It’s really no surprise that both of these iconic film-makers have been all over the press of late, allowing us to see the intimate thoughts and frustrations with their own creative life struggles.  So many aspects of our growing economy are changing the game.  Big business is not what it was, and the life-long employee isn’t either.  This certainly brings the challenges of employee engagement and motivation to the forefront, among other aspects of Talent Management – compensation, assessment, employee evaluation, and then some.  You don’t have to be in the film business to understand the challenges of creativity and authenticity.  All industries feel it, in a whole host of ways.

“How to Lead a Creative Life,” Fast Company (Jan 2012) – great map, this is how you do it:

I do believe this is a wonderful time to be a creative & authentic force, in whatever way that notion strikes you.

Maybe you want to:

• Develop a new product or system in a different way
• Measure & reward in a different way
• Analyze in a different way
• Create & produce in a different way

Bottom line… it takes a bit of risk.  Think hard about the word risk and what RISK & FEAR mean to you.  And when you’ve got a notion of the answer, think about how Wikipedia and Google fought back last week – incredibly creative and risk seeking companies, even the way in which they decided to fight was a risk – who would have thought?

And then think about the Japanese art of Dwarf Trees – what risk-taking, creative horticulturist thought of that??

I know you all know it’s true.  And thus – think about the following:

• What resources are you personally tapping into?
• What resources is your team, as a whole, not tapping into?
• What resources as a leader are being left unturned?
• What resources as a company are you not effectively utilizing?
• How can you maximize both internal and external resources – and I mean that both on a personal individual level as well as on a team and corporate level.
• How does the lack of effectively reviewing and analyzing untapped resources affect your bottom line?

Get in out of the rain & get focused.  I just did.

With rain on my back & dust in my face,

ER

What has been most profound in my research interviews recently in Los Angeles is the simple notion that creativity cannot be micro-managed.  Now this may not seem like revolutionary information, but what is key here is the ability to know how and in what ways the process is being micro-managed, most often inadvertently.  The key to progress in managing creative and innovative teams is to understand the ways in which the process impedes the goal.  Now, that’s not all that different from the general knowledge we have of organizations and teams, the reality that the process often (unfortunately) impedes the goal.  But what was reiterated to me over and over in my incredible week of interviews was how that affect is more detrimental to success than ever.  In our lightening speed age of technology and the dissemination of information, this decade could not be a more important time to get information processes and communication right.  Not only is the economics of business reliant on getting it right, but because of how quickly information is communicated, the ability to ‘correct’ communication has become increasingly challenging. 

Back to my first point on ‘waiting for the time…’  The time, simply, for everything is now.  The time to research ideas, the time to create ideas, the time to brainstorm and, the time to bring ideas to fruition is simply now.  Because if you don’t do it now, someone else will, another company will come up with a similar concept, or even worse, your company will fail waiting for the right time to make things happen, creatively and innovatively.

Fact: according to entrepreneur.com “8.7 percent of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in second quarter 2009.”

Entrepreneurs in residence are springing up on both coasts (and in the middle), paying innovative thinkers to do just that, sit and think, with the hopes of cashing in on creative and innovative ideas that can change the world (really, think Google). And in the not so different world of film, a bicoastal and international production, The Hurt Locker, seems to have taken some folks by surprise as the winner for Oscar’s Best Picture – in comparison to the more obvious modern template for creativity, Avatar, which seemed to be the likely contender. But the win shows that creativity is multi-faceted, and flexibility with innovation is not necessarily in the form of modern creation, but sometimes grounded emphatically in the use of traditional art. The Hollywood Reporter’s Elizabeth Guider writes: “In the end, and despite opening the competition to 10 contenders, the Academy’s decision might have come down to that reflex preference for art over commerce or to its sense of purpose in rewarding art in an increasingly corporate, commercially driven film industry.”

At the 2009 TED Conference when talking about creativity and educating our youth to embrace and develop such, Sir Ken Robinson said “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Yet, in our risk adverse economy, being ‘wrong’ sounds like a scary proposition. So then, how do we get it right? How do we make it okay to be wrong, yet be creative? To begin with, we use past knowledge and experience as a springboard for understanding ways in which we need to replicate or change where we’re going. And then, we research, evaluate, and apply.

As I head to Los Angeles next week to begin filming a podcast series on successfully innovative and creative teams, I will keep aversion out of my mind and mistakes on my radar.

“Experience is the name that everyone gives to their mistakes.” – Oscar Wilde

• Attract teams that want to collaborate
• Encourage creativity within yourself and others
• Identify team members who are flexible and think outside the box
• Problem solve effectively instead of in a reactionary manner
• Encourage people to want to be on your team and help you work towards goals
• Harness the entrepreneurial spirit that anything is possible as long as you work at it
• Work as hard as possible, knowing that eventually your investments of time, energy, and money will pay off

And if you’re still having a hard time imagining it all in a positive light, do some soul searching with the following examples:

Success is being a Google executive and despite a ruling sentencing a few of them to 6 months in prison for violating Italian privacy laws, knowing it’s an unfair and unjust ruling and actually serving the sentence will never come to fruition, and instead using your team to review global standards on privacy is a much more effective use of 6 months.

Success is being Mark Burnett & Mike Darnell and believing in your product so strongly that you know that despite an FCC investigation, your idea for a game show that highlights smartness and acquired knowledge in children is a great contribution to family programming and, with successful team development, will eventually be able to shine as a wonderful example of a successful game show idea.

Success is being Tachi Yamada, M.D., President of the Global Health Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and acknowledging that the incredibly difficult journey of arriving from Japan to attend boarding school in the US is what has shaped him as a person and made him flexible and ‘open to challenges’ in ways he approaches life and business, and has contributed to the model of how he hires successful members of his team.

Success is believing in success, even if it takes a little longer than originally planned.