New discovery: Comb over benefits creativity.
I now understand the reason for Rudy Giuliani’s snazzy hair style. You can’t have vision with hair in your eyes.
I’ve often equated vision with imagination. So, I guess we now know the secret to extraordinary creativeness.
The former New York City Mayor was stumping in my city over the weekend. The gist of his remarks, if I trust my local newspaper, was vision.
According to the Providence Journal, “Leadership, (says) Giuliani, who wrote a book by that title, has two ingredients: a vision, and the ability to execute that vision.
If you’re all vision and no execution, you’re a philosopher, (Giuliani continued,…) Are you all execution and no vision? Then, he suggested, you should work for somebody with vision.” (He wasn’t recruiting campaign drones, was he?)
I don’t care about your political leanings, only the first two paragraphs into this article and there’s a lot of wisdom for those of us always trying to hone our creative edge.
All imagination without follow through, well, we all know those kinds of people - creatively brilliant, but little accomplishment. But forgot the parent of the big idea, a “great idea” with poor execution is worse than a lousy idea with poor execution, because there is so much potential that‘s lost.
We discuss creativity from all sorts of angles in this blog. We can’t lose sight - vision, I suppose - of the need for equally high quality execution as well, to give an idea its due.
On the second profound point our poster child for the comb over made in his speech, equally as sad as vision with out execution is “all execution and no vision.”
I see this a great deal today. Great design is all around us; from home furnishings to electronics to advertising. But, designing what? A crappy idea skillfully designed is still a crappy idea.
Beware the people you hire to execute your “vision,” they usually only care about execution. Show me a commercial director who can tell a strong concept from a weak one? Even some of the “great” ones. (Okay, show me two.) Execution people too often don’t know from ideas. They’re more than happy to take your money to design and produce your me-too ironing board, or your raised ranch with lousy traffic flow. Popular music is a highly polished junkyard today, filled with wonderful production around absolutely horrible songs.
There is a huge difference between execution and what’s at the core of it - vision, imagination, ideas. Don’t overlook this, so to speak.
Next month we discuss the mullet: a sure fire way to get people to buy your fresh ideas.
[Note: the Rudy Giuliani image above came from combover.com - yes, there is actually a site about comb overs, them line: “No rugs, no drugs, no plugs.” Check it out for more photos of genius visionaries.)
