Industries, teams and creative minds. Ten ideas for tomorrow.

Pandemic, isolation, restrictions, risks, infection, suspension, closure, uncertainty, chaos, improvisation, blockages, unemployment, layoffs, bankruptcy, disruption, crisis and turmoil. These are just a few of the keywords that describe the most recent period of our lives, just as they would appear in our daily speeches. You can easily notice the generally negative connotation of these terms that describe the instability, disorientation and especially the uncertaninty that we find ourselves in.

In some situations and cases, this vocabulary is also enriched with terms such as opportunity, necessity, niche, need, demand, innovation, decision, communication, collaboration, relocation, debate, vision, testing, execution and again, disruption. It’s quite clear that these terms bring a balance to the situation and illustrate the rational-emotional state of the higher speakers. Just as this disruption is bad for some, it might be good for others.

Undoubtedly, we’re currently going through very troubled times, while also having an economic, social and political background that has caught most of us off-guard. It is difficult to anticipate the evolution of the situation and almost impossible to plan any sort of businesses, projects, products or even partnerships in the medium and long-term, but we can definitely draw some conclusions and ideas from what we can observe and understand that is currently happening around us and we can imagine what tomorrow could look like, especially for educated people that are connected globally and involved in the knowledge-based economy, in the creative industries and in the realm of innovation.

I’ll try to put out 10 ideas about tomorrow in the context of economic organizations, while keeping in mind that these are just personal thoughts and observations, undoubtedly subjective and greatly restricted by the information and connections that I currently have.

1.Opportunity, not crisis.

For the most part, the knowledge-based economy and creative industries are experiencing a great opportunity today, not a crisis. Beyond the temporary dysfunctions, discomfort and natural delays caused by movement and meeting bans and the abrupt relocation of work from dedicated facilities and offices to makeshift areas in people's homes, the information and technology businesses can only file accidental or temporary market losses.

We can notice an even more consistent orientation of the entire social and economic system towards digitization and automation of operations and routines, which allows us to anticipate an increase not only in demand for services in this area, but also the possibility of new disruptive concepts. We know that Airbnb, Uber and other players in the gig-economy have emerged from the dust clouds of the post-2008 financial crisis.

We enviously look at the explosion in online commerce sales and revenue, which will be certainly maintained afterwards and will intelligently capitalize on the inertia of the new type of shopping and changes in consumer behavior. We can notice that even the government is now forced by these circumstances to make a swift transition to modernization and digitalization, and most companies have only just realised how many services, applications and platforms they lack in order to preserve and develop their productive capabilities.

Certainly, creative people from other areas are not just as lucky yet. I repeat: yet. Artists of all kinds, entrepreneurs from the events, sports and entertainment industries, those from the technology education industries and creators of tourist, culinary or cultural experiences are totally or mostly stuck. I believe that these areas will be the first to benefit, as soon as the restrictions are lifted, from the thirst for life of the frustrated people that have been locked in their homes, but especially the fortified and multiplied economic, information and technology businesses, which will demand and integrate, directly or indirectly, more services from the creative areas than ever before.

2. The future belongs to the smaller and agile ones

During this period, I’ve encountered a lot of situations reported by people from large companies, related to malfunctions, improvisations and even blockages caused by the transition from working in the office to working at home, and that there is a total or partial lack of practiced and optimized plans created to enable the business to work as expected . Only now has it become clear that people and companies are enormously lacking in many areas such as tools, processes, methods and equipment, which will most likely be properly addressed and covered in the future.

But what is even worse is that the poor quality, lack of qualification, competence and credibility of the leaders in these organizations has surfaced. Those managers obsessed with control and accustomed to directing their people through micro-management and visual whipping in open-space offices found themselves overnight devoid of the power to physically dominate their people. They found that without a clear vision, voluntary collaboration and open communication, without trust and autonomy, without natural collaboration, naturally practiced and developed relationships and without authentic hierarchies, people are not productive, they do not know what to do, and are impossible to drive remotely and do more harm than good to the organizations that pay them.

Superficial management, scruffy and self-sufficient, of poor quality, based on connections and pulling strings, not on meritocracy, transparency and skill, is, unfortunately, a rule and not an exception in these large companies. And this is found not only within multinational corporations, but it has spread like a pandemic of insensitivity and impotence in large companies with domestic capital, whether they are entrepreneurial or already listed on stock exchanges. This tendency of imbecile ossification, absurd procedures and muddling in the cliché of hypocritical bureaucrats makes many Romanian companies with more than 150 employees nowadays to be as powerless, disoriented and difficult to budge as the international giants, who stand on other financial foundations and, in the most desperate situations, survive thanks to the dubious principle called "too big to fail".

Beyond the border of those 150 people that make up an organization (the extremely relevant number of Robin Dunbar that coincides with the size of the tribes at the beginning of history), companies transform from a mobile group of gatherers and hunters into a rudimentary society of peasants , and the principles and mechanisms that ensure the dynamics of vital systems change radically. Without a clear ideology, without practiced scenarios and without capable leaders, organizations ossify and dinosaurize, and start to become just complexes of routines and procedures, annihilating creativity and numbing curious and inventive personalities, reaching the dynamics of an overweight snail.

 I believe that the near future belongs mainly to small companies, those that today have between 20 and 100 people, who already have a stable business, but have not lost their vitality, dynamism and creativity, who are constantly looking for opportunities and that can quickly and seamlessly mold to the architecture and requirements of these new opportunities. As Clayton Christensen said numerous times, radical innovation occurs rather in young, knowledge-hungry, curious and courageous companies that do not suffer from the blindness caused by optimizing their current offers and focusing on the current market. And what better opportunity to produce and introduce a great innovation (especially a disruptive one!) do you know than a situation like the one we’re currently facing, when an entire social, economic and political system is shaken at its foundations and looking for a new equilibrium?

3.Our own product instead of / in parallel with outsourcing.

This is an old conversation, the one of the natural need of Romanian organizations working in outsourcing to start differentiating not only their client portfolio across several industries to limit their exposure to risk, but also their portfolio of products and services. Many of our organizations have managed to build a customer and project base, and also expertise and a reputation that secures them, at least for a few years, a reassuring volume of orders for outsourced platforms, applications and services.

While a very good and consistent source of income, these services are very close to reaching their maximum exploitation potential, especially in complexity and costs, and while today they might represent a dairy cow, milked for cash, they’re at a great risk of turning, in the near future, into a lifeless dog.

The transition from working hours to working with ideas, opportunities and creativity is not only an opportunity, but also a long-term rescue solution for these organizations, which have reached a degree of development and qualification that no longer allows them to sell intellectual property at the hourly rental price of a coder, but allows them to risk and venture into building their own concepts, whether they are software, hardware, a combination of them, web or cloud applications, extended solutions on existing platforms or even SAAS (software as a source).

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed at least three recruitment campaigns in Cluj of small or medium IT companies, looking for good people for marketing director positions, for locally produced IT products or services that are ambitious and target the overall market. The past years in terms of goals such as conquering international markets for domestic concepts were rather exceptional, now it is seen that these are beginning to become a habit, indicating that the idea is good and no longer too bold or risky for the level of capability and competitiveness of our local companies.

4. The employer brand is no longer a fad, but rather part of the company's capital.

I had a big smile on my face (it was laughter, actually) seeing that some of the loudest and most powerful people in the business world (honestly, I tend to call it "leadershit") happily announced the death of the so-called "employer brand(ing)", which many considered a fad of the moment, a weakness and a compromise that employers made just because they couldn’t otherwise secure sufficient human resources. They have already started festivals of dismissals, lay-offs, cuts in wages and rights, renegotiation of employment contracts and the returnal to aggressive vocabulary and shepherding practices of business management.

Those who like to think only in volumes, who see people only as numbers, calculating their contribution only in work hours and those that sell physical work hours, could have, let’s say, the justification of the limited understanding of the concept, mainly because they may never have had the opportunity to understand the concept and value of intellectual work, the creative product, the economic value produced by an idea and the creative skills that develop and patent it.

But they cannot be fully understood, especially considering that they have such a rude attitude towards those who have managed to realize that, in most situations, people who work for an organization represent an exceptionally valuable, strategic and decisive capital for the evolution of the company.

It is true that the economic shock of the pandemic has led to redundancies in certain areas and has supplied the labor market with a certain amount of human resources, partially balancing the previous disproportion between supply and demand. But we can not judge this market based only on quantity, even if we refer to unskilled or lower-skilled jobs in industrial production, because even there the performance of an employee is given by his level of experience and qualification, gained over time and a lot of effort.

Even a simple assembly line worker does not produce economic value with hunger being his sole motivating element, even for these professional categories, there are needs and expectations, as such, even minimal management techniques, exceed the semantic sphere of the first two floors of Maslow's Pyramid. And when it comes to jobs and professions that involve a more complex set of skills and a number of previous work experiences, the number of available people continues to remain small and, even if it were higher, it would not be very relevant, especially in the absence of quality and professional consistency of these candidates.

What the great managers with narrow minds and no wisdom do not understand is that convincing economic results can no longer be obtained with unmotivated human resources, that are abused and considered a convenience. And also, innovation (whether incremental) and continuous improvement are mandatory for the short- and medium-term survival of every company and it can no longer be achieved without an attractive and compelling culture, climate and work experience that generates loyalty and intrinsic motivation, before producing successful ideas and concepts, through collaboration.

The employer brand not only didn’t die as a passing fad, but it is even more important today than it was yesterday and ever before. Because the brand is made up of rational and emotional connections created between an entity (a company in our case) and its target audiences (employees, in this case). These connections will be strong, beneficial and productive, they will generate the loyalty of the target audience and will preserve the transactional relationship between the parties only if the value proposition and experience delivered by the company are evaluated by employees as the best on the market. If you want employees to generate value, show them that they are of real value to you.

5. Experience, not tasks listed in job descriptions.

I’ve been talking with many friends and colleagues about how our work will look and carry out after the shock caused by the coronavirus. Certainly, occupational safety and health standards will be supplemented and updated in all economic activities, from industrial production facilities to even the most elegant offices. I remember that in the spring of 2019, a death caused by the flu epidemic severely affected more than 10,000 people and 20 companies working in the office complex "The Office" in Cluj for more than a week. The case did not appear in the press, but the employees in the building found out and made a lot of noise on this subject, the managers of all companies and the building made huge efforts to alleviate the shock of the health danger, and as such, the story was slowly forgotten.

There was a single case, a death from the flu, which generated a lot of temporary panic and disruption. What changes and what impact will we see now, after this shockwave that is tens or hundreds of times stronger and longer? We will see new sanitary standards in public and crowded spaces, we will see more serious checks of ventilation installations and we will have new standards for everyone's workspace. There are companies in the same office building that each occupy an entire floor, but have different parameters in terms of space allocated to each employee: some companies have 900 employees on one floor, while others even have double that, which can be definitely noticed because it creates congestion in these famous and less-than-ever productive open-space offices, which tend to be nothing more than a glossy factory for white collars.

But beyond changing the philosophy and standards of these conditions, equipment and workspaces, companies and especially their leaders (the real and capable ones, of course) need to understand the need to design and provide people with whom they work with a rich collaborative experience that is pleasant, attractive and relevant and one that generates satisfaction, joy and learning. You can no longer successfully work with stable / loyal employees in the knowledge-based economy if you cannot draw and offer people a memorable professional and human experience.

When analyzing a job offer, people no longer just want a job description, they want to see the opportunity of an interesting journey, from which they and the organization can earn, in which they live memorable moments, learn, grow professionally and personally, discover and can open new paths to collaborate with minds as bright as their own and produce value by fulfilling a mission that fascinates them.

6. Authentic, local and human, not irrelevant and impersonal.

I’ve used digital social networks and I’ve asked my contacts what they were doing prior to the pandemic and what they won’t do afterwards, but also what they did not do before and will do after. The answers were numerous and diverse, and while some were humorous, I found a large number of mentions related to a different understanding, much deeper and richer in meaning, relationships with loved ones, be they friends, relatives, colleagues or just neighbors or locals.

People have frequently and insistently mentioned two types of situations: the need for direct and deep contact with their loved ones and the preference for purchasing products and services from small, local producers and traders, with whom they can develop a personal relationship. Those who answered my question realized in these months of isolation how much they lack the simultaneous physical and spiritual connection with their loved ones, from the face-to-face dialogue in which non-verbal language that we know is of enormous importance, to the small gestures of tenderness and generosity that loved ones make: caresses, hugs, handshakes or even dance moves.

It is to be expected that, at least in the short and medium term, people will give a lot of attention and maximum priority to deep relationships with those in their inner circle, either friends or family members, and this will lead to an even greater importance of emotional elements that are authentic, natural, mentoring, individual energies and identification, in all types of interactions and relationships.

Equally important are the connections with local suppliers, which people have had the time, need and opportunity to discover during the period of isolation at home and with whom they have developed stable connections and loyalty, through empathy and open communication, all within our current deep and emotional situation. It is possible that the idea of ​​health and the need for safety also contributed to this preference for the relationship with local sources of goods and services, even despite their price disadvantages comapred to multinational, standard, wholesale and impersonal traders.

7. Personalization, even individualization.

When I was offered to write this article, the magazine's editor was very specific, even naming one of the topics by simply asking one question: „Do you think that companies will cancel some of the benefits they gave to employees before the pandemic, against the background of reducing the gap between supply and demand on the labor market and in the context of a possible economic crisis? ”.

The answer should’ve been an astounding: yes, it is possible that some companies will reduce the budgets they have allocated for extra benefits. As it is just as possible for other companies to increase these budgets or just keep them as they are. I also believe that, at least in the knowledge economy industries, these budgets for Benefits will continue to grow, even if we have a small discount or a plateau period in the upcoming months.

It depends on the economic area, the specifics of the company, the actual value of the work of those employees, the HR and Marketing strategy that those companies create and many other extremely relevant factors. The labor market is also an area where transactions are made on the basis of supply and demand, and benefits are part of the value proposition that secures and perpetuates the labor transaction between the employee and the company, so the benefits package can be seen as a salable product that you work on until you get the optimal version. And while we’re talking about product and optimization, it is clear that, in recent years, we have to talk about customization.

I usually tend to separate the benefits provided by employers into two categories: those that are material and relate to the performance of the individual. Those I consider part of the Price (bonuses, days off, car and apartment, protocol budget and travel, family benefits, etc.), and then we have those that are not necessarily performance-related, called Perks (learning, qualification, personal development, physical health and mental well-being, flexibility of program and location, everything related to work / family balance, etc.). The ones related to the Price are obviously personalized, being generally the subject of an individual negotiation, and the ones in the Perks area should also be customizable, since people have different needs, attributes, situations and preferences that also vary from one year to another.

As such, I think that regardless of the budget that companies allocate to Benefits, this budget must be managed individually by each employee, so that he or she can decide what they want to receive from a gigantic catalog of options that we already have handy (check out BenefitOnline). Considering all of these, you have to be sure that people's needs, behaviors, feelings and preferences will know new looks and will bring newer and newer requirements to the table, even more sophisticated, diverse and complicated than ever before.

8. Freedom, autonomy, diversity, courage and resources. Towards the fifth place.

We are talking about the knowledge-based economy and creative industries, i.e. about a sustained and top-priority concern for creativity and innovation. Let's think about the scientists who studied the phenomenon, from the perspective of psychology, economics and management. Extensive and in-depth research over the past four decades by Teresa Amabile, Robert Sternberg, Fiona Patterson, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Mike West, Neil Anderson, Goran Ekvall, Edward de Bono and many others makes it clear that productive ideas cannot be obtained without people and quality, and for them to perform, you need to build a culture and climate conducive to innovation.

Freedom of thought, movement and research, autonomy in organizing individual and group efforts, diversity of backgrounds, personalities and individual values, courage, risk-taking and curiosity, real responsibility of organizations and leaders to support creative initiatives and resource allocation (money, technology, information, but especially time) are among the most important and mandatory conditions that lead to the success of any idea that can become a product, a service or even a new economic paradigm.

There was a lot of discussion lately about the idea of working from home, remote collaboration, online meetings and productivity, but also about the intelligent and especially efficient design of the experience of working in general. It is already obvious that the creative man needs flexibility and multiple resources. To produce ideas, the creative person needs both private space, tranquility and landscape changes, as well as premises and opportunities for interaction, debate and collaboration, which would ideally provide comfort, functionality and protection. To bring the idea to innovation, individual intellectual effort is no longer enough, the new concept is bound to be the product of the intelligence of many people, who must interact frequently, authentically, self-programmed and according to constantly changing plans.

I tend to believe that beyond the traditional offices, where everyone has their own space, but also diverse options for isolation or collaboration in small groups and beyond the work "from home", where everyone must have permission flexibly, I discovered now that it can be both uncomfortable and unproductive, and that we will soon see the appearance not only of the third, but also of the fourth and fifth place. We already know that Starbucks has positioned itself as the "third place", an intermediate workspace between the hustle and bustle of the office and the family at home, and many cafes and restaurants have taken over this very concept.

We already have the fourth place, represented by the hub-type co-working spaces, which offer advantages such as freedom and logistics, but also the disadvantage of congestion and the perception of a new routine, which can be felt after a while. I see the fifth place of creatives as a space always new, temporary, discreet enough to feel that it belongs to you, but mobile and dynamic enough to give the opportunity for new perspectives as often as possible. I think that creative minds and teams will be somehow itinerant, they will seek to have an irregular transhumance between the office, home and the fifth place, gradually giving up the third and fourth space, which no longer offers creative comfort and health safety.

9. The advantages of uncertainty.

When will the virus be defeated? Will we have a vaccine and will it work? When will the crisis end? What will it be like afterwards? When will this afterbegin? What good or bad situations will we face again and when? What if those weirdos cook some animals again and set up a new infectious explosion? We live in a period in which we have the aggressive perception of uncertainty, the feeling that we have to face in the immediate future a lot of situations about which we do not have any clear information and for which we cannot formulate a well-defined schedule. Of course, this generates discomfort and complicates the decision-making process, but let's get out of this hamster wheel and discover the bright side of things.

Sure, we will have to improvise for a long, long time. We will have to live under the impression of everything being temporary and unstable, giving up the comfort of fixed and concrete floors. But aren't these some of the characteristics of the creative landscape? The production of new ideas and the approach of problems from unique perspectives are based on the exploration of the unknown. Brave adventures in uncertain and unknown spaces, experiments, exaggeration, extremes, aberration, overturning the existing order and logic, counterpoint, metaphor, contradiction or absurdity are the already confirmed paths to discovering and validating new ideas, from which, through coordinated effort, new concepts can be born, including products, technologies, processes or even new systems.

When people have an exaggerated feeling of comfort, certainty and stability, the spirit impoverishes, and the mind becomes lazy and tends to travel in narrow spaces that have been already previously visited. It is said that only idiots (and religious extremists, I would say) have certainties. Anthony Hopkins has a short interview with the BBC at the launch of "The Two Popes", in which he talks exactly about this situation, about the natural condition of the intellectual, who needs the honesty of acknowledging the little or nothing he knows, to overcome his ego that keeps him captive in insensibility. You should definitely watch this seven minute interview, it’s probably the best spiritual vitamin I’ve received in recent isolation.

Acknowledging that we know nothing or that we know far too little is uncomfortable at the moment. But immediately after that there will be mobilization, curiosity, courage and motivation, the inner engine gets triggered that starts producing hypotheses, associations, connections, experiences and ideas. From chaos and darkness, light can be turned on, but it is important to accept the context in order to highlight its characteristics and to establish a productive direction of search and movement. But for that we need vision, role models and courage, and by that I mean leaders.

10. The need for true leaders. Where and with whom?

The entire literature on innovation and creativity, from scientific articles published by Baas, Amabile, Isaksen or Christensen, to books written for everyone by Sinek, Hamel or Laloux, there are talks about the strategic and mandatory conditions of quality leadership, for the success of any creative initiatives. Any organizational framework for innovation we address, whether we use CCQ from Ekvall, TCI from Anderson and West or KEYS from Amabile, we can easily see that the leaders of organizations are the key character, the absence of which renders any approach as highly unproductive. This is because every creative project needs vision, mentoring and guidance, resources and proactive support, a capable and diverse team that is recruited intelligently and correctly motivated, especially intrinsically, safety, comfort and interaction, collaboration and debate, autonomy, freedom and recognition, standards of consistency and quality at each stage. All of these things are the responsibility of a leader, whether they are purchased, brokered, or created by that individual.

Some authors talk about a transformational leadership style, characterized by all of the above, but others, that are even more inspired, add a nuance and talk about servant leadership. The difference is made by priorities: the transformational leader first looks at the organization's interest and results in the creative process, and while the one who serves his team puts his people first, considering that the road to successful innovation must go through the joy and satisfaction of those who’ve created it. Paradoxically or not, scientific research shows that this philosophy is most beneficial even for organizations, because the products of creative processes and business results are far superior when the focus on people prevails.

In the vast majority of organizations nowadays, people want to reach higher positions in the hierarchy for power, comfort and money. They want to be masters, they want to make decisions, to have a fleet of servants whose destiny lies at the tip of their fingers. Their position in the hierarchy, an imaginary and conventional creation, makes them consider themselves intellectually superior, much more capable and skilled than others, although administrative tasks stop them from training and developing their professional skills and make them much more stupid in the long term. This toxic model does not necessarily belong to one form of property or another, to one dimension or another of the business, to one political regime or another. Unfortunately, this plague of bosses, barons and masters is settling quickly and imperceptibly and spreading illness in large and long-standing organizations. 

The group of false leaders who believe themselves to be masters is extraordinarily extensive and has gigantic power, and the solidarity of the mediocre makes the human swamp isolate and quickly eliminate true leaders, who become dangerous because they propose different, more natural types of approach, and thus, they quickly become visible and popular. We need a profound paradigm shift so that we can secure the culture and creative climate in these organizations. We must choose and promote leaders using a single criteria: the capacity for personal sacrifice and service to others. We see this in the philosophy of Agile management, specific to creative industries, the role of Scrum Master, a discreet and ubiquitous character, a connector and a facilitator, who has no explicit authority and no position of decisional superiority, but who makes the subtle magic that leads the project at the destination. Perhaps we should study this concept carefully and use much of the attributes and personality of this role in the leadership models we promote in organizations.