Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 12. Podsnaps and ponytails

If Botticelli were alive today, he'd be working for Vogue.

—Peter Ustinov

If you're the manager of a business that relies on creative people to produce the goods or services you need to generate revenue, here's some very straightforward advice:

1. Hire the best talent you can afford.

2. Let them get on with it.

Judging from the paucity of startling new ideas in the marketplace most of your colleagues in the creative industries haven't the faintest notion of where or how to begin. Or, even more dangerously, they think they do. In the peculiar arena of creativity management a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a lot of it is completely catastrophic.

Taking the most generous possible view, we could just about forgive the major film, TV and music companies for producing such a consistent stream of unmitigated kak during the past five or six years. Struggling with distribution issues, new technologies, internet piracy and declining profits it seems churlish to blame them for neglecting their core business, producing content that people want to see, read or hear. But blame them we shall.

As long ago as January 2003 The Economist, in a cover article entitled 'Lights! Camera! No profits!' took the entertainment industry to task for favouring 'instant commercial returns' over 'long-term investment in creativity'. But the public's appetite for new media content is as voracious as ever, despite these long years of being fed such indigestible schlock, or ...