Five years. That's how long our company, Barkley, has been conducting its two-day creativity symposium. By the employees, for the employees. I've been to all of them. And I've always been inspired. Today was no exception.
It started with Sam Harrison, author of IdeaSpotting and Zing! He's a former professor and an all-around creative teacher. He spent two hours downloading us with creativity techniques we can use to keep us fresh. Yes, some of them I've heard before, but no matter. I need to hear them over and over. And Sam's Southern-Gentleman approach made listening to him easy.
He gave us a list of 28 things for our "creativity list," and peppered his presentation with interesting exercises. Some take-away gems:
"Are you filling your life with work or filling your work with life?"
"Listen. Silent and Listen are anagrams for a reason."
"Ask questions: How come? Why? What matters? What's missing? What's next?"
After lunch, Michael Jager of JDK Design took the stage. A creative veteran, he's work with brands like Burton Snowboards, Microsoft's Xbox, Levi's, The Dave Matthews Band and Phish. His subject was collaboration, and I really appreciated his honest assessment of the dark and light sides of this topic. Some highlights:
"We have to be masters of collaboration."
"If collaboration becomes decoration, it's poisonous."
"Be bold enough to take a collaborative opportunity to a client."
The most interesting case he shared with us, IMO, was their creation of a "collabratory" when working with Levi's. Basically, they took 25 people from cross-functional disciplines -- from agencies and client -- broke up into six teams, and gave themselves one week to develop product ideas from concept to the go-to-market phase. That may not sound innovative, in theory, but have you ever pulled off anything like this successfully? This was a diverse group of creative people -- from industrial designers to traditional creatives to engineers to account service people, from all over the world. And they charged themselves with developing product ideas that were on trend, on strategy and were represented by marketing-communications concepts. Again, all within 5 days.
Michael told me after his presentation this wasn't a cheap affair for the client, but well worth it. Two ideas from that session that Levi's ultimately brought to market were their organic cotton line and their redwire line.
But the cherry-on-top for the day was an hour-long session by Stanley Jordan. If you're not a jazz fan, you may never have heard of him. If you aren't, or haven't, you need to check him out. I am a jazz fan, but have only listened to a bit of his music, and I've never seen him live. He's freak'n amazing! Read up a bit on him, then check out some of his playing. His two-handed hammer technique is unique. He played everything from traditional jazz to the Beatles to Led Zeppelin. Then he played a song on both piano and guitar -- at the same time! Unbelievable.
