Education in Singapore

While I was teaching in Singapore I had the opportunity to learn a lot about their educational system. My course was part of a master's program so my students had all completed their bachelor's degrees, some in Singapore and others in Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other places. I learned about their undergraduate programs and also observed what was going on at my university, and it was interesting to see the differences from the Western (or at least, the American) system.

Many of the things I learned or observed could also be found in the US, of course, but here we hope some of these are exceptions, whereas there they tend to be the rule. And while the educational practices I learned about might be appropriate for the ethnic, political, or social background of the students, I could see a negative effect on creativity and innovation.

I realized early on, of course, that Singaporeans are very pragmatic. Whether this leads to a certain educational style, or is the result of it, I don't know. But for many students there seems to be less interest in actually learning, and more interest in passing the test, getting the diploma, and going to work. The time in school is viewed by many as simply job training, or even worse, as just checking off an item on a list so you can move on to a job. As a result there's not a lot of questioning, nor is there time spent thinking about issues beyond the narrow confines of the syllabus. There's memorization and regurgitation, and that's it.

The faculty, in many cases, encourages this. They lecture for the entire class and when exam time rolls around they expect students to simply repeat what they've heard. Some professors supposedly just read out of a book...the same book the students already read on their own. This isn't usually the case at the graduate level, though one of my peers once remarked that he could do his whole class online without any class meetings, because he didn't expect his students to say anything original in class discussion anyway. personally, I've always been a believer that you're students will meet your expectations, no matter how high -- or how low -- they may be.

I should point out that the students in my class weren't like this themselves. Either they had outgrown that frame of mind, or they had good instructors in their past, but whatever the reason I was blessed with 24 inquisitive students who, after a few weeks, weren't at all shy about sharing their views, even if they contradicted mine. That's what education is supposed to be about, not memorizing stuff and then spitting it back out on a test.

Another aspect of education there is a vast distance between teachers and students. I noticed that undergrads passing by would avert their eyes so as not to make eye contact with me. I later learned that there's almost a sense of fear, and often a sense of combativeness, when students deal with teachers growing up, and unfortunately that feeling continued in college. Relations between students and teachers there have gotten so bad that, when a professor was stabbed by a student (who then committed suicide) the comments on the online news stories almost uniformly suggested the professor must have done something wrong to provoke the student, and possibly even attacked the student first himself. Bad relations between students and teachers limit the opportunity for mentoring and certainly don't help learning.

Once again I'll point out that my students weren't like this. We had a great relationship, and they would often come to my office to chat about things from class and beyond. Among the things they shared with me were their experiences with teachers in university and in secondary school, and that's where I got my first sense of what things were like.

How does this affect creativity and innovation? Well, obviously, people who are trained not to question anything have a hard time developing new ideas. How do you come up with something new if you've repeatedly been told to focus only on what already exists? Students who have their interest in learning beaten out of them (not literally, but it felt that way) are less likely to become Creatives and are more likely to become government bureaucrats (is it any surprise Singapore is scrambling to recruit foreign talent?). And students who are taught to fear their teachers will have trouble later developing a good working relationships with leaders and authority figures, like, for instance, YOU. It's hard for you to guide them if they aren't prepared to do anything besides salute and carry on.

As I noted earlier, we can find these effects throughout US educational systems as well, but hopefully, these are the exceptions rather than the rule. In order to keep our innovative edge, however, we need to encourage even greater interest in learning, even more questioning and challenging of conventional wisdom, and even better social skills on the part of students. You can't teach creativity, but with a proper education, you can provide a strong foundation for it.

Location Location Location

A report on CNN last fall suggested the top 100 places to start your business. Obviously, this is a broad generalization, and you need to consider the needs of your particular creative business before picking a place to live and work. But the report does two important things: it gives you some ideas and information, and it also emphasizes the importance of location.

The phrase "location, location, location" is the mantra of the real estate world, but you need to keep it pretty high on the list of important factors for your firm as well. If you're picking a city in which to launch, or if you're already tied to a city but need to pick a neighborhood, then you need to give some thought to what you need and what your different possibilities can provide. There's a growing sense that with the opportunity for dispersed working that location doesn't matter anymore, but that simply isn't the case. And if you're coming into a firm that's already in an established location, you need to figure out how to take advantage of the opportunities there while minimizing any disadvantages.

So why does location matter?

Well, first of all, it's good if your Creatives are in a stimulating environment. It helps to be around other Creatives, and not just from your own company. Coffee houses, museums, galleries...these are great places for your Creatives to meet and talk with with others, to get inspiration, or just to recharge their batteries. There's a great place in Singapore for example, the Red Dot Traffic Building, which is filled with marketing companies, design firms, music studios, photographers, and other Creatives, who seem to share a lot with others in the courtyard or in the local Pacific Coffee Company (I spent a lot of time there myself). Putting your firm in a city with a good university, or with an active art and music scene, or with something else that encourages creativity, will help you a lot.

What else? Well, frankly, convenience, both in terms of daily commuting and also when it comes to getting in and out of the city. If possible, try to minimize the commuting hassles for your Creatives...you don't want them stressed out from road rage when they get to work, nor do you want them watching the clock at the end of the day so they avoid rush hour. Commuting can take a LOT out of your Creatives, so look for a city with an active urban center to provide a nice centralized location, and if possible try to encourage walking or biking to work, or taking public transport...anything to avoid driving! In terms of getting in and out of the city, it's not surprising that many Creatives enjoy travel, whether to new places over seas or just out of town for the day. Cities with well-served airports, with good road systems leading in and out of town, and with passenger rail service, can make travel easier and your location more attractive.

What do you do if you're stuck with a location but it doesn't give you all you need? Well, when it comes to your city, maybe get involved in the community in a way that helps bring the things you need, like a more active art scene or bike paths to ease commuting. If your neighborhood isn't cutting it, look at how you can design your office space to compensate. For instance, if there are no food and beverage outlets nearby, then provide a nice place within your offices where employees can gather for lunch (with big tables rather than small, to encourage people to sit together rather than individually) rather than having to brown-bag it at the desks all the time. If the commute is bad, try encouraging telework at least part of the week.

Ongoing discussions about the advantages of telework and free agents may suggest that location doesn't matter because remote work is the way to go, but that's really not the case, particularly for your permanent, full-time Creatives. There are advantages to all these different working styles, but while remote work can be necessary based on your circumstances, that doesn't mean it's always the best. As always, you need to consider the needs of your field and your firm and determine what's most important to you. Professor Richard Florida, in a March 2009 article in The Atlantic, discusses Nobel laureate Robert Lucas and notes that

"Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed this."

Location still matters. If you have a chance to choose, then make the most of it. If you're stuck with what you've got, and it's not ideal, do the best you can with what you have.

Shift the Learning, Shift the Style

A great story on Monday evening's All Things Considered talked about the new way of learning to design video games. In days of old (what, 20 years ago?) most video game designers learned from other designers, a form of apprenticeship that we used to see 200 years ago here (and we still see in some forms...some hairstylists go through apprenticeships rather than attending cosmetology school, for instance).

(come read and listen to the complete story on NPR's website)

Passing down one generation's ideas to the next is certainly one means of teaching, but it has the effect of creating a "we do it this way because it's how we've always done it" culture. It creates a "universe" of ideas from which it's hard to break free. Without fresh perspectives from the outside it's hard for a firm to expand, or even survive. Government bureaucracies can get away with this kind of stovepiping, because it's almost impossible to get rid of them, but the same can't be said for your firm.

The idea presented in the ATC story was that by developing their skills in the university classroom rather than simply watching over an experienced designer's shoulder, the new game designers were encouraged to approach the field as an artistic endeavor rather than merely as a technical exercise. This has led to new types of games that use the same technology but in a different way, presenting a different message through the game. By offering up something nontraditional, these designers have the chance to reach new markets, attracting customers who would never play Grand Theft Auto but who might appreciate a more Zen-like video game experience.

Check out the story at the link above and see what you think. Should game design firms be looking only for university graduates? Should they stick to what they've traditionally done? How can they best mix theoretical or artistic education with practical technical training?

An Office for Groups and Singles

While many firms employ telework or a free agency style of working, those concepts may not be right for everyone. For many firms large and small, the office will be the center of the working world. That being the case, it's important to have an office space that inspires ideas and encourages creativity and innovation. And yes, an office space CAN do that, just like it can hurt the ability to do that. When I've worked for different organizations I've never had a workspace that was designed to facilitate creativity, though sometimes there are accidental features that do help.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that balancing collaboration with concentration is critical in a creative environment. While the specifics of your design will depend on factors such as the particular field in which you work, the nature of the creative work you do, or the size of your firm, you really need to keep this concept in mind. teamwork is often important in creative fields, but so is independent work, and you need a workspace that encourages both.

In my current job, we set up a strategic planning division last year, and some of the members were so taken with their newfound importance that they wanted to have all our meetings behind closed doors. This had the double effect of isolating us from all the other divisions with whom we should be working and fueling suspicion that we were up to something like cutting budgets. Though we finally got past this childish point, it did remind us that there are times when you do need to work privately, and having a place to do that, in addition to encouraging collaboration, was important.

The common path taken by creative firms is to get out of individual offices and and have some sort of open floor plan. This is good when you want to cooperate, but can be bad if it creates a noise level that makes independent work difficult. There are some ways to address this. One might be to have individual cubicles designed in a way that minimizes the noise flow throughout the office, while having a central area in the room where people can roll their chairs and discuss. Another option might be to have two rooms...I worked for an agency 10 years ago that had one room with individual cubicles while the other had an open design, and Creatives chose the room in which they wanted to work based on their individual preferences. originally, the leadership was moving in the direction of having both rooms incorporate an open design, because "that's how you encourage creativity," but they weren't taking into account the fact that individuals' work habits differ.

It's worth having informal places for collaboration as well. In many offices, the coffee lounge or snack room can serve this purpose. In my current office that room is very small, has two large refrigerators, a microwave, industrial-size coffee maker, and is located right next to some cubicles so there's a sign asking people to keep conversations to a minimum. In the process, we're losing out on a great, well-lubricated (in a coffee sense) place for some interesting conversations. A better solution might be to have a larger space, with some small tables and a white board or two on the wall, where spontaneous conversations can lead to something productive.

Informal places for self-work would be useful too. When I taught at a small college a few years ago, another professor pointed out what was missing from the large area between the dorms and classroom buildings: benches. Even though thousands of students passed through this area every day, there was no place to just sit and think about what they'd just discussed in class. OK, now, every student's not going to be so introspective as to need a bench, but what this professor pointed out was that the message the school was sending was "get out of class and get back to your room...don't stop to think about what you just learned." Having someplace away from the individual office where one can stop, get a change of scenery, and do some thinking without checking e-mail every 5 minutes, can be a useful thing. For me, i often leave my office and head down to Starbucks for something different, which is great for Starbucks but, because it's along a major corridor in our building, doesn't provide a great atmosphere for deep thinking.

One interesting idea is to incorporate a share bookshelf bookshelf somewhere into your floor plan. Creatives often seem to have more books than other folks and a strong desire to share if only to have someone else with whom they can discuss the latest Christopher Moore novel or new ideas in photography techniques. Having a central place for sharing books, magazines and journals can encourage more professional reading and spark new discussions that can head off in very interesting directions.


As we noted above, the specifics of your design will depend on what attributes are important for your firm's success. There are some good basic principles to follow, though, and one firm full of Creatives offers a useful checklist for office design. There's another interesting article that has a discussion with architects and designers about what they like to put into a creative office...and perhaps, where they'd like to work themselves.

You can go simple or complex in your design, and during the dot com boom many firms included silly elements designed to make the office more interesting. One friend at a web gaming firm in Berkeley had a slide that went between floors, obviating the need for stairs (well, for going down, anyway) and there are plenty of fire station poles, hot tubs, and so forth. There's a place for "highly-designed" offices, and maybe your firm could benefit from that. You might also need something much simpler (and less expensive). Either way, you need to put some thought into what kind of space will best serve your Creatives.

Contingency Planning

Strategic planning is important whether your creative enterprise is large or small. If you do it right it will help you ask the right questions about what you really want your firm to do, how big it should be and what talents you require, how your resources should be spent and how much you need, and basically, how to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Some people avoid planning because, they say, nothing ever goes according to plan anyway. And honestly, they're right. Baron von Moltke wrote about military planning in the 19th century that "no plan survives contact with the enemy," and there's a lot of truth to that. Once you have a bunch of unknowns entering into your equations, all the known vaiables in your plan suddenly seem less important.

You can try to account for this in your strategic planning by trying to address as many variables as you can, but there's a limit to what you can do before your plan gets too big to be manageable. You can also try to make your strategic plan flexible, but it's possible to get so flexible that it doesn't provide clear guidance anymore. Your other option is contingency planning.

In contingency planning, you identify some of the more likely scenarios you might face, and develop an idea how you would deal with them. It doesn't have to be intricately detailed -- you might want more detail for the more likely possibilities, but for the less likely ones you might just come up with the basic idea and fill in the blanks if it actually happens. It all depends on how much time you want to devote to this. Once you have your plans, put them on the shelf until you need them. A review every now and then would be helpful, but don't obsess over it.

You can't think of every possible situation, of course, and you shouldn't try. Contingency planning is particularly useful for addressing short-term problems that can have long-term consequences. It gives you a starting point for your response, rather than trying to come up with ideas in the midst of a problem. If you're trying to deal with the immediate aftermath of a problem it's hard to focus on permanent solutions to the underlying problem, so give yourself something to start with.

What are some situations you might think about? Well, how about if a major client suddenly cancels a contract? Or you lose a critical employee? How about serious IT problems? These are the kinds of things that can happen with no warning but can have a serious impact on your work in the short-term and your firm's survival in the long-term. Think about what's important to your business and about how you'd respond if something happened to it.

As with strategic planning, the contingency planning process is very useful, especially when it helps identify what's most important to your firm. You might even realize that, rather than worrying about contingency plans, you actually have to take some steps in your day-to-day work to address vulnerabilities.

Realize too that contingency planning doesn't have to just be about problems. You might consider certain opportunities that could come your way and ask how you'd take advantage of that. What would you do if you had more money? What will you do if a client extends a contract for another three years? Opportunities only matter if you capitalize on them.

With a collection of Creatives working for you, you're at an advantage. If you are looking for potential scenarios and the means for dealing with them, you benefit from having a group of creative thinkers helping you. they may not be doing the actual planning but you should definitely take advantage of their inputs.

Lots of people may turn their nose up at contingency planning, thinking it's a lot of time spent on something that may never happen. Then again, we spend a lot of money on insurance against events we also hope never happen. Is there really any difference?

Singaporean Pragmatism

I mentioned recently that I just returned from teaching a graduate school course as a Fulbright Scholar in Singapore. It was a pretty amazing experience, not just the teaching and the great students, but also immersing myself in another culture. Singapore is intriguing in that it's been somewhat Westernized, but just enough to lull you into a false sense of security before BAM, you make a social error. But overall, I think I did pretty well. Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to consider some of the differences between Singapore and the US, to help Americans better understand some of the concepts we've been discussing, and also to help leaders in other countries analyze their own cultures to see how they encourage creativity.

One thing I learned early on is that Singaporeans are pretty pragmatic. Before my first class some students came to talk with me and pointed out that, unlike other professors, I was unknown there, and no one knew how I'd be teaching my class. As I explained my teaching philosophy -- emphasizing students' responsibility for their learning, the importance of classroom discussion, and a preference for understanding concepts rather than memorizing details -- one student told me "we're Singaporean, we're very pragmatic, we just want to know what it takes to get a good grade." In truth, I had quite a few students (including Singaporeans) who went far beyond "memorization and regurgitation" to some much higher levels of learning, but his comment stuck with me the whole time and I watched for signs of this throughout society.

I found that, to a large extent, he was right. In many aspects of their lives, including professional, many people seemed to want to do the bare minimum without worrying about going beyond. I sensed a common attitude of "it's good enough, why do more?," and I'm still trying to figure out where that came from. Why would people be satisfied with "good enough?" Were they concerned about losing face if they tried to do something more, and failed? Were they more interested in stability than in advancement? Were they relying on the government to push things forward rather than doing it themselves?

A culture where "good enough" and "bare minimum" are considered acceptable, and even desirable, isn't a culture that encourages creativity and innovation. It's hard to put the effort into developing new ideas if there's no internal or external motivation for doing so. With no interest in being innovative, societies don't set up the necessary infrastructure to support innovation, and appropriate corporate cultures don't emerge. In many cases (and I heard this a number of times in a number of fields), local Creatives leave for better opportunities outside the country where they'll be appreciated and their talents used.

All of this seems strange when you consider Singapore's dramatic economic development over the last 45 years. It's even stranger when you consider a report released this month that rates Singapore as the most innovative country in the world (the US was eighth). How can this be the case if so many Singaporeans are only interested in "what it takes to get a good grade?"

One reason they might be doing so well is the creativity brought by foreign talent. For a number of years the Singaporean government has had an active program for recruiting foreign talent. Is this who's doing the innovation? Hard to say, but there's one interesting point I noticed there: among my friends in Singapore, the only ones who had university degrees...weren't from Singapore (they were pretty much all from Malaysia).

It could also be that the innovation report was examining only a snapshot rather than looking at how the culture has encouraged innovation over time. For me, there's another index that's useful for measuring how well a society supports creativity and innovation: the number of Nobel laureates it has produced. So far, no Singaporean has ever won a Nobel Prize.

What lesson can leaders take from this? Simply that encouraging a pragmatic attitude and designing a culture that supports it does not encourage innovation. Leaders should be worried about employees who want to do "just enough" without any interest in pushing boundaries. That's a recipe for a very un-creative firm. Employees should be encouraged to take risks and shouldn't be punished when those risks don't pan out.

That student's statement got me to look around the larger society and watch closely to see how much that attitude was repeated. I found it to be pretty common, and for those who did strive to do better, I saw little support for them. I had friends who were starting small creative businesses, I saw others trying new ideas in their jobs, I saw some trying to push training and education in their firms as a way to improve their creativity, but in many respects they were fighting an uphill battle.

And if the US really does rank eighth in innovation, well then, leaders here can't afford to let their Creatives adopt a "what it takes to get a good grade" attitude.

More Millennial Traits

Many of your current Creatives, and a growing number in the future, will be members of the Millennial Generation. They, like every generational cohort, have a number of interesting characteristics that you should take into account when leading them. Obviously, these are broad generalizations and you should deal with each individual...well, individually, but it helps to have some reasonable expectations about their perspective.

They like feedback. A lot. The Millennial Generation is referred to by some as the "Trophy Generation." Many parents, in an attempt to protect their children from disappointments they faced as kids, reduced the emphasis on competition and made sure youngsters were rewarded just for participating in something, not necessarily for winning. "A for effort" seems to have taken on new meaning here. Ironically, as kids the Millennials also found themselves pushed into more organized activities, including sports, where they received constant feedback from parents and coaches.

They want to fit their job around their life, not the other way around. Having seen their parents shuttle them around despite professional demands on their time, Millennials entering the workforce expect to be able to take time off from work for personal events or set a work schedule that matches their personal desires. They will be more interested in telework and are more likely to hop from job to job as their personal circumstances change.

They want responsibility. Now. With all the positive feedback they received early in their lives, they are pretty sure they're the best that ever was, and they expect you to acknowledge it. Add to that the instant gratification they've grown used to courtesy of modern technology (why spend hours researching in the library when Wikipedia is on your laptop?) and they may not feel the need to work their way up from the bottom. They have a strong desire to work hard and do good work, and they want to see that recognized and be put into positions of authority where they can make things happen.

Individuality is a trend. Many Millennials say they avoid trends and maintain their individuality, to the point that individuality is the greatest trend of all. Many of the tools they use to express that individuality are used by millions of others. Writing blogs detailing aspects of their everyday lives or presenting their views on their topic of choice, posting videos of their activities on YouTube, creating Picasa and Flickr albums showing all the unique stuff they and their friends do...everybody tries hard not to be like everybody else. Important safety tip: do not make fun of the irony of Hot Topic being a national chain of stores that sells nonconformity. Just don't.

You may be a Millennial yourself and just accept all this as the natural state of being. You might also be someone who says "well, back in MY day, this is how we did things." If the latter, you have a couple choices as a leader. First, you can focus on how you think things SHOULD be, rather than how they ARE, and in the process, you're liable to end up with very few employees. If you want, you can just accept these traits and try to ignore them. Or, if you're a really good leader, you can find ways to use these traits to improve the quality of your Creatives' work and outperform your competition. Your choice.

Training and Education

Some leaders say they want to provide training for their employees. Others say they focus on education. Very often, they don't recognize the difference between the two. But once they do, they realize their employees can often benefit from both. When it comes to Creatives, that last point is especially true.

Training tends to focus on skills. It's about how to do something correctly, mastering a particular way of doing things. It involves a lot of memorization and repetition. Training tends to be pretty narrowly focused, with specific, measurable goals. Certification programs are just one example of training...students are working to understand how to do a specific function, such as programming in a particular language, and do so in a way that can be measured so they can pass a standardized test to see if they meet the minimum level of knowledge.

Education, on the other hand, is really more about thinking. Students learn about different approaches (consider the differences between anthropology and chemistry), different styles of thinking, solving ill-defined problems, and more. Good learning should create a desire for more learning, so it becomes a never-ending process, as people are able to adapt to the evolving world around them and understand how they fit into it. A bachelor of arts programs, for instance, is more about learning how to learn than it is about preparation for a specific job. Someone coming to you with a B.A. may not have all the job skills you desire, but they've shown the ability to learn.

In short, training helps you understand how to do a task, while education helps you understand why and when to do it. Education helps you be a better planner, for example, while training helps you put that plan to work.

For Creatives, both types of learning are important. Think about graphic designers in an advertising firm. They need training is specific technical skills, such as drawing, using software, photography, and maybe others. But they also need education to broaden their worldview and help them find inspiration, and to view things from the diverse perspectives of different target audiences. Just one or the other won't work...they really need both.

When it comes to getting the right training and education for your Creatives, you may have to rely on them somewhat. Unless you're in the same specific field as them, you might not understand what they really need. Have them do some investigation to determine what will make them better able to support the company's goals (which means, by the way, that your company has to first have goals, and it also needs the employees to know and understand them). In an ideal world you'll have someone whose sole job is to be a training and education manager for your company, and they can work with leaders and employees to figure out the best programs and find a way to make it happen, within the resources of the firm.

On that last note, let's make one more important point: if you feel you cannot spare any of your people for any professional training or education, then you probably have too few people to begin with. For your firm to be successful your employees need to be continuously learning, through formal and informal means, so you need to have enough people to cover your workload while still working on improving your workforce.

You should encourage learning within your workforce, and if you have employees who have no interest in continuing to improve their skills or broaden their minds, then perhaps you should be looking for some new employees. Training and education are not options that you can do when you decide you have the chance...they are instead the keys to future success for your company.

Keeping a Long-Term Focus

When Saturday Night Live started in 1975 the cast members were collectively known as “The Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players.” The idea was that they were on late at night on Saturdays because their material wasn’t suitable for the family audiences who tune in from 8pm-11pm for their television fix. But since then, the show has had a few TV specials that aired during prime time. Perhaps they weren’t ready for prime time at first, but prime time caught up with them. Sometimes, you have to take a chance on something that doesn’t seem right for the conditions, and then wait for the conditions to change and catch up with you.

American research and innovation in the 1950s and 1960s had a long-term vision underlying them. The shock of the Soviet sputnik launch and the race to get to the moon spurred scientists and other innovators to pursue projects that would take many years to come to fruition. The products of defense and space research often didn’t affect lives for years or even decades, but the basic research continued nonetheless.

Despite some changes in the business world during the 1980s and 1990s, this long-term spirit continued, especially in emerging fields like information technology. But with the bursting of the Internet bubble and the failure of major firms such as Enron and others, shareholder accountability increased and a short-term focus on the company’s bottom line replaced that long-term vision. The current economic problems have increased the focus on short-term survivability so that companies can even have a long-term.

Creativity, however, does not always conform to the quarterly report schedule. Things that aren’t “right for now” may be “right for the future.” Consider that new technologies and new thought processes take time to grow and to be accepted, and you may need to pursue them now and then put them “on the shelf,” or introduce them while realizing they won’t be profitable, until the time is right for them. In some cases, your Creatives will try new ideas only to find they don’t work out, and even though that doesn’t add to the profit/loss statement, that’s OK (as long as not EVERYTHING fails). If your Creatives never come up with a bad or unworkable idea, that means they aren’t taking enough chances. Encourage them to try new approaches that may not be “ready for prime time” just yet.

While you need to meet your clients’ requirements and need to make sure you can stay in business long enough for your new ideas to take hold, those shouldn’t be your only concerns. The difference between having a successful business tomorrow and having a successful business 20 years from now is keeping a long-term focus for your firm. In creative fields you’re in a position to look to the future, and with good Creatives working for you, you should be able to do that pretty well.

Saturday Night Live, by the way, is now in its 34th season. Not bad for a show that wasn’t “ready” for its time.

Separating Work and Real Life

As a grad student, I was always thinking about school. I can remember having deep thoughts about organizational theory while in the shower (my water bills tended to be high as a result). I felt sorry for friends who asked how my dissertation was going because they typically got a 3-hour report in excruciating detail (but I warned them...). It was pretty much impossible to separate school from my "real" life when school was on my mind every waking moment.

One of the occupational hazards for your Creatives is a similar blurring of work life and real life. Many Creatives enter their field because it matches their passion for art, writing, the pursuit of knowledge, whatever. In many ways, they're turning their hobby into their work, and there are some great advantages to that from a job satisfaction viewpoint. But doing so makes it kind of tough to still have hobbies that are separate from work, when your favorite hobby IS your work.

Real creativity doesn't stop at 5pm, and you want employees who are passionate about their work, so the idea that they'll always be doing, or at least thinking about, their job can be pretty appealing to the leader who only has to pay them for 8 hours a day. But it's better if your employees can take a break from work. They need time to recharge their batteries, to put things aside so they can come back with a fresh look. Frankly, they need interests beyond the job they do for you, or they're going to get stale and burnt-out. They -- and any relationships they have with other people -- will be better off if they can draw a line between working for you and having their personal life. And ultimately, a happy employee is better for you, too.

This is particularly tough for teleworkers, both those who are regular employees and those free agents you bring in. A good friend of mine who worked remotely had a small apartment with his desktop in the bedroom. As a result, he couldn't even get away from work by sleeping...it was always right there next to him. He lived on the East Coast and the company was on the West Coast, so by following the office's schedule he could easily be working until 9 or 10 every night while his local friends were off from work. His sleeping was messed up, his social life suffered, and his work wasn't any better than if he'd worked a normal schedule.

You can't really dictate to your teleworkers (and even, somewhat, your in-house employees) how they should be working, and it's hard for you to know if they're spending too much time on work. But you can try to create a culture -- even remotely -- that encourages people to stop and have a personal life. Be clear about your expectations with new employees, and let them know you don't expect them to be continuously focused on work. Have "suggested" working hours in the office (with some flexibility) and for your long-distance remote workers, try to set "windows" every day for things like phone calls and e-mails, so they don't feel like they have to be up at 3am checking their mail.

Remember, all this applies to you, too. No matter how much you enjoy your work, get away from it. A nice philosophy is "work to live, don't live to work." It's easy to say "I'll just do one more thing, then go home" but after a while you need to realize no matter how long you spend on it today, something will still be there tomorrow. You want to do a good job, of course, but you'll do it better if you get away from it when you're supposed to.

Social Capital

Every firm requires capital, and there are a number of different kinds. There’s what we think of as financial capital, of course, consisting of the monetary and physical investment needed to get a firm going and keep it operating. Then there’s human capital, which we generally think of as the skills and abilities of our employees and leaders, the intangible resources needed to perform the company’s mission. But one that often gets overlooked is social capital, and it’s worth understanding this concept so that, as leaders we can try to develop it in a way that most helps our business.

What is social capital? Essentially, it’s the accrued benefit of the relationships between people. As your employees trust each other, as they develop customs and protocol for interaction, or as relationships get defined informally, the path is smoothed for better dealings among your employees, or between your employees and you. Social capital is like a lubricant that allows the “machinery” of your business to work more easily. In a people-dominated field such as a creative industry, rather than, say, a manufacturer, social capital is very, very important.

How social capital manifests itself will of course be different in different firms. In smaller companies it’s more important to have good relationships between individuals, whereas in bigger firms it might be more useful to focus on relationships between different departments that have to cooperate. When individual work is the norm the relationship between leader and Creative is key, whereas in team-oriented work the relationships among Creatives tends to be the dominant concern.

The benefits of strong social capital are easy to see. People who know each other are more likely to help each other, rather than dropping everything to meet a stranger’s request. Employees who understand each other’s abilities can work together without a lot of supervision. When Creatives trust their leaders to take care of them, they can focus less on administrative concerns and more on their creative work. When leaders trust their employees, they spend a lot less time double-checking their work. Informal rules of conduct that are developed by employees are more likely to be followed, because they come from within rather than being imposed by bosses, and such rules allow for better interaction because people know what’s expected of them and what they can expect of others. The culture in a firm with strong social capital tends to support the firm’s work.

Purposely creating strong social capital is tricky; it’s better for relationships and customs to develop naturally. Still, there are things you can do to guide its development. Have a comprehensive orientation for new employees, and actually, try explaining some of your corporate culture as early as the interview process so potential employees know what’s expected of them. Encourage your Creatives to get to know each other, whether in the office, through company functions (while avoiding mandatory fun as much as you can) or through remote means if your employees are scattered around the country or the world (a company Facebook group, used actively, might be one way to do this, or perhaps an e-mail newsletter that keeps employees informed about what’s going on and what others are doing). As you see customs or informal relationships emerge, watch to see if they will help the business. If so, encourage them; if not, consider trying to nip them in the bud. That last point is important…negative social capital hurts, so if you see things happening that can hurt your company, look for ways to avoid them.

A Harvard professor named Robert Putnam wrote a now-classic book a few years back entitled Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which talks about the reduction in association between individuals and how American society faces a loss of social capital as a result. In his follow-up book from 2004, Better Together: Restoring the American Community, he shows how new forms of association are making their way into American society. Leaders would benefit from these books, as they offer ideas about society on a large scale that can be tailored for the “society” of your company. There are new methods for association that Putnam doesn’t think much of, including social-networking sites and other Web 2.0 tools – the sorts of things your Creatives will be very familiar with – and you should consider how to use this tools to enhance associations and increase social capital within your company, depending on your particular situation. Another good source of thought can be found in the simply, and aptly, named Social Capital.

In creative firms we tend to focus on human capital, looking at the technical skills our employees bring and the style of thinking their education provides. But very few Creatives are going to be completely independent, so it’s important to look at those interactions and figure out how we can make the best use of them. Understanding what social capital is, why it helps, and how to develop it, gives you an additional form of capital your competitors might not have.

Review: Closing the Innovation Gap

Judy Estrin is worried about the innovation gap that's developed in America. And if all her information is right, she has reason to be.

Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy examines the macro-level system necessary to support innovation as well as the company-level environment that supports good innovation. Estrin, a Silicon Valley veteran with plenty of successes behind her (and lots more where that came from still in front of her), explores what's necessary for innovation to happen, and rounds up her professional friends and colleagues whose own experiences bolster her main points.

Her discussions of corporate support for innovation are particularly useful for those of us who are leading Creatives. Our work is all about innovation, and if we don't find a way to foster that, we're out of business. Many of her specifics are more suited to large corporations -- Google comes to mind -- but the principles are useful for businesses of all sizes. And if you're a small firm now, but hoping to become a big one, this gives you an idea of how to shape that growth. Estrin makes the point a few times that the days of coming up with an idea in your garage and making billions of dollars are pretty much over. A more formal structure, with more people of diverse backgrounds, seems to be more important now than ever. With the ideas presented here, leaders are better able to design the kind of environment needed to foster innovation.

The portions of the book dealing with the innovation "ecosystem" give leaders an idea of where their Creatives are coming from and how it might be more difficult to find them in the future. She talks about such things as education, cultural attitudes toward science and engineering, funding for the arts, financial support for basic research, corporate and academic preferences for short-term rather than long-term results, and the broader need for instant gratification rather than a longer focus that has gripped the country in recent years. These sections of the book offer leaders a better understanding of what's needed to support a culture of innovation, with lessons they can apply on a smaller scale in their own firms. While fixing the problems in this ecosystem and closing the innovation gap might seem beyond the abilities of small businesses, there are some efforts that smaller firms can make, and if nothing else, leaders can identify big-picture problems and try to work around them.

Unlike many authors today, Estrin doesn't point to 9/11 as THE reason for current problems...innovation was on a downhill slide as early as the 1980s, when talented American college students started seeing careers in finance as preferable to science and engineering, and the creation of wealth became more important than the creation of the actual ideas and inventions that lead to wealth. But she agrees that 9/11 hurt, in part by shocking the US economy, but also by leading to stricter immigration practices that made it tougher for foreign students to come to the US and stay after graduating. In days of old, many of these students would come to the US and then elect to stay after finishing their degrees. These days, though, between the difficulty of getting student and work visas, combined with emerging opportunities in their home countries, even those who do still come to the US often plan to return home afterwards. I've seen examples of this myself. When I was pursuing my PhD in the early 2000s we had 4 Chinese students in my cohort, all of whom returned home. While teaching in Singapore this year I had two students, one Indonesian and one Chinese, who plan to go to the US to pursue their PhD, then return home to bring that knowledge back to their countries. We can probably all find examples of this in our own experience.

Estrin's writing style is very nice and easy to follow. She jumps around from executive to executive, but following the identity of all the speakers isn't important; following what they say is. Her political views come through strongly at a few points, and if you're of the opposing view, that might get in the way of your appreciation for her message, but it shouldn't. Closing the Innovation Gap provides an important wake up call for a country that isn't used to being second-best, and offers some good ideas for avoiding that fate.

More Professional Reading...Online This Time

Even if you don't feel like subscribing to magazines or lugging books home from the library, there are still plenty of opportunities to do some professional reading, keeping up with what's happening in your field and learning more about leadership. You might consider taking a look at some blogs.

We've tried to include some useful websites over on the right side of the screen (and we'll update that list once Blogroll is fully functional again!) but few of those are blogs. One useful resource, for leadership at least, is a list of Top 100 leadership blogs that was put together on a site called Best Universities.

Here are some blogs they recommend that might be of particular use when leading Creatives:

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Center for Leader Development: Foster your budding leadership skills as a student or an adult with the resources provided by this center’s blog.

Extreme Leadership: Learn how to take your leadership to a whole other, more extreme level with tips from Steve Farber.

Unleashing Your Leadership Potential: Blogger and businessman Kevin Eikenberry provides help and insights on unleashing your leadership potential on this site.

Slow Leadership: This blog is all about taking the slow and steady approach to building leadership skills and becoming a great leader.

Survival Leadership: Don’t just be a successful leader, but a significant one. This blog provides loads of leadership development skills.

Mick’s Leadership Blog: Learn how to self-assess, get tips on management and much more from this blog.

The Leadership Blog: Check out this site to find some truly inspirational interviews with business leaders.

The Leadership Evolution: Are you in need of a leadership pick-me-up? This site is dedicated to providing leaders of all kinds with inspirational quotes.

The Recovering Leader: Learn to be more self-aware in your leadership skills with a little help from this blog.

The Practice of Leadership: South African blogger George Ambler shares his journey to better leadership on this site.

Zinger On Strength-Based Leadership: Here you can find advice and guidance on strength-based leadership.

Great Leadership: Blogger Dan McCarthy provides some great insights on leadership development on his blog.

Learn This: Give this blog a visit to learn to boost your productivity, career tips and of course, leadership advice.

Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog: Check out this site to learn more about the latest in leadership and get tips on improving your tips from coach John Agno.


MANAGING OTHERS

Managing Leadership: Learn how to be a great leader at the senior executive level, managing other managers.

Management Craft: here you’ll find some great advice and articles about updating your management skills.

CEO Blog: Jim Estill, CEO of SYNNEX shares his experiences as senior executive and provides some useful management tips.

Leadership Turn: Learn how to lead your employees by doing instead of just talking through this blog focused on helping you build a great leadership style.

Bird’s Eye View: Susan Willet Bird writes this blog that is all about building better communication with employees and customers.

Management by Baseball: Learn some management tips from the great American sport in this blog.

Agile Management Blog: Check out this blog to learn about software, leadership and more from David J. Anderson.

Slacker Manager: Learn to manage better by doing less from this helpful blog.

Management IQ: Business Week maintains this blog that helps managers learn to build their leadership skills and manage smarter.

Management Improvement Blog: Get some advice on numerous ways you can be a better manager and run a better business from blogger John Hunter.

Execupundit: Michael Wade comments on leadership and ethics in this business blog.

Management Skills Blog: Share in the knowledge of Tom Foster in this blog that aims to help managers and business leaders do their jobs better than ever.

Cali and Jody: These authors wrote a book on how work sucks and how you can make it better and share many of their tips on this blog.

The Enlightened Manager: Don’t manage from the dark ages. Instead, take some tips from this blogger on little things you can do to improve your on-the-job performance.

I haven't read all these yet, but I intend to, and you should too, so you can what might be most useful for you. While it would be nice, of course, if you got all your leadership lessons from LeadingCreatives.com, the truth is, you need to broaden your reading. If you feel you don't have time or energy for intensive reading right now, then just get started with these, and as you learn from them, you're liable to start looking for more.