Given the importance innovation in today’s world, one would think that creativity should be a priority to CEOs operating in rapidly moving environments.
Creativity is essential in both creating of maintaining competitive advantages. One could one argue that all successful companies started with a burst of creativity, an idea that defined their mission but that, as they grew, left-brain thinking started to dominate and creativity started to dwindle, resulting in an all-too-common creative genesis-operational ossification pattern.
It is hard to manage creativity. In fact, can creativity and leadership coexist?
The answer seems to be: Not easily. The tension between leadership and creativity points to a fundamental challenge in organizational design. Most traditional leadership models emphasize control, predictability, and risk mitigation—qualities that can actively suppress the conditions creativity needs to flourish.
Can successful leadership manage this tension?
“managing for creativity” echoes what I have seen in complex adaptive systems, where the role of leadership shifts from direct control to creating the right environmental conditions. The function of the leader is to create conditions for successful emergence of creativity. This requires a fundamentally different leadership mindset.
Leadership and creativity rarely go together. But when it does amazing things happen.
Steve Jobs and Edwin Land shine among the exceptions.
Steve Jobs admired Edwin Land. The relationship between Jobs and Land is one of the most fascinating mentor-mentee dynamics in business history, though it was largely one-sided admiration that evolved into personal connection.
At his peak, Edwin Land was more famous than Steve Jobs. He was certainly more influential since he had the ear of US presidents. He studied physics at Harvard but left after his freshman year. Land developed the meticulously precise science behind instant photography and served as the CEO of the Polaroid Corporation. “Nobel Prizes have been given for less,” one admiring scientist declared. He was an inventor’s inventor with many patents to his name. He made many contributions to the US Intelligence Community. He won the National Medal of Technology and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Art was important to Land. He hired art majors – many women art majors from Smith College. Land was connected to the world of contemporary art.
Jobs discovered Land’s work through Polaroid cameras as a young man and became obsessed with Land’s approach to innovation. What captivated Jobs wasn’t just the technology, but Land’s philosophy: that truly revolutionary products should sit at the intersection of science and arts, making sophisticated technology feel magical and intuitive to users.
Land famously said, “Industry is best at the intersection of science and art,” which became almost a mantra for Jobs. Both rejected market research, believing that consumers couldn’t articulate needs for products that didn’t yet exist.
Both believed in what Land called “products that are inevitably right”—innovations that feel so natural once you encounter them that you can’t imagine why they didn’t exist before. Land’s instant photography and Jobs’ personal computer both exemplified this principle.
As Jobs matured as a leader, he sought out Land personally. They spent time together in Land’s later years, with Jobs treating these conversations almost like masterclasses. Land, by then retired from Polaroid, seemed to appreciate having someone who truly understood his vision for how technology should serve human creativity.
In many respects they could not have been more different. Land was fundamentally a self-taught scientist who became a businessman; Jobs was fundamentally a technologist-philosopher who understood business. Land invented breakthrough technology; Jobs was more of a system integrator who made existing technologies work together beautifully.
Land also seemed more comfortable with the scientific process of gradual discovery, while Jobs was more impatient and demanding of immediate perfection.
Both saw their companies struggle after their departure, suggesting that their unique blend of technical vision and creative leadership was difficult to institutionalize or replicate.
Besides Jobs and Land, several leaders have demonstrated this rare blend:
Walt Disney created what might be the most systematic approach to organizational creativity through his studio’s structure. He institutionalized creative processes while maintaining artistic vision, essentially building creativity into the company’s DNA rather than treating it as a separate component.
Reed Hastings at Netflix built a culture of “freedom and responsibility” that gives creative professionals the autonomy they need while maintaining strategic coherence. The company’s famous culture deck essentially codifies how to manage for creativity.
Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia demonstrates how values-driven leadership can create conditions where innovative solutions emerge organically from the company’s mission rather than being imposed from above.
A less obvious example may be Satya Nadella who transformed Microsoft’s culture from one of internal competition to collaborative innovation. His leadership philosophy of “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all” created psychological safety that’s essential for creative risk-taking.
The creative curator
Do you need to be creative to manage creative enterprises? Or really understand how creative people work? Bernard Arnault of LVMH represents something different from the Jobs-Land archetype— the leader as a “creative curator.”
Arnault has spoken extensively about creativity, often emphasizing that his role is to provide creative talent with the resources and freedom they need while protecting them from commercial pressures. He’s said things like “Give the artists the means to express their talent” and structured LVMH to insulate creative directors from short-term financial constraints. His approach is to find exceptional creative minds, like Marc Jacobs, Virgil Abloh, or Nicolas Ghesquiere.
Arnault’s philosophy around creativity reflects a deep understanding of how creative industries actually function. He’s articulated several key principles that distinguish his approach: the “give creators the means to dream” without imposing commercial constraints on their creative process, is a component. When LVMH acquires a brand, it avoids interfering with the creative direction, instead providing the infrastructure—better ateliers, expanded teams, superior materials—that allows creative vision to flourish. Advocating for “patient capital” for creativity is another. Truly innovative collections might not pay off immediately, creative directors may need multiple seasons to develop their vision. This is radically different from quarterly earnings pressure that stifles most creative industries. Hard to export these ideas to other industries. Arnault has spoken about luxury requiring a different relationship with time—that the best creative work can’t be rushed or forced into standard business cycles. He’s structured LVMH brands to work on longer creative cycles than typical fashion or consumer goods companies.
Ending
Hard to make a list of “must haves” of leadership-creativity attributes. In fact, such listing may have internal contradictions. An enthralling vision of what’s possible, psychological safety, autonomy, diverse perspectives, tolerance for productive failure, an understanding that creativity is an emergent property of the right organizational conditions.
The rarity of this combination suggests it might require leaders who are comfortable with paradox and ambiguity—qualities that traditional leadership development often doesn’t cultivate.
Julio’s Perspective
