curmudgeon

It was clear from the start that Sketch was uncomfortable having assistants or delegating tasks, no matter how much he claimed to need an 'extra pair of hands.' What he meant was an extra pair of his own, not someone else's.Spot on, no? Most bosses want everything done the way they would do it, whereas real excellence comes from having a team where every individual can do what he or she does better than the boss could do it, and the boss knows it and revels in it, and still asks for better.There's a reason Chip Kidd knows corporate life: He isn't a novelist, despite having written two first-rate novels. He's got a day job, as a designer of book jackets for the Knopf division of Random House. So we can understand a design professor saying this in "The Learners.Kiddies, what makes good design is good clients. It's as simple as that. Look at CBS — the eye. Genius. But Frank Stanton, the head of the network, deserves as much credit as Bill Golden, who actually designed it. If the sumvabitch paying the bills isn't on your bus, you ain't going anywhere. But if he really lets you drive, you can gun it to the moon.All of us who've worked in corporate life and tried to do anything remotely daring know just what he means. But hold on you pick up Kidd's collection of book-jacket designs, "Chip Kidd: Book One," and there we get to see his rejected work. We even get to peek in and see Post-It notes attached to some of his design proposals. On one he's written "Gary — Please love this." Gary is his editor, and the please is underlined, giving it a pleading tone. Yet, on the same page we see the final design .not the one Kidd wanted, but one less daring. Sigh.It's tempting to think that as you become a star in your profession, then management and everyone else would defer to you. It would be only natural to resent anything less. And therein lies the downfall of most successful professionals: the expectation and the resentment.

But Kidd seems immune.Take the case of one jacket design in Kidd's collection where we're shown Post-It comments from John Updike .a dozen of the things, mostly nagging and second-guessing, butting in on the design process. Maddening, right? No. Here's Kidd's comment: "John is nothing if not thorough. While some designers' hearts might sink at such instruction, I thought the attention to detail was touching and got a real kick out of it.

At least he cares.OK, so maybe Kidd is being diplomatic, but there are too many other examples of cases where his design is questioned and he bounces back, eager to try something else new, treating each round of design as a chance to amaze someone, often himself. What we see in Kidd's work is the great lesson of successful creativity .it isn't a flash, but a flashlight.