Dave Pollard on the Plight of the Creative Class

Look at the people picked for promotions, for leadership training, for the corner office jobs, the people who are highest-paid and most appreciated in almost every large organization, and you'll find they come from the uncreative positions [i.e. sales, cost management, risk management]. Look at the consultants they're bringing in, and you'll find they, too, are in the [left-brain] professions. Look at the people who are least fulfilled by their jobs, those who feel underpaid and under-appreciated and feel they have nowhere to go in their organizations, and you'll find them mostly in the [right-brain] positions. And look at the ranks of the unemployed and you'll find them, too, disproportionately in the [right-brain] professions...

It's not the fault of big business that they aren't creative. They are dinosaurs of the industrial era, when hierarchy was king and success was a matter of leverage -- 100 low-paid drones doing what they're told, working hard, grateful for their jobs, for every manager who every once in awhile might have to do something creative (usually when competitors' disruptive innovation forces them to). The creative types don't last long in this stultifying environment, so they quit, and the people who are left hire (and contract-in) people in their own image, so the dearth of creativity, and of interest in creativity, is self-perpetuating...

It's a vicious cycle, and expecting large corporations to be enlightened and altruistic enough to get us out of it is sheer folly."

As usual, Pollard gets us thinking.

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