Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 2. The problem with creative people

I think the problem of the management of creative personnel is both fantastically difficult and important. I don't quite know what we are going to do with this problem because, in essence, what I am talking about is the lone wolf. The kind of creative people that I've worked with are people who are apt to get ground up in an organization, apt to be afraid of it, and apt generally to work off in a corner or an attic by themselves. The problem of the place of the 'lone wolf' in a big organization, I'm afraid, is your problem and not mine.

—A.H. Maslow (from a speech delivered at a Creative Engineering Seminar for the US Army Management School, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 1957)

The job of creative director in an ad agency is very much like the job of a football manager; you buy the best talent you can afford and you strive to get the best performances out of the rest of them. Unlike Roman Abramovitch of Chelsea, I could usually afford to buy only a handful of A-list players, so the second part of the job became much more important to me. I began to wonder what the conditions were that made nominally average creative people perform so well at certain times and so badly at others.

It's fair to say, as the years wore on and the hiring budgets failed to improve, I began to obsess over it. I wanted to know how it was that you could buy a proven superstar from another agency and he or she would fail to perform in the new environment. Conversely, how could ...