"The Teacher"
I’ve known David Slocum for a decade or so. He has a rare gift for combining the theoretical with the practical, and I’ve watched scores of his students become more thoughtful and intentioned leaders as a result of his teaching. One of the areas we talked about was why talented people are willing to work for demanding leaders. ‘Demanding’ sometimes being a euphemism for rude or worse. Let me know what you think at charles@fearlesscreativeleadership.com
Three Takeaways
- The ability to look at situations three dimensionally.
- Define collective as well as individual goals.
- Codify your insights to make them accessible to others.
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 55: "The Teacher" David Slocum
I’m Charles Day and this is Fearless!!
This week, my conversation with David Slocum, Faculty Director of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
“you have two long millennia old topics around which there's a great sense of romance. Creativity, artistry, being touched by the demonic genius of the gods on the one hand and then you have the romance of great heroic leaders.”
Creative leadership. There is such romance in that description, isn’t there?
The romance of creativity and it’s limitless possibilities. And the romance of leadership.
We want our leaders to be more than human. We want them to be evangelists, leading us to the promised land. Visionary, seeing a future beyond our own imagination. Inspirational. Courageous. We want them to be fearless.
The gap between those expectations and the realities that human beings wake up with every morning can be as narrow as a crack in the pavement or as wide as a canyon. Insignificant or insurmountable.
Bridging that gap between expectations and realities comes down to two things in my experience.
Putting creativity to work with ambition and intention and discipline.
And being clear about what matters to you and what makes you unique.
Because you are.
——
I’ve known David Slocum for a decade or so and he’s been kind enough to invite me to speak to his executive MBA class at the Berlin School in Cannes for the last several years.
He has a rare gift for combining the theoretical with the practical, and I’ve watched scores of his students become more thoughtful and intentioned leaders as a result of his teaching.
One of the areas we talked about was why talented people are willing to work for demanding leaders. ‘Demanding’ sometimes being a euphemism for rude or worse.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Charles:
David, welcome to Fearless. Thank you very much for being here.
David Slocum:
Thank you for having me, Charles.
Charles:
You are actually in Michigan as I understand it.
David Slocum:
Correct, where I grew up, visiting my parents.
Charles:
Which is a perfect segue. Thank you for providing me with that. When are you first aware of creativity showing up in your Michigan youth?
David Slocum:
One of the great stories of my youth was that in high school, I announced to my friends all of whom were I think between our sophomore and junior years in high school applauding to get even the best paying or the most convenient jobs. I announced that I was going to write a novel.
Charles:
At what age was this?
David Slocum:
I was 13 and the gimmick as you'll come to understand when I tell you the whole story was that I was going to get away from all of my friends and away from all the distractions that of course a 13-year-old suffers from and go from the suburbs of Detroit where I lived then to Mackinac Island which is a small island between the lower and upper peninsula of the state of Michigan. [00:01:30
Truth was that I didn't in fact go to Mackinac Island but I got up very early every morning and biked across town to the elementary school where my mother was a kindergarten teacher and worked on my novel there. I spent the summer writing that novel which ended up being about 130 pages. It is absolutely terrible. It's beyond locked in a desk drawer. It will never be seen during my lifetime, but it's funny because I spent the entire summer this way. It was blissful and to answer your question, finally, I really have the sense that by removing all of these … At that age, social constraints, I could in fact express myself and be creative.
I was finally outed as it were by the father of my best friend and he's still a dear friend of mine who was a very astute lawyer who had nine kids, and I think could read me like a book. When I was telling this story at one point, he just shook his head and said, "No, that didn't happen. What really is going on?" When I told him he and everyone appreciated at least that going through this entire ruse at least I was productive and followed through. It wasn't as if I was just becoming a hermit or was not doing anything. That summer besides whatever I ended up setting down on paper, really allowed me to think about creativity and again what could flow through me and certainly came to all sorts of realizations that I thought at the time were magical and world changing but at least as I look back at them now were important for steps in my own development of experimentation.
Charles:
What did you remember most of those realizations? What still sits with you?
David Slocum:
That the dance, as I call it, between the introspective time that I had for myself and the interactions I had, not with a lot of people that summer but with books and other ideas and examples of novels I thought at that point where brilliant and that I wanted to model my own work after that that dance was something which was exhilarating to me. It was an experience that I really enjoyed and almost got a high from. Certainly as you well know that dance between an individual and his or her surroundings, coworkers, colleagues, creative team members, that's something which still becomes extraordinarily important to understand at whatever level with the head, or with the heart, or with the gut. At that point, I think my recognition of that was much more preliminary but it was still there and I very much enjoyed the time that a teenager doesn't ordinarily have.
Charles:
That sounds like, obviously, a very individual and a very focused, and potentially but a lonely way of encountering creativity. When did it become more socialized?
David Slocum:
Well, again, it goes back to high school where I was also doing a lot of creative writing then where the output were a series of scripts for skits that my class performed in the school and I was always frustrated although it was a learning experience. I was always frustrated because I would write these skits and I thought they were brilliant and people would want to change them. What I would now call collaboration was introduced as a potential way to approach my masterworks.
Charles:
Did that get in the way? Was that an adjustment for you to make?
David Slocum:
I think very much. Again, flashing forward and again as you know I spent too many years in schools and colleges and universities but even when I went to college and then my first graduate school, I was writing screenplays for films. That was still a lonely individual endeavor which I enjoyed. I'm an introvert of sorts I think and so that came naturally to me but I came particularly as I began to study and do research and write academically about the film industry first that I found myself thinking in a more analytical way about collaboration and the creativity that was generated by production teams, studios, big film companies. On the one hand, even as I was huddling in my little room working my individual screenplays. There was always that balance. I don't know if I was schizophrenic at that point but certainly there were always both streams which sometimes merged and other times didn't.
Charles:
As you mentioned, you've spent a lot of time inside academic institutions attached to and around them. What was the transition between writing screenplays and getting involved with academia?
David Slocum:
The short answer is that my academic writing was better received than my screenwriting.
Charles:
The force of the market plays, right? The power of the market place?
David Slocum:
Exactly, and the academic market is a completely peculiar and inefficient so I found myself responding to that. I actually had a wonderful undergraduate experience that led me with a friend to go live in Europe and wear a beret and live a bit of the Hemingway life or so I thought. When I came back from that, I realized I had to do something responsible and so I decided to enroll in graduate school but that was a bit of a cover for my continuing screenwriting. For three years, I was in Boston at the time. I was doing both.
I was starting philosophical aesthetics of all topics while writing my world changing screenplays or what I hope would be world changing. Philosophical aesthetics lead me not to a career as a philosophy professor but rather lead me to think about a creativity and all sort of issues that I found much more interesting in the process of filmmaking and filmmaking institutions. Several years later by the time I have finished in my second graduate school, I had written a dissertation that was very much about how the creative organizations, plural, in the film industry in fact make decisions and produce the motion pictures that we all see and hopefully enjoy. I say organizations because those can be small production teams or those can be big entertainment holding companies. It was precisely those tensions between in different levels of decision-making map that began to fascinate me.
Charles:
Before we go on, what is or are philosophical aesthetics?
David Slocum:
Philosophical aesthetics, it's a topic where one tries using philosophical ideas or theories to understand ways in which the world is perceived and sensed by people so for example the reason that I applied to graduate school at Harvard was because Stanley Cavell worked there and Stanley Cavell long-time professor of philosophical aesthetics at Harvard have written a one book of film theory that I read as an undergraduate and I said, "Okay. If I'm going to find a cover for my screenwriting, this is what I'm going to study."
His work in different ways proposed that films do not present or represent an orderly world that we can all take as a way of understanding our own place in a community or world rather what films do is to present to us the possibility such an ordered world can exist. It's a nuanced distinction but I think it's an important one where we do in and we become at least for our 90 minutes part of a world and we are reassured whether that world is of the Avengers or in the case of Cavell screwball comedies.
We are convinced that a world has certain rules and certain order to it that ultimately reassures us when we walk out of the theater that, "Hey, this world isn't entirely random that I'm living in but rather in fact there's some underlying system, or order, or set of rules that I can in fact rely on." In ways the aesthetic or sensory logic of films is that especially in telling stories that they reassure us that, "Hey, when we wake up in the morning, the sun is in fact going to rise and there's going to be air to breathe and so forth."
Charles:
That explain why I am binge watching in fact the west wing and have it on a loop because I am looking for the [inaudible 00:14:38] if that world actually does exist out there and if in a 40-minute burst I came live in that world again.
David Slocum:
Right. Cavell in particular, he brought a lot of 19th century thinking into the 20th century. You may have to rework it for the 21st because heaven knows we're in a somewhat different world now that needs a lot of sense made of it. I don't know how effective a summary. I haven't actually given a lot of thought to philosophical aesthetics in a lot of years but it was a wonderful time and again as a way of balancing a lot of wide open creative work that I was doing again very much on my own. It was liberating.
Charles:
You have really become a student of, and a professor of, a teacher of creativity across a pretty wide spectrum. When did that started to show up? When did that desire to really study creativity as a discipline, as a life force, as a point of inspiration, as a point of expression and then to be able to impart that knowledge to others. When did that start to show up?
David Slocum:
I spent 10 years at New York University teaching and working in various administrative positions and part of what fascinated me about NYU was that it's an extraordinary institution, incredibly talented faculty and staff but also very vulcanized. I was always an interdisciplinary thinker. I didn't want to be bound by the work that's done in specific disciplines and literally there I worked across three different schools. I did most of my teaching at the Tisch School of the Arts in cinema studies but I also worked in the arts and science school and some at the Stern School of Business.
At first it was institutional politicking and it was a matter of asking myself, "How do we get the business people and the arts people together?" What's the deal that can be struck? Then I started becoming much more interested in what I guess would maybe underline a more fundamental questions about why they were approaching what I saw as a potentially integrated topic, film in such different ways. It was there in fact that I started thinking along lines that I still believe in greatly which are the business guys can be everybody's creative as the arts people.
When I first, I guess, post that question to myself what it drive me to do is really to look historically and philosophically at why was it that the Tisch School of the Arts people are the ones who ordinarily are credited with being creative and the business people are certainly the people of the law school are seen as the evil overly serious and uncreative suits. There's always some truth to those sorts of stereotypes, part of what I recognize was that creativity in many ways becomes too … To put it overly bluntly, are cultural construction. There are people who work in the, quote-unquote, "arts" who are definitely dull and their work is routine and uninspired. Ultimately, I would argue on creative.
Whereas cultural credit for creativity is given in a default way to those in the school of the arts and deny those in a school of business or in a school of law. Part of what began to fascinate me was the fact that creativity written large could apply to any or all of these different areas and any or all of these different areas could also be definitely dull or very routine.
It may be much more familiar to hear now but I was realizing 10, 12 years ago that as I guess Pixar was in practice that anybody can be creative. Anybody in the organization can contribute creatively. Part of the challenge and really opportunity of leadership or of organizational design is in fact to unleash that, to liberate that creativity as to appropriate to whatever situation that individuals or the organization might be in.
Charles:
Do you have a definition for creativity?
David Slocum:
Not that it's terribly distinctive. I think that creativity is to me going back, I suppose to the basics. Creativity has to be original in whatever way. We conceive of that. There has to be a utility to it and I like the idea of there being an element of surprise. Those three dimensions are those, I pick up from wonderful English writer named Margaret Bowden. Originality is so complicated. Who's originality is it? Is it capital C creativity where it's completely original in the world, is it lower case creativity where it's new to me but you've known it for 20 years.
Originality is a bit tricky and I think it's also one of the problems that we face where individuals wants so desperately to have in many cases that label of being creative and they don't necessarily get beyond themselves to understand that they don't have to be original at a global scale but there needs to be an appreciation for originality or ultimately creativity that goes beyond themselves. Maybe this goes back to my novel writing where there needs to be some connectivity or interaction that exist between each of us and others for us to really to prize creativity rather than just saying, "Oh, well. I had this magnificent idea."
I'll also say that I've use Bowden's three dimensions before and the utility dimension is one that some people would say, "What about a painting or a sculpture or a piece of fine art?" To me going back to thinking about aesthetics, that still has a use in terms of inspiring those who see it or demonstrating what's possible in terms of self-expression or sharing of ideas or feelings.
Charles:
As you said, you've studied creative leadership from lots of different lenses. Are there common themes that you've identified and people who are better at unlocking creativity in others?
David Slocum:
If you asked me that five years ago, I would have given you a quick and dirty list of traits and practices that you could find in almost any issue of fast company or inc or entrepreneur. Those are the traits that in many ways are most associated with Silicon Valley or with tech entrepreneurship. They're about failure. They're about experimentation. They're about finding the right form of collaboration. They're about being creative problem solvers particularly when it comes to serving clients or customers.
I believe in the value of all of those in certain situations and flashing forward to today, what I would say is the most creative leaders are those who are able to make sense of, analyze, take, decisive and imaginative action that suits individual situations. In many cases, and I think this is the real shift from that snapshot of five years ago. Sometimes the most creative response from leaders or creative actions that leaders can take may in fact be very traditional. May in fact be top down. May in fact be more of a command and control or command and collaborate as Herminia Ibarra says which I like a lot.
I think that one of the problems with fixing a strawman creative leader with those traits again that are trotted out again and again is that they're much more about the individual. The continuation of the way you romanticize heroic leaders, in this case, heroic creative leaders and they in a way remove that leader from whatever situation she or he is in. I think too often we can celebrate an individual or a type or again a bundle of characteristics, traits, talents but those don't necessarily suit every situation. At an organizational level, it's what would Google do, question. I recommend all my students that they ask exactly that question if they're having a challenge in their own organizations. What would Google do?
Then as soon as they come up with the answer they need to ask a follow-up question very skeptically, does that have anything to do with the challenge I'm actually facing because in most cases, it doesn't. It's not to say we can't learn from the Google's or again a whole range of very creative and successful organizations and individuals. I just think that we too easily seek to adopt individual case examples of success that are irrelevant to what many of us ourselves are facing.
Charles:
Do you pick Google a reason? I mean do they specifically represent certain kinds of creative ideals and practices or do you think it's pick any company that you think is disruptive and relevant to what is that you're doing?
David Slocum:
Two reasons. One, you may know him as well. Jeff Jarvis wrote a book called What Would Google Do? Different context but I always liked that question because I think to your point, Google is one of … It's an enormous success. One of the biggest companies in the world and I think that in many cases they have worked very hard to institutionalize creativity and innovation and so it becomes a ready example to bring into especially many legacy organizations that in fact could learn from current practices or practices of a successful organization.
You could talk about Apple, you could talk about Elon Musk and Tesla. They are non-tech companies too. You can talk about Gore, you can talk about … Huawei is another tech company. Their whole series of I think companies that many of them newer but nevertheless are used again and again as examples at least of specific practices that people see as being very effective in terms of unleashing creativity and enabling innovation. In many cases, they are and I would advocate that many organizations and many leaders should in fact study Google. All I want them to do is to do that in a more skeptical way to make sure-
Charles:
I mean to that point, is there a lens of ethics or values that you think people should place over their analysis of those kinds of businesses as well or do you think if the study is … How do we innovate? How do we use original thinking in a way that is both valuable and surprising to your point that we need to make sure we have our own ethics and values in place but we're not worrying about that in terms of how other companies show up.
David Slocum:
Very much. I think it's a brilliant point because for me, it raises both a fact that so much of what's done at Google or other big tech companies is in fact very particular to tech innovation which is not a restrictive category but it's one that doesn't necessarily apply to creativity innovation in other industries or sectors so one needs to be very careful and Spotify is another great example of this with what they've done in terms of Agile organization.
I think that they've been very smart. Does that in fact work at other kinds of organizations? Maybe, but maybe not and so I think again that skepticism is helping getting to your question about ethics. I sometimes say that to me differences at the heart of creativity and diversity is at the heart of creative leadership. I believe that. Some of my … Frankly, I've had wonderful experiences at the Berlin School but some of my most fulfilling experiences there have involved the work I've done on diversity programs or programs that seek to address issues of diversity and inclusion in leadership and in creative organizations.
I say that both because I see diversity as a really central way that leaders or anyone who wants to be more committed to ethical behavior can in fact enter into that realm of thinking and action but I also think that it is … It's a way creating greater diversity inclusion that is a way to in fact drive and again liberate creative outputs. Again, it goes back to basics of how it is that original and ultimately useful, hopefully surprising creative products or services or solutions are going to be generated, that's going to come from different perspectives. It's going to come from the diversity of the individuals who are involved in whatever process is arrayed to try to address an opening in the market of a problem whatever it might be.
Charles:
It's one of the reasons I think that there are two foundations on which the best leaders unlock creativity reliably. One of those, I think is having a clear vision for what it is they're trying to achieve because the unpredictability of creativity needs to be challenged and held to account towards a destination in some fashion otherwise it's so powerful and it's chaos that you can head off in all kinds of directions. I remember working from a man called Norman Berry who was the global creative officer of Ogilvy & Mather back in the early '80s and he used to talk about sliding around on the slippery slope of creativity relevance which clearly has stayed with me for many, many, many years and it struck me at the moment he said it to the group that I was standing with. It remains true to this day because creativity is capable of anything.
David Slocum:
In fact the shift that I mentioned from five years ago to now, part of how that has occurred in my mind is both encountering myself but also reading others research about turbulent environments and the reality of trying to coral or in whatever way harness creativity as you're describing. Jeffrey Pfeffer who's at the Stanford Graduate School of Business writes a lot about this. I mean he talks for example about how when we want to really think about an improved leadership, we have to address leadership as it exists in the actual world rather than as we wish it to.
I think that that again becomes a challenge in many cases because with creative leadership to my mind, you have two long millennia old topics around which there's a great sense of romance. Creativity, artistry, being touched by the demonic genius of the gods on the one hand and then you have the romance of great heroic leaders. I think you bring those together and it's very difficult to say, "All right. What is it on the ground, in the everyday that a creative leader or a leader seeking to foster or enable greater creativity should do?"
Often times it's very mundane and to your point which I think is great and one of my books of the year so far is it's called Athletic CEOs. It's a terrible title but it's a brilliant book by an NCI professor. He conducts four extended profiles of Russian leaders. His argument very much life Pfeffer's is that these are not leaders who aren't empathetic, they're not interested in the wellbeing and nurturing of their people and not necessarily interested in being kinder or gentler or more open or helping people learn and develop what they have.
Again, you mentioned it is an extraordinarily clear vision of where they want to go and how they then need to get there in a turbulent environment, in this case Russia although by the end of the book, Shekshnia is talking about Jeff Bezos at Amazon being one of the CEOs. He's talking about InBev, AB InBev and in Brazil is a company where this is also practiced.
In other words this is where not immediately assuming the default position of what Larry Paige would do in the situation but rather really taking to account what is the situation that the environment call for, what are the capabilities that we can in fact bring forward? Do we have the competence? Do we have the courage? Do we have the bravery? As well as the assets and whatever other resources to succeed. It seems to me in many cases yes, we want to take the more ethical, supportive nurturing path but there are others where it's more appropriate if one is going to succeed. Everyone wants to succeed. There's a trade-off there admittedly. I think that there are other creative choices to be made.
Charles:
I think that's right. I think what's fascinating about that reference point is that is you're outlying the romance and creativity and the romance of leadership. You [inaudible 00:41:10] by the reality of the psychodynamic side of the human being that you're dealing with, what they're actually capable of and desired to do and then you're dealing with the very practical reality of the fact that you're running a real business that has a real bottom line reality to it and so you have to find a way to navigate all of that. I think part of it is setting a North Star both of the individual and for the business and saying the ambition is this and that's gonna require us to solve problems that we've never really identified before.
I know you have to marry that too who is this human being, what makes them work, and think, and see the world the way they do and what are the capable of and interested in. Within all of that complexity you have to then to add, and by the way you probably got a quarterly earnings report coming up in six weeks, right?
David Slocum:
Yeah. Sorry. One more reference here but Sydney Finkelstein who runs a leadership center at Tuck, at Darmouth wrote a marvelous book called Super Bosses where he talked about three different types of successful leaders and one of them was particularly fascinating to me and again is I think a less common to a lot of maybe popular leadership and especially creative leadership discussions that go on. He called this category Glorious Bastards. His idea and the poster boy of Glorious Bastards was Larry Ellison at Oracle.
I think Finkelstein starts his discussion in the book about Ellison saying, "Oh, well. Going back decades, we … " I think this is often associated with Tom Peters, we talk about the value of getting out of the corner office and practicing leadership by walking around, by getting involved with people. it's a bit of a cliché but it's very practically useful. You find out what's going on, what the mood and atmosphere is. What's worrying people, what's making them happy and so forth. Finkelstein says that the employees at Oracle realized that Ellison was a completely different animal that his routine was in fact not leadership by walking around but leadership by ridicule.
He goes on to talk about other anecdotes but part of what is fascinating is that people would be ridiculed but they would stay. People in the early years of Apple, there are of course many stories about how difficult Steve Jobs was. People talk about the extraordinary demands that Elon Musk puts on people today. Why is that? Is it because of the vision? Is it because these are charismatic leaders who beyond simply being charismatic and visionary also are intrapersonally very difficult to work with?
That's slight different from behaving badly or sharply because of a turbulent environment but it raises this question again, it's the interpersonal dynamics as you point to which are so critical but it also suggests that there's a necessary complexity that we need to understand among followers or coworkers at the same time we're talking about how it is that we want to better understand leaders because again so many of the practices that we might identify are traits or tendencies that effective creative leaders might in fact embody. To me those work with certain kinds of people than they don't with others.
Charles:
I think that's absolutely right. I learned some of what I know today from self-observation having a business for which I had extraordinarily clear vision. I mean I just saw exactly how this thing was gonna work. Nine years before it was capable of being that business and so part of my frustration was the time it took for me to keep going back and explaining to people what we had to do next to get to somewhere that I already knew. We were going to and they couldn't see yet for a bunch of reasons and then recognizing overtime, probably not as quickly as I would like but identifying my own behavior, my own characteristics, my own instincts, many of which I think were formed by childhood as most of ours are and where those impulses served me well and where those impulses served me badly into your point lost the audience at certain points.
Now you have to stop and go back and regain trust and regain support for what it is you're trying to build. There is enormous human complexity built into trying to unlock the power of this thing that by in definition is amorphous, and unpredictable, and also irresistible. I'm personally fascinated by both of these pieces which are endlessly changing and incredibly complex.
The boundaries of which are often also hard to see but also increasingly I realized somebody in this equation has to help provide the boundaries. it's interesting to me how many people are still even in senior positions within organizations, how many of those people are still intimidated by creativity as a force and want to put it in on the other side of that fence and see the creatives over there and we're gonna give them a nice space and be really nice to them and then hope like crazy that something good comes out of all of that because we're not really sure how it works, right?
David Slocum:
Yeah.
Charles:
I think that is untrue. I think that creativity works much, much more effectively when it is given a mission, when it is given ambition, when it is held to account, when the right conditions are applied which is often not leave them alone and hope. It is put expectations on them. It is give them better challenges, give them better tools and give them, better challenges and make sure by the way that you're hiring people for whom those challenges are meaningful and relevant, that those are the problems they actually want to solve. I think we need to lean in to creativity within an organizational structure, not run away from it.
David Slocum:
Yeah. I think that's really well put. I like to use the example of deadlines which there's an interesting research on where put simply, the right deadlines do exactly what you're describing and the wrong deadlines either make the chaos even more chaotic or they just stifle people completely. They shut them down.
Charles:
That's right. I remember that great Nightline story from 25 years ago. Maybe even more than that. IDEO. Did you ever see that?
David Slocum:
Shopping carts.
Charles:
Exactly. It's a great example. IDEO who have done really well. In part because they bring that kind of discipline to the process. I think that's right. I interviewed Dan Pink a few weeks ago who just written a book called When which is about timing and he talks … One of the chapters in the book is about deadlines and the power of the right kind of deadline. He also talks about intervals and how important beginnings are and setting the thing off on the right framework. He also talks about middles and how half-timing gains is important because if teams are behind by a little bit, they actually tend to do better than teams that are ahead by a little bit in the second half because it creates focus and intention. All of these pieces to me are part of the same puzzle which is what are the rules we're putting on in place? What are the systems? What's the order that we're trying to apply so that the chaos can actually be released in places that are powerful?
David Slocum:
That's a huge challenge and it makes me think of a dear friend of mine, just completed her second novel and she's worked in magazines and in publishing and she always has a kind of uncertain smile when I talk about, quote-unquote, "creatives" in advertising or in film or even in technology because she still and most of the people she works with are still doing what I did back in the day being creative alone. I think that's a whole separate interesting topic about writing and about to some extent what I do a lot of now teaching which both of those are right for disruption in terms of greater collaboration.
Beyond the labeling issue, part of what I think fascinates me and this goes to your point about deadlines and figuring out how to unleash teams or businesses is understanding how all of those different individuals with all their different expectations and experiences, and hopes, and dreams, how they in fact are going to best work together in order to produce something creative that none of them individually could have produced but if they just followed the numbers they would not have been able to produce and I think that's … Again, it's where the creative magic comes but creative magic produced through, I think if not entire systematic at least very thoughtfully designed and implemented ways of gathering people and giving them a brief or a charging them with solving problems.
Charles:
I know you might not classify yourself as a leader in the organizational business sense but to me you are certainly a leader so therefore let me ask you this question. How do you lead?
David Slocum:
First of all, thank you. It's interesting. I give a lot of thought to this. In fact when I was a young dean at NYU, and that's where my greatest, I suppose leadership experience was in terms of leading people and multimillion dollar office. The parallels are interesting I believe between teaching and leading. I'm a bit biased or that lens is one which I have to be very aware of when I think about it or when I answer your question. The word I often associate with what we do at the Berlin School and what I try to do is enable.
I'm an enabler in terms of trying to motivate people to motivate people to provide them with examples with … Hopefully a little inspiration from the past, from examples that they might not know and I understand that in teaching and again, I think this is very much a challenge for leaders, there needs to be some combination of, again, I think of the Berlin School, some combination of personal growth and transformation and business growth and transformation. That's not to suggest that I need to be become a close to your friend of every student or the analogy holds every employee. I think that's a very personal rhythm that individual leaders need to figure out for themselves.
Some are good at knowing all about the family lives of employees. Others are not and I don't think one is necessarily better than the others. You have to care for the person you have to have genuine empathy with them but I don't think again that there's a simple formula and so what I believe is important is that you're gathered in an organization or in a team, in a classroom and you … I try to lead or to teach by enabling people to move forward, to reach whatever collective goal we have while also growing individually.
I think that has a different overall, a different tenor in a classroom, even in an executive program, but I think it still holds in work settings, project settings where to me part of a future work and future leadership is ensuring to whatever extent possible and situations again are different that individuals are learning, they're finding some meaning or purpose in whatever collective tasks are being worked on. if that doesn't happen, I don't think those individuals are gonna stick around for so long or they're just going to I think become less and less productive.
Charles:
Two last questions for you. What's your view about the … What's the word I'm looking for? What's your view of the tortured genius syndrome? Do you think organizations need to make room for tortured geniuses? We're living in what I would describe as the creative economy. I don't know. I think I'm not the only person who would say that but creativity is very much to the foreign terms of being an essential business fuel. Creativity tends to be associated with tortured geniuses. Do you think businesses need to make room for those kind of people?
David Slocum:
I suppose that I would challenge how prevalent the tortured genius is. I think they do exist and I know of a couple of wonderful cases where tortured geniuses or … Certainly solitary geniuses have found the right places. Accommodations have been made and I think both individual and organization are better off. You may have many more people in mind. I think of the tortured genius is probably an exaggerated category where I think that there are a lot of … The word I would use is a lot of primadonnas who want to consider themselves tortured geniuses and if only the organization weren't in the way, if only they weren't constrained that they would be able to deliver unprecedented creative master works. That's not to say that leaders should double down or organizations should not allow for individuals who need extra time and space or whatever other allowances that the organization shouldn't be more flexible. I just think that particularly in those industries and organizations that are known to be creative certain individuals gravitate toward them because they believe that there's perhaps extra accommodation there that isn't needed.
Charles:
I think that's well put. I think you've put a piece of punctuation on that. I suspect too that the gig economy has created more opportunities for people to find the right kind of environment in which for them to make a living and express their own talent where you don't have to work inside an organization anymore, you can have a very successful life as what we might want to describe purely as a freelance but in fact is much more depth than capability attached within that.
David Slocum:
That's true. My only concern with that is what's often written about is the precarious economy where those who have the talent and imagination and also the wherewithal in the gumption to be able to succeed in the gig economy, you're exactly right. You're gonna find the opportunities that allowed them to grow and to succeed. I'm not sure everybody is there and that's not to set up an elite that is going to make it and others who aren't but I think that part of what at least I see in the gig economy right now is yes, great opportunities for individual talent to grow and shine but there's also a need for people to market themselves and have a set of skills that are in many ways different from just producing their creative work.
I think that's always true. When I was writing screenplays like all right. What percentage of the success is actually the genius of my screen plays and what is it about finding the right agent or using the right connection ultimately marketing that script. I think it's the same now and so there's a double challenge for people and I think that becomes harder in many ways for those who might have talent in a particular area who don't have to do the politicking or the marketing in organizations but in the gig economy they have no choice.
Charles:
I think that's right too. My last question for you what are you afraid of?
David Slocum:
That's a great final question Charles. I just wrote a piece about a short blog post about the need for greater creative business leadership literacy. This is very much on my mind. What I'm afraid of is that so much of the power and potential and opportunity of creativity, of really great leadership and of creative leadership, you want to put those together will be lost or will be neglected because of the superficiality of treatment that the Fast Company covers. I'm picking up Fast Company even though I read it but I think part of what they represent to me picking up a wonderful line from former strategist who used to speak to the Berlin School named Bill O'Connor.
He used to talk about innovation pornography and this is the kind of superficial … There's always an interview with Elon Musk or Richard Branson or Michelle Sandberg. They're all brilliant. They all have lessons to teach us but again his point was if all we're doing is revisiting the facts of their successes, if all we're doing is maintaining that distance between what others do as creative leaders and what we think about in our heads but don't actually have to pun. It's like pornography. Other people are doing what it is that, I don't know, we're hoping or thinking about doing. My fear is that there's more and more of that and that people will oversimplify, they'll dumb down. They will miss out on, again, ultimately the extraordinary potential of creativity and leadership maybe because they're lazy but in most cases because they don't know any better.
The swirl of information on these topics and the romance that we've talked about can be overpowering for people. My fear is that to some extent the very prominence or prevalence of creativity, innovation, leadership in discussions of how to make businesses more successful or build entrepreneurial ventures that that will in fact … Not in fact, enable people and empower them to go forward but rather it will stifle what individually they could offer.
Charles:
Which I guess means I need to make sure that this podcast doesn't turn into porn?
David Slocum:
Are there any visuals attached to this?
Charles:
Just your headshot if somebody wants to go to the …
David Slocum:
Oh, wow.
Charles:
We'll probably limit it at that. Let me give you the three takeaways that I've heard from this conversation. One is your ability and your desire to look at situations three dimensionally. I think there were just too many people who take the first two obvious dimension of the situation and fail to stop and just turn it over and say, "Okay, but if you look at it from here, it reveals an entirely different perspective instead of possibilities and also risk factors."
I find that compelling in talking to and listening to you, and watching you when you work as well. I think two, you have that teacher's gift of generally wanting the best for other people around you and so you focus is on how do we create a dynamic in which we are helping you individually and you as a group I think as you said earlier to reach a set of common goals. Then the third thing I think that again I think is very evident, compelling in fact is your ability to … This is probably not quite the right word but to codify the things that you're learning in a way that allow other people access to those insights, to be able to say there are patents here, there are themes here, there is structure here, there are lessons to be learned from this and here's what they are and here's how they might apply to you. I think if you put those three pieces together, you end up with somebody who has the knowledge and wisdom and ability to help people that you do.
David Slocum:
Wow. That's very kind of you. Thank you, Charles. It's been a pleasure. I hope I haven't rambled too much which is also I think at least an executive teacherly bad habit but I've enjoyed it. I think that your distillation is also helpful to me so thank you for that.
Charles:
No, thank you. Thank you so much for being here and I've enjoyed this just so much as I thought I would.
You've been listening to Fearless: The Art of Creative Leadership, and if you like what you've heard, please take a moment and go and leave us a rating on iTunes, and we'll be back next week with more. Thanks again for listening.
