The advertising agency grew structurally out of the creative process.
It's simple: when there are new ideas, there are clients. Without ideas, there is nothing.
The structure consists of two key functions. Everything else is nice to have.
You guessed the first function immediately: Generation. Fresh ideas cannot be bought wholesale from China. They have to be drawn from the void.
The second role is Fixation. Something valuable but still fragile must not be lost. It needs to be recognized, protected, watered, nurtured.
Ideas bring in money — and with it, pleasant problems: payroll, paperwork, and so on. A set of useful subfunctions emerges.
Those subfunctions tend to consider themselves just as valuable as Generation, if not more so. After all, their world is clear and orderly. Generation is a dark forest.
If the people inside forget the "ontogeny" of creativity, the business is doomed.
No procedures, investments, reorganizations, training programs, or team replacements will revive what is dead. These are whale bones on the ocean floor.
By contrast, a company can visibly flourish after even the smallest changes, provided they occur at the right point. More precisely, FROM the right point, when the entire team recognizes What Does Not Yet Exist as its highest value.
Generating something new is not a trivial move like E2-E4. Creativity contains a wild element X that the mind cannot control.
The mind must bow before this mystery — if it wants to survive.
Sincerely yours,
-Alexander
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