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By K-HOLE

posted September 12, 2014

When 032c asked us to explore the idea of creative leadership, our firstquestion was: does that even exist? We decided to ask FLORIANE DESAINT PIERRE, the luxury brand headhunter who placed ChristopherBailey at Burberry and Alexander Wang at Balenciaga. We emailedVENKATESH RAO, a rogue management consultant whos accused start-ups of being design fictions masquerading as businesses. Floriane uses theterm creative leadership to describe a new paradigm piloted in fashion

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K-HOLE Investigates the Phenomenon ofCREATIVE LEADERSHIP

but now spreading to other industries in which creative directors aretaking over the role of the CEO. This dossier investigates this new class ofmutants and its relationship to innovation and big data.

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BECAUSE CREATIVITY

Creativity is kinky. Its a strategic knowledge of how to use old things to getnew results necessary in a world that seems increasingly prone only toburps of progress rather than long, clean stretches. The forward momentumof time, capitalism, and sheer boredom demands that we eke out newnesseven in the moments when everything feels pretty much the same.

Creativity and innovation are auspicious words. They recognize that wedont really know where new things come from. Innovation simplydescends out of the realm of heavenly possibility with an unknowabledeistic logic. If this all sounds a little religious, it is we didnt kill God, wejust stopped anthropomorphizing him. Instead of actively attributing theunknown to the divine, we just presume someone else understands whatsgoing on.

Creativity no longer has an antonym. Once upon a time the opposite ofcreativity was destruction: Genesis and Revelation, yin and yang. Today wethink in terms of creative destruction. Creativity disrupts and it innovates,it cleaves and it fills. Theres a unified opacity and thingy-ness to the worldaround us, and it all bears the traces of human engineering.

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NO NEW THINGS

Everyone wants to know how a successful creator got from point A topoint B. Many companies are willing to oblige, providing an origin storyfor every product. Eager entrepreneurs watch closely for clues to replicate

success. Is it the graph-ruled Japanese notebook? The pour-over coffee? Allof the details are spelled out ad nauseam, but in the end, the trailer hasbecome longer than the feature we paid for.

Portrayals of the creative process formulate a managerial logic for thecreative class. You can think about these displays as employee training:teaching you how to brainstorm, how to organize a workspace, and how toconstruct an environment that will let the creative juices freely flow.Documenting the home offices and personal spaces of creative producerscan ease everyone into feeling less doomed in a world full of permalancersworking between their apartments and incubators.

Creative production works under some hazy economics. Surplus doesntexist when every element can be commodified and any waste can beimmediately repurposed (a bonus when youre trying to be a responsible,ethical brand neoliberal face-palm). Its the Nose to Tail ethos as appliedto creativity. It takes a process that (in the case of creative agencies and seed-round start-ups) uses resources to create intangible goods or creative capitaland makes it look like its running off of its own fuels. With a blind eye tothe pallets of Nespresso and bottled water being consumed, creativity canbe made to seem like a self-perpetuating machine. The creative processbecomes its own ecosystem, where creative energy is a renewable resource.

This is why any creative waste can end up becoming more valuable thanthe end product itself. Beyond sustainability, putting the waste on displayvets the creative process authenticity. You can trace an idea back to thesprawling whiteboards of an incubator, or to the lacquered desk made ofreclaimed wood in its founders swaggy apartment. Internally, this wasteallows for everything to operate at an accelerated speed. Theres no need tostop and consider the next big thing when you can revisit the scrapsknowing that every Post-It contains another possible app.

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BLACK SWANS

The blue sky R&D era was about collective responsibility for innovation.The U.S. wrote the tax code in a way that basically capped executive salariesand offered subsidized credits to funnel that money into weirdo scienceprojects. Some companies are still on this train i.e., Googles relentlessquest to replicate the Star Trek computer while others just let the moneyflood into CEO compensation packages, shareholder dividends, andIreland. Using money to go where no man has gone before is no longer aforegone conclusion. Its something that only grows out of a certaincorporate ethos (or DARPA).

Steve Jobs dying freaked us all out for a variety of reasons. But a big one isthat he intensified the suspicion that astronomic, era-defining success for abrand could only come from a single genius. He made everyone know,

however briefly, that collaboration is a lie and that control cannot benetworked or synthesized. But if innovation has to be centralized in orderto thrive, that means it can die.

Innovation may have become an individual responsibility, but it still hascollective consequences. This is why we want to imagine creative leaders asbermensch. The pro is that it satisfies our desire to have real-life heroessave us; the con is that it means our heroes can abandon us. Practically,both of these narratives benefit the creative leader.

Whereas the CEO provides accountability for risk by navigating themeasurable reality that defines whether a business flounders or flourishes,the creative leader provides accountability for uncertainty. Trolls, culturalappropriation, extreme weather these are the consumer influences that nobig data model can credibly predict. The black swans lurking in the fog.

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HEROES

In todays economy, it pays to be a lot of people at once. The history ofbranding in the 20th century the birth/death/adolescence of the corporatepersonality is about making a group of people (the company) behave likea single person (the brand).

Conversely, the history of heroism is about making one person act with thestrength of 10 men, or at least being impressed when someone gets close.Heroes rise to the occasion. It wouldve been way less cool for Hercules toclean all those stables and fuck all those bitches if hed done it at a randomtime, or for no compelling reason. Heroes strike when the iron is hot.

The creative leaders abilities can seem super-human. Like they have an Xfactor, a mutation for dealing with the sprawling complexity of globalindustrial civilization. We often perceive the X factor as an aura of personalcool. But its clear that the X factor that enables the creative leader is moreform than content and totally situational. The difference between X-Menand regular ol mutants is body armor and a supersonic stealth jet. To turna freak into a superhero, all you have to do is accessorize.

In the same way, the difference between a speaker at TED and a crazyperson screaming in the street is the platform theyre speaking from. Thatswhy creative leadership is priceless, but creative labor is worthless.Successful creative leaders are creatures of amplification. Theyreuninterested in debating who really built it, and think the wholeconversation is just another chicken-or-the-egg dispute, a concession to thestoner dorm logic of political debates.

Creative leaders are a timely negotiation of the individual and the group a discrete configuration of the brand + the hero, the singular + the plural,the now + the whats next. Their executive-creative vision conflates theirpersonal will, the trajectory of a brand, and the thirst of an audience. Theystand for that inconsistency with their creative genius; they vouch for it towhoevers trying to keep the business on track. They rebrand caprice by

performing it sexily to the public or staunchly to a board of directors. Theyknow its their job to act like a mutant, even if in reality they might be acyborg.

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CREATIVE NONFICTION

It doesnt matter to Airbnb whether you have an apartment; real success fora brand moves beyond the distribution of goods and into the distributionof ideas. (For more on this idea, download K-HOLE #2: ProLASTinationfrom khole.net.) Recognition is as valuable as adoption. Haters are asvaluable as followers. Success isnt millions of followers, its envy not justgrowing your existing userbase, but becoming a reference point forsomeone elses.

Summon the creative leader. Theyve promised their genuinity, theirintuition, and their personal experience (or lack thereof). Like any celebrity,they bring a personal audience. Theyre given the privilege to come fromone community and to work in many others, to connect a host of otherniches to their niche. This mobility separates the creative leader from thecreatives and gives the impression that their genius is irreplaceable. If itwerent for the fact that there are lots of other creative leaders, equallyadept at performing themselves, it might seem like theyve beaten thesystem altogether.

The creative leader becomes the line through which the dots are connected if not progress, then someones idea of progress. We get excited whendesigners are traded, like NBA players, to new studios. We watch theminterpret the mission of a brand and challenge it. We actually witness thejump from A to B, from the brand before to the brand now. We dontnecessarily learn anything specific. But we do get a point of entry, andsomeone to idolize or blame.

Creative leaders keep the narrative of late capitalism popping byembodying progress. Without them, we face the existential reality thatliterally everything is beyond human control, that nothing really happensfor a reason. How do you justify the transition to flat interface design? Orthe deployment of an uncomfortably large screen size for a mobile phone?Or the exploi- tation of a step team to spice up a runway collection?Recognizing that there might be too much going on to explain whyexactly, creative leaders offer themselves as the answer to literally everyother question.

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The essay was commissioned by 032c for issue 26(http://032c.com/archive/issues/), Creative Leadership, which also includesinterviews with Floriane de Saint Pierre and Venkatesh Rao.

www.khole.net (http://khole.net)

CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

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