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OK, so maybe that title is meant to provoke a response, but is that so wrong? This post is about arguments, after all. Or put another way: I’d like to argue that the best businesses are, in essence, arguments.

There are many definitions of the word “argument,” but the one I want to focus on is the one that comes up first when you type define:argument into Google: “A fact or assertion offered as evidence that something is true; (as in) ‘it was a strong argument that his hypothesis was true.’”

In my experience starting businesses, and in my study of other businesses that have succeeded wildly (like Apple, Google, or eBay), every great business is founded in a thesis, a statement of what should be true. It’s then the business’s job to go prove that thesis - in essence, the business becomes the argument that proves the thesis.

Wired, for example, was founded on the thesis that digital technologies were forever changing the face of human society - from culture to politics, business to pleasure. We then made a business out of proving that thesis. Every single issue of Wired, every page of HotWired, every book we published and every deal we did was an argument proving that thesis. Read entire article.

Posted in Leadership, Planning & Strategy

Many companies place ‘creative stimuli’ like pool tables in their offices to inspire remarkable ideas, but what actually materializes as a result? Whether your office is made up of cubicles or open-plan architecture, your workspace should foster a culture of Productive Creativity.

You can learn a lot about a person from taking a look around their home. Since everything communicates, a brief glimpse at a bookcase is a lens for what your colleague finds interesting. Much like you can tell a lot about a person by looking around their home, you can understand a company’s culture from their workspace. Read entire article.

Posted in Leadership, Planning & Strategy, productivity

Visionary leaders run the risk of overriding the ideas of the brilliant people around them.

Jack Welch, legendary CEO of GE, was known to walk in a room of great people solving important problems and proclaim “Here’s what I think we should do.” He would go on to explain his vision and reasoning. And then, after sharing his solution for the problem at hand, he would ask, “what do you think?” It is no surprise that he would get many nods of affirmation and not much disagreement or new, bold ideas.

Perhaps this is sometimes necessary in a large corporation, but never in a creative team. After all, a creative team’s purpose is to exchange, digest, and refine ideas. If you fail to capture the insights from each member of the team, then you are actually “losing value.”

The tendency to “act first” is a fatal flaw for leaders in the creative community. Read entire article.

Posted in Leadership

How should we reconcile our tendency to seek the advice of experts with our desire to also question the status quo and try things differently? As creative professionals, we cannot become imprisoned by the past, but we must also not be stubborn and spend our time reinventing the wheel.

There is a somewhat healthy tendency in every discipline to defer to the knowledge of elders. Starting with the original “apprenticeship” structures of the 19th century to the traditional corporate hierarchies that permeate our life today, societies are built on collective wisdom from the past. Major conferences around the world gather industry “experts” to share their wisdom. We painstakingly listen to our elders’ projections as if they were coming from an oracle. Read entire article.

Posted in Planning & Strategy