Last week I travelled to Brighton to talk to David Amor, Creative Director at computer games developer Relentless Software, for the latest interview for my research on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries.

In an industry where, according to Gamesindustry.biz, “insane crunch times and endless overtime hours … are considered to be a standard part of working in the development sector”, David and his business partner Andrew Eades are remarkable for having had “the crazy idea of a development studio that works 9 to 5 with no overtime”. Not only that, they strictly limit internet and e-mail access during working hours, and recreational games are banned from the office. Their approach has elicited protests about such ‘draconian’ measures, mixed with incredulity when they explain that in 3 years of production they have never missed a deadline or asked their staff to work evenings or weekends.

David and Andrew founded Relentless Software in 2003 to make Social Games on traditional games consoles such as PlayStation2. Their first product, DJ: Decks & FX, was published by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) in September 2004 to critical acclaim and was subsequently nominated for a BAFTA. DJ: Decks & FX is a music-mixing product that gives users a virtual DJ rig and a set of over 100 genuine dance tracks to play. It allows the user to perform live at parties as well as record their perfect mix for later sharing and playback.

In 2004 and 2005, Relentless worked on SCEE’s London Studios titles, EyeToy: Groove, EyeToy: Kinetic and SingStar. PopworldEyeToy and SingStar are SCEE’s internally developed social games that have collectively sold tens of millions of units. SCEE are world-leaders in developing and publishing this genre of products and Relentless is pleased to work closely with SCEE in this increasingly important market segment.

In October 2005, Relentless Software and SCEE released Buzz!: The Music Quiz, a music based quiz game set in a TV studio that includes four bespoke buzzer peripherals. Buzz!: The Big Quiz was released in March 2006 and Relentless continue to develop new Buzz! games for PlayStation platforms including Buzz!: The Schools Quiz and Buzz! The Mega Quiz. The Buzz! franchise has sold 4M units in its first year and continues to be an important brand in the Sony catalogue.

Relentless was honoured with Best New Intellectual Property and Best Innovation in conjunction with SCEE at the 2006 Develop Industry Excellence Awards. Later in 2006 it went on to win a BAFTA for Best Social Game. Relentless was also named 3rd highest UK independent game developer in the recently published Develop 100 which lists the top 100 developers by revenue generated in the UK. At a global ranking of 43 with a single Buzz! product, above Microsoft and Sega, this demonstrates the potential of social games and the ability of Relentless to achieve success in this area.

Relentless continues to make games that everybody can play and has developed considerable expertise in the new Social Games genre that allows people to enjoy video games without having the gamer expertise required by other products.

Talking to David, I was struck by his emphasis on the hard business value of ensuring his staff have a good balance of focused work and time away from the office. In his view this is not just a case of being ‘nice’ to people, but of providing the optimum conditions for efficient work and reducing some of the uncertainty inherent in creative production.

Relentless are currently hiring - e-mail David if you think his approach to making games could be for you.

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

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I’m very pleased that Mark Earls is the next interviewee in this series on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries, as his book Welcome to the Creative Age was one of the inspirations behind the project - particularly his concept of the “accelerator manager”, whose job is to “help my people get a better job next time”.

Mark Earls is one of the leading thinkers about brands, marketing and consumer behaviour. He has been described variously as “one of the Advertising scene’s foremost contrarians” and “the Christopher Hitchens of advertising and marketing”. But mostly he just refuses to accept received wisdom and is determined to make us all think a bit harder to get better results.

Mark has been an account planner for most of his working life. He has held senior positions in some of the largest and most influential communications companies in the world - his last job was as chair of Ogilvy’s Global Planning Council, prior to which he was Planning Director at the revolutionary St. Luke’s Communications. He was Vice Chair of the The Account Planning Group and has judged a number of awards competitions in the UK and abroad for communications and marketing effectiveness and innovation and even collaboration between arts and business.

His written work has regularly won awards from his peers and is considered by many to be amongst the most influential being written today. His first book, Welcome to the Creative Age, was widely read and discussed and has been translated into several languages. Dominic Mills of Campaign Magazine called it, “the book that Naomi Klein should have written”.

His latest book, Herd: how to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature challenges our Western received wisdom about mass behaviour and develops an alternative model rooted in our ‘Herd’ nature and has already received strong endorsement from other leading practitioners and theorists both in the US and the UK. The story continues on Mark’s blog, a welcome recent addition to the conversation.

Mark is in much demand as conference speaker around the world – in recent years he has spoken in the UK, USA, Argentina, France, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Spain. He lives in North London and is currently preparing his next book and doing the odd bit of consulting for interesting companies and people.

The video is of “the greatest try ever scored”, by the Barbarians v the All Blacks in 1973. Mark refers to it in the interview as an example of both good coaching and the limits of the coach’s influence, pacing on the touchline while the players are out on the pitch.

Mark’s interview is a great way to draw the research project to a close for 2006. Early in 2007 I’ll publish the research report here as a free download. Many thanks to Mark and all my other interviewees for being so generous with their time and expertise.

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

 Interview with Mark Earls: Download

This interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Matt Taylor, Director and Producer at Fat Beehive and Fat Beehive Films.

Fat Beehive is a small web developer based in the heart of London’s New Media cluster around Hoxton Square. Established in 1997, it has built up a strong reputation for creating accessible and engaging websites for charity, NGO, Faitrade and sustainability organisations. Its client list includes The Sustainable Development Commission, Crisis, GamCare, Global Witness, Compass Network, People Tree and Union Chapel.

Matt is one of the founding directors of Fat Beehive - there are now seven members of theteam including fellow director Tom Moreton. They have recently launched Fat Beehive Films, taking advantage of their film-making skills and the growth of the corporate film marketing, driven by the expanding broadband network. As well as the actual filming and editing, Fat Beehive Films offer video hosting and live webcasting services. You can see a selection of their films on their website.

I spoke to Matt in the relaxed surroundings of a cafe on Hoxton Square, where he described the importance of social skills and peer learning in a small new media agency. He also offered some amusing observations about the way management terms such as ‘coaching’ are regarded in the Fat Beehive office!

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 Interview with Matt Taylor: Download

This interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Terry Childs, who has the dual roles of Managing Director and Creative Director at Silver Chair.

Founded in 1998 Silver Chair has developed into an agency with international experience in creativity and media, working on brands such as BMW, Barclays, Kellogg’s, Sears, BT, Norwich Union, HSBC and Land Rover. 2006 saw the agency expand with the launch of Silver Chair Digital.

Terry is the Managing Director and Creative Director at Silver Chair and has spent over 15 years in the marketing communications industry. During this time he has worked for both agencies and clients including Ogilvy & Mather, WWAV, Leo Burnett, BT, Norwich Union, Safeway, BMW and has recently developed campaigns for tic tac, Yamaha and the Department For Education and Skills.

Terry gave an entertaining account of the challenges involved in managing creative professionals. He also described Silver Chair’s internal mentoring programme, and highlighted the importance of using appropriate terminology when ’selling’ a development initiative to a creative team.

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

 Interview with Terry Childs: Download

This interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Jill Fear, Continuous Professional Development (CPD) Manager for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA).

The IPA is the industry body and professional institute for leading advertising, media and marketing communications agencies in the UK. Collectively, IPA members handle over 80% of media spend (worth £13 billion in 2004) and a large proportion of the £43 billion spent on marketing in the UK each year.

The role of the IPA’s 55-strong staff is to serve, promote and anticipate the collective interests of IPA members; and in particular to define, develop and help maintain the highest possible standards of professional practice within the business. The IPA’s CPD in Advertising Standard is the industry’s training and people development standard, launched in 1999. Commitment to achieving the standard is now mandatory for IPA membership.

Jill Fear spent eight years at full service agencies (DMB&B and J Walter Thompson) before moving into the design industry as Group Marketing Director of Coley Porter Bell and Client Services Director of Springpoint.

In 2003 Jill joined returned to the advertising industry when she joined the Professional Development Department at the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising). There she manages the CPD (Continuous Professional Development) Accreditation Standard.

Jill’s experience of agency life as well as her current developmental role enabled her to give a well-rounded overview of the issues involved in managing and developing people in the advertising industry. She argues passionately for greater recognition of the quality of informal development practices in advertising agencies, as well as the need to balance these with more formal programmes. Towards the end of the interview she gives some excellent examples of informal coaching by managers going about their day-to-day work.

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 Interview with Jill Fear: Download

This interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Sian Prime, Training and Development Manager for the NESTA Creative Pioneer Programme. Through this programme, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) provides funding, training and mentoring for early stage creative entrepreneurs, helping them turn their ideas into viable businesses.

Sian gave a fascinating account of the challenges facing creative entrepreneurs, particularly those moving from a hands-on creative role into a leadership position. She challenged the stereotypical dichotomy between creativity and commerce by emphasizing the potential of creative skills to translate into business success. She also highlighted the pitfalls trainers and coaches can encounter when introducing ‘management’ concepts to creative entrepreneurs - and gave some memorable examples of how she overcomes these problems and engages delegates on the Creative Pioneer Programme.

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

 Interview with Sian Prime: Download

According to Patrick Burgoyne it can - he’s just written a provocative post on the Creative Review blog, claiming that by sitting ‘hunched over their Macs, headphones on, plugged into their own private world’ designers are killing conversation in the studio - and when the conversation dies, so does creativity:

Design studios used to be full of banter – work-related or otherwise. Now all you can hear is the tssk, tssk of a dozen headphones.

Sure, you can still hold meetings and discuss the work, but who ever had a great idea at a “brainstorming” session? There’s something about the appearance of a flipchart that just sucks the life out of a room.

Great ideas come about either when you are busy doing something else – walking, taking a shower – or through talking to another human being.

If you’ve listened to any of the podcasts of my research interviews about managing creative teams, you won’t be surprised to hear I think he’s got a point. Every single manager, director, consultant and development professional I’ve interviewed has said that conversation and interpersonal interaction are essential to the creative process. One of the themes that has come out of the research for me is the idea of conversation as a creative meta-medium, where new connections and ideas emerge that would never have occurred to individuals working in isolation (or with their headphones on).

So should design studios ban iPods? That might be a bit extreme, but just as some companies have regular ‘no e-mail’ days, maybe there’s a case for ‘no-iPod’ days, or a return to the communal office sound system.

What could be better for fuelling the creative tension on a Monday morning than a good old-fashioned squabble over who gets to put their tunes on the stereo?

The next interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Ben Demiri, Brand Manager and International Sales and Marketing Manager at SIX Showroom.

SIX Showroom is the collective behind Swear and b store (own brands) and 5 worldwide footwear licenses (Eley Kishimoto, Bernhard Willhelm, Peter Jensen for b store, Henrik Vibskov and Opening Ceremony).

Working with mainly UK designers and emerging design talent, supporting them with distribution and a unique production infrastructure, SIX is the roof of an international operation encompassing London’s b Store which is the international flagship for its line of ‘b’ footwear (formerly Buddhahood), Swear in London’s Carnaby Street, and a synergetic marketing and branding operation.

SIX specialises in the design, development, production and wholesale of fashion footwear collections. It operates a production-sourcing agency in Portugal and in Hong Kong, and has more than 20 agencies worldwide covering all continents, including Scandinavia, France, UK, USA, Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, South east Asia, Italy and Spain.

SIX’s first venture into premium footwear design and production happened with the internationally acclaimed brand Swear founded in 1994, opening its flagship in London in 1996. Since then, the company has evolved, launching Buddhahood in 2001.

SIX has developed close ties with many designers resulting in collaborations to launch footwear for Eley Kishimoto, DIE for Swear, Peter Jensen for b, Judy Blame for b, Bernhard Willhelm and in the recent past, Zakee Shariff, YMC, Burro and PPQ.

SIX now handles all product development, international sales and distributions of the following footwear lines: Bernhard Willhelm, Eley Kishimoto, Swear, b store, Peter Jensen for b store and the last additions to our family, the new Spring Summer 2007 footwear collections for Opening Ceremony and Henrik Vibskov. Read the rest of this entry »

 Interview with Ben Demiri: Download

The next interview for my research into Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Richard Scott, founding Director of Surface Architects. Surface was formed by Richard in 1996, in collaboration with philosopher Jeremy Weate and architect Kristen Whittle. Their first project ‘Soft-space’ won first prize in the Shinkenchiku-Sha Residential Design Award in Japan and ‘Aquaphilia’ was one of the ‘Ideal Rooms’ exhibited at the RIBA in 1997. At this time Richard worked for Will Alsop and taught History & Theory at the Bartlett and the AA with Jeremy Weate.

From 1999, Richard concentrated on Surface, winning a competition for the headquarters for new media company Razorfish. Surface’s next project was to be their largest to date. The £6M South Eastern European University in Macedonia was designed and constructed in 10 months, using pre-fabrication.

Andy MacFee, who was the project architect for Will Alsop’s Peckham Library, joined Surface in 2001 as director. Richard and Andy’s work together aims at the emergence or ‘surfacing’ of new experimental possibilities, promoting an architecture of rich experience.

Surface were the highest placed British practice (third) in the Building Design/Corus Young Architect of the Year Award 2004 and were third again in 2005. Significant built projects for Queen Mary, University of London have brought the practice critical recognition. Read the rest of this entry »

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On my trip to Birmingham to research Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries I spoke to Antonio Gould and Sara Harris.

Antonio is an independent consultant and producer working across media. After ten years as a new media producer his work now centres around the creative industries, the future of digital content and the application of creativity and technology to education. He was also a co-founder with Stef Lewandowski of the interactive design agency 3form. His current projects include producing a six month series of podcasted radio shows for Channel 4 IdeasFactory, exploring the potential of new media for creative people, and leading the development of a tool called the Lightbox which will be used in the facilitation of film workshops. His blog is at http://antoniogould.com/

Sara is Director of Media Content Lab, Media Skills, Notion Studio and Screen Media Lab, Deputy Course Director: MA Media Production and Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at UCE. As head of Externally Funded Projects within the Department of Media & Communication at UCE, she leads a team of 20 staff engaging with businesses from the creative industries in a number of ways. Its latest venture is Notion Studio, which offers expertise in animation and digital video with aim of working with new talent to develop projects which use animation techniques as alternative media, looking at different production processes and exploring its uses in teaching and learning. Sara is a Knowledge Transfer Fellow and has recently developed a Master’s course in Media Enterprise.

Their combined range of practical and academic experience made for a lively discussion about managing people in creative businesses. Look out for more interview podcasts over the next few weeks.

 Interview with Antonio Gould and Sara Harris: Download