"It really hasn't been demonstrated at any level by any major corporation that it can nurture what is euphemistically called creativity"
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Peter Bart, a longtime observer of Hollywood and corporate media, is pushing back against the way large organizations congratulate themselves for fostering originality. The barb lies in euphemistically called creativity, which suggests that the term has been diluted into a corporate buzzword. What gets celebrated as creativity inside boardrooms is often a managed, low-risk version of it: ideation sessions, brand refreshes, sequels to proven properties. The messy, subversive, failure-prone work that produces real breakthroughs clashes with the routines of quarterly earnings, procurement cycles, and committee approvals.
Major corporations are built for predictability and scale. They optimize for consistency, efficiency, and defensible returns. That architecture rewards imitative success and penalizes risk. Layers of approval, metrics that prize short-term wins, and a culture of consensus tend to neutralize the very qualities that fuel original work: autonomy, eccentricity, and tolerance for waste and uncertainty. In entertainment, Bart saw studios trumpet originality while leaning on franchises and test screenings that sand away idiosyncrasy. Even when a fresh voice gains entry, the notes process, market research, and brand protection often contour it to familiar shapes.
Counterexamples are instructive precisely because they are exceptions. Skunk works, labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, or film units with strong creative leadership have generated remarkable innovations. Yet they succeed when insulated from the parent companys incentives, backed by leaders who absorb risk and protect creators. The moment those buffers thin, corporate logic reasserts itself and the pipeline narrows to what can be forecast and franchised.
Bart is not denying that corporations can package, finance, and distribute creative output at scale. He is challenging the claim that they nurture it. The enduring lesson is that creativity flourishes under conditions that corporate systems rarely provide: slack time, patient capital, license to fail, and a tolerance for the unruly. Without those, creativity becomes a polite synonym for incremental novelty and marketing gloss.
Major corporations are built for predictability and scale. They optimize for consistency, efficiency, and defensible returns. That architecture rewards imitative success and penalizes risk. Layers of approval, metrics that prize short-term wins, and a culture of consensus tend to neutralize the very qualities that fuel original work: autonomy, eccentricity, and tolerance for waste and uncertainty. In entertainment, Bart saw studios trumpet originality while leaning on franchises and test screenings that sand away idiosyncrasy. Even when a fresh voice gains entry, the notes process, market research, and brand protection often contour it to familiar shapes.
Counterexamples are instructive precisely because they are exceptions. Skunk works, labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, or film units with strong creative leadership have generated remarkable innovations. Yet they succeed when insulated from the parent companys incentives, backed by leaders who absorb risk and protect creators. The moment those buffers thin, corporate logic reasserts itself and the pipeline narrows to what can be forecast and franchised.
Bart is not denying that corporations can package, finance, and distribute creative output at scale. He is challenging the claim that they nurture it. The enduring lesson is that creativity flourishes under conditions that corporate systems rarely provide: slack time, patient capital, license to fail, and a tolerance for the unruly. Without those, creativity becomes a polite synonym for incremental novelty and marketing gloss.
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| Topic | Management |
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