Rod Judkins - Make Brilliant Work: Lessons on Creativity, Innovation, and Success

Also By Rod Judkins

Change Your Mind

The Art of Creative Thinking

Figurative Painting with Collage

Ideas Are Your Only Currency

Everyone would benefit from reading Judkins, if only because he is so entertaining... His chapters are packed with counterintuitive insights and hard truths, which are seldom so clearly and vividly laid out Psychology Today

Whatever your creative hangup, Rod Judkins has steps you can take now, and a wealth of examples to support his advice. An admirably straightforward, no-nonsense guide to getting over yourself and getting to work Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

This book is packed with great stories and ideas to power up your work journey with creativity and success by doing things differently Susie Pearl, author of The Art of Creativity and Instructions for Happiness and Success

As thrilling as it is useful, Rod Judkins latest manifesto on how to lead the creative life is... full of left-field thinking and case studies that illustrate the path of success... I loved it Phil Beadle, educator and author of How to Teach

Rod Judkins is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins in London, one of the worlds pre-eminent art schools whose alumni range from Lucian Freud and Antony Gormley to Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. He has lectured on the subject of creativity at universities and to businesses around the world. Trained at the Royal College of Art, he has exhibited at galleries including Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. As well as writing Make Brilliant Work, Rod has published three other books including The Art of Creative Thinking, which is an international bestseller and has been published in fifteen languages.

You dont have to be brilliant to produce brilliant work. Many of the characters you will meet in this book failed at school, lacked natural talent, were not especially gifted or were repeatedly sacked. But their methods produced brilliant work and they will work for you, too.

For the last twenty years, I have taught the techniques in this book to students at Central Saint Martins in London, one of the worlds leading art and design universities, helping them tap into a reservoir of unused potential. And when I give talks and workshops at some of the worlds most successful companies, such as Apple, Samsung and Porsche, I draw on these stories to inspire creativity. Now I want to share them with you.

Whether you are a business or an individual, you might find it hard to produce something significant and important. The real-life heroes in this book will show you how to make the transformation from ordinary to extraordinary. The longer you carry on working in the same way, the deeper into the rut of mediocrity you might get. Dont expect help its down to you. So if your work is good but not brilliant, or if you feel like youre dying inside as you sit through another meeting or a dreary PowerPoint presentation, now is the time to act.

Anyone wanting to produce brilliant work needs to adopt a gladiator mindset. A gladiator in ancient Rome needed intelligence, skill and a strong will qualities that underpin any significant project. You have to shield your work against attacks while simultaneously fighting back.

In the 1990s, a painful professional blow struck the architect Zaha Hadid. Her design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House had won the competition. It was her big breakthrough moment architects and design experts agreed it would be the most original and compelling building in Britain, looking like jewels around the neck of an opera singer. Yet the narrow-minded politicians and bureaucrats in control of the funding cancelled the project.

Hadid was devastated, yet she fought back with even more proposals for projects across the globe. A pattern emerged. Architects and designers considered her designs the best, and she won the commissions. But committees in charge of decision-making lost their nerve and backed down.

Still, she didnt become discouraged, despite the many years when her ideas were considered impossible to transform into bricks and mortar. Only when a Hadid design was eventually built, the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein, Germany, did the floodgates open. Suddenly everyone wanted her to design a landmark building.

I had the privilege of meeting Hadid at Central Saint Martins when she came in to talk to my students. She was a lively and commanding presence. Before her talk, she had a strong coffee and a bag of potato crisps, and before eating a crisp she held it up and rotated it slowly to scrutinize its curved geometry from different angles.

I had set my art students an architecture project. Rather than design a building on paper, I asked them to dive straight in and make models with whatever materials they found in the studio; not only traditional mediums like cardboard and clay, but things like coffee cups or bubble wrap. I limited them to twenty minutes to make the model. Their rough, raw models fascinated Hadid, and she loved the idea of working quickly and instinctively, an attribute she felt in danger of losing given her role as CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. Despite her fame and success, her interest in the work was intense. She also knew that I was a painter, and bombarded me with questions about glazes, washes and the techniques of various artists. She saw an opportunity to learn, absorbing anything that could make her work stronger and more brilliant.

Weapons of mass creation

Hadid had the steely determination of a fighter. She wasnt born with this ability she developed it. As an Iranian woman in the competitive and male-dominated world of architecture, she had to overcome obstacle after obstacle. She intentionally developed her gladiator mindset so that her personality shone through in her work a determination to be true to herself and her vision, no matter what. Look around you: most objects are symmetrical. Hadid used asymmetry to make her designs dramatic and eye-catching. Although committees had been afraid of the asymmetry in her work, Hadid stuck to her guns. She didnt strive for balance but aimed for unbalanced.

Dare to create instability. Unbalance your audience by keeping them on edge. Punctuate long, quiet periods in a song with short, loud sections, or leave a large blank area of a painting next to a finely wrought area. Every element in your work its colour, size or texture has a weight. Symmetry divides these elements equally either side of a centreline, making it predictable and humdrum. An asymmetrical design has different loads. It will make your work more dynamic and surprising. In Hadids brilliant design for a 128-metre yacht, in association with the German shipbuilder Blohm+Voss, each side was different, but the weight was distributed equally. Instead of the usual horizontal lines, Hadid connected the decks with diagonals, to create a dynamic object that suited its dynamic environment.

The committee of Welsh politicians and bureaucrats played it safe and refused to fund the Cardiff Bay Opera House. When their Chinese counterparts later commissioned the Guangzhou Opera House from Hadid, they helped transform their city into a cultural capital that declares Guangzhou to be a modern, forward-looking city, unafraid of new ideas. In 2004 Hadid became the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize since it was first awarded in 1979, and more prizes followed. When she won the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture in 2016, she said, As a woman in architecture, youre always an outsider. Its OK, I like being on the edge. Once, Hadid had a reputation for designing unbuildable buildings; now, she has earned a reputation for building the unbuildable.