Chris Ritke at 49 Sparks has recorded an interesting interview with Neil Tortorella, one of the founders of Business of Design Online. Neil talks about how the idea evolved for a site dedicated to helping designers master the business of running a design studio, as well as the people involved and plans for the site’s future.

As a guest author on BoDo I’m pleased to hear about the buzz being generated by the site, and Chris and Neil do a great job of outlining what it’s all about. BoDo and the interview are worth checking out even if you’re not a designer - the business skills they cover are relevant to most creative professionals.

Roger von Oech has just posted a terrific interview with David Armano, Creative VP at Digitas and author of the Logic + Emotion blog. That’s right, Roger von Oech the creativity guru is conducting the interview, so you get two creative heavyweights for the price of one!

Lots of you will already be avid readers of Logic + Emotion - if not, you really should have a look, it’s packed with ideas and experiences about creativity, communication and running a creative business. Some of my personal highlights are T-Shaped Creativity, Influence Ripples and Anatomy of the New Creative Mind.

Back to the interview. As a business coach I’m particularly interested in the questions about David’s approach to management. In places his answers read almost like textbook descriptions of the coaching style of management. Now I’m not for a moment suggesting that David learned his approach from a book or a course - it’s obviously an extension of his authentic communication style, and he’s frank about the mistakes he’s made while learning the trade. But - as with the managers in my research project interviews - I’m fascinated by the similarities between coaching and the natural approach of a successful manager in a creative business.

For example, here’s David’s description of his role as a manager:

I view my role as a “persuader.” I can’t force my teams to do great work. I also can’t force clients accept our ideas and executions at face value. I need to convince my teams and clients that pursuing the right kinds of solutions is a worthy effort.

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Interesting piece in Campaign (2nd March) about ‘Adland’s Artists’ - advertising luminaries who create art in their spare time, with pics of their creations and quotes about why they do it.

Some of them, like Graham Fink (Executive Creative Director, M&C Saatchi), see a link between their advertising work and their art:

“Art is massively important. It’s important to stamp a part of your spirit on your work projects.”

While Trevor Beattie (Partner, Beattie McGuinness Bungay) sees the two as worlds apart:

“Art has nothing to do with my work; art is in a box marked ‘art’. Advertising is strictly commerce.”

Here’s the article - you need to sign in but apparently registration is now free. (The Brandrepublic site has just gone all Web 2.0 with a new design and blogs - maybe Russell’s having an influence.)

Personally, I like having my poetry occupy a slightly separate space from my coaching work (it even insisted on having its own blog) and I don’t mention it much during coaching sessions, but I’m sure the two influence each other.

How about you? Do you keep your ‘professional creativity’ and your ‘art’ separate or do you like to mix them up?

Thanks to Steve Moore and his colleagues at Policy Unplugged for organising a terrific ‘unconference’ event at NESTA on Tuesday. Under the heading Uploading Innovation, they assembled an eclectic and engaging mix of authors, entrepreneurs, consultants, software developers, bloggers and other creative types for an afternoon of structured and unstructured debate, with food at the beginning and drink at the end.

We were spoilt for choice when it came to the ’speakers’, who didn’t deliver lectures (putting the un- into unconference) but facilitated discussions around different themes. In the first round I went to Mark Earls‘ session about mass behaviour, based on his new book Herd (previewed here on Wishful Thinking last summer). The session started promisingly, with a group Mexican wave, and entered the realms of the faintly surreal during a discussion about Diana’s funeral when one of the group casually mentioned that he was responsible for organising the Royal funerals… My contribution was a story from my time in the trenches doing psychotherapy for the NHS, which has since appeared on Mark’s blog.

Theoretically all delegates were free to move from one debate to the next, but we got so involved in individual vs group dynamics that the hour went very quickly. Which was great, although it meant I missed the other sessions, including Charles Leadbeater about his new book We Think, Matt Hanson about A Swarm of Angels, a collaborative £1 million film that will be given away to 1 million people, Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin about their Million Penguins wikinovel, and Dan McQuillan from Amnesty talking about the implications of Web 2.0, intellectual property and online privacy for human rights issues.

In the second round I joined Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff for a welcome bout of improvisational silliness, playing at being ’slow-motion samurai’ and throwing and catching imaginary balls made of strange noises (hopefully those bits won’t surface on YouTube).

The structured sessions were just a part of the event though - the main attraction was the opportunity to meet up with so many enthusiasts doing creative things with people, networks and technology - many of which overlap, intersect with or hover in a conceptual space ‘next door’ to what I’m doing with Wishful Thinking.

Special thanks to Deb Khan for introducing me to Steve Moore and indirectly wangling me an invitation to the event. Deb is a very bright and very charming lady who does lots of work around creativity, presentation and communication (see what I mean about the ‘next door’ thing?). I met her recently and we have a lot in common, although obviously I’m furious now that she’s blogged the event before me. Deb introduced me to Inga Clausen, another bright and charming lady who is also ‘next door’ to Deb and I, doing creative facilitation work with Artisan, whose website will be here soon. Russell was in the building and Richard Tyrie is doing something intriguing to do with labour markets, which I didn’t find out about on the day, so this is my reminder to investigate it.

Turning from the ‘people people’ to the ’software’ side of social software, I met Fiddian Warman who’s got some dangerously addictive online creativity toys at Soda, Matt O’Neill, Sam Sethi, Christoph Schmaltz of Headshift, and Raj Anand and Jack Fairhall of Kwiqq .

“It’s a bit like blogging in real life” was a phrase I heard several times during the day (as if blogging weren’t real life…). Watching others typing into their laptops during the sessions reassured me that my ‘blogging addiction’ is probably nothing more than a mild recreational habit…

Thanks for the photo and videos to Lloyd Davis, self-proclaimed social media tart and one-man camera crew. If you want to see/hear/read more about the event, check out the Uploading Innovation blog and the nestauploading tag on Technorati, Flickr and YouTube.