Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy
By Gordon Torr
Published by Wiley, May 08
Drawing from the leading lights of creativity research and a lifetime of experience in creative businesses, in Managing Creative People, Gordon Torr takes a scalpel to the institutionalised idiocy that is stifling the generation of ideas in today’s corporations. The curse of the brainstorm, the commoditisation of creative talent, the deskilling of the imagination, the startling inadequacies of management theory – these and other horrors of idea-assassination are dissected and disembowelled in this cutting expose of the drama that unfolds every time a new idea slides across the boardroom table.
The extraordinary growth of creative businesses, such as film, video games, music, broadcasting, publishing and advertising, has shifted the traditional focus of management from the organisation of skills and resources to the mysterious art of mining the imagination. Now the glacial predictability of corporate process has come up against the notorious unpredictability of the creative temperament, and business leaders are confronted with the challenging paradox of managing the unmanageable.
The resulting clash between control and creativity, between measurement and the immeasurable, between the ideology of growth and the growth of ideas, is exacerbated by the myths and misunderstandings that hamper our quest for innovation and originality.
Not without occasional justification creative people are often regarded by their managers as a species of alien whose motivations are impossible to fathom. And the non-conformity of the creative temperament is famously difficult to accommodate in structured organisations. The response of management theorists, unable to predict or measure the productivity of creative workers, has been to co-opt the pliable ones into management roles and to deny among the rest of them the existence of any form of creative skill that cannot be taught to the uncreative majority.
Which is why, as Gordon Torr argues in the book, two guys in a garage will continue to outperform major corporations in the desperate race for originality. And the consequences go far beyond the woeful inability of big creative-sector companies to bring a steady stream of fresh ideas and innovations to the marketplace. At stake is the vitality of popular culture itself.
Passionate, polemical, yet eminently practical, Managing Creative People is the essential guide to understanding how, when and where to get the best out of that most precious of resources – the imagination of the talented individual.
Download a chapter here
About the author
Artist, journalist and musician, Gordon Torr has lived and worked in South Africa, Mexico and the UK. He was Creative Director of one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies before launching his consultancy, The Unfactory, which specialises in the organisation and management of creative sector companies. Visit www.gordontorr.com.
ISBN: 978-0-470-72645-7; Hardback; £24.99 / €33.80
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