The Rise of the Creative Leader

To speak of a creative leader, or manager, is for some a paradox: creativity is chaotic and unrestrained while leadership is orderly and controlling, and setting the two together makes for an uneasy, potentially volatile combination.

It was not always thus. A century ago, as businessmen entered the twentieth century seeking to differentiate themselves by building modern enterprises, the most respected outcomes of creative thinking and problem-solving took the form of order and process. The giants of the age were Henry Ford, whose automobile assembly line had revolutionized manufacturing production by changing and regimenting human behaviors, and Thomas Edison, a tireless inventor who sought constantly to make his process of experimentation and invention more systematic.

The evolution since has been fitful, swinging between the exigencies of commerce, with its demands for planning and predictability, and the realities of art, or creative production, with its requisite freedom and openness to exploration. The 1960s were particularly compelling years for this antithesis. The Romantic legacy of creativity as authentic self-expression, being true to oneself and one’s vision of the world, contrasted sharply with the rigidity of social conventions and corporate constraints. Opening a fictional window on this golden age of American advertising, the AMC television drama Mad Men has shown how that contrast led to the setting apart of creativity in its own departments, appreciated but anomalous, a necessary function of business to be tolerated and closely supervised.

Rightly admired for its historical accuracy, the series’ repeated celebration of the effectiveness of creative advertising also casts light on the apparently contradictory nature of real-life business creativity during the era. Business does not succeed in spite of creativity and free-spirited creative individuals but rather thrives because of their imaginative work. As a result, it would seem, successful leaders of creative enterprises may be less chaperones and disciplinarians than coaches and co-conspirators in their shared endeavors. Looking back at actual advertising agencies of the time, like Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) in the US with its pioneering teams combining art directors and copywriters, reveals the reality of such a shared sense of creative possibility.

The last two decades have seen nearly all businesses embrace innovation and creativity as central missions, at least at a high level, with leaders expected to serve as imaginative guides. Designated ‘creatives’ still do essential work in brand communications (or marketing services) industries like advertising and beyond, say, in the design areas of manufacturing firms. But more and more, creative production and excellence have become collective affairs with attention to the effectiveness of collaboration throughout businesses. For many, an equally dramatic realization has been that the most far-reaching instances of creativity involve organizational or process innovations rather than more obvious new product or service offerings. Hearkening back to Ford’s assembly line or DDB’s restructuring of traditional agency teams, these changes attest to the value and reach of leaders capable of the implementation of original thinking.

Technology-driven industries have been especially important to shaping this recent change in thinking about business creativity and many leadership icons of our time – Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma – have worked there. Yet creative leadership today is not simply about technological wizardry. At Apple, Jobs’ creative genius was to envision and market new horizons for emerging technologies and existing industries alike (going back to the company’s beginning, his skills were complemented by co-founder Steve Wozniak’s technical abilities in programming). The reverberations of new media and technology firms have been profound: the emergent approach to creative leadership often combines the Silicon Valley start-up ethos, traditional creative industry openness to expressiveness and exploration, design thinking, and the sheer need of all businesses to become more innovative to remain competitive and serve customers better.

The terms, leadership and management, of course are not entirely interchangeable. There are many distinctions drawn between the two, both functional (e.g., the manager administers what is; the leader innovates what will be) and cultural (Americans like to speak of leadership, Brits and other prefer management). One of the best-known is that managers focus on systems and structures while leaders focus on people. That particular distinction made good sense in the industrial era, when both managers and leaders were crucial, respectively, to organizing work and workers efficiently and to ensuring that the firm was effective, that is, competitive in the marketplace. However, in the 1990s, legendary management consultant and educator Peter Drucker recognized that such lines were increasingly blurring and less helpful in the information economy, in which the overriding task is to “make productive the specific strengths and knowledge of every individual.” Today, we might fairly extend Drucker’s insight to our own economy in which creativity is the new normal for businesses.

Understandings of creative productions and industries themselves have likewise changed dramatically during this time. The groundbreaking classification and mapping of the creative industries by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport first launched in 1997 has ushered in far-reaching reassessments of the status of creative activities, work and organizations around the world. While having the result of raising the profile of creative activities, such attention has been criticized by some for reducing the value of those activities to the purely economic. Richard Florida’s influential The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) claimed with comparable reach that the presence and work of creative talent could foster openness and ultimately attract business and capital to post-industrial cities. Even as the stakes of leadership in such scenarios grow far beyond individual firms or agencies, the core relationships between individuals with creative skills and talents and those seeking to marshal and direct them and their activities appear to become less oppositional and more fluid.

If creative leadership can no longer be readily understood through the tension between order and chaos, commerce and self-expression, what should be our orientation for its future? Returning to the words “creative” and “leadership” themselves, freighted as they are with history, offers some guidance. Together, they suggest bringing novel thinking to complex leadership challenges and at the same time deploying strategic prioritizing and decision-making to creative opportunities. Rather than antitheses, the words can convey a necessary balance and even symbiosis that support a sustainably successful creative business. No creative leader could ask for more.

This piece was originally written for House Magazine and also appears as a "Berlin Brief" on the Berlin School of Creative Leadership website.

Ten Lessons of Start-ups for Established Businesses

The Berlin School of Creative Leadership is traveling this month to the Bay Area in Northern California for the second week of the U.S. residency of its Executive MBA program.  Among the key topics orienting the week are innovation, agile leadership, and effective, entrepreneurial and ethical teamwork.  Overall, for already experienced leaders of creative communications firms, the week offers an opportunity for immersion in an atmosphere of entrepreneurship and innovative start-ups.  It consequently prompts a crucial question for many creative leaders, What are the lessons of start-ups and early-stage entrepreneurial businesses for more established firms?

An undeniable romance surrounds start-ups and entrepreneurship.  The prospect of building something entirely new, of developing an original idea and implementing it successfully in the market, is alluring.  Even viewed more prosaically, such an extended process of risk-taking in order to create new value and build a successful business, is exciting. Established firms are, by contrast, fraught with a host of messy, pre-existing practicalities. They already contain some version of all the elements, from products or services and strategy to talent, organizational structures and cultures, and leadership that many entrepreneurs dream of instituting anew.

Of course, the distinction is hardly so sharp. In Silicon Valley in 2014, amidst the continuing percolation of entrepreneurial energy and effort, part of what’s most fascinating to consider is how relatively recent start-ups have grown rapidly into large, established firms.  In only 10 or 15 years, in some cases, companies have become among the largest, best-known companies on the planet.  For example, Google, which the Berlin School will be visiting, was incorporated in 1997 and now has more than 46,000 employees.  Increasingly for these still relatively young firms grown, the challenge is how to sustain that early energy and avoid the loss of entrepreneurial spirit.

Older firms, too, have sought to embrace the principles and tools of start-ups as means to becoming more innovative. In a recent LinkedIn post, Beth Comstock, CMO of GE, discusses her experience at one of the world’s largest corporations. She opens by saying that she and her colleagues consider their efforts “to act small even if we’re big…as the biggest implementation of Lean Startup principles on earth.” Comstock then offers four key learnings from the company’s recent past:

·      Simplicity is the key

·      We have to work fast

·      We don’t have all the answers, but you might

·      Uncertainty is okay

The objective, shewrites, is to find constructive ways to be “constantly tinkering with our business models to get leaner and more agile and to get closer to our customers.”

(www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131210134205-19748378-we-ve-learned-these-four-lessons-from-startups-and-we-re-using-them-to-transform-ge?trk=vsrp_people_res_infl_post).

Comstock’s reference is to the LeanStartup methodology developed by Eric Ries and among the most influential operating today.  Lean is, for Ries, a management process tailored for accelerated new product development and, especially, delivery to customers. “Startups exist not to make stuff, make money, or serve customers,” he has said.  “They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically, by running experiments that allow us to test each element of our vision.” Ries goes on to specify that,  “The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning – a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.”  Such priorities, as well as the following key principles of Lean, should resonate with leaders of established businesses seeking to prioritize learning, innovation and leadership at all levels of their firms:  

1.     Entrepreneurs are everywhere

2.     Entrepreneurship is management

3.     Validated Learning

4.     Innovation Accounting

5.     Build-Measure-Learn

(http://theleanstartup.com/principles) 

Ries’ priorities indeed arguably dovetail with some of the major elements of other recent and current approaches to change and strategic management in existing firms.  For instance, his imperative to model, measure and specially learn faster in Lean parallels the urgency of John Kotter’s renowned change model (http://www.kotterinternational.com/our-principles/changesteps). (There’s a fascinating study waiting to be written more generally comparing Ries’ Lean methodology to Kotter’s 8-step change model.)  Likewise, the faster pace and greater uncertainty of business and markets, and as a result the demand for the greater speed of effective strategic leadership, underpins Rita Gunther McGrath’s paradigm-shifting argument for “transient advantage” in The End of Competitive Advantage. 

Exactly that kind of parallel, combined with successful examples of existing companies like GE, allows us to identify principles and practices that are central to building start-ups and also potentially valuable to established firms seeking to build new businesses and gain new advantage. 

1. Speed

The essential argument of McGrath’s The End of Competitive Advantage, as just noted, is that a new, faster-paced marketplace places different demands upon individual businesses for success.  Her idea of “transient advantage” directly recognizes how the most competitive leadership and strategic response to these new conditions is speed (http://hbr.org/2013/06/transient-advantage/ar/2).  One of McGrath’s favorite examples is Milliken & Co., which transformed itself, through continuous strategic reassessment and reprioritization, from a company that “had been largely focused on textiles and chemicals through the 1960s, and advanced materials and flameproof products through the 1990s, had become a leader in specialty materials and high-IP specialty chemicals by the 2000s.”

2. Adaptability

R/GA, the legendary creative agency (which the Berlin School EMBA group will be visiting in New York the week before hitting the Bay Area), has re-invented itself every nine years since its founding in the mid-1970s.  This has meant ranging, always successfully, from computer-assisted filmmaking (1977-1985) to an integrated digital studio (2005-2012).  The regular willingness to reassess its place in the marketing universe demonstrates an extraordinary adaptability to rapidly changing environmental conditions and internal capabilities alike (http://www.rga.com/the-next-9-years/).    

3. Customer-centrism

Amazon’s commitment to service is renowned, from founder Jeff Bezos’s keeping an “empty chair” at board meetings as a reminder of the customer being in charge to the required annual call-center training required of all employees to maintain their humility and empathy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56GFhr9r36Y). Such priorities of start-ups as gathering and working with customer feedback (increasingly data, as well) and getting products in customers’ hands faster and more easily should also be objectives for both existing and potential new businesses of established firms.

4. New business opportunities

Since its founding in 1997, Netflix has continually reinvented itself by exploring new business opportunities in the rapidly changing media and entertainment sector.  Such exploration has been driven both by competitive necessity and new technological and market possibilities.  Seeking to “revolutionize the way people watch TV shows and movies,” the company has repeatedly revised its business model to offer multiple services, often combining distinct offerings like streaming with DVD home delivery, and recently, with original programming in an effort to be “the world’s leading Internet television network”

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-09/netflix-reed-hastings-survive-missteps-to-join-silicon-valleys-elite

5. New structures

Of the many changes needing to be made within existing businesses to become more entrepreneurial, organizational re-structuring and resource sharing are among the easiest to attempt and also the most difficult to get right.  These crucial changes need to be tied, as P&G’s Connect + Develop program has been, to core tenets of the organization’s culture and identity.  In building an open innovation platform and structuring a Global Business Development team around its complex global operations, P&G met its initial goal, in only four years, of having half its innovations fueled by external partnerships (http://www.pgconnectdevelop.com/home/pg_open_innovation.html).

6. New metrics and testing – particularly of existing talent

Most firms recognize the imperative to create aggressive and appropriate metrics for testing new product or service offerings – and, as the Lean Startup methodology would have it, embrace “validated learning.”  More challenging is the inclusion of existing talent in the process, particularly in ways that allow their skills to be re-directed to new projects.  In the December issue of Harvard Business Review, Professor David Garvin details “How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management” by making the company’s management assessment and talent development more systematic while retaining its humanity and eary-stage spirit of innovation (http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/this-is-what-it-looks-like-when-a-google-manager-gets-feedback/). 

7. Uncertainty is okay

“Navigating uncertainty is what defines entrepreneurship,” writes Beth Comstock.  At GE, she goes on, in the aforementioned LinkedIn post, “we’ve made it a point to protect some ideas from the pressures of developed operations. We have a class of internal start ups that need to be nurtured, like GE's Durathon battery, a green backup power source for cell phone towers in Africa that started life as a hybrid locomotive battery.”  Enabling those start ups with space, time and resources to develop, without any certainty of positive results, is crucial today.

8. Balancing new and existing, inventing and improving

In management terms, “ambidexterity” is the ability of firms to exploit existing, often mature markets and to explore new, often emerging ones simultaneously.  At the heart of established firms’ efforts to spur innovation, the challenge is how to allocate resources to strike an appropriate balance between these two often conflicting strategic directions.  Harvard’s Michael Tushman has incisively analyzed the more than decade-long successful efforts at IBM to grow new businesses like Pervasive Computing, which allows mobile workers greater access to data and supports M(mobile)-commerce (http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/07/exploring-and-exploiting-growt/).

9. Top leadership buy-in

In March 2013, one of the world’s successful media companies, Axel Springer, sent its top executives (flying economy-class and then sharing rooms in a two-star hotel) to Silicon Valley to learn the language of digital entrepreneurship.  The results included their setting up their own garage for innovation (!) and, more substantively, returning to Germany where they became roles models and drivers of change within their company (http://www.inma.org/blogs/media-entrepreneur/post.cfm/finding-common-ground-with-digital-nerds-in-silicon-valley).

10. Simplicity pays

Annually for the last four years, the strategic branding firm Siegel+Gale has ranked global brands for simplicity (http://simplicity.siegelgale.com/2013/). The European-based discount supermarket brand, ALDI, ranked as the #1 global brand in 2013. Despite being far-flung with more than 9,000 stores worldwide and a brand that “focuses on the essentials, no matter what city,” ALDI’s good-value-for-the-money reputation has adapted to thrive before, during and since the economic crisis.  Beyond serving customers, however, Siegel+Gale’s research shows how innovation within a firm like ALDI is served by the greater clarity of shared purpose and goals accompanying brand simplicity.

All these lessons should inform the decisions and behaviors of two central actors in any established firm wanting to be more entrepreneurial and act more like a start-up.  The first actor is existing talent.  While unavoidable that organizational transformations often require the hard, if hopefully mutual, realization that formerly valuable talent no longer fit in new priorities and plans, the participation of current workers in any entrepreneurial venture is vital for its success.  Some talent will obviously be more directly involved in such efforts than others, but all need to recognize the shared purpose. 

The other actors, of course, are leaders.  Some of the lessons here, like adaptability or uncertainty or senior leadership buy-in, explicitly reference the demands (and opportunities) of leadership.  Yet several key principles and practices of start-ups, like Ries’ “entrepreneurship is everywhere” and “entrepreneurship is management” accord well with the more generally valuable precept that leaders, in existing firms, especially, are defined by what they do rather than by where they sit or the titles they hold.  In the end, at the heart of established firms should be leaders seeking, like their counterparts in start-ups, to grow business faster, serve customers better, transform existing markets and make inroads into new ones, and creatively sustain the elusive spirit of ongoing innovation.

Recommended Readings for Creative Leaders to Close Out 2013

In the first half of 2013, we saw several new books that were not merely provocative but pioneering in the lessons and insights they offered to creative leaders. These included Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s manifesto for women in business, Lean In, Columbia Business School Professor Rita Gunther McGrath’s call for The End of Competitive Advantage in business strategy, economist Mariana Mazzucato’s iconoclastic analysis of the necessity of The Entrepreneurial State for successful innovation, Wharton professor Jonah Berger’s best-selling account of social transmission, Contagious, and psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s revisionist study of talent and creativity, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined.

For the second half of this year, various new titles have appeared (or are scheduled to shortly) that can also speak directly to the work and lives of creative leaders. These range from in-depth popular accounts of successful creative firms to more scholarly approaches to entertainment, marketing, and creativity itself. All can contribute, however, to fostering more effective leadership and successful creative businesses.

1) Scott Berkun, The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work (Jossey-Bass) Blogger Scott Berkun’s lively account of working for a year at Wordpress.com, the world’s 15th busiest website, where he led a team of programmers and learned very practical ways to nurture a successful culture of creativity.

2) Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal (Portfolio) Bilton, a New York Times reporter, tracks the growth of podcasting start-up Odeo and how it morphed into the $11.5 billion dollar Twitter, particularly following the relationships between the four mercurial founders.

3) David Burkus, The Myths of Creativity: The Truth about How Innovative Companies and People Generate Ideas (Jossey-Bass) Management Professor Burkus offers an accessible history of creativity dating from the ancient Greeks as the basis for exploring contemporary myths and, most usefully, techniques for improving business creativity in the future.

4) Niraj Dawar, Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers (Harvard Business Review Press) To succeed in the world marketplace today, argues Ivey Business School Professor Dawar, firms need increasingly to look ‘downstream’ to where you interact with customers.

5) Dave Eggers, The Circle (Knopf) In this novel, the experiences of an idealistic protagonist who goes to work at the world’s most powerful internet company are the basis of a far-reaching meditation on work, privacy, democracy and knowledge in the wired era.

6) Anita Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking and the Big Business of Entertainment (Henry Holt) Elberse, of Harvard Business School, describes how building an entertainment business around blockbuster products and stars has recently been and remains the surest way to long-term success.

7) Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy and Imagination in the Digital World (Yale University Press) Gardner, the originator of the theory of multiple intelligences, and Davis discuss the increasing ‘app-dependence’ of technology users and its consequences for identity, relationships and creativity.

8) Jocelyn K. Glei and 99U, Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (Amazon Publishing) The latest in the 99U book series, this collection offers actionable recommendations and techniques from the likes of Seth Godin, Dan Ariely and Stefan Sagmeister for developing successful creative practices in a distracted world.

9) Tom Kelley & David Kelley, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (Crown Business) The Kelley Brothers, founder and partner in the design firm, IDEO, offer an invaluable and entirely usable guide to proven practices of better creative thinking, doing and confidence-building.

10) Charlotta Mellander, Richard Florida, Bjorn T. Asheim, and Meric Gertler, The Creative Class Goes Global (Routledge) 11 years after Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class transformed discussions of creative economies and urban planning with a focus on U.S. cities, this new work expands critical attention to the growth and development of the creative class in cities around the world.

11) Alexis Ohanian, Without their Permission: How the 21st Century Will be Made, Not Managed (Hachette) The reddit.com co-founder offers a paean to the endless opportunity of the open internet that is equal parts American Dream story (his own), start-up MBA, and two-fold plea to the government to keep the perfect marketplace open and to individuals to make the world better with innovation.

12) Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy (Patrick Brewster Press) Tech journalist Scoble and consultant Israel describe the new five forces: mobile, social media, data, sensors and location – and the trust required for businesses to make them work – in a book project innovatively sponsored by the likes of Autodesk, Bing, and charity:water.

13) Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little Brown) Journalist Stone’s detailed, revelatory (and controversial) account of the online retailer, its visionary founder, and how they seek to re-invent (again) the future of customer experience and the digital economy.