Please check out my lighting and photography at www.kscottphoto.com
Showing posts with label Chicago Photographer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago Photographer. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
The Journey - trailer
Please check out my lighting and photography at www.kscottphoto.com
10 creative uses of photography in packaging
By
Graphics and illustration are not the only weapons in your packaging design arsenal. Here are some inventive ways designers have added photography to the mix.
If you look at the most creative packaging on retail shelves today, it's usually graphics-led. When photography is used, it's usually standard product or lifestyle shots that add little visual flair to a design.But for precisely that reason, photography can be a great weapon in your armory for getting your packaging designs noticed. In this post, we share 10 examples where designers have gone the extra mile, and combined photography with clever design to create something special.
01. Sprout baby food
02. Petrocoll putty
03. Matsu organic wine
04. Coco Juice
05. '1300 on Filmore' speciality foods
06. Innocent Drinks smoothies
07. Sigtuna beer
08. Darling Spuds potato chips
09. Petcurean pet food
10. Hatziyiannakis Pebbles
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom May is a freelance writer and editor specialising in design and technology. He was previously associate editor at Creative Bloq and deputy editor at net magazine, the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers. Over two decades in journalism he’s worked for a wide range of mainstream titles including The Sun, Radio Times, NME, Heat, Company and Bella. Follow him on Twitter @tom_may.For Chicago advertising photography, check out my work at www.kscottphoto.com
Monday, September 24, 2012
Guinness Book of World Records
It's finally out! The new Guinness Book of World Records was released just a couple of weeks ago. I had the opportunity to shoot close to a dozen photoshoots for the 2013 book and am pleased to see the amazing coverage globally. I will post some of the articles in the next few weeks from some of the shoots. Make sure to get a copy. They make great gifts. Guinness World Records
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Two Pennies and a trip to Africa
I will be blessed with the opportunity coming the end of March, to go to Ghana Africa as part of Alighted Lantern Productions and Two Pennies Ministries to do a documentary at the Countryside Orphanage. Two Pennies Ministry started working with Countryside Orphanage just last year to help them re-start their chicken farm that was totally lost to disease. Two Pennies started a campaign to raise $10,000 to allow them to purchase 2000 chicks, 3 workers to work the farm and proper inoculations to keep the chicks healthy. I will be part of a small team telling the Two Pennies and Countryside Orphanage story. I will keep updates in this blog about how this project is going. As a Chicago advertising photographer, I will be way out of my element and comfort zone.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Jewels By Parklane Fall Catalog
Check out the latest catalog that Sierra photographed. I shot about 97% of the images in this catalog. Thank you Parklane!
Friday, April 15, 2011
New Logo Update!
This is the new Kevin Scott Photography Logo. I think Im ready to keep this design for good! At least that's how I feel about it right now. hahaha. What do you think?
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
This puts my job into perspective
4 Times Journalists Held Captive
in Libya FacedDays of Brutality
John Moore/Getty Images
TYLER HICKS The New York Times photographer near the front line during a pause in the fighting on March 11 in Ras Lanuf, Libya. Four days later, he and three other Times journalists were taken captive by government soldiers.
By ANTHONY SHADID, LYNSEY ADDARIO, STEPHEN FARRELL and TYLER HICKS
Published: March 22, 2011
As the four of us headed toward the eastern gate of Ajdabiya, the front line of a desperate rebel stand against the advancing forces of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a car pulled up alongside.
“They’re in the city!” the driver shouted at us. “They’re in the city!” Lynsey and Steve had worried that government soldiers might encircle the town, trapping us, but Tyler and Anthony discounted it. We had covered the fall of two other rebel-held towns — Ras Lanuf and Brega — and each time, the government had bombed and shelled the towns for days before making a frontal, methodical assault.
When they did, rebels and journalists fled in a headlong retreat. If Ajdabiya fell, Colonel Qaddafi’s forces would be on the doorstep of Benghazi, the opposition capital, and perched on a highway to the Egyptian border, from where we had entered Libya without visas.
No one really knows the script for days like these, and neither did we.
As we left the town’s last traffic circle, heading for Benghazi, all of us saw the checkpoint in the distance. “I think it’s Qaddafi’s soldiers,” Lynsey said.
Our driver, Tyler and Anthony shook their heads, but within seconds, the reality dawned on us. Unlike the rebels in their mismatched uniforms, track suits and berets, these men were uniformed. Their vehicles were a dark army green, and they lined in the street in military formation.
By chance, we made it through the first line of soldiers, but not the second.
“Keep driving!” Tyler shouted at Mohammed, the driver. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”
Mohammed had no choice, and a soldier flung open his door. “Journalists!” he yelled at the other soldiers, their faces contorted in fear and rage. It was too late.
Tyler was in the front, and a soldier pulled him out of the car. Steve was hauled out by his camera bags. Anthony crawled out the same door, and Lynsey followed.
Even before the soldiers had time to speak, rebels attacked the checkpoint with what sounded like rifles and medium machine guns. Bullets flew around us, and the soft dirt popped. Tyler broke free and started running. Anthony fell on a sand berm, then got to his feet and followed Tyler, who, for a moment, considered making a run for it.
Lynsey instinctively clenched her cameras as a soldier pulled at them. She let them go and ran behind us. Soldiers tried to get Steve on the ground next to the car, and he pointed at the gunfire. They made him drop his camera, then he ran, too.
We made it behind a simple one-room house, where a woman clutched her infant child. Both cried uncontrollably and a soldier tried to console them. When we got there, soldiers trained their guns on us, beat us, stripped us of everything in our pockets and forced us on our knees.
Tyler’s hands were bound by a strip of a scarf. A soldier took off Lynsey’s gray Nike shoes, then bound her with the shoelaces. “God, I just don’t want to be raped,” she whispered to Steve.
“You’re the translator!” a slight soldier screamed at Anthony. “You’re the spy!”
A few seconds passed, and another soldier approached, demanding that we lie on our stomachs.
All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.
“Shoot them,” a tall soldier said calmly in Arabic.
A colleague next to him shook his head. “You can’t,” he insisted. “They’re Americans.”
They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.
Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.
But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.
From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body outstretched next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet to be found.
If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for.
No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.
Captors in the Same Plight
We probably shouldn’t have lived through the night.
Even before the sun set, another gun battle broke out, almost as fierce as the first one. We were trapped in trucks in the open. Tyler stretched the binding of his handcuffs, allowing him to open the door. Anthony yelled for help, trying to open the door with his teeth.
A soldier finally let Tyler crawl around the pickup to let Anthony out. For a moment, our captors were in the same plight as us. As the hours passed, they offered us food, drink and cigarettes.
“These are the morals of Islam,” one said to Anthony. “These are the morals of Qaddafi. We treat prisoners humanely.” For a few hours they did. They offered blankets and mattresses, then put us in a car. As rebels attacked every so often, we all barreled out of the car and dived to the ground, until the firing subsided. They put us back in, and we dived to the ground again. They eventually let us lie behind a pickup.
Lynsey asked for her shoes. She got a bullet-riddled pair of Tyler’s, taken from his bag.
At 2 a.m. on Wednesday we were awakened.
“The rebels are massing,” one officer shouted. That day, and the ones that followed, we never really understood the command structure. No one wore rank; authority seemed to come from the pitch of a barked order.
In hindsight, the rebels and the army, or militia, didn’t seem separated by all that much. They were really gangs of young men with guns, each convinced of the other’s evil.
The rebels’ story was more familiar: They were fighting nearly 42 years of dictatorship, wielded by a man whom the vast majority in opposition-held Libya deemed insane. To the soldiers around us, they were fighting Al Qaeda or homegrown Islamists, and they couldn’t understand why we, as Americans, didn’t understand their battle.
And none of the men around us, all born after Colonel Qaddafi seized power as a young lieutenant in 1969, could imagine Libya without him.
A new group seized us, and they were rougher. They blindfolded us, tied our arms and legs and beat us. They then stuffed us into an armored car, where Lynsey was groped. She never screamed but instead pleaded. A soldier covered her mouth, tracing his hands over her body. “Don’t speak,” he warned. Another soldier tried to shove a bayonet into Steve’s rear, laughing as he did it.
A half-hour later, we arrived on what we thought were the outskirts of the other side of Ajdabiya. A man whom soldiers called the sheik questioned us, then began taunting Tyler.
“You have a beautiful head,” he told Tyler in a mix of English and Arabic. “I’m going to remove it and put it on mine. I’m going to cut it off.” Tyler, feeling queasy, asked to sit down.
We were finally put in a pickup where a soldier taunted Lynsey.
“You might die tonight,” he told her, as he ran his hand over her face. “Maybe, maybe not.”
From the moment of our arrest, the soldiers said we would be delivered to a man they called the doctor. Some referred to him as Dr. Moatasim, one of the more vicious of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Each has his own militia, and each seemed to operate on its own, with its own rules.
Like Trophies of War
At 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, we were thrown blindfolded and bound in the back of a pickup truck and driven along the Mediterranean coast toward Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, Surt, a six-hour drive. Libya was never much of a state. In theory, that was Colonel Qaddafi’s idea. The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab State of the Masses was supposed to be perpetual revolution.
At its best it was dictatorship, at its worst chaos, and what we saw from one end of the country to the other was the detritus of an experiment whose own people lamented had lasted far too long.
We felt like trophies of war, and at a dozen checkpoints, we could hear militiamen running to the car to administer another beating.
“Dirty dogs,” men shouted out at each stop.
Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now we were the faceless we had covered perhaps too dispassionately. For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists, for hands to go numb.
The act is probably less terrifying than the unknown. You don’t know when it’s going to end or what comes next. By late afternoon, we were taken to a jail in Surt. Our captors led us to a basement cell with a few ratty mattresses, a bottle to urinate in, a jug of water and a bag of dates. As night fell, we wondered whether anyone knew — or could know — where we were.
Graffiti of devout prisoners was etched into the wall, testament to an insurgency that was crushed in eastern Libya in the late 1990s. “God bring us relief,” one line read.
At one point, Anthony was taken out of the cell for questioning. He never saw the captors.
“How could you enter without a visa?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know you could be killed here and no one would ever know?” Anthony nodded. The man went on to denounce the rebels he said they were fighting — Qaeda fanatics, he said, and gangs of armed criminals.
“How could they ever rule Libya?” he asked.
They sent Anthony back to the cell, and we knew that no one had any idea where we were.
Camaraderie and Brutality
The next afternoon, on Thursday, was perhaps the worst beating. As we stood on the tarmac in Surt, waiting for a military plane to Tripoli, Tyler was slapped and punched, and Anthony was hit with the butt of a gun to the head. We were blindfolded and bound another time with plastic handcuffs, and Lynsey was groped again.
As we sat in the plane, we asked a question that came up at every stop: “Is everyone here?” Hearing a familiar voice seemed to encapsulate everything that camaraderie came to mean. As long as were together, we probably stood a chance.
Nothing ever felt more generous to Anthony than a handcuffed Tyler managing to reach into the pocket of Anthony’s jacket, pull out a cigarette and light it before handing it back to him.
The flight lasted 90 minutes and, again, we were dealt a gesture of kindness.
“I’m sorry,” a sympathetic air crew said to each of us.
Our destiny may have been decided at the airfield in Tripoli.
We were put in a police wagon, reeking of urine, that resembled so many Interior Ministry vehicles in so many Arab capitals. Guards stripped of us our shoes, socks and belts. One then yelled in Anthony’s ear, “Down, down U.S.A.!” He did the same to Steve. “But I’m not American, I’m Irish,” Steve answered.
“Down, down Ireland!” he shouted back.
We were moved to two more vehicles, and an argument raged for a half-hour over us. We suspected the fight was between the vicious Interior Ministry and other branches of the government. That kind of fight is waged by the logic of a dictatorship: the spoils go to whoever can muster a greater threat.
We were moved to another vehicle but not before a soldier, perhaps from the losing side, drove the barrel of his rifle into the back of Tyler’s head.
‘Protection of the State’
Within a half-hour, we were in a military compound, in the hands of military intelligence. We collapsed on the floor, accepting milk and mango juice. We saw our bags unloaded, though we would never get them back.
A gruff man struck a sympathetic tone. You won’t be beaten or bound again, he told us. You will be kept safe and, although you will be blindfolded if you are moved anywhere else in the compound, no one will mistreat you.
From that moment, no one did.
We were taken to a detention center that looked more like a double-wide trailer. On the shelves were a two-volume German-Arabic dictionary and five of Shakespeare’s plays. (Colonel Qaddafi once famously quipped that Shakespeare, or Sheik Zubeir, was actually an Arab migrant.)
The men were given track suits. Lynsey was brought a shirt that read, “Magic Girl,” emblazoned with two teddy bears. Her new underwear read, “Shake it up.”
At the late hours of night, we were blindfolded to receive visitors.
“You are now in the protection of the state,” a Foreign Ministry official told us.
Official after official made excuses for what happened to us. One said we had to understand the difference between militias loyal to Qaddafi and the actual army. Another asked whether Anthony had seen any rebel unarmed — the presence of guns deployed against the state seeming to justify any crackdown. Officials asked Lynsey whether she had been raped.
The more they talked, the clearer it became: This semblance of a state was not a state.
In the four days that followed, we fought boredom more than anything else. Tyler finished “Julius Caesar.” Lynsey started “Othello.” If it went on much longer, Tyler jokingly suggested we perform the plays. As the hours passed, we replayed each moment of the preceding days in detail, trying to piece together what had happened to Mohammed.
We wondered whether we would be delivered into more sinister hands. After the no-fly zone was imposed and we heard volleys of antiaircraft fire, we thought that a desperate government could make us human shields. Weighing over all of us was guilt for what we had put our families and friends through.
In the end, it was the trappings of diplomacy that delayed our departure.
Foreign Ministry officials, clinging to a prestige they may have never had, insisted that our transfer be formal, between two sovereign states. At one point, they insisted an American or British diplomat had to travel to Tripoli in wartime. In the end, Turkish diplomats served as intermediaries and delivered us to the border.
As we left, we saw the billboards of a crumbling government. “Forty-one years of permanent joy,” read one slogan superimposed over a sunburst. But the words that lingered with us as we left were quoted to Steve by an urbane Foreign Ministry official speaking idiomatic British English.
As we sat in an office, he murmured two lines of Yeats.
“Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.”
No one really knows the script for days like these, and neither did we.
As we left the town’s last traffic circle, heading for Benghazi, all of us saw the checkpoint in the distance. “I think it’s Qaddafi’s soldiers,” Lynsey said.
Our driver, Tyler and Anthony shook their heads, but within seconds, the reality dawned on us. Unlike the rebels in their mismatched uniforms, track suits and berets, these men were uniformed. Their vehicles were a dark army green, and they lined in the street in military formation.
By chance, we made it through the first line of soldiers, but not the second.
“Keep driving!” Tyler shouted at Mohammed, the driver. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”
Mohammed had no choice, and a soldier flung open his door. “Journalists!” he yelled at the other soldiers, their faces contorted in fear and rage. It was too late.
Tyler was in the front, and a soldier pulled him out of the car. Steve was hauled out by his camera bags. Anthony crawled out the same door, and Lynsey followed.
Even before the soldiers had time to speak, rebels attacked the checkpoint with what sounded like rifles and medium machine guns. Bullets flew around us, and the soft dirt popped. Tyler broke free and started running. Anthony fell on a sand berm, then got to his feet and followed Tyler, who, for a moment, considered making a run for it.
Lynsey instinctively clenched her cameras as a soldier pulled at them. She let them go and ran behind us. Soldiers tried to get Steve on the ground next to the car, and he pointed at the gunfire. They made him drop his camera, then he ran, too.
We made it behind a simple one-room house, where a woman clutched her infant child. Both cried uncontrollably and a soldier tried to console them. When we got there, soldiers trained their guns on us, beat us, stripped us of everything in our pockets and forced us on our knees.
Tyler’s hands were bound by a strip of a scarf. A soldier took off Lynsey’s gray Nike shoes, then bound her with the shoelaces. “God, I just don’t want to be raped,” she whispered to Steve.
“You’re the translator!” a slight soldier screamed at Anthony. “You’re the spy!”
A few seconds passed, and another soldier approached, demanding that we lie on our stomachs.
All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it’s almost over.
“Shoot them,” a tall soldier said calmly in Arabic.
A colleague next to him shook his head. “You can’t,” he insisted. “They’re Americans.”
They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.
Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi’s bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn’t matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.
But moments of kindness inevitably emerged, drawing on a culture’s far deeper instinct for hospitality and generosity. A soldier brought Tyler and Anthony, sitting in a pickup, dates and an orange drink. Lynsey had to talk to a soldier’s wife who, in English, called her a donkey and a dog. Then they unbound Lynsey and, sitting in another truck, gave Steve and her something to drink.
From the pickup, Lynsey saw a body outstretched next to our car, one arm outstretched. We still don’t know whether that was Mohammed. We fear it was, though his body has yet to be found.
If he died, we will have to bear the burden for the rest of our lives that an innocent man died because of us, because of wrong choices that we made, for an article that was never worth dying for.
No article is, but we were too blind to admit that.
Captors in the Same Plight
We probably shouldn’t have lived through the night.
Even before the sun set, another gun battle broke out, almost as fierce as the first one. We were trapped in trucks in the open. Tyler stretched the binding of his handcuffs, allowing him to open the door. Anthony yelled for help, trying to open the door with his teeth.
A soldier finally let Tyler crawl around the pickup to let Anthony out. For a moment, our captors were in the same plight as us. As the hours passed, they offered us food, drink and cigarettes.
“These are the morals of Islam,” one said to Anthony. “These are the morals of Qaddafi. We treat prisoners humanely.” For a few hours they did. They offered blankets and mattresses, then put us in a car. As rebels attacked every so often, we all barreled out of the car and dived to the ground, until the firing subsided. They put us back in, and we dived to the ground again. They eventually let us lie behind a pickup.
Lynsey asked for her shoes. She got a bullet-riddled pair of Tyler’s, taken from his bag.
At 2 a.m. on Wednesday we were awakened.
“The rebels are massing,” one officer shouted. That day, and the ones that followed, we never really understood the command structure. No one wore rank; authority seemed to come from the pitch of a barked order.
In hindsight, the rebels and the army, or militia, didn’t seem separated by all that much. They were really gangs of young men with guns, each convinced of the other’s evil.
The rebels’ story was more familiar: They were fighting nearly 42 years of dictatorship, wielded by a man whom the vast majority in opposition-held Libya deemed insane. To the soldiers around us, they were fighting Al Qaeda or homegrown Islamists, and they couldn’t understand why we, as Americans, didn’t understand their battle.
And none of the men around us, all born after Colonel Qaddafi seized power as a young lieutenant in 1969, could imagine Libya without him.
A new group seized us, and they were rougher. They blindfolded us, tied our arms and legs and beat us. They then stuffed us into an armored car, where Lynsey was groped. She never screamed but instead pleaded. A soldier covered her mouth, tracing his hands over her body. “Don’t speak,” he warned. Another soldier tried to shove a bayonet into Steve’s rear, laughing as he did it.
A half-hour later, we arrived on what we thought were the outskirts of the other side of Ajdabiya. A man whom soldiers called the sheik questioned us, then began taunting Tyler.
“You have a beautiful head,” he told Tyler in a mix of English and Arabic. “I’m going to remove it and put it on mine. I’m going to cut it off.” Tyler, feeling queasy, asked to sit down.
We were finally put in a pickup where a soldier taunted Lynsey.
“You might die tonight,” he told her, as he ran his hand over her face. “Maybe, maybe not.”
From the moment of our arrest, the soldiers said we would be delivered to a man they called the doctor. Some referred to him as Dr. Moatasim, one of the more vicious of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons. Each has his own militia, and each seemed to operate on its own, with its own rules.
Like Trophies of War
At 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, we were thrown blindfolded and bound in the back of a pickup truck and driven along the Mediterranean coast toward Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, Surt, a six-hour drive. Libya was never much of a state. In theory, that was Colonel Qaddafi’s idea. The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab State of the Masses was supposed to be perpetual revolution.
At its best it was dictatorship, at its worst chaos, and what we saw from one end of the country to the other was the detritus of an experiment whose own people lamented had lasted far too long.
We felt like trophies of war, and at a dozen checkpoints, we could hear militiamen running to the car to administer another beating.
“Dirty dogs,” men shouted out at each stop.
Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now we were the faceless we had covered perhaps too dispassionately. For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists, for hands to go numb.
The act is probably less terrifying than the unknown. You don’t know when it’s going to end or what comes next. By late afternoon, we were taken to a jail in Surt. Our captors led us to a basement cell with a few ratty mattresses, a bottle to urinate in, a jug of water and a bag of dates. As night fell, we wondered whether anyone knew — or could know — where we were.
Graffiti of devout prisoners was etched into the wall, testament to an insurgency that was crushed in eastern Libya in the late 1990s. “God bring us relief,” one line read.
At one point, Anthony was taken out of the cell for questioning. He never saw the captors.
“How could you enter without a visa?” the man asked him. “Don’t you know you could be killed here and no one would ever know?” Anthony nodded. The man went on to denounce the rebels he said they were fighting — Qaeda fanatics, he said, and gangs of armed criminals.
“How could they ever rule Libya?” he asked.
They sent Anthony back to the cell, and we knew that no one had any idea where we were.
Camaraderie and Brutality
The next afternoon, on Thursday, was perhaps the worst beating. As we stood on the tarmac in Surt, waiting for a military plane to Tripoli, Tyler was slapped and punched, and Anthony was hit with the butt of a gun to the head. We were blindfolded and bound another time with plastic handcuffs, and Lynsey was groped again.
As we sat in the plane, we asked a question that came up at every stop: “Is everyone here?” Hearing a familiar voice seemed to encapsulate everything that camaraderie came to mean. As long as were together, we probably stood a chance.
Nothing ever felt more generous to Anthony than a handcuffed Tyler managing to reach into the pocket of Anthony’s jacket, pull out a cigarette and light it before handing it back to him.
The flight lasted 90 minutes and, again, we were dealt a gesture of kindness.
“I’m sorry,” a sympathetic air crew said to each of us.
Our destiny may have been decided at the airfield in Tripoli.
We were put in a police wagon, reeking of urine, that resembled so many Interior Ministry vehicles in so many Arab capitals. Guards stripped of us our shoes, socks and belts. One then yelled in Anthony’s ear, “Down, down U.S.A.!” He did the same to Steve. “But I’m not American, I’m Irish,” Steve answered.
“Down, down Ireland!” he shouted back.
We were moved to two more vehicles, and an argument raged for a half-hour over us. We suspected the fight was between the vicious Interior Ministry and other branches of the government. That kind of fight is waged by the logic of a dictatorship: the spoils go to whoever can muster a greater threat.
We were moved to another vehicle but not before a soldier, perhaps from the losing side, drove the barrel of his rifle into the back of Tyler’s head.
‘Protection of the State’
Within a half-hour, we were in a military compound, in the hands of military intelligence. We collapsed on the floor, accepting milk and mango juice. We saw our bags unloaded, though we would never get them back.
A gruff man struck a sympathetic tone. You won’t be beaten or bound again, he told us. You will be kept safe and, although you will be blindfolded if you are moved anywhere else in the compound, no one will mistreat you.
From that moment, no one did.
We were taken to a detention center that looked more like a double-wide trailer. On the shelves were a two-volume German-Arabic dictionary and five of Shakespeare’s plays. (Colonel Qaddafi once famously quipped that Shakespeare, or Sheik Zubeir, was actually an Arab migrant.)
The men were given track suits. Lynsey was brought a shirt that read, “Magic Girl,” emblazoned with two teddy bears. Her new underwear read, “Shake it up.”
At the late hours of night, we were blindfolded to receive visitors.
“You are now in the protection of the state,” a Foreign Ministry official told us.
Official after official made excuses for what happened to us. One said we had to understand the difference between militias loyal to Qaddafi and the actual army. Another asked whether Anthony had seen any rebel unarmed — the presence of guns deployed against the state seeming to justify any crackdown. Officials asked Lynsey whether she had been raped.
The more they talked, the clearer it became: This semblance of a state was not a state.
In the four days that followed, we fought boredom more than anything else. Tyler finished “Julius Caesar.” Lynsey started “Othello.” If it went on much longer, Tyler jokingly suggested we perform the plays. As the hours passed, we replayed each moment of the preceding days in detail, trying to piece together what had happened to Mohammed.
We wondered whether we would be delivered into more sinister hands. After the no-fly zone was imposed and we heard volleys of antiaircraft fire, we thought that a desperate government could make us human shields. Weighing over all of us was guilt for what we had put our families and friends through.
In the end, it was the trappings of diplomacy that delayed our departure.
Foreign Ministry officials, clinging to a prestige they may have never had, insisted that our transfer be formal, between two sovereign states. At one point, they insisted an American or British diplomat had to travel to Tripoli in wartime. In the end, Turkish diplomats served as intermediaries and delivered us to the border.
As we left, we saw the billboards of a crumbling government. “Forty-one years of permanent joy,” read one slogan superimposed over a sunburst. But the words that lingered with us as we left were quoted to Steve by an urbane Foreign Ministry official speaking idiomatic British English.
As we sat in an office, he murmured two lines of Yeats.
“Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.”
Monday, February 21, 2011
Personal Projects!
The key to becoming a consistently better photographer is to shoot shoot shoot. The more you shoot the better you are able to make a vision a reality. When I'm not going crazy at the studio or with my wife and kids, I like to work on self assisgnments. I have recently started working on a different look and experimenting with a different style. I have been wanting to show more expression in peoples faces almost to a humorous side. Here is the start of this project which I expect will evolve with time.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Using Visualization To Drive Creativity
I find this to be an interesting article which fits how I tend to do things.
How I Use Visualization To Drive Creativity
January 17, 2011 @ 8:00 am › Guest Author
This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur turned VC. He sold his second company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster on his blog at Bothsidesofthetable and on Twitter at @msuster.
Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity.
As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity. The one that works best for me is visualization coupled with self talk.
Visualization is so important to help yourself & others conceptualize ideas. It’s why I always work hard to find images for my blog posts & why all of my keynote presentations are visual rather than bullet points with words.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a long post, so I put an executive summary here if you want to get the point without reading all the detail. If you plan to read the post you can skip the summary if you want.
Almost all business success relies on creativity. This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives
Despite the importance of creativity, there seems to be almost no focus on teaching it, encouraging it, training at it & incorporating it into our daily routines. The need for creativity extends well beyond product design.
Many people are visual thinkers. Therefore to drive creativity people need to do visual brainstorming
You need to find what works for you to put yourself in that environment and learn how to do “self talk,” learn how to create visual charts, learn how to test & iterate ideas and the learn how to effectively communicate results.
For me I can only do this by myself. I think team sessions are better for testing ideas than for original thought, but that’s me. Solitude & creativity go hand-in-hand.
I use tools to invoke my creatieve self. One example is driving, which has an actual physiological reason it makes you creative. The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward
One of the books that first made me aware of the “creative brain” was “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. It’s a book about creating art but shows how an artist’s mind gets “into the zone,” how creativity can be invoked, and why looking at what you create in a different way than the rational mind would conceive is an important part of creativity. She literally encourages you to draw things upside down.
Other ways I drive creativity are time pressure, showers & occasionally wine. All are known creativity drivers and are covered in the book mentioned above. For others they swear by music. I personally find music more distracting than helpful.
Adding structure to creativity is not an oxymoron. It’s how you codify your ideas
Like anything, creativity takes practice. There’s no such thing as “not being a creative person.” Some people are more creative than others but it’s within us all. You just have to dedicate yourself to a wanting to tap your creative juices.
I apply visual thinking for nearly everything I do: preparing for important phone calls (I imagine my opening lines, I imagine the responses), writing keynote presentations, deciding whether or not to invest in a company, preparing for board meetings – you name it. These are all creative processes.
Visualization is a well known technique in professional sports where the difference between winning & losing is often psychological more than physical. If it can work for them, it can work for you.
THE DETAILS
What exactly is visualization? – It is exactly as it sounds. The process of visualization is literally imagining or seeing things in your mind. When I need to give a speech and I’m writing a slide for my deck, I think up the story in my mind that I’m going to tell for this slide. I literally imagine myself on stage saying the words. I think about how the audience might react and whether if I were in the audience I would be intrigued.
It’s why before every speech I call the organizer and drill them about who will be in the audience. I want to know how many people, their level of tech sophistication, their age and their interests. I look carefully at who is speaking before me. In order to visualize how an audience will receive my presentation I have to be able to imagine the whole situation.
When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them. If I know I have a topic I’m interested in writing about many times I’ll literally think whole sentences in my mind as a test drive before I ever sit at the computer and type.
Strange, I know. But for many people the most important driver of innovation is this kind of visualization & self talk. Yet it almost sounds too strange or mystical and as a result I seldom hear leaders talk about it. So I thought I would.
Creativity in our business lives – The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on. I hear very little discussion ever about how to be more creative.
It’s ironic because I believe creativity is the most important success criterion for a startup. And if we’re reflective, it’s also one of the most important success criteria for investors, senior executives, tech writers and virtually anybody involved in business leadership. Yet most startups seem to constrain creativity to product design. That’s a shame.
Creativity is what helps us think of our ideas in the first place. It’s what helps us imagine what feature sets would be most appealing. It’s how we package our company story and drive our press coverage. As a VC it’s how I think through which markets will be attractive in the future, which ones I want to be in now and how the technology & business world will likely evolve. Without creativity I’d simply invest in the trends I’m seeing on TechCrunch which I inherently believe means I would be investing in what has already happend rather than imagining what could be.
When I make important phone calls I literally play out the start of the call in my mind’s eye before I ever pick up the phone. I imagine myself saying my opening line and put myself in the shoes of the receiver to think about how they’ll react.
There is not a single important business function I do that doesn’t involve creativity. And whether I’m preparing to attend a board meeting, I’m planning to lead a strategic discussion with an executive team, or whether I’m preparing for a TV interview – I use the same process.
The creative process - Whenever I need to do any task that requires insight I have to be able to visualize – to literally SEE the decision framework. Many people are visual thinkers. I often start with a blank piece of paper & a pen and start doodling. I try to visually deconstruct the problem with boxes, arrows, circles & other shapes. I add words & ideas. I try to figure out the structure of the component parts. I start to build in metaphors for what I’m thinking about. I roll up metaphors into a narrative or theme that has coherence.
I know this sounds abstract so let me give you an example from this week.
I recently invested in a company in the media & entertainment sector (this will be announced in a couple of months) so I’ve been thinking a lot about how the industry works, why the structure has evolved the way it did, why the company I invested in has had so much success and what this all implies for the future. I had to do all of this in order to get comfortable that the company had a scalable & sustainable advantage and to think through the threats I thought they would encounter.
I started to build this into a media & entertainment value chain that broke down the components of the industry into discrete parts. I put my definitions on them because I didn’t want my thinking to be constrained by industry-defined boundaries or definitions. From left to right I wrote in boxes: talent discovery, content development, production, post-production, distribution, & marketing. Underpinning it all I wrote: sales, asset management, analytics & talent management.
I used these boxes to imagine what existing film, tv, radio & print media companies did in each of these areas. Were they vertically integrated? If so, why? Did they dominate one or two areas? How did they come to do so? Why do cable & satellite companies force us to take content “bundles” that cost more than we want and have content we don’t watch. Why? Who else is complicit and equally bound by The Innovator’s Dilemma? Will this hold in the future?
Where do the new entrants like YouTube, Pandora, iTunes, Huffington Post, Boxee, Netflix, Demand Media and other disruptive offerings fit into that equation and how is it changing? How much power does Google have due to search? How does social media on Facebook & Twitter change things?
If the past required us to watch in a linear, time-based TV show that favored a grid-like TV Guide or electronic programming guides (EPGs), how will we find & discover content in the world of over-abundance? Can the market support new entrants like Clicker or will it favor the old guard like Rovi? If this appointment television had a 22-minute structure, is there a reason to expect that time allotment in the future? Why?
I wrote my initial conclusions in a post on The Future of Television & The Digital Living Room. If you read the post you’ll literally see the dissection of the topic in the way I saw it in my head.
But as I contemplate the future world I asked myself this new set of questions and I literally thought about each topic in my head and I scribbled notes onto my page. I moved the boxes around, I changed where the arrows went, I drew bullet points underneath each box. I rewrote the page 7-10 times. Writing it & re-writing it is not a problem – it is part of the creative process for me.
By having thought through the issues I can now begin the process of talking with industry people about this topic and why it works how it works. I can ask for feedback in a focused way rather than a vague way. ”In which situations do you start with talent and built content that matches their talents and in which situation do you write the storyline first?” My framework gives me a deeper understanding of the sector.
Creativity & structure are not mutually exclusive – We associate creativity with the right side of our brain and logic or structure with the left side of our brains. So having structure with creativity sounds like an oxymoron. It is not. In every brainstorming session I have (with myself) I start by scribbling down ideas in a rapid, free form way and then I look for structure. As I already spoke about, when I do it with paper I often draw shapes, words, lines & bullet points and then think out loud in my head with self talk to think about how they’re connected.
I have a process I use for blog posts, too. The ideas themselves almost always come from an idea I had in discussions with others as part of my daily working life. I then mull them over in my head when I’m jogging, when I’m driving or when I’m laying in bed. I visualize the blog title and think about whether it will be impactful. I often start thinking about sentences and constructing them in my head. I think about what the key points are.
From there I add the title into WordPress. I probably have about 30 blog titles tee’d up to write for any day that I sit down. I never really come to WordPress and think, “what should I write about today?” Either it’s a thought I’ve had and have to get out of my head, or something I’m reacting to because I read a post that I want to respond to or – as is usually the case – I look through my titles and think, “which one am I passionate about today?”
And here’s where the formal structure comes in. I almost always break up my post into sections before I write. Just as in this post, I thought about the structure before letting the words flow out of my head and on to the screen. I organize the components of the topic, I write the section headings, I think about them each as individual titles, I think about whether the order flows and whether the overall narrative holds.
In a way, I’ve written the whole thing before a detailed word comes out of my head. Then it’s just a function of writing each section, re-reading to test for flow, attempting to edit a bit and then hit publish.
I then think visually about the post. I imagine people reading it. I wonder whether it will make an impact. If I think I’ve missed the mark I either delay publishing it or I rewrite sections. Or – like today – I decide it’s too long for most readers but I still want to get all my thoughts out so I decide to add an executive summary for those with less time or interest.
But to be clear – it is structure that underpins my creative process. Always. Free form, then aggregation, then organization, then structure, then words, then metaphors, then narrative, then publish. I becomes predictable and repeatable.
The importance of solitude – I don’t believe in group creativity. I understand that some people do. They work well with a facilitator and they learn from hearing other people’s ideas. Not me. I really need a quite space, a blank canvass, a pen or keyboard, an objective, and enough time for ideas to flow. In a group if I have a creative spark I have no time for it to marinate as other people begin speaking.
To be clear – V1 of my ideas are never the best I can do. Once I have my ideas I then like to bring them to a public setting and take them for a test drive. Debate is one of the most important ingredients in innovation. But I like to show up to the debate with my “strawman” ideas rather than thinking about a topic for the first time. It all starts on my own.
Time pressure & creativity - I’ve written about “The Urgency Addiction” before. The premise is that many people focus on stuff that’s urgent & important when we should really focus on what’s not urgent & important. But people like me thrive on urgency. For whatever reason it’s what gets my creative juices going. I think that without a deadline my mind wanders too much on other tasks. Knowing that I’m doing a speech in the morning in front of 200 people has a funny way of focusing my mind the night before if I haven’t finished my deck. I have a high fear of failure that acts as my safety net.
In the urgency post I talked about creating artificial deadlines that get you to dig into the same creative urgency while giving yourself a buffer to refine your ideas. I spoke at the NextGen conference last week to a large audience. It was on a Wednesday and I was traveling to be there. I knew I’d have 7 other meetings the day before so I told myself that I HAD to finish the deck on Sunday night to avoid pulling an all-nighter on Tuesday and getting myself sick. And that did the trick.
I decided the topic – “All the things I effed up at my first company.” It was a conference for mostly college undergraduate students or recent graduates. First time wantrepreneurs. So I thought this would be a good topic. I then took 20 blank Powerpoint pages. I brainstormed the things I had messed up and wrote a title for each: raised too much money, wasn’t passionate about the industry, hired too senior of people, built too many products & over spec’d them, internationalized too early, etc.
Next, I imagined a story I would tell for each topic and what image would represent that story. I spent time on istockphoto and Google Images getting the images just right. And in 2 hours I was done. I woke up early the day of the presentation and I practiced the stories in my head. I did self talk. I visualized whether the story would be well received. I tweaked a couple of titles and changed 2 pictures that didn’t sit right with me. And then done. If you’re interested the deck is here.
Things I Effed Up at my First Company
Invoking the creative brain – Have you ever noticed that you have more creative thoughts when you’re on a long drive? For years I felt this and never understood why until I read “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” a book by Betty Edwards that talks about the creative process in art. When you drive you’re forced to deal with 3D visual stimulation coming at you in a continual stream. Your brain has to process this information and the process of dealing with all of this visual stimulus forces you into “right brain thinking” and when you’re in that zone you’re tapping into your creative potential.
Apparently what artists do when they sit at their canvass or when they record songs is get into this right-brain creative zone. Artists often have more right-brain thinkings skills and so it comes more naturally. For us left-brain thinkers we need to find ways to get into the zone. When I’m in a creative zone I literally feel like an artist at work.
When I start scribbling on paper and am able to “see” solutions to problems or outline industry structures I feel “in the zone” and what I’ve learned over the years is that I need to have the right environment and stimuli. That’s why I talk about the importance of being alone, my need for silence, having blank paper for scribbling notes furiously, applying time pressure and forcing myself to do unconstrained writing, which can be organized into patterns when I have a chance to read it later.
In addition to driving Ms. Edwards talks about the other natural activity that invokes creativity – taking a shower. I’m sure you’ve noticed you’ve had creative thoughts in the shower before. Be open to it. I also get into the zone when I’m running and occasionally after a glass of wine.
One of the most interesting more recent things I’ve noticed lately is that Guitar Hero has the same impact on me as driving. I’m forced to look at colors dropping rapidly on my TV and I have to hit the keys on my plastic guitar in rapid sequence. There’s no way to deal with the falling colors logically so you literally start to “feel” the notes dropping and your fingers start to respond to your visual stimulus without rational thought. This is the best way I can describe “the zone” to anyone who doesn’t regularly experience it.
Reworking human interactions back into your creative design – I’ve talked a lot about my need to be creative on my own but as we all know it’s the power of human interactions that improves our thinking. For me it’s just a question of when I bring other people into my process. My first ideas never survive contact with others. I’ll walk my model around several smart & informed people on any topic. I’ll practice my arguments and hear how they respond.
Sometimes it is by presenting to my colleagues and debating. Sometimes it is by speaking at a conference in the way that comedians test drive their material at small venues before taking their shows on the road. They use audience reactions to refine their craft. I also feed off of the energy of others. My ideas morph the way your products do when you test them with customers and watch how they use them.
Being creative in an ADD world - Sitting at your computer can often detract from creativity, which is why I often do it with paper & pen and in a room with no computer. The problem I have on the computer is that there are always distractions to pull me away from my brainstorming. I look up at the tabs in Chrome and see that there are two new @ messages to me in Twitter. Somebody IM’s me in Gmail. I feel like looking at the headlines on NYTimes. I hear a bell ring in Outlook telling me, “you’ve got mail!”
I handle this in three ways. Really important innovative thinking I do with pen & paper. If I need to innovate on my computer I try to turn off all my external stimuli (e.g. close email) so I can stay focused. Or if I’m struggling to get into the flow I take an ADD distraction break over on email or Twitter and come back to my brainstorming session 20 minutes later.
Summary / Putting it Into Action:
Allocate enough time in your weekly routine for “being creative”
Find ways to invoke your creativity (driving, shower, wine, music) and learn what your best environment is (quite vs. music, alone vs. group)
Develop & refine a process. It might be similar to mine: write, organize, shape, move objects, add bullet points, develop stories, etc. Or your process might be different. But you need a process for innovation. It doesn’t just happen.
Test your ideas with others, seek feedback, refine.
Have fun. That’s what the creative process is supposed to be.
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Mark Suster
Website: grpvc.com
Birthplace: Philadelphia
Companies: GRP Partners, Dealmaker Media, GumGum, RingRevenue, Ad.ly, Qualys, Ad.ly, Bedrock, Burstly, Launchpad LA, App7, and more
Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) following its acquisition of Koral,where Mark was… Learn More
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How I Use Visualization To Drive Creativity
January 17, 2011 @ 8:00 am › Guest Author
This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur turned VC. He sold his second company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster on his blog at Bothsidesofthetable and on Twitter at @msuster.
Creativity. I’ve always believed it’s been one of the most important attributes of business success yet something very few business leaders talk about. So I thought I’d write a post about how I drive my personal creativity.
As a practitioner of creativity rather than as an instructor of it I’m certain that there are many ways to get the creative juices flowing and how to release more creativity. The one that works best for me is visualization coupled with self talk.
Visualization is so important to help yourself & others conceptualize ideas. It’s why I always work hard to find images for my blog posts & why all of my keynote presentations are visual rather than bullet points with words.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a long post, so I put an executive summary here if you want to get the point without reading all the detail. If you plan to read the post you can skip the summary if you want.
Almost all business success relies on creativity. This applies equally to VCs, startups & big company executives
Despite the importance of creativity, there seems to be almost no focus on teaching it, encouraging it, training at it & incorporating it into our daily routines. The need for creativity extends well beyond product design.
Many people are visual thinkers. Therefore to drive creativity people need to do visual brainstorming
You need to find what works for you to put yourself in that environment and learn how to do “self talk,” learn how to create visual charts, learn how to test & iterate ideas and the learn how to effectively communicate results.
For me I can only do this by myself. I think team sessions are better for testing ideas than for original thought, but that’s me. Solitude & creativity go hand-in-hand.
I use tools to invoke my creatieve self. One example is driving, which has an actual physiological reason it makes you creative. The key is channeling what you learn when you drive onto paper for retention purposes so you have to write it down soon afterward
One of the books that first made me aware of the “creative brain” was “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. It’s a book about creating art but shows how an artist’s mind gets “into the zone,” how creativity can be invoked, and why looking at what you create in a different way than the rational mind would conceive is an important part of creativity. She literally encourages you to draw things upside down.
Other ways I drive creativity are time pressure, showers & occasionally wine. All are known creativity drivers and are covered in the book mentioned above. For others they swear by music. I personally find music more distracting than helpful.
Adding structure to creativity is not an oxymoron. It’s how you codify your ideas
Like anything, creativity takes practice. There’s no such thing as “not being a creative person.” Some people are more creative than others but it’s within us all. You just have to dedicate yourself to a wanting to tap your creative juices.
I apply visual thinking for nearly everything I do: preparing for important phone calls (I imagine my opening lines, I imagine the responses), writing keynote presentations, deciding whether or not to invest in a company, preparing for board meetings – you name it. These are all creative processes.
Visualization is a well known technique in professional sports where the difference between winning & losing is often psychological more than physical. If it can work for them, it can work for you.
THE DETAILS
What exactly is visualization? – It is exactly as it sounds. The process of visualization is literally imagining or seeing things in your mind. When I need to give a speech and I’m writing a slide for my deck, I think up the story in my mind that I’m going to tell for this slide. I literally imagine myself on stage saying the words. I think about how the audience might react and whether if I were in the audience I would be intrigued.
It’s why before every speech I call the organizer and drill them about who will be in the audience. I want to know how many people, their level of tech sophistication, their age and their interests. I look carefully at who is speaking before me. In order to visualize how an audience will receive my presentation I have to be able to imagine the whole situation.
When I write a blog post I often see the words before I write them. If I know I have a topic I’m interested in writing about many times I’ll literally think whole sentences in my mind as a test drive before I ever sit at the computer and type.
Strange, I know. But for many people the most important driver of innovation is this kind of visualization & self talk. Yet it almost sounds too strange or mystical and as a result I seldom hear leaders talk about it. So I thought I would.
Creativity in our business lives – The average tech startup these days spends time talking with colleagues & investors about a multitude of things: customer acquisition, viral adoption, raising capital, hiring / firing employees, product features, technology trends, marketing / branding, and on and on. I hear very little discussion ever about how to be more creative.
It’s ironic because I believe creativity is the most important success criterion for a startup. And if we’re reflective, it’s also one of the most important success criteria for investors, senior executives, tech writers and virtually anybody involved in business leadership. Yet most startups seem to constrain creativity to product design. That’s a shame.
Creativity is what helps us think of our ideas in the first place. It’s what helps us imagine what feature sets would be most appealing. It’s how we package our company story and drive our press coverage. As a VC it’s how I think through which markets will be attractive in the future, which ones I want to be in now and how the technology & business world will likely evolve. Without creativity I’d simply invest in the trends I’m seeing on TechCrunch which I inherently believe means I would be investing in what has already happend rather than imagining what could be.
When I make important phone calls I literally play out the start of the call in my mind’s eye before I ever pick up the phone. I imagine myself saying my opening line and put myself in the shoes of the receiver to think about how they’ll react.
There is not a single important business function I do that doesn’t involve creativity. And whether I’m preparing to attend a board meeting, I’m planning to lead a strategic discussion with an executive team, or whether I’m preparing for a TV interview – I use the same process.
The creative process - Whenever I need to do any task that requires insight I have to be able to visualize – to literally SEE the decision framework. Many people are visual thinkers. I often start with a blank piece of paper & a pen and start doodling. I try to visually deconstruct the problem with boxes, arrows, circles & other shapes. I add words & ideas. I try to figure out the structure of the component parts. I start to build in metaphors for what I’m thinking about. I roll up metaphors into a narrative or theme that has coherence.
I know this sounds abstract so let me give you an example from this week.
I recently invested in a company in the media & entertainment sector (this will be announced in a couple of months) so I’ve been thinking a lot about how the industry works, why the structure has evolved the way it did, why the company I invested in has had so much success and what this all implies for the future. I had to do all of this in order to get comfortable that the company had a scalable & sustainable advantage and to think through the threats I thought they would encounter.
I started to build this into a media & entertainment value chain that broke down the components of the industry into discrete parts. I put my definitions on them because I didn’t want my thinking to be constrained by industry-defined boundaries or definitions. From left to right I wrote in boxes: talent discovery, content development, production, post-production, distribution, & marketing. Underpinning it all I wrote: sales, asset management, analytics & talent management.
I used these boxes to imagine what existing film, tv, radio & print media companies did in each of these areas. Were they vertically integrated? If so, why? Did they dominate one or two areas? How did they come to do so? Why do cable & satellite companies force us to take content “bundles” that cost more than we want and have content we don’t watch. Why? Who else is complicit and equally bound by The Innovator’s Dilemma? Will this hold in the future?
Where do the new entrants like YouTube, Pandora, iTunes, Huffington Post, Boxee, Netflix, Demand Media and other disruptive offerings fit into that equation and how is it changing? How much power does Google have due to search? How does social media on Facebook & Twitter change things?
If the past required us to watch in a linear, time-based TV show that favored a grid-like TV Guide or electronic programming guides (EPGs), how will we find & discover content in the world of over-abundance? Can the market support new entrants like Clicker or will it favor the old guard like Rovi? If this appointment television had a 22-minute structure, is there a reason to expect that time allotment in the future? Why?
I wrote my initial conclusions in a post on The Future of Television & The Digital Living Room. If you read the post you’ll literally see the dissection of the topic in the way I saw it in my head.
But as I contemplate the future world I asked myself this new set of questions and I literally thought about each topic in my head and I scribbled notes onto my page. I moved the boxes around, I changed where the arrows went, I drew bullet points underneath each box. I rewrote the page 7-10 times. Writing it & re-writing it is not a problem – it is part of the creative process for me.
By having thought through the issues I can now begin the process of talking with industry people about this topic and why it works how it works. I can ask for feedback in a focused way rather than a vague way. ”In which situations do you start with talent and built content that matches their talents and in which situation do you write the storyline first?” My framework gives me a deeper understanding of the sector.
Creativity & structure are not mutually exclusive – We associate creativity with the right side of our brain and logic or structure with the left side of our brains. So having structure with creativity sounds like an oxymoron. It is not. In every brainstorming session I have (with myself) I start by scribbling down ideas in a rapid, free form way and then I look for structure. As I already spoke about, when I do it with paper I often draw shapes, words, lines & bullet points and then think out loud in my head with self talk to think about how they’re connected.
I have a process I use for blog posts, too. The ideas themselves almost always come from an idea I had in discussions with others as part of my daily working life. I then mull them over in my head when I’m jogging, when I’m driving or when I’m laying in bed. I visualize the blog title and think about whether it will be impactful. I often start thinking about sentences and constructing them in my head. I think about what the key points are.
From there I add the title into WordPress. I probably have about 30 blog titles tee’d up to write for any day that I sit down. I never really come to WordPress and think, “what should I write about today?” Either it’s a thought I’ve had and have to get out of my head, or something I’m reacting to because I read a post that I want to respond to or – as is usually the case – I look through my titles and think, “which one am I passionate about today?”
And here’s where the formal structure comes in. I almost always break up my post into sections before I write. Just as in this post, I thought about the structure before letting the words flow out of my head and on to the screen. I organize the components of the topic, I write the section headings, I think about them each as individual titles, I think about whether the order flows and whether the overall narrative holds.
In a way, I’ve written the whole thing before a detailed word comes out of my head. Then it’s just a function of writing each section, re-reading to test for flow, attempting to edit a bit and then hit publish.
I then think visually about the post. I imagine people reading it. I wonder whether it will make an impact. If I think I’ve missed the mark I either delay publishing it or I rewrite sections. Or – like today – I decide it’s too long for most readers but I still want to get all my thoughts out so I decide to add an executive summary for those with less time or interest.
But to be clear – it is structure that underpins my creative process. Always. Free form, then aggregation, then organization, then structure, then words, then metaphors, then narrative, then publish. I becomes predictable and repeatable.
The importance of solitude – I don’t believe in group creativity. I understand that some people do. They work well with a facilitator and they learn from hearing other people’s ideas. Not me. I really need a quite space, a blank canvass, a pen or keyboard, an objective, and enough time for ideas to flow. In a group if I have a creative spark I have no time for it to marinate as other people begin speaking.
To be clear – V1 of my ideas are never the best I can do. Once I have my ideas I then like to bring them to a public setting and take them for a test drive. Debate is one of the most important ingredients in innovation. But I like to show up to the debate with my “strawman” ideas rather than thinking about a topic for the first time. It all starts on my own.
Time pressure & creativity - I’ve written about “The Urgency Addiction” before. The premise is that many people focus on stuff that’s urgent & important when we should really focus on what’s not urgent & important. But people like me thrive on urgency. For whatever reason it’s what gets my creative juices going. I think that without a deadline my mind wanders too much on other tasks. Knowing that I’m doing a speech in the morning in front of 200 people has a funny way of focusing my mind the night before if I haven’t finished my deck. I have a high fear of failure that acts as my safety net.
In the urgency post I talked about creating artificial deadlines that get you to dig into the same creative urgency while giving yourself a buffer to refine your ideas. I spoke at the NextGen conference last week to a large audience. It was on a Wednesday and I was traveling to be there. I knew I’d have 7 other meetings the day before so I told myself that I HAD to finish the deck on Sunday night to avoid pulling an all-nighter on Tuesday and getting myself sick. And that did the trick.
I decided the topic – “All the things I effed up at my first company.” It was a conference for mostly college undergraduate students or recent graduates. First time wantrepreneurs. So I thought this would be a good topic. I then took 20 blank Powerpoint pages. I brainstormed the things I had messed up and wrote a title for each: raised too much money, wasn’t passionate about the industry, hired too senior of people, built too many products & over spec’d them, internationalized too early, etc.
Next, I imagined a story I would tell for each topic and what image would represent that story. I spent time on istockphoto and Google Images getting the images just right. And in 2 hours I was done. I woke up early the day of the presentation and I practiced the stories in my head. I did self talk. I visualized whether the story would be well received. I tweaked a couple of titles and changed 2 pictures that didn’t sit right with me. And then done. If you’re interested the deck is here.
Things I Effed Up at my First Company
Invoking the creative brain – Have you ever noticed that you have more creative thoughts when you’re on a long drive? For years I felt this and never understood why until I read “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” a book by Betty Edwards that talks about the creative process in art. When you drive you’re forced to deal with 3D visual stimulation coming at you in a continual stream. Your brain has to process this information and the process of dealing with all of this visual stimulus forces you into “right brain thinking” and when you’re in that zone you’re tapping into your creative potential.
Apparently what artists do when they sit at their canvass or when they record songs is get into this right-brain creative zone. Artists often have more right-brain thinkings skills and so it comes more naturally. For us left-brain thinkers we need to find ways to get into the zone. When I’m in a creative zone I literally feel like an artist at work.
When I start scribbling on paper and am able to “see” solutions to problems or outline industry structures I feel “in the zone” and what I’ve learned over the years is that I need to have the right environment and stimuli. That’s why I talk about the importance of being alone, my need for silence, having blank paper for scribbling notes furiously, applying time pressure and forcing myself to do unconstrained writing, which can be organized into patterns when I have a chance to read it later.
In addition to driving Ms. Edwards talks about the other natural activity that invokes creativity – taking a shower. I’m sure you’ve noticed you’ve had creative thoughts in the shower before. Be open to it. I also get into the zone when I’m running and occasionally after a glass of wine.
One of the most interesting more recent things I’ve noticed lately is that Guitar Hero has the same impact on me as driving. I’m forced to look at colors dropping rapidly on my TV and I have to hit the keys on my plastic guitar in rapid sequence. There’s no way to deal with the falling colors logically so you literally start to “feel” the notes dropping and your fingers start to respond to your visual stimulus without rational thought. This is the best way I can describe “the zone” to anyone who doesn’t regularly experience it.
Reworking human interactions back into your creative design – I’ve talked a lot about my need to be creative on my own but as we all know it’s the power of human interactions that improves our thinking. For me it’s just a question of when I bring other people into my process. My first ideas never survive contact with others. I’ll walk my model around several smart & informed people on any topic. I’ll practice my arguments and hear how they respond.
Sometimes it is by presenting to my colleagues and debating. Sometimes it is by speaking at a conference in the way that comedians test drive their material at small venues before taking their shows on the road. They use audience reactions to refine their craft. I also feed off of the energy of others. My ideas morph the way your products do when you test them with customers and watch how they use them.
Being creative in an ADD world - Sitting at your computer can often detract from creativity, which is why I often do it with paper & pen and in a room with no computer. The problem I have on the computer is that there are always distractions to pull me away from my brainstorming. I look up at the tabs in Chrome and see that there are two new @ messages to me in Twitter. Somebody IM’s me in Gmail. I feel like looking at the headlines on NYTimes. I hear a bell ring in Outlook telling me, “you’ve got mail!”
I handle this in three ways. Really important innovative thinking I do with pen & paper. If I need to innovate on my computer I try to turn off all my external stimuli (e.g. close email) so I can stay focused. Or if I’m struggling to get into the flow I take an ADD distraction break over on email or Twitter and come back to my brainstorming session 20 minutes later.
Summary / Putting it Into Action:
Allocate enough time in your weekly routine for “being creative”
Find ways to invoke your creativity (driving, shower, wine, music) and learn what your best environment is (quite vs. music, alone vs. group)
Develop & refine a process. It might be similar to mine: write, organize, shape, move objects, add bullet points, develop stories, etc. Or your process might be different. But you need a process for innovation. It doesn’t just happen.
Test your ideas with others, seek feedback, refine.
Have fun. That’s what the creative process is supposed to be.
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Mark Suster
Website: grpvc.com
Birthplace: Philadelphia
Companies: GRP Partners, Dealmaker Media, GumGum, RingRevenue, Ad.ly, Qualys, Ad.ly, Bedrock, Burstly, Launchpad LA, App7, and more
Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) following its acquisition of Koral,where Mark was… Learn More
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Friday, January 14, 2011
Sierra Studio's New Website
Sierra Studio's new website is finally done! It is temporarily living at http://www.sierrab2b.com and will soon replace the original sierrastudio.com site. For those who have not had the chance to work with me, Sierra Studio is where I do most of my work and have been the head photographer there for 14 years. While shooting is what I do primarily, I have developed other skills over the years. Building Sierra's new website as well as Sierra's food website ( http://www.sierrafood.com ) is just one of the skills that I have developed. Please feel free to browse through the sites and give me a call to schedule a shoot.
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