Photo by J R Guillaumin

How would you like to work 15-20 hours unpaid overtime a week?

What about doing it for weeks on end because of unrealistic schedules?

How about a 65% chance of damaging your health from the stress of overtime?

And what if someone told you these were just occupational hazards, to be expected if you choose a career in the creative industries?

Earlier this year, Develop magazine conducted Quality of Life survey of 350 employees in the games industry. The results were published in the May 2009 edition of Develop, which you can download here.

The stats make pretty damning reading:

• 98% of respondents are not paid for the overtime they work
• 85% have to work ‘crunch’ – periods of intensive overtime before deadlines
• 60% have to work over 10 hours overtime a week during crunch — some as many as 25 to 30 hours per week
• 60% feel that they work too much
• 65% say that working crunch has impacted their health

As well as the statistics, the magazine published some very telling quotations from the anonymous respondents.

I am currently looking to leave the games industry, where I have worked as a programmer for seven years. The excessive overtime and minimal recognition is damaging my health, my sanity and my marriage.

Both myself and my friends have been forced to work a ridiculous amount of overtime, causing depression and bad physical health from lack of exercise and poor diet.

It’s no secret that prolonged workplace stress can lead to employee burnout, accompanied by symptoms of anxiety, depression, addictive behaviour, relationship problems and illness. Not to mention days off, sick leave, resignations, low morale and lost productivity.

Yet several of the survey respondents suggested that ‘crunch’ is normal and inevitable, not just in computer gaming, but in any creative industry:

Crunch seems to just be accepted as ‘the norm in creative industries’ — this attitude will only prolong the myth that it aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

Until we have fundamental changes throughout the industry … the only way to make quality games is to crunch. I don’t like it, but fundamentally I’m in the entertainment business, and a bit of pain is the norm in these.

Everyone is always aware why crunch is needed. No one wants to do it by choice, but in a milestone-oriented environment this is inevitable. It’s no different to film and TV, where creativity is integral to the product and boundaries are pushed. Especially now when we have a recession and so many small teams are on the brink of collapse.

The computer games industry does have a particularly bad reputation for overworking people (see: EA Spouse). It even has a special word for it — ‘crunch’ — which sounds as bad as it must feel. But it’s far from the only creative industry in which people are expected to work absurdly long hours to meet deadlines, often for little or no overtime pay or other compensation.

What’s going on here? Are crunch and burnout inevitable in the creative industries — or can anything be done to avoid them?

Should Creative Companies Do More to Protect Employees from Burnout?

Many of the respondents to the Develop survey were highly critical of studio management.

Specific accusations included poor planning and scheduling and unrealistic expectations:

• 65% disagreed that “projects are well-scheduled”
• 80% agreed that “crunch is caused by unreasonable or unrealistic expectations”
• 75% disagreed that “the crunch culture of games development is necessary to produce good games”

I would suggest another two management factors that contribute to burnout:

Poor people management skills. As we saw in my e-book on Motivating Creative People, it’s frighteningly easy to demotivate people through clumsy people management skills. Conversely, it’s possible to maintain morale under pressure (within reason) if managers are empathetic and supportive of their teams.

A cavalier attitude to competition. In some industries, where talent is plentiful and competition for jobs is fierce, managers sometimes adopt the attitude ‘Consider yourself lucky to be working here – there are plenty of people willing to fill your shoes if you don’t like it’. Which may be true on the face of it – but it’s also a brilliant strategy for demotivating people and making the least of their talent.

Reading through the Develop survey, it would be easy to paint the managers of games studios as the villains. But it’s only fair to remember that they are often under enormous pressure from publishers, especially regarding scheduling and deadlines.

And the survey results weren’t all negative. Respondents were fairly evenly split on whether they are “adequately compensated” for their work, and whether their companies have “a good attitude to Human Resources and keeping [their] staff happy”.

There were also signs of lessons learned by some games studio managers:

I am a manager and partly responsible for a hideous release and crunch period. I have personally made it my mission to do it better, and have spent the last two months studying different project management methodologies, practices and frameworks non-stop. My first child is due in five weeks: I have to do this better, I have no choice.

Are Creative Workers Partially Responsible for Burnout?

Two of the quoted respondents felt employees should take some of the responsibility for their predicament:

It’s a talented employee’s responsibility to leave an over-crunched studio. Let the good studios get the good employees, and let the poorly managed studios be staffed with the untalented.

The rank and file employees are also partially accountable on the crunch culture, because we agreed on the task and schedules and did not deliver it on time. It’s not only management’s fault that crunch happens.

While I’m not sure how much choice employees really have when they ‘agree’ to an unrealistic schedule, it’s worth considering how far employees contribute to their own burnout — and what they can do about it.

A few months ago I published an article on Lateral Action called Burnout: the Dark Side of Creativity, in which I looked at the elements of the creative process and the creative personality that make artists and other creative professionals particularly susceptible to burnout:

• Obsession — As we saw in The Joy of Work, creative professionals love what they do. Which is great, as long as we don’t overdo it and become obsessive, working more hours but becoming less productive.
• Perfectionism — Of course you need to be a perfectionist to do great work. But there’s a difference between high standards and nit-picky dissatisfaction and frustration. Do you know where to draw the line?
• Hypersensitivity — We put so much of ourselves into our work that any feedback can feel like personal criticism. Unless we learn to ‘let go’ and look at things more objectively, this can get very stressful for everyone involved.
• Control freakery — As with perfectionism, you probably won’t achieve much creatively without being a bit of a control freak. But you can’t control everything, particularly in a team situation – trying to do so will only make your life more difficult.
• The weight of expectation — High standards breed high expectations. No problem with that – as long as you remember that (a) you are only human, and (b) risk and failure are inevitable in any creative endeavour. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with expectation, maybe it’s time to go easy on yourself.

I’m not suggesting workers only have themselves to blame for burnout. But if you’re a creative worker feeling under pressure, have an honest look through the list and ask yourself whether any of them apply to you.

If so, maybe it’s time to ease up a bit and find some time for rest and relaxation. And talk to someone you trust about your situation. Workplace stress and burnout are sadly common experiences, and there are plenty of options for getting help if you need it – often the biggest step is acknowledging that you need it.

What’s the Cost of Burnout to Creative Companies?

Crunch is designed to boost productivity and meet deadlines – but ironically it can have the opposite effect:

this attitude will only prolong the myth that [crunch] aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

As we saw in the Motivation E-book, crucifying morale = crucifying creativity and productivity.

Some people argue that ‘deadline magic’ can have a galvanising effect on a creative team, giving them an adrenaline rush of energy and raising performance. There’s some truth in this argument, when applied to short bursts of energy, such as a musical concert, theatre play, sales pitch or other performance situation. This is because our ‘fight our flight’ stress response has evolved to help us reach peak performance instantly, to deal with immediate threats such as the proverbial sabre-toothed tiger.

But the ‘fight or flight’ response did not evolve to help us deal with extended periods of stress, such as spending weeks working unpaid overtime for a demanding and unappreciative boss. In this situation, stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol start to damage the brain, blood vessels and other parts of the body, eventually causing a range of mental, emotional and physical symptoms.

For example:

Stress and crunch have caused me to take several months off work in order to recover. There was no help from the company in question. I’ll never let it happen again, and I won’t let any person that working under me go through it, either. Utterly unproductive.

The human cost of a story like this is bad enough. But if you’re tempted to play the hard-nosed businessperson, stop and think about the cost – in time, money, productivity and morale – to a company of having an employee signed off for several months with stress and/or illness. And make sure you factor in the effect on the entire team, not just this individual.

What Are the Alternatives to Crunch and Burnout?

So can anything be done to eliminate crunch and burnout in creative companies, or should we just grit our teeth and get on with it?

Here are some of the options that emerged from the Develop survey, plus one suggestion of my own.

Fair Rewards for Overtime

Develop Editor Michael French highlighted two very different approaches to the problem of crunch:

Epic Games (which rewards staff generously for crunch, by all accounts) and Relentless (which claims to have never worked overtime) might appear to be on opposite ends of the spectrum given that one is pro and the other anti crunch.

Michael Capps, President of Epic Games, caused outrage in some quarters when he said the company expects people to work 60 hour weeks. But Develop Develop Deputy Editor Ed Fear points out in Capp’s defence that “while Epic does expect staff to work longer hours, it makes that expectation clear from the outset and rewards its staff with bonuses that exceed their base salary”.

Banning Overtime

Long-time Wishful Thinking readers may recall my interview with David Amor, Executive Director of Relentless Software, in which he described his company’s radical approach to management: employees have to clock in at 9 and work until 5, but are not allowed to work overtime! The Relentless website even proudly displays a counter showing the number of days/hours/minutes/seconds the company has been working without crunch.

Earlier this week I contacted David to tell him I was writing about burnout, and asked him to answer the question “Are crunch and burnout necessary evils in computer games development, or are there alternatives?’. Here’s his response:

I think that a lot of creative projects are hard to schedule and it’s easy for things to overrun, but that fact is often used as an excuse for poor scheduling and lack of planning. Worse than this are schedules that actually plan for weekend work; that suggests that the project scope could never be achieved within the budget.

Crunch and burnout are both avoidable with enough planning and contingency, but there’s a degree of tolerance and expectancy within the industry that seems to make them par for the course.

(David Amor, Executive Director, Relentless Software)

Tighter Regulation

In the Develop survey, 75% of respondents felt that “trade body organisations have a duty to monitor and restrict over-working of employees”. One of the respondents suggested that “we need an actual union for developers, not just something for companies to join”.

Better People Management Skills

With my background in stress management and managing creative performance, I naturally see a link between people management skills (often neglected in creative companies) and stress and performance levels. When the pressure’s on, a really good manager can act as a ‘buffer’ against external demands, maintaining rapport and morale, and supporting team members during the period of stress.

If you or your fellow managers are looking for some tips on how to get the best out of people in difficult circumstances, feel free to download my e-books How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself) and Creative Management for Creative Teams. Both are licensed for free noncommercial distribution, so you’re welcome to forward them to anyone who may find them useful.

What Do You Think?

Should we accept overwork and burnout as occupational hazards of working in a creative business?

Should creative industries companies be doing more to protect employees from burnout?

Is intensive overtime necessary to meet deadlines — or does it impair productivity?

Regular readers of Wishful Thinking will know that I hold the work of Roger von Oech in high esteem. Roger was one of the original sparks behind the creative revolution in business; his books and card decks, and more recently his blog and Ball of Whacks, have brought inspiration to thousands of people worldwide.

Roger’s classic A Whack on the Side of the Head is always the first book on creative thinking I recommend to clients. So when he e-mailed me a few weeks ago to let me know he had prepared a revised 25th Anniversary Edition of A Whack on the Side of the Head, I couldn’t resist asking him for an interview. Roger kindly agreed – you can read his answers to my questions below.

Regarding the book itself – if you haven’t yet read Whack, this is definitely one you should have on your creative bookshelf. It’s a thoroughly good read – funny, challenging, useful, unsettling and inspiring. If you already own a copy, then you’ll be pleased to know the new edition is still recognisably the same book, with all the old favourites still in place – but with new ideas, techniques and ‘Whacks’ added for good measure. My experience of reading the new edition was an enjoyable combination of familiarity and surprise. I was also delighted to see that I make a cameo appearance in the book – in a footnote on p.115 (I won’t spoil the surprise by telling you what it’s about).

1. A Whack on the Side of the Head is a classic. Why is that?

Roger von Oech: Whack is about the ten “Mental Locks” that prevent most people from being more creative. These locks include such beliefs as: “There’s one right answer,” “To err is wrong,” “Don’t be foolish,” Avoid Ambiguity,” and “That’s not my area.” These ideas make sense for a lot of what we do, but when we’re trying to be creative they can get in the way. Most people have an intuitive understanding of these ideas, and so it’s easy for them to think about them.

Whack has a lot of unusual and off-beat stories and anecdotes. It’s got weird drawings that capture our imagination. Also, Whack is an accessible and interactive book. People seem to like that. There are a number of exercises in it. I think that we improve our ability to be creative by using our creativity, not by being lectured at. Whack is also fun. I guess people respond to all of these things.

2. Why change a classic book?

I’ve always considered Whack to be a living book, that is, one I could update and revise over time. This 25th Anniversary Edition is actually the fourth edition I’ve done since it first came out in 1983. The last previous edition, however, was in 1998, and there were a number of insights, exercises, and stories I wanted to add and I’ve gone ahead and done so. I hope that it reaches a new generation of creative people!

In addition, my last book was Expect the Unexpected, which came out in 2001. This was a true labor of love and dealt with the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus whom I consider to be the “world’s first creativity teacher.” This book was well-reviewed but unfortunately it was published a few days before September 11, 2001 and thus, got lost in the strangeness of the post 9/11 period. (What a cosmic irony considering this book’s title!) As a consequence, I’ve taken some of my favorite Heraclitus insights and incorporated them in the new Whack. I’m very happy with the results.

3. How are you different from twenty-five years ago?


At age 60 (me today), I’d like to believe that I have a little more perspective than I did when I was 35. In the intervening years, I’ve (helped) raise a family, had a successful business, and have had a few more life experiences. I think all of that enters into my tone. But, I’ve tried to keep it fun. For example, I’ve added a “Breaktime” chapter between chapters five and six. This allows the reader to “Pause for A Bit,” which is always a good thing.

4. Whack was one of the catalysts of a creative revolution in business. These days the Creative Economy and Creative Industries are all the rage, and the most admired companies are often those that excel at creativity and innovation. Was this what you had in mind?

I think that the “most admired companies” of just about any age have excelled at creativity and innovation. What’s changed though is that today there’s an expectation that a higher percentage of a company’s employees should be creative than was the case twenty-five or thirty years ago. It’s gone from maybe 3% up to 25%. This is a very good thing.

When I started doing “creativity consulting” in 1977, there were probably only four or five other people I was aware of who were doing it. It was a difficult sell to companies. Now, there are thousands (if not more) creative consultants, and business certainly seems receptive to the idea of innovation. I’d like to think that my seminars, workshops, books, and other products have played a small role in this changing creative landscape.

5. A while ago you wrote a funny post in the voice of your books, who complained that you were neglecting them in favour of blogging. How’s your relationship with your books these days? Did your experience of blogging change the way you approached re-writing Whack?

I have a “love-hate” relationship with blogging and some of the other social media (such as Twitter). I felt that blogging was a big help during the 8 months I was re-doing the new “Whack.” I could test out my ideas by writing posts about them. This helped me think them through. It also allowed me to meet new people from around the world (you, for example!).

On the other hand, social media take time. For example, I have a good blogger friend who is well respected in the design and marketing communities because of his social media involvement. But the downside is that he has read only one novel in the past year.

Perhaps I’m old school, but I believe that “reading paper” – as opposed to “reading screen” – is still a worthwhile activity.

6. In an interview for the launch of the new edition of Whack you say that you’ve ‘come to appreciate more the value and importance of constraints and limits in stimulating the creative process’. What prompted this appreciation?

Probably working with companies with limited budgets – as opposed to those who could just throw lots of money and resources at a problem. I think it’s better to have a policy to “out-think” the competition than to “outspend” them.

I’ve also had this experience with my own entrepreneurial activities. This has been true whether I’ve been producing conferences or creating new products that are manufactured in China. When I have a tight constraint, it forces to think more deeply about the problem and look for alternatives.

7. Can you give me a specific example in one of your products?
The “Creative Whack Pack” card deck is a good one (the same applies to the “Innovative Whack Pack” as well). Each card in the deck contains a creativity strategy, an illustration, a story that exemplifies that strategy, and finally a question for the reader to apply the strategy to a problem.

When I’m writing a book, I can take multiple paragraphs to develop and expound on a particular point. But when I was writing copy for a card’s story, and there was only room for eight or nine lines (that’s the constraint), I had to boil my thoughts down to just the basic points. The constraint forced me cut through the story’s clutter to get to the essentials. As a result, I came to understand the basic idea in a fresh way. Of course, if you cut too much, you lose the point of the story, so you have to be aware of that extreme as well. But I’ve found that adding a constraint makes me think.

8. Whack has been rightly praised as an inspiring book. I also find it quite disturbing – there’s something deeply unsettling about the way it undermines all our assumptions and replaces them with ambiguity and paradox. A bit like meeting the Sphinx. George Willet’s illustrations capture that spirit perfectly – charming, playful and slightly macabre. Do you recognise this disturbing quality in Whack, or is it just me?

I agree with you. The creative process can be incredibly messy. It’s a place where there’s no “one right answer,” and paradox and ambiguity prevail. I think one has to appreciate this when he or she enters into their own creative place. Once you’ve done it, it’s a lot easier to get your bearings.

9. Do you think the challenges facing creative people have changed significantly over the past 25 years, or are they fundamentally the same?

I guess the glib answer would be, “Oh, these are the most challenging of times.” But I think it’s always challenging. Creative people of every era have had to deal with their own personal demons, and also deal with negative people, and constraints of all types (time, money, resources). And no matter who you are, you still have to be able to sell your ideas to other people. So, a lot of stuff hasn’t changed. The main limits are usually in our own heads. And that’s why a “good whack” can be beneficial to your thinking!

10. If you had to reduce the advice in the book to a single ‘Whack’ which one would you pick – and why?

I guess if I had a motto or a mantra, it would be: “Look for the Second Right Answer.” This has been my guiding principle for over thirty years.

I find that looking for the second right answer is an incredibly easy way to open my mind. For example, When I’m looking for information, this mantra tells me to go beyond the right answers that have worked in the past and look for others. When I’m trying to be creative, it playfully advises me to put my ideas in unusual contexts to give them new meanings.

When I’m evaluating concepts, it implores me not to get stuck in the negative, and not to fall in love with one particular approach. And, when I’m implementing ideas, it reminds me that if one idea doesn’t work, a different one just might, and to act accordingly.

Thanks for your interest, and best wishes to your readers.

Thank you Roger!

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If you enjoyed the interview, there’s plenty more inspiration on Roger’s blog and of course in the 25th Anniversary A Whack on the Side of the Head.

UK readers – get your copy here.

If you are responsible for getting the best out of a team of creative professionals, my new e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams is for you. Feel free to download and share it (here are the terms of the Creative Commons licence).

The e-book is a compilation and revision of my blog series on business coaching.

Introduction to the E-book – Why Coaching?

As a creative director, business owner or manager of a creative team, the chances are you already coach your people to an extent – and you may be better at it than you realise. But there’s also a fair chance that you have received little support in developing your people management skills.

In the creative industries, so much attention is lavished on creative ‘talent’ and the products of creativity that vital aspects of the creative process are often overlooked. Such as the massive influence (positive and negative) managers and creative directors have on the creativity of their teams. While many individual managers are doing an excellent job of managing and developing their teams, there is little wider recognition of people management in the creative sector.

It’s hard to develop a skill that goes unrecognised. And you don’t need me to tell you that managing temperamental creatives can be one of the most challenging jobs going.

So how do you meet the challenge? I’m willing to bet that you find most books on management a bit of a turn-off. You’ve probably left or avoided the corporate world because it’s not an environment you feel comfortable with. I know how you feel. As a poet who moved from consulting for large organisations to specialising n the creative sector, I can clearly remember the day I walked into an ad agency and instantly felt at home. Call me superficial, but given the choice between cubicles and suits, or a colourful studio with electric guitars and table football on standby, I know which I prefer.

But creativity needs more than bean-bags and Playstations. And if creativity is your business, you know there’s a lot more to it than ‘thinking outside the box’. For one thing, you probably have to think inside a few boxes – such as the budget and brief, and your client or audience’s tolerance levels. So while you need to encourage blue-sky thinking and risk-taking, you also need to make things happen on time, on budget and to keep the end users happy.

Give people too much creative freedom and they may have a blast working on the project – only to end up frustrated when the client or audience ‘don’t get it’. But if you play it too safe, your creatives will feel constrained and everyone will be underwhelmed by the final result.

Not an easy balancing act to pull off. Even before you factor in a few creative egos. Plus the fact that creative people are not satisfied with just doing the job – they want to be challenged and inspired on every project, every day. They want opportunities to learn and hone their skills. And if they don’t get them in your team, sooner or later they’ll start to look elsewhere.

A lot of it comes down to what you say and do with people day-in-day out. How well you listen. What questions you ask. How you deliver tricky feedback. How well you find the right fit between people’s talents and motivations and the task in hand. How easily you pick up the subtle signals that alert to you to problems before they blow up in your face. In short, how well you facilitate the idiosyncratic creative process of everyone on your team.

Now ‘business coaching’ may not sound like the most inspiring activity in the world, but it does offer you an effective approach to managing and developing creative people. It’s not a miracle solution, or a step-by-step model, but it provides practical answers to the following questions:

• How can you allow people creative freedom while keeping a grip on deadlines and deliverables?
• How can you develop people’s skills while keeping them productive?
• How can you stimulate creative thinking in others?
• How can you avoid the temptation to micro-manage people?
• Why don’t people do what they’re supposed to do?
• How can you keep people motivated while giving them bad news?
• How can you be yourself while adapting to others’ needs?
• When is it better to keep your mouth shut?

This e-book introduces the core principles and skills of business coaching. It considers the role of the manager and how coaching complements other management styles. It describes the most common model for structuring coaching sessions. It also challenges you to think about coaching as an informal process, in which every workplace conversation becomes a coaching opportunity.

The e-book also touches on ways a coaching consultant can help you and your colleagues develop your effectiveness as a management team – but I don’t assume you need a consultant to get started. After all, you’ve probably done a lot of great coaching already, without necessarily putting that label on it. Hopefully the e-book will raise your awareness of your existing skills and encourage you to do more of ‘what works’ in future.

Some of the material in the e-book is similar to that found in other books on business coaching (a few of which I recommend in Chapter 13). What is different is my emphasis on the specific challenges facing leaders of creative teams, and how coaching can develop the individual and collective creative talent of a business.

I hope this e-book gives you some food for thought about the challenges you face in managing talented creative professionals – and some ideas that will make your job a little easier and more rewarding.

Download the e-book – Creative Management for Creative Teams

Image © Dave Gray, reproduced by kind permission

If creativity is your livelihood, is it a good idea to pursue multiple interests and develop a range of skills, or should you focus on one or two key talents and become the best around in your specialism?

I’m asking the question because two of my favourite blogs take completely opposite positions on this issue. In the red corner, Steve Hardy devotes his entire blog to the concept of the Creative Generalist, and recently wrote an excellent post about What Specifically Do Generalists Do?. In the blue corner, advertising copywriter Scamp has this to say about creative generalism:

the idea enrages me so much that every time it pops up I feel the need to reach for a hammer, like I’m playing a blogging version of whack-a-mole.

At the risk of getting whacked by Scamp’s hammer (and of mixing metaphors) I’m going to look at both sides of the question and see if I can referee the fight.

The Case for Creative Generalism

Photo by tjscenes

In his blog post What Specifically Do Generalists Do? Steve Hardy argues for the ’secret talent’ of generalists:

Nothing can substitute for depth of analysis, and there’s proven value in specialization – it’s what education, career paths, scientific research, and technological innovation are built on – but generalism is a secret talent. With so much complex information, fragmented in so many ways and developing faster and faster, it is increasingly important to have generalists around to make sense of it all, of the big picture. People who appreciate diversity, who are in the know about the wider world and who understand how things interact are invaluable observers, matchmakers, and pioneers of the intersectional ideas so vital for success in today’s knowledge economy, conceptual age, and global community.

He then describes the lists the following ‘core areas at which Creative Generalists excel’:

• Wander & Wonder – finding possibility
• Synthesize & Summarize – presenting information
• Link & Leap – generating ideas
• Mix & Match – connecting people
• Experience & Empathize – understanding worldview

It’s a thorough, thoughtful post that repays the full ‘cup of tea and a sit down’ treatment. Steve also makes the case for generalism in a Creative Generalist manifesto for Change This.

Among Steve’s eclectic curiosity interviewees is Russell Davies, whose blog exemplifies many of these characteristics of creative generalism. Russell also writes about creative generalism from time to time. One of the things I like about Russell’s blog is that you never know what you’re going to get next, from cashless telephone boxes to transport depots to the action cook book to electroplankton baths and ukulele mashup genius. He’s a kind of innovation antenna for the rest of us, investigating novel technology and attitudes and extrapolating trends and possibilities.

The poet W.B. Yeats wrote a moving elegy for his friend Major Robert Gregory, in which he praised the younger man as an artist, scholar and man of action:

Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
And all he did done perfectly
As though he had but that one trade alone.

As poetry, I love these lines, but I would say that (if Yeats can be believed) Major Gregory was an untypical generalist. Perfection of each kind is not usually what they are after, or what they deliver. They are more at home with the notebook or sketchpad (or these days the blog) than the marble plinth or three volume novel. Coleridge is a good example – described by his biographer Richard Holmes as ‘the great master of the suggestive fragment’, he has a restless, omnivorous imagination that flits, in the 6 volumes of his Notebooks, from poetry to journalism to philosophy to plans for an ideal society in the wilderness of America to recipes for beer to dreams to sexual fantasies to prayers to nature studies and the colour of urine in a chamber pot. Several of his greatest poems, such as ‘Kubla Khan’ and Christabel, were left unfinished.

Leonardo da Vinci was probably the ultimate creative generalist (or polymath or Renaissance man as they used to be known). As a painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, botanist, writer and musician, he approached perfection in several disciplines – but also left his share of unfinished projects and suggestive fragments, such as the huge statue of a horse (’Gran Cavallo’) that was never cast in bronze, or the unfinished paintings of St Jerome and the Adoration of the Magi. More recently, some of my favourite generalists include Mervyn Peake (novelist, poet, painter, illustrator, sculptor), Brian Eno (musician, producer, thinker, installation artist) and Thomas Heatherwick (designer, architect, engineer, sculptor).

If I’ve whetted your appetite for generalism, you might enjoy these two blogs I discovered while researching this post: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist and The Martini Shaker. And Tim Ferriss’ Top 5 Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades. Oh, and Leonardo’s finally got round to starting a blog.

The Case for Specialism

Photo by ceriseyyy

There’s a Japanese proverb that says if you try to chase two rabbits at once, you’ll lose both. Scamp is clearly of the ’single rabbit’ school of thought and lists his Top 5 reasons why Specialism is better than Generalism. The thrust of his argument is that it’s rare to find someone who is able to perform well at a wide range of skills, just as Johann Cruyff was almost unique among footballers in being able to ‘defend, create goals and score goals’. He acknowledges that ‘great advertising requires different skills’ but says it’s better to assemble a team of diverse specialists than to try to find all of them in the same person.

Marcus Buckingham and Kurt Coffman make a similar point in their book First, Break All the Rules, where they argue that instead of trying to fix our weaknesses we should focus on developing our strongest talents. So for example, I could probably learn to play the guitar competently, but I don’t have my brother’s talent for music, so I’ll never achieve any great distinction at it – or experience the kind of satisfaction he gets from playing in a really good band. I’m better off concentrating on writing, which is something for which I have more talent and inclination. And less chance of being trounced by my little brother.

Scamp laid down the gauntlet to the champions of generalism in advertising:

Here’s my team of specialists – Johnny Hornby (CEO), Paul Feldwick (Head of Planning), Richard Flintham (ECD). Could anyone put up a team of three generalists, that would make a better agency than HFF? I doubt it.

That was 8 months ago and so far no-one has done it, which suggests he has a point.

Scamp receives staunch support from another advertising man, Winston Fletcher, in his book Tantrums and Talent – How to get the best from creative people:

In the creative industries specialisation of labour applies with a vengeance. Most creators, thought they may not realise it, have a narrow range of creative abilities. Feature writers rarely make good fictions writers; designers are quite different from illustrators; fashion photographers can’t shoot portraits; still photographers can’t shoot movies; in advertising few creators of press advertising are really good at television commercials…. one of my partners is an outstanding editor of comedy programmes. At a pinch he can edit anything – but he has an instinct for the timing of hilarious sequences.
(Tantrums and Talent, p.49)

Fletcher does acknowledge the existence of generalists, but like Scamp he sees them as the exception to the rule of creative specialisation:

There are exceptions, but they are so infrequent as to be noteworthy. Some of the most massively talented creative people – Sir Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles spring to mind – have been able to master a wide range of disparate creative roles. Such multi-faceted talents are few and far between. The creative manager should almost always urge creators to keep to their last, and to excel at the things they do well, rather than allow them to try and be jacks-of-all-trades.
(Tantrums and Talent, p.49)

It’s worth checking out the comments on Scamp’s post, for a lively debate about the issue, including other footballers who can defend, create and score.

Dave Gray’s solution – generalists are best at defining problems, specialists at solving them

Image © Dave Gray, reproduced by kind permission

Dave Gray suggests that we should look at generalists and specialists as playing complementary roles in the creative process. Generalists have the breadth of knowledge to be able to survey the big picture and identify critical problems and goals, but they may not have the specialist knowledge to solve the problem or execute the plan.

It’s an appealing idea that seems to fit the traditional division of labour in advertising agencies between planners (strategic generalists who define the goal) and creatives (specialists who solve the problem with their creative execution). Maybe we can imagine a team including planner Russell Davies and his eclectic enthusiasms, and Scamp bringing his laser-like creative focus to the execution. I’d love to be a fly on the wall.

David Armano finds a ‘lot of truth’ in Dave Gray’s diagram, but suggests that the roles are not always so clearly defined:

Generalists can excel at both defining and solving problems but may require the assistance of specialists as they go deeper into execution. Specialists can excel in defining the problem especially when it falls within their area of expertise. Are we saying the same thing? I think the difference is stressing that both can actually function in the other’s “role” depending on the individual and context.

Coming back to advertising as an example, it’s not hard to detect both sides resisting the straitjacket of their roles, with cheeky planners wondering whether they are the new creatives and awkward creatives challenging the creative briefs that planners work so hard on. Having said that, I think Dave’s diagram does a good job of clarifiying the essential differences between generalists and specialists, and their complementary functions.

So come on then, which is better?

Image by Steve Hardy

As usual with this kind of debate, I can see the merits of both sides. The world would be a poorer place without the Leonardos, Coleridges, Heatherwicks, Davies and Peakes dipping their fingers into as many pies as they can. Equally, I wouldn’t want to stop Scamp haring after his rabbit.

To get myself off the charge of sitting on the fence, I’m tempted to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ But I’ll resist the temptation.

Instead I’ll quote Steve Hardy again, who sees generalists and specialists as ‘two sides of the same coin’:

the best fireworks are generated when the two approaches are somehow blended–in either an individual’s mindset or in an organization’s structure–and arranged to work together in concert.

To me, ‘creative generalist or specialist?’ is a false dichotomy. Apart from the argument that the two roles are complementary, the question assumes that ‘creative’ is an easily identifiable, homogenous quality. It isn’t. It can be applied to all kinds of activities, disciplines and professions, some of which are better suited to generalists, some specialists.

A third way? David Armano’s T-shaped Creativity

Image by David Armano

David Armano’s concept of T-shaped creativity which he described in a post for the Marketing Profs blog, gives us another way of looking at the specialist/generalist division:

The notion is simple – cultivate people on your team that have a core competency, but can easily branch out (like the shape of a T). They ideally possess traits such as curiosity, empathy and aren’t afraid to ask why. And there is a distinction between this type of individual vs. a “jack-of-all trades.” The core competency and branches are complimentary, with the branches being secondary strengths. It represents breadth and depth of skills.

In terms of an individual’s skill-set, the vertical stroke comprises specialist skills and knowledge, while the horizontal stroke represents the generalist skills that enable the person to position their specialism in a way that it is useful and desirable for others. We can see this as a variation of the classic definition of creativity as novelty + value. The novel element derives from the vertical stroke of the T – which David labels ‘creative driven’, comprising insights, ideas and concepts. The horizontal stroke of the T is concerned with value – whether the new ideas and products are useful and/or desirable. At the intersection of the T a useable end product.

For example: my own core specialisms (the vertical stroke of the T) are:

• writing
• facilitating change (as a coach, trainer or therapist)

In order to make these skills relevant, attractive and useful to others, while working as an independent consultant, I’ve developed some knowledge and competence in the following areas, which comprise the horizontal stroke of the T:

• blogging
• marketing
• networking
• sales
• accounting
• presentation skills
• intellectual property law
• organisation theory
• strategy
• project management
• negotiation
• entrepreneurship
• time management

One reason I took time out to study for an MA in Creative & Media Enterprises was to broaden my knowledge of the creative industries sector so that I could position my core skills in a way that would be meaningful to my clients. At a basic level, this means clients feel comfortable when they find I can ’speak their language’ and have some understanding of the challenges they face. I would definitely say that studying for the MA broadened my mind – at the same time it was something of a relief to return to my own writing afterwards, and to get back to working with clients face-to-face.

I never knowingly pass up an opportunity to compare myself to Shakespeare, so I’ll wheel him on as my next example. It’s hard to think of anyone with a greater specialist talent for writing, or who achieved more with such a talent (the vertical stroke of the T). Yet he was also a competent actor and a highly successful businessman as a partner in the acting company The King’s Men (the horizontal stroke). The various aspects of his career were not in conflict, but created a dynamic creative tension that led to enormous creative and professional success.

The T-shaped model suggests that we are all generalists and specialists to some degree. Some people will have a longer vertical stroke, others a wider cross stroke, with many variations of size and proportion. (No sniggering at the back, please.) The most wide-ranging generalist will usually have one or two favourite specialisms at which s/he excels; and even the most committed specialist will need some grasp of other disciplines if s/he wants to achieve recognition and rewards. Scamp recently blogged about starting to work as a creative director – a role that requires new skills, as a facilitator of others’ creativity, helping them catch their own rabbits.

How about you?

• Do you consider yourself a creative generalist or specialist? Why?
• How has generalising or specialising helped or hindered you?
• Would you assign separate roles to generalists and specialists?

Table of contents for An Introduction to Business Coaching

1. An Introduction to Business Coaching
2. What Is Business Coaching?
3. Coaching Is Not Training, Mentoring or Counselling
4. Different Types of Coaching
5. The External Coach, or Coaching Consultant
6. The Manager as Coach
7. Coaching and Leadership
8. Key Coaching Skills
9. The GROW Coaching Model
10. Formal and Informal Coaching
11. The Business Impact of Coaching
12. Why Coaching Matters to Creative Companies
13. Recommended Business Coaching Books

The ‘Introduction to Business Coaching’ series is now available to download as an e-book, Creative Management for Creative Teams. It’s licensed for free noncommercial distribution so you are welcome to share it with your colleagues and contacts.

Having looked at The Business Impact of Coaching, I’m now going to focus specifically on companies in the creative industries – such as advertising agencies, design studios, TV broadcasters, computer games developers – and explain why I believe coaching is vitally important to their success.

In this context I should really refer to coaching as ‘coaching’ or even coaching – creative people are often suspicious of ‘management speak’ and my research showed me that many of them put the word ‘coaching’ in that category. No problem. I’m not a huge fan of the word myself. I’m more interested in what people do than in what label we use for it.

And what I’ve noticed are lots of managers, creative directors and other leaders of creative teams using skills that are very similar to classic coaching behaviours – i.e. lots of listening, asking questions, observational feedback, defining the goal/brief and then stepping back and allowing people to find their own way of achieving it. It’s as if these managers, many of whom have never read a book on coaching, using a coaching-style approach intuitively, because they find it the most effective way to get the best out of creative people.

So why are these coaching behaviours effective at facilitating high-level creative work?

Questions

We have already seen, in Key Coaching Skills, that questions are one of the hallmarks of the coaching style of management. They are also key drivers of creative endeavour. Many great creative discoveries and inventions have begun with questions – What if we did things differently? What if we could travel to the moon? What happens if we start connecting up all these computers?

Looking and listening

In his classic book on creative thinking, A Whack on the Side of the Head, Roger von Oech quoted Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who said: ‘Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different’. We all spend a lot of time looking at each other – yet it is surprising how little we often see. Much of the time we are too preoccupied with our own ideas and needs to really focus on the other person. Coaches spend a lot of time looking at people and listening to them carefully – and noticing little clues in the way they speak or act. These clues can be the difference between success and failure in a working relationship – particularly when dealing with notoriously complex and sensitive creative types.

Different perspectives

According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function’. Combining multiple perspectives is central to creativity – and to coaching. Good coaches are able to empathise with coachees and see the world from their point of view – even if they don’t necessarily agree with their opinions. Many classic coaching questions prompt people to examine a situation from new perspectives, e.g. ‘What would person X say about this problem?’, ‘What’s good about being stuck?’, or ‘What’s the view from Mars?’.

Exchanging information and ideas

Related to different perspectives is the importance of exchanging information and ideas for creativity to happen. The most obvious recent example is the massive surge of creativity and innovation facilitated by the growth of the internet, perhaps the ultimate information exchange. Creative exchanges are integral to coaching, a conversational medium that facilitates better communication and the sharing of ideas.

Intrinsic motivation

One of the key findings of the research on creativity is that creativity is highly correlated with ‘intrinsic motivation’ – i.e. when we are working for the joy of the task itself, we are likely to be more creative than if we are working in order to achieve something else (extrinsic motivation). For example, the poet Anne Sexton told her agent that although she would love to make a lot of money by writing poems, she had to ‘forget all about that’ in order to actually write them.

Coaching facilitates intrinsic motivation by asking questions and delivering observational feedback in a way that helps coachees focus on the task in hand. In The Inner Game of Tennis, coach Timothy Gallwey says he noticed that it didn’t seem to matter whether he praised or critiqued tennis players, as both had a negative effect on their performance. Even his well-intentioned praise had the effect of making them take their eye off the ball, since they started judging themselves and hoping their next shot would be as good as the last one. So he stopped praising them and instead asked them to notice whether the ball was spinning clockwise or anticlockwise as it flew towards them – in order to answer this, they had to focus on the ball itself, and they were much more likely to return a good shot.

Creative flow

At its most intense, intrinsic motivation and absorption in creative work can lead to creative flow, described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as ‘An almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness’. Creative flow is the state of mind in which peak creative performance is achieved – see How Coaching Creates Creative Flow.

Individuality

Creative people are famously idiosyncratic, and there is no ‘right way’ or ‘best practice’ in creative work. Coaching typically takes place in one-to-one discussion, and demands that the coach adapts her approach to the coachee’s personality, learning style and situation – so it is ideally suited to working with all the kinks and nuances of an individual creative talent.

Learning on the job

Coaching deals with live work issues, not abstract or hypothetical situations. It focuses on the realities of the current situation and develops creative options that are then tried and tested. This is a good fit with the culture of many creative industries, where off-site training may be rare but there is a long tradition of learning on the job through a process of osmosis, support and challenge from peers and managers.

Influence rather than authority

Creative people are typically not impressed by fancy titles and formal authority, only by talent and results. If you want to get the best out of them, you will need to exert influence rather than rely on authority and giving orders. Coaching offers a practical approach to exerting influence and stimulating people to find creative solutions to challenges. Crucially, it it a facilitative approach, enabling you to create a space for others’ creativity – thus minimising the risk of ruffling creatives’ feathers by intruding into their territory!

Creative capital

We saw in The Business Impact of Coaching how coaching helps learning organisations increase their intellectual capital. In his book The Creative Economy, John Howkins extends this into the concept of creative capital:

It seems reasonable to treat creativity as a capital asset. It has the essential qualities. It results from investment, which the owner may increase or vary; and it is a significant input to creative products. It is a substantial component of human capital. According to George Bernard Shaw, the only sensible definition of capital was Stanley Jevon’s casual remark that it was ’spare money’. We could call intellectual capital ’spare ideas’, and creative capital ’spare creativity’. Creative capital … may have been included in some varieties of intellectual capital, but only on the edge. It needs to be fully recognized.

Describing the conditions for developing this capital, he says ‘Creative capital gains most when it is managed and made purposive … The creative manager uncovers the intellectual assets that lie hidden in companies and, ultimately, in our minds’. As the above examples show, coaching is one of the most effective means of uncovering these ‘hidden assets’ in the minds of creative workers – and therefore a vital way of increasing the value of any creative business.

Table of contents for An Introduction to Business Coaching

1. An Introduction to Business Coaching
2. What Is Business Coaching?
3. Coaching Is Not Training, Mentoring or Counselling
4. Different Types of Coaching
5. The External Coach, or Coaching Consultant
6. The Manager as Coach
7. Coaching and Leadership
8. Key Coaching Skills
9. The GROW Coaching Model
10. Formal and Informal Coaching
11. The Business Impact of Coaching
12. Why Coaching Matters to Creative Companies
13. Recommended Business Coaching Books

The ‘Introduction to Business Coaching’ series is now available to download as an e-book, Creative Management for Creative Teams. It’s licensed for free noncommercial distribution so you are welcome to share it with your colleagues and contacts.

Having spent most of this series outlining the What and How of coaching, it’s time to consider the Why – the key benefits to a business where coaching is an integral part of managing performance and developing people’s talents.

I’ve left this till late in this guide because until we’re clear about what coaching is and how it works, it’s hard to consider its impact on an organisation. With all complex ‘people skills’, it is hard to draw a straight line between particular skills and practices and business results. This is particularly true of coaching, as it is essentially a facilitative approach. Whether managers or consultants, coaches act as catalysts for various processes within an organisation, so it’s often hard to separate the different elements that contribute to success.

However we can identify factors that coaching seeks to influence, and consider how it does this. In each case, note how the personal benefits (to both coaches and coachees) are intimately linked to the business benefits. Ideally a company should be looking for a dynamic balance between the two, especially in the context of a creative business.

Commitment

It’s impossible to create commitment – but you can encourage it by giving people an opportunity to (a) work towards goals they find personally meaningful as well as delivering business results, and (b) use their creativity and initiative to do the job in their own way. Coaching offers a wealth of options for doing both of these. In fact, the coaching approach is founded on the assumption that the coach’s role is to act as a facilitator, while the coachee has the biggest emotional investment in the goal and the responsibility for committing to action.

Creativity

Following on from Commitment, because the coach is a facilitator, asking questions, listening and giving feedback in order to stimulate the coachee’s thinking, it is a highly creative process. Not in an abstract, fuzzy way, but in challenging people to come up with ideas that are new, useful and practical – and then to put them into action and see them through. For more on coaching and creativity see How coaching creates creative flow and my next post on Why coaching is vital to creative companies.

Empowerment

When people are given the opportunity to pursue meaningful goals using their own ingenuity and initiative, this results in high levels of empowerment within an organisation. There are obvious benefits to the team members being empowered in this way – in terms of using their skills and talents to the full and gaining the satisfaction, recognition and rewards of doing so. And having these people work at full capacity obviously benefits the organisation too. But it is not so commonly noticed that delegating responsibility and empowering people has huge benefits for the managers themselves – when they can genuinely empower people, managers are able to free up their time and energy from micromanaging and use it for the ‘big picture’ thinking and action that is crucial to the company’s success.

Accountability

Commitment, creativity and empowerment are all very well, but if left unchecked they can create more problems than they solve. Coaching balances these freedoms with a strong emphasis on accountability: goal-setting, questioning, listening, giving feedback and reviewing progress all enable managers to monitor progress, detect problems and help people to correct errors, solve problems and deal with unexpected outcomes. This ensures that good intentions and creative freedoms deliver tangible results.

Performance improvements

Because coaching balances creative empowerment with rigorous monitoring of results, it can have a big impact on performance. Other reasons for its success in raising performance are the facts that it is highly focused on the day-to-day realities of work, and the typical format is one-to-one – so it is very flexible in adapting to the specific needs of the individual and the situation. When these individual improvements are multiplied and co-ordinated by ‘cascading’ coaching throughout the company (i.e. so that managers are coaching each other throughout the levels of the organisation) then the impact on performance can be dramatic.

Morale and retention

It’s fairly obvious that staff who are empowered and supported to use their talents in the pursuit of meaningful (to them) goals are likely to be happier than if their enthusiasm is thwarted by old-school ‘command and control’ approaches to management. But the impact on company morale and staff retention are easier to overlook. In their classic study of the effect of management behaviours on business performance, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman make the findings of their research crystal clear:

Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor. (Break All the Rules, p.11)

Coaching offers the ‘immediate supervisor’ a set of principles and practical tools for managing this relationship in the most productive and satisfying way for all concerned – increasing the chances that the talented employees will hang around and do their best work in your company.

Skills and knowledge

Coaching focuses on learning on the job, ensuring that results are delivered and lessons are learned simultaneously. Over time, this results in a more highly skilled workforce who are able to take on more ambitious work and complete it to a higher standard.

Intellectual capital

In addition to developing skills and knowledge, continuous coaching will contribute to the development of the company as a learning organisation. When learning is an ongoing, integral element of an organisation it enhances not just its operational efficiency but also its ‘intellectual capital’ – a vital asset in a knowledge-driven economy. In their book Coaching and Mentoring, Eric Parsloe and Monica Wray present the case for the learning organisation, beginning with the premise that ‘we are moving into an era of global, information technology-driven organisations’. They argue that ‘ Storage, transfer and retrieval of information is essentially technology-driven, but application of that information is people-driven’ and that ‘ Only organizations, and individuals, that actively manage their learning processes will be successful – or indeed will survive!’ Coaching and Mentoring, p.17). Their ‘new agenda for the learning organisation’ includes ‘encouraging as many people as possible, and certainly all managers, to become coaches to ensure learning occurs in the workplace and elsewhere’ (p.22).

Jane Greene and Anthony Grant make a similar case for coaching in a knowledge economy:

We are moving from an industrial era in which wealth lay in raw materials, machinery, goods – what Karl Marx called ‘the means of production’ – into a world where wealth and power lie in ideas, imagination, knowledge and the information you control. (Solution-Focused Coaching, p.4)

They quote an article from HR Focus magazine, January 1996, stating that ‘The emergence of the knowledge-based economy requires managers to act as coaches’.

These writers present coaching as a vital approach for all companies managing learning and performance in a knowledge economy. I believe coaching becomes even more valuable in the context of the creative economy and creative industries – where ‘ideas, imagination, knowledge and the information’ are the lifeblood of every creative business. I’ll elaborate on coaching and creative companies in the next post in this series.

Photo by judepics: Planet Greenwich (home of Wishful Thinking)

Thank you for reading Wishful Thinking in 2007. It’s been great fun writing it and connecting with so many interesting and creative people – online and in person.

Here’s my personal selection of the best of Wishful Thinking in 2007, based partly on my own judgment, partly on the amount of visitors, comments and links they attracted.

I hope you (re)discover something to inspire you. Have a great New Year, see you on the other side…

January

How to Maintain Your Enthusiasm When Things Get Tough

7 Ways to Stop Worrying When You’re Under Pressure

February

7 Ways to Tap into Enthusiasm

Interview with David Amor, Creative Director, Relentless Software

March

David Armano on Management

An Introduction to Business Coaching

April

Chris Ritke Interviews Me at 49Sparks.com

The Manager as Coach

May

A Blog Is for Life, Not Just for Christmas – British Library Talk

Getting in Touch with Creativity – Roger von Oech’s Ball of Whacks

Brian Eno – 77 Million Paintings

June

Coaching and Leadership

Listen to My Issue of Magma on the Poetry Library Website

Key Coaching Skills

July

What Amadeus Shows Us About Creativity

Free E-book – An Introduction to the Enneagram (based on the series for Successful Blog)

August

‘Too Many Notes’ – How Not to Give Feedback on Creative Work

5 Tips for Giving Feedback on Creative Work

The GROW Coaching Model

September

What Seamus Heaney Taught Me About Giving Feedback

6 Tips for Dealing with Feedback on Your Creative Work

October

What’s the Difference Between Incubation and Procrastination?

Are You a Right-Brain or a Left-Brain Person?

November

Inspiring Boundless Creativity – an Interview with Tina Brazil, People Director, Profero

December

Time Management for Creative People – Free E-book (based on the series for Business of Design Online)

Three Ways to Assess Your Own Creative Work

Should Artists Give the Audience What They Want?

If you’re in London you may like to bookmark the latest Creative Business Club event from CIDA, on 14th November. I’ve blogged about the Creative Business Club before – I’ve always found it an inspiring evening and a good opportunity to meet interesting creative professionals.

This time the theme is Making Workspace Work, looking at the effect of your physical environment on your business and your creativity. This is a topic I’ve previously looked at on this blog, when I considered The Thinkubator and Other Creative Environments. I’ve also written about the Creative Space Agency who are among the speakers, and who are building their business on a brilliantly simple idea about creative use of space in London.

Making Workspace Work

The Creative Business Club offers knowledge through networking and the perfect opportunity to get together with other creative professionals. Each event features lively panel discussions with leading experts followed by networking and drinks.

When: Wednesday 14 Nov, 6 – 9pm

Where: Barbican Centre (Barbican)

Who: Freelancers, businesses and cultural organisations

Cost: FREE to all (supported by Creative London – London Development Agency and Arts Council England)

Facilitator: Lucy Kyle, CIDA’s Creative Industries Business Adviser

Has your business outgrown your home, or are you renting a space that just isn’t working for you? The next Creative Business Club – Making Workspace Work – explores how to find a space that will help your business grow. Having a professional address and a meeting room for clients are just some of the benefits, but the right space can also help you build a profitable referral network and inspire creativity.

The expert panel including Cani Ash – Founding Partner Ash Sakula Architects, John Burton – Director of the Creative Space Agency, Paul Allen, journalist and author of the Ethical Business Book and Helen Johannessen of Yoyo Ceramics will discuss what to consider when selecting a workspace, where to look and how your physical environment can affect your profile, productivity and creativity.

Join us afterwards for drinks and a chance to chat to exhibitors who will be on hand to provide expert advice on finding the right creative space for you.

Making Workspace Work is supported by the Creative Space Agency

The World Intellectual Property Organization got in touch to let me know about this conference:

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is organizing an International Conference on Intellectual Property and the Creative Industries, which will be held at WIPO headquarters in Geneva on October 29th and 30th, 2007.

The Conference is being organized to provide a forum for discussion on the concept and application of creativity in the creative industries with a clear focus on their intellectual property component. More information is available on the WIPO website.

It sounds like an interesting event, especially as it’s free. When I did the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at Warwick University one of the key modules was on Managing Intellectual Property, which turned out to be surprisingly interesting. If you’re running any kind of creative business, then it’s essential to have some grasp of the key principles of intellectual property law, and particularly the issues raised by digital technology and the internet. (I mean the real issues, not the tub-thumping scare-mongering by certain Content Kings.)

For some useful IP resources you might like to have a look at my Books and links: Intellectual Property page.

I’ve discovered an excellent blog called New Music Strategies, which has a lively and well-argued point of view on the new realities of the music business. A good introduction is author Andrew Dubber’s e-book 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online, which is also available as a free printed booklet.

Daniel Schutzsmith has a new issue of Graphic Define online, with a great selection of guest authors writing about ‘the business of running a design studio’ (most of which will apply to any creative business). On a similar theme the Creative Review blog has a great piece called Running A Design Studio: The Boring Stuff, by Build partner Nicky Place.

I’m finding The Ideafeed an excellent source of new stories and publications about the creative industries. Maybe you will too.

Andrew at Northern Planner shares some tips on Using research and information to write a great creative brief – worth reading for anyone on the giving or receiving end of a creative brief.

Steve Roesler has an insightful series on Fear of Success, which in my experience is surprisingly common among creative professionals (and also applies to Organizations).

If you’re wondering what could possibly be scary about success, have a read of Marcus Brown’s unforgettable post The Show Off. I’m pleased to say Marcus retains his creative enthusiasm, in a mind-boggling new project The Ides of March. If you have a business problem, send it to Marcus and he’ll come up with an idea to help you solve it – if you like the idea, you pay what you think it’s worth (yes, really), if not he posts it on the Ides of March. I had the pleasure of meeting Marcus at the Interesting conference in June – he’s charming and obviously very bright, so I’m looking forward to following his creative thinking high wire act.

Juliana Frasson Xavier is a Brazilian planner who’s been making the most of her time in London by interviewing some of the luminaries of the UK advertising scene and posting her findings on John Grant’s Brand Tarot blog. She asked her interviewees about the thought processes they use to approach creative and business challenges – a fascinating topic, especially considering her interviewees include Phil Teer, Creative Director of St Luke’s, Richard Huntingdon of Adliterate, and Russell Davies of Russell Davies.

Finally thanks to Steve at Creative Generalist for this sighting of the rare species of Poet Managers:

Poetry speaks to many C.E.O.’s. “I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers,” says Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, a $3 billion producer of sound systems for luxury cars, theaters and airports. Mr. Harman maintains a library in each of his three homes, in Washington, Los Angeles and Aspen, Colo. “Poets are our original systems thinkers,” he said. “They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”