Why “Turning Creativity into Money™”?

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Why do I keep talking about "Turning Creativity into Money™"? Well, listen my children and you shall hear, of a story from my TV career.

If you're a video person, I lay it all out in the video below. If reading is more your thing, skip the video and hop straight to the transcript below!

Hey there, Bill Stainton here with Turning Creativity into Money™, and let's, let's talk about that phrase: Turning Creativity into Money™. Where did that come from? How did I come up with that?

Well, it goes back to my television days.

Some of you know this. I used to produce a comedy TV show here in Seattle, Washington. Uh, it was called Almost Live! We were on the air for 15 years. We were also syndicated on Comedy Central for two and a half years. And I was the executive producer. And we were really good! Really creative, really good. I led an amazingly creative team to outstanding results. We won a lot of Emmy® awards—oh look, there are some now!

Anyhow, we did pretty well. And like I say, I, I worked with this incredibly creative team. And I was the executive producer. And every now and then people would ask me, "Okay what does the executive producer really do?" A lot of times that would be my staff asking me that.


But still, sometimes outsiders would ask, you know, what does the executive producer really do? And that's when I came up with the phrase, with the phrase, "You know what I really do is I turn creativity into money."

And here's what I mean by that.

I mean, my team was incredibly creative. They came up with incredibly creative ideas week after week after week every, every year for 15 years.

But if I could not turn all that creativity into a product that the sales department could sell to advertisers for money, then it was just wasted time and wasted effort, and we would have been cancelled really, really fast.

See creativity is the starting block, but turning creativity into money—that's the innovation part. Creating something of value out of creativity. That was my job, my real job as the executive producer. To create something of value out of the raw creativity that my team provided.

And that's your job also as a leader. As a leader in an industry, in a business that thrives on innovation. Because your industry does thrive on innovation, and I know that because every industry thrives on innovation. Whether you know it or not, every industry thrives on innovation.

The innovators are the ones that, that jump ahead of the crowd. The innovators are the ones that consistently beat the competition.

So your job as a leader in an industry that thrives on innovation is to take the creativity of your team, nurture that creativity, come up with that creativity, but then turn it into money. Turn it into something of value. That's what innovation is. That's what's going to get you ahead.

I'm Bill Stainton. I'll be back next time with more ideas on how you can Turn Creativity into Money™.
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About the Author:

29-time Emmy Award winner and Hall of Fame keynote speaker Bill Stainton, CSP is an expert on Innovation, Creativity, and Breakthrough Thinking. He helps leaders and their teams come up with innovative solutions — on demand — to their most challenging problems.
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