In this week’s Agency Creative Series, we have reflections from creative directors behind three primetime Emmy Award-winning commercials on the challenges that lie ahead for the industry. In that spirit, we present in this column some observations on “The Future of Creative Leverage” as excerpted from a most worthwhile read–the recently released book Juicing The Orange, How To Turn Creativity Into A Powerful Business Advantage (Harvard Business School Press), authored by Pat Fallon and Fred Senn, cofounders of Fallon Worldwide.
Fallon and Senn write that they enter their next quarter century convinced of three things:
- Creativity will be an increasingly essential business tool.
Think about the challenges of your own organization this way: other than creativity, what points of leverage do you have? More than likely, your resources will become more constrained, and your markets will be more hotly contested. If you can’t put creativity to good use, you’ll be vulnerable–to competitors from anywhere in the world. We opened this book by saying imagination was the last remaining legal means to get an edge on your competition. Increasingly, it’s the only means. - You can’t buy creativity, but you can unlock it.
Everyone draws from the same talent pool, and only the George Steinbrenners of the world have any recruiting advantage. Salary, benefits, and geographical amenities won’t necessarily determine the creative power of your company. “It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment,” writes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “than by trying to make people think more creatively.” Rather than hire more creative people, first unleash the creativity in the people you already have on the payroll. - Creativity is not an easy path to walk but the rewards are worth it.
One of the heads of a rival agency in town once came up to us at a local restaurant. Nothing that we would get paid whether we did creative advertising or not, he joked, “Why do you have to do it the hard way?”
One reason is that we’ve seen the rewards, and not just with our own work. Almost every success story of the past ten years–whether it was something as brash as Apple’s iPod or as unassuming as Saturn’s promise for a car company you could love–has been because of creativity.
The survival of the fittest doesn’t mean the survival of the strongest; it means the survival of those who are most capable of adapting to change. If you can’t adapt, you can’t survive. Maybe we are reflexively attracted to the hard way because we dread the alternative.
And part of the “Final Thought” expressed in the book by Fallon and Senn is simply:
“We don’t want to compare what we do to great works of art, but we do want to support our belief that creativity motivates all of us in powerful ways. Think about the Sydney Opera House. Not only is it an aesthetically beautiful building, there is something inspiring about the city’s decision to embrace the creativity of its design. Whatever satisfaction the architects got out of dreaming up this building is matched by the satisfaction the people in the community get out of having this icon be a part of their lives. Art does as much for the audience as it does for the people who fight to bring it to life.”
