Seven Rules for Managing Creative People (offensive article)

[Rosstin]

Hey all, there was a pretty eye-opening article on Harvard Business Review recently on how to manage your insane, mouth-drooling artists. For one thing, pay them hardly anything. They'll work harder. Really.

I want to link the original article as a reading for some of my fellows in my Game Design class, to show people why you need to know a little business (so people like the author don't shaft you.)

Problem is, the author retconjured the article because of the massive outrage. I want a permanent link to the original article. It's still in Google's cache, but I suspect it won't be permanently.

original article:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PAfbzXjTrOIJ:blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/seven_rules_for_managing_creat.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

retconjured article:
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/seven_rules_for_managing_creat.html

[angrymudcrab]

It is always refreshing when people say what they really mean.

[Chen]

There's no a real big difference between those two articles. The points remain pretty much the same. The one they changed from pay them little to don't overpay them stayed pretty much the same. In reading the paragraphs it was clear the intent was that you didn't HAVE to pay them a lot since they'd do well even without the monetary incentive.

I suppose the implication that all creative people were hard to work with was bad, but considering the vast majority of the two articles stayed the same I'm not necessarily sure that was the original intent anyway.

[Asta Kask]

Apart from the "pay them poorly" point I think it seems rather sensible. If we remove that point - what's offensive about the rest?

[Karoht]

"Pay them poorly" appears to be slightly sarcastic.
His suggestion is don't overpay them, keep your artists hungry, don't over-complicate what they love with too much money. The rest of the paragraph then discusses the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic reward systems.

If all you took was the 'tips' without the paragraphs, I can see why there would be outrage. But when one reads the paragraphs it makes a lot more sense.

None the less, indeed, this is something that artists should be aware of.

[GnomeFighter]

Ok... Appart from the slightly stupid comment about paying poorly I don't see what is wrong with this. And that was, I think, a bit of a poorly worded joke. As supported by the change to the artical.

Also, this is not talking about artists. This is talking about those people who are creative in business. The people who come up with the off the wall ideas, new stratagys etc. that "normal" thinking would not. You get them all over the place, not just "arty" types. It's the people who make leaps of logic or see things others don't.

I think your reading a bit to much in to this and seeing it as a "Them V Us". And too much "I'm an artist. Only I can be creative" in the comments.

[Deepbluediver]

I didn't follow the links to all the studies the author claims to cite, but it sounds like for a couple of the points, at least, they may be confusing correlation with causation.

People who really REALLY want to work in a creative field will likely do so no matter how bad the conditions are, but that does not necessarily mean that this somehow encourages them to be more creative. What happens when the head of your design team quits to take a better paying but more "boring" job because they can't afford to raise 2 kids on pittance of a salary they are getting?

What happens when your advertising department turns in a whole bunch of stuff celebrating nihilism for the Big Boxmarts Spring sale because they are all stressed out of their minds?
etc etc etc.

And the majority of these points could be applied to pretty much ANY field or part of an industry. So basically they vary between "oversimplified to the point of uselessness" and "justification for acting like an ass".


1. Spoil them and let them fail
4. Don't pressure them
7. Make them feel important
Ignoring, for the moment, that these three seem to run contradictory to each other, I would say this about any person in a job. It's pretty much just a long-winded version of "balance criticism and praise".

2. Surround them by semi-boring people
aka, the support staff should be competent by not contradictory. I would love to live in whatever world the author does where you can apparently pluck whatever type of people you need off a shelf and slot them in wherever they are needed to fit and prop up the existing team.

3. Only involve them in meaningful work
6. Surprise them
Again, two points to say one thing- some people have shorter attention spans than others.
I'm sure we'd all love to be on the team thats planning the next rocket mission to mars, but some one needs to empty the wastebin and file the TPS reports. You get to be a higher job-level in business by proving your competence and commitment, not by being creative. You don't staff your entire board of directors with newly-graduated fine-arts majors.

5. Pay them poorly
I think I hit most of the relevant counterpoints in my intro. Finding people who enjoy the work and are not just doing it for the paycheck is of course that best circumstance for any position, but this really just seems like a cruel dig at keeping personal costs down.
And the revised version isn't any better. I wonder what the author would say about overpaying CEO's (http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/CEOsOverpaid.htm)?

[GnomeFighter]

Again, you have missed the point that it is not about art graduates or creative artists. It's about people who creative and have ideas in business.

[Deepbluediver]

Again, you have missed the point that it is not about art graduates or creative artists. It's about people who creative and have ideas in business.

I don't think so... :smallconfused:

I specifically called out that some of this would be decent advice for how to manage ANYONE in a company or organization, and the author fails to distinguish how we determine who is "creative" vs "semi-boring", and why there should be a double-standard on things like pay.


Edit: let me elaborate a little further-
Take the point about "meaningful work". Theoretically, ALL work in a company should be meaningful. If you have people doing busywork or pointless activities, then its costing the company money without gaining it anything. There might be BORING or REPETITIVE work, but that doesn't mean its not important.

A better way to phrase it might have been "always have them working on new projects" which may or may not be good advice, but at least it would be more accurate.

[Emmerask]

Pay them poorly is the author not understanding the studies sadly.

These studies show that a reward system for good work makes people work at less efficiency (on avg).
So what you should not do is to have bonuses for doing the work faster etc

It has however no influence on the monthly pay your receive because this is not viewed as a reward (at least I know of no one who views it that way) and therefore does not narrow the focus of the worker to a completely target oriented view.

[pkoi]

2. Surround them by semi-boring people
aka, the support staff should be competent by not contradictory. I would love to live in whatever world the author does where you can apparently pluck whatever type of people you need off a shelf and slot them in wherever they are needed to fit and prop up the existing team.


Uhh, that's pretty much how staffing works. You interview people, then hire the right one for the job. Or, you rearrange staffing to more suitably meet project requirements.

[Finlam]

I didn't follow the links to all the studies the author claims to cite, but it sounds like for a couple of the points, at least, they may be confusing correlation with causation.

The means of producing effect that the author of article is describing is called "Cognitive Dissonance"[1]. It has been well known and documented that you can make people enjoy even very monotonous work by paying them less. [2, Festinger 1959]. There is no confusion of correlation and causation, rather it is merely a statement of a well documented fact. For further edification see Leon Festinger's original publication[3], or any of the references cited by APA[4].



[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Festinger#Cognitive_dissonance
[3]http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=voeQ-8CASacC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=cognitive+dissonance+studies&ots=9w97SyphtA&sig=Jg_PFsYPYZSE9tNT20ErXyeCOuQ
[4]http://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/education/dissonance.aspx

[Don Julio Anejo]

The means of producing effect that the author of article is describing is called "Cognitive Dissonance"[1]. It has been well known and documented that you can make people enjoy even very monotonous work by paying them less. [2, Festinger 1959]. There is no confusion of correlation and causation, rather it is merely a statement of a well documented fact. For further edification see Leon Festinger's original publication[3], or any of the references cited by APA[4].
Basically, not ninja'd but halfway through the thread I wanted to post something similar. Main point to look into is cognitive dissonance: when you chose/get something worse than a different option (i.e. you're paid poorly for your work, like say, $30k salary as an artist), you justify it (I'm doing it because I really like art).

On the other hand, if you're paid too well, you start a) tying what you like exclusively to extrinsic motivators (you draw because someone pays you, not because you like it.. and your performance suffers) and b) getting lazy & complacent (I'm going to do a hack job on this because I don't like it, and I'm too important for them to say anything about it).

For tl;dr, non-overcomplicated lingo version of scientific papers, watch this RSA Animate video (www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc) on motivation.

[Copper]

I think most of these points are good and make sense. I think it is good to have different kinds of people work together-- and that having too many creative types trying to work together can cause friction. Letting people try and fail is a good way to help them come up with big ideas. The money part-- well, I'm not going to touch that for now.

I think my problem with this article is how it is written. It just all seems condescending, as if "creative people" were small children, or perhaps pets that you had to take care of and keep quiet, not fully grown, diverse individuals with their own motivations and feelings. It passes the line from helpful to really manipulative.

Now obviously this is subjective, and I'm not part of the business word, so maybe this kind of way to think of employees is normal, but it just all struck me as kind of weirdly written.

[Deepbluediver]

Uhh, that's pretty much how staffing works. You interview people, then hire the right one for the job. Or, you rearrange staffing to more suitably meet project requirements.

Yes, but that was my point. This isn't some super-secret method for success, its just general good business practices.


The means of producing effect that the author of article is describing is called "Cognitive Dissonance"[1]. It has been well known and documented that you can make people enjoy even very monotonous work by paying them less. [2, Festinger 1959]. There is no confusion of correlation and causation, rather it is merely a statement of a well documented fact. For further edification see Leon Festinger's original publication[3], or any of the references cited by APA[4].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Festinger#Cognitive_dissonance
[3]http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=voeQ-8CASacC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=cognitive+dissonance+studies&ots=9w97SyphtA&sig=Jg_PFsYPYZSE9tNT20ErXyeCOuQ
[4]http://www.apa.org/pi/aids/resources/education/dissonance.aspx


Basically, not ninja'd but halfway through the thread I wanted to post something similar. Main point to look into is cognitive dissonance: when you chose/get something worse than a different option (i.e. you're paid poorly for your work, like say, $30k salary as an artist), you justify it (I'm doing it because I really like art).

On the other hand, if you're paid too well, you start a) tying what you like exclusively to extrinsic motivators (you draw because someone pays you, not because you like it.. and your performance suffers) and b) getting lazy & complacent (I'm going to do a hack job on this because I don't like it, and I'm too important for them to say anything about it).

I'll have to go back and read the original article and some of those links, but I think what you are trying to tell me is that people convince themselves things aren't so bad when they should be miserable to avoid that cognitive dissonance.

Ok, so if you believe the underpaid and the desperate make for better employees, how does that apply only to creative people as opposed to just everyone?
And even for the creative types, if they come to work stressed or unhappy because they can't pay the rent and are eating Ramen for the third week straight, do you really think that makes for a good employee?


Most notably, two large-scale meta-analyses reported that, when tasks are inherently meaningful (and creative tasks are certainly in this condition), external rewards diminish engagement.

This is a quote from the article, but if you follow the link, it mentions two studies to support the idea, and one against it, so at the very least there is some disagreement. Also, they seemed to focus on "educational policy", not business.

I'll ignore the "creative tasks are inherently meaningful" bit because as I stated earlier, "meaningful" is a vague and kind of pointless term, in this context.


I think my problem with this article is how it is written. It just all seems condescending, as if "creative people" were small children, or perhaps pets that you had to take care of and keep quiet, not fully grown, diverse individuals with their own motivations and feelings. It passes the line from helpful to really manipulative.

Now obviously this is subjective, and I'm not part of the business word, so maybe this kind of way to think of employees is normal, but it just all struck me as kind of weirdly written.

Agreed, for the most part. You could just say "pay everyone appropriately" but that doesn't sound like very special or sage advice now, does it?
And even the altered "don't overpay them" is kind of pointless; I would like to ask the author who he thinks it IS a good idea to overpay.

[Rosstin]

According to the author, the world can be divided into creative people, and semi-boring people. The article is dangerous in that it horribly overgeneralizes. It assumes that all creative people are basically the same.

It's like... benevolent creative-person-ism. I would hate to work for someone who had taken this article to heart.

I'm rather surprised that so many people are willing to defend such a terrible article.

[Aedilred]

People who really REALLY want to work in a creative field will likely do so no matter how bad the conditions are, but that does not necessarily mean that this somehow encourages them to be more creative. What happens when the head of your design team quits to take a better paying but more "boring" job because they can't afford to raise 2 kids on pittance of a salary they are getting?
Assuming you want to keep him, when he tells you he's planning to leave and why, you offer him a pay rise so he can afford to stay in the job. There's a difference between not overpaying, and underpaying. In that scenario he's clearly underpaid.

[thorgrim29]

The thing is, when you're used to working with business types , managing creative types (R&D folk, advertisers, programmers, writers, etc....) can be a bit like working with children, because they don't play the same game you do at all and barely live in the same world (not that one "world" is intrinsically better) . This seems like an article for the guy who just started a new job working with those kind of people and tries to manage them like he would manage say, fiscalists. Like he said in the article, it's basically a primer on managing Don Draper, and it seems a bit condescending because frankly that can be a huge pain in the ass and he needed to keep it short.

Sorry you're not getting the outrage you were hoping for, but it just doesn't seem warranted.

[SaintRidley]

And the revised version isn't any better. I wonder what the author would say about overpaying CEO's (http://management.about.com/cs/generalmanagement/a/CEOsOverpaid.htm)?

My guess: "Overpay them. They aren't creative, so overpaying them will help them to feel important, which ensures that they will do their job at a level justifying their self-perceived importance. The more you overpay them, the more important they will perceive themselves to be and the harder they will work."