The one sentence summary

Smart creatives hold the key to success for companies.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • Smart creatives hold the key to success for companies. They are a new breed of employee capable of creating superior products.
  • The internet, mobile and cloud computing have shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers.
  • There are many pearls of advice here, including:
    • Your plan is wrong: keep adjusting and iterating.
    • Keep them crowded: people in close proximity work more effectively.
    • Messiness is a virtue: creative people need to generate stuff and have it around them.
    • Passionate people don’t use the word: they live it.
    • Don’t listen to the HIPPOs: that’s the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. A tenurocracy is where length of tenure gets you promoted, rather than merit.
    • Do all reorgs in one day: forget the 100-day plan and get on with it.
    • Bet on technical insights, not market research: engineers and smart creatives can tell you what is possible; customers probably can’t.
    • Default to open not closed: let people outside the company help to improve your products.
    • Urgency of the role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality when hiring: if they are not right, keep looking.
    • Decide with data: “You’re both right” may be true in opinion-based (overly diplomatic?) companies, but the data should rule decision making.
    • Be a damn good router: good leaders keep information and communications flowing regularly through the company.
    • 70/20/10 time allocation: 70% of resources dedicated to the core business, 20% on emerging, and 10% on new (speculative) work.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Climb, confess, comply is a good management approach. When pilots get in trouble, this is their approach:
    1. Climb: get yourself out of danger.
    2. Confess: talk to the tower, explain that you screwed up and how.
    3. Comply: when traffic controllers tell you how to do it better next time, do it.
  • “I leave out the parts that people skip.” Elmore Leonard, writer.
    • Good advice for emails.
  • “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” Mario Andretti, racing driver.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • It’s debatable whether much of this advice could help any company other than a fast-moving tech one.