Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 8. Towards a formula for genius

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

—B.F. Skinner

Right-brained, hostile, anxious, compulsive and ill-fitted for survival – it's unsurprising that creative people find it tricky to settle into the regime of institutional life, or that corporations have a difficult time deciding how best they should be managed.

Equally unsurprising, then, is the urge of the corporate technocrats to codify the behaviour of creative people as soon as they discover that they can be deskilled no further.

The search for the creative trick that will consistently deliver surprising ideas is especially intense in advertising. Since most good advertising ideas flirt with subversion in one way or another, the formula that usually ends up as everyone's favourite is the notion of the paradigm break, the unexpected overturning of convention.

Burt Manning of JWT called it 'abruption'.

But Jean-Marie Dru made it famous, first at BDDP in Paris, and later with TBWA, by calling it 'disruption'. What a difference a prefix makes. In his book of the same name he describes it as, '... finding the strategic idea that breaks and overturns a convention in the marketplace, and then makes it possible to reach a new vision or to give new substance to an existing vision'.

You can see what he's getting at. But for clarity of exposition it's not going to beat Koestler's 'creativity is ...