Creative Streak

Is It Better to Be Decisive or Flexible When Presenting Ideas?

This is a group of responses based on one of the most popular posts I've written in the three years since Creative Streak began. How To Make A Creative Director Cry outlines the ten most common responses I've heard as a creative director, with links to each subsequent post giving more thoughts and suggestions to address each statement. This is statement #9: "That's an interesting idea. What else do you have?"

Statement #9 is a distillation of many debates in my creative director career about the best way to present ideas to a client or project manager.

There are two schools of thought. Present the client with several ideas from which to choose. Or, present the client with one definitive idea.

Several ideas?

From the presenter’s point of view, a selection of ideas demonstrates the breadth of their creativity, and by extension, a range of alternatives for implementation for the client. But from the client’s point of view, a selection of ideas can look overwhelming, if not unfocused.

The problem typically lies in how the ideas are presented. In what order are the ideas presented? In what context or reasoning? Like a comedian, do you start with your funniest joke? Or like a storyteller, do you take the client on a journey with the most compelling idea coming at the end? Or, are the ideas presented without preference, neither highlighting nor elevating one idea about the others?

Is Pret A Manger the new Zappos?

In case you didn't see it over the weekend, a profile in the New York Times on the restaurant chain Pret a Manger entitled "Would You Like a Smile With That?" It's a great case study on teamwork and customer service.

When I lived in London for a month in March, the £24 charge for breakfast drove me out to the nearest Pret every morning. The food and service were impeccable, and I can't wait for them to land in Chicago.

Here's their US website. The food photography alone gets a big thumbs-up.

The Four Agreements, Applied to Business

Many people deservedly know Don Miguel Ruiz from his appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s television show to speak about his philosophy in his book The Four Agreements. I was introduced to him by my friend Greg in New York who gave me the audio book as a gift.

But, true to the Aussie personality, friends here in Sydney scoffed at the New Age spiritualism and the "icky" motivational philosophy ... and I had to agree, during the moment.

But when I re-read the book again this weekend, I was struck again by its relevance to the business environment. If you could scrub clean the Aquarian elements from its core philosophy, you might agree its essential clear tenets which should describe the behaviour of the most effective leader, a strategic creative thinker, or an ideal team member.

Be impeccable with your word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others day and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

Don’t make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can do avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

Always do your best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

If you like Ruiz' style and philosophy, you'll love his website.

If you're curious about the book, take a look here, on Amazon.

Bits & Bytes, April 26

Some slow posting lately, but lots to read on creativity elsewhere on the web. Here's a few of my recent favourites.

Creativity and Lawyers

Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of Major League Baseball in the US, and a lawyer by education, wrote a commentary on how he changed his own views about creativity as it relates to business.

“If a client came up with what we saw as a creative solution to a business problem, it was often our job as lawyers to explain why that route was illegal. In business, we saw creativity as the effort to do — often indirectly — what should have been done directly. In that world, a “creative” answer was not the admirable, straight answer.”

Creativity and Teams

From Edward Glassman’s book, Team Creativity At Work II: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best, some interesting thoughts in this article on teams and creativity. Specifically, that the single biggest factor to enable people to be more creativity: other people.

“The biggest factor that helps people to be more creative, according to about half of 450 people I have surveyed, is "other people." Items like time, challenge, and freedom occur at a much lower frequency. Rewards are hardly mentioned. Conspicuously absent are customers and vendors, who usually want to help. One person wrote: "The biggest help to my creativity is when my boss leaves town."

Creativity and Solving Problems

While I can’t exactly account for the background of its author on an online news database, I do agree with this commentary from a news syndicate in Hawaii on the power of problem-solving, and more so, I like the simple definition of creativity.

“The intelligent solution to a problem seems to involve more than trial and error. It often requires a fresh insight based upon a sudden shift in the way the problem is viewed. Creativity always is the answer to a problem.”

Creativity and Accounting

Here’s something I never thought I’d read: an article in favor (correctly!) of “creative accounting”!

"If you think about it, I bet many of you are positively creative every year, month, week and day. You have to find ways to track and get the accounting right on new business transactions. You are asked to find ways to change the old methods of doing things in order to track more transactions, more accurately with less labor. You are asked to find better, faster ways to report the results of the business so that management can make better decisions quicker. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. CPAs need to be creatively accurate.”