Creativity Regained

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"Redford is a proven, smart, savvy entrepreneur," says Dale Pollock, veteran Hollywood producer and dean of the filmmaking department at North Carolina's School of the Arts. "The business potential is enormous. Sundance has the best brand name and the ability to expand its audience base.

"How large the indie film niche can become, I don't think anyone really knows," says Pollock. "As for profitability, it may not be huge by mainstream Hollywood standards yet. But it's growing significantly, and Sundance is the lead player positioned in the right way."

Such prolificacy is not the consequence of mountain air or movie star charisma. Rather it springs from Redford's unshakable belief that growth is not an accounting practice but a creative process. And that goes not just for the entertainment industry, but also for ordinary companies that make sunscreen and software and ceiling fans. "The more I got involved with business, the more I got shocked at how dumb a lot of businesses were. Even the ones that had so much money," Redford says. "And, it's because they lacked a creative, imaginative approach. That's why I got taken with people like Steve Jobs and [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard and [Smith & Hawken founder] Paul Hawken, who understood exactly how important business is but also understood the role of the creative.

"Do you think the earth was created by an accountant?" Redford asks me. "No! The earth was created by the combustion of a creative explosion. Fire and chaos are what started everything. Then order came on top of that."

It is to study Sundance's own creative explosion that I am here. And while I hate to digress, I think at this point I should say a word about myself and why I believe business can learn so much from Sundance.

First -- and let's just get this out of the way -- I'm a businessperson, not a journalist. For most of the '90s I was CEO of Long Haymes Carr (LHC), an advertising firm in Winston-Salem, N.C., that in three years grew from the 100th largest U.S. agency to the 50th. One tool we used to differentiate ourselves was Creative Odyssey -- a series of magical mystery tours to cities like New York, London, and New Orleans where our clients and employees immersed themselves in the leading edge of pop culture. We met with people like graffiti artists and chaos theory physicists to experience new perspectives. We escorted Fortune 1000 CEOs to hip-hop stores and encouraged them to buy chartreuse sandals with four-inch heels and flame-toed Doc Martens and wear them on the subway. Again and again we found that most of the ideas and strategies for our breakthroughs came from sources outside the business world.

Then one day our corporate parent announced it was consolidating our agency...ultimately out of existence. Disillusioned and reluctant to return quickly to corporate life, I began looking around the business world for my next opportunity. What I saw wasn't pretty.

This was the fall of 2001, a time when corporate misjudgments and miscreants were ubiquitous on the news. Everywhere companies were slowing down, stopping, shifting into reverse. I saw the artificial growth of acquisitions and book-cooking collapsing everywhere, but no sustainable, organic growth based on the invention of genuinely new markets, products, and services. Where was the real top-line growth, I wondered? Had management forgotten how to do it? Was business losing the ability?

Organic growth, it seemed to me, required something I've come to think of as "imaginative intelligence": the ability to convert the raw material of experience and insight across disciplines of knowledge into inventive work. Having experienced something like that on LHC's Odysseys, I wondered whether others had figured out how to build imaginative intelligence into their processes and organizations. I cashed in my frequent-flier miles and gave myself a year to find out.

"When you have the good fortune to have success in your life," says Redford, "that is precisely the time you should reinvent yourself. Because you can get real stale. You can fall in love with yourself."

Together with my colleague Jane Stephens I launched the Odyssey Project, a wide-ranging exploration of organic growth focused on 30 innovation leaders in diverse fields. Creative Odyssey had taught me the value of seeking answers from nonobvious sources, so I excluded destinations like Intel, Apple, and Southwest Airlines from my itinerary. Instead I traveled to Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago, which pioneered the idea of growing exclusively through conversion, and Antenna Theater, an experimental stage company in San Francisco that found commercial success creating interpretive audio programs for museums and parks. Rather than try to meet with Peter Drucker or Gary Hamel, I interviewed T. George Harris, the maverick editor of Psychology Today who broke ground in developing interest-specific journalism, Dan Yankelovich, who reinvented public polling with the Yankelovich Monitor, and the poet Maya Angelou.

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