Cannes Lions as Global Creative Leadership Classroom

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity held each June is the world’s leading celebration of brand communications and creativity.  The official programme of the week-long festival combines a dizzying array of industry and agency showcases, formal seminars, lectures, workshops, teaching academies, and award shows.  Arguably even more happens unofficially, with agency and holding companies gathering their global talent and leadership, often with clients, in meetings and parties, and with informal business meetings and social gatherings occurring around the clock. 

For each of the last five years, the Berlin School ofCreative Leadership has partnered with Cannes Lions to offer the premiere educational programme among the many held at the festival.  The Cannes Creative Leaders Programme (CCLP) begins with six intensive days of leadership training in Berlin followed by six days of the festival curation and closed-door sessions with industry leaders in Cannes.  While individual faculty, industry speakers and sessions provide many specific insights to programme participants, CCLP also emphasizes how more generally to learn from the festival itself – from Cannes as a model classroom for creative excellence.  The result is a fresh approach to sustaining creative and intellectual stimulation both within individual businesses and at other idea and creativity festivals. 

Here are a handful of the touchstones we urge participants to adopt in making the most from the festival:

·      Relevance

Why should I care about what’s said or shown on the stage at Cannes when we are pursuing creative excellence?  It’s a large question but an essential one: beyond the hype and personality cults and justifiable admiration for strong imaginative work, what is relevant to my own creative leadership and why?  Is a brand, client or consumer problem being defined and an original solution being plotted, one or both of which may be relevant to my own situation (either now or in the foreseeable future)?  Direct relevance and applicability are not the only tests of value, of course, but particularly in sessions featuring high-profile individuals or agencies, we do well by asking what concretely are the ideas or insights being shared and how are they relevant to our own work.  Too often, on big stages in Cannes and elsewhere (from other live events like MIPTV for television professionals to online offerings like TED), we partake in what I call “popcorn creative thinking” – easy and even enjoyable to consume in the moment but failing to provide any real nourishment or impact.  The more we question relevance and value, the more sharply we gather knowledge and insights from others that can help to make us better leaders.

·      Inspiration

Part of what animates Cannes is a core tenet of creative leadership and all creative work: inspiration.  We’re inspired by the examples of new standards of work that move the industry forward and even improve society, the innovative solutions to business and human problems, and the perspectives of leading voices and thinkers.  Inspiration doesn’t always readily pass the relevance test, but it is vital to advancing creative excellence.  The challenge is to know how to take the inspiration of a Cannes session or speaker (or, again, those at any number of other events) back home to enrich our own work.  Sometimes the answer is as simple as reflecting on what kind of inspiration we’re experiencing.  In its 2012 CEO survey, IBM looked closely at what constituted inspirational leadership and revealed five major characteristics: creating a compelling vision, driving stretch goals, hewing to shared principles, exercising enthusiasm, and guiding with expertise.  By asking that additional question – how specifically are we being inspired? – we increase the likelihood of taking away practical knowledge of how to sustain the inspiration of the moment and use it to lead others.

·      Idea Events

Part of the attraction, even magic, of Cannes Lions is that it happens only once a year.  Thousands gather from around the world and produce a singular, energetic mass of industry voices, experience and successful work.  The festival consequently becomes what anthropologists call a “tournament of values,” a site where the priorities of a community, here of global creative communication professionals, determines its leading values, standards and priorities.  Tracking closely which values – or ideas, debates, challenges, and kinds of work – are highlighted and celebrated helps further our understanding of the shape and future of the industry.  Viewed this way as a hothouse of industry ideas, however, Cannes Lions also becomes a model for us as individual leaders to stimulate thinking and engage diverse ideas more consistently.  Put in more practical terms, how do we as creative leaders construct similar opportunities for our teams or businesses to learn from and be inspired by multiple voices and engage in industry-defining debates and conversations?  Many organizations, large and small, from BBDO’s Digital Lab to Pixar University, have institutionalized such continuing engagement with diverse and innovative ideas.  The question remains for us, how are we doing so in ours?

·      Creativity Voyeurism

Common to testing relevance, sustaining inspiration, and continuing engagement with diverse ideas is the challenge of actively taking home the experiences and insights of Cannes and making them a part of our own creative leadership practice.  Again, not all lessons or experiences of Cannes Lions or other events can or should be immediately applicable (some of what happens in Cannes should indeed stay in Cannes…).  But too often, the big names, the trend-setting work, and the fresh ideas – and a kind of romance with creativity they often come to represent – can turn us into passive viewers and admirers.  As an educator of professionals and executives, this tendency casts light on a special imperative for me in any setting in which I work: what will you do with what you’ve learned?  For creatives, the added burden of what I call “creativity voyeurism” can dull our capacity to embrace and transfer the rich diversity of ideas we experience.  Put simply, often the greatest challenge of participating in Cannes Lions or any idea festival is to act concretely and locally after the event is over. 

·      Making the Story Your Own

We have the good fortune to be living in (and hopefully contributing to) a golden age of creativity and innovation in business.  From reading Fast Company, Inc. and Entrepreneur to following our favorite TED-talks and video blogs to attending Cannes Lions and SXSW, we are awash in tales of creative leadership, bleeding-edge practices, and innovative possibility.  Yet the voyeurism I’ve mentioned, while allowing us to be cocktail-party conversant in what our creative heroes are doing, can easily leave us doing little if any comparable work ourselves.  One of the exercises we do in CCLP is to respond to sessions, speakers or experiences at Cannes Lions by creating our own individual stories about them.  They may be stories we would tell our bosses, our clients, our friends or loved ones and they may speak to the opportunity, awe or even irrelevance of the ideas or experiences.  But what’s crucial is that the stories of creativity become ours.  In the crucible of storymaking, we at least begin to transfer the creative leadership, learning and experience of others to ourselves.  In that way, we take a critical step toward making real for us the extraordinary ideas, insights, excitement, and possibilities of Cannes.

A Frequent Flyer's Guide to Innovation

I should open by being making clear that this post is not about imaginative ways to secure upgrades or avoid baggage or other fees….  It is, rather, about a range of ideas related to innovation and creativity experienced during a busy recent stretch of flying. Travel, of course, is generally marked by the kinds of situations often embraced by leaders wanting to foster greater creative production or excellence: engagement with unfamiliar situations and people, regular opportunities to make fresh choices and connections, a willingness to explore and uncertainty and the unknown.  During several flights since last month, though, I had various experiences explicitly about innovation, creativity and even leadership that prompted further reflection.

1. Keep Climbing

A current TV commercial for Delta Airlines shown on-board flights opens with black-and-white images of historical aviators and a voiceover declaring the need to celebrate these pioneers not by ‘looking behind’ but, like them, ‘looking beyond.’  This ‘Aviation Leaders’ entry in the ‘Keep Climbing’ campaign was created by award-winning agency Weiden + Kennedy.  Its presentation of the Wright Brothers, Amelia Earhart and first astronauts to walk on the moon is moving and held up as prologue to the continuing and forward-looking innovations of Delta.   Interestingly, as the comments on iSpot make clear, the commercial has been viewed alternately as inspiring but also as offensive to some, who interpret the treatment of these heroes as disrespectful (http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7IKp/delta-airlines-aviation-leaders).

2. Sky Magazine

The traditional communications outlet, creative and otherwise, for airlines is the in-flight magazine.  Delta’s paper offering, Sky, like most of its competitors, is now also available online: http://deltaskymag.delta.com/.  The September 2013 issue is conspicuously focused on creativity and brands.  The covergirl is Heidi Klum and the story of her current projects reveals an obvious focus on (personal) brand communications.  Other content extends this emphasis, for example, an article on ‘channeling American style to Asian markets’ with profiles of brands like Red Wing Shoes and Pendleton clothing.

Several of Sky’s regular features speak to the novelty and encounters with the unfamiliar that can define travel.  The ‘Wheels Up’ section offers a blurb about a cave bar in Croatia and in ‘Creative Commons’ showcases the original graphic design work of Austrian Albert Exergian and Milan’s ‘Couture Culture.’  The ‘1 City/5 Ways’ section, this month about Hong Kong, reminded me of Edward de Bono’s famous six hats approach to creative ideation by looking at the city through the eyes, respectively, of culture vultures, hipsters, people with kids, foodies, and jetsetters.

As it happens, the same issue even has an ‘In-depth Executive Education’ section on ‘The Enlightened Leader’ that uses some of the authentic leadership ideas of Bill George, author of True North, to address the need for effective leaders to identify and use their own values to guide them.  Interestingly, a box in the article featured an interview with Anita Elberse, a Harvard Business School faculty member who leads the module there on marketing creative industries.  In Sky, she discusses Lady Gaga, whose case is featured in Elberse’s forthcoming book, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking and the Business of Entertainment (MacMillan; http://www.amazon.com/Blockbusters-Hit-making-Risk-taking-Business-Entertainment/dp/0805094334).

3. Fashion’s Lessons

Besides movies, TV shows, games and the moving map tracking flight progress, TED Talks are now available as part of Delta’s in-flight entertainment.  Obviously many of these talks, both from TEDGlobal and TEDx local events, address innovative behaviors and ideas.  So it is unsurprising that among Delta’s selections are several that directly address the challenges and opportunities of creativity and creative leadership.  One example is the provocative Johanna Blakley, whose ‘Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture’ from 2010 explores the opportunities of an open creative process and culture: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Specifically, Blakley uses fashion as a basis for contrasting both the originality and revenues of copyright protected and non-copyright protected industries – and ultimately advocating greater creative collaboration and sharing.

4. Daily Visual Inspiration

A new entertainment offering aboard Delta are brief videos from coolhunting.com, the website that is ‘synonymous with inspiration’ in all things creative: http://www.coolhunting.com/video/ .  I already receive Cool Hunting Daily updates and have enjoyed and learned from the many online profiles.  Like TED talks, a selection of the videos are now available on Delta flights.  Among the half-dozen viewable on a recent transcontinental flight were 4-7 minute films of such creatives as decoupage plate designer John Derian, tintype portrait studio Photobooth, custom ski-maker Zai, and Roy Denim’s handmade jeans.  I particularly liked the story of Lisadore, the passionate maker of one-of-a-kind Comme il Faut tango shoes in Buenos Aires.  While delivering something of the promised ‘insider look at their inspiration and process,’ the segments seem more generally to present matter-of-fact summaries of the origins and processes of these artists, designers and true originals.

5. Technology Update

On September 30, Delta announced that they were equipping 11,000 pilots with Microsoft Surface 2 tablets.  The move would replace the paper-based flight kits containing navigational charts and reference materials and carried by the crew and to take a major step toward the goal of a paperless cockpit by the end of 2014.  Trumpeting both the promised increase in efficiency and the environmental benefits of the move, their partners at Microsoft spoke directly about Delta’s ‘absolute commitment to bringing the best in technology innovation into flight operations’ (http://news.delta.com/index.php?s=43&item=2118).  A special ‘Keep Climbing’ segment was created to showcase the upgrade.

So much to consider and be inspired by.  Yet I found myself asking what are passengers to do with all this information and inspiration while at 30,000 feet.  Or to extend that beyond the flight itself, what passengers do once they land and carry on with the rest of their everyday lives.  Put more pointedly, can the insights of the TED talks or Cool Hunting vignettes or even ‘In-depth Executive Education’ offerings be taken off the plane and somehow put into practice on the ground?  Or are they minor and occasionally edifying amusements merely meant to pass time in the stratosphere, little more than an entertaining variation on the experience of a doctor’s office waiting room?

That may be a general issue for anything one does when flying.  However, with so much attention given over to creativity and innovation today, the prevalence of on-board content related to the topics I experienced begs further questioning.  In fact, stepping back from particular flights, and tales of creative daring, we might ask how to avoid merely being along for the ride of others’ creative or innovative work.  Recall the viewers of ‘Aviation Leaders’ offended by what they took to be a lack of respect for early pioneers of flying.  Those commentators raise an essential question: What do we do with our innovation heroes?  Do they stand on their own, largely set apart from our own lives and the present by their historical achievements, or do we actively use their example as motivation for our own original attempts to break free of the past?

This is hardly an either-or question.  We can venerate creative heroes from the past or faraway while also striving to stand on their giant shoulders and climb still higher in the future.  Too often, though, the tendency to romanticize their accomplishments, to dwell in every detail of their journeys, can become an end in itself.  Our challenge accordingly becomes to internalize the inspiration they provide us and to use it to inform and drive forward our own innovative work.  Or as I asked myself at the end of a recent long flight, How do we step away from being passengers on the innovation journeys of others and become better innovators or creative leaders ourselves?

Where will you find your ideas? The Ideas Economy and Moving beyond TED

In the Financial Times this weekend, April Dembosky writes about Richard Saul Wurman, one of the creators of the TED conference, and his new WWW event:  http://on.ft.com/SXqtXS .  WWW doesn't stand for anything specific; instead, it refers to a list words starting with "W": "wanderlust," "warming," and "wizardry" -- evidently in order to emphasize the fertile openness of the events to generating new ideas.  Besides being very expensive, charging $16,000 per person, the new event has a distinctive format of conversations between two high-profile speakers.  Dembosky devotes most of the piece to Wurman and, despite alienating many he's left behind at other events like TED (which he sold in 2001), what has been his successful career at organizing such conferences.

What's more compelling about the story, though, is how Wurman has so successfully operated as an entrepreneur of ideas.  The 21st century ideas economy has thrived through the development and interaction of communities energized by extraordinary transformations in business and society but enabled by new communication technologies and a circuit of on-the-ground events.  While TED is, again, the best known of these platforms for producing and circulating ideas -- familiarly, both in person for those who can pay entry fees of $7500 and (over time) online for others at no cost -- many, many other events are what make the economy thrive.  These range from local unConferences and cross-industry workshops to South by Southwest and the World Economic Forum.  While many of the events draw together the creative class and technorati, they have varying political and industry priorities.  But together, they have tapped into and accelerated a contemporary drive to innovate and to understand the changes re-shaping business today.

The title of Dembosky's piece, "Life after TED," has an obviously specific meaning in offering its profile of Wurman.  Yet it also broaches two broader topics.  One is the matter of what comes after TED, either because that particular event is becoming, for some, too slickly-produced or even running out of speakers.  An illustrative critique of TED, by the consistently insightful Evgeny Morosov, appeared recently in The New Republic (http://bit.ly/NNmpgi).  More important than TED or its prospects, however, is a fuller comprehension of the ideas economy itself and how we should understand it as a driver of creativity and change in business and society.  (The very term, "ideas economy," is for some associated with The Economist and its excellent series of global events, http://econ.st/PloKL8 -- but that is taking the term too narrowly.) 

The compelling question -- not least for those, like me, with deep roots in the traditional academy -- is what is the future of the wider ideas economy and the dense fabric of events and communities supporting it?  In other words, what will be the shape and dynamics of how we produce, share and act on ideas in the future?  By better understanding the process and structure of how we engage ideas, we arguably will be a step ahead in producing and building on better ones.

Honda's "Power of Dreams" Online Films

I've been viewing the short films online at Honda's "Power of Dreams" series (http://dreams.honda.com). While very clearly advertisments for Honda, its history and current operations, the films can also be alternatively smart and inspiring, brimming with au courant ideas of management, risk-taking and innovation. (One does wonder, of course, how many of the ideas are actually implemented and practiced in the everyday.) Besides the corporate figures, many of the faces and voices are familiar (Deepak Chopra, Danica Patrick) and some refreshingly unexpected (Christopher Guest, Clive Barker). And the "Mobility 2088" instalment is simply cool. Viewed collectively, these films aspire to be a cross between the groundbreaking BMWfilms.com series of shorts, The Hire, directed by luminaries from John Frankenheimer to John Woo, in 2001-2002 and more recent online salons, from TED to the Aspen Ideas Festival (http://www.ted.com and http://www.aifestival.org). They finally fail to reach that standard, but do offer an excellent summary of how a company, particularly in a challenged industry like automobile manufacturing, reflects on -- and, with polished production values, presents -- itself and its vision of the future.