Good creative direction is a set of decisions and disciplines.

The uncomfortable finding underneath all of this: research on creative professionals in leadership has found that organizations tend to see highly creative people as less suited to leadership roles by default — right up until that person also reads as confident and distinctive. In other words, the market doesn’t reliably reward the best thinker. It rewards the best thinker who also looks like a leader. That’s not a flattering finding, but it explains a pattern most people in this industry have seen and never quite named: the person promoted to creative director isn’t always the person with the sharpest instincts in the building. Sometimes it’s just the person who looked most like a creative director was supposed to look.

Which is really the whole argument in one line: good creative direction is a set of decisions and disciplines. Bad creative direction is a costume. The unsettling part is how similar they can look from the outside, for a surprisingly long time.