Creative businesses: managed for efficiency or managed for ideas?

The pursuit of efficiency, or productivity, in manufacturing led to great advances in economic growth and wealth, but only by `deskilling' - the supplanting of human skills by machines.

Creative businesses: managed for efficiency or managed for ideas?

Gordon TorrWiley

By demonstrating how perilously close we've come to the complete commoditisation of creativity in the marketing and communications industries, the producers of the BBC's immensely popular The Apprentice have inadvertently done us all a whopping great favour.

Sir Alan Sugar, the millionaire electronics genius, plays the bloodthirsty Emperor Nero and a dozen or so jumped-up MBAs and eager Media Studies graduates play the gladiators. It's the Coliseum in suits.

While we don't actually get to see exposed viscera flopping into the dust of the arena, the...

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