An Excerpt from The Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas
An excerpt from The Creative Shift by Andrew Robertson, published by Basic Venture and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Innovation & Creativity category.
How can organizations prioritize innovation and execute new ideas, while also continuing to do what they do best? We want Mercedes to be careful, methodical, and risk-averse when testing their vehicles. But we also want them to be able to remove their blinders when envisioning next-generation car technology. How can a company strike a balance between operation and exploration?
Andrew Robertson, the CEO of BBDO, an advertising firm considered to be the gold standard of creativity, knows that it is critical to conduct business as usual while pursuing business unusual. Most companies focus on the former, while giving lip service to the latter. In The Creative Shift, Robertson offers the tools to help individuals, teams, and companies switch into creative mode, seamlessly and effectively, including:
- Developing a common language to convey when a creative shift is needed;
- Generating an array of possibilities and applying them onto your problem until something clicks;
- Managing unhelpful personality traits;
- Properly incentivizing and protecting creative contributions;
- Getting out into the world to “forage” for ideas.
This book is for every manager, leader, and entrepreneur who needs to rally a team, an organization, or themselves to think big and keep the flame of invention burning brightly while under suffocating pressure—which happens to be when you need creative problem-solving the most.
The Creative Shift has been longlisted in the Innovation & Creativity category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is from the book's opening chapter, "Why the Creative Shift Works."
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Creativity is good.
Organizations need creative people.
Leaders must nurture new ideas.
Who would disagree with these statements?
Almost no one.
Yet many leaders who say they know the value of creativity act as if it’s the last thing they want factored into their day-to-day operations.
Few are happy to stub their toe on a new idea. Even at BBDO, where creativity is our bread and butter, it can be hard. How do you know when to begin, and, more importantly, when to stop? When someone suggests an idea with the potential to stall forward motion, people visibly tighten up. Can’t we just get on with this, even if the current approach isn’t perfect?
Just because people like an idea doesn’t mean they’re instantly going to fall in love with it or act on it. That’s because they can often see things in it that are frightening. Or complicated and expensive. And that will cloud their view of it.
These people have failed to fully grasp what can seem like a paradox: Creativity is good, except when it isn’t. A lot of the time when you’re running a business, the very kinds of ideas and processes that make you successful are going to impede your ability to be creative. The key to maximizing creativity is to understand that nurturing it requires the conscious development and application of a whole different set of rules.
My definition of creativity as it applies to advertising is that it is the magical ability to capture and hold the attention of an audience while giving them a demonstration, some information, or an experience that changes the way they think, the way they feel, and the way they behave.
I define creativity more broadly as finding completely new solutions to either new or old challenges. And the word “completely” matters.
MORE CREATIVITY, BETTER OUTCOMES
Everyone agrees that organizational creativity is important, but does it actually lead to better business results? According to a study by the consulting firm McKinsey, it definitely does.
Much better.
McKinsey used the number and type of Cannes Lions Awards (given to brands and companies for advertising creativity) as a proxy for the creativity of the companies themselves.1 From there McKinsey came up with something called an Award Creativity Score.
McKinsey found that the brands whose ads received the most awards during a five-year period showed significantly better financial performance—including revenue growth and return to shareholders—than those that received fewer awards. Companies with lower scores, on the other hand, “were far less likely to post above-average financial results.”
McKinsey identified several key practices that the most creative leaders embrace:
They weave creativity into the fabric of the company. The senior executives at the most creative companies don’t just set creativity as a goal for the company (i.e., everyone else), but see themselves as personally responsible for nurturing it. And they model their behavior accordingly. They make creativity and innovation a topic of conversation in board meetings more than their peers do. And they prioritize and commit the necessary investment to those things.
They are fanatically devoted to customers. Most companies claim to be focused on their customers. Who wouldn’t? The key word here is “fanatically.” The most creative companies go way beyond traditional research methodologies, such as focus groups and surveys, and use advanced analytics, along with ethnographic and behavioral analysis, to gain a comprehensive and detailed understanding of their customers. Of particular importance, they regularly observe customers in their own world as a way to form a clearer picture of the problems they face and thus to identify how the company can help them.
They are much faster at executing ideas—and measuring the results—than their less creative counterparts. Speed is a competitive advantage. But it can’t be an excuse for a lack of rigor and accountability. The best companies define specific deliverables, not vague goals, and make clear who is responsible for what, and when.
I have seen inside some of the most operationally excellent and financially driven companies in the world, including AT&T, FedEx, General Electric, and Visa. I believe that these companies are able to achieve disproportionate success precisely because of the way they are able to complement these capabilities with the Creative Shift.
If creativity demonstrably leads to better results, then why do so many leaders shy away from it? Because it has a cost. Every new idea represents a risk. If time and money weren’t obstacles, businesses would try every possibility until one prevailed. The constraints on creative exploration and experimentation are real.
Doing things the way you’ve always done them, by contrast, seems safe and predictable—especially when it’s been working. But that, too, comes with a cost. It can leave you flat-footed when a nimbler competitor enters the market with a new technology or just a new way of doing the same things you’ve already been doing. It can cause a great idea to stay hidden in a folder, only to appear fully realized in some other company’s product or service. It can even cause what you do to slowly become obsolete.
And yet, the more the ground shifts beneath people’s feet, the more they crave certainty. It’s a very human response to instability.
Rapid changes in business and society at large have become overwhelming—whatever the industry. External business threats, technological disruption, supply chain issues, media fragmentation, political instability—these are running up against a rising tide of disaffection and burnout among employees. Any of these challenges alone would be enough to keep an executive awake at night. But the combination of internal and external chaos makes for a leadership and management powder keg.
Entrepreneurs, who often need creativity the most, aren’t immune to instability, uncertainty, or rapid change either. Living in volatile and unpredictable times inhibits decision-making. Try figuring out how to pivot your new app when that expected round of venture capital funding dries up. If you don’t keep your head screwed on tight, you’ll run out of ideas before you can taxi to the runway, let alone reach the end of it. When making payroll every month remains an open question, you can’t help but push away the ideas you need to reach the next level.
Some psychologists, along with business experts and government officials (including—famously—former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), have said that to meet new challenges, we must prepare to face “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and, most perplexing of all, “unknown unknowns.”2
Known knowns are the easiest kinds of problems to handle, because you clearly understand the problem and what it will take to solve it. With known unknowns, your knowledge of the problem may be mistaken, or only partial and imperfect, but at least you know the kind of risk you’re taking when you tackle it. But the unknown unknowns are so out of left field that you didn’t even know they were coming (a worldwide pandemic would be an example).
You’re going to need creativity for new opportunities and growth. But you’re also going to need it to deal with the unknown unknowns when they happen—and they will.
All those known knowns, known unknowns, and especially unknown unknowns breed anxiety. And that anxiety is highly transmissible. Part of my job as a leader is to be an insulator, not a lightning rod. I need to shield my people from as much outside anxiety as I can, so they can do what they need to do and focus on that—because transmitting and sharing all the pressure of multiple unknowns will stifle their ability to be creative.
You only beat the competition to the punch by exploring possibilities more efficiently than they can. This means strategically directing your creative output.
Excerpted from Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organization by Making Space for New Ideas by Andrew Robertson, published by Basic Venture. Copyright © 2025 by Andrew Robertson. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Andrew Robertson is Chairman of BBDO Worldwide. He served as President and CEO for two decades, during which BBDO was recognized as the world’s most effective network five times, and as Network of the decade at Cannes Lions. Inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 2022, he has taught guest classes at NYU, UNC, and Wake Forest University, appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg News, and The Today Show, and is a Chairman Emeritus of The Advertising Council.
