Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 13. Structures and strictures

Serious corporate persons can, with self-respect intact, confidently put a case to their board for sponsoring experimental laboratories, investing in a lot more R&D and hiring another six postgraduate chemists. They feel a great deal less manly when asking their boards to contemplate the astonishing commercial potential of an untried animated vampire duck.

—Jeremy Bullmore from 'Wanted: a new kind of incubator for hatching Harry Potters'

Of the three great plagues that beset the imaginative capacity of our public and private institutions, only one appears amenable to rapid redress.

Market forces will continue to erode vast tracts of the intellectual commons as long as national governments and supranational regulators lack the foresight or the will to intervene. Vested interests and political sensitivity will make it difficult for dissenting voices to be heard.

The Taylorist agenda, with its sights now firmly set on the productivity of knowledge workers, will continue to erode the discretionary powers of middle management. That toxic concoction of increasing responsibility with diminishing authority will serve to intensify their aversion to risk in all its forms.

It's in the third area, where the dysfunctional relationship between management and creative workers has been falsely framed as a struggle for dominance or control, that a cool assessment of the issues and opportunities can pave the way to immediate progress.

The first two problems are steeped ...