Scott Belsky has just stepped off a plane from London. Before that he was in Texas, and before that Amsterdam. He's back in New York for a couple of weeks respite - a rare break these days - then it's onto another long-haul flight, to Australia and a series of speaking engagements in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.
The founder and CEO of The Behance Network (a Linkedin x Youtube x flickR lovechild specifically for the creative industries that boasts millions of active members), Editor of award winning blog
The 99%, and author of the best selling book
Making Ideas Happen, Belsky has had a lot of speaking engagements lately.
The eloquent New York business man has carved out something of a niche for himself as the world's only corporate productivity expert who doesn't make the creative class's skin crawl. This is a man who can say the words "actioning deliverables" to someone as flighty and mercurial and a fashion writer (that would be me), without making me want to vomit blood all down the front of my smock. This is not an easy task.
Belsky does this in two ways. The first is by tying up his message in a pretty package, making his suggestions appealing to the people who most need to take them. The second is by talking sense. Sure, there are many who might find his particular vision of monetising creative output a little distressing, but whether you agree with him or not, Belsky is a man worth listening to.
What can we expect from your trip?
I've spent the past five and a half years with my team helping organise the creative professional world. We've built the largest online platform of creative professionals, called Behance and have been developing a lot of research over the years all around the execution of ideas. How creative people can be more productive and really have more empowered careers. Australia is home to many Behance network members, from all sorts of fields, be they photographers or architects or illustrators… so I really hope to share more about what we're doing on the Behance network side of my business, and I'm also going to be talking about my book, which chronicles some of the best practices of some of the most productive creative people and teams on the planet. It was a labour of love, and it took years to put together, but now it has become quite a popular topic in The States and my hope is that people in Australia will appreciate that as well.
What do you have to say about the idea that creativity comes from chaos, and organisational procedures are an anathema to creative work?
There is a myth of the loan creative genius and I certainly believe that ideas don't happen because they're great, and they don't happen by accident. I really believe that the competitive advantage in the creative world is organisation. It's interesting, because you'll take a company like Apple, a brand that's known mostly for its creativity and innovation. Now every year
Project Management magazine puts out a list of the 100 most organised companies on the planet, and they use really quantifiable metrics and really measure the level of organisation. And for the past three years Apple has been number one on this list, followed by FedEx and UPS and other really logistics driven companies. Another example is authors, people like James Paterson who writes seven novels at once, and has published more best sellers than Random House does combined, he's this especially prolific author and he's extremely organised. I really believe that that is part of the creative's compromise, to actually make ideas happen.
You seem to be arguing for more rigour in an area that's traditionally thought of as pretty precarious and even volatile. Why do we view creatives as delicate flowers that need the perfect environment to flourish?
I think creativity has always been a black box. People don't understand where ideas come from, so we tred really carefully, and we start to tell stories to ourselves about why we're creative, and where it comes from, and why we might be inspired or not inspired, some people say they need to be in a certain place at a certain time…
It's a black box so we don't really like to tamper with it. There's been this notion that creatives are different from everybody else and so they need to be kept in a cage, and every now and then let out. And that's really sad!
I just think that the creative individual or team coupled with real leadership and planning can work wonders for the world. I mean we're seeing it now. We're in an era now where creatives don't have to be confined to cubes in corporate America and be managed. People can work on their own now.
We're in the time of the free radical where creative people can work on their own terms and make great salaries because there's less friction now than ever before. Ten years ago if you wanted to start your own business online you needed servers, you needed to be able to build websites yourself, you needed lawyers, LLC's, and these days you can get access to all that online for a $10 a month subscription. That's why we need to start a dialogue between the creative professionals themselves, so they can figure out how they can be more organised and connected.
A lot of people feel uncomfortable about the idea of creativity and commerce intermixing…
I think you have a responsibility to uh... Well, you know how on an aeroplane they always give you that safety briefing where they say you have to put the mask on yourself first before you put it on your child? It's sort of like that. You need to take care of yourself in order for you to be able to create and you need to have food on your table, you need to live a sustained life in order to produce your greatest work.
I think that we shouldn't frown down on the idea of having a rewarding career personally and financially, and I think that they are intertwined. Whether people like to admit it or not.
It reminds me of this story I heard from John Maeda, the President of the Rhode Island School of design. He worked with a man by the name of Paul Rand, who's really one of the most famous designers ever. And he worked in this studio, and told me about how once, when Paul was an old man he gave John some advice. He called him over and said:
"Listen, you're just setting out on your career as a designer. You're new to all this and I want to give you one extremely important piece of advice, please listen carefully."
So John Maeda leaned in with great intention, waiting for these incredible words of wisdom from this legendary designer. And he looked at John and he says:
"Go make money. You can create whatever you want, but go make money." And the point here is to leverage your talents and skills, to commercialise so you can sustain yourself to support them.