The Rise and Fall of Creative Leadership

Creative leadership emerged in the post-World War II era as a reimagining of organizational and economic possibility and, in the context of the Cold War, an exemplar of U.S. and Western European cultural and Capitalist potential. Initially rooted in the growing recognition of creativity as a driver of economic growth and a symbol of cultural vitality, the concept evolved into an organizing principle for businesses seeking competitive advantage. In the second half of the twentieth century, creative leadership evolved into a corporatized doctrine largely centered in corporate research and development units and industries whose products were recognizably creative, such as media, entertainment, and advertising. By the 1990s, creative leadership was applied more broadly, notably to entrepreneurial ventures, innovative technology firms, and the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI). The following decade saw creative leadership, as a theory and practice, face a host of fundamental cultural, economic, and technological challenges to its core assumptions about innovation, leadership, and organizational change. The subsequent co-optation of creative leadership as a largely backward-looking managerial imperative by the Leadership-Industrial Complex reflects both its contemporary dilution and its continuing aspirational potential.

The Rise: Creativity as an Economic, Cultural, and Ideological Imperative

Creative leadership, as understand today, arguably emerged from three converging forces in the mid-20th century: the professionalization of management theory, the rise of knowledge work, and the growing recognition and promotion of creativity’s economic value (Franklin, 2023). This convergence reached its first major expression in the late 1950s and saw early successful organizational experiments in the following decade at places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, where traditional hierarchical management gave way to more fluid, innovation-focused approaches. The varied embrace of these ideas by engineers, technologists, and cultural producers underscored the alternative ideas and behaviors of creative leaders.

The two closing decades of the twentieth century ushered in broader changes that would provide further opportunities for the expansion of creative leadership: the globalization of media, the democratization of creativity through digital technologies, and the emergence of knowledge-based economies. By the 1990s, creative leadership had become a recognizable in the Euro-American business, championed by figures like John Kao, who was an early evangelist while teaching at the Harvard Business School, and institutionalized through initiatives like the United Kingdom’s Creative Industries Task Force. The shift was reflected in popular business literature that elevated creativity from an artistic or narrow research pursuit to a more widespread corporate imperative (Kao, 1997). The UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sports, which emerged from the Task Force as part of Tony Blair’s energetic new Labour government, formally recognized creative industries as economic drivers, reinforcing the legitimacy of creative leadership (2001).

At the same time, Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, originally formulated a half-century earlier, became a guiding ethos, justifying disruption as an essential leadership strategy (Christensen, 1997). The dot-com boom, Apple’s reinvention following Steve Jobs’s return in 1997, and the rise of early digital platforms all reinforced the belief that creative leadership could redefine industries and even the wider culture. The proliferation of design thinking, open innovation, and agile management as approaches to creative ideation, experimentation, and management in the following years further entrenched the notion that leadership must be dynamic, visionary, and aesthetically engaged.

During this period, visionary CEOs like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Howard Schultz became archetypes of the creative leader – blending artistic intuition, strategic insight, and personal branding. A new generation of entrepreneurs, many of them engineers of digital technologies, adopted the non-traditional precepts and practices of creative leadership to build their teams and organizations with enormous success. Around the same time, the influence of the University of Toronto’s Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class extended this ethos beyond corporations to cities and economies, where creativity became shorthand for economic vitality, and creative ladership its guiding hand and spirit (2002).

The turn of the millennium arguably marked both the apex and the beginning of creative leadership’s undoing. Corporate leaders and entrepreneurs everywhere, inspired by models of artistic ingenuity and alternative management and organizational practices, sought to emulate the perceived fluidity and innovation of cultural and creative industries. Yet with creativity formalized as an economic driver, the “creative class” valorized as individuals capable of transforming cities, and tech entrepreneurs embodying for investors, management gurus, and the public alike the potential of creative leadership to generate financial success, critical voices began questioning the corporatization and democratization of creative processes and organizations. The dotcom era epitomized this tension, as innovation culture and the leaders guiding its became simultaneously more influential and more superficial.

The Fall: Co-optation, Exhaustion, and the Limits of Mythologized Leadership

The dotcom bubble burst in March 2000. The fall of creative leadership had deeper causes, however. In The Invention of Creativity (2017), cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz argues that the decline of the concept accelerated because of three key failures: first, the inability to deliver on promises of democratized creativity within hierarchical corporate structures; second, the reduction of creative leadership to a set of marketable behaviors rather than substantive and adaptive organizational practices; and third, the growing disconnect between creative leadership rhetoric and the realities of digital and algorithmic capitalism and automated decision-making.

As a result, by the 2010s, creative leadership was no longer a subversive or largely even a contrarian idea; it had become increasingly institutionalized by business schools, industry training programs, and professional events. An illustrative sample includes the Berlin School of Creative Leadership opening in 2006, the Business Perspectives for Creative Leaders program launched by AIGA and the Yale School of Management in 2008, and the Cannes Lions event changing its tagline from the International Advertising Festival to the International Festival of Creativity in 2011. Creativity and its leadership were increasingly packaged – into design thinking workshops, innovation labs, sprints and hackathons – often detached from real organizational dynamics. Rather than fostering ongoing creative practices, the Leadership Industry and wider popular leadership discourse adopted what British human geography professor Oli Mould calls “aestheticized management” in which digitally-disseminated leadership performances – TED Talks, LinkedIn manifestos, and personal branding – mattered more than actual, habitual behaviors and substantive, disciplined innovation (Mould, 2018).

The so-called “techlash” of the late 2010s and early 2020s exposed the limits of creative leadership. Scandals at WeWork, Uber, and Theranos revealed that many so-called creative leaders were more concerned with visionary storytelling than sustainable, humane, and value-creating management. The relentless push for creative and entrepreneurial disruption-at-all-costs led to burnout, ethical failures, and widening economic inequalities. As NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway argues, the obsession with innovation – and the accompanying “idolatry of innovators” that mythologized leading creatively and disruptively – often masked deeper individual pathologies and organizational dysfunctions (2019). Creative leadership became a more and more nebulous, catch-all phrase, invoking what had increasingly become a commodified and easily replicable set of skills rather than a deeply contextual practice.

During these same years, critiques appeared from cultural analysts and scholars. Researchers like Reckwitz, American cultural historian Samuel Franklin, and UC Berkeley humanities professor Shannon Steen’s The Creativity Complex (2023) point to a fundamental paradox: as creative leadership became more institutionalized and democratized, it became less effective at fostering creativity and innovation that differentiating firms. The Leadership Industry likewise transformed creative leadership from a vital and protean practice into a packaged product, from an authentic process into a choreographed performance. In popular management discourse, at the time, a general questioning of “Leadership B.S.” highlighted the ethical failures of celebrated innovative and entrepreneurial leaders – exemplified by WeWork’s Adam Neumann and Uber’s Travis Kalanick – and exposed the contradictions of a creative leadership model that had increasingly prioritized a romanticized and heroic individual image over substantive decisions and behaviors (Pfeffer, 2015).

Put differently, the very forces that enabled creative leadership’s rise – technological advancement, market disruption, and the commodification of a distinctive vision of fostering creativity – ultimately contributed to its decline. Institutional imperatives in the Leadership Industry, the entrepreneurial economy, and emergent social and algorithmic media also contributed to the transformation of creative leadership from a purposeful organizational set of organizational principles and purposeful practices into what Franklin terms a “cult of creativity,” a performative set of practices often disconnected from meaningful innovation or sustainable business practices. The continuing rise of platform economies, automation, and artificial intelligence in the late 2010s and 2020s have only further challenged traditional notions of creative leadership and revealed its limitations in maintaining the dynamism and originality that had previously enabled it to address individual, organizational, and social challenges.

References

Clayton Christensen (1997) The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Harvard Business Review Press.

DCMS (2001) Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001, London, Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Richard Florida (2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, New York, Basic Books.

Samuel M. Franklin (2023) The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Scott Galloway (2019) The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, New York, Penguin.

John Kao (1997) Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, New York, HarperBusiness.

Jane McConnell (2021) The Gig-Mindset Advantage, Figure 1 Publishing.

Oli Mould (2018) Against Creativity, London, Verso.

Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015) Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, New York, HarperBusiness.

Andreas Reckwitz (2017) The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New, trans. Steve Black, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Shannon Steen (2023) The Creativity Complex: Art, Tech, and the Seduction of an Idea, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.