Digithoughts

Last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was an overwhelming swirl of badge-wearing and suited humanity, packed tightly into the tradeshow floors and the Venetian Hotel.

The actual gadgets, roughly (and inaccurately) defined by me as: Beeping Things, Glowing Things, Loud Things, Connectivity Things, Things that Work with your iPhone/iPad, and Things that Cover your iPhone/iPad – I am generalizing here of course, but the mind does glaze under those florescent lights after a while – offered the usual cornucopia of slight functional improvements and rather more design improvements.  The two trends I noted (or maybe just enjoyed) the most, however, were:

(1)    You Can Now Monitor Everything. Especially Yourself.

Calories, location, physical activity (duration AND intensity), objects behind you in a car or in front of you on a ski slope, levels of milk and eggs in your refrigerator (thanks LG) … there are systems and devices to constantly monitor all these things now, and post them on Facebook (sorry Google+) while you’re at it.  Clearly, the future is in carefully recording the metrics on our favorite subject: ourselves.  I predict next year the trend will be how this information is best integrated with reality TV, which brings me to our second trend.

(2) Television is Dead (but Long Live Television)

Between continuing press and push for both Google TV and the Yahoo! Connected TV (now augmented further by the new Tom Hanks content deal), and the increasing connectivity of every device we have with large-scale whisper-thin LCD screens that hang on our (presumably) Architectural Digest-worthy walls … traditional television networks as content streamers have never seemed less relevant, while the creative format they devised continues to expand and develop.Both shortform and longform video entertainment is finding ways onto our TVs, and the networks have less and less to do with it.  Time to re-think the ad model, anyone?  Again?

Meanwhile, back on the strip: Ad Age’s “Creativity and Technology” day highlighted the uncomfortable relationship between creativity and power with their first speaker, Activision’s Eric Hirshberg.  Hirshberg’s evolution into the CEO role from a creative history rather than a business-operational one has attracted considerable ink; interesting, given in a 2010 Fast Company poll, the most important quality identified for CEOs (by, it should be noted, other CEOs) was, you guessed it: creativity.

But, perhaps “creativity” is the kind of thing you want to say you have at CEO meetings, rather than actually embody or perform, given studies like this one published by Cornell in 2010: Recognizing Creative Leadership: Can Creative Idea Expression Negatively Relate to Perceptions of Leadership Potential.

In short: Mueller, Goncalo and Kamdar find that even in roles that require creativity, actually being creative (as defined by expressing creative ideas – y’know, out loud in front of people and everything) actually lowered a peer group’s opinion of the subject as having leadership potential. Hmm.

Creativity, after all, calls for elements of risk, unpredictability, and leaps and bounds in logic and development process. It’s easy to see the anxiety that might cause in the boardroom.  Real change is hard, real change agents aren’t always valued.  C-levels are often known for liking people who speak their own language (and reinforce their own values, not least of which is: how incredibly qualified and valuable THEY are).  And recognizing creativity – real, often messy creativity – as not just a force for influencing ‘the system’ from the outside, but as a central place from which to develop and lead a company – is indeed an experiment to be watched, and, hopefully, repeated more.  

Hirshberg points out that many ‘creative’ leaders of companies (Jobs, etc.) are founders with considerable cults of personality.  Many more creative founders are exited (as Jobs himself was) to make room for more corporate types.  If the true yardstick of a CEO is their personal charisma, then creative types, I think you know what you need to bone up on now to make this happen.

Confronted with the famous “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” leak last year, Hirshberg chose to direct his team to view the leak as an unplanned (albeit stressful) opportunity to court noisy fan love rather than a complete corporate shut-down of information.  Hirshberg’s ability to emphasize with core fans – to understand that they were interested in the game, not the company –  gave a positive outcome to an otherwise hard-swallow moment.

I'd like to say this is because 'he's creative.'  It's probably just because he's smart and hasn't forgotten what it's like to be a fanboy himself.  And I'd like to think that's really the defining qualification for CEOs of the future.  Maybe we can create a device to monitor that too....

Sarah Kotlova Account Director

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