Hubris

You have been in business for forever or you adhere to the teachings of those in your industry who have.  You have worked on many many great projects over the years. Lately though, well pretty much for the last five years, life has become increasingly more difficult. It used to be that clients gave you the benefit of the doubt when it came to your vision for the project and the budget.  Relationships with the media were important and respectful on both sides.  You felt as if you were part of a rather insulated and high-minded profession. There was a distinct difference between the true professionals and the newbies or Debbie-dabblers and everyone knew it.  Now, none of this matters and the “professionalism” of yesterday has been replaced with client distrust and rampant competition on all fronts.

The response for these old guard creative business owners and all of their acolytes has been to double down. They talk about setting standards, licenses; try to protect at all costs “to the trade” and dismiss those who refuse to accept the way of yesteryear as interlopers — whether that is the media, tech startups or even competitors.

So we find ourselves at a cross-roads in so many creative businesses: choose to embrace what is coming as opportunity or die a painful death to irrelevance.

First, the painful death to irrelevance. Death will not come as you believe with a meteor shot that will  wipe you away.  Instead, it will be an erosion of your foundation until you are unable to stand. You will be fighting increasingly for irrelevant ideas and standards.  The easiest example is the purchasing power of a professional interior designer — you get paid 35% on your purchases but rely on the idea that you get a discount that consumers simply cannot get on their own.  

While there will always be some truth to this notion, the spread narrows every day.  The reason is audience.  If there are 100 designers in the world that each purchase a $100,000 each year, it is worth it to a business to offer a significant discount presuming reaching the end user of such high-end, custom products is both costly and risky.  Better to offer the discount to designers rather than spend an enormous amount on marketing to a consumer that is very hard to find.  You see where I am going.  When it becomes ever easier to identify the end consumer who is ready to purchase, investment shifts. Of course, this does not mean that the designer is not valuable, just not nearly as valuable as she once was.  If you are designer hinging your entire value on your designer discount, good luck with that. What then the 35% commission?

Managing multiple vendors and inflow into a single place so that it can be installed/produced at once is a challenge and quality control matters.  How about we talk about what this means to consumers and the value it offers?  But wait, you conflated the commission with your cost of design. So exactly how much is for design, how much for management? Oh, it is all in the percentage means your client gets to decide, not you.  Slip sliding away into oblivion you go.

Or.  The opportunity is to see the value in redefining culture, to embrace what has created distrust today and actively work to change your industry so that this very thing that is currently creating distrust becomes the measure of trust. Clients need to fall in love with process AND to pay for the value of design alone.

The day when your ability to capture the value of creativity in places other than the creative endeavor itself is almost over. The hubris all of those wedded to the old guard will be not be in evaporating businesses but rather in client experiences that will become ever insufferable.  They will forever be blaming technology and how it has blown up the professionalism that never was.

In the midst of their hubris will be those who free themselves of the burden of provincialism and  the opportunities that will abound once culture is changed so that the value of the idea and the creativity, experience and wisdom behind it will itself be the driver.  In that realm, technologies such as 3D Printing, Virtual Reality, even Artificial Intelligence will come to represent brave new frontiers instead of being the enemy of all things traditional.  

Culture does not change overnight though.  It takes committed artists to embrace that the age of imperfect information pales to the future of ever-increasing information. And to do something about it, namely to change the story of what matters.  HT to Bill Baker — now is the time more than ever to acknowledge that the answer is not in a better solution to the same problem but an understanding that we need new problems to solve.  Getting the world to care about the new problem is the challenge and then getting it to pay for the solution is even more difficult. Drip by drip though it can be done by those who refuse to be anything other than radically, irrationally authentic.  With no note of hyperbole at all, your soul as an artist and your ability to wholly practice your craft depends on it. The future is here for us to shape if we as creative professionals so choose.  I, for one, hope we do.