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Step
inside the consulting firm’s office building in
Shockoe Bottom. You’ll see that the offices are
not partitioned in any meaningful way. There are no
rooms, no hallways, no cubicles. Carving out
ill-defined domains for their work stations, desks
and bookshelves, employees often chat past one
another across the open space. As for suits, ties
and other symbols of hierarchy… forget it. This is
where the Knowledge Economy meets the Casbah.
It’s
one thing to be creative, but it’s another to be
so… so unstructured. Could this company really
have something to offer the most button-down names
in corporate America… the likes of GE, Time
Warner, General Motors, Timberland, L’Oreal and
The Gap?
“Big
companies get governed by bureaucracy and
process,” explains founder Andy Stefanovich. They
hire Play to spur innovation and creativity. One way
to do that is to bust rules, conventions and
established modes of thought. Play simply practices
what it preaches.
The
firm has moved beyond its previous incarnation as a
company that helped clients brainstorm ideas in a
free-wheeling, romper-room-for-adults setting.
Artifacts of that old business model are still in
evidence – the urban chic décor, the trampolines,
the toys, the red rubber balls. But make no mistake
about it, Play is not about fun and games.
Stefanovich
and his colleagues have moved beyond helping clients
generate cool ideas to helping them institutionalize
the capability to generate those ideas on their own.
They have developed a five-part methodology for
fostering a culture of creativity – built around
the principles of measurement, momentum, mood,
mindset and mechanism – that could come straight
out of the “Harvard Business Review.”
Fortune
500 companies know they must innovate constantly to
stay a leap ahead of their competitors. It’s not
enough to master the art of incremental improvements
to existing products and processes – everyone
wants to find the next breakthrough idea, the Next
Big Thing. But it takes more than a dictate from the
CEO to inspire creativity. It requires
thorough-going changes to the corporate culture. And
few companies have the skills to make themselves
over.
In
the 1990s, Play was one of the very first companies
to position itself as a “creativity” consultant,
making it the first mover in a fast emerging field.
“We defined the category of creative
consultants,” says Stefanovich. “We essentially
birthed that term.”
Changing
corporate cultures is not something that Stefanovich
set out to do in 1990 when he arrived in Richmond at
the ripe old age of 24 to start an event marketing
business with his sister. Two years out of college,
he had some management training under his belt from
the Ritz Carlton hotel in Michigan and a vague idea
that there was a better way to do things.
"I
didn’t know anything,” he says in retrospect.
“But I was always looking around for inspiration
on where our business could go.”
Apparently,
Stefanovich learned fast. Before long, clients were
asking for additional services, and the event
marketing company morphed into a
marketing/advertising firm. Bringing on people with
advertising, P.R. and graphic design background,
Stefanovich changed the company’s name to Opus.
Making a name for itself with its outside-the-box
thinking, employees used such unconventional
techniques as role playing in outrageous scenarios
– advertising meets improv theater -- to brew wild
new marketing ideas.
By
the late 1990s, clients were asking for help on a
strategic level. “Our clients were asking us to be
their thinking partner,” Stefanovich says.
“’You’re good marketers,’ they told us.
‘But you’re just as good at thinking about our
business topics.’” So, the company mutated
again, this time into a consulting firm. In 1999,
Opus became Play and took on the red rubber ball as
its corporate symbol. “We thought the name
reflected the spirit of creativity and
innovation,” Stefanovich says. “It’s genuine,
honest, real, human.”
The
name worked nicely during the waning days of the
go-go dot.com era, when creativity as a business
concept was “on fire,” Stefanovich says. But
then came the recession and 9/11. When companies
were laying off employees, and terrorists were
crashing planes into the World Trade Center,
“Play” was not the kind of consulting firm
people wanted to hire.
As
the market turned, so did Play. Stefanovich
reinvented the company once again as a management
consulting company, letting go some employees and
hiring others with different skills. “Prior to
9/11, we were about inspiration and ideas,” he
says. “After 9/11 it was ideas and innovation.”
Play
takes its business very seriously.
The
first step in Play’s methodology, explains
Stefanovich is to do a “deep dive.” That’s
Play lingo for immersion in the client’s business.
‘We want to know them well enough to be
knowledgeable about the dynamics of the business,”
he says, “but not too well. … We don’t try to
master the engineering details of GE turbine
engines.”
Then,
through a series of workshops, coaching sessions and
consulting, Play works on the five key drivers that
sustain innovation within a company:
Mood.
What is the client’s corporate culture – its
personality, its day-to-day esprit de corps? Is the
company receptive to innovation, or does it squelch
it? Some clients start out ahead, Stefanovich
observes. Their culture stresses innovation – they
just want to be more innovative. Others have a lot
of work cut out for them. It’s critical to get the
mood aligned with strategic objectives.
Mindset.
Play tests the personalities of key executives and
managers to gauge their receptivity to creativity.
Individuals vary on their ability to switch
perspectives, to see through the eyes others. They
differ in their tolerance of confusion, their
ability to work in situations where no one has set
the rules yet. Some are willing to take risks, to
“skin knees,” while others are not. Some bring
passion to the workplace, others leave it at home.
Mechanisms.
These are the technologies, management tools and
processes that make innovation happen within a
company – anything from coaching employees to
productive brainstorming. One of Play’s key
nostrums – “look at more stuff” – is to look
outside the organization for original thinking and
fresh ideas. The more ye seek, the more ye shall
find.
Measurement.
How does a company measure innovation? There are
many potential measures – patents, new product
rollouts, employee attitudes, rewards and
recognitions for risk takers, the degree to which
decision making is pushed down the hierarchy – and
businesses have to decide which are most appropriate
for them.
Momentum.
What is the company doing to make innovation a
culturally sustainable proposition? It’s not
enough for the leadership to buy in, as essential as
that is, but the corporate culture must support the
drive to innovate.
Play
is the epitome of creativity – almost to the point
of extremes. Employees aren’t hung up on titles.
If they even bother to give themselves one, they
make up whatever sounds appropriate. Stefanovich’s
business card describes him as “In Charge of
What’s Ahead.”
Operational
roles can be a little fuzzy – employees seem able
to cope with a high degree of ambiguity. Geof
Hammond, a senior employee, is described as “the
guy who does the content stuff,” in charge
of converting Play’s training tools and workshops
into products that can be sold to businesses in lieu
of consulting services.
No
fixed office spaces... No clearly defined job
titles... A business model in continual flux… In
sum, creativity bordering on anarchy. Even
Stefanovich concedes the need to provide more
structure. Morphing yet again, Play has hired a new
president with a pin-striped pedigree to run
operations and ramp up marketing.
Matt
Erskine comes to the job having served as deputy
secretary of economic development in the Warner
administration as well as a previous consulting
background in business strategy, organizational
development and human capital development. “Play
has an impressive list of clients and they’ve
carved out quite a niche for themselves in the
creativity and innovation space,” he says.
“There’s a ton of potential to grow the company
and become a best-in-class organization.”
There
are two components to the new president’s job:
focusing on operational excellence internally and
helping grow the business. As Stefanovich sees it, a
key marketing challenge for Play is to better define
for outsiders just exactly what the company does.
“What we’re doing sometimes is unique and
obscure,” he confesses.
Whatever
it does, Play is very good at it. With 16 employees
in Virginia and four in Mexico City serving the
Latin American market, the company is back in growth
mode. For Stefanovich, who will remain the leader
and chief idea guy, the business couldn’t possibly
be more fun. Thirty-nine years old, married, father
of two girls and living in Richmond, Va., he’s
traveling around the country and working with some
of the most powerful corporate chieftains in the
U.S., Europe and Latin America. “Our clients have
incredible resources at their disposal,” he says.
“By working through them, we can help make the
world a better place.”
--
February 27, 2006
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