Build Your Career, Master Your Craft, and Shape the Culture

Our stories sit in the intersection of craft, career, and culture; highlighting smart solutions and innovative thinking that help remind us all: Creativity is a skill we can hone, and it is not only reserved for artists. Every week we share three new stories with insights and takeaways for your own work and practice.?

This week, James Wood and Paul Ferry share how a small team can best deliver to a client; Taamy Amaize explains her thoughts on how the future is not evenly distributed; and we reflect on Tom Petty’s tireless work ethic that led him to more hits than just about any musician in history.

1. Why the Best Business Decisions Are Made in Conversational Settings

When Creative Director James Wood and Director Paul Ferry decided to launch their London-based brand and experience design studio ShopTalk/DEPT? together in 2017, they quickly swallowed their pride and found that they needed to reach out to everyone they knew to find clients —?a not-so-easy task when their team was so small and new.

But they used their small team as their calling card. “We get to the solution quickly and we don’t fill it with loads of unnecessary stuff,” says Ferry. “When you're a smaller team, the team you're using is the team that the client gets. We found we were able to work with bigger brands because we’d staff the project with as many people as the bigger agencies did — the difference was that that was our entire team versus a small percentage of theirs.”

Here, Wood and Ferry share the key to a successful partnership and how they built and sold their company.

2. How Taamy Amaize, Chief Strategy Officer, COLLINS, Injects Creativity into the Furthest Reaches of an Organization

As COLLINS Chief Strategy Officer, Taamrat Amaize and her team live by William Gibson’s adage,? ‘The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.’?

“The William Gibson adage often makes me wonder, has our species ever succeeded in evenly distributing ‘the future’? A sobering reality is that as we experience the effects of climate change, the consequences of the future will be unevenly distributed amongst the least powerful, most marginalized in our communities,” Amaize says. “If that isn’t enough to grab our attention, then recognizing that as a species and a society, we are a whole, interdependent system. Vulnerabilities at the margins will not stay at the margins. The center will not hold.”

Read the full interview here, where Amaize shares why she works at COLLINS to create futures, plural.?

3. 10 Creative Truths: Tom Petty

While Tom Petty’s peers attended classes, he started playing professionally at age 16 —?at afternoon socials, bars, fraternities, anywhere he could land a local gig.?

“We were working guys,” he says. “We were either practicing or playing all the time.”?

Don’t let the stoner vibe and long hair fool you —?Petty maintained that tireless work ethic throughout his career, pushing himself to write an album’s worth of songs every year. hat commitment led to more hits than just about any musician in history. Besides a single-minded dedication, read here for 10 more insights from Petty’s view on music, art, and dedication.?

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Newsletter written by Contributing Editor Madeleine Magill .