Creative Reaction

In an NYT article entitled Even the Giants Can Learn to Think Small (free subscription required - don’t bother) we see another nail in the coffin of the “if you’re not growing, you’re dying” mantra.

Part of the “thinking smaller” movement is a desire to provide better service through personalization, and part of it is the need to be leaner in an increasingly global marketplace. In the Times article, Professor Thomas W. Malone of MIT’s Sloan School of Management offers another reason - employees’ “noneconomic goals” like freedom, personal satisfaction and fulfillment. “How much energy and creativity might be unlocked if all the members of an organization felt in control?” he asks. Thinking back, this ties in perfectly to other times we’ve mentioned globalization making good talent harder to attract and keep.

Being smaller and agile has competitive advantages as well; companies as a whole tend to be more entrepreneurial. Philip Rosedale, founder and chairman of Linden Lab (Second Life), says optimizing a company for creativity involves helping all employees regardless of position develop an entrepreneurial spirit. “Most companies erroneously focus on competition and on differentiation from their competitors…the business opportunity lies in turning creativity into productivity.” And as most entrepreneurs know, ideas are worthless unless they are executed.

(If you do read the article, you may pick up on some similarities between Linden Lab’s and Pixar’s philosophies. And if have a really good memory, you’ll remember some similar posts on company and team size here, here, and here)

So, focus on fostering a collaborative, entrepreneurial spirit company-wide, and not growth for the sake of growth, for your business’ success.

Another post on the size of a design team and its effect on creativity. In this post on his blog Subtraction, Khoi Vinh, Design Director for NYTimes.com speaks largely from personal experience and makes several excellent points. I’ll summarize by mashing his words:

— Design doesn’t scale well. This craft rests on the efficiency of transferring ideas from the brain to the hand. The perfect design staff is a single designer who can conceive of and execute an idea from start to finish, maintaining the same coherent creative vision throughout. Of course, as an economic matter, this is impractical - it almost always has to scale. The smaller the scale, however, the more efficient the practice of design —

Plenty to think about here. So how can we keep our staff/departments lean and agile enough to provide the best possible work for our clients? You could pay the slackers to quit…