Subscribing to Smarter Creativity

The recent announcement of the retirement of Google Reader, and Feedburner most likely following, has led me to revisit the ways you can subscribe to the blog and the growing collection of feeds related to it. 

You can follow us on the usual social networks. You'll get a stream of related links and everything we post on the blog. 

You can still subscribe to our various feeds via RSS using the following direct links: 

SmarterCreativity RSS feed for all the blog's content.
​DanceMoves.Me RSS feed for the blog's dance related content only. 
​WordsMove.Me RSS feed for the blog's writing related content only. 
​MusicMoves.Me RSS feed for the blog's music related content only. ​
​The Week's Links RSS feed for the blog's weekly collection of all the links posted on social networks plus all the blog's posts and book recommendations. 

In addition, many of you asked to subscribe via email. Below you can subscribe to a daily email delivered in the late afternoon, with the days' posts, or to a weekly email that delivers the week's links only, delivered in the late afternoon on Fridays. 

If you already receive the blog posts via email I would ask that you re-subscribe below. The emails you are receiving now are generated by Feedburner and there are no guarantees they'll continue to work past the retirement of Reader. 

Subscribe to receive Smarter Creativity posts.

Subscribe to receive our weekly list of links only.

Let me know if you experience any problems and thank you for following the blog and for all the great things you share with me, especially for your reactions to something you found useful in your own creative work. 

The Devil Is An Artistic Director→

Adweek covers the promotion of Anna Wintour last week: ​

Powerful Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour is expanding her role at Condé Nast. Today, the publisher announced that Wintour—who is also the editorial director of Teen Vogue—was named artistic director of Condé Nast. In the newly created role, Wintour will be responsible for "curating and cultivating the creative vision" for the company, according to a statement.

In an interview with The New York Times, Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend said that Wintour would be assuming some of the responsibilities left open by Si Newhouse, the 85-year-old chairman of Condé Nast parent Advance Publications, when he scaled back his role, including oversight of Condé Nast's editorial division, last fall. "Si Newhouse leaves a void, inevitably," Townsend told the Times. "Anna, without even having to think twice about it, is the most qualified person to pick up that torch and carry it into the future."

Townsend added that the role of artistic director had been created, in part, to keep Wintour at Condé Nast, telling the Times that he "would go to great distances to avoid losing Anna, particularly in the prime of her career." Wintour had been rumored last year to be a possible Obama administration appointee to the U.K. ambassadorship, but she maintained that she had no plans outside of Condé Nast.

I find Wintour to be truly fascinating. While everyone is discussing the death of publishing as we know it she secures herself an even bigger position of leadership at Condé Nast​. At this moment it's not clear what this new position really means for publications like Wired, Epicurious or The New Yorker and I can not help but find myself very curious to see how her obvious influence will extend beyond the world of fashion. 

​In conversations I often compare Wintour to Steve Jobs. Most of us were willing to dismiss his most demanding character traits while acknowledging that he was a visionary genius, and yet similar behavior and success from Wintour results in her being branded a Prada-wearing devil. 

I gained a better understanding of who Wintour is from a film, not that one, the other one. The R.J. Cutler directed documentary The September Issue (available for streaming in the usual places.)​ Cutler spent eight months following Wintour and filming over three hundred hours of footage. 

While making The September Issue, I observed Anna Wintour day-in and day-out as she single-handedly commanded the $300-billion global fashion industry. In a business where last week's fashion shows are already old news, she has been at the top of her field (and the top of her game) for two decades and counting. Shortly after we began filming, I observed to a friend who asked what it was like to watch Anna work, "Well, you can make a film in Hollywood without Steven Spielberg's blessing, and you can publish software in Silicon Valley without Bill Gates' blessing, but it's pretty clear to me that you can't succeed in the fashion industry without Anna Wintour's blessing."

​Cutler even learned four lessons in management by watching Wintour work. 

Another reason to watch the documentary is to discover Grace Coddington. Every influential public figure always has a behind-the-scenes person who is equally, if quietly, influential to the work. 

Watch the above trailer for the documentary. At around the 2:00 mark there is a moment that resonated with me when I watched the film and that I confess I've stolen. ​In many meetings over the past few years I've been known to paraphrase her and demand "where is the quality?, where is the elegance?, where is the follow through? Come on, elevate it."

​If God is in the details, so is the Devil and she is an Artistic Director.

Milestones

Deadlines and project milestones have me pondering two questions today, and so I ​share them with you:

​What has been the highlight of your career? 

Did you recognize it as it happened, or after the fact? ​

On Reporting Annually

In the past, when I was working mostly with arts organizations, a lot of the work created was supported in large part by grants and other sponsorships that required comprehensive and transparent accounting and reporting, culminating with the annual reports that would determine whether further funds would be granted in the future.

It has been a while since I've had to write a complete annual report, and if I had to I would take my inspiration from three recent annual reports, full of wit, style, and proper reporting while taking advantage of technology to present the information.

From Bill Gates 2013 Annual Letter making the case for using a tool of business to improve the health and welfare of more of the world’s people, to Warby Parker's report - itself somewhat inspired by Nicholas Felton's annual reports - and last but not least, MailChimp, a service I love with a cheeky monkey doing the reporting, accounting has never been this much fun. 

New Year's Resolutions Are A Lousy Substitute To Caring

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.

A letter from Mark Twain to Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, January 1863. ( via Exp.lore.com)

We are now reaching that point of the year where resolutions made have begun to fade, giving way to the ease and comfort of routines that accommodate for realities lived. In the past couple of weeks I've seen family, friends, colleagues, all intelligent and capable in their own ways, surrender to the shortcut for caring that is New Year's resolutions.  

Making resolutions is a way of pretending, of fooling ourselves into thinking that we are taking steps towards becoming a better version of ourselves. Resolutions are a dream. 

See that video up there? That is Australian-born Berlin-based designer and illustrator Rilla Alexander, at the 99u conference, brilliantly exemplifying the simple truth that without the doing, dreaming is useless. 

We all have an idea we want to execute on and yet don't know how to begin. Take the time to figure out what that idea is. What do you really want? Really. Think it through. Pursue it.

What do you care about?

I don't mean what you tell yourself you care about, I mean what you actually care about. You know, that thing that takes the most of your time. Take a close look at your week, and whatever takes the most of your time, be it email, Facebook, Twitter, meetings, family, friends, working out, television, video games, work and so on, that is what you care about. That is what you are making a priority every day. 

Is that time-consuming thing what you really want? If it is, then it is time to really focus on it and give it the attention it deserves. If it is not, then it is time to change.