
 Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant. - da5e
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201111/stan-richards-unique-management-style.html
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invalidOrTaken
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.

~~~
dhx
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
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.

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InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
jfarmer
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...](http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/02/quantity_equals.html)

~~~
kitsune_
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.

~~~
skb_
My own work-flow is kind of a mixture of the two. I find that I have to play
around with my synths a bit just to find that right sound - it might not be
the right sound for the current project, but I save it just in case. Same
thing with melodies, I have a ton of files with unfinished melodies that I
mine ideas from.

My best work is actually a culmination of these "snippets" that I build up
over a few months/weeks. It's like with each mediocre/average project I
produce, I'm discovering the parts of the great one not too far off.

It's the same thing with code, design and all my other creative projects. I
have to wade through a lot of weaker ideas and designs in order to discover
the best parts. And once I figure those out, it's mostly a rewrite of all my
past ideas into the one good idea.

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

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

~~~
alabut
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.

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jakeonthemove
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 :-).

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6ren
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

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systemtrigger
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."

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joe8756438
How much of the workforce in advertising is actually "creative?"

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adaml_623
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.

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

~~~
rdiddy
But people do...

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

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dhx
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?

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flocial
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...](http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/24/3227298/steve-jobs-delves-deep-
into-complex.html#ixzz1cpSYuH94)

------
pnathan
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'.

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

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adorton
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.

~~~
Detrus
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.

~~~
jiggy2011
Not so sure, allot of internet advertising still looks allot like traditional
advertising to me.

When I watch stuff on youtube it's very often prefaced with a 10-30 second
video advert for something. I'm assuming these adverts were designed by people
with "traditional" advertising skills. Not to mention image/flash animation
based ads that have been around for even longer.

Allot of advertising works simply by forcing your attention to it, such as
"you can't watch the video you want until you watch this" or more annoyingly
"this box is going to obscure the text of this website for the next 10
seconds".

A growing trend in adverts seems to be "interactive" ones, for example playing
10 seconds of video than forcing the viewer to make a choice which will affect
the next 10 seconds of video. These things literally force you to acknoledge
the advert. I can see this becoming more common, pherhaps even to the point
where you get something like "You can watch this episode of Dexter for free
but first you must watch this clip and answer correctly this short quiz about
the brand of washing detergent featured".

I doubt that simple text based adverts such as google adwords will totally
trump old school loud obnoxious stuff (although I wish it would).

I think it will be a _very_ long time before we have good enough data
mining/AI programs that can magically generate perfectly targetting adverts
for products without any creative input. If that world did come to pass we
would probably be mostly redundant anyways.

~~~
Detrus
That type of crud is done by people who come from old media companies and
think of the web as a hot new thing in 2011.

Agencies charge for how much production work they can do for the commercial -
video shoots, retouching, flash, etc. This doesn't necessarily deliver
conversions but no one is taking it seriously because the web is seen as
secondary to print and TV.

Bad user experience is just that, bad. On TVs it's tolerated because you don't
have as much choice as you do online. TiVo's major selling point was it let
you skip commercials.

Apple's iAds have good UX, so do many ad network startups like
<http://decknetwork.net> You don't need to be annoying to use targeted display
advertising online.

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

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

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

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recoiledsnake
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.

