K-HOLE Investigates the Phenomenon of

CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

SELECT (HTTP://032C.COM/ARCHIVE/SELECT/)
PREVIOUS (HTTP://032C.COM/2014/K-HOLE-INTERVIEWS-FASHIONSTRATEGIST-FLORIANE-DE-SAINT-PIERRE-ON-CREATIVE-LEADERSHIP/)
NEXT (HTTP://032C.COM/2014/ITEM-IDEM-INVADES-NEW-YORK-CITY-WITH-ATIKI-POP-REFLECTION-ON-LATE-CAPITALISM/)
By K-HOLE
posted September 12, 2014
Like

256

Tweet

71

When 032c asked us to explore the idea of creative leadership, our first
question was: does that even exist? We decided to ask FLORIANE DE
SAINT PIERRE, the luxury brand headhunter who placed Christopher
Bailey at Burberry and Alexander Wang at Balenciaga. We emailed
VENKATESH RAO, a rogue management consultant whos accused startups of being design fictions masquerading as businesses. Floriane uses the
term creative leadership to describe a new paradigm piloted in fashion

but now spreading to other industries in which creative directors are

taking over the role of the CEO. This dossier investigates this new class of
mutants and its relationship to innovation and big data.

(http://032c.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/07/original_49ee62fcc112815b7a6a0c17c1b3a029.jpg?
16ab30)

BECAUSE CREATIVITY
Creativity is kinky. Its a strategic knowledge of how to use old things to get
new results necessary in a world that seems increasingly prone only to
burps of progress rather than long, clean stretches. The forward momentum
of time, capitalism, and sheer boredom demands that we eke out newness
even in the moments when everything feels pretty much the same.
Creativity and innovation are auspicious words. They recognize that we
dont really know where new things come from. Innovation simply
descends out of the realm of heavenly possibility with an unknowable
deistic logic. If this all sounds a little religious, it is we didnt kill God, we
just stopped anthropomorphizing him. Instead of actively attributing the
unknown to the divine, we just presume someone else understands whats
going on.
Creativity no longer has an antonym. Once upon a time the opposite of
creativity was destruction: Genesis and Revelation, yin and yang. Today we
think in terms of creative destruction. Creativity disrupts and it innovates,
it cleaves and it fills. Theres a unified opacity and thingy-ness to the world
around us, and it all bears the traces of human engineering.

(http://032c.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/07/large_5cea496da3076e6545fc1e
16ab30)

NO NEW THINGS
Everyone wants to know how a successful creator got from point A to
point B. Many companies are willing to oblige, providing an origin story
for every product. Eager entrepreneurs watch closely for clues to replicate

success. Is it the graph-ruled Japanese notebook? The pour-over coffee? All

of the details are spelled out ad nauseam, but in the end, the trailer has
become longer than the feature we paid for.

Portrayals of the creative process formulate a managerial logic for the

creative class. You can think about these displays as employee training:
teaching you how to brainstorm, how to organize a workspace, and how to
construct an environment that will let the creative juices freely flow.
Documenting the home offices and personal spaces of creative producers
can ease everyone into feeling less doomed in a world full of permalancers
working between their apartments and incubators.
Creative production works under some hazy economics. Surplus doesnt
exist when every element can be commodified and any waste can be
immediately repurposed (a bonus when youre trying to be a responsible,
ethical brand neoliberal face-palm). Its the Nose to Tail ethos as applied
to creativity. It takes a process that (in the case of creative agencies and seedround start-ups) uses resources to create intangible goods or creative capital
and makes it look like its running off of its own fuels. With a blind eye to
the pallets of Nespresso and bottled water being consumed, creativity can
be made to seem like a self-perpetuating machine. The creative process
becomes its own ecosystem, where creative energy is a renewable resource.
This is why any creative waste can end up becoming more valuable than
the end product itself. Beyond sustainability, putting the waste on display
vets the creative process authenticity. You can trace an idea back to the
sprawling whiteboards of an incubator, or to the lacquered desk made of
reclaimed wood in its founders swaggy apartment. Internally, this waste
allows for everything to operate at an accelerated speed. Theres no need to
stop and consider the next big thing when you can revisit the scraps
knowing that every Post-It contains another possible app.

(http://032c.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/07/IMG_82261.jpg?
16ab30)

BLACK SWANS
The blue sky R&D era was about collective responsibility for innovation.
The U.S. wrote the tax code in a way that basically capped executive salaries
and offered subsidized credits to funnel that money into weirdo science
projects. Some companies are still on this train i.e., Googles relentless
quest to replicate the Star Trek computer while others just let the money
flood into CEO compensation packages, shareholder dividends, and
Ireland. Using money to go where no man has gone before is no longer a
foregone conclusion. Its something that only grows out of a certain
corporate ethos (or DARPA).
Steve Jobs dying freaked us all out for a variety of reasons. But a big one is
that he intensified the suspicion that astronomic, era-defining success for a
brand could only come from a single genius. He made everyone know,

however briefly, that collaboration is a lie and that control cannot be

networked or synthesized. But if innovation has to be centralized in order
to thrive, that means it can die.
Innovation may have become an individual responsibility, but it still has
collective consequences. This is why we want to imagine creative leaders as
bermensch. The pro is that it satisfies our desire to have real-life heroes
save us; the con is that it means our heroes can abandon us. Practically,
both of these narratives benefit the creative leader.
Whereas the CEO provides accountability for risk by navigating the
measurable reality that defines whether a business flounders or flourishes,
the creative leader provides accountability for uncertainty. Trolls, cultural
appropriation, extreme weather these are the consumer influences that no
big data model can credibly predict. The black swans lurking in the fog.

(http://032c.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/07/large_357ae141f79f978637913a
16ab30)

HEROES
In todays economy, it pays to be a lot of people at once. The history of
branding in the 20th century the birth/death/adolescence of the corporate
personality is about making a group of people (the company) behave like
a single person (the brand).
Conversely, the history of heroism is about making one person act with the
strength of 10 men, or at least being impressed when someone gets close.
Heroes rise to the occasion. It wouldve been way less cool for Hercules to
clean all those stables and fuck all those bitches if hed done it at a random
time, or for no compelling reason. Heroes strike when the iron is hot.
The creative leaders abilities can seem super-human. Like they have an X
factor, a mutation for dealing with the sprawling complexity of global
industrial civilization. We often perceive the X factor as an aura of personal
cool. But its clear that the X factor that enables the creative leader is more
form than content and totally situational. The difference between X-Men
and regular ol mutants is body armor and a supersonic stealth jet. To turn
a freak into a superhero, all you have to do is accessorize.
In the same way, the difference between a speaker at TED and a crazy
person screaming in the street is the platform theyre speaking from. Thats
why creative leadership is priceless, but creative labor is worthless.
Successful creative leaders are creatures of amplification. Theyre
uninterested in debating who really built it, and think the whole
conversation is just another chicken-or-the-egg dispute, a concession to the
stoner dorm logic of political debates.
Creative leaders are a timely negotiation of the individual and the group
a discrete configuration of the brand + the hero, the singular + the plural,
the now + the whats next. Their executive-creative vision conflates their
personal will, the trajectory of a brand, and the thirst of an audience. They
stand for that inconsistency with their creative genius; they vouch for it to
whoevers trying to keep the business on track. They rebrand caprice by

performing it sexily to the public or staunchly to a board of directors. They

know its their job to act like a mutant, even if in reality they might be a
cyborg.

(http://032c.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/07/large_c975b815fbc66a9e9f9badd1cbee46a0.jpeg?
16ab30)

CREATIVE NONFICTION
It doesnt matter to Airbnb whether you have an apartment; real success for
a brand moves beyond the distribution of goods and into the distribution
of ideas. (For more on this idea, download K-HOLE #2: ProLASTination
from khole.net.) Recognition is as valuable as adoption. Haters are as
valuable as followers. Success isnt millions of followers, its envy not just
growing your existing userbase, but becoming a reference point for
someone elses.
Summon the creative leader. Theyve promised their genuinity, their
intuition, and their personal experience (or lack thereof). Like any celebrity,
they bring a personal audience. Theyre given the privilege to come from
one community and to work in many others, to connect a host of other
niches to their niche. This mobility separates the creative leader from the
creatives and gives the impression that their genius is irreplaceable. If it
werent for the fact that there are lots of other creative leaders, equally
adept at performing themselves, it might seem like theyve beaten the
system altogether.
The creative leader becomes the line through which the dots are connected
if not progress, then someones idea of progress. We get excited when
designers are traded, like NBA players, to new studios. We watch them
interpret the mission of a brand and challenge it. We actually witness the
jump from A to B, from the brand before to the brand now. We dont
necessarily learn anything specific. But we do get a point of entry, and
someone to idolize or blame.
Creative leaders keep the narrative of late capitalism popping by
embodying progress. Without them, we face the existential reality that
literally everything is beyond human control, that nothing really happens
for a reason. How do you justify the transition to flat interface design? Or
the deployment of an uncomfortably large screen size for a mobile phone?
Or the exploi- tation of a step team to spice up a runway collection?
Recognizing that there might be too much going on to explain why
exactly, creative leaders offer themselves as the answer to literally every
other question.

(http://032c.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/07/original_1018b0bdb5f4bee78f44f9671d83a821.jpg?
16ab30)

The essay was commissioned by 032c for issue 26

(http://032c.com/archive/issues/), Creative Leadership, which also includes
interviews with Floriane de Saint Pierre and Venkatesh Rao.
www.khole.net (http://khole.net)
Like

256

Tweet

71

CREATIVE LEADERSHIP
FASHION

81 (HTTP://032C.COM/ TOPIC/FASHION/)

FLORIANE DE SAINT PIERRE

K-HOLE

1 (HTTP://032C.COM/ TOPIC/K-HOLE/)

VENKATESH RAO

Recommended

The digital platform for

032c, culture
magazine; Manual for
Freedom, Research &
Creativity.
Profile
(http://032c.com/profile/)

032c System GmbH

Brunnenstrasse 9
10119 Berlin
office@032c.com

Follow us:
Like

48k

Follow

(http://instagram.com/032c?
Sign up for our Newsletter

ref=badge)

Profile
(http://032c.com/profile/)
Media
(http://032c.com/profile/media/)
Contact & Imprint
(http://032c.com/profile/contact/)
Stockists
(http://032c.com/stockists)