This will come as a shock to those of you who know me pretty well. I took Studio Art when I was in college. That’s right – the guy whose handwriting is indecipherable (no Catholic school education here, kids) tried to make pretty pictures (and failed miserably although I passed the course).
The reason I bring this up is that I did something way out of my comfort zone that actually helped me later in my business life (although who knew at the time). No, not because I could do a great job on the white-board (my diagrams are awful and that’s being generous). It helped because I got a look over the fence at real artists and here’s how it helped.I’ve spent a lot of years on the business side. I conceive and negotiate deals, among other things, and while that takes creativity, it’s of a different sort than that of writers, TV producers, and others. In a sense, they’re on different planets although we operate in the same solar system and that’s the point.
When I had to supervise those folks, I had to respect that they saw the world through a different prism. To some, business was a painful fact of life that they did their best to ignore. To others – the smart ones – business was the “day job” that made their art possible. On my side of the fence, their creativity was sometimes frustrating (the different drummer to which they marched was often very out of beat) but it was the core of what pulled folks to view our content, whether that was in TV or on the web. I used to remind the team that we were making commerce, not art. That said, without the art, we’d have been pretty unappealing to our potential audience.
I bring this up because I’ve had a couple of conversations recently with business folks who think their production teams just don’t “get it” and they’re trying to figure out how to get them on the same page. Well, you can’t, not exactly anyway. As I learned in studio art there are some folks who are born with a different way of seeing the world and who want to use their talent to express it their way. When they’re working for us we need to be careful not to stifle that creativity until it gets so far from our solar system that it’s useless. I always felt as if the best thing was to let them know how I was evaluating their work (just as the art teacher did) and then not pre-judge what I was going to receive. Sometimes – actually a lot of the time – I was pleasantly surprised by something I never thought to do – maybe because I couldn’t have done it myself.
How’s it look in the other side of your fence?
Consult Keith 