No wonder your culture isn’t creative. Maybe you’ve built it all WRONG. How to 10x creativity without 10x budgets - lessons from Quentin Tarantino, John Lennon and Local Beer

You’re building your challenger creative culture all wrong, mate.
You’ve been lied to, pal.
You’re being told awful advice, babe.
C’mon BROSKI.

FIX UP.
LOOK SHARP.

We no longer live in the industrial factory economy.
We live in the ideas economy.

So, why do challenger brands still run our businesses like we’re in the factory age?

During the Industrial Revolution. Fordism. Factory work. Blah. Blah. Blah

Everyone built their organisation around Inputs = Outputs

4 hours of inputs = 8 units of output
8 hours of inputs = 16 units of output
16 hours of inputs = 32 units of output

Fine when building cars and trains and planes and factories and titbits.

But, now, we’re in the ideas age.

because, today:

ideas win.
creativity wins.
10x creativity > 10 x budget

in the creative age:

2 minutes of input = 90 units of output
7 hours of input = 12 units of output
1 unit of input = 1 units of output

Creative output doesn’t work on a factory schedule.
Like using a Golf Club to play Cricket.

Founders are using golf clubs to play cricket.

I speak to so many founders who trying to optimise everything. B2B meetings. B2B Zoom.

The Irony?
In the pursuit of hyper optimisation, we’ve become under-optimised.

Back-to-Back is The Blue Peter Badge of Honour for Founders in Fedora Hats and VEJAS wearing Whoop! Whoop Whoop! Congrats! You’re LITERALLY killing your creativity.

Your goal is simple: 10x Creativity with 10x less budget

Ideas don’t come in brainstorming sessions. They come as you’re washing your bits in the shower.

Ideas don’t come in board room meetings, when people are fucking.bored.com. They come as you’re running for your train.

Ideas don’t come when you’re in a 1-2-1. They come as you’re grabbing your meal deal.

Quentin Tarantino’s Creative Process

*Credit Billy Oppenheimer:

In 2008, Quentin Tarantino restructured his creative process.

"Before," he said, “I was an amateur, mad little writer."

He would go to a bar, “order some shit, drink a lot of coffee, and be there for hours with all my shit laid out all night long.”

"It all changed," he said,

When he started working on "Inglorious Bastards."

“I started writing during the daytime,” he explained. "I started writing around 10-10:30, something like that, and then around 5 or 6, I stop for the day."

Now, he says, comes the most important part of his process:

"What I do is I go into my pool and just kind of float around in the water…And then a lot of shit will come to me. Literally, a lot of ideas will just come to me. Then I get out and make little notes on those ideas I came up with while [he pauses, trying to think of the word] meditating—it actually is meditating. And then that's the next day's work."

Takeaway 1:

When Tarantino is floating around in his pool, he said, a lot of ideas just come to him.

The neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen conducted the first brain-imaging study of brain activity when the brain is in a "resting state"—free of inputs/free to wander.

"We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex," Dr. Andreasen wrote. "We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.”

Essentially, Dr. Andreasen demonstrated that the brain defaults to creativity.

When you are floating around in a pool, doing absolutely nothing, the brain engages in what Dr. Andreasen termed "random episodic silent thought" or REST.

During REST, the brain "uses its most human and complex parts."

During REST, a lot of ideas will just come to you.

“If a plant only gets sunlight, it’s very harmful. It needs darkness too…In the darkness, it converts oxygen into carbon dioxide. We are like that too. We need periods of doing & periods of non-doing.” — Robert Pirsig

How to Restructure Your Challenger Brand to Be More Creative

Idea One:

You know, Quarterly Team Away Days where you go off site?

Sit around the camp-fire all happy-clappy.
Make pottery out of bird shit.
Make Dream Catchers out of Courgettes by a Bare-footed-Forager, dunked in Patagonia, called Pat-who-agonises over the colour of waterfalls.

How energised do you feel?
How many ideas do you have by stepping out the office?
How many new ways of thinking do you have by being distracted

Why ON EARTH do these once a quarter?

Imagine, you generate 4 new ideas per quarterly team event. That’s 16 per year.

Meh.

This is why I believe all challenger brands should introduce a 4 hour distraction period once per week.

Do nothing.
Walk.
Go to Yoga.
Distract yourselves.
Make Brownies.

Most founders will find this hard to swallow. It takes bravery to escape entrenched dogmatic thinking.

“Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time” - John Lennon

“Distraction is not procrastination” Rick Rubin

Imagine, you generate 3 ideas per 4 hour lunch break. 3 per week. 12 per month. 144 a year.

hope that maths is right lol

Quarterly away day = 16 per year.
3 hour lunch break once per week = 144 new ideas per year.

And, that my friends, is how you 10x creativity without 10x budget.

MASSIVE CAVEAT:

** for those thinking “too many ideas is TOO much, we’ll lack focus, TOO many distractions… how will we get the team to focus with so many ideas?:

Ideas are NOT projects
Ideas are NOT projects
Ideas are NOT projects

Yes, totally agree, too many projects = lack of focus = chasing tennis balls = waste of time.

Project = launching a new piece of NPD
Project = hiring an Ops Director
Project = moving office to Shoreditch

Ideas = new way to negotiate with a supplier to get your costs down
Ideas = quirky subject line to grab a buyers attention
Ideas = thoughtful personalised gift to give your intern who’s smashing it.

Ideas are tiny.
Projects are big.

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of little ideas COMPOUND.

They creatively compound to give you a creative edge.

Idea two: Unlimited Book Budget

Books cost fuck all.
Books turn your team into Curious Creative Monsters.

Curiosity is the birth place of creativity.

Reading is breathing in.
Creativity is breathing out.

Giving your team an unlimited budget to buy books (audio or analogue) on Amazon is unfair advantage.

Local Beer

James Tyler, my broski from another Moski, co-founder, Local, is one of the most creative hounds I know. He looks like a miserable git above. But he’s not.

James works hard and intensely. But also spends lots of time DISTRACTING himself. Weekly pottery classes. Long walks. Unstructured days. Lots of cooking. Watching birds in Victoria Park.

Local have tonnes of little creative ideas that compound.

Local are 10x creativity with 10x less budget.

LOVE this ON YOUR ‘EAD activation for the Volley Football Pub

North Star. Get listed. Stay listed. And Grow.

Struggling to get your mitts on bloody expensive data?
Struggling to get get your pitches to really speak “buyer” language?
Struggling to actually analyse the data - lost in the Excel vortex?

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Feel free to email Huw or Keiran (they’re both legends) for a demo.

Pretty-pease may you do me a huge favour, mate. This newsletter took me +18 hours to compile + write. It’ll take you literally 10 seconds to forward it on to a friend. Please may you ping it on to someone? We grow one recco at a time. Hugely grateful for you support xx

Still Hungry? Course you are…

Please feel free to gorge on the most downloaded podcast episodes of all time (these are CERTY: BANGERS)

1. Rory Sutherland: Why Challenger Brands Must Never Follow Logic to Truly Disrupt Categories 

2. Waitrose CEO: How Challenger Food & Drink Brands Can Win and Build Profitable Partnerships with Waitrose - James Baile

3. Spencer Matthews: How Spencer Matthews Built Unshakeable Resilience and Raised + £10m to Launch Clean Co. in Sainsbury's, Tesco and the U.S.A. 

4. How Grenade Exited to Mondelez for £200 Million and Lessons in Unapologetic Authenticity- Juliett Baratt

5. Tyrells Tycoon: How William Chase built and sold Tyrells for £50 million and sold Chase Distillery to DIAGEO 

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