For close to two decades, I have opened programs for creative business leaders with a book most of them have never read and many have never heard of. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, originally published in 1983 with the wonderfully odd subtitle, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (which alone tends to silence a workshop room), argues that works of art today inhabit both market and “gift” economies at once (Hyde, 1983/2007). Executives tend to bristle at the claim. One film producer told me it sounded like a poet’s alibi for a missing budget, and an agency CFO once asked which economy pays for the servers.
Within an hour, the room usually turns, because people begin naming what no invoice ever captures, such as the mentor who spent an afternoon on a junior’s portfolio, the half-formed idea handed over in a corridor and never claimed, or the introduction made without expectation of return. They come to realize Hyde supplies anthropological language for something these leaders already know, and his language casts light on what they’ve consistently seen in the past but not registered. If management prices and allocates, leadership also recognizes what carries no price and protects the conditions under which teams remain vital and keep producing such value.
Across five major works, the longtime Kenyon College scholar, essayist, and cultural critic describes an economy of creative renewal in which value circulates before anybody captures it. Today, generative AI is straining that economy and exposing a question beneath the familiar debate over whether machines can be genuinely creative. If production becomes abundant and cheap, he suggests, what becomes scarce? Read forward into the present, Hyde’s work suggests that the scarce resource is the human and institutional capacity to govern circulation, receptivity, consequence, reciprocity, and forgetting, so that novelty can still become the vital meaning individuals and cultures value.
A second pattern runs through his oeuvre, and it took me years of teaching to name it: Hyde never resolves the powerful oppositions he sets up. Market and gift, order and mischief, enclosure and commons, memory and oblivion stay alive in his pages, and he treats the ongoing tensions as productive conditions that no solution should dissolve. Management scholarship has a canonical version of a related problem in Stanford social scientist James March’s concept of ambidexterity, which speaks to how organizations must continually allocate the resources required to explore new possibilities and exploit old certainties, an ongoing process of coordination on which survival and prosperity depend (March, 1991). A large literature has since examined how firms combine the two through continuous learning, structural separation, contextual design, or the integrating work of senior teams (Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004; Raisch & Birkinshaw, 2008; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996).
Organizational ambidexterity coordinates competing demands along axes legible enough that structures, roles, or contexts can be designed around them. Contextual ambidexterity complicates that picture, since varying organizational contexts can support alignment and adaptability at once. Approaches like both/and thinking and paradox theory come closer to Hyde’s logic by treating contradictory demands as persistent, interdependent, and dynamically managed (Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004; Smith & Lewis, 2011). But Hyde carries the insight even more fully into territory that ambidexterity scholars have only entered partly, and which I name, creative ambidexterity.
Creative ambidexterity makes a narrower and deeper claim, grounded in the collisions that I have argued elsewhere drive a third loop of creative leadership learning. These collisions are moments when incompatible systems or frameworks confront one another so directly that leaders must question the frames through which the problem itself is perceived and understood (Slocum, 2025b). My claim is built on the work of organizational learning pioneer Chris Argyris, who explained how double-loop learning taught leaders to question the assumptions beneath their actions (Argyris, 2005). The third loop asks them to examine the frameworks that make some assumptions visible and others hard even to formulate.
In AI-mediated creative work, priorities like authorship, openness, originality, dissent, and organizational memory can change meanings during the very act of managing them, requiring leaders to re-set the poles of exploration and exploitation even as leaders are working to coordinate them. Three signs distinguish this condition from an ordinary trade-off: the poles themselves are unstable, more than one governing logic remains legitimate, and adaptation alters the leader’s or organization’s understanding of what the tension means. Consider a U.S. businessperson forming a partnership with a Chinese counterpart that aims to serve both markets. The collisions between systems are both ongoing and shifting.
Creative ambidexterity names a mode of leading and learning when the boundaries move because evolving frameworks collide in ways that are not immediately resolvable. My contention here is that each of Hyde’s works exposes a version of that condition, and the sections that follow discuss them in the order of their publication.
The Gift, 1983: Circulation Before Capture
A gift must keep traveling, because hoarding kills it in the hands of whoever holds on. Where the transactions governing commodity exchange leave the parties even and unconnected, gift exchange, for Hyde, binds the people involved in a relationship that no price clearly settles (1983/2007). Whereas no one owes anyone anything after buying a hacksaw blade at the hardware store, accepting the saw as a gift enters the recipient into a relationship whose terms no one can concisely capture.
Creative organizations run on this asymmetry more than their formal architecture admits. While a studio may look like a market, with its contracts, rate cards, utilization targets, and intellectual-property clauses, its productive core depends on a persistent gift logic that expresses itself in colleagues teaching one another, making introductions, sharing references, and passing along incomplete thoughts without settling every account. Leaders who mistake the market for the whole system can optimize the measurable layer of relations with clients, partners, and customers and quietly starve the relational layer that generates value. If one considers quarterly development cycles and earnings calls,
Hyde’s description of a labor of gratitude, the period in which a recipient absorbs what was received before passing anything along, offers a helpful illustration of this contrast.
Generative AI performs the outward form of the gift while offering none of its social substance. Asked for help at two o’clock in the morning, an AI model answers tirelessly at negligible marginal cost with something that can confidently resemble generosity. Because the model and its outputs cannot be changed by gratitude in the interpersonal sense Hyde lays out, no obligation passes between giver and receiver. The resulting question for organizations becomes what happens when frictionless service, indeed exchange, replaces the relationships through which craft, standards, and responsibility once traveled and grew.
That concern now sends a potentially telling labor-market signal, even if it falls short of proof. ADP payroll data covering millions of U.S. workers through June 2026 show employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations about 19% below where it would be had it tracked less-exposed peers, while experienced workers show no comparable gap (Brynjolfsson et al., 2026). Some critics – whose affiliation with Google may represent a conflict of interest – respond that a narrow age band reacts mechanically to hiring slowdowns and that hiring in exposed occupations began falling in 2022. That was before generative AI spread widely, when changes were driven in part by the pandemic and amid rising financing costs and economic uncertainty (Iscenko & Curto Millet, 2026).
Evidence from another market cuts against any simple deskilling story as well. In a study of 5,172 customer-support agents, generative-AI assistance raised productivity most for less experienced and lower-skilled workers and coincided with increased signs of worker learning, which suggests that AI can transmit elements of expert practice (Brynjolfsson et al., 2025). Neither body of evidence measures apprenticeship itself, to be clear, and that gap matters for the potential work impacts that could follow.
The leadership question therefore reaches beyond whether AI removes entry-level tasks and puts at risk the individual humans fulfilling them. The deeper question is whether firms redesign those tasks so that novices still have the opportunity to engage ambiguity, feedback, consequence, and expert correction, or, instead, to automate the very experiences through which tacit judgment used to form. While a thinner entry rung need not produce a thinner capability pipeline for workers, it easily can without deliberate apprenticeship and learning design.
“Do it for the love of the work” has supported a great deal of unpaid internship, and anyone with a payroll to shrink can enlist the romance of the gift in bad faith. Hyde is more careful here than many of his single-minded and artistry-embracing popularizers, since he insists that artists must find a way to earn a living at the boundary between gift and market. For leaders, the implications are helpfully concrete: protect the gift core, pay people properly at the market edge, and refuse to redescribe uncompensated extraction as creative devotion. A gift extracted under duress stops being a gift early in the process.
Hyde takes care to explain why the boundary between gift and market matters without telling anyone where to place it, which is precisely the perpetual challenge of creative leaders. The placement moves with every funding round, every change in client economics, and every wave of automation that absorbs or recasts work once given to juniors. As a result, firms that codify a permanent answer convert judgment into a rule that can quickly become obsolete and counterproductive. Creative ambidexterity begins with keeping the boundary visible enough to be revisited and, ultimately, reformulated as conditions change.
Advertising built its own quantitative answer to this tension over the past two decades, and the result has been instructive. Drawing on nearly a thousand cases in the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Databank, effectiveness researchers Les Binet and Peter Field made a powerful case for balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation, popularizing a roughly 60:40 benchmark while acknowledging that the ideal ratio varies by context (Binet & Field, 2013). In a later review of nearly 600 cases through 2018, Field found that the efficiency advantage of creatively awarded work had fallen from roughly twelve times that of non-awarded work in the twelve years to 2008 to below four times in the twelve years to 2018 (Field, 2019).
He attributes much of the decline to short-termism, including that involving juries who have increasingly favored short-term campaigns, and his empirical account is compelling. Hyde nevertheless points toward another, more fundamental mechanism at play: a gift metered closely enough, he explains, starts behaving like a transaction, and the relational surplus that made the gift generative in the first place becomes harder to identify and evaluate. Since the IPA archive is a selected population of effectiveness cases, and creative awards themselves changed across the period, the figures describe a consequential trend and fall short of a natural experiment. The broader irony is that the business case for creativity can grow so efficient at defending creativity that it teaches organizations to value only the parts that convert creative work into a business case or whatever metrics are being used to track effectiveness.
“Two Accidents,” 1996: The Discipline of Chance
If The Gift explains how creative value circulates, Hyde’s “Two Accidents” essay in the Kenyon Review explains how some of the value arrives. It may therefore be among his most straightforwardly useful writing for anyone running a creative team or business. He begins the piece with a discussion of the Greek term hermaion, which refers to the uncanny find – of an idea, a connection, a solution – that belongs to Hermes, the ancient Greek god of messengers. Hyde’s initial insight is that the term already carries the argument that a find differs from a search, a purchase, or a theft (Hyde, 1996).
He explains that the reasons for the difference are dumb luck and smart luck, which for leaders is important because a find made entirely accidentally produces no capability. Smart luck adds craft to what contingency delivers, which makes the lucky find a collaboration between the world and a practiced receiver. Louis Pasteur’s neglected chicken-cholera cultures, which led him to the deliberate, repeatable process of producing vaccines, and Pablo Picasso’s 1942 bull’s head, welded from a bicycle seat and handlebars, give examples of the pattern across science and art. In each case, somebody had spent years learning to recognize what an initial accident made possible. Pasteur’s maxim that “chance favors the prepared mind” becomes more demanding in this light, because the prepared mind must also stay ready for what it was not prepared to see, holding its theories loosely enough to notice an anomaly that could wreck them.
Composer John Cage supplies a harder lesson, because he used chance operations, including coin tosses, not as a celebration of randomness but as a discipline for interrupting the pursuit of his own preferences. That same discipline should be instructive for leaders considering what they should ask of generative systems. Large language and multi-modal models excel at recombination, traversing patterns in existing material and returning forms that no individual could have searched exhaustively. Since a find in Hyde’s sense still needs an environment able to recognize, test, reject, revise, and absorb what appears, leaders need to deliberately guide and contextualize their and their teams’ interactions with AI.
Evidence about how the abundance generated by AI operates in practice relates to the same leadership imperative of close guidance. When British management researchers conducted an experiment on the impact of short story writers’ access to generative AI ideas, the results suggested an increase in the creativity of individual story ideas and better writing at the same time as a narrowing of the scope of novel content produced collectively (compared to the novelty in human-only stories) (Doshi & Hauser, 2024). Put differently, plausible accidents can multiply even as distinctiveness, the property a find requires, grows scarcer. The resulting leadership task therefore becomes building the standards, attention, and selection practices that turn abundance into smart luck.
Hyde also notes a related second trade-off often hidden by the tendency of people to recognize an anomaly only to explain it away in terms of their existing models. For leaders, calibrating how firmly a team operates according to its assumptions or models in a given situation means deciding between holding on loosely enough to notice what they may have failed to anticipate and tightly enough to advance as commitments accumulate and execution risk rises. Creative ambidexterity operates here in miniature, inside a single mind regularly deciding how to coordinate trust in its own taste, preferences, and frames and commitment to escaping those preferences and allowing the frame to be disturbed.
Trickster Makes This World, 1998: Boundary Work and Its Costs
Preparation carries a firm only so far, because the more entrenched problem often concerns the difficulty of challenging tightly-held assumptions that constrain thinking differently – or the development of alternative assumptions that nobody inside the organization considers. Hyde’s trickster embodies the ambiguity, ambivalence, and paradox that can offer such different thinking or alternative ways of seeing situations (1998, p. 7). Hermes, Coyote, Loki, Eshu, and their cousins steal, lie, cross boundaries, and get caught, and cultures keep telling their stories because the disruptions they embody do the necessary, ongoing work of helping a culture test what it holds sacrosanct.
Hyde argues that cultures need space for these figures whose function is to “uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on” (1998, p. 9). The word space does a great deal of work here: grant too little and the culture ossifies around assumptions nobody can name; granting too much weakens shared rules until coordination becomes difficult. Psychological safety, a familiar frame for shaping questions and dissent in organizations, asks whether that dissent and those who voice it are welcomed (Edmondson, 2018). Hyde’s bargain pushes one level further, to where forms of dissent that the organization can absorb without domesticating them and to where boundaries must stay firm enough for collective action to continue.
Many creative businesses have half-absorbed the trickster and, in the process, often made him decorative. Innovation labs, hackathons, and disruption titles can institutionalize the role while stripping out the impact, because dissent becomes safer once it is scheduled, budgeted, and expected to end on a given schedule. That domestication mirrors the longer historical arc of creative leadership that’s moved over the last sixty years from insurgent practice toward a marketable commodity administered by a leadership-industrial complex (Slocum, 2025b). Real trickster energy appears when an account director tells a profitable client that their strategy is wrong or when a junior challenges the metric around which everybody’s incentives (and compensation) have aligned, and leaders reveal their culture in what happens to those people afterward. Netflix’s practice of “farming for dissent” formalizes the invitation, although its value ultimately depends on whether leaders reward the dissenter after the meeting (Hastings & Meyer, 2020).
The trickster also pays a price for these disruptions of business as usual, and anyone tempted to cast AI as the new organizational disruptor should look more closely at that part of the founding myth. Hermes stands trial before Zeus, Coyote dies repeatedly and comically, and the community watches the boundary-crosser absorb consequences. The more recent case of Mata v. Avianca shows the modern asymmetry cleanly. In it, lawyers filed a brief citing nonexistent judicial decisions generated through ChatGPT, and in June 2023 Judge P. Kevin Castel sanctioned the lawyers and their firm $5,000 after finding that they had abandoned their responsibilities and then stood by the fake opinions once the court questioned them (Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 2023).
A crucial takeaway from the case is that after an AI model generated the false material, the people still nevertheless had to carry the responsibility. For organizations, that asymmetry of action and ownership is not a temporary defect awaiting better models or agents. Instead, it is a reminder that, even amidst the rapid integration of AI, accountability stays attached to actors who can authorize, verify, explain, and provide governance as well as question and disrupt.
Common as Air, 2010: Stewardship of What We Inherit
Where The Gift works largely at the scale of the artist and the exchange, Common as Air moves to the scale of the polity, which makes it especially useful for considerations of AI. To take that step, Hyde returns to the American founders to recover an older understanding of ideas like commonwealth. Benjamin Franklin, when declining a patent on his open stove, reasoned that people who enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others should serve others with their own inventions “freely and generously” (Franklin, n.d., p. 55). Thomas Jefferson’s 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson supplies a parallel depiction of one person lighting a taper at another’s stove without darkening it (Jefferson, 1813).
Hyde’s invocation of the wider values of exchange turns on the observation that a commons has never meant a free-for-all. Many historical commons carried stinting rules and enforcement governing who could graze how many animals, in which places, and for how long (Ostrom, 1990). Cultural commons also require particular forms and standards of governance, because unqualified openness without reciprocity can become another form of extraction. As Hyde notes, the rules designed to protect creative property can fence off the very resources from which more widespread and shared future creation must draw.
Published in 2010, Common as Air anticipates a dispute that generative AI has since made urgent. Current copyright disputes with AI companies around training data ask who owes whom a licensing or usage fee. Yet this necessary legal and market question leaves a second question open. What obligations of replenishment, attribution, or reciprocity arise when firms build private advantage by drawing at scale on collectively produced language, images, code, and knowledge? Though Hyde does not settle the legal question, and a commons argument does not erase the rights of individual creators, he succeeds in exposing the institutional arithmetic that many licensing debates alone miss. Whereas lighting your taper at my stove costs me nothing when we are two people in a room, lighting several billion tapers and selling access to the resulting light changes the system even where the costs of access or copying remain cheap.
In a sign that the online realm is already responding, a global group of fifty leading researchers conducted an audit of roughly 14,000 web domains between 2023 and 2024 and found that more than 5% of all tokens in the widely used C4 corpus, and more than 28% of its most actively maintained sources, became fully restricted from crawling (Longpre et al., 2024). Though the audit does not establish a single motive for this move among publishers, creators, and site owners, it documents a growing withdrawal of permission, and the resulting weakening of the commons when participation becomes more and more structurally one-way.
Whether they name it or not, creative leaders sit inside this problem because decisions about what to train models on, license, attribute, share, or release under open terms are acts of commons governance. The choice extends well beyond open versus closed models or systems. Historically, commoners revised sparing rules as herds grew and soil thinned, and firms today should likewise vary what they ringfence according to the fragility of the resource, the distinctiveness of the advantage, and the reciprocity of the exchange. A blanket position taken by leaders in the direction of being either fully open or closed access to data usually signals that ideology has replaced attention to active deliberation of the specific case at hand.
A Primer for Forgetting, 2019: The Creative Work of Letting Go
Hyde’s most recent book turns memory inside out. Assembled in fragments that draw on Greek myth, instances of political reconciliation, and intimate family experiences, A Primer for Forgetting argues that forgetting deserves fuller standing in our individual and social lives alongside remembrance. Why? The logic is that every act of remembering also necessarily entails forgetting because attention to one thing requires letting countless others go, which makes forgetting an active condition of living in time (Hyde, 2019).
The creative core of his argument arrives through the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, who observed that, “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration” (quoted in Hyde, 2019, p. 15). Anyone who has made something difficult recognizes the state in which the self recedes as attention moves toward the work. Organizations now make that state unusually hard to sustain, because dashboards, notifications, quarterly attribution, searchable archives, and personal-brand maintenance keep both past performance and present identity continuously available even as the creative work highlighted by Bishop and Hyde often requires temporary release from each.
Digital systems do not literally possess human memory, and they can lose, overwrite, or fail to retrieve information. The more consequential shift, though, is that cheap storage and retrieval make organizational remembering the default, reversing a historical condition in which forgetting happened without explicit design (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009). Hyde’s discussion therefore connects unexpectedly to occasional efforts among management researchers to understand the dynamics of organizational forgetting (de Holan & Phillips, 2004). A challenge today exists because cheap and instant digital recall can produce an authority problem in which homogenized information can keep shaping choices simply by remaining searchable. Part of the work of creative leadership today must consequently include deciding which precedents deserve continued priority, which should become harder to retrieve, and which must be preserved because accountability depends on them.
This approach to forgetting also connects to the third loop of learning that I’ve previously discussed orients our current era of creative leadership (Slocum, 2025b). It is in that third loop that I locate collisions between the frameworks and assumptions of systems that cannot be straightforwardly revised or reconciled by simple integration or better execution into a single coherent and consistent model. If relearning must often wait on selective unlearning, Hyde’s forgetting supplies an essential missing verb for the process of learning and leadership today.
To engage in such forgetting nevertheless carries a double risk, since an organization that cannot release obsolete categories becomes captive to past precedent, while one that too easily forgets safety failures, ethical breaches, or hard-won craft knowledge condemns itself to repetition. Besides learning through the collisions of frameworks and assumptions without resolving them prematurely, Hyde thus helps us to understand that creative ambidexterity also involves intentional forgetting. The opportunity for leaders is to preserve what protects people and institutional integrity while loosening the past’s constraints on what those people and the organization can become.
The Practice Ahead: What Hyde Gives Us, and What He Does Not
Five trade-offs thread through Hyde’s writings, and none of them remains resolved for long when circumstances change. Leaders must decide how much of the enterprise remains unpriced, how loosely a team holds its theories, how much boundary-crossing a culture can absorb, what gets fenced and what stays open, and what an organization carries forward and what it lets go. While all leadership involves ongoing trade-offs, creative work under our current technological conditions is distinguished by terms that keep moving as the systems defining them collide. A leader weighing openness against enclosure in 2026 faces a question rewritten several times since 2022 by tools, business models, legal disputes, and cultural expectations that share no single governing logic.
Organizational ambidexterity research and paradox theory illuminate some of these persistent tensions, and Hyde adds a more granular provocation about circulation, consequence, commons, and forgetting. His writing also highlights the practice of resetting those boundaries while the work continues and, more importantly, learning from the collisions that make prior categories insufficient. The third-loop test is demanding, because leaders must recognize when a familiar trade-off has itself become a conflict between frameworks, kept more than one logic in view without forcing false coherence, and altered their own understanding of what the problem requires (Slocum, 2025b). Cast in this way, the concept of creative ambidexterity generates observable questions and makes no claim to empirical validation, which only future evidence can supply.
To be sure, Hyde’s writings also have their limits, and treating him as a management theorist, even of creative leadership, would flatten the very insights that make him original and provocative. His “cases” involve poets, artists, myths, gift societies, founders, and political memory, mostly considered at human scale, and he says little about capital allocation, regulatory governance, global supply chains, or how a listed company with twenty thousand employees might operationalize any of this. Even so, I am convinced that the claims drawn from his work need not remain metaphorical, because leaders can look for concrete effects on behavior and resource flows by asking some of the central questions that he poses in other contexts. For instance, whether unpriced exchange generates learning, whether protected dissent changes decisions, whether tighter enclosure reduces replenishment, and whether selective forgetting expands the option set without erasing safeguards.
As a result, Hyde’s categories become useful since they generate propositions that can be observed, compared, and revised in leadership practice. The required discipline for leaders wanting to benefit from his thinking lies in asking where a metaphor illuminates a mechanism and where it merely makes the speaker sound profound, a distinction central to leadership understood as ongoing craft development and set against framework consumption (Slocum, 2025a).
To contribute to leaders’ disciplined embrace of Hyde’s ideas, I’ve summarized five diagnostic questions from the five works being discussed here. What valuable thing moved through your organization last quarter without an invoice attached, and did your systems make such movement easier or harder? What happened to the last person who told a client or senior leader something unwelcome? What does your firm take from a cultural or knowledge commons, and what does it return? Which inherited category would open options by disappearing, and which piece of institutional memory would create danger by disappearing? Finally, what preparation lets someone in your firm recognize a lucky accident, and did it survive the last structural reorganization? Behind all these questions sits the same governance problem, which is who has the authority, incentives, and judgment to keep resetting the boundaries before efficiency or legacy assumptions set them by default.
The executives who called the gift economy a poet’s alibi mostly stop saying so after reflecting on their own work. Still, admittedly, Hyde solves none of their problems directly. In fact, an honest reading of his writings removes the comforting hope that any framework, policy, or AI model will provide simple resolution to leaders’ complex challenges. The value of his thinking nevertheless persists by making visible the conditions under which creative value circulates, surprises, disrupts, replenishes, and renews itself.
As the generation of ideas, solutions, alternatives, and finally value becomes more and more abundant, creative leadership acquires a different center of gravity in the judgment about which conditions deserve protection, which boundaries need moving, and which outputs merit becoming consequential. The greatest insight of Hyde’s writings may be that technology, markets, and habit will keep striking those organizational boundaries and balances automatically until leadership takes account of their dynamics and employs creative ambidexterity to choose and act differently.
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David. This is amazing. So impressive intellectually (as always) but also a really elegant presentation. Congratulations.