Habit 3

Lead with creative choices

How to choose to be an inspiring leader

A beacon of inspiration

A wise man once said: ‘Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things’.² To do the right thing as a creative leader you need to be a beacon of inspiration to those around you. By its nature, creative leadership is the least prescriptive of the habits. That’s because it’s a deeply personal learning journey that lasts a lifetime. Along the way your development path should be about building your own authentic, inspiring leadership style. But there’s no set formula to become a creative leader. They often diverge significantly from what we think of as ‘normal leadership’. But, in my work with leaders and managers in countless creative businesses, one thing has become clear: there are identifiable leadership themes and principles that crop up again and again. These are described in this chapter so you can study them, personalise them, and build them into your individual philosophy.

This chapter is about applying creativity to the way you approach your role as a leader. It’s a golden opportunity to compare your own principles with those of other leaders. The objective, of course, is to grow your influence within your business. It’s about making your leadership challenge a little easier.

Leadership is crucial. Many of us have worked in businesses that have a lot of people in management positions, but a disturbing lack of leaders. And the idea that a creative approach to leadership is important is evidenced by the largest ever study of CEO attitudes. 1,500 corporate and public sector leaders from 60 nations and 33 industries were interviewed. The majority rated creativity as the most important personal quality.³

Leadership from every chair

Ideas come from anywhere and everyone. So, creative leadership is not confined to people who sit in the boardroom. The non-hierarchical and meritocratic culture of a creative business means leading is less of an individual pursuit, and more of a team sport, than any other type of organisation. Creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson puts it this way: ‘The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued . . . it’s a big shift for a lot of people.’⁴

Of course, owner-managers, founders and senior executives have to inspire those around them. And middle managers need to lead, too. But this section on creative leadership is not just for people with director, or chief or ‘head of’ in their title. It’s aimed at every-body in a creative business. Everybody has to get leadership so they can spark electric conversations. Creative businesses encourage leadership from every chair in the office.

Eight principles of creative leadership

Sir John Hegarty’s story might make you think creative people make the best creative leaders, but that’s not the case. Developing yourself from an expert practitioner into a genuine leader is a challenging transition – and creative people struggle with it. Nick Catliff was a film director before founding the UK production company, Lion TV. He said: ‘When you are a practitioner it’s all about your vision. When you step up and start employing people, you have to make a big change. Many do it very badly. Their instinct is to tell people what to do. They can’t let go; as a result they are very poor leaders. The best creative leaders manage to retain what made them good in the first place – their incisiveness and guts – but allow other people’s creativity to flourish.’⁵

Your ability to handle the transition is defined by the creative choices you make: about your own leadership purpose, how you respond to what happens every day, how you stand up for people and ideas – and how you inspire electric conversations. Leadership is highly personal; there is no ‘one way’ for you to go. But there are eight consistent principles I’ve seen over and over again, as shown in Figure 3.1.

figure 3.1 The eight principles of creative leadership

1 Find your purpose

A creative business relies on its environment – its internal weather system. Leaders play a big part in influencing the weather to be stormy, humid, rainy – or creative. But to change the weather around you, first you have to make your own weather. To proactively make your own weather - your emotions, thoughts, attitudes and behaviours - you need to be inspired. But this has a distinct chicken and egg feel to it. To inspire others, first you need to be inspired. And that inspiration comes from inside you. This means leadership is an inside-out development journey. Finding your own inspiring leadership purpose entails committing to a personal journey of self-reflection to discover the sort of leader you want to be – with an authentic style that’s personal to you. It’s about answering the question: ‘Why would anyone want to be led by you?’⁶

A big step on that journey is to embrace what you stand for as a business leader. BBH’s Sir John Hegarty is very clear about his leadership purpose. It is to: ‘Inspire everyone around me.’ All of the great creative leaders I’ve worked with have a clear understanding of their own ‘Why?’ Don’t lead because you got promoted or you have to – because there are no other volunteers. Lead because you want to make an impact on the world.

2 Be self-aware

You spend most of your time on the ‘dance floor’ of life. Modern jobs and home life, like a packed, heaving night club, are absorbing places to be. You’re encouraged to move in time to music that’s often cued up by other people and external events. The alarm clock goes off in the morning like a starting gun, propelling you into frenetic activity. Sometimes, you’re dancing alone, wrapped up in a particular issue. At other times, you’re fully engaged with those around you. Either way, there’s little time or opportunity to observe how well you are dancing, living or leading.

Learning to stand back and see yourself as others see you is crucial to successful creative leadership. It’s the ability to step off the dance floor⁷; to walk to the balcony overlooking the throng, and observe your life. To become sufficiently self-aware to stand back and make conscious decisions of how you will respond to what happens to you in any situation. It’s the invaluable knack of dispassionately monitoring your own mental, emotional and physical states as you interact with the world around you. Self-awareness is the cornerstone of modern leadership development. It’s accepted as crucial for developing an authentic and effective leadership style. It’s even more important for creative leaders because so much is expected from them: an ability to engage with people, persuasively communicate ideas, as well as be inspirational to others.

Being authentic

Creative leaders don’t need to be perfect, but they do need to be human and real. Finding a clear purpose helps you to be authentic and is a vital part of creative leadership development. You wouldn’t think it would be difficult just to be ‘authentically you’ in a management role, but it is, isn’t it? In their study of what makes an authentic leader, London Business School Professors Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones found that inspiring leaders are those that have sufficient self-knowledge to have worked out what works for them – and they reveal just enough of themselves to be acknowledged as an authentic leader. In other words, they are themselves, but with more skill.⁸ A British TV executive told me about a creative commissioner in the USA who insisted, when teams flew in to pitch their ideas, they sang with him around the piano in his office. Is this authentic and inspiringly risky? Or, is it just a bit embarrassing? You’d have to be in the room to make that call. But creative leaders are not afraid of pushing people out of their comfort zones – and revealing their own unique quirkiness. Revealing yourself involves taking a few risks. But for your colleagues it’s living proof that you are a person not just a suit. You need to be able to inspire and motivate people by showing them who you are, what you stand for – and, importantly, what you will and won’t do. Goffee and Jones conclude with a warning: ‘Showing yourself as a leader always involves risks, and the risks are personal. To imagine you can act as an effective leader without putting a little bit of yourself on the line is an illusion. And a dangerous one.’⁹

3 Make creative choices

Nelson Mandela is judged by many to have been the most inspiring political leader of our time: the only politician in history to be grieved globally. His amazing ability to connect with billions of people was not just down to his perseverance, his improbable Long March to Freedom, or even his one-thousand megawatt charisma. It was driven by the creative choice he made one day in his Robben Island prison cell during his 27 years of incarceration by the South African Government. Instead of reacting in the obvious way – by plotting the downfall of his tormentors – he chose to do the exact opposite. He learned Afrikaans, the language of his jailers, in order to communicate with them. His leadership purpose in life was to make One South Africa, black and white together. His creative choice was to forgive, and even to offer redemption to his white persecutors, in order to live that purpose. There’s a reason why Mandela captures the imagination. If he can make such a brave creative choice, can we do the same in our life?

Self-awareness enables creative choices. By examining your thoughts, as they happen, you can influence how you perceive the world. You are able to create your own reality – rather than allowing life to create it for you. It’s about using your free will to choose your response to what life throws at you: client wins, client losses; sunshine and rain, sickness and health. The key to truly transformative creative choices is to defer judgement: to refuse to label life’s external events as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Instead think: ‘How can I respond creatively to this situation to get the best result?’ By leading yourself more consciously, you’re able to more effectively lead and inspire others.

figure 3.2 Making space for your creative choices¹⁰

4 Hear the faint signals

Creative leaders spend less time telling, and more time truly communicating: listening as well as speaking. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Dame Gail Rebuck, the chairman of Penguin Random House’s British operations. I interviewed her in the months after the merger between Random House and Penguin, which created the biggest book publisher in the world. She maintained that one of the most useful things any leader can learn is to listen very carefully for new ideas, problems or opportunities. She describes an ability to detect things that are vitally important, but are not obvious unless you are ‘in the moment’ with your sixth sense switched on. ‘Creative leadership is about listening for the faint signals inside and outside the business. It’s another way of using your instincts,’ she said. ‘You’ll never be on top of all the detail in a company. But you could be in an elevator listening to a particular conversation, or have a chance meeting as you buy your sandwich. Someone says something which illuminates some aspect of the business. And you think: “‘Oh, that’s interesting” or “That’s a problem,” and respond. It’s about being a listening organisation.’

This ability to listen and observe with real intensity – what a colleague of mine¹¹ calls ‘X-Ray listening’– is connected to the open style that leaders need to use in a creative business. As someone who works with organisations and leaders – sometimes as a coach – I see the obvious connections between empowering creative leadership and the techniques that underpin coaching itself. Coaching is about using the power of open questions that provoke a full response rather than a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’. For example, ‘Why?’ is always an open question.

Creative leaders need to use questions and active listening to help people to find their own best solution to a problem. The objective of any interaction is not to tell them what to do but to raise people’s awareness of the issues at hand and sharpen their feelings of responsibility to get it done. Good teachers tell people where to look; not what to see. You start with the belief that people are fundamentally good enough to do the job; they have untapped potential and, if empowered, will find their own solutions.¹² Developing a listening sixth sense is about becoming a skilled observer of people and their motivations. When I met with Stuart Murphy, Sky’s Director of Entertainment Channels, he reflected: ‘One of the things you need in a creative business is to read rooms and understand people. I almost think there should be an obligatory psychology exam for managers and bosses. My job is to make sure I see where people can fly. What buttons to push for each particular person.’¹³

5 Push for perfection

Steve Jobs worked and innovated in a number of industries. So, as well as co-founding the computer business Apple, he also co-founded Pixar Animation. During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at some point ‘hit the pause button’ and went back to the drawing board because he felt it failed to be perfect. Take the Pixar animated movie, Toy Story. After Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg bought the rights to the film, he pushed the Pixar team to make it edgier and darker. Jobs and the visionary director John Lasseter resisted. The impasse became so great, the pair finally halted production to completely rewrite the script to make it even more friendly and warm. This was highly unusual, expensive and risky. Of course, they were right, and the rest is cinematic history. Toy Story went on to earn hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. It’s widely considered by many critics to be one of the best animated films ever made.

At Apple, Jobs also hit the pause button on the iPhone. The initial design had the glass screen set into an aluminium case. Jobs went to over to see the head designer Jonathon Ive. ‘I didn’t sleep last night because I realised that I just didn’t love it,’ he said. Ive saw, to his dismay, that Jobs was right. ‘I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had to make the observation.’ Jobs helped Ive to see the whole device felt too masculine, task-driven and efficient. After nine months of hard work, the team tore up their designs and started again. ‘It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,’ Jobs said.

A creative leader needs to push for perfection. This theme is picked up in the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather’s staff manual. It urges everyone in the agency to become an uncompromising perfectionist: ‘Don’t bow your head. Don’t know your place. Defy the gods. Don’t sit back. Don’t give in. Don’t give up. Don’t win silvers. Don’t be so easily happy with yourself. Don’t be spineless. Don’t be gutless. Don’t be toadies. Don’t be Gollum. Don’t go gently into that good night. And don’t ever, ever allow a single scrap of rubbish out of the agency.’

It’s about an obsession with quality. Pixar’s John Lasseter said: ‘Quality is the best business plan of all.’¹⁴ The same tough streak can be seen in how creative leaders connect with employees. They are the first in line to elevate and protect talented people. But, because creative quality and ideas are so important, they are not afraid to review the effectiveness of people on an ongoing basis. Paul Kitcatt, founder of the London-based digital agency Kitcatt Nohr Digitas, is a softly spoken and thoughtful man. He’s known as a humane, empathetic and supportive leader. But, when I met him in London, he admitted to me: ‘I’m not going to pretend creatives go on being wonderful forever, even in our regime. Clearly they don’t. People lose direction and motivation and what you then have to do is talk to them about it … people do lose their jobs. That does happen.’¹⁵

6 Be brave enough to fail

A Formula 1 motor racing journalist once asked the legendary risk-taking and creative F1 driver, James Hunt: ‘James, what’s the secret to winning?’ Hunt paused for effect, and then deadpanned back to the startled reporter: ‘Big balls’. The creative process is painful, messy and risky. Like Hunt, it doesn’t race along in nice neat lines; it’s unpredictable and, during the development and launch phases, you won’t know how things will work out. You need to have ‘big balls’ to stake your reputation and hard-earned money on what often will amount to hunches.

The Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote the scripts for films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, argues that nobody knows which films will be successful and which ones will sink without trace. Even with audience focus groups, this is still true today. It is why Hollywood seems to retreat to turgid summer blockbusters supported by massive marketing machines or incessant sequels. These are more likely to offer a guaranteed return on investment, so they require significantly less bravery to ‘green light’.

Part of the challenge of creative leadership is living with risk. If the leader of a creative business doesn’t show bravery and stand up for new ideas, who will? A tongue-in-cheek Ogilvy & Mather anecdote amusingly illustrates what happens when teams become timid and seek to lower the risk of a new advertising campaign to zero:

“The creative director thought it was funny. The managing director thought it was funny.

The chairman thought it was funny. The tea lady thought it was funny.

The client thought it was funny. The client’s wife thought it was funny. The client’s butcher thought it was funny.

Okay now, let’s research it to see if it’s funny.”¹⁶

A creative leader needs to encourage people to be brave enough to take risks, and safe enough to fail. ‘Part of our culture is that we celebrate failure,’ says John Herlihy, who heads up Google’s European operations centre in Ireland. ‘It’s okay to fail here. If you are not failing enough, then you are not taking enough risks. When the Romans used to ransack Europe, they had this fantastic model where they would send scouts out in five different directions. The four that didn’t come back, they knew not to go in that direction. So what we do here is fail, and fail fast.’¹⁷

Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin empire, points out the value in failure: ‘You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.’ So, a skilled creative leader must accept failure and point out how it can be useful learning. Of course, you must not flinch from assessing why things have gone wrong and ensuring it doesn’t happen again. But, where required, you must vigorously protect the people behind the failed new app, cleaning product, recruitment service or CRM system. The same mistakes should never be made twice; but failure is part of the creative business model – and the buck stops with you.

So – if failure is such a big part of successful innovation – why are businesses so risk averse? Wally Olins is one of the world’s leading practitioners in branding and identity, and was chairman of the company which came up with the mobile phone brand, Orange. ‘Why is it the case that large, global companies tend not to innovate?’ he asks, ‘Why are they frightened of creative solutions? Because they have a defensive mentality, because they listen too much to what focus groups tell them. They tend not to trust their own judgement or the expertise of their creative advisors. That’s why, when they have failed to innovate, they have to go out and buy a small company that can and does.’¹⁸

A senior luxury goods executive from the handbags, fashion, perfume and champagne giant LVMH once demonstrated to me what commercial bravery should feel like. I asked him how much research he did to get the right materials, tailoring, look and feel for next year’s line. He turned to me and declared with a heavy French accent: ‘We don’t ask people what they want next; we tell them.’

To get over their quite sensible fear, leaders need to fight against their own pre-programmed human nature. Human beings are hardwired to dismiss challenging new ideas on first contact. Studies show, independent of other factors, the more often people are exposed to something, the more positive they feel about it. But when things are brand new, rare and unfamiliar they will often provoke negative reactions. Stanford University psychologist Robert Zajonc calls this the ‘mere exposure effect’. This human predisposition to think new-is-bad, familiar-is-good has been found with things as diverse as shapes, photographs of faces, random sequences of tone, food, odours, flavours, colours and people. We’re mostly unaware of the effect and routinely deny it happens; but it does.

Bravery sometimes means introducing a little chaos: after all, creative tension starts from the top. Some have taken it upon themselves to become the Trouble-Maker-in-Chief in their own business. Founder of Ogilvy & Mather, David Ogilvy, wrote: ‘We have a habit of divine discontent with our performance. It is an antidote to smugness.’¹⁹ The current generation of Ogilvy leaders recall: ‘David never entirely grew up. He would heckle in meetings, throw chocolate cakes at dinner parties and roll down grassy slopes in Brooks Brothers suits.’²⁰

The media streaming company Netflix tells its staff they must be careful not to cause an irrevocable financial disaster or a catastrophic legal issue but, that aside: ‘Rapid recovery is the right model. Just fix problems quickly. We’re in a creative-inventive market, not a safety critical market like medicine or nuclear power. You may have heard preventing error is cheaper than fixing it. Yes, in manufacturing or medicine. Not so in creative environments.’²¹

Saatchi & Saatchi’s million-dollar cheque

Advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi is now one of the world’s leading creative organisations with over 4,500 people and 130 offices in 70 countries – and part of Publicis Groupe, the world’s third-largest communications group. The agency works with 6 of the top 10, and over half of the top 50, global advertisers. But in 1997 things were very different. ‘At the time, the business was on the brink of disaster,’ Saatchi & Saatchi’s deputy chairman Richard Hytner told me over Earl Grey tea at their UK headquarters in Charlotte Street, London. ‘The founders Maurice and Charles had quit. They had gone to set up their own business. The company they left was bleeding cash, losing clients, losing people.’²²

Turnaround Chairman Bob Seelert rolled the dice and hired the maverick British marketeer Kevin Roberts to change the fortunes of the business. One of Roberts’s first acts as worldwide CEO was to write a highly symbolic cheque from Saatchi & Saatchi’s dwindling investment fund for $1 million. The recipient of the cheque was Bob Isherwood, the worldwide creative director. He was briefed to spend it as he saw fit to put Saatchi & Saatchi back on the map as a creative force. Hytner said the message to staff and clients must have been clear. The cheque made a statement: ‘This company has the unreasonable power of creativity at its heart.’ The prime directive for a creative leader is to be brave enough to champion talented people and good ideas. Or sometimes, as Kevin Roberts did, to stand up for the importance of creativity itself.

7 Say thank you

However outwardly confident and decisive they are, creative leaders often display a curious humility. A lot is made of the value of charisma. But creative leaders tend to be humble about their own contributions; charismatic in a different way. This stems from the realisation, however creative they are personally, they are not the sole fount of ideas – even if they were when the business began its life. They allow ideas to bubble up from the bottom, in fact they encourage it.

Lion TV managing director Nick Catliff recognises the tension between humility and ego: ‘When you’re the leader you cannot be too dominant – you can’t be the “biggest dog in the room” anymore. It’s a tension between steering and pushing an idea forward, making it happen, but listening to others. But you also need to be very confident in your judgement. As the leader it will probably be you who pitches the idea to clients, or the boss. And pitching is all about walking into a room and believing in yourself and the idea. In our industry 99 per cent of pitches end in failure. For that you need a pretty robust ego.’²³ Robust ego with tough personality always needs to be balanced with humility. Ben Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, once shared with me his simple but compelling insight: a conductor doesn’t play a note, but leads the orchestra to play perfectly in tune and on tempo to make beautiful music.²⁴

An acknowledgement of the value of others isn’t just about generosity; it’s based on a sensible survival instinct. Researchers analysed an internet start-up offering a new, sophisticated form of computer graphics from its inception to its collapse seven years later. While the business enjoyed initial success, ultimately it was unsustainable because it depended too much on the genius of its award-winning founder and took organisational creativity for granted.²⁵

I’ve witnessed ‘I-can-do-it-all-syndrome’ many times. Diego Rodriguez, a partner at the award-winning global design firm IDEO, calls this the ‘lone inventor myth’. He argues that in modern business most innovations draw on many contributions.²⁶ When I worked with a renowned senior TV executive, developing her leadership team, she made a point of travelling around the global businesses to listen and to hear how ideas had made it on the screen in regular informal get-togethers. It was her way of learning and acknowledging creative people working on the best programmes.

The scarcest resource in any business is time; but creative leaders need to be able to find enough of it to say thank you, to acknowledge great work. In several decades of studying business creativity, US academic Teresa Amabile highlights simple encouragement as a vital success factor. She writes that good managers ‘freely and generously recognise creative work by individuals and teams often before the ultimate commercial impact of those efforts is known.’ By contrast, bad managers kill creativity ‘by failing to acknowledge innovative efforts or by greeting them with scepticism’.

8 Explain creative tensions

Leaders need to be comfortable with the Yin and Yang of creative business. Creative businesses – and the people who lead them – are like circus performers who teeter on rolling steel drums with a foot planted at opposite ends of a plank balanced on the top. They need to make the constant adjustments necessary to hold the equilibrium. It isn’t a simple black or white response to the question: ‘Are we creative or commercial . . . are we A or B?’ The answer must be: ‘We are both creative and commercial – we’re A and B.’

The tension at the heart of a creative business is the constant discussion, debate and occasional battle between creativity and making a profit. The creative versus commercial tug-of-war needs to go on forever. An honourable tie is what we’re looking for; but with creativity celebrated more obviously, widely and passionately. Jeremy Shaw, the chief operating officer of digital advertising agency Kitcatt Nohr Digitas, concluded there is something to be gained by letting all staff know how they have spent their days and weeks on timesheet records to make the link between activity and profitability. But he doesn’t run this exercise on a weekly, or even monthly, basis; he knows this would emphasise profit too much.

Steve Jobs was aware of this balance at the heart of creative business. At the end of his famous product demonstrations, Jobs finished by showing a sign at the intersection of ‘Liberal Arts and Technology Streets’.²⁷ He knew creativity occurs when different attitudes, knowledge sets and disciplines intersect. He was a leader that connected creativity to technology; art to engineering. There were always better techies (Bill Gates for one) and better designers (Jobs hired one: Jonathan Ive). But Jobs was a connector that allowed electricity to flow between the two opposite poles. A creative leader must embrace opposites and demonstrate that they’re not mutually exclusive. In this way you can transform normal business wisdom into creative business wisdom. Creative businesses must embrace the fact opposites can – and do – live together under one roof.²⁸ After all, the clue is in the seemingly odd bedfellows of the two-word descriptor:

creative + business.

Sometimes it’s not about balancing opposing ideas – but about resolving tension by transforming people’s views of what a business is all about. A creative leader becomes an expert in translating that language of normal business into creative business speak (see Figure 3.3).

figure 3.3 Translating normal business into creative business speak

Electric conclusion

Creative leadership is a lifelong journey. It is about finding the spark inside you that will help kindle a spark in others. There is no formula, but you can speed up your personal development by understanding and practising the eight key principles in this habit – and combining these with your own unique approach and style.

1 Hegarty, J., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme at BBH London on 24 June.

2 Drucker, P.F., 2008. The essential Drucker: the best of sixty years of Peter Drucker’s essential writings on management. New York: HarperBusiness.

3 Carr, A., 2010. The most important leadership quality for CEOs? Creativity. Fast Company [online]. Available at: <www.fastcompany.com/1648943/most-important-leadership-quality-ceos-creativity>.

4 Robinson, K., 2011. Ken Robinson on the principles of creative leadership. Fast Company [online]. Available at: <www.fastcompany.com/1764044/ken-robinson-principles-creative-leadership>.

5 Catliff, N., 2013. Nick Catliff, managing director at Lion TV, interviewed by Greg Orme on 21 May.

6 Goffee, R. and Jones, G., 2006. Why should anyone be led by you? What it takes to be an authentic leader. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press Books.

7 With thanks to Heifetz, R.A. and Linsky, M., 2002. Leadership on the line: staying alive through the dangers of leading. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

8 Goffee, R. and Jones, G., 2006. Why should anyone be led by you? What it takes to be an authentic leader. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press Books. p.29.

9 Ibid.

10 Inspired by Covey, S.R., The seven habits of highly effective people, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

11 Judy Rees.

12 Amabile, T.M. and Khaire, M., 2008. Creativity and the role of the leader. Harvard Business Review, October. Available at: <http://hbr.org/2008/10/creativity-and-the-role-of-the-leader/ar/1>.

13 Murphy, S., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme at Sky Grant Way, Isleworth on 29 August.

14 Capodagli, B. and Jackson, L., 2009. Innovate the Pixar way: business lessons from the world’s most creative corporate playground. McGraw-Hill Professional.

15 Kitcatt, P., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme, 1 October.

16 Ogilvy & Mather, 2009. The eternal pursuit of unhappiness: being very good is no good, you have to be very, very, very, very, very good. Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. p.45.

17 Business & Finance [online], quoted in: <http://thelearnersway.net/ideas/2013/3/31/google-reader-skeumorphism-games-apps-and-schools>.

18 Olins, W. 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme at the Saffron HQ in London, 22 May.

19 Ogilvy & Mather, 2009. The eternal pursuit of unhappiness: being very good is no good, you have to be very, very, very, very, very good. Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. p.45.

20 Ibid., p.36.

21 Netflix, 2009. Reference guide on our freedom and responsibility culture.

22 Hytner, R., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme at Saatchi & Saatchi, London, 26 September.

23 Catliff, N., 2013. Nick Catliff, managing director at Lion TV, interviewed by Greg Orme on 21 May.

24 Zander, B. and Stone Zander, R., 2000. The art of possibility. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

25 Amabile, T.M. and Khaire, M., 2008. Creativity and the role of the leader. Harvard Business Review, October. Available at: <http://hbr.org/2008/10/creativity-and-the-role-of-the-leader/ar/1>.

26 Ibid.

27 Isaacson, W., 2012. The real leadership lessons from Steve Jobs. Harvard Business Review, April 2012.

28 Collins, J. and Porras, J.I., 2000. Built to last: successful habits of visionary companies. London: Random House Business Books. p.43–5. The authors talk about the ‘No Tyranny of the Or (Embrace the Genius of The And)’. The Yin and Yang symbol is used throughout the book rejecting (p.43) ‘the rational view that cannot easily accept paradox’.