10 ms·

Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

99 points by da5e 15y ago

meanJim 15y ago
"Time spent on the job must be accounted for in 15-minute increments, daily. Fail to do so, and you'll be docked $8.63" Oh.
- eCa 15y ago
  Yes, it's like something out of The Hudsucker proxy.
adaml_623 15y ago
The advertising business. Probably isn't the same as IT. Although keeping track of your time so you can figure out how much time a similiar task may take in the future is pretty sensible.
joe8756438 15y ago
How much of the workforce in advertising is actually "creative?"
michaelpinto 15y ago
Creativity doesn't need a rule. That's why it's creativity.
- rdiddy 15y ago
  But people do...
  - joe8756438 15y ago
    I don't.
  - sbashyal 15y ago
    Creative people? If you're in the middle of an idea and keep on taking breaks to log your 15 minute updates?
losethos 15y ago
What's wrong with muses? I do money laundering with muses. I do a comic, God gives me a melody. That sort of thing. http://www.losethos.com/hymns.html http://www.losethos.com/hymns.html Angels are VERY clever. They try to be just. I think if you are a good boy and do work, they bless you with ideas. This drill seargent idea probably works, but don't kid yourself -- any good ideas might not be your own. I'm pretty confused on where myself begins and ends.
invalidOrTaken 15y ago
I get the feeling advertising is a very "pure" industry, by which I mean its business model is pretty well set, and widely understood: take "creative" people, put them in offices, sell their services. Compare that to the software industry: Who is the software for? Will we charge for it, and if so, how much? What is possible and what is impossible? How long will it take? What's the most important part? In software, the answers to these questions either change quickly or are opaque to the layman. In advertising, it's easy: The account execs sell to companies, the "creatives" to consumers. We've done something similar a million times, so it will cost $x. Richard's strategy could probably work with a large development shop that made (not technically ground-breaking) "the official" apps for companies.
- dhx 15y ago
  Marketing: who is the client? what image are they trying to create? what are the target demographics? how much time do they have? how much money do they want to spend? which mediums should be targeted? Those factors can change quickly depending on news and current affairs, someone beating you to an original idea, technological changes and business changes (mergers, new services/products becoming the focus). Software development, by your metrics, is very similar. Instead of selling marketing people, you're selling programmers.
  - smilliken 15y ago
    I believe the grandparent was referring to a product company instead of a consultancy. A software consulting company does indeed have a lot more in common with a creative agency.
ryanlchan 15y ago
If you read the article, it doesn't actually ever mention how creativity benefits from having tight time constraints (the drill sergeant metaphor). The closest I saw was a theory that Richards' agency didn't go bankrupt when Hyundai ended their contract, taking 10% of revenues with it, because of his tight time-tracking and budgeting.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  My takeaway was that creativity doesn't have to suffer because of time constraints imposed, not that creativity is necessarily enhanced by them.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense. If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so. The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.
- nickpinkston 15y ago
  Re: Real Artists Ship I was expecting them to talk more about getting people structure to get them shipping more and challenging themselves - a la Jobs'. Instead, it really did feel like that place was a soul-grinder. The guy they interviewed didn't even work there anymore - telling...
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work. If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you shouldn't work there. At the same time there are surely creative people out there who bristle at the idea of working through the night or on weekends. To those people a workplace that closes at 6pm and enforces a no-work policy after that would be appealing. The beauty of this article is it tells us both ways work. So people who want to close down at 6pm can start a company and draw other like minded people to them. While people with no interest in that lifestyle can stay away
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this. Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning. If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.
MarkTraceur 15y ago
How I read this headline: "Creativity doesn't need a mouse...." Result: http://i.imgur.com/XGSNx.png http://i.imgur.com/XGSNx.png
jakeonthemove 15y ago
Well, I can work in any conditions, however I'm most creative (as in "original ideas" creative, not "see what others are doing and do it, too") when I'm motivated by something, not pushed by discipline. It's hard to explain, but I believe his employees would take a job at Google or Apple (or heck, even Microsoft) any time of the day - if they really wanted to be pushed (not motivated) to their limits, they could've just joined the Navy :-).
recoiledsnake 15y ago
I fail to see how coming to work at 9 and leaving at 5:30 would've failed the company. Having time to do relaxing stuff in the evening and get more sleep can help the brain unwind and foster clear thinking and creativity.
alabut 15y ago
Everyone is making (probably well deserved) ad hominem attacks on the ad agency, but the principle of structured creativity isn't a bad one. Steven King once said his muse is a drill sergeant with a flat top lurking in his basement. The book The War Of Art has a similar perspective from a dance choreographer about how she breaks through creative blocks.
- tjr 15y ago
  I didn't really see the article describe much about the principle of structured creativity. I would have liked to have seen that.
  - alabut 15y ago
    True, it didn't explain the principle but that wasn't the point of the article - it was to show it in use and document this particular case study. It's up to the reader to pull out lessons learned. I'm personally a fan of using the pomodoro technique to break down tasks into manageable chunks with mini deadlines. A simple countdown timer does a lot to get my competitive juices going and just get started.
systemtrigger 15y ago
I love this part: "Creativity and drudgery are not mutually exclusive, Richards deduced as he toiled away. Instead, they enable each other. A good idea can come from anywhere. Expressing it in a way that jumps off the page—fresh, elegant, exciting—requires, first and foremost, relentless hard work."
nostrademons 15y ago
Is this why the ad industry is getting eaten for lunch by Google/Facebook?
- adorton 15y ago
  How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.
  - Detrus 15y ago
    Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers. Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the industry, with new specialties like SEO/data mining/brain science taking on a larger role.
    - jiggy2011 15y ago
      Not so sure, allot of internet advertising still looks allot like traditional advertising to me. When I watch stuff on youtube it's very often prefaced with a 10-30 second video advert for something. I'm assuming these adverts were designed by people with "traditional" advertising skills. Not to mention image/flash animation based ads that have been around for even longer. Allot of advertising works simply by forcing your attention to it, such as "you can't watch the video you want until you watch this" or more annoyingly "this box is going to obscure the text of this website for the next 10 seconds". A growing trend in adverts seems to be "interactive" ones, for example playing 10 seconds of video than forcing the viewer to make a choice which will affect the next 10 seconds of video. These things literally force you to acknoledge the advert. I can see this becoming more common, pherhaps even to the point where you get something like "You can watch this episode of Dexter for free but first you must watch this clip and answer correctly this short quiz about the brand of washing detergent featured". I doubt that simple text based adverts such as google adwords will totally trump old school loud obnoxious stuff (although I wish it would). I think it will be a very long time before we have good enough data mining/AI programs that can magically generate perfectly targetting adverts for products without any creative input. If that world did come to pass we would probably be mostly redundant anyways.
pnathan 15y ago
Americans love their fun and to have their undisciplined freedom. It's not particularly popular to say, but disciplined work yields the best results. Can't say as I think ties will help with discipline tho'.
6ren 15y ago
My experience is that creative work is trial and error. Can try to put yourself in a position to have inspiration, but then your actual task is to catch it when it comes, and then figure out how the hell to make it work. If it doesn't, then try something else. By being immersed in the work, working it, you are more likely to have inspiration (Poincare worked like this). Sometimes you have inspirations that are solutions to a problem - sometimes you have inspirations of what a problem is, and that it would be really cool to solve it, and that a solution exists (just, not what it is). Some writers have this attitude too, saying they keep fixed hours when they must be at the typewriter, whether they feel like it or not. [Note: this is successful writers, who publish regularly - some might call them hacks, like Stephen King. Hobbyist writers don't need this.] There's an old writer's saying that nicely sums this up: Inspiration strikes he who is at the typewriter
dhx 15y ago
Is this a case of enforcing strict work hours and conditions as a "performance management" technique to ensure employees aren't slacking off? I imagine it is difficult to know whether someone in a creative job has actually performed as much work as they claim to have done. The other plausible reason for strict work conditions that comes to mind is for highly collaborative jobs. Jobs where you're not paid to work on your own and produce result X, but rather, you're paid to be part of a team, continually bouncing ideas off each other to produce result Y. I guess it would be similar to pair programming -- with more than 2 people involved. Other than the reasons above, I can't see much reason for forcing people to work in a strictly-enforced rule-based workplace. Have I missed something?
flocial 15y ago
People are so caught up with office hours (which I think work because they expect people to come early but leave on time) but the real gem is rigorous quantification of tasks in 15 minute increments. It's like the Pomodoro technique at double speed. “I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline,” Steve Jobs http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/24/3227298/steve-jobs-delves-deep-into-complex.html#ixzz1cpSYuH94 http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/24/3227298/steve-jobs-delv...

99 points by da5e 15y ago

"Time spent on the job must be accounted for in 15-minute increments, daily. Fail to do so, and you'll be docked $8.63" Oh.

eCa 15y ago
Yes, it's like something out of The Hudsucker proxy.

adaml_623 15y ago

The advertising business. Probably isn't the same as IT. Although keeping track of your time so you can figure out how much time a similiar task may take in the future is pretty sensible.

joe8756438 15y ago

How much of the workforce in advertising is actually "creative?"

michaelpinto 15y ago

Creativity doesn't need a rule. That's why it's creativity.

rdiddy 15y ago
But people do...
- joe8756438 15y ago
  I don't.
- sbashyal 15y ago
  Creative people? If you're in the middle of an idea and keep on taking breaks to log your 15 minute updates?

losethos 15y ago

What's wrong with muses? I do money laundering with muses. I do a comic, God gives me a melody. That sort of thing. http://www.losethos.com/hymns.html http://www.losethos.com/hymns.html Angels are VERY clever. They try to be just. I think if you are a good boy and do work, they bless you with ideas. This drill seargent idea probably works, but don't kid yourself -- any good ideas might not be your own. I'm pretty confused on where myself begins and ends.

invalidOrTaken 15y ago

I get the feeling advertising is a very "pure" industry, by which I mean its business model is pretty well set, and widely understood: take "creative" people, put them in offices, sell their services. Compare that to the software industry: Who is the software for? Will we charge for it, and if so, how much? What is possible and what is impossible? How long will it take? What's the most important part? In software, the answers to these questions either change quickly or are opaque to the layman. In advertising, it's easy: The account execs sell to companies, the "creatives" to consumers. We've done something similar a million times, so it will cost $x. Richard's strategy could probably work with a large development shop that made (not technically ground-breaking) "the official" apps for companies.

dhx 15y ago
Marketing: who is the client? what image are they trying to create? what are the target demographics? how much time do they have? how much money do they want to spend? which mediums should be targeted? Those factors can change quickly depending on news and current affairs, someone beating you to an original idea, technological changes and business changes (mergers, new services/products becoming the focus). Software development, by your metrics, is very similar. Instead of selling marketing people, you're selling programmers.
- smilliken 15y ago
  I believe the grandparent was referring to a product company instead of a consultancy. A software consulting company does indeed have a lot more in common with a creative agency.

ryanlchan 15y ago

If you read the article, it doesn't actually ever mention how creativity benefits from having tight time constraints (the drill sergeant metaphor). The closest I saw was a theory that Richards' agency didn't go bankrupt when Hyundai ended their contract, taking 10% of revenues with it, because of his tight time-tracking and budgeting.

mgkimsal 15y ago
My takeaway was that creativity doesn't have to suffer because of time constraints imposed, not that creativity is necessarily enhanced by them.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense. If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so. The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.

nickpinkston 15y ago
Re: Real Artists Ship I was expecting them to talk more about getting people structure to get them shipping more and challenging themselves - a la Jobs'. Instead, it really did feel like that place was a soul-grinder. The guy they interviewed didn't even work there anymore - telling...
TomOfTTB 15y ago
I don't buy that at all. It's impossible to look at the success The Richards Group has had and conclude it's all "moderately creative trash". More to the point it's insulting to the people who did that work. If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you shouldn't work there. At the same time there are surely creative people out there who bristle at the idea of working through the night or on weekends. To those people a workplace that closes at 6pm and enforces a no-work policy after that would be appealing. The beauty of this article is it tells us both ways work. So people who want to close down at 6pm can start a company and draw other like minded people to them. While people with no interest in that lifestyle can stay away
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  All ads are trash. They do not aspire to art - only to hook the viewer with a few seconds of nonsense. Ad people are perfectly aware of this. Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning. If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.

MarkTraceur 15y ago

How I read this headline: "Creativity doesn't need a mouse...." Result: http://i.imgur.com/XGSNx.png http://i.imgur.com/XGSNx.png

jakeonthemove 15y ago

Well, I can work in any conditions, however I'm most creative (as in "original ideas" creative, not "see what others are doing and do it, too") when I'm motivated by something, not pushed by discipline. It's hard to explain, but I believe his employees would take a job at Google or Apple (or heck, even Microsoft) any time of the day - if they really wanted to be pushed (not motivated) to their limits, they could've just joined the Navy :-).

recoiledsnake 15y ago

I fail to see how coming to work at 9 and leaving at 5:30 would've failed the company. Having time to do relaxing stuff in the evening and get more sleep can help the brain unwind and foster clear thinking and creativity.

alabut 15y ago

Everyone is making (probably well deserved) ad hominem attacks on the ad agency, but the principle of structured creativity isn't a bad one. Steven King once said his muse is a drill sergeant with a flat top lurking in his basement. The book The War Of Art has a similar perspective from a dance choreographer about how she breaks through creative blocks.

tjr 15y ago
I didn't really see the article describe much about the principle of structured creativity. I would have liked to have seen that.
- alabut 15y ago
  True, it didn't explain the principle but that wasn't the point of the article - it was to show it in use and document this particular case study. It's up to the reader to pull out lessons learned. I'm personally a fan of using the pomodoro technique to break down tasks into manageable chunks with mini deadlines. A simple countdown timer does a lot to get my competitive juices going and just get started.

systemtrigger 15y ago

I love this part: "Creativity and drudgery are not mutually exclusive, Richards deduced as he toiled away. Instead, they enable each other. A good idea can come from anywhere. Expressing it in a way that jumps off the page—fresh, elegant, exciting—requires, first and foremost, relentless hard work."

nostrademons 15y ago

Is this why the ad industry is getting eaten for lunch by Google/Facebook?

adorton 15y ago
How are agencies threatened by Google and Facebook? They aren't creative ad agencies. They provide publishing media (Google's AdWords, PPC ads, Facebook ads, fan pages, etc) and tools (Google Analytics) that agencies use to advertise more effectively. If anything, I'd say Google, Facebook and the like are helping ad industry grow.
- Detrus 15y ago
  Simultaneously the print industry is dying. Ad agencies are not used to the new mediums. You can advertise on Google and Facebook without the overhead of designers and rich media production. Big old agencies are cutting staff and outsourcing to smaller "techy" shops. The number of total employed and revenue may have fallen, I haven't seen the numbers. Either way, there will be significant reorganization of the industry, with new specialties like SEO/data mining/brain science taking on a larger role.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    Not so sure, allot of internet advertising still looks allot like traditional advertising to me. When I watch stuff on youtube it's very often prefaced with a 10-30 second video advert for something. I'm assuming these adverts were designed by people with "traditional" advertising skills. Not to mention image/flash animation based ads that have been around for even longer. Allot of advertising works simply by forcing your attention to it, such as "you can't watch the video you want until you watch this" or more annoyingly "this box is going to obscure the text of this website for the next 10 seconds". A growing trend in adverts seems to be "interactive" ones, for example playing 10 seconds of video than forcing the viewer to make a choice which will affect the next 10 seconds of video. These things literally force you to acknoledge the advert. I can see this becoming more common, pherhaps even to the point where you get something like "You can watch this episode of Dexter for free but first you must watch this clip and answer correctly this short quiz about the brand of washing detergent featured". I doubt that simple text based adverts such as google adwords will totally trump old school loud obnoxious stuff (although I wish it would). I think it will be a very long time before we have good enough data mining/AI programs that can magically generate perfectly targetting adverts for products without any creative input. If that world did come to pass we would probably be mostly redundant anyways.

pnathan 15y ago

Americans love their fun and to have their undisciplined freedom. It's not particularly popular to say, but disciplined work yields the best results. Can't say as I think ties will help with discipline tho'.

6ren 15y ago

My experience is that creative work is trial and error. Can try to put yourself in a position to have inspiration, but then your actual task is to catch it when it comes, and then figure out how the hell to make it work. If it doesn't, then try something else. By being immersed in the work, working it, you are more likely to have inspiration (Poincare worked like this). Sometimes you have inspirations that are solutions to a problem - sometimes you have inspirations of what a problem is, and that it would be really cool to solve it, and that a solution exists (just, not what it is). Some writers have this attitude too, saying they keep fixed hours when they must be at the typewriter, whether they feel like it or not. [Note: this is successful writers, who publish regularly - some might call them hacks, like Stephen King. Hobbyist writers don't need this.] There's an old writer's saying that nicely sums this up: Inspiration strikes he who is at the typewriter

dhx 15y ago

Is this a case of enforcing strict work hours and conditions as a "performance management" technique to ensure employees aren't slacking off? I imagine it is difficult to know whether someone in a creative job has actually performed as much work as they claim to have done. The other plausible reason for strict work conditions that comes to mind is for highly collaborative jobs. Jobs where you're not paid to work on your own and produce result X, but rather, you're paid to be part of a team, continually bouncing ideas off each other to produce result Y. I guess it would be similar to pair programming -- with more than 2 people involved. Other than the reasons above, I can't see much reason for forcing people to work in a strictly-enforced rule-based workplace. Have I missed something?

flocial 15y ago

People are so caught up with office hours (which I think work because they expect people to come early but leave on time) but the real gem is rigorous quantification of tasks in 15 minute increments. It's like the Pomodoro technique at double speed. “I’m one of the few people who understands how producing technology requires intuition and creativity, and how producing something artistic takes real discipline,” Steve Jobs http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/24/3227298/steve-jobs-delves-deep-into-complex.html#ixzz1cpSYuH94 http://www.kansascity.com/2011/10/24/3227298/steve-jobs-delv...