Management Blog

Nurturing a Creativity Culture - A Case Study

Saatchi & Saatchi
Supporting a Creative Culture

Creativity is a much talked about attribute in the business world, but few companies can be said to be as committed to creativity as Saatchi & Saatchi, the international advertising agency headquartered in England. 

Saatchi & Saatchi is very profitable as a result of this commitment.  The company has 134 offices in 84 countries, with more than 7,000 employees.  Saatchi & Saatchi’s clients include 60 of the biggest 100 spenders on advertising, as well as more than half of the world’s 50 most valuable brands.  In the past five years, the company has won more than 3000 awards for its creative and commercially successful advertising campaigns.  Creativity has been the cornerstone of Saatchi & Saatchi’s success.  The company looks for job applicants on its website by asking,

“Are you an ideas person?  Do you think outside the box?  Do you even refuse to recognise the existence of the box?”   

Saatchi & Saatchi advertised on the Berlin Wall just before it came down, and then was the first western advertising agency to set up an office in East Berlin.  The company was hired by Margaret Thatcher in her bid to become Prime Minister, and later by Boris Yeltsin in his campaign to become Russia’s first democratically elected President. 

Ian McDougall, a manager of Saatchi & Saatchi’s agency in Wellington, New Zealand, sums up the reason for the company’s success in the following manner:

“The reason for Saatchi’s phenomenal and continuing growth is, according to popular rumour, because it was headed by a creative brother and a money brother.  Quite wrong.  The real reason is that they were both creative.  It’s just that one created ads, the other created balance sheets.  The point being, creativity is not the exclusive territory of writers, art directors, film-makers, or poets.  It spins out across all areas of commercial endeavour.”   

Blended Learning

Call of the Wild launch new blended learning approach to Leadership and Team Development

We at Call of the Wild have been developing and delivering bespoke leadership and team development solutions for our clients including Panasonic, Carphone Warehouse, ICAEW and BMW for over 9 years. We have always prided ourselves on our ability to offer programs that have a real impact in the workplace. For 2008 we have further enhanced our range of services by introducing a blended approach to our development services.

Call of the Wild are delighted to announce the launch of their on line development resource the Call of the Wild development academy. This exciting new product sits alongside our core leadership and team development services and offers a blended learning solution, which aims to maximise the benefit of our programs by supplementing our facilitator-led developmental inputs.

We encourage clients to think of the academy as a body of knowledge, a motivation to explore management, an advice and help centre, a monthly magazine, an intelligent dictionary, a reference tool, a set of challenging thoughts and ideas, a set of guided and unguided learning opportunities, a reward system, and a community for learning about management.

Blended learning is an attempt to combine the claimed strengths of e learning and the human facilitator and overcome the weaknesses of both.

	Strengths	Weaknesses
Trainer	Feedback, facilitation	Knowledge delivery
E-learning	Knowledge delivery	Feedback, facilitation

The aim is for knowledge to be pre-delivered by e learning so that the facilitator can spend his or her (limited) time on the inter-personal aspects of their role. If it works, then 60% of the trainer’s time is either saved or used for more in-depth feedback and facilitation. Indeed, studies we have carried out for clients indicate that blended learning can realise savings of between 30% and 50% of a company’s training costs. With all training budgets under pressure, this can make all the difference between delivering quality management training and not.

We have sought to keep away from traditional e learning. All our work is built upon the insights of Professor David A Kolb and his Learning Styles analysis. Thus, we do not have serial chunks of learning that everyone is expected to work through. We strive to capture the interest and to motivate a larger range of people - those who like to experiment, those who like to work fast, those who want to ponder upon an issue or theory, as well as those who like to follow a guided pathway.

With the Call of the Wild Development Academy, the trainer can offer people approaches to the pre-work, which will satisfy their learning preferences. He or she can request that specific elements of the Academy are studied and can test for completion – but, at the same time, can allow people to explore around the topic if they wish, to be guided through the material if they wish or indeed just to leap in, complete the requirements and move on.

This way, the trainer has a higher chance of walking into the training room to meet participants who (a) have completed the pre-work (b) are expectant rather than bored and perhaps even more important (c) who have questions to ask, points to make and disagreements to air.

We would like to discuss this exiting new service at the HR forum in Birmingham in January and therefore are offering the opportunity to begin to explore the Development Academy free of charge for 1 month.

Visit www.cotwdevelopmentacademy.com in order to register as a new user and receive your free one-month log in.

To discuss our services in more detail or if you have any questions regarding the academy please contact [email protected]

Time and Time Management Exercise

This is an example of the type of exercises that can be found on our e-learning website. Give us a call to find out how you can get your free trial log-in details. telephone : 01639 700388 or e-mail [email protected] Monday 22 October 2007 Consider each statement and decide whether you think it is true or false. Give an answer for every statement even if you are unsure about your response. Any answer that you have left blank, counts as wrong. <><> 1 Getting things done on time is always the most important objective. Select: True False 2 What the customer expects is often less complex than we think. Select: True False 3 Time means the same to everyone. Select: True False 4 Mixing up long and short term priorities will rarely allow jobs to be done well. Select: True False 5 Major reports are best left to 'mature' for a couple of days after they have been written. Select: True False 6 Deadlines always improve performance. Select: True False 7 Keeping the overall purpose of a job in mind helps manage priorities. Select: True False 8 Most people like a bit of routine in their job. Select: True False 9 People almost always have time for what really interests them. Select: True False 10 Always respond to all requests for information immediately. Select: True False 11 Detailed planning always yields the most effective use of time. Select: True False 12 Investing in staff development is a key aspect of time management. Select: True False 13 The effective manager always has a quick solution for any issue that arises. Select: True False 14 Priorities almost always change. Select: True False 15 If people keep their heads down working on objectives set, the organisation will prosper. Select: True False 22 The manager whose time is fully occupied is the most effective. Select: True False 23 Evaluating tasks by how much time they are 'worth' maximises the time available. Select: True False 24 Planning a schedule for the week and sticking to it will improve your time management. Select: True False 25 Informal notes save time in communication. Select: True False