Creative Leadership

Creative leadership is all the rage these days. We hear about it all the time. Google the term and you’ll find half a million hits ranging from consultancies and business school institutes to panels at the World Economic Forum devoted to the topic. It is to the business world today what strategy was to organizations in the 1980s and early 1990s.

For the most part, this concept evokes the traditional ideas of leadership qualities: the importance of vision, passion, courage, transparency. For example, former president of India, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, recently spoke at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School about the key ideas of “creative leadership”:

A vision for the organization
A passion to transform that vision into action
The ability to travel into an unexplored path
The knowledge to manage both success and failure
The courage to make decisions
Practice nobility in management
Transparency
Integrity

These are great, albeit clichéd, notions. But in reality, this approach to leadership—like most current approaches—misses key points that are crucial for running effective organizations. And obviously, leadership should be about running effective organizations.

In our approach to leadership education at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, we place much more emphasis on analysis, organizational design, and the creation of a culture of innovation. Building a lasting culture of creativity that transcends a given leader is the ultimate expression of creativity. But how is this achieved? How do leaders construct truly innovative organizations?

The Complexity of Creative Leadership

It is a little too easy to take potshots at the fields of strategy and economics right now, but it’s relevant for our discussion here. For three decades, economists have been content to analyze the world through theoretical mathematical models, which are impressively complex in terms of math but horribly simplistic in their assumptions about the real world. Such approaches contributed greatly to the accounting scandals of 2000-01 and the economic meltdown of 2008.

Truly creative leaders recognize that complexity is something to be cherished, examined, analyzed for opportunities; it is not something to be assumed away for the elegance of a theoretical mathematical model. Complexity exists on two levels: (1) the macro-level complexity of the organization’s environment; and (2) the micro-level complexity of the human dynamics within the organization.

Take the creative success of Pixar. The company was born in the 1980s upon core animation technology nurtured at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, grown at Apple amidst the wider computing technology revolution of the ’90s, and has thrived in the digital entertainment era since as a maker of full-length animated films, finally being acquired by Disney in 2006. At the macro-level, the company’s longtime leaders, notably co-founder Ed Catmull, navigated these changing environments and collaborated with other industry leaders, while always maintaining Pixar’s vision not to have the best technology, but to tell great stories.

At the same time, the company has maintained a commitment to address its own, inherent complexities through Pixar University. This professional development program offers ongoing employee education, but does so by bringing together engineers, writers,

executives, even janitors, to learn more about everything that will help the company make films better and faster—from fine arts to new technologies to acting styles. The result is an inclusive and continually invigorated organizational culture of innovation.

Leadership, Analysis, Alignment

In 1977, Harvard Business School Professor Abraham Zaleznik set a new course for the field of leadership when he penned the essay “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” From that point forward, the field of leadership has been defined around individual personality traits—visionary, intuitive, inspiring individuals who understand work and interpersonal relationships differently than other people do.

What was lost in the personal and individualistic turn in leadership was the importance analysis. In our approach to creative leadership, we shift the discussion away from individualistic traits like charisma, personality, and style. Instead, we emphasize an analytical approach to organizational design focusing on alignment—creating harmony among all of the organization’s component parts. Truly creative leaders do not lead by intuition or charisma but

instead by having the patience to take a step back and think analytically about how the complex parts of their organizations fit together. They think deeply and carefully about how to put the structures in place that will produce a culture of innovation and change.

Consider the work of Michael Conrad at the Leo Burnett ad agency. When he arrived in Chicago in the mid-1980s, his charge as the agency’s first international chief creative officer was to strengthen the creative work as well as the ties between individual offices in the agency network. This was a period of intense internationalization in the industry. Some agencies imposed structures for collaboration from European or U.S. home offices, while others merged into agency groups, thereby losing their own agency differentiation. Conrad analyzed the proudly independent Burnett culture and pursued a third way.He developed a new standard for evaluating advertisements, the so-called “7+” system, which allowed agencies around the world to interact and compete based the quality of their creative work. Over nearly two decades, the Burnett agency network grew larger and more robust through the strengthening of a global organizational culture grounded in the shared value of creative excellence.

The Prescription for Creative Leadership

It is easy to imagine all the great individual qualities that might help leaders to be effective. And all too often, prescriptions for creative leadership focus on changing individual personalities.

But the real key to effective leadership is appreciating and embracing the complexities of modern organizations and taking an analytical approach toward creating a culture of innovation.

The Berlin School is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to research and leadership education for executives in creative industries. By bringing together top creative executives and international leadership experts, the Berlin School will pave the way for new standards in communication and leadership, fostering global discourse on creative leadership in media, entertainment, advertising, design, journalism, and marketing.

At its heart is the Executive MBA in Creative Leadership, a part-time program comfortably spread over one year, taking place in Berlin and othercreative industry hotspots like Chicago, New York, London, Shanghai, and Tokyo.