Business vs Creativity

Listen to your average windbag businessman and he'll tell you how important creativity is in the workplace. What he really means by this is 'coming up with ideas', but creativity and coming up with ideas are only linked in the most tenuous fashion. The truth is that anything really creative is going to appeal to some people, but if the product is original and unadulterated, it is probably going to offend or displease others.

Business people – ie, those who see the pursuit of money as an art – are morbidly afraid of offending anyone who might have a dollar at their disposal. Unless you're talking a third-world nation, that's most of us. It's here that business and creativity split apart and cannot be sewn back together again. The true artist doesn't care who he or she offends, so long as the integrity of their vision remains in tact. On the other hand we have creativity as it is defined in the business world, best exemplified by television advertisments, where the creatives' original vision is modified, homogenised, dumbed-down and generally meddled with until the conceptual spark is all but snuffed out. The same goes for custom publishing (a field in which I have considerable experience), where a true writer's prose is 'edited' by people who have trouble stringing a coherent sentence together. The final result is a review (for example) with the same basic structure as the writer envisioned, only with all the style, substance and interesting turns of phrase removed. It is, in essence, a form of taxidermy, except in this case the subject is still alive while its vital organs are ripped out and replaced with cotton wool.

No, business and creativity live on two sides of a wide river. They might occasionally engage in trade, but there can never be a true synergy between them.