I’ve been reading Liz Strauss’ Successful Blog for a while, and have discovered some really good blogs via her Successful and Outstanding Blogs Hall of Fame - so I’m delighted to see she’s just added Wishful Thinking to the Hall of Fame. Thanks Liz!

If you don’t already read Liz’s blog you should have a look at it - lots of good stuff for creative types and entrepreneurs, and she’s very good at responding to comments, so I’m sure she’ll give you a warm welcome.

The next interview for my research project on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with David Roberts, Senior Project Manager at Tribal, and responsible for Creative Launchpad projects across East and West Midlands.

Creative Launchpad has been set up by Tribal, and offers support services to the creative industries, both those operating in them, and those trying to support their development.

Creative Launchpad offers advice, guidance, business support, 1-to-1 consultancy, training and seminars for creative clients - whether freelancers, microbusinesses or larger companies. It delivers projects across various areas in the West and East Midlands, to various target groups of clients, each offering a different type of support.

In this interview David opened up the discussion about management in the Creative Industries, by talking about the freelancers and microbusinesses that make up a significant portion of Creative Launchpad’s clients. These are businesses that operate outside of traditional management structures, and frequently ‘off the radar’ of statistical measures of the Creative Economy. When they become successful, these creative entrepreneurs are faced with the choice of staying small or growing their business - which inevitably involves questions about management, and whether it is appropriate to adopt ‘professional’ management practices from other industries.

The interview was the longest in the series so far, so I’ve divided it into two files. The first part looks at the structural and cultural issues relating to the network of creative enterprises in the West Midlands, including the choice of whether to stay small or grow larger. The second part considers the specific behaviours required of a manager in a growing creative business, and whether ‘coaching’ is a useful term to describe the style of management employed.

Click the ‘AUDIO MP3′ icons below to hear the interview.

 Interview with David Roberts - 1: Download
 Interview with David Roberts - 2: Download

I’ll be presenting at the Direct Marketing Association’s ‘Open Minds’ workshop on 7 September at the London Art House in Islington. This is the third year I’ve presented at ‘Open Minds’ and I’m looking forward to another day of creative ideas and meeting new people.

There’s a strong line-up of agency speakers, including Chris Arnold and Mick Rigby who have featured in my current interview series, plus a client perspective from Honda. There should also be a good mix of agency and client delegates, making for some interesting cross-disiplinary discussions.

I’ll be talking about creative flow and how managers can raise their teams’ creative performance by coaching for creative flow - plus I’ll be giving delegates a chance to try it for themselves.

More details on the Direct Marketing Association website, plus the pdf brochure below.

Open Minds brochure (pdf)

Hope to see you there.

The next interview for my research project on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Chris Hirst, Managing Director of Grey London advertising agency. Grey London is a top-10 advertising agency with 200 staff and over £300 million in business. The agency benefits from being part of an enormous network, employing 9,000 people worldwide.

Chris read Engineering Science at Oxford before beginning his career at SP Lintas. Hired as a Planner, he quickly switched to Account Management, then to BBH where he worked on a range of domestic and global brands including TAG Heuer, Audi, Olivio and Remy Martin.

In 1999 he joined Fallon London where he helped pitch and win the award-winning Skoda account and a place on the BBC roster which he ran until he left, being responsible for Radio 1, Radio 1xtra, BBC3 and BBC Music Live. He was also responsible for the Sony Europe and Citibank Europe business. As Client Services Director Chris restructured and ran the Account Management Department, ultimately helping build one of the strongest departments in London.

Chris joined Grey London in 2003 as Managing Director. In his three years at Grey Chris has overseen a major turn-round in the Agency’s financial and creative fortunes. He has day-to-day responsibility for the Agency’s Client relationships, the implementation of its Business Plan, its people and its processes.

He is an average tennis player, a below average golfer and a fatalistic Newcastle fan. He is married with two small, but very noisy, boys.

In the interview Chris describes ‘managing relationships’ as a key skill in advertising, and talks about the challenge of motivating and co-ordinating staff, including dealing with inevitable conflict. He takes a pragmatic approach to people management, breaking it down into the specific behaviours that have a positive impact on performance and development.

Click the ‘AUDIO MP3′ icon below to hear the interview.

 Interview with Chris Hirst: Download

Liz Strauss sparked a heated debate recently with her post 10 Reasons Creative Folks Drive Us Crazy, with some people (mistakenly) interpreting her as meaning that “creative folks” are somehow different in kind to the rest of us. I made a half-baked comment on one of her follow-ups, and she suggested I turn it into a blog post - so this is my attempt at the slightly-more-baked version, with thanks to Liz for the prompt.

It’s a question that comes up for me quite often in relation to my work, when people ask me why I focus on coaching creative professionals - after all, isn’t everyone creative? So aren’t I being restrictive by working with the “creatives”? To which I answer: Yes of course they are; and No I’m not. To explain why, let’s look at the concept of the “creative person”.

We can probably all recognise the classic image of the artist or creative person - a Romantic, wilful, sensitive, temperamental, tortured soul, a perpetual outsider with a mysterious and misunderstood talent. A bit like a cross between Lord Byron and Vincent Van Gogh.

The trouble is, it’s not true. However appealing the image might be to some artists and the makers of biopics, there are many creative people who don’t fit the stereotype. Even among the poets, some of the most obvious candidates for the mantle of the incurable Romantic, we find quite a few actively resisting the image. W.H. Auden called himself “an incurable Classic”, and his friend and fellow-poet Louis MacNeice wrote: Read the rest of this entry »

The latest interview in for my research on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Russell Davies, who until last month was Global Planning Director for Nike. Before Nike Russell spent 9 years as a planner at the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy.

Campaign magazine called it “a sign of the times” when Russell announced his resignation from Nike via a blog post rather than a press release, and it’s fair to say Russell is embracing the potential of the web in a big way - his latest project, the Open Intelligence Agency as a “global small business” with him and his partners “trying to see if we can be online using regular consumer tools, not fancy corporate stuff”.

Check out Russell’s blog for an eclectic and stimulating read about anything from planning and post-rationalisation to kerning and the grammar of roads. And look at the sidebar for his other web pages, such as the Account Planning School of the Web and eggbaconchipsandbeans - an encyclopedic review of greasy spoon cafes, and a public service if ever there was one. Anyone who remembers my post about creative environments will be interested in his Squidoo lens on creative spaces.

Russell’s pragmatic take on business emotional intelligence is very relevant to my research, so I asked him about the kind of managerial emotional intelligence needed to get the best out of creative teams. The result was a down-to-earth and entertaining interview covering creativity, people, failure, managing and mentoring.

Listen Now:

 Interview with Russell Davies: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

My latest interview for my research project Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Chris Arnold, Executive Creative Director of BLAC (Barradale Leagas Arnold Campbell), a creative integrated marketing and advertising agency that specialises in change marketing.

EDIT (5.7.07): Chris is now Executive Creative Director of the ethical marketing agency FEEL.

Formed from the merger of Ron Leagas’ integrated agency Edge and Chris Arnold’s creative shop Feel, BLAC seeks to challenge conventional thinking both with its clients and internally. Read more about their approach on the Change Marketing blog.

Chris has strong opinions about the state of management in the UK advertising industry. He is also very interesting on the subject of managing risk - always a hot topic in a creative business. As with my other interviewees, I was struck by the way his approach to people management seems to emerge naturally from his creative and business strategies.

Watch this space for more interviews in this series…

In typical bohemian fashion we met for our discussion in a cafe, which means there’s some background noise on the recording - but hopefully that won’t be too much of a distraction from what Chris is saying.

Click the ‘AUDIO MP3′ icon below to hear the interview.

 Chris Arnold interview [40:02m]: Download

The second interview for my research project on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with film producer Ruth Kenley-Letts.

Ruth worked at BBC Drama before becoming an independent producer. Her film credits include Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1994), featuring a manic Richard E. Grant as Kafka with writer’s block, which won an Academy Award and a BAFTA; Strictly Sinatra (2001), for which she was nominated for the Carl Foreman BAFTA award; and Isolation, an atmospheric horror film set in rural Ireland, due for release in February 2007.

Ruth is currently filming The Margate Exodus, which will be a feature film as well as a day of live events in Margate on 30th September 2006. Commissioned by Artangel in association with Creative Partnerships, Arts Council England, Kent and Channel 4 Television, the film is being written and directed by Penny Woolcock and features the artwork of Antony Gormley.

Ruth kindly took a break from the filming to speak to me about the trials and tribulations of being a film producer, responsible for marshalling an army of actors and technical specialists to realise a writer/director’s vision. Anyone who thinks of the Creative Industries as a ‘touchy feely’ kind of business should listen to Ruth’s description of the military discipline of the film set. In many ways her description of the film industry - rigidly hierarchical, with the authoritarian figure of the director at the apex of the pyramid - flies in the face of received business wisdom about fostering creativity. Yet she also makes it clear that a range of people management styles are necessary, particularly in the way the producer and writer/director complement each other - the magic of the cinema has its spark in the magic of collaboration.

I’m recording more interviews for this series and will be posting them on the blog over the next few weeks…

Click the ‘AUDIO MP3′ icon below to hear the interview.

 Interview with Ruth Kenley-Letts [41:19m]: Download