Smart Creatives: Tech and the Search for a Successful Operating Model

'Creative' used to possess different meanings than it does now. And so did 'smart.' But they are changing and converging in ways that those in the gray flannel suits might find astonishing.

Being creative was considered a gift, but often regarded as one with distinct limitations in the organizational context. It meant you had skills and talent, possibly galore, but of a distinctly artistic nature. Advertising, design, maybe communications. Nice, and often useful, but not the stuff from which the hard men and women who focused on numbers and were destined for greatness were usually forged.


Smart meant intelligent, sometimes just a tad too much for your own good. You understood the data and more importantly, what it meant for the client and the firm. Good to know, but whispers about loyalty, entitlement and an eye for the main chance often wafted around the subject in question.

Creatives didnt do math. The smart guys and gals knew what they liked  when it came to design (is there an organization anywhere on earth in which every single employee is not a self-selected expert on advertising?) but couldnt be bothered with the concept stuff.

Well, times have changed. Apple has made it clear that there is money in design. Creativity fuels multi-billion industries and the leading companies within them. But much of that creativity is based on the sources and uses of data. And smart is everywhere. Professional athletes and shop girls wear lens-less glasses to look 'intelligent.' Movie idols invest in start-ups and tweet about it.

But the convergence of creative and smart is where success lies and where the future is going. As the following article explains, Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and their aspirational like have figured out not just how to identify people who possess both qualities, but how to organize themselves so that those people can think, collaborate, innovate and prosper. Along with those who had the good sense to hire them.

This is not just about producing a more effective algorithm to find them, but to inveigle, manage, tolerate and inspire them so that they will do what they do for you rather than a competitor who's raptor-ish urges you may not have yet noticed. Hiring such people is disruptive to processes, structures, inputs and outcomes. Which means it is probably exactly what you need to succeed. JL
 

Steve Lohr reports in the New York Times:

Fast decision-making and flat organizational models have to become a corporate way of life. Companies need to operate like Google, innovating and experimenting more rapidly to stay ahead in manufacturing, transportation, retailing, media, banking and other industries.

Can Google’s winning ways be applied to all kinds of businesses? The authors of “How Google Works,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s former chief executive, and Jonathan Rosenberg, a former senior product manager at Google, firmly believe that they can.

The critical ingredient, they argue in their new book, is to build teams, companies and corporate cultures around people they call “smart creatives.” These are digital-age descendants of yesterday’s “knowledge workers,” a term coined in 1959 by Peter Drucker, the famed management theorist.

But the new breed is a far cry from the staid, organization men of the past. Smart creatives, the authors write, are impatient, outspoken risk-takers who are easily bored and change jobs frequently. They are intellectually versatile, typically “combining technical depth with business savvy and creative flair,” the authors note.

“They are a new kind of animal,” Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Rosenberg write. “And they are the key to achieving success in the Internet Century.”

Their book, written with Alan Eagle, a speechwriter and communications employee at Google, is filled with instructive anecdotes of Google lore. One early story, from 2002, is presented as a distillation of Google’s distinctive culture. Larry Page, the co-founder, was chagrined at how terrible the ads were that were being served up alongside many searches — random and irrelevant. He printed out the searches with the offending ads, marked them, and wrote on top, “THESE ADS” STINK. He pinned the pages to a bulletin board in the company kitchen, and left for the weekend.

Five engineers worked on the ad program over the weekend, without any direct prompting, and solved the problem. That became the essence of Google’s “ad relevance score,” which presented search-related ads based on their relevance rather than how much the advertiser was willing to pay or how many clicks the ads received. The five “problem-solving ninjas,” the authors write, were not even on the Google ads team.

It’s a neat and telling story. But it’s also true that similar stories of smart, creative entrepreneurial teams solving thorny problems are nothing new.

In a joint interview, Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Rosenberg conceded that point, but what has changed, they argued, is the context of an economy that is increasingly digitized and throwing off data. In the past, bursts of innovation by small teams — from IBM’s development of Fortran, the first higher-level programming language, in 1957, to the Apple Macintosh in 1984 — were exceptional episodes within more bureaucratic corporate structures.

Yet today, the authors insist, fast decision-making and flat organizational models have to become a corporate way of life. Cars, jet engines and medical equipment, for example, are all animated by software and often generate vast quantities of sensor data. So it is not just the Internet companies like Google, they say, that need to operate like Google, innovating and experimenting more rapidly to stay ahead in manufacturing, transportation, retailing, media, banking and other industries.

“The world is becoming increasingly digital,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Every major corporation needs a software strategy, needs a data strategy. If not, then you have no real strategy.”

And smart creatives, the authors write, are the key to digital-age speed, strategy and product success. People with their characteristics, they say, have always been around. But in the digital environment, Mr. Rosenberg said, “the degree to which people with that set of characteristics can have an impact is very different than years ago.”

“The defining characteristic of today’s successful companies,” the authors write, “is the ability to continually deliver great products. And the only way to do that is attract smart creatives and create an environment where they can succeed at scale.”

What about becoming a smart creative? Can it be taught and nurtured? How does one train to become one? Here Mr. Rosenberg, now an adviser to Mr. Page, the chief executive of Google, and Mr. Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman, offered somewhat different takes. Mr. Rosenberg, who has an undergraduate economics degree and an M.B.A., said it really helped to start with some quantitative or technical expertise, like computer science or data science, and broaden out from there.

Mr. Schmidt, who is a computer scientist and a former researcher at Bell Labs, said the important thing was not so much education in a specific discipline but to “think analytically” and to adopt that mind-set and mode of thought. “I don’t think you necessarily have to do a lot more,” Mr. Schmidt said.