Free Creative People Must Be Stopped by David A Owens Page A

ado, they began to suggest ideas while she wrote them on a notepad. Heinz, the IT specialist and a generally soft-spoken person, wondered to himself what, exactly, the board had meant by larger ? And what did they mean by diversity ? Not sure whether to bring it up, he reasoned that because things were already well under way, it might embarrass Josephine if he brought it up now. Plus, she didn’t seem concerned. After all, she was extremely competent and had far more experience doing this than he did; that’s why she was chosen as the executive director of ShowArts just over a year ago.
    Sonya from marketing offered a number of big radical ideas, among them doing a teaser show for the new production on “a stage on the back of a tractor-trailer that stops at various hip places throughout the city.” Todd, who managed subscriptions, began to suggest “buying Ad-Words from Google if the data showed it to be—” but he was interrupted by Mark from the business office, who insisted that they first “analyze current audiences, segment them by levels of giving, and then survey them for willingness to attend shows and support the coming capital campaign.” In an annoyed tone, Sonya reminded Mark that the problem was “increasing the audience, not bean-counting the capital campaign.” Mark retorted that at least his ideas “were not delusional fantasies.” The room became uncomfortably quiet, so Josephine called the meeting to an end, suggesting that they had “a couple of good ideas to work with.” Sonya, however, disagreed, saying she didn’t think they had a really exciting idea, to which Mark mumbled something in reply about “moving on and getting some real work done.”
    At the next meeting, Josephine had the Think Big team continue with their brainstorming, and said that she’d like by the end of the meeting to choose the idea they’d pursue. After some initial confusion about what the ideas were—Josephine had forgotten to bring the notepad from the last meeting, and none had been written down from this meeting—they resurrected most of the ideas from memory, writing them on the whiteboard. Then, just as the voting process was about to begin, Josephine’s cell phone rang and she answered it. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said to the team, “I’ve got to get this—go ahead and vote without me. I trust you and will go with whichever idea you choose,” and stepped out of the room.
    Calling out each idea, Jason tallied the votes. After a bit of horsetrading, they finally came to a choice that seemed to be acceptable to everyone. Or, as Heinz commented later, “one that was not unacceptable to everyone.” When Josephine returned to the room, they told her the outcome of the vote. She was a little surprised and not fully convinced that it was the best option. But she decided to go along with their choice, reasoning that it had been hard enough to get them this far; any setback at this point would mean that all the time already spent would have been wasted.
    The next meeting was intended for planning implementation. As Mark led the planning, Sonya lost interest; she couldn’t get excited about the approach the team had decided on. She left halfway through the meeting, a pattern that persisted throughout the rest of the project. After six weeks of meetings, the team began closing in on their “opening day,” as they referred to the project launch date. Their idea was to record a short video of the preparations for ShowArts’ new production along with a short teaser staged by the performers. This video was to be posted online and linked in a marketing email, and would begin playing when the recipient opened the email. The email was to be sent to several thousand people on a mailing list purchased exclusively for this purpose.
    At the final coordination meeting, a week before the first round of