How to Get Ideas Flowing in Your Workplace: Ideaship

WHAT IS IDEASHIP? 2 I spent half my life in advertising. Half of that time I ran creative departments in advertising agencies, half in creative departments run by others. I was telling a client of mine one day about the difficulties of running such a department, a department that is — by definition and design — a collection of misfits and free spirits, of original thinkers, of people who resist authority and reject dogma; and whose strength is their ability to discover — on command — fresh solutions to a variety of problems. He thought about it for a while, and then he said: “Running a creative department is not a do-able job. Any attempt to direct or lead or run people who are like that will be counter-productive. They’ll rebel. Or they’ll clam up.” Perhaps he was right. But that’s because we were using the wrong words. “Direct” or “lead” or “run” don’t describe what I, and many like me, did. We didn’t direct or lead or run our departments. We ideaized them. We weren’t leaders. We were ideaists. And the art form we practiced was not leadership. It was ideaship. Henry Miller once wrote: “No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.”3 A leader motivates and directs and runs and guides and leads. An ideaist restores. A leader leads. An ideaist ideaizes. In short, ideaship is a step beyond leadership, for an ideaist does more than lead — he or she restores to people their belief in their own guidance. Another client of mine maintained that creative departments are so atypical that any lessons learned there about leadership (I hadn’t yet coined the word ideaship) are not applicable to other groups of people in other kinds of organizations. Phooey. The creative people in advertising agencies don’t have a patent on getting ideas. Everyday, the people you work with probably come up with dozens of ideas, from how to get to work quicker to how to stretch their lunch hours, from how to make deliveries faster to how to write memos better, from how to jazz up a sales meeting to how to speed up a production line. So we know they can come up with ideas. And if you want them to come up with more and better ideas and with more original thinking and innovative approaches and fresh solutions, then an advertising agency creative department is far from some weird model that only a gull would emulate. Rather, the reverse is true: It is a paragon for your organization, and the lessons learned there are a guide for you. * * * * * * What follows then are some of the things I think I’ve learned and some of the conclusions I’ve drawn about ideaship from thirty-five years experience in advertising agency creative departments.