Brad Bird on Innovation

This is a must-read article clipped out of the McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Brad Bird on "fostering innovation" in the workplace. One feels the pain of recognition in every one of Mr. Bird's points:

When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain… The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”

"Innovation" seems to be the way in which capitalism can understand and harness creativity, which makes it a
buzzword with a future.

You can tell the idea of innovation has arrived because The New Yorker this year added a themed issue around it, right between the fashion issue and the fiction issue...

1,000 True Fans

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

From a thought provoking article by Kevin Kelly about how to make it as an artist in whatever age we're in now, the one after the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Thanks to the Internet, there can now be far more idiosyncratic artists in all disciplines who are able to make an honest living, with high status within a certain subculture. The corollary to this may be that after a while there will be fewer expensive blockbuster movies and platinum albums.

And while I haven't been a "true fan" of Trent Reznor, the first music he's created after being free of Interscope is, by far, his most compelling. I encourage you to download it. For free.