In every entertainment medium, we hear the same refrain:
”The suits are messing up the creativity. If we get rid of the suits, we shall reclaim our creativity as it was in the Golden Age.”
The Golden Age! Why, that was when the entertainment medium was young and everyone frolicked about in flower fields of creativity. Then, the suits invaded and paved these creative fields with cold pavement and the medium, since then, has become a dystopia of machine like efficiency. It is no wonder movies like The Matrix has the machine-like villains running around in suits and the human good guys wearing flamboyant leather. This is an excellent physical representation of what many creative types envision their fights with the ‘suits’.
This lamentation is brought up in every entertainment industry: music, television, movies, books, and of course gaming. Same story, same verse.
The creative types do not like the suits mostly because they are the barrier to their creativity. “I want to do this.” The suit replies, “Can’t afford it,” or “No one will buy that.” The creative type then quietly seethes in the background. Other times, the suits come in and ‘mess up’ the creative types work. Many times, it is an actual bungling. There are countless examples of a good show or game and suits come in and mess it all up with what they think is ‘right’.
Many of the complaints against the suits are valid. The suits don’t understand how to make an effective creative product. The suits interjecting into the creative process messes it up. So on and so on. Yet, the creative types also have their share of sins as well. They aren’t little saints being whipped by overlord suits.
The way how to make the suits disappear is to become them. If the creative types would take business matters seriously, and understand that the entire purpose is generating customers and running a company, then they would not need the suits. The entire reason why suits exist in the first place is because the creative types RESIST understanding or pursuing business. To the creative types, business is the antithesis of creativity. There has never been a stupider statement said.
If I say to myself, “I want to live the creative life! I want to be an artist! Business is bourgeois and is not creative. Boo on business matters!” I condemn my life as an employee to work for a suit until the day I die. I have no other choice but to laugh when a creative type complains about a suit because by rejecting business matters, creative types have no other destiny then to be the lowly employee. And the employee’s destiny is to work for someone else, i.e. the suits. The suits never invaded the creative types. The creative types did it themselves the moment they rejected taking up the business matters.
At this point, should a creative type be reading this, he would be shouting at the monitor screaming, “Of course, no one is arguing about making money!” This shows just how off the creative type is. The reason why the creative type thinks business is ‘soul-less’ and ‘machine-like efficiency’ is because they think business is only about making money. Business is actually about making customers. Sales, marketing, and allowing the customer be the barometer of value for the product are all integral parts. And none of it is ‘machine-like’ or ‘soul-less’.
Right now, I can create a Limited Liability Corporation and call it Malstrom Inc. As founder of Malstrom Inc, I am now president of the company. Of course, my company has no employees, no cashflow, and no office. In order to make my Malstrom Inc. into something, I have to convince investors to give me starting money, have to find the right people for my employees (much more difficult than you think), and focus on how to create things that customers want to buy. All this requires an incredible amount of work but also an incredible amount of emotion. The reason why many people do not start businesses like this is because it is extremely emotional. Being an employee is like having a vacation compared to this!
Once I am done setting up Malstrom Inc. and have my company running, I have to make sure that we keep generating customers and keeping customers. This can be a nerve wreck to me because another company can come out and steal my customers or make my product obsolete. While I am doing all this, the creative types in the company seethe, “Malstrom is a suit! He won’t let me do whatever I want!”
The creative types can then leave in a huff to found their own company to create a paradise of creativity they seek. Most often, these companies fail very rapidly such as Flagship Studios which was made up of former Blizzard staff. The most extreme example is Romero’s Ion Storm Studios which fell apart in a very big, and very famous, way. Ion Storm’s motto was “Design is Law”. They found out that reality’s motto is “Customers are Law”.
When a creative type complains about the rules the suits impose on them, it reminds me of a kid complaining about the rules the parent. The parent says, “So long as you are under my roof, you shall do what I say.” Like the creative types, if the kid doesn’t wise up to reality fast once leaving the home, a very difficult life emerges.
The solution to make the suit go away is to do what the suit does. Then the creative type has total control. One great example of making the suit go away would be Satoru Iwata. Iwata is a creative type, a game developer, but is now the president of Nintendo. Another example would be the Oliver twins running Blitz Games.
The best example of a creative type becoming a suit is Steve Jobs. Long-hair Steve Jobs liked making computers and all. He and his friends made fun of IBM because they were ‘corporate’ and suit wearing while he and his friends were ‘artists’. Eventually, Steve Jobs chops his hair and appears in a suit to the astonishment of his friends. While starting Apple would be enough for one’s lifetime, once Jobs got fired, he started neXt and Pixar. neXt got bought by Apple which is how he returned to Apple.
Steve Jobs is the rare type that can both step inside the creative type and business type worlds. Yet, in both, his central rule is to put the focus on the customers, that the user experience is supreme. I’ve talked to some people who want to work at Apple because “there are no suits”. That is true, but only because the creative types became the suits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xflXMZL2stU
