Creative R & D

Your company's future depends on new ideas and new talents. In the creative and ideas business you can only go so far with the same old ideas and styles. It is essential that you invest in R and D for your next creative wave. Essential. And you cannot expect to have an immediate, this quarter, return on this investment - you have to manage it so that it will pay out in time.

You need to bring your educated brain to evaluating which innovative ideas and which individual talents are worth investing in and mentoring. Just because you have a junior team member in place does not in itself mean that she is the key to the future - challenge them creatively and challenge your decision to invest in them. You invest in your juniors' training and you invest in your own self-improvement, just the way you invest in equipment. Choose and monitor them just as carefully as you do that new piece of equipment.

These investments in your creative R and D are the most important part of ensuring your company's future. You should be thinking about them all the time, evaluating them, encouraging them, nurturing them: just the way you reevaluate your stock portfolio on a regular basis. (You do do that don't you?) A good investment will pay handsomely, a bad one - well - is a bad one.