Why Creativity and Leadership Are So Intertwined

THE GROOVE

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SEPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

My TEDx Talk, "NFTs, Graffiti & Sedition: How Great Artists Invent The Future" just went live on YouTube! You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofp6eTPTgFo&t=1s

The words “leader” and “leadership” get thrown around too much without meaning.

Leadership is the effective exercise of influence over a group of people, done by a leader. What gets lost in this concept is that to lead effectively, whether in the boardroom or in a collaborative studio, you have to possess creative thinking skills.

The ability to think differently and to act on those ideas is paramount to long-term leadership.

One important aspect that leaders must demonstrate is the integration of inner leadership - or the ideas that come from within - with outer leadership, or how to make the people around you follow your lead.

As I was re-examining the life of the Italian Ettore Sottsass, the great and influential architect, designer, and artist, I clearly saw how his life and career was one of effective leadership. Here are three important takeaways that work for anyone:

If you want to succeed as a leader, you must be able to clearly articulate your mission and explain it to whomever you want to influence.

For Sottsass, it all started when he was an employee of Olivetti. After becoming the star designer, he realized that he wasn’t creating work out of pleasure, he wasn’t involved in the decision-making of which products came to life and worst of all, he had no contact with the consumers, so he didn’t know who he was creating for.

In 1973, in the middle of this dilemma, Sottsass wrote an essay titled “When I Was A Very Small Boy” and articulated his sentiments against the confinement of a big corporation, and what served as his mission for his upcoming projects:

“I would like to think that the old happy state that I once knew could somehow be brought back: that happy state in which “design” or art — so called art — was life, in which life was art, I mean creativity, I mean it was the awareness of belonging to the Planet and to the pulsing history of the people that are with us.

I’d like to find somewhere to try out things, together, things to do with our hands or machines, in any way, not like boy scouts or even like craftsmen and not even like workers and still less like artists, but like men with arms, legs, hands, feet, hairs, sex, saliva, eyes and breath, and to do them, certainly not to possess things and to keep them for ourselves and not even to give them to others, but just feel what it’s like to do things by trying to do them…”

Seth Godin wrote in his book, “Tribes,” that you only need two things to form a tribe: a shared interest and a means to communicate. What separates a tribe from a crowd is the presence of a leader and an effective way to talk to each other. You don’t want to force them to do anything, but you want them to connect with you.

This is what Sottsass did in 1980: he invited a group of young designers from around the world who had similar interests and gathered with them in his apartment in Milan. This is how one of the most influential design groups of the 20th century was born: “Memphis.” (Named after Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, a song they were listening to that night.)

Sottsass not only accomplished his objective with dividends, but his designers understood the assignment to perfection. Founding Memphis member Martine Bedin wrote that all the designers had: “The same obsession always; can we imagine a new world by drawing another chair, another table, another light, another vase.”

Around the same time, Sottsass also established his own design consultancy, Sottsass Associati, which went on to design the Malpensa Airport in Milan, all the stores for the brand Esprit, create the identity of Alessi, and generate important work for companies ranging from Apple to Siemens.

One of the most important pillars that any creative leader must possess is autonomy, to the extent that I dedicate an entire chapter in my book to that skill.

Sottsass's work philosophy was about reacting to the purity of modernism, which he found castrating, but it was also about rejecting corporate structures that strangle creativity.

He was autonomous and had a clear conviction about his path, but he also granted autonomy to his collaborators, and this was key in the success of Memphis and Sottsass Associati. He conveyed his mission with so much clarity and then allowed his people to work independently until they were to meet again.

“He detested any type of institution or hierarchy,” the designer’s widow, Barbara Radice, once noted. “He didn’t like anything that told you what to do. He believed everybody should find their own way of doing things.”

According to Nathalie du Pasquier, one of the designers in Memphis: “it was all happening around Ettore Sottsass. He had been asked to do an exhibition, and he decided to call a lot of different people and do a very different kind of show. He was the leader and the engineer of all that… But Memphis was not a studio per se. We would meet, have dinners together, and then once a year we would have an exhibition that was chosen around an idea.”

While this may seem radical and difficult to execute, granting autonomy to others is an integral part of true leadership. Surrounding yourself with the right people and motivating them to execute your vision according to your mission takes creativity, risk-taking, trust and work. But this is the nature of the beast and one that can be tamed, with direction and guidance, rather than micromanagement and suppression.

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