Puttnam’s five laws of creative business

Friday, April 30, 2010 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, management, creative industries, ideas, dreams, House of Lords, zeitgeist, NESTA, profitability, blame, David Puttnam

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps: Not everyone in the House of Lords is a boring old has-been looking to pick up a £200 a day attendance fee – as Lord Puttnam comprehensively proved yesterday [28 April 2010] in an inspirational speech to the NESTA creative business mentor network about the laws of creative business.

In the spirit of these digital times, there was only one thing for me to do: copy it. Sorry – I meant sample short excerpts from it digitally, giving proper credit to the source material.

Anyway, Puttnam came up with five excellent laws on how to run a creative business, and here they are, paraphrased in my no doubt fairly incompetent summary. I am sure this is worth passing on.

1. The first creative idea is never perfect. You might have the germ of a good idea, but it will need development.

Puttnam told a great anecdote from his early days in advertising, when an old hand would send him and his bemused colleagues back to the drawing board each night to work on their campaign again – without making it easy by telling them what was wrong with it. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

2. Hang on to the idealism of what took you into the job in the first place. As George Bernard Shaw said: ‘Be true to the dreams of your youth.’

However much one likes to believe otherwise, this is a hard thing to do when faced with the daunting practicalities of turning a creative business into a profitable one – which had been the content of the discussion earlier in the evening among a fairly august group of media executives at NESTA.

3. Don’t waste time attempting to micro-manage what is essentially a creative undertaking.

Puttnam was very keen on the idea of devolving creative power down the management chain, but protecting the creatives from the negative consequences of their risk taking.

4. Don’t get trapped or tempted into the blame culture.

The prevalence of blame culture in this country, Puttnam said, is a massive distraction from our priorities in building a creative/knowledge economy. We should develop skills in problem solving rather than shove out MBAs in ‘how to cover your back’.

5. Be prepared to share your learning, experiences and mistakes at every possible opportunity.

This was an original thought. You have an obligation to share your knowledge about your successes and failures, to let people find out what they are themselves capable of. (And Puttnam, producer of my favourite ever film, Local Hero, did that brilliantly in his speech.)

We have reached a ‘Radio Caroline’ moment, he said, meaning that political attitudes have fallen way behind the cultural zeitgeist.

Another of these moments was in Hollywood in 1969, which was run by half a dozen men in suits who smoked cigars together at weekends. By 1972 they had been booted out as the Scorsese/Lucas generation swept into town.

The same could be true right now in Britain’s creative industry, unless it reinvented itself and stuck to its core values.

There are tough and challenging times ahead, and to prosper in them, we all need to be true to the creative dreams of our youth.

Image: © Caroline Bonarde Ucci licensed under GNU Free Documentation License 

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps reports on the media industry for the Grant Thornton blog -– read more posts by Alex Connock