Art Thinking: How to Carve Out Creative Space in a World of Schedules, Budgets, and Bosses

A work of art is something new in the world that changes the world to allow itself to exist.

The idea of accomplishment growing out of friendship disrupts the idea of the lone-wolf genius.

I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement.

Bruce Henderson, the founder of the Boston Consulting Group, introduced the classic management-consulting framework of the growth-share matrix in 1970,

the Bauhaus, the German school and social experiment started in 1919 and disbanded in 1933. The Bauhaus took as its founding mission the connection of the creative and commercial arts.

They distilled good manager success into eight attributes: 1. Is a good coach 2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage 3. Expresses interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being 4. Is productive and results-oriented 5. Is a good communicator—listens and shares information 6. Helps with career development 7. Has a cl

For your life or for your organization, you can take an audit of how you spend your time and how you make your money. Are time and money aligned, or are you earning money in one area to support work in another? You can actually draw it on paper as two pie charts—one for time and one for money—or you can map it in your head for a moment. Are there a

In any workplace, being a producer does not always have to be a full-time job. It does, however, need to be an intentionally designated role. Designating a producer frees up everyone else to focus on the work itself. The task of commercialization becomes a creative assignment unto itself. If the producer role rotates it is less likely to feel like

To effectively manage the risk of early-stage creative work, you need two tools: what I will call portfolio thinking and ownership stakes.

a project will usually appear to you at the outset in some kind of idealized form. Then you start to make the work, and when you get halfway through you realize it does not look like what you imagined at all. The important part is everything that happens after that point.