Habit 8

Balance focus with freedom

How to manage creative tensions

Managing creative tensions

Creative businesses are chock full of creative tensions. For anyone who craves a clear-cut, black-and-white existence it can be a challenge. Balancing day-to-day tensions and striving for seeming opposites can seem strange. An innovative company is riddled with perilous balances – it’s a defining feature. It’s all about embracing this reality, rather than fighting it.

Dame Gail Rebuck, chairman of the UK arm of Penguin Random House, puts it this way: ‘To manage a creative business is like navigating a sea of paradoxes. Anyone who can’t cope with that probably shouldn’t be in a creative business. Our role is to balance the two ends of the see saw and somehow knit the paradox together. Creative people love certainty – they like to think they live in a protective microcosm. So, I always thought my role was to be a rock of certainty in this uncertain universe. To be calm . . . not to panic. Being a creative leader is like handing out life rafts the whole time while navigating the currents of change.’²

Coping with the tensions in a creative business follows the logic of a brainstorm. You defer judgement at the beginning, knowing an environment with less negative criticism will help bring out more courageous ideas. But we know at some point we’ll need to pick good ideas, and kill the bad ones. Creative leaders therefore need to develop the skill to intervene at the right moment during the process, to bring in commercial reality at the right time. It sounds odd but, in the same process, they need to be non-judgemental and then, at some point, they need to be judgemental. There’s no formula for this – it’s based on intuition, empathy for the people coming up with the ideas and experience.

Managing director of Lion TV Nick Catliff makes for a great lunch companion. Fast and funny, he’s insightful about what makes a creative business tick. He’s equally committed to commercial success and creative excellence. He believes managing tensions is the essence of creative leadership: ‘It’s about being pulled in different directions. A director says to me he needs an extra day shooting, but I need him to be on budget. That tension requires a judgement call about the value of that extra day. And it’s not about balance. Balance implies a calm decision-making process and that you know all the facts and can judge the outcome. You don’t. You’re managing tensions.’³ Creative business leaders have to live with this Yin & Yang of creative business; here are just a few more tensions:

• Creativity versus commerciality
• Time to create versus urgency to deliver
• Supportive to staff versus challenging to staff
• Excellence versus accepting failure
• Delivering what customers want versus delivering what customers need
• Profit in proven products versus investment in unproven products
• Living the values versus challenging the status quo
• Process-focused versus goal-focused
• Serious versus fun

First, let’s explore the benefits of laser-like focus. Then we’ll turn 180 degrees to see why clarity always needs to be leavened with freedom.

Focus

Focus at business level

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 it was in a mess. It was just a few months away from bankruptcy, with a dwindling 4 per cent share of the PC market and annual losses exceeding $1 billion. Three CEOs had come and gone in a decade; board members had tried to sell the company but found no takers. At the time, rival CEO Michael Dell said, if he ran Apple, he’d ‘shut it down and give the money back to shareholders’.⁴

The company was selling a wide, and rather confusing, array of computers and add-ons. There were a dozen different versions of the Macintosh alone. In the first few weeks after he came back, Jobs sat through hours of review sessions about the product portfolio. Finally, he’d heard enough. ‘Stop! This is crazy,’ he shouted. In the stunned silence he grabbed a marker, stalked up to the whiteboard and drew a simple two-by-two grid. At the top of the two columns he wrote ‘Consumer’ and ‘Pro’. Then he labelled the two rows ‘Desktop’ and ‘Portable’. He turned around and made an announcement that changed the strategy and the fortunes of the business. He told his team their job was to focus on developing just four products – one for each square in the grid. He added one more thing: all other products should be cancelled.

Jobs definitively answered the crucial strategy question: Where is your focus? Put another way: What do you want to say ‘yes’ to? What do we want to say ‘no’ to? He later remarked: ‘What not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.’ Focus was dear to Jobs’ heart – and one of the reasons why the business became so successful after he returned to the helm.

After he’d turned the business around, he made a habit of taking the top leaders on a retreat each year. On the final day he would stand at the whiteboard and ask: ‘What are the 10 things we are going to do next?’ His lieutenants would fight to get their idea on the board. As the discussion subsided, 10 potential products would remain. At this point, Jobs would cross off seven explaining: ‘We can only do three.’⁵

What he meant, of course, is Apple could do only three things brilliantly well and better than the competition. Jobs’ almost pathological urge to focus, to pare down, to simplify has become an Apple motif. He once declared: ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’ You can see this philosophy at work if you compare Apple’s software with its rival, Microsoft. As Microsoft becomes ugly and complicated with added features, Apple follows a focused design ethic of simplicity.

The kid in a sweetshop

Focus should be a mantra for any business. But it is particularly important when plying your trade in new ideas. There’s precious little that’s tangible about a knowledge business. The only thing to see is an office, some laptops and people. Value lies in the unique culture, the creative energy and that most modern of assets: intellectual property in the form of brands, patents, copyright and trademarked processes. This lighter-than-air quality leads to agility, an entrepreneurial spirit and a flexibility that’s exciting and full of potential. But there’s an ever-present challenge: if you can turn your hand to pretty much anything, what do you say no to?

Creative people can do anything, and they often try. I call it the ‘kid in a sweetshop’ syndrome. Everything looks so appetising and interesting management ends up trying to do everything, being average at everything, and feeling a bit sick when it looks at the profits – and the success of its rivals. The key to focus is being crystal-clear about what you want to be famous for.

There are obvious benefits to focus on:

• Excellence: You get very good at what you do. Focus leads to mastery. What business professors call a ‘core competence’: the way your people work together. It’s made of the creative attitude brought to projects, technical know-how, reliable processes and trusting relationships with customers and suppliers. Understanding what you’re good at as a team or a business provides a liberating focus. For example, Sir Richard Branson knows Virgin is not just about recording music, driving trains, providing broadband or managing financial services. It’s actually about offering the best customer service. This focus has led to a uniquely Virgin core competence. Ironically, for a quality that’s about focus, it’s allowed Virgin to be successful in a wide variety of markets.
• Reputation: Being excellent naturally leads to a good name with customers and with potential employees. Creativity is by its nature somewhat subjective – so fame is the ultimate differentiator. It is why winning an Oscar (or Cannes Lions Award or Yellow Pencil, the equivalent in advertising and design industries) is so important in the creative industries. It’s not just ego. Awards bestow vital credibility on the creative output of a business. That’s why it’s not unknown in the advertising world to have ‘awards won’ as a key performance indicator in a commercial strategy.

Focus at project level

Focus needs to be consistent from the dizzy heights of commercial strategy to the creative business coal face: projects. In the advertising industry they call project-level focus the ‘freedom of the tight brief’.⁶ An advertising brief is the hallowed document agreed with the client before work starts. It throws down a gauntlet for the agency to respond to with a creative solution. Artists intuitively understand working within rigid bounds liberates creativity: they have embraced self-imposed limitations for centuries such as canvas size and poetic forms such as sonnets or haikus. Perhaps the best-judged and most simple brief of all time was provided in 1501 by the elders of a Florentine Cathedral to a 26-year-old Italian sculptor: ‘Please turn this six tonne block of marble into a statue of the biblical hero David’. The specific brief didn’t stop Michelangelo from producing a masterpiece of Renaissance art; it spurred him on.⁷

The insight for creative leaders: you won’t cramp someone’s creative style by presenting them with a focused business objective and clear criteria. In fact the opposite is true. When people understand the rules of the game, they play more creatively to arrive at an ingenious solution. On the other hand, if you want to kill creativity, start with a blurred focus or move the goalpost every few weeks.

Context, not control

It is about providing sufficient insight for people to make good decisions within their teams or projects, as shown in the following table.

Good context	Too much control
Make overall strategy and assumptions clear Provide a tight brief Link goals to company objectives Define roles and responsibilities Provide transparent decision making Prioritise deliverables Communicate project success criteria	Top-down decision making Management approval needed for new ideas or small changes in direction Management by committee Planning and process valued over results

Source: From Netflix, ‘Reference guide on our freedom and responsibility culture’ 2009, p.78.

Time travel

In August 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King delivered his spine-tingling ‘I have a dream’ speech. In front of 250,000 people he poetically described a USA free of racial prejudice. It was an electric sermon built around a single phrase, ‘I have a dream’. It still has the ability to move people today. When you speak from the heart, people respond.

You need to provide a focused vision of the future for your employees or team members. A vision is how the world will look and sound when your business or team succeeds in its objectives. Visions don’t have to be flashes of rhetorical genius like Martin Luther King’s; but they do need to inspire. It can be as simple as what your office might feel like when it changes for the better. To be a success it needs to engage employees with the excitement of joining forces to make them come true.

Once upon a time …

I once worked with an introverted and highly intelligent MD who had been asked by a global board to turn around an underperforming operating company. I challenged him to be creative about communicating his vision for the future. It was an urgent task, as employees desperately needed some encouragement in what was a very tough time. He took the exercise to heart. A week later he emailed me with a document, which began: ‘Once upon a time . . .’ Using the structure of a simple first-person story, he’d skilfully painted a picture of what he was seeing, hearing and feeling on a typical day in the office three years in the future. He gave it real colour, humour and emotion – talking about the team’s joy when they won a particular client (which at that point was with a competitor), as well as the pride and emotion of energising a flagging culture. His management team listened in silence. They were clearly surprised to see this quiet and calm guy had such burning passion hidden away underneath his rather cool surface. After giving him an unexpected round of applause (I think they even surprised themselves), they asked him to repeat the story at an all-staff event the following week. His vision inspired many people in the business to turn things around.

Freedom

With focus, offer freedom. Once you have pointed out the mountain you want your people to conquer, don’t be too prescriptive about how they should climb it. Point at a challenging snow-covered peak in the distance and exclaim: ‘I don’t care how you do it; just get to the top of that.’ Non-creative businesses offer the following prescription:

• First, put on your boots.
• Second, use the handy and detailed map provided for you by your line manager.
• Third, lean your body weight forward and swing your right leg. You are now what we call ‘walking’.
• Fourth…

You get the picture.

Gordon Torr, author and former creative director of JWT, one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies, puts it this way: ‘We should be absolutely clear what “freedom of process” means. It means: in the period between the brief and the creative solution, complete autonomy needs to be granted to the creative people involved. This includes the freedom to work on it where they want to, when they want to and how they want to. It means they must be trusted to use their time and available resources in the way that suits them, not in the way that suits the company. It means that their performance will be measured only on the quality of the result and not on the way in which they want to go about getting there.’⁸ The advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather expressed it like this: ‘We don’t like rigid pecking orders. We give our executives an extraordinary degree of independence, in the belief that freedom stimulates initiative. We dislike issuing orders; the best results are produced by men and women who don’t have to be told what to do.’⁹

Freedom to experiment

Spencer Silver is famous in the world of business innovation because he failed. In 1968 Silver was a young scientist working at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. He was trying to develop super-strong glue, but he got it completely wrong. Instead of developing tough, muscular glue, he came up with the opposite: weedy, weakling glue that was sticky only when some pressure was applied. But, Silver was a determined young man and promoted his ‘invention’ within the company for five long years, despite the inevitable jibes and jokes. Things weren’t great for Silver, but then serendipity struck.

In 1974, a colleague called Art Fry came up with the idea of using the glue to anchor a bookmark in his hymnbook. Because the glue was not very tacky, it was also reusable and so perfect for something that might need to be stuck to surfaces more than once. Buoyed up by his small success, Fry continued to work on applications for the glue in what the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company called ‘bootlegging time’: hours put aside for scientists to run free and develop their own ideas.

Offering this freedom in the 1960s must have seemed like a big risk. But it paid off. The company now offers more than 600 products using the weedy glue in more than 100 countries.¹⁰ When you look down at your desk you’ll probably catch sight of the result of Spencer’s failure, and Art’s perseverance: the humble Post-It Note. Now an established office icon, the Post-It Note is not so humble in terms of profit. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company has now shortened its rather unwieldy name to 3M. It makes and sells more than 55,000 products worldwide: everything from waterproof sandpaper to Scotchlite, the reflective material that helps people to be more visible on roads at night. The business is now ranked as the third-most innovative company in the world.¹¹ Its culture of invention is reflected in an impressive statistic: 30 per cent of its $30 billion sales come from new products.¹²

Bootlegging time is now called 15 per cent time in 3M: how long every week 3M people spend pursuing speculative ideas that are not necessarily anything to do with their job specification. 3M is famous for pioneering the peculiar idea that workers should do as they please for some of the time. You can see why: big breakthroughs come when people venture beyond their area of expertise and start asking dumb questions like ‘Why don’t we try it this way instead?’ As with all speculative, creative endeavours this leads to a lot of ‘wasted time’. But it also produces the occasional acorn – like the Post-It Note – that grows to be a mighty oak.

Enlightened companies have picked up on this idea of offering autonomy for new product development:

• Google upped the stakes and increased the free time for its people to a day a week – 20 per cent time. It asks its engineers to choose what takes their fancy – from fixing an existing product to something entirely new. Google News, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Sky and Google Translate have all come from this ability to work autonomously.¹³ Google says its most successful innovations are the ones that bubble up from the ranks.¹⁴
• Corning makes the tough Gorilla Glass that graces the front of iPhones.¹⁵ Its R&D lab requires scientists to spend 10 per cent of their time on ‘Friday afternoon experiments’ to develop ‘slightly crazy ideas’. Sometimes they are pet ‘passion’ projects superiors have discontinued. For instance, a Corning genomics technology business was developed on an idea that was officially killed by the head of research – but doggedly pursued on Friday afternoons.¹⁶
• Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis encourages scientists to spend a portion of their time working on drugs for ‘niche’ diseases. The criteria consists of two questions: 1) Is it scientifically possible to develop?; and 2) Does it meet an unmet medical need? Note they don’t ask the question ‘What’s the market?’; but instead, ‘Is there a patient suffering who could be cured with today’s knowledge?’¹⁷
• Linden Lab, the company that manages the virtual world, Second Life, claims the autonomy offered to workers leads to the company’s greatest success stories.¹⁸
• Every quarter, Australian software company Atlassian encourages its 400 or so ‘geeks, beer drinkers, nerf herders, fraggers, and Wolverine-wannabes’ to participate in ‘24-hour hackathons’. They were originally called ‘Fedex Days’ because employees deliver the project overnight.¹⁹

These managerial decisions are supported by comprehensive analysis of creative success. A study of patents filed by 11,000 research and development employees found workers were more fired up by their work – and filed more patents – when projects were intellectually challenging and independently motivated. Self-motivated employees filed many more patents than those solely motivated by salary, benefits and job security.²⁰

The four Ts

Offering freedom can seem daunting and, of course, it does involve some risk. So it helps to break it into the four Ts, listed below. In this way you can decide in which areas, and how far you want to go:²¹

• Time: Could you introduce your own version of bootlegging time? If this sounds a bit radical, could you trial it as a single workshop, or an away day to see what comes out? What criteria are you going to use for what the project should be about? 100 per cent freestyle? Improving ‘something annoying’ in the way you do things now?
• Task: Developing a system in which it is possible for people to put themselves forward for the projects that excites them. Matching people with the right projects at the right time is the key to great people management.
• Team: Allowing people to lobby to move on to different teams, or poach talent from elsewhere in the business for their team. Allow supply and demand for talent to help you reward your most effective and creative people.
• Technique: Offering people the widest possible latitude to the ‘how?’ of their job. Can you introduce some feedback in your processes to find out if the people on the front line might find a better way? The old-fashioned suggestion box is only a laughing stock because so many companies have failed to put good ideas into practice.

Ignore the boss

The production of a film shares a lot of characteristics with a business project. A key cast and technical crew are brought together at the right time during the project to produce something that’s never been seen before. The director’s role is to guide the creative process to achieve his or her vision. It is a potent analogy for creative tension: a balance between following direction and the possibility for individual acts of artistic and technical creativity by actors, cinematographers, animators and editors.

Legendary director Woody Allen is unusual. He invents most of the central ideas for his films himself, as well as writing the script. You would think this would make him obsessively controlling of his vision; quite the reverse. In fact, Allen has been called ‘the least directing of directors’. Over five decades of making films, he’s honed a simple way of getting the best out of creative people:

1. Hire the best talent you can find.
2. Allow them as much freedom as possible.
3. Ask their opinion of how things should be done.

In 1995 a young actress, Mira Sorvino, landed a central role as a prostitute and part-time porn star in Woody Allen’s film Mighty Aphrodite. Naturally, she expected to be told what to do by the great man. So, she was taken aback when he turned to her and said: ‘You don’t have to say any of the words I’ve written, if you don’t want to.’ She recounted: ‘I was shocked. Because I was like: This is the best genius comedy writer we have; his script is so fantastic, why wouldn’t I say the words?’ But Allen insisted, telling her: ‘The script is just a blueprint. It’s whatever makes you as funny and natural as possible; so, if you want to say something else, go ahead and say it.’ Mira followed his advice and won an Academy Award for the role.

Woody Allen has a very clear vision for all of his film projects. But he knows it will be more vibrant and interesting if his co-collaborators bring their ideas to the party. His allowance for deviation from the blueprint has its limits. The actors must stick to the intention of the scene and the lines they are ad libbing around. But, if they comply with this, they can then make the part their own. It means they are keen to give their very best. The actor Josh Brolin, who starred in Allen’s 2010 film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, puts it simply: ‘He’s just one of these guys you want to please.’ The paradoxical outcome of a leader’s confidence in allowing freedom is summed up by Larry David, the writer of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, who has appeared in Allen’s films: ‘This notion I hear that he doesn’t direct is kind of ridiculous. He gets what he wants.’²²

The co-founder of Hewlett Packard, David Packard, brags in his book, The HP Way, about an employee who took this idea of freedom so far he disobeyed a direct order. Chuck House was working at HP’s lab in Colorado Springs, devoted to oscilloscope technology. He was told in no uncertain terms to abandon the development of a display monitor. He ignored his supervisor and embarked on a holiday to California – taking his own time to stop along the way to show potential customers the prototype. He even persuaded his R&D manager to rush the monitor into production. Some years later, at a gathering of HP engineers, Packard presented Chuck with a medal for ‘extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty’. The monitor resulted in sales of $35 million.

Box ticking versus going the extra mile

In 2013 Swindon Borough Council in the south of England asked contractors to paint double yellow lines in the alleyways behind some houses to prevent parked cars blocking the way. They gave detailed instructions. Most of the job was done satisfactorily. The reason the story achieved national media attention was the instructions failed to mention the contractors were not supposed to paint lines in the narrow pedestrian alleyways next to the roads. The result: a number of alleyways efficiently painted with yellow lines on each side with a gap between them of 33cm – about the width of a laptop. A local commented with admirable understatement it was a ‘bit of a mystery’ as ‘you couldn’t even fit a motorbike down it’.

Telling people exactly what to do all the time is a dangerous game in any business. The world is more complicated than any rulebook you can write. A rules-based, box-ticking culture steals away any impulse for independent thought. It might buy compliance, but at a heavy cost. The opposite happens when an employee is so inspired by creative business values that they go the extra mile. While working with Virgin Media I stumbled upon a powerful example. A call centre operative was scanning the records of her team when she came across multiple complaints from Graham, a particularly tricky customer.²³ He’d been phoning day-in day-out, saying he couldn’t work the remote control for Virgin Media’s set-top box. He wasn’t happy; the problem hadn’t been resolved. The Virgin employee knew calling him back would take time. But she did it anyway. After genuinely listening, she did something remarkable. She found a remote control for the box in question and took it home. She rooted around in her garage, found a spray can, removed the remote’s facia, painted it white, replaced it, and posted the customised remote to the customer. The next day she received an email enthusiastically thanking her. He was partially sighted so he hadn’t been able to make out the remote’s black buttons against the standard black facia. Amongst the Virgin values, written on the wall near the employee’s desk, are three she delivered on with one small act of kindness: insatiable curiosity, heartfelt service and delightfully surprising. Virgin Media is now developing a range of different colours for all its remote controls.

Electric conclusion

Managing a company for new ideas is paradoxical; resolving creative tensions goes with the territory. Leaders and managers need to ensure everyone in the business is aware of the balance required between focus and freedom.

Of course, freedom is not absolute. It’s like free speech. Just as it’s illegal to shout ‘Fire!’ in a theatre, it should be against the rules to do anything that might be dangerous or unethical in a business. And there are some markets – such as nuclear power, medicine and health and safety – where freedom clearly needs to be more tightly subscribed. But the empowering philosophy of focus and freedom works for all managers seeking to increase creativity. Point to a mountain, but let employees decide their route to the top.

1 McCord, P., 2014. How Netflix reinvented HR. Harvard Business Review, January–February.

2 Rebuck, G., 2013. Interviewed by Greg Orme on 7 November.

3 Catliff, N., 2013 Interviewed by Greg Orme on 21 May.

4 Stone, B., 2011. Steve Jobs: the return, 1997–2011. Bloomberg Business Week [online]. Available at: <http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-return-19972011-10062011.html>. 6 October.

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

6 Torr, G., 2008. Managing creative people: lessons for leadership in the ideas economy. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

7 David (Michelangelo) Wikipedia entry available at: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo).>

8 Torr, G., 2008. Managing creative people: lessons for leadership in the ideas economy. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. p.253.

9 Ogilvy & Mather. Corporate Culture. Available at: <www.ogilvy.com/About/Our-History/Corporate-Culture.aspx.>

10 Pink, D.H., 2009. Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. Edinburgh: Cannongate Books. p.95.

11 The Economist, 2012. The roots of creativity: throwing muses. The Economist [online]. 17 March.

12 3M website. Available at: <www.3m.com>. See also: <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/most-admired/2013/snapshots/284.html>.

13 Pink, D.H., 2009. Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. Edinburgh: Cannongate Books. p.95.

14 A claim made by Intuit co-founder Scott Cook in 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>.

15 Bell, K., 2012. Lighter, stronger, Gorilla Glass 2 coming soon to your iOS devices. Cult of Mac [online] 2012. Available at: <www.cultofmac.com/138304/lighter-stronger-gorilla-glass-2-coming-soon-to-your-ios-devices/>. .6 January.

16 Sutton, R.I., 2001. The weird rules of creativity. Harvard Business Review. September. p. 96.

17 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>.

18 Ibid.

19 Atlassian website available at: www.atlassian.com/company

20 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>., p. 7. A convincing analysis was put forward by Henry Sauermann, then a doctoral candidate at Duke University (now at Georgia Tech), who presented new research carried out in collaboration with Duke Professor Wesley Cohen.

21 Pink, D.H., 2009. Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. Edinburgh: Cannongate Books. p.93.

22 Woody Allen: a documentary, Part 2 [TV programme], BBC, 2013.

23 The names have been changed.