Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership: March 7, 2025

Nearly eight decades ago, Canadian political economist Harold Innis gave a lecture in which he sketched a revolutionary framework for understanding media’s impact on civilization, distinguishing between ‘time-biased’ (durable but immobile) and ‘spacebiased’ (portable but ephemeral) communication technologies. Nicholas Carr, the author of the still invaluable The Shallows (2013) argues that the commercial imperatives of today’s digital landscape – and social media’s ‘continuous destruction of elements of permanence’ – has dramatically tipped toward space-bias. This profound imbalance transforms the digital realm from a potential archive into a ‘bazaar’ largely lacking temporal context – a comfortable trap that blinds us to historical perspective. For creative leaders navigating information abundance, Innis’s paradoxical warning that ‘enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult’ remains startlingly relevant. Combating such ‘presentmindedness’ requires deliberately creating spaces for reflection and interpretation. Innis suggests the intimate, human-scale nature of conversation and debate – vehicles for critical, communal thought – may provide our best defense against algorithmic superficiality.

Nicholas Carr (2025) “The Tyranny of Now,” The New Atlantis, Winter 2025.

The debate about return-to-office policies misses the point, according to new McKinsey research, which reveals that working models (or RTO mandates) matter far less than underlying organizational practices. While in-person work has doubled since 2023, employee outcomes remain similar across all arrangements, with concerning levels of burnout and intention to quit. The research identifies five core practices driving performance regardless of location: collaboration, connectivity, innovation, mentorship, and skill development. The research also illuminates a significant perception gap: leaders believe their organizations excel at practices like collaboration and mentorship, while employees consistently rate these poorly regardless of working model. For leaders, this presents an opportunity to refocus on what truly matters: implementing structured mentorship, creating psychological safety for innovation, aligning team goals, ensuring leadership accessibility, and investing in skill development. Successful organizations recognize that these foundational practices – not work location – create the conditions for creativity to flourish anywhere.

Aaron de Smet, Brooke Weddle, Bryan Hancock, Marina Mugayar-Baldocchi, and Taylor Lauricella (2025) “Returning to the Office? Focus More on Practices and Less on the Policy,” McKinsey Quarterly, February 14, 2025.

In their 2025 annual letter, Stripe’s founders detail how their platform has become critical infrastructure for the digital economy, processing $1.4 trillion in payments annually. Yet beside the company specifics, the letter provides an excellent illustration of how individual leaders and organizations can make sense of – and communicate clearly their strategic intentions about – complex and evolving markets, technologies, and related macro-environments. For creative leaders, key takeaways include investing early in emerging technologies (60% of American small businesses now use vertical SaaS), focusing on data network effects to build defensible advantages (Stripe’s fraud prevention shows remarkable results), and the importance of regulatory environments for innovation (contrasting Europe’s productivity challenges with US growth). Another more general point discusses how stablecoins are emerging as transformative financial infrastructure, doubling transaction volumes in one year. Ultimately, the letter underscores how leaders must position their organizations at the intersection of technological shifts – particularly AI, vertical-specific solutions, and programmable financial services – to capture exponential growth in rapidly evolving markets.

[This is neither an endorsement of Stripe’s services nor an investment recommendation.]

Stripe (2025) “Annual Letter,” February 27, 2025.

Anna Abraham’s The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths examines seven persistent myths about creativity – from the tortured artist stereotype to right-brain dominance – and reveals more nuanced truths. The University of Georgia neuroscientist demonstrates how mental well-being rather than suffering enhances creative output, how complex interactions between hemispheres collaborate in creative thinking, and how innovation emerges from focused engagement rather than altered states. Overall, her conclusions are liberating: creativity isn’t magical but accessible through deliberate practice, curiosity, and collaboration. As Abraham writes, creativity thrives when you combine knowledge with curiosity, technical skill with playful exploration. Such a balanced understanding helps us shed limiting beliefs while embracing creativity as a fundamental human capacity. For today’s leaders, this means fostering environments where collaboration flourishes, mental health is prioritized, and diverse thinking styles are valued. The book’s message is ultimately empowering: creativity isn’t reserved for the gifted few but is an achievable capacity for all.

Anna Abraham (2024) The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.

In a newly published study, Abraham challenges creativity’s standard definition as ‘novel and useful,’ arguing it fundamentally confuses product evaluation with process understanding. The flaw she points to is the way that researchers study creators’ minds using external judgments rather than creators’ internal experiences. Abraham proposes redefining creativity as ‘novel and satisfying,’ thereby accommodating both external and internal frames of reference across scientific and artistic domains. For working creators and creative leaders, too, this distinction is crucial: when evaluating team creativity, many teams and organizations exclusively employ external metrics that may systematically undervalue novel approaches that don’t immediately demonstrate utility. By implementing dual evaluation systems that value both external reception and internal creative experiences, particularly for breakthrough innovations that challenge existing paradigms, leaders can potentially avoid missing breakthrough ideas or opportunities that require time to reveal their value.

Anna Abraham (2025, February) “Why the Standard Definition of Creativity Fails to Capture the Creative Act,” Theory & Psychology, Vol. 35(1), 40-60.

A Summary of the Inaugural Creative Leadership Hub Webinar, March 4, 2025

Creative leadership’s trajectory from post-WWII promise to contemporary commodification reflects deeper cultural and economic shifts. Initially conceived as a reimagining of Western organizational and individual potential, it evolved through the late 20th century from R&D laboratories to entrepreneurial ventures and cultural industries. By the early 2000s, creative leadership had become more and more institutionalized – with business schools offering specialized programs, industry events rebranding around creativity, and the wider Leadership Industry packaging creative and disruptive practices into workshops and frameworks. What was once a vital, contextual, and largely heterodox practice increasingly has become what critics see as aestheticized and institutionalized management, with digitally-disseminated performances and potted interventions performances mattering more than substantive innovation. The same years saw the increasing financialization of formerly quintessential creative businesses in the advertising industry by holding companies like WPP and then scandals at entrepreneurial companies like WeWork that exposed the limitations of disruption-at-all-costs mentalities.

The emergence of digital, social media, and algorithmic platforms – from Facebook’s 2004 launch to today’s enterprise systems – has rested on their creation of value by facilitating interactions while harvesting data. At the same time, platforms have come to shape our shared reality, fundamentally resetting how creative work happens. Unlike previous technologies, platforms actively structure creative relationships and authority while encoding specific norms and economic logics. Their mechanisms of datafication, commodification, and algorithmic selection have compound effects, recasting not just what creative leaders do but, increasingly, who they are. This evolution produces a paradox where unprecedented connectivity constrains behavior through architectural choices, often undermining the very human connection platforms claim to facilitate. Importantly, platform influence extends beyond digital spaces to reshape physical infrastructure, ways of creative working, and traditional industries, accelerated dramatically during the pandemic when platforms became essential infrastructure for remote work, commerce, and social connection. As AI integrates more deeply into platform infrastructure, this paradox intensifies, promising enhanced productivity while raising questions about algorithmic bias, creative ownership, and professional agency.

Today, creative leadership requires everyday work to evolve specific leadership domains for platform environments. To foster trust and psychological safety means incorporating hybrid approaches, digital retrospectives, and anonymous feedback tools. To support feedback systems, leaders can integrate AI-powered communication analysis and virtual meeting engagement. To ensure greater connectivity enables more robust and creative interactions, communication systems need AI-analysis capabilities and virtual meeting engagement metrics. These adaptations and many others demand specific implementation strategies – from Accenture’s Digital Trust approach to Google’s Motivation Matrix, the company’s UX concept and tools. Similarly, collective creativity must transform through digital debate platforms, AI-powered idea aggregation, virtual prototyping, and platform-based integration workshops, with each creative and leadership approach requiring tailored reflections, action steps, and success metrics. Inevitably, leaders will also need to move beyond adaptation to explore and develop new principles and practices that are specific to the challenges and opportunities of the platform era.

Promising ‘middle-way approaches’ – those emerging between macro-level critiques of the platform society and micro-level leadership actions occurring locally – suggest how creative leadership might avoids corporatized platform constraints and still rise beyond limited and local creative experiments. Micro-communities and creative collectives offer alternative organizing models and potential autonomy from dominant platforms within creative-social economies, maintaining human connection and agency amid algorithmic environments. Leaders must also develop multilayered literacy – digital, social, algorithmic, and AI – while adapting leadership practices for an emerging secondary oral culture where visual and audio communication often supersede text. Most crucially, creative leadership must focus on alternative forms of economic viability and sustainability that balance innovation with regenerative practices and evolve leadership both on and beyond familiar trajectories to envision new forms of creative-social organizing and societal change. The future demands a shared focus on self and systems—micro and macro, ego and eco, mindsets and models—always embracing the magic of humanity whatever the technological developments.

To put it all more simply, the event presented a call: (1) to recognize how many previous principles and practices of creative leadership have become outmoded and new formulations need to emerge; (2) to broaden our view of the compound platform technologies and dynamics with which we now live, lead, and create; (3) to evolve our valuable and proven everyday creative leadership behaviors and approaches, from building trust and psychological safety to facilitating creative agility and abrasion, for the platform era; and (4) to explore middle ways – between macro-level critiques of the platform society and micro-level leadership actions – of organizing and leading new creative communities and associations that are less platform-dependent and financially viable. Thanks again to those who attended and participated in a valuable and forward-looking discussion.