Creativity in business is a tricky business to fathom. On one hand, we have highly successful moguls of the business world, and on the other we have mega-rich artists, but between them both there is a common ground of innovation and entrepreneurialism. Creativity has no business in business, and business has no business in creativity.
Creative people have their heads in the sky, thinking of nothing real, living below the poverty-line and believing egotistically only in their ‘art’. Business people are sharks without a conscience, thinking only of their next prey and the easiest way to catch them. However, sometimes the two sides merge. Enter Russell Simmons.
Beginning as a concert promoter and artist manager, mainly of rap/hip-hop acts, he met Rick Rubin at a club who explained that he needed help getting his new record label off the ground. Russell saw an opportunity for the fledgling label, which would cater mainly to hip-hop, and it was in Rick Rubin’s dorm room at New York University, in 1984, that the Def Jam record label was founded. The first record they released was LL Cool J’s “I Need A Beat”. They went on to find and sign more hip-hop acts around New York, notably Public Enemy and Beastie Boys. The big break, arguably, was with Run-D.M.C (which included in its line-up Russell’s brother, Joseph “Run” Simmons). Hip-hop emerged not only as a culture, but as a brand; Russell Simmons pioneered the music and the style that came with it.
Now Def Jam is but one pie in the bakery of Russell’s corporation, Rush Communications, which also encompasses clothing company Phat Farm, television shows like Def Comedy Jam, and an advertising agency. His net-worth is estimated at $340 million. Yet he is seen as “father of hip-hop” rather than, “shrewd businessman”, because popular culture skips the business side of things.
Similarly, Warren Buffett is a businessman who is not recognised for his creativity, because the business world has no real outlet that recognises creativity. Buffett was ranked the second richest man in the world in 2009, with a net-worth of $37 billion. His origins were humble enough, though he capitalised at an early age, monopolising on pinball machines at highschool. He studied at Columbia University, under the tutelage of Benjamin Graham; Graham’s ideas of intelligent investment influenced Buffett to view stocks as a business, and to use fluctuations in the market to his advantage – Buffett himself said, “A hundred years from now those ideas will still be the cornerstones of investing.”
He taught night classes in “Investment Principles” at the University of Nebraska before accepting a job at Benjamin Graham’s partnership in 1953, starting on $12,000 a year ($97,000 modern-day). After Graham retired in 1956, he started Buffett Partnership Ltd., an investment partnership. He still lives in the same house he bought in 1957. A secret to his success may be his frugal nature: in 1962 he became a millionaire, yet lived solely on his annual salary ($50,000). It is clear that he is, even now, sensitive to oppurtunities that others may overlook: he recently acquired BNSF Railway, seeing the the economic and environmental oppurtunity of transporting goods by rail rather than by air, which is very expensive with a huge carbon footprint.
He is a pioneer and he thinks ‘outside the box’, but because he is in business he is a “shrewd businessman”, not “the father of investment”, and certainly not a creative genius: he is an example of invisible creativity, that which more often than not goes unnoticed, but produces huge and significant financial and influential gain. Both he and Russell Simmons should be equally known for their creative genius, but Buffett is relatively unknown and regarded as mad by his contemporaries, whereas Simmons is just ‘cool’.
Although not all creativity is business-orientated, nor all business creatively driven, the examples that have been mentioned are but a tiny percentage of those individuals who inhabit both sides of the coin. People do not want to hear that Beyoncé is intelligently promoting herself as a brand, just about her fabulous lifestyle as a seemingly vacuous singer, whilst people in another walk of life will not look past creativity’s association over the centuries with insane artists.
The two obviously thrive together, but it is people in both sides that speak and think ill of the other. What is needed is a little more openness and a little less loyalty to one side or another, ending in admittance that there are no sides, just one coin with two slightly different faces.
by Russell Thomas
