Creative businesses: managed for efficiency or managed for ideas?

By demonstrating how perilously close we've come to the complete commoditisation of creativity in the marketing and communications industries, the producers of the BBC's immensely popular The Apprentice have inadvertently done us all a whopping great favour.

Sir Alan Sugar, the millionaire electronics genius, plays the bloodthirsty Emperor Nero and a dozen or so jumped-up MBAs and eager Media Studies graduates play the gladiators. It's the Coliseum in suits.

While we don't actually get to see exposed viscera flopping into the dust of the arena, the thrill is surely no less exhilarating. The apprentices, who are obliged to fulfil various marketing tasks at the behest of Sugar and his sadistic hench-creatures in the corner office, spend most of the programme tearing strips off their colleagues, stabbing them in the back, or biting and scratching their way to the top of the pile. Their reward, which serves a fitting trope for the way we measure success in the current business environment, is not being fired.

The individual who successfully evades Sugar's merciless finger of doom until the end of the series is the winner, the last gladiator standing.

LESSONS FROM 'SRALAN'

The Apprentice is instructive for a number of reasons. For ambitious young guns hoping to scale the glass mountain of corporate achievement it is a vivid lesson in the virtues of hypocrisy, selfishness and sycophancy. The caricature of the ruthless boss who will publicly abuse and humiliate his employees for taking their eyes off the sharp chance – played to chilling perfection by the loveable boss of Amstrad – is a salutary reminder that there is no place for human frailty in the shining halls of greed.

While for those of us who cling to the belief that there is yet some shred of redemption to be had out there, some accomplishment that isn't valued only in pounds and pence, something beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars, that is worth doing for its own glorious sake, some triumph of the imagination or act of creative courage that will stand proud and firm and monumental long after (or even just a few days after) they've covered the bloodstains with fresh sawdust – for inveterate romantics like us the message of The Apprentice is writ large and clear: you're about to be deskilled.

THE MANY FACETS OF DESKILLING

Deskilling sounds more like something Gordon Ramsay would do to a trout rather than a central tenet of the management theory that has defined the way we've done business for the better part of a century. If you don't hear it bandied around in the pub all that often it's because most of the fierce debate surrounding deskilling takes place in obscure sociology journals and neo-Marxist chat rooms.

But it's been around in one guise or another ever since it inspired the apocryphal General Ned Ludd to take a ten-pound hammer to a stocking frame in Nottingham in 1782. In those days it was a lot easier to tell when it was happening to you. You'd come to work in the morning and find a spinning jenny where your workbench used to be.

As mechanisation rolled out from one industry to the next even the workers came to embrace it – those, at least, who were re-employed to mind the machines. And it sure beat cotton picking by hand. Efficiency improved, productivity increased and economies boomed. Marx himself was unequivocally in favour of mechanisation, heralding it as 'the end of slavery'. By the time the first Model-T trundled off Henry Ford's production line the Luddites had been rebranded as anyone who didn't like progress, especially in the form of new technology.

All of this seems remote and dusty now. The world has moved on, and the relevance of it all to the current generation of knowledge workers armed with iMacs, iPods and brave new iDentities seems scarcely credible. Machines have liberated us from the drudgery of repetitive manual labour, and information technology continues to enable and empower our quest for mastery of the higher-order pursuits in which each of us is now engaged. So it's increasingly difficult to imagine the circumstances that would be required to provoke a mass of disaffected office workers to stream down Madison Avenue and throw their laptops into a flaming pyre of printers, photocopiers and computer peripherals in the middle of Times Square.

PRODUCTIVITY THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

Considering how many of us now work for corporations that are wealthier than most countries, it's surprising how little attention we pay to the way they are organised and managed. If we were half as passionate about human resource theory as we are about ideas like democracy and human rights, the commuters on the train to Waterloo might not look quite as miserable as they do. Unfortunately, most of the literature on productivity is about as exciting as the taxonomy of lichen, which goes some way to explaining why it has failed to ignite the popular imagination.

The problem is that, while we weren't looking, the spirit that animated the rapid and entirely welcome mechanisation of industry, commerce and agriculture in the 20th century had transmogrified into a wholly more subtle variety of strategies designed to maximise worker efficiency and minimise cost, not all of which transplanted with equal success from the factory floor to Dilbert's cubicle. Deskilling was one of those exceptions.

The Principles of Scientific Management

Undoubtedly the most famous of the early productivity theorists was Frederick W. Taylor, whose formulation of 'scientific management' led to the notorious time-and-motion studies parodied with such ruthless aplomb by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Taylor is an easy target for armchair critics of the system that gave them such comfy armchairs. They forget that it was Taylor who recommended to factory bosses that workers would be more productive if they were forced to take an occasional ten-minute rest, a practice that became institutionalised as the beloved British tea break.

Based on the idea that there was 'One Best Way' to get any job done, scientific management sought to break all tasks into their individual components, separating those that could be 'routinised' from those that required an element of human judgement. The benefits were immediate. The routine processes could be reallocated to cheaper, unskilled workers, while the discretionary aspects of the task could be moved upwards to management, affording them more control over the outcomes.

New Management Theories and Deskilling

In the case of someone riveting metal plates into the tailfin of a passenger jet it makes eminent good sense to limit the realm of his or her creative expression. And if you have any experience in the assembly of flat-pack furniture you'll know only too well that any deviation from the precise instructions of the superior intelligence who designed them, now matter how cryptic they may appear, will lead directly and inevitably to irredeemable disaster. Do not try to second-guess a Swede.

Deskilling is exactly this – a deliberate and systematic removal of the 'craft' from the 'craftsman'. It's the divorce of the mental from the manual, the apartheid of conception and execution.

We may bemoan the resulting fact that help isn't what it used to be, that plumbers cost as much per hour as brain surgeons, and that no one at the hardware megastore knows the difference between a cheese knife and a hacksaw. We can curse the telesales calls from automatons who can't answer anything that isn't on the script in front of them, the help menus that don't help, and the customer services departments that don't have the discretion to serve their customers. But by driving down manufacturing costs and standardising rote operations, deskilling has brought us an endless array of material blessings, from cheaper, safer travel to better, safer drugs, from healthier, tastier food to cheaper, faster communications.

Stalin's fulsome praise for the principles of scientific management, which he used as the basis of several Five Year Plans, had the odd effect of undermining the popularity of Taylorism in the west. Others, took up where Taylor left off. Borrowing from the exciting advances taking place in psychology they advocated a kinder, more worker-centric management style. The latter half of the 20th century saw an explosion of new theories of productivity, and a seismic rise in the fame and fortunes of the new management gurus.

We've now got systems theories, contingency theories and chaos theories, and leadership theories and follower theories, and more consultants and experts than there are problems worth solving. The Japanese theorists learned from the Americans and the Americans learned from the Japanese. Then the Japanese learned what the Americans had learned from the Japanese and went one better. But as much as they changed the language, fiddled with the mechanics and reinvented the principles, the one thing they never tampered with was deskilling.

WELCOME TO THE 'CREATIVE CLASS': 21ST-CENTURY KNOWLEDGE WORKERS

While all this was going on, and with the eyes of the management consultants still firmly fixed on the manufacturing end of the Fortune 500, another more radical change was taking place in the equally exciting field of demographics. It took Richard Florida to point out that most of us were no longer engaged in manufacturing or agriculture but had moved on, like the management consultants themselves, to become knowledge workers, or what he described as the new 'creative class'. And this is where it gets interesting.

What happens when you apply deskilling to people working in the creative industries? Which parts of their jobs can be routinised, and which can be reallocated to management?

It's easy enough to track how technology has put the traditional typesetters and typographers out of business. It's self-evident that drum machines will have obliged many drummers to take up the wedding circuit as a means of survival. These things are inevitable, and only the most reactionary Luddite would argue otherwise. But things get hazier as you move up the creative ladder towards those people who have traditionally been paid for having ideas. These aren't just the copywriters and art directors that populate ad agency creative departments, they're also the marketing men and women whose success depends on the application of their wits.

Deskilling and Creativity

According to the traditional deskilling model, thinkers should be sent upstairs and the doers should remain on the factory floor. But in the creative industries the doers are the thinkers.

There is yet another complicating factor. Deskilling, as we have seen, is aimed at increasing management control by shifting discretionary tasks up the management hierarchy. It is in the nature of commercial bureaucracies, no matter how flatly they are structured, and no matter how much lip service is paid to the interdependencies of a management matrix, that the amount of discretion you have is directly proportional to the depth of the embossing on your business card. Creative tasks are always, inevitably, and by definition, entirely discretionary. Their outcomes are indeterminate, and they are naturally antipathetic to any kind of control.

This is the paradox of managing creativity, the very nub of the peculiar conflict between managing for efficiency and managing for ideas.

As the battle intensifies throughout all the creative sectors, from the music business to film, television and the arts, the collateral damage becomes increasingly apparent, most notably in the paucity of original thinking that disgraces the entire spectrum of popular culture.

Where there are exceptions we can trace their genesis to an exceptional cadre of individuals with the courage of their convictions and with the money or the enterprise to pay for them. These are the patrons of the new age, the 21st-century Medicis unfettered by, or indifferent to, corporate constraint.

And right at the centre of the storm lie the marketing and advertising businesses, caught up in the white heat of having to produce something memorable and magical, not just some time this year or sometime this month, but by tomorrow morning, at eight o'clock. Until they learn to sort it out the hard way, which also happens (somewhat unfortunately) to be the right way, there is only one obvious escape route. Switch on The Apprentice.

DESKILLING HITS MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

Justifiably or not, most people in marketing and advertising like to think of themselves as creative in one way or another. Florida has no doubt that they belong in the creative class rather than in the service sector, even if convention suggests the contrary. It's a crucial distinction.

Making something is very different from serving something – the former is about the quality of the product, the latter about the quality of the delivery. And making something well requires craftsmanship, in this case the crafting of ideas, an endeavour highly resistant to deskilling. Much to the chagrin of the technocrats it is still impossible, in creative-sector businesses, to separate the craft from the man, or the woman. The unstoppable march of increased productivity has run headlong into the unswerving stubbornness of creative pride. Something had to give.

The agencies blinked first. Conveniently forgetting that their best ideas had always transcended the medium in which they were conceived, they took up the righteous sword of media neutrality and began to hack the full-service offering to pieces. Cheered on by jubilant procurement managers, they lopped off their media arms, accidentally lobotomising themselves in the process.

Their clients smelled blood and were quick to scavenge for themselves the best of the agencies' strategic and media planning brains.

Desperate to stop the haemorrhaging, all but the most creatively dedicated of the agencies scuttled for the shelter of the service model, selling layouts by the yard and ideas by minute. And, taking their lead, all but the most imaginative of the marketers became buyers of services, a skill that could be routinised and allocated to the lowest ranks of brand management.

THE FUTURE IN A DESKILLED WORLD?

For this, after all, is the real lesson of The Apprentice. Underpaid and underskilled, Sir Alan Sugar's acolytes are living proof that you no longer need expensive, well-trained craftspeople to get the job done. Motivated by money, power and status, and inspired to unbecoming displays of ruthless individualism by their fear of being fired, they will do whatever it takes to satisfy the unpredictable whims of their masters. Unlike craftspeople, they are in abundant supply and instantly replaceable. Such discretion as they are allowed is applied to second-guessing strategies for survival, outmanoeuvring the other members of their teams, and taking only those risks that they can credibly blame on others in the event of failure.

The winner will sit at the right hand of the emperor. Or she will be given her very own Coliseum. And since the only lesson she has learned on the way to the top is that expediency trumps skill every time, this is the criterion she will use to decide the fate of the unfortunate young hopefuls thrown into the arena before her. In this way deskilling makes apprentices of us all.

This article featured in Market Leader, Summer 2007.