Strands of Genius: Everything is PR, Where is Counter-Culture, All the Trends Reports
Strands of Genius: Everything is PR, Where is Counter-Culture, All the Trends Reports
plus our thoughts on: creativity and its history
WRITING FROM | Nashville, TN
WORKING ON | Remote training for teams in Australia, the US, and Brazil
LOOKING AHEAD
Jan 8 - 17: Beersheba Springs, TN
Jan 17-28: Nashville, TN
Jan 28-Feb 4: Greenville, SC
Feb 4-11: Clayton, GA
Feb 11-15: Nashville, TN
Feb 15-April 15: Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic*
(*TBD! But if you or anyone you know has been there, please hit us up!)
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
January you said? Well, it’s 2/3 of the way over, so, hopefully you’ve let Janus help you make good choices to move forward this year. Tomorrow is the US presidential inauguration and, even though nothing ever ends [as we wrote about previously], we’re looking forward to the punctuation point and hoping everything goes smoothly.
It would be nice to not have to think about politics for a while, but that doesn’t seem like the world we are now in, so we all have to work out how we can work, and work out, and get space, and stay informed, but not overloaded.
Enjoy your week, and go get ‘em, tiger!
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Two dumps of snow in the Cumberland Mountains, a whole lot of fireplace activity, Pretend It’s A City, which is a cynical, smart, witty love letter to New York City (and the people who have put up with it), snowy walks, our new Yeti mic and green screen setup, mmhmm, Miro, and hot chicken salad!
:: THE LINKS ::
WHERE IS THE COUNTER CULTURE?
One remarkable aspect of modern capitalism is that it happily absorbs, merchandizes and re-sells any form of cultural dissent, often in the form of advertising. Thus any counter-culture is just the raw material of capitalism, which defeats its own purpose. “In the age of social media, personal expression has become the most valuable form of currency, yet we still use the term ‘counterculture’ to describe alternatives to the hegemonic forces of yesteryear, as if dressing middle-class, white, and preppy still aligned with the rules of power today.” All expression is absorbed by the social platforms, which means any idea that gains attention fuels the machine. “To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.” (Document Journal)
EVERYTHING IS PR
This has been a hard month to focus on working, as have many of the months over the last four years, for obvious reasons. How does this endlessly urgent environment impact the amount of attention left for brand and advertising ideas, and how should brands behave when crisis seems to continually engulf society? Is everything really PR? Faris explains his view on the modern mediascape in his column this month. (WARC / ADMAP)
ALL THE 2021 TRENDS
The nice people at Space Cadet have collated ALL THE TRENDZ reports, from agencies, consultancies, tech companies and any other entity who appreciates the value of knowledge marketing through useful content. *Ahem. Cough. Cough.* Fill your boots, absorb with appropriate skeptical filters ON, attuned to whatever the author/sponsor sells. (Space Cadet)
Strands of Genius is currently read by 12,000 subscribers. Support us by sponsoring an issue, becoming a member of The School of Stolen Genius, or encouraging friends or colleagues to subscribe.
School of Stolen Genius Scholarships || Applications Open
We have seen, time and time again, how diverse viewpoints are key to creativity. They can be the difference in an idea sinking or swimming, because it’s impossible to know what we don’t know, or to discard our biases entirely. Too often, we end up hiring people who look or think or act like we do. Someone claims it’s not a culture fit, as if that’s a bad thing. (This is when Rosie breaks out into The Little Mermaid - ‘a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view…’)
We think it’s important to walk the walk, and want to make sure that we have diverse representation within The School of Stolen Genius.
We’re giving away 68 year-long scholarships, in honor of our clients and partners last year. We let them direct their scholarship toward one of four underserved communities, and undirected scholarships were split evenly among all four groups. Here are the allocations:
27x BIPOC = For individuals who identify as Black, Indigenous, People of Color
13x Emerging Market = For individuals from emerging markets, where $25/month is cost-prohibitive
13x Recent Graduate = For individuals with less than 2 years working experience
15x LGBTQ+ = For individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, queer or questioning
If you meet the criteria above, we hope you’ll apply. If you know of someone who fits the bill, we hope you’ll pass this along or nominate them using the application below.
Scholarship applications are open until Jan 25th. Apply here.
:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: CREATIVITY ::
In the earliest days of founding Genius Steals, we were often tapped for providing training on brief writing, and how to make the briefing process more efficient. It’s still some of the curricula that’s most frequently requested. But in the past few years — and especially since the pandemic — we’ve gotten tapped more and more for creativity training.
Creativity doesn’t have a deep history, at least not in the way that we use the word. It was first used in the 17th century, and throughout the 17th & 18th centuries it held a divine meaning. "In creation, we have God and his Creativity.” Creativity was capitalized because it was a tool of God’s. And original thought was believed to be divine itself.
Secular creativity doesn’t enter until the Romantic Era when it appears in imaginative arts. But after World War II, in the mid 20th century, is really when the term begins to gain popularity. This is likely because creation was no longer thought to be secular. People began to acknowledge that creation could happen from someone other than God.
From aeon’s long read, “The Rise and Rise of Creativity”:
“The military was a key actor in creativity’s Cold War history. That helps to make it a particularly American history, though there was uptake in other ‘free world’ settings. The American national requirement for ever-growing ‘stockpiles’ of scientific talent was clear in the earliest stages of superpower conflict, and it became urgent after Sputnik. ‘In the presence of the Russian threat,’ a psychologist wrote:
‘creativity’ could no longer be left to the chance occurrence of genius; neither could it be left in the realm of the wholly mysterious and the untouchable. Men had to be able to do something about it; creativity had to be a property in many men; it had to be something identifiable; it had to be subject to efforts to gain more of it.”
We began to come up with our own definitions for creativity, and tests that told us if individuals had more or less of it. We became concerned with how we could institutionalize creativity — but we never really came to a consensus on what it was, or whether the tests were right, or if they even worked. Despite all that, there was one link that creativity couldn’t fight: divergent thinking.
Individuals were believed to “have creativity” if they could look at a problem and imagine a range of possible solutions, especially those that diverged from typically accepted wisdom. We often use a paperclip, or an item from inside their bathroom cabinet, and ask people how many different uses they might have for a single item. People who are strong divergent thinkers might find hundreds of uses for paperclips, while those who are prone to convergent thinking may only think of the obvious: “to hold papers together” or maybe, if they’ve seen enough spy films, “to pick locks.”
“Convergent and divergent thinking stood in opposition, just as conformity was opposed to creativity.”
Meanwhile, in the business world, a distinction was beginning to develop, thanks in part to an essay called “Creativity is Not Enough” from Theodore Levitt on HBR back in 1963. Levitt said that creativity was simply being able to create a new idea, but innovation involved strategy. Innovation, he argued, is having a new idea that helps the company or organization achieve a specific purpose. (Of course, he also believed that creative people were also irresponsible and detached, ha!)
“Many techniques other than defining and testing have been put in place that are intended to encourage making the new and useful, and the specific language of creativity has tended to subside into background buzz just as new-and-useful-making has become a secular religion.”
The problem with creativity - and indeed one of the benefits of creativity - is that it’s not one single idea. It can appear differently depending on the task. Which is one of the reasons it’s so exciting. When we talk about creativity for work, we’re often talking about commercial creativity. We define this as ‘non-obvious ways to solve business problems.’ Creativity is the facility we use every time we face a new problem, or solve an old problem in a new way.
How do you define creativity? What about commercial creativity?
We’d love to hear from you :)
:: AND NOW… GOODBYE BLUE MONDAY ::
Yesterday was “Blue Monday”, a PR idea created for a travel company [Sky Travel] in 2005, which used a ‘formula’ to ‘discover’ which is the most depressing day of the year. LOL. It is much better as a song by New Order, or the frontispiece from Breakfast of Champions you see above [with art by Vonnegut himself!] Faris bought one of these pieces when he first moved to NYC because the site was run by Vonnegut and his old mate and they would only take checks so he couldn’t buy it while still living in London! Happy Tuesday!
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
Know someone who could use some inspiration in their inbox? Send ‘em our way!
It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)