Necessary Creativity

Today Carter had to study for her impending exams so for her sanity as well as mine Russ and I left her home alone while we took Shay Shay to the farm for some off leash running and some family visits. It was the perfect day for the farm with low humidity and temperate warmth. Even though it was an ideal walking day I did not get all my steps in at the farm because there were so many stories to listen to.

My father had a lot of opinions about my blog and most recently the Graduation Advice about daydreaming. He recounted a story about a speech a boss of his at Avon, Jim Clitter, gave when my Dad was a young executive. Clitter told the audience that creativity came out of necessity.

My dad took his advice to heart. So when he created a new fragrance line called “Charisma” my Dad sent, and back in the old non-internet days that meant messengering, all the Vice President’s wives a mock-up of the kind of racy campaign materials for “Charisma” that were clearly targeted at women, along with a sample of the product. He asked the women to look over the campaign and if they liked it to tell their husbands to vote for it at their upcoming meeting.

What my father knew was that women were his target audience and if his fate was left up to a room full of men he might not get their approval. He came up with the creative way to show the all-male group that he knew what women wanted in a fragrance. Thank goodness he was right and the wives told their husbands to vote “yes.” When my Dad went to the meeting to present the campaign he got a standing ovation thanks to his “wives campaign.”

Today, my Dad told me all his creative ideas happened between five and eight in the morning. All my life he has been a morning person. He used to get up at 4:30 to catch the earliest possible train into New York City to get to work first. I now understand it was a necessity because if his best thinking was going to end by eight am that did not leave much time.

I’m sure that “wives campaign” was a risky thing for my Dad to do. He was still a young guy in a new company, but I’m sure that the success gave him courage to continue to try other brilliant but risky moves. One famous one was when my Dad was working at Sprint and they had just finished building the first all digital long distance network. To help drive the point home that Sprint was way ahead of the rest of the phone world my father made a commercial of blowing up an old telephone tower without getting permission from the network guys. The ad was exciting and made lots of news, which in turn got lots of customers.

My Dad was called on the carpet and told that the network guys were mad because they could have sold the antiquated equipment to a third world nation for $25,000. The network guys had no idea how much more valuable that tower was as a symbol of “out with the old and in with the new.” They did not have the same necessity for gaining new customers that my father did, and creativity was never the strong suit of guys in “network.”

Consider these two stories a counterpoint to the daydreaming advice I wrote about last week. I know my father may say his creativity came out of necessity, but I think that being creative is just a lot more fun and he was always one who liked to have fun. My charge is for you to consider a problem you might want to tackle at five in the morning and see what crazy solution you can come up with to solve it. You might not know that you are really an early morning person because you never had to get up and catch a train that early.