Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201111/stan-richards-unique-management-style.html

by da5e • 15 years ago

99 54 15 years ago

inc.com

meanJim• 15 years ago

"Time spent on the job must be accounted for in 15-minute increments, daily. Fail to do so, and you'll be docked $8.63"

Oh.

eCa• 15 years ago

Yes, it's like something out of The Hudsucker proxy.

adaml_623• 15 years ago

The advertising business.

Probably isn't the same as IT.

Although keeping track of your time so you can figure out how much time a similiar task may take in the future is pretty sensible.

joe87564382• 15 years ago

How much of the workforce in advertising is actually "creative?"

michaelpinto• 15 years ago

Creativity doesn't need a rule. That's why it's creativity.

rdiddy• 15 years ago

But people do...

joe87564382• 15 years ago

I don't.

sbashyal• 15 years ago

Creative people? If you're in the middle of an idea and keep on taking breaks to log your 15 minute updates?

invalidOrTaken• 15 years ago

I get the feeling advertising is a very "pure" industry, by which I mean its business model is pretty well set, and widely understood: take "creative" people, put them in offices, sell their services.

Compare that to the software industry: Who is the software for? Will we charge for it, and if so, how much? What is possible and what is impossible? How long will it take? What's the most important part? In software, the answers to these questions either change quickly or are opaque to the layman. In advertising, it's easy: The account execs sell to companies, the "creatives" to consumers. We've done something similar a million times, so it will cost $x.

Richard's strategy could probably work with a large development shop that made (not technically ground-breaking) "the official" apps for companies.

dhx2• 15 years ago

Marketing: who is the client? what image are they trying to create? what are the target demographics? how much time do they have? how much money do they want to spend? which mediums should be targeted?

Those factors can change quickly depending on news and current affairs, someone beating you to an original idea, technological changes and business changes (mergers, new services/products becoming the focus).

Software development, by your metrics, is very similar. Instead of selling marketing people, you're selling programmers.

smilliken• 15 years ago

I believe the grandparent was referring to a product company instead of a consultancy. A software consulting company does indeed have a lot more in common with a creative agency.

ryanlchan• 15 years ago

If you read the article, it doesn't actually ever mention how creativity benefits from having tight time constraints (the drill sergeant metaphor). The closest I saw was a theory that Richards' agency didn't go bankrupt when Hyundai ended their contract, taking 10% of revenues with it, because of his tight time-tracking and budgeting.

mgkimsal• 15 years ago

My takeaway was that creativity doesn't have to suffer because of time constraints imposed, not that creativity is necessarily enhanced by them.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense.

If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so.

The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.

nickpinkston• 15 years ago

Re: Real Artists Ship

I was expecting them to talk more about getting people structure to get them shipping more and challenging themselves - a la Jobs'. Instead, it really did feel like that place was a soul-grinder. The guy they interviewed didn't even work there anymore - telling...

TomOfTTB2• 15 years ago

I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work.

If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you shouldn't work there.

At the same time there are surely creative people out there who bristle at the idea of working through the night or on weekends. To those people a workplace that closes at 6pm and enforces a no-work policy after that would be appealing.

The beauty of this article is it tells us both ways work. So people who want to close down at 6pm can start a company and draw other like minded people to them. While people with no interest in that lifestyle can stay away

JoeAltmaier4• 15 years ago

All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this.

Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning.

If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

Perhaps "trash" is going too far, even so I find it offensive that someone would put forward the notion that a work environment that is suitable for producing mildly creative advertisements should be the universal model for all creative work.

Advertisements are perhaps the shortest lived, least substantive, and least impactful creative works.

jfarmer• 15 years ago

When it comes to producing amazing work, quantity beats quality.

That is, it's better to produce 100 things and throw away 99 than it is to sit around a perfect 1. In the end the quality will be higher.

http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/02/quantity_e...

r00fus• 15 years ago

Absolutely this. The trick is to getting where people see you deliver that one out of a hundred, and assume that your quality beats others' quantity.

How are Jobs' keynotes so well delivered? Repetition, iteration, practice, just like martial arts, makes perfect.

kitsune_• 15 years ago

I don't buy into this. I've been producing music for over 10 years now. The "snippet" and fire and forget approach doesn't work. I'm sitting on thousands of different loops, demos, half-finished songs, and so on.

Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- and software synths, fantastic effect plugins and hardware, drum machines, more outboard gear. You tweak and compress, change melodies and harmonies. You press 'save as a new version' every minute.

Your wandering mind be damned, if you want a great track you need to stop, sit down, and focus. All good tracks I come up with come from a focus on quality, not quantity. By the way, in my opinion, iterative refinements do not belong into the category of "quantity", I don't know how anyone could make such a statement.

Of course you sometimes need the sessions to come up with some idea that resonates with you, but after that you (read: I, I'm talking about my own experience) have to force yourself to focus.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

This is how you build skill and artisanship but that's not the sum total of art. Is James Patterson the best writer of our age? He wrote 10 novels just in 2011 alone.

Shockingly there's more to art than a trite truism. If you want to acquire skill, go for quantity. But after that, if you want to become a master, if you want to impact people's lives in a way they appreciate and care about you'll need more than skill, you'll need inspiration.

MarkTraceur• 15 years ago

How I read this headline: "Creativity doesn't need a mouse...."

Result: http://i.imgur.com/XGSNx.png

jakeonthemove• 15 years ago

Well, I can work in any conditions, however I'm most creative (as in "original ideas" creative, not "see what others are doing and do it, too") when I'm motivated by something, not pushed by discipline.

It's hard to explain, but I believe his employees would take a job at Google or Apple (or heck, even Microsoft) any time of the day - if they really wanted to be pushed (not motivated) to their limits, they could've just joined the Navy :-).

recoiledsnake• 15 years ago

I fail to see how coming to work at 9 and leaving at 5:30 would've failed the company. Having time to do relaxing stuff in the evening and get more sleep can help the brain unwind and foster clear thinking and creativity.

alabut2• 15 years ago

Everyone is making (probably well deserved) ad hominem attacks on the ad agency, but the principle of structured creativity isn't a bad one. Steven King once said his muse is a drill sergeant with a flat top lurking in his basement.

The book The War Of Art has a similar perspective from a dance choreographer about how she breaks through creative blocks.

tjr• 15 years ago

I didn't really see the article describe much about the principle of structured creativity. I would have liked to have seen that.

alabut2• 15 years ago

True, it didn't explain the principle but that wasn't the point of the article - it was to show it in use and document this particular case study. It's up to the reader to pull out lessons learned.

I'm personally a fan of using the pomodoro technique to break down tasks into manageable chunks with mini deadlines. A simple countdown timer does a lot to get my competitive juices going and just get started.

nostrademons2• 15 years ago

Is this why the ad industry is getting eaten for lunch by Google/Facebook?

adorton• 15 years ago

How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.

Detrus4• 15 years ago

Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers.

Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the industry, with new specialties like SEO/data mining/brain science taking on a larger role.

nostrademons2• 15 years ago

In the short run, yeah. In the long run, the Internet has fundamentally changed the value proposition of ad agencies, and their old core competencies aren't that useful anymore.

I'm reminded of how in high school and early college, every teenager thinks that the way to get your ideas heard is to shout louder. But if you actually look at effective leaders, ones that change the world, the quality they share is that they listen more. That's what the Internet provides us: a way for brands to listen more to their customers. And when you have that, you don't need an industry that grew up around being able to shout louder.

Detrus4• 15 years ago

The stricter schedule in advertising vs work whenever probably has little to do with it. Advertising by its nature is more predictable, it doesn't have long term, world changing impact. The ultimate problem of selling is easy enough to crack, even if a campaign flops you try again. They're satisfied with their efficiency so no need to invest in neuroscience yet.

In software/science/math there is more variety, some problems are hard to crack. There is also more motivation to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude, to disrupt the market, like Google/Facebook do. Ad agencies don't develop new tech, only adapt to it, so they're vulnerable to obsolescence. At some point advances in neuroscience, behavioral economics and tech will outpace the rate at which most agencies can adapt.

There are agencies that spend crazy hours polishing up their work, or more often mismanaging. But the end result of such effort is more polished work, not necessarily effect, or a larger quantity of work thrown out on a whim. In technology the end result of crazy hours has more potential impact.

klbarry2• 15 years ago

Considering this is obviously and forthrightly shown to be a very unusual method of managing employees in the first few paragraphs of the article, common sense would tell you that this could not be evidence for anything like that.

systemtrigger• 15 years ago

I love this part: "Creativity and drudgery are not mutually exclusive, Richards deduced as he toiled away. Instead, they enable each other. A good idea can come from anywhere. Expressing it in a way that jumps off the page—fresh, elegant, exciting—requires, first and foremost, relentless hard work."

pnathan• 15 years ago

Americans love their fun and to have their undisciplined freedom.

It's not particularly popular to say, but disciplined work yields the best results.

Can't say as I think ties will help with discipline tho'.

6ren• 15 years ago

My experience is that creative work is trial and error. Can try to put yourself in a position to have inspiration, but then your actual task is to catch it when it comes, and then figure out how the hell to make it work. If it doesn't, then try something else. By being immersed in the work, working it, you are more likely to have inspiration (Poincare worked like this). Sometimes you have inspirations that are solutions to a problem - sometimes you have inspirations of what a problem is, and that it would be really cool to solve it, and that a solution exists (just, not what it is).

Some writers have this attitude too, saying they keep fixed hours when they must be at the typewriter, whether they feel like it or not. [Note: this is successful writers, who publish regularly - some might call them hacks, like Stephen King. Hobbyist writers don't need this.] There's an old writer's saying that nicely sums this up:

  Inspiration strikes he who is at the typewriter

dhx2• 15 years ago

Is this a case of enforcing strict work hours and conditions as a "performance management" technique to ensure employees aren't slacking off? I imagine it is difficult to know whether someone in a creative job has actually performed as much work as they claim to have done.

The other plausible reason for strict work conditions that comes to mind is for highly collaborative jobs. Jobs where you're not paid to work on your own and produce result X, but rather, you're paid to be part of a team, continually bouncing ideas off each other to produce result Y. I guess it would be similar to pair programming -- with more than 2 people involved.

Other than the reasons above, I can't see much reason for forcing people to work in a strictly-enforced rule-based workplace. Have I missed something?

flocial• 15 years ago

People are so caught up with office hours (which I think work because they expect people to come early but leave on time) but the real gem is rigorous quantification of tasks in 15 minute increments. It's like the Pomodoro technique at double speed.

“I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline,”

Steve Jobs

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/24/3227298/steve-jobs-delv...

Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

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