The next interview for my research project on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries was with Chris Grant, a consultant and founder of 14A Conversations. Chris has 25 years’ experience of consulting in a wide range of industries, including the Creative Industries sector.

At 14A Conversations Chris and his colleague Ann Lyon work with clients ranging from Government Departments to Community Groups; from PR Consultancies to Global TV Channels. Chris describes his trade as “a builder of bridges” and aspires to be “an alchemist”.

Because of his wide experience, Chris was a good person to ask whether or not the ‘people management’ challenges faced by creative businesses are essentially any different to other industries. Authenticity is a key theme of this interview, as Chris emphasises the importance of managers’ intentions as well as their behavioural skills, whatever the style of management they employ.

Thanks for staying with the blog during the recent hiatus in posting, while I’ve been hard at work on the research project report.

This interview takes us to almost half-way through the series - there will be plenty more posted over the next few weeks, plus I’m looking forward to having more time for writing posts.

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

 Interview with Chris Grant: Download

Greg Orme is the Chief Executive of the Centre for Creative Business, a joint venture between Europe’s highest-ranked business school, London Business School and Europe’s largest creative university, University of the Arts London. The Centre for Creative Business is Europe’s pre-eminent organisation helping creative industry management teams to grow more profitable businesses through management courses, networking, events, conferences, research and media.

Greg is a regular commentator and writer in national media on leadership and strategy. His media and journalistic background, together with an MBA from London Business School, enables him to be creative and analytical in his approach to business. In 2002, he co-founded a boutique strategy consultancy, 4future, which works at board level with FTSE 100 companies to maximise the potential of their business. Prior to completing an MBA at London Business School, Greg spent ten years in the media as a journalist and editor.

Greg’s position in an organisation that is a key player in the development of the UK Creative Industries enables him to give a good overview of the state of people management across the sector. He also suggests that some creative managers may be better coaches than they realise.

The book Greg refers to is Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce by Richard E. Caves, (Harvard University Press, 2000). We also refer to Greg’s recent article, Special, Moi?, published in the June edition of PACT magazine (the trade body for the screen based creative industries).

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

 Interview with Greg Orme: Download

Here’s the latest interview for my research project on Perceptions of Coaching in the UK Creative Industries. Neil Youngson is Technical Director of Cabinet UK Ltd, a small London-based creative digital agency providing clients with comprehensive interactive solutions. Projects are varied, examples being on-line stores for the V&A Museum and Hidden Art, a global brand extranet for Orange, and a photo kiosk solution for cruise ships.

In addition to bespoke solutions Cabinet has created a suite of hosted software applications called PictureCabinet, which is a system for managing image collections and generating revenues through on-line image licensing and print sales. PictureCabinet is used by a number of cultural institutions such as the V&A Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Museum of London, the National Theatre, and the National Museum of Photography Film and Television. Not all the hosted collections are from such traditional institutions though, the expanding list of clients includes Hed Kandi, Poker Images, Buyagift, and Chelsea Blues in black and white - a collection Neil disapproves of being an Arsenal fan! View some of these projects at Memory Prints.

Cabinet is a small company employing 12 staff from 6 different countries. The role of the directors is very much hands-on in terms of running projects, dealing with clients, and providing creative and technical input.

Neil describes the experience of working as part of a small team of highly-skilled workers, in which the culture of collaboration and mutual learning enables the directors to manage with a light touch.

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

 Interview with Neil Youngson: Download

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

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

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.

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 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

Thanks to Mark White at Better Business Blogging for his post about my research project. It’s nice to see that he’s picked up on what I’m trying to do with the project in terms of transparency and interactivity.

With all research, there’s a danger of ‘bias blindness’ and missing something important in the methodology or analysis. So I’m publishing my source material so that readers (and listeners) can form their own opinions about the issues.

Mark’s blog is well worth checking out - lots of useful advice for anyone writing a business blog. It’s also refreshing to see someone taking a UK perspective on blogging - both highlighting the good UK blogs that are already being written, and encouraging the vast majority of UK businesses who don’t have a blog to take the plunge. If you’re running a small business, start with his post on Why Small Businesses Should Start a Business Blog.