyr.kr/uPvSQQ). "The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution." Gladwell's next sentence makes his point unmistakably: "That is not a lesser task." Almost certainly not, but for many it still seems out of sorts with the romantic, world-changing image of the creative genius re-imagining the new through the power of his will.

Such a characterization of Jobs, both before and after his death, hardly diminished the veneration of the man or celebration of all he accomplished. Yet more interesting, perhaps, is the question of how the emphasis on perfectionism, tweaking, and implementing is relevant to the rest of us and to our understanding of the creative processes and creative leadership beyond Apple. More on that to come.