How Google Works summary

As we’ve seen, smart creatives are the key to developing great products. So how can your business attract employees that fit this description?

To start, make hiring one of your top priorities. In most organizations, hiring new employees falls to the supervising manager. Yet the opinions of just one person are highly subjective. Focus instead on creating a hiring committee to represent your company’s different viewpoints and roles (for example: an engineer, a salesperson and a manager).

What can you do to make your company more attractive to smart creatives? The answer lies in your company’s culture – that is, the values on which your company is built.

So what kind of culture attracts smart creatives? Such employees thrive in environments that encourage creativity. Here are the three key aspects of a creative company culture:

Most CEOs may think their company needs a business plan, but they’re wrong. In fact, most traditional plans inevitably lead to failure.

That’s because a typical plan doesn’t leave room for change. And yet, running a business requires that you respond to new challenges whenever they arise.

In traditional companies, decision making tends to be hierarchical. Senior management makes the big calls, while everyone else nods in agreement.

However, if you’re lucky enough to manage a company staffed by smart creatives, things work differently. The decision-making process becomes as important as the decision itself, because if employees don’t support the decision, they simply won’t follow it.

Information is a valuable currency. This might explain why so many managers maintain a Scrooge-like mentality when it comes to sharing what they know. But that’s simply not an option for those who oversee smart creatives.

When you’re managing creatives, you need to have an open approach to information to foster a more creative, collaborative working environment.

Why did you hire smart creatives in the first place? To innovate, of course. But can you actually force people to be innovative?

Well, many companies do try to artificially enforce innovation, for example by appointing a “Chief Innovation Officer.” But this is rarely effective.