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creativity fuels success in both art and business

PEOPLE OFTEN ASK me how I can be involved in the arts and still be in business. Everybody immediately assumes that these endeavors, from an emotional and an aesthetic point of view, are mutually exclusive. The assumption is that if you are an artist, you should not be soiled by commercialism, whereas business-people say that artists are unrealistic dreamers who do not know anything about the real world. There is emotional prejudice on both sides. My contention is that the business world and the artistic world are not opposites. When they are both functioning at their best, they draw on the same mental process—it is all creative. Business can be like art, and it should be just as creative.

The surest way to stifle creativity is for corporations to require a prescribed “position” because many of these businesses are too big to recognize individual contributions. You can become depersonalized, systematized, and ultimately alienated because your position in the company has become a “job” and has no individual character. You become mechanized because you cannot recognize any tangible contribution to an ultimate end. Like a character in a Franz Kafka novel, you are a mere cog in some great wheel.

It may strike the reader that I’m describing a military concept. Every soldier has his job, and each soldier must depend on others in order to carry it out. A failure of one may be a failure of all, so each military person is taught to obey and obey blindly. So why doesn’t that work in business? After all, there are similarities. The answer is that it will work in a large organization that eschews individual initiative. But why do people accept that? Because they hope that a large corporation will offer security, something to depend on, something that provides financial and emotional stability: the security of a job.

Such diverse figures as Vladimir Lenin and Milton Friedman have pointed out that regimented systems imposed on humans are counterproductive. Armies of people marching to the same ideology are destructive to the creative process. I have explored this in art and in business. Cool Hand Luke, one of the movies I appeared in at a tender age, is really an allegory about not succumbing to “the system.” Age Old Friends, an HBO film starring Hume Cronyn that I coproduced, is about two guys in an old-folks home who refuse to be subjected to the routine of a patronizing system that homogenizes the patients. In my business experience, this has meant doing what is not expected and what is outside the mainstream.

So I am making the case for the entrepreneur, the small businessman—the one who takes a risk to initiate an enterprise, the one who provides much of the economic impetus in the United States, the one who creates most of the jobs in the workforce today.

The entrepreneurial businessman (as opposed to the corporate businessman) must engage in a creative process, rather than an administrative process. The requirements for this are questioning the constraints of the system instead of blindly obeying them, not being restrained by the straitjacket of conventional experience, and thinking outside the box. The creative process as applied to business must be unencumbered, and you should approach it by asking not only “why?” but also, and more important, “why not?” This leads to solutions that are not obvious or burdened by policy, tradition, and corporate regulation.

I started down the unconventional path when I was a senior at Princeton University and had no real idea of what I was going to do. Major firms visited the campus to talk about their companies and to recruit graduates. I never met with any of them. Why? Because I knew that I could not exist in that kind of atmosphere. To quote Samuel Goldwyn, “Include me out.”

Most people want to land a job with Procter & Gamble or IBM, work their way up the ladder over the course of thirty years, and then retire to Florida and play golf. Mostly, they are looking for security. If that is your goal, it is your choice. However, that option has become much more restricted in today’s economy. Fewer firms are recruiting at colleges; companies do not poach from competitors the way they used to; and the career corporate path is not as readily available as it once was. In 2009, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates ages 20–24 was the highest since early 1983. Therefore, more people are looking for an alternate path.

To survive outside the mainstream in the business world, you must be creative. Whether you work for yourself or for someone else, problems will emerge, and creative opportunities will also emerge if you are open to looking for them. Either the person you work for or necessity will require you to fix the problems. The challenge will often be “How?” The directive is often “Be creative.” So what does that mean?

creativity doesn’t happen by accident

Let us start with the philosophical questions. Is all creativity born out of destruction? Do you have to destroy the convention before you construct something or re-create it? Is it like the Phoenix rising from the ashes? Can you take a creative approach only when something conventional has been put in your path and you must get around it? Finally, do you become creative only because you have to go against the grain, or can you be creative in the absolute?

I have always believed that there are two variations of creativity, one exemplified by someone who starts with a blank slate and the other exemplified by someone who challenges convention. In one process, you sit down and try to create something from nothing, such as a painting. In the other, you ignore or modify the conventions and find a new way to do something.

Typically, in business, you will be faced with the latter situation. Within the context of a given, you will need to find a different way—a creative way—to do something. You will need to go in a different direction than everyone else.

Most people have heard these lines from Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.” But the truth is that you will more likely be confronted with something more difficult than an either/or, and you will need to heed Yogi Berra’s advice: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Remember, in decision making in a capitalist society, the cost of omission is often greater than the cost of commission.

In many cases, the exigencies of the problem leave you little choice. Necessity can induce thoughts you have not considered before, unleash options previously considered impractical, and inspire new ways to tackle old problems. When faced with the possibility of total destruction, the mind can conjure up the wildest of solutions. The essence of this is being convinced that there is always a way.

This creative process begins with research—“homework,” if you will. You must immerse yourself in all the data that are available on the subject—both the conventional material and the unconventional. For example, as I write this, the country is experiencing a fierce debate about the environment—whether or not global warming is the result of the release of increased amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through human activities, primarily the burning of carbon fuels. Both sides have recruited a wide array of supporters.

Here is a case of opposing viewpoints, each firmly convinced that the other is incorrect and citing various reasons to support its view. Leave it to the politicians and the scientists to pick sides. The global-warming debate helps us understand how new businesses are born as creative answers to present problems. The ancillary business opportunity here is in finding the most efficient uses of alternative energy sources, not necessarily for the theoretical reasons espoused by either side. If the fossil fuel fight over carbon emissions provides an opportunistic reason, then alternatives are catapulted to the forefront by the demands of national security and the need to free ourselves from being held hostage to foreign fuel sources, namely Middle Eastern countries.

And what has resulted? We have a plethora of solutions: solar power, wind turbines, geothermal exploration, and even bizarre algae- and manure-based solutions. There is no end to the creativity fostered by the view that the world is approaching an impending crisis. And, of course, the magic of the free market, with its unique pricing mechanisms, is telling everyone that energy costs will ultimately drive various alternatives to an equilibrium.

This is an obvious example of how creativity and business work. You must start with all the available research, some good, some bad, but gather it all, try to understand it, make your choices, and test them. I say “test your choices” because if you have the opportunity and the luxury of time, you may be able to try a number of “wrong” ways on the road to finding the “right” way, and that again engenders the questions that lead to creative answers. For every question, there may be more than one answer, sometimes many more, and, once again, these can foster creative thinking.

a radical solution for the vineyard

I put this kind of creativity into practice at a vineyard I developed. The adventure began when a bargain price caught my attention when I was reading an ad in The Wall Street Journal for a large parcel in central California. The ad was an offering to sell 2,500 acres of arable land for $325 an acre. The land had wheat and alfalfa on it. There was debt against the property, and the owner was in some financial trouble and needed money. My thinking was to “land bank” the property for some period of time. I could do this by farming the wheat and alfalfa, which would give my associates and me enough to pay the taxes and insurance and reduce the debt.

I put together a small group of investors and purchased the land. My partner and I became the general partners, so it was our responsibility to make sure the venture was successful. At the time, we did not know if the land had the potential to grow grapes.

I had a friend at that time who was a grower in southern California and who knew something about vineyards. He directed me to his son, who was planting a new vineyard in the Santa Barbara district. Through him, I met a group that was planting a vineyard in Shandon, a tiny community near Paso Robles in California. As one thing led to another, I contacted this group, and its members were very helpful in pointing us to the University of California at Davis, whose viticultural expertise they had followed. (Viticulture is the science of growing the grape, and enology is the science of turning it into wine.)

I drank wine, but I was not a collector. The cellar in my house was more conducive to the storage of coal than wine. I could distinguish cabernet sauvignon from pinot noir, but that was about it. By the way, the business of wine has nothing to do with the aesthetics of drinking it. The decision to plant grapes was purely financial: it was the best and most profitable use of the land.

Turning a piece of property into a vineyard also gave this adventure a comfortable discomfort because I knew nothing about starting or running a vineyard. First, I needed an education in viticulture, so I went to the professors at UC Davis, which has one of the leading viticulture and enology departments in the country. I gathered and used as much of that information as possible.

Like most ancient agricultural practices, viticulture is bound by tradition. People did things a certain way simply because that was how they had always been done. In contrast, much of what we decided to do came out of necessity. And it broke with the traditional practices.

One of the first things I learned in the wine business was that conventions are sometimes necessary and, to improve on them, you must understand them. One particular convention was the installation of a frost protection system. If we did not have some way to protect the grapes, we would lose all the vines in the winter months, when the temperature dropped below the freezing mark. This sounds pretty straightforward and logical, but the process is actually very scientific.

A frost protection system uses a series of sprinklers to wet the vines when the dew point and temperature arrive at a point that will produce frost. The process, called “icing the vines,” involves spraying the vineyard with water and letting that water freeze on the vines. What does water do when it freezes? It gives up heat. So, when you spray the vines and cover them with ice, the vines heat up and insulate themselves from the cold. It looks like you are killing the vine when, in fact, you are protecting it.

There was also a time-honored process to planting a vineyard. You would take cuttings of vines and plant them directly in the ground, similar to the way roses are planted. As it turned out, we could not use that process because of unforeseen circumstances, so we had to be creative. What does that mean? Necessity, as the overused, infinitely apt cliché goes, became the mother of invention, and it is one of the best tools to push you to your creative limits.

We had purchased 260,000 cuttings and healed them in a sandpit awaiting planting. For the uninitiated, a cutting is an eight-inch to ten-inch section of a dormant vine, much like one would take from a rose bush to propagate another bush. The problem was that California was having an unusual amount of rainfall that year, so we couldn’t drive the bulldozers on the soil to install the sprinklers because they would sink into the wet ground. If we couldn’t install the irrigation system to ice the vines, we couldn’t plant the cuttings because the frost would kill them. Unfortunately, we had all the cuttings sitting in sand, and if we didn’t plant them in the ground before they pushed buds and grew roots, they would die anyway.

I felt haunted by the image of Orson Welles in the Paul Masson wine commercial. Swirling a glass of white wine, Welles invokes Masson’s century-old declaration: “We will sell no wine before its time.” This raises an obvious question: What do you recommend we drink until your wine is ready?

Joking aside, we were faced with a major problem, and so we combed the state searching for anyone who could suggest a solution. One person would introduce me to the next, but no one seemed to have an answer. Eventually, I met a man named Dr. John Weinberger, who was the leading exponent in the world of the rapid propagation of bench-grafted rootstocks. His solution involved planting the vines in quart-size milk cartons in a mixture of PerLight, some chemical fertilizers he specified, and peat moss, then placing them on palette boards in a suitably warm climate until they could be permanently planted.

No one had ever tried this before on a commercial scale, so it was a somewhat radical idea. Since we had invested almost a quarter of a million dollars in the rootstock, we had little choice but to try and save our investment. We bought the pots and planted them all on palette boards that spring, loaded them on flatbed trucks, and sent them over to the warmer climate of the San Joaquin Valley to let them grow. In the meantime, the land dried out, and we were able to install the irrigation system.

The land was hilly in parts, so we had to pick and choose our locations. We selected three spots and made separate vineyards on each one, giving us about five hundred acres of grapes on the total 2,500 acres. Then we constructed earth dams in the canyons above, drilled wells, and made water easily available to the vines.

It was late July by the time the irrigation system was ready. No one had ever planted that late in the season, but by then our plants had developed a root system, so they were well ahead of the growing schedule when they went into the ground. We planted the rootstocks with the help of fifty day workers armed with short-handled hoes and appropriately named our vineyard Rancho Tierra Rejada, which means “land of the cracked earth.”

My daughter, Laura, at the vineyard.

Because the plants already had root systems, the result was an instant vineyard. Our cost was an extra 9 cents a plant to get them in the ground, but we had a 92 percent “take,” meaning that 92 percent of the vines grew successfully. After three years, the vines produced on schedule, and we were selling grapes. Suddenly, professors from UC Davis began to show up and asked what we had done. Our solution had become news.

This process became the standard way to plant a vineyard in California. No longer are cuttings planted. You grow a root system in a pot, and then you transport those potted plants to the field when the conditions are right. It costs a little more, but your take is much higher and you know what you have right away.

Besides our unconventional planting methods, we also grafted our vines differently. The traditional method called for grafting at the root, which takes two years to grow a vine that can be trained out on a wire. My idea was to graft high up on the vine and take advantage of the two years’ growth already completed. Nobody had done that commercially, either. We started grafting on the vine. When we ended up with too much zinfandel, we grafted some of that over to fumé blanc. In one year, we transitioned from twenty acres of zinfandel to twenty acres of fumé blanc.

We were one of the small players in the wine business, and, from time to time, things worked against us. For example, during the Reagan administration, the dollar became weak, which meant that imports had a decided price advantage in the marketplace. Italy was producing a wine called Reunite, subsidizing its production and distribution and landing it for $7 a case in New York. At that price, California wineries could not buy the glass, the label, and the boxes for their bottles, let alone fill the bottles with wine. Fortunately, the dollar turned around two years later, and conditions returned to normal.

I also learned that the wine business is not a business in and of itself; it is a way of life. To start with, it is enormously time consuming. People enter the wine business for different reasons and, in the 1960s and 1970s, the wine industry had an intense cultist quality. There were a lot of guys who were going through midlife crises. They divorced their wives, moved to the Napa Valley, smoked funny cigarettes, wore colored beads, and tried to grow grapes.

That has all changed. Good land is very expensive, and the output of working vineyards does not justify the high prices they command. Though many of the legendary families still run their wineries, the wine business in California has become a huge industry for the state. In that regard, it has become a business of professionals who remind me of the New York Racing Association motto: “For the betterment of the breed.”

Rancho Tierra Rejada is still a going concern. The Paso Robles area now has more than 26,000 acres of vineyard and is the fastest-growing wine region in California. But I do not miss being an owner. I am happier being a consumer. Sometimes very happy.

being creative requires imagination plus reason

There are businesses, occupations, and professions that do not lend themselves to creativity. Generally, people in those fields operate in a more structured manner. For example, traders in the stock and commodities markets have a different mindset. By nature, they are gamblers, and that word does not fit into the definition of creativity.

Gamblers are satisfying an emotional response as well as executing a mental strategy, and such strategy has to take into consideration things that are totally uncreative. The gambler is not building something. He is not creating anything. He is not challenging conventions. In the case of a stock or commodities trader, he is just trying to execute a transaction quicker than the next guy. He is thinking, “If I can buy this for x and he is selling for y, I am going to win and he is going to lose.”

The difference has to do with calculation versus imagination. Being a stockbroker, a trader, or a gambler requires the ability to manipulate numbers very quickly in your head. This may be a gift, but I don’t think of it as creative. It doesn’t involve the imagination. What it may involve is the ability to write a computer program that runs rapidly and to use information in a way that puts the odds in your favor. I think of someone who is creative as an innovator, as opposed to someone who uses a mental process that anyone presumably can be trained to do.

At the other end of the spectrum, in order to get anything done, you have to maintain a semblance of reality. When your imagination takes you beyond reason, you are in a fantasy. Consider the allegorical Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Circus. In the book, young Morris McGurk imagines starting an extravagant circus on an empty lot behind the cranky Sneelock’s store, a subversive twist because Sneelock is the authority figure over the kid. The boy wants to clean up the place and build the Circus McGurkus. But Morris’s plan veers into fantasyland. He envisions old Sneelock serving five hundred gallons of lemonade, getting mixed up with Wily Walloo, and wrestling a Grizzly-Ghastly.

Often, people will look at a business or a store and think, “If I ran this place, I would…” and imagine ways to improve that business. But you need to find the limit where creativity becomes fantasy and respect that limit. Here’s a quotation from my friend Alan Alda that sums it up quite nicely: “The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself.”