Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Part II. THE CREATIVE ORGANIZATION

As business learns to compete in the new creative age, the efficient exploitation of the imagination will be as critical to success as the exploitation of coal once was. And it would be good to think that some of the management skills and tricks that its communications advisers have painfully accumulated over the years could be brought more usefully and centrally to bear.

—Jeremy Bullmore

Introduction to Part II

All great things are done for their own sake.

—Robert Frost

A belief in creativity for the sake of creativity is a necessary condition for the success of creative companies.

Perhaps this isn't as explicit as it could be, so I'll say it again:

For a creative company to succeed it must celebrate its creativity as an end in itself. This is not because creativity has any lofty moral purpose, or because it is somehow more worthy than other human activities. It doesn't, and it isn't. It is because creativity is self-consummatory, non-instrumental. It is its own purpose.

But how do we harness the power of creativity, which refuses to do anything well except for its own selfish gratification, to the drive-train of the profit motive, which refuses to do anything at all except for its own selfish gratification? How will society deal with their irreconcilable differences? How can companies do it?

In 1952, at about the same time that Osborn was telling the world ...