Managing creative processes starts with the understanding that it’s not a science—everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong. The passion it takes to create something is powerful, and most creators are understandably sensitive when their vision or execution is questioned. I try to keep this in mind whenever I engage with someone on the creative side of our business. When I am asked to provide insights and offer critiques, I’m exceedingly mindful of how much the creators have poured themselves into the project and how much is at stake for them.

To create usually means to make or do something for public consumption. If the public accepts you, life is exciting. If it ignores you, your spirits may slump.

Creativity is not just about making fascinating inventions or great works of art. It has to do with shaping your life and cultivating your very soul.

COLLABORATOR. Historical situations, always new, unveil man’s constant possibilities and allow us to name them. Thus in the course of the war against Nazism, the word “collaboration” took on a new meaning: putting oneself voluntarily at the service of a vile power. What a fundamental notion! How did humanity do without it until 1944? Now that the word has been found, we realize more and more that man’s activity is by nature a collaboration. All those who extol the mass media din, advertising’s imbecilic smile, the neglect of the natural world, indiscretion raised to the status of a virtue- they deserve to be called collaborators with the modern.

What, then, is the real role of the artist and the arts in society? It is the part that the arts play in the very survival of the human. The human body needs food, water, and air. But human beings have an ethical dimension to their being. Humans don’t live to eat but eat to live. Humans make choices, moral and aesthetic, that create and cater to the spiritual dimension to their being. Many ethical systems in the form of religions and other ritual practices try to reflect and cater to this spirituality, to nourish the soul in the same way food nourishes the body. The body and the mind are essential to human existence.

However, there is one realm of being without which there would be no difference between humans and the rest of nature. I am talking of the imagination. Imagination is central to the survival of humans as humans. Architects must picture a building in their minds before they can build it. Without imagination, there would be no religions. We imagine God and Satan as embodiments of the oppositional ideals of good and evil. Worship and ceremony would be impossible without imagination. Humans can imagine journeys before they set out on them. Humans can imagine the past and the future. We can imagine different futures, endless different possibilities, and then make choices based on what we imagine. This capacity to imagine a different future is important in order to resist succumbing to apparently impossible situations. We have seen how an oppressive social system, or rulers in general, try to limit our imagination, to make people unable to imagine and therefore unable to struggle for a different future. That we have arrived at the best of all possible worlds is the constant refrain of the dominant social forces in society. Without imagination, there would be no songs, poetry, fiction, and prophecy.