Do Employers Look For Creative People?

Do employers look for creative people? No, not generally. There's increasing demand in corporations for creative people, but the problem with being creative is that you're useless at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. You're not there to think outside the box; you're there to learn what you're supposed to do and implement it. Creative people, that is what they do.

What happens though to companies is that because they filter all the creative people out at the bottom, people start to rise up to the top. You really need creative people at the top because they are the entrepreneurial types. They are the ones, for example, in law firms; the more entrepreneurial ones are the ones that bring in all the business.

But it's also very difficult to nurse them within any system because systems do not nurture creativity. The artist is always the person who stands outside the structure or maybe builds his or her own structure, which is also why it's hard to evaluate creative people. You can't; if they're operating within the confines of a system that has an evaluative structure, they're not creative.