Do you like your creativity mashed?
That statement is not a silly as it sounds, especially to people who are part of the creative class, and it was just one idea that got the creative wheels turning during a recent seminar hosted by Knupp Watson & Wallman.
KW2 brought people from various creative worlds together at the Sundance Theater, and those in attendance were advised that the volume of ideas is an important as the vetting, that broadening the scope of who contribute ideas can pay big dividends, and that an old technique of combining already existing ideas has yet to outlive its usefulness.
Among the nuggets of wisdom:
From Scott Dikkers, founding editor of The Onion: The worst thing in the world is a creative person with just one idea, so creative volume is important, and don’t be afraid to cultivate ideas form varied sources, not just the people in the C-suite.
“The implication is you better find the time [for creativity], if volume is a requisite,” said Andy Wallman, president and executive creative director of Knupp Watson & Wallman. “Based on reaction I saw there, that seemed to be an eye-opener to that audience that night. I don’t think all the folks in crowd were thinking, ‘Hey, maybe that quiet person in cubicle down the halls could offer some unexpected ideas.’”
From Tory Miller, executive chef at L’Etoile restaurant: The importance of setting a high bar with the attitude that his next dish has to be better than the last one, and a high-decibel tagline that illustrates it. “I was surprised that a chef would have a tagline, but his tagline is to yell about ‘refusing to be mediocre,’” Wallman said. “I asked him to yell it to the crowd, and he yelled to the crowd.”
From John DeMain, music director for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra: Every creative decision is a business decision, meaning that if it’s a creative decision, there needs to be a business rationale behind it.
The Glory of Tory
For Tory Miller, no culinary idea is too small or too weird, but there is a filtering process. With one notable exception, he prefers to bat ideas around with his fellow chefs as they prepare sauces, chop vegetables, or dream up new “dishes” in their element — the kitchen. Having others to bounce ideas off lends itself to “sifting and winnowing.”
“The biggest thing I try to stress is that when you put too much pressure on finding an idea, it doesn’t typically work out, and it’s more of a frustrating process,” he explained. “But if you have fun and you let yourself be creative, or put yourself in a creative environment, you’re going to have better results.”
The lone exception is when Miller sequesters himself in back of the restaurant to plan L’Etoile’s New Year’s celebration menu. It’s a big annual event for the restaurant, especially in this first year of its new facility, so Miller wanted to pull out all the stops. This is when he dons a pair of headphones — a music lover, he especially finds inspiration from rap — and starts letting things “flow out.” One wonders whether L’Etoile patrons realize they are enjoying a hip-hop inspired dish, but Miller not only wants to avoid mediocrity, he wants to whip up something fresh.
Whether it’s steak, lobster, pheasant, or seafood, Miller wants to produce a “wow” factor. “I always print off the last three year’s worth of menus to make sure there are no repeats,” he stated. “To me, it’s really more of a feeling I want to covey for the entire menu. I try to put myself in place of someone coming into celebrate the New Year, and I want it to be very special because some of our guests that come for New Year’s only come that one time. I don’t want them to be disappointed.”
Aside from certain favorite dishes (see Beef Carpaccio) that diners insist on retaining, Miller said the L’Etoile menu is altered every two weeks. Part of his challenge is that a segment of the public views L’Etoile as solely a French restaurant when, in fact, it serves food in the French style but its menu is varied. The chefs’ creativity must be applied to a variety of cuisines, which is fine with Miller. He enjoys preparing dishes for “the melting pot” that is the American palette, even if it results in occasional stress.
One night, he had to prepare an Italian wine themed dinner for a holiday gathering. He was off the day before the dinner, and upon his return on “the day of” nothing was ready and 70 people were expected. The menu was being tweaked to the very end, and one course was a salt-crusted bass fish. The cooking staff has never made it before and, given the volume of ingredients needed, it had to change the way it prepared the salt crust.
Normally, the chefs would make the salt crust, wrap the fish in it, and individually bake it. But with more people having ordered it, Miller had to use a large mixer for the crust and calculate the proportion needed to produce the same result. “It turned out great, but that was intense,” he recalled.
Miller actually is the chef at two restaurants, L’Etoile and a casual eatery-“gastro pub” called Graze, which serves as an outlet for “some of the creative process that we can’t necessarily do at L’Etoile,” he said. “Waffles are one of our standards over there. We would love to try that at L’Etoile, but obviously that would not fly.”
DeMain Man
It is somewhat telling that when John DeMain discussed creativity, it was not in relationship to his interpretations of classical music pieces, but in growing the nonprofit entity he’s been entrusted with. That should come as no surprise, given the fact that his charge was to double the size of the MSO’s audience.
DeMain believes in assimilating various kinds of research, but he also likes to think outside the box. But first, he had to figure out what the box is, including the demographic box. “When I got here, people challenged me to double size of audience,” he noted. “One of the things I looked at is where audience comes from. Who do we market to? And if one thing is that we are just serving Dane County, how do we reach that larger audience?”
For the answer, he drew on past experience. The MSO was performing only on Saturday night, so to double the size of the audience, he realized they had to perform more often, including a Sunday matinee. A Sunday matinee could attract people outside of Dane County Dane, he reasoned, because with the exception of December and January, they would have enough time to drive here, enjoy the MSO at Overture Hall, and perhaps downtown restaurants and bars, and drive back before dark.
The Sunday matinee, plus an additional performance on Friday evening, induced more people to purchase subscriptions in advance, as did scheduling flexibility. Orchestra patrons now can switch out from Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, so if they have the big homecoming game on Saturday night, they can come on Friday or Sunday.
In addition, the MSO found a way to get more college age kids to the concert hall. The organization did not market to that demographic because it is considered a transient crowd, but DeMain felt that if MSO could reach students where they lived — social media — they’d be part of the orchestra’s future audience. Using Facebook and e-mail blasts, the orchestra, which has its own blog, reached out to UW-Madison, Edgewood, and Madison College, generating “student rush sales” where it would attract 200 to 300, maybe 400 on a good week.
“We’re getting close to 700 people coming in [overall], although 600 has been sort of our average,” DeMain. “We’ve never seen student body representation like this before, and that of course is changing the personality of the audience.”
Facing the Music
DeMain doesn’t consider himself to be particularly creative, just open to new ways. That’s true of business and music, but with classical pieces, there are boundaries. Being creative musically involves taking a score and, through analysis and experience and the bounds of good taste, reinterpreting it in a way that adds vitality.
While Madison has fought this better than most, there is an entire generation for whom music education stopped in the schools, especially symphonic music. “We face a shrinking repertoire musically because the public is less musically educated,” DeMain explained. “How do we keep it interesting for people who know something about the music, and for people who are trying it for the first time? That keeps us dancing a fine dance all the time.”
Some of that “dancing” is for the benefit of very young school children who visit the MSO. To get them interested, DeMain will play classical music’s greatest hits, or parts of them, so he’ll expose them to Beethoven’s fifth symphony or part of Tchaikovsky’s nutcracker or the Overture of William Tell (the Lone Ranger theme), and he will introduce them to instruments. The idea is to make the discovery of symphonic music fun, not snobbish.
“This past year, I was playing a Bach-Brandenburg concerto, a rather famous and very tuneful one,” he related. “Whether the kids knew it or not, I don’t know, but the point is that we also were trying to teach kids about language of music, that the melody is called the motif and the concert was called getting “motif-ated.” So what I was trying to get across is that you can hear the motif, three notes back and forth, back and forth. So let’s all go, “Yes I can. No you can’t. Yes I can. No you can’t.”
“I divided them in half so they could repeat that back and forth, so when they heard the orchestra play it, they could hear this abstract language and begin to hear it as a language, a series of phrases that had an antecedent, in concert phrases, because listening to classical music demands some education into how to listen. It is a language.”
Some people seem to get the language almost instinctively; others can be taught how to understand that language. If they are interested and they get it, DeMain believes they will become fans for life.
Digging for Creative Gold
Wallman’s favorite creative exercise is a time-honored one that depends on producing a large portfolio of ideas, and then combining ideas that make sense. The old axiom that says, “By definition, an idea is nothing more than a combination of existing ideas,” has been proven true time after time. Apple Computers’ iPhone and iPad are among the latest commercial examples.
“I love that tactic,” Wallman said. “Dig, dig, dig, make big lists, and then connect, connect, connect, and you’ll find some unexpected ideas.”
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