Cats and creatives

David Parrish posted recently an interesting compariso between creative people and cats, the sort of things makes you smile but then – in the end – has some strategic potential.

You can find the complete post here; what below is an excerpt. Enjoy.

In an article in the Harvard Business Review on ‘Leading Clever People’ (details below). The researchers make several interesting points about leading creative people (and other clever people including scientists and academics). Before my own presentation I was musing on the conclusions of the article and the analogy of ‘herding cats’. I couldn’t help thinking of some similarities between the article’s conclusions about leading creatives and managing a pet cat.

1. ‘Creatives’ do not want to be led. Neither do cats. Try putting a lead on a cat.
2. ‘Creatives’ like to do their own thing. So do cats. Some companies allow their employees to use 20% of their time to pursue personal projects. I call this the ‘80% loyalty’ philosophy. Some cat owners accept that their cats sometimes disappear for days to do their own thing. They probably have another human who also feeds them.
3. ‘Creatives’ have a low boredom threshold. Cats soon get bored with you.
4. ‘Creatives’ expect instant access. Even if they want you to keep away from them most of the time, when they want you, they expect to get to see you. Similarly with cats. You can’t find them but they can always find you when they want you.
5. ‘Creatives’ won’t thank you and will be unwilling to recognise your leadership. Cats might get friendly  when they want something, but after they get fed they just walk away.
6. Even though they don’t acknowledge it, ‘creatives’ need you and the organisation as much as you need them. Despite cats’ aloofness, like ‘creatives’ they do depend on the shelter and food you provide.

I won’t try to push the comparisons further but it does seem that there are some amusing similarities!
Let me know what you think – I’d like to hear your views.

The HBR article is ‘Leading Clever People’ by Rob Goffee from London Business School and Gareth Jones from INSEAD, who have studied leadership for 20 years. Their article was published in March 2007 and is available online from Harvard Business Review.

From one to many

This was posted here by Derby-based Graham Bennett. It’s food for thought in relation to organization management. Not that you have to be CEO of something to make sense of it. it works also if you work alone. especially in the creative sector. Thank you, Graham.

Changing organisational cultures

At a presentation given by Kevin Williams (at the time Chief Executive of YMCA England) we were shown a photograph of the people responsible for running YMCAs in the 1960s. They were all grey suited men.

Kevin then went on to explain that, currently, the majority of the larger YMCAs are now managed by women.

Clearly this cannot be the whole story – so what other changes have also taken place which might support such a change in leadership? And what might we learn from this?

I began by drawing a line down the middle of the page, putting “Male” at the top of the left hand side, and “Female” at the top of the right hand side. The following is a list of changes which seem to have happened in the world with which we work, during the same period of time:
Male to Female

Heavy Industry to Service Industries

Machines to Ideas/Knowledge

Strength to Nurturing

Specialisms to Multi-tasking

Power to Influence

Hierarchies to Networks

Control to Encourage

Command to Persuade / “sell”

Mono-culture to Valuing Diversity

Facts to Intuition

Books to Internet

Vote to Buy

Membership to Shareholder or User Group

Grants/Subsidies to Social Enterprise

Competition to Collaboration for mutual benefit

As with all caricatures, this needs some careful handling – but much of the world we work in is undoubtedly moving this way, and we all need to be able to respond. Even where organisations still need to work to the left side, some of their activities will need to work to the right side if success is to be achieved.
It seems likely that some of us are more comfortable when working in the way shown on the left side, others to the right. The solution to this must surely be:
* awareness of the issues;
* recognition of the inherent tensions between people, disciplines, organisations, and sectors; and
* having the right teams or partnerships in place to cover all bases.

If, from where you see the world, you feel that there are any other issues which should be considered, or added to the list, I would be delighted to hear of them.

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Edgecraft

Ok, I got a crush on Seth Godin’s insights. This one you can find here. It’s about Edgecraft, which – according to him – is an iterative process that is much easier for an organization to embrace than brainstorming. Off we go:

It’s a mistake to try to champion much beyond your reach.

There are hundreds of available edges, things you can add to, subtract from or do to your product or service. Find an edge and go all the way to it. Going partway is time-consuming and expensive—and it doesn’t work very well. Going all the way to the edge is the only way to jolt the user into noticing what you’ve done. If they notice you, they’re one step closer to talking about you.

It’s all marketing now. The organizations that win will be the ones that realize that all they do is create things worth talking about.

And another little bit from the same book:

It’s not that people somehow lose their ability to be creative when they’re in an environment in which they feel safe. It’s that they ignore the creative ideas that naturally occur to them and fight the changes championed by others.

They like things the way they are, and they can’t resist the urge to defend the status quo. The challenge of the champion is to help people who are already creative to take advantage of their talent. By selling the dream and fighting the status quo, we can free people who have been lulled into a false sense of security.

And again:

You only have one boss, and if she doesn’t believe you can do it or that it’s worth doing, you’re stuck. If you can’t make the fulcrum work in the eyes of that key decision maker, your work is much more difficult. But there are hundreds of sources of capital in the outside world, and when you approach them as an entrepreneur, you’re more likely to have the posture of the champion. They want to believe that you’re the person who can do this, and thus you’re more likely to persuade them that you’re the guy.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the answer is to go outside and start something new. It means, instead, that you and your boss (or your co-workers, or your employees) should sit down together and figure out which parts of the fulcrum are out of whack.

Dramatic changes. Things that may very well be unattainable. Things that require not incremental improvements or changes, but significant quantum leaps in the way you organize, create and deliver what you do. If you can’t find a scary edge, then you haven’t found an edge, have you?

No use going to an edge that all your competition is going to as well. That’s not an edge. That’s the middle. Growth only comes from the leap to the remarkable.

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But are you really serious about it?

Like the one that follow (and the one before), this is an article by Seth Godin; this time you can find it here. I almost bought his book…but before you rush off, here’s some interesting highlights:

I did a gig in New York today about the Dip and it went really well. Afterward, someone asked me a question about his new business.

I asked back, “if you accomplish that, will you be seen by your audience as the best in the world, or will you be seen as doing your best?”

He didn’t have to answer. He got it.

If you’re doing your best, only your AYSO soccer coach cares. If you’re the best in the world, the market cares. The secret, if you have limited resources (don’t we all) is to make ‘world’ small enough that you can actually accomplish that.

Obviously, this approach is applicable to just about any idea-based product, whether it’s consulting or clothes:

1. Find the core market

2. Obviously the otaku (Seth’s name for the ’surplus’ in things)

3. make it easy to sample

4. Make it easy to share. And hope it hits the critical mass.

That seems common sense, but it’s common sense that’s not so common. Designing anything for the masses is silly. why? because the masses don’t buy stuff any more. The edges do.

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Short. No attention left

This is an article by Seth Godin available here:

Short books, short shows, short commercials, short ideas…

In 1960, the typical stay for a book on the New York Times bestseller list was 22 weeks. In 2006, it was two. Forty years ago, it was typical for three novels a year to reach #1. Last year, it was 23.

Advise and Consent won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. It’s 640 pages long. On Bullshit was a bestseller in 2005; it’s 68 pages long.

Commercials used to be a minute long, sometimes two. Then someone came up with the brilliant idea of running two per minute, then four. Now there are radio ads that are less than three seconds long.
It’s not an accident that things are moving faster and getting smaller. There’s just too much to choose from. With a million or more books available at a click, why should I invest the time to read all 640 pages of Advise and Consent when I can get the idea after 50 pages?

Audible.com offers more than 30,000 titles. If an audiobook isn’t spectacular, minute to minute, it’s easier to ditch it and get another one than it is to slog through it. After all, it’s just bits on my iPod.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t limited to intellectual property. Craigslist.org is a free classified-ad listing service. A glance at their San Francisco listings shows more than 33,000 ads for housing. That means that if an apartment doesn’t sound perfect after just a sentence or two, it’s easy to glance down at the next ad.

The end.

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Knowledge

Is it really true that knowledge is something superior to other ‘goods’ of life? That is – by far – the most desirable of things? Having the access to an item may represent an advantage; even if is not a goal per se, but rather a tool. The ultimate aim of mankind is happiness, not goods: on this we might all agree. Now, what about knowledge? It seems that is the only good which don’t bring, along with its satisfaction, some disadvantages.

Let’s make two examples: in medicine, for instance: the fact that humans can cure themselves from flu, it’s definitely an advantage. But it also bring the need to cure themselves from any other type of illnesses, even those that once where not contemplated, those that we didn’t care about, because they could not be considered in terms of advantage/disadvantage, but as facts of life. Now, the fact that we can save our life from flu brings also the need to save ourselves from all other types of illness. If we cannot satisfy this need, we perceived it as a disadvantage. The threshold of happiness has been moved forward.

Same thing with transportation: when cars didn’t exist, they couldn’t solve all the problems, which they solve today. But now a car has become the base, without which one has a disadvantage. A car is, so to say, the base to be happy (take it not literally), and once achieved this basic need, we will look forward to ‘step up’ to the next one, maybe a bigger car, or maybe two cars in the family, and so on. This is valid for all the items and services of technical progress: from the satisfaction of a need, springs up immediately other needs to satisfy that we didn’t have before.

The degree of happiness doesn’t depend on which step of the social ladder we are: everyone can feel happy or sad at whatever social level. We cannot say that humanity in the past was happier or sadder than today. Reading, for instance, the ancient texts, it seems that the level of happiness was more or less the same, even with far less items and technological progress.

The fact is that happiness is achievable only in the brief moment of acquisition of an item, or a service: when one was ill, and is cured; when one needed a car, and got it. The only brief lapse of happiness is attainable in the passage from one state to the other, and not from the fact of being in one state. After that, we immediately start to perceive the need of going further onto the next level. That means, the satisfaction of a need brings always the disadvantage of creating another need.

Regarding our first concern, knowledge, it seems that it is immune from such a thing: to know something is a linear process, it doesn’t bring to us the t unbearable feeling of having to progress to the next level. But it does something else. If it’s true that the less one knows, the better s/he lives (because the more one knows, the more s/he perceives the bad things of life), it’s also true that knowledge is something that once achieved, it cannot be undone. To put it in simple terms: we cannot go back to a previous state of ignorance, because we don’t want to. Knowledge is an irreversible (linear) process: who knows, wants not to know less. Nobody wants to decrease his or her level of knowledge, even if it would bring a major happiness. We can try for ourselves: let’s think about a happy person with less knowledge, less acculturated than we are, and then let’s ask ourselves if we would exchange with him or her: we wouldn’t. We are not able to renounce to our knowledge.

No matter its relationship with happiness, knowledge is a progressive entity, it’s ‘oriented’, so to say: it’s not neutral; humans don’t want to renounce to it, whatever it brings along with, even unhappiness. The good thing, on the other hand, is that it doesn’t originate other needs: it’s a type of acquisition, which is more stable. But as soon as we know more, we would never accept not to have it.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

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Wealthy Family

During coaching sessions, or informal chatting, it happens quite often to discuss the importance of coming from a wealthy family, which is seen as an absolute advantage for pursuing the creative career one wants. It seems that a wealthy family is all one needs to have in order to start a successful profession in the arts. I would like to question this assumption.

Being wealthy helps to get into the best schools, master courses and it might even allow the person to finance his or her own projects: if you have the money to fund your own production, say a book, an exhibition, a film, what else can you ask for? Family wealthy also provides you with the social links that one needs in order to become a well-spoken, networked, high-status cultural producer: in short, if you belong to a rich family, you will have access to powerful people, which can go a long way, as everybody knows.

It will give you not just more means, but also good habits, psychological finesse, travelling, and also traditions: well-established roots, family identity, a sort of model ‘how to stay and move in the world’. If you come from a rich family, you’ll become someone quickly at ease within the environments where decisions are made. Unfair, but true.

Now, what possible advantage could one get from NOT belonging to this category of people?

First, one has more motivations to get out of a disadvantaged situation, and more drive to achieve his/her goals: if you come from a poor environment, you don’t already have what you need, and you are more willing to commit to get results. Basically, you have more of that ‘primary energy’, which you cannot get anywhere if not in real need of something. The disadvantaged person knows very well that nothing will happen if s/he doesn’t make it happening. No fear, no scary about anything. Do not underestimate this strength.

Secondly, paradoxically, the poorer enjoy also more freedom to make his/her own choice, because no tradition to follow exists. You can easily see that if a family has a long and important tradition of lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc., the pressure put on financial value and social status is so high that will be a problem if someone wants to become, say, a photographer, or a graphic designer. The demands to keep up that ‘family value’ will override any natural inclination of the subject. There is too much to loose, from a risky choice that departs from the tradition.

A third, fundamental aspect: the disadvantaged person might not be attached to any particular location in which his/her family lives, precisely because s/he has nothing to loose: having anything specific which anchor him/her to the family place, will provide the flexibility to search the locations offering the best possibilities. It will be easier to head for the places where the natural inclination might get fulfilled, either through study or work.

So, back to our coaching sessions for artists and creative people: take the assumption that a wealthy family is important in career-succeding with a grain of salt: to start advantaged, is not always better.

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Time passing

I had once a colleague, Maria her name, who every evening read the newspaper of two years before.

And anyone at work putting up funny faces when she was telling this, making a bit of fun of her, saying, you know, she’s a nice girl, after all. I no longer would put a funny face. Reconsidering a bit this little fact, I would say that two years delay in reading the news seems to me a luxury, which very few could afford, and the majority still deny to themselves.

In skimming a paper just a week old, the higher relevance every article, title, person and editorial cut had at that time, the more surreal and bizarre it appears now. I believe Maria was, ans still is, much farther than me in having understood all this a decade ago.

I don’t have any more contact with her, but I would like to know if she still reads the 2005 newspapers. Truly. I learnt from you, Maria, in all these years, that distance, temporal more than spatial, makes things cleaner, and maybe more honest, somehow. Not just clearer, we all know this, but more human, closer to our reach.

Some days I really think I cannot keep the pace, that I’m running up and down without knowing exactly what for, and then, maybe I should get home in the evening, and open a newspaper of 2002, or 1997, stretch it out, skip the weather forecasts and the sport section (but you never know), and read the articles and feature of how my life changed in the meantime, what I was facing in the future, and how could I got out of trouble.

Realizing soon after, while balling the paper for the recycling bin, that I don’t remember to have done all things things at all. Maybe then I’m still into them, or maybe I never got into them in the first place. Let’s see it tomorrow.

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Failure

Since it makes uncomfortable, failure among our contemporaries has no space. No room for development. No room for address. Failure –in other words– should not exist, according to the present society. Do we feel the same? We shouldn’t, of course. Theoretically each of us allows a margin of failure in life. But maybe not this time, we tell ourselves…

We feel that if we fail here (and now), we could jeopardize our future credibility. For instance, from where I stand it’s impossible to talk about failure in a positive sense, nor develop a notion of failure, without suspicion for whom is reading and/or approaching me.

We set our expectations on a high level, and we don’t even consider the possibility of not achieving them: and this works also for the expectation in the others. If I say to you than this space about coaching creative people could be a failure in pursuing its goal, you get immediately on-guard.

Hence, what is important in any activity, professional or personal, for duty or leisure, for ourselves and the others, is to attempt to dispense with the error-phobia that envelop us in a perennial mist. Not only we are scared of failing, in physical and mental terms, sometimes we even set up mechanisms of self-censorship. We don’t even allow ourselves to think we could fail, and things could go wrong. What does exactly mean things could go wrong?

When we expect something from someone else or some situation, we want to enjoy the most of it. We get ideas; we plan them, put to work and enjoy the results. Still, the possibility to fail is not harming anything. Failure is a precious space where we can stretch our boundaries and experiment with another dimension of living. In this sense, failure is a vital component of our experience of life.

I bet most of you feel now the urge to ask why should we fail? It’s not that we should fail in order to live better. We should simply allow ourselves the space, the mental dimension, of failure. We live in a win-win society, where one cannot afford to step into something wrong. For instance, we cannot bear the thought to lose our time following someone or something, which in the end disappears and leave us alone. This can happen in love as well as business.

In our deeds we invest feelings, time, money, and precisely because it’s an ‘investment’ we expect something back. A return, some results. We cannot conceive an action freed from expected effects, freed from the obligation to avoid errors. It hurts us to see and to think about our failure. We can bear only someone else’s failure. And we don’t want to be that someone else.

There’s a school of thought arguing that there’s no right to fail, but a duty to experiment. Fine. Does it mean that an experiment cannot fail? Why do we take away the word ‘fail’? We fail in studies, jobs, loves. We fail permanently, as well as succeeding. In writing these lines, I’m probably failing to communicate exactly my thoughts to you, completely or to some extent.

I fail a lot, as well as not. And I fail sometimes because I’m overly generating, and couldn’t fit everything in place and in time. Other times because I wasn’t able to carry out a commitment, or didn’t feel like, and my project, or task, collapsed on itself for obvious lack of will, time and resources. Other times again, I fail because I initiated something already doubtful, and it went worse and worse.

And in some occasions I managed to successfully complete something totally different from what I started. Is that a failure?

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Trust

It’s true that life sometimes is both painful and simultaneously rewarding, especially in moments where you feel lost, or stuck, or somehow put in a corner. Painful for the experience (a loss, a feeling of inconclusiveness); rewarding because, in the end, is what pushes us towards some choices (even the non-choice is a choice). I’m not sure, as I have read in an online forum (nettime.org, precisely), that this has to be realized at the expenses of trust. Trust in ourselves, and in the other.

A life centered on the trust in the self, would be challenging, difficult and fascinating at the same time, but how far could we go in this sense? What would be a human without the environment around, which include her/his similar? Isn’t the idea of only first-hand experience a bit too privileged?

Everyone of us has the possibility to choose among a range of solutions, for work and life: not only in the professional approach (the way one can ’sell’ her/himself in life, or not) but also regarding information (what you want to become, through reflection, info-gathering and coaching, for instance), and distribution of this information (the context, restricted or enlarged, in which you want to act). True, I’m probably talking for the Western society, with all the ups and downs – not so sure if the majority of the world population can do the same.

In doing the above, trust in the other is simpler, and more human. I doubt all the time in my work practice and personal life, but at the same time I do trust people I have chosen to have around, or I share a life with. If I have to distrust everyone and everything, I would get stuck in my own thoughts. Is it really something wrong in trusting? I don’t want to get too transcendental (I know the term itself might rise some eyebrows), but isn’t all this also a matter of love? Do we have to confront each other and everything around us all the time to claim we are ‘free’?

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