Managing Creativity

Managing creative people is hard. Doing it well is rare.

Managing Creativity: Lenses for Leading Creative Work is a practical guide for managers, producers, and arts leaders who live in the crossfire between originality, deadlines, budgets, and ethics. Instead of treating creativity as a mysterious gift, this book shows you how to see it as something you can design for.

Drawing on ten major creativity theories-from personality and motivation to collaboration, culture, flow, leadership, burnout, and ethics-each chapter gives you:

• A first‑person story from "inside the artist's head," set in a specific creative world (music, comedy, TV writers' rooms, festivals, agencies, arts nonprofits, and more).

• A clear, jargon‑free explanation of the theory in management language.

• A second story from a manager's point of view, applying the same pattern under pressure.

• A short analytic bridge that names the pattern and helps you recognize it in your own work.

• A branching mini‑case that forces you to make tough calls and see the consequences.

You'll learn to:

• Read different creative personalities and design around them rather than fighting them.

• Balance structure and freedom so your teams can take real risks without chaos.

• Protect intrinsic motivation and reduce burnout in long, grinding projects.

• Navigate power, culture, and ethics when your work could go viral for the wrong reasons.

• Turn abstract theories into concrete questions you can ask in meetings, rehearsals, and crises.

Whether you manage artists, writers, designers, performers, or any team that has to invent under pressure, this book gives you a portable set of lenses for diagnosing what is really going on-and a toolkit for responding in ways that are strategically sound and humanly sane.

If you've ever thought, "I wish I had a way to explain what I'm seeing in this room," this book is designed to be that missing language.