It's crazy to talk about sharpest-edge new technologies, a dramatist who has been dead for 399 years, and the nature of creativity all in the same workshop. But at its core creativity requires the nutty combination of unlike things, so perhaps there's hope after all.
Business genius and creative genius are partners, not opponents. Both sorts of genius thrive in times of intense change, and 2015 is one of those times. Digital technologies are exploding out of our laptops, phones and tablets into the rest of our lives. You can see this across megatrends like robotics, 3D printing, wearable computers and the internet of things: new forms of and access to information create new products and industries while old ones experience rebirth under evolutionary pressure. (Netflix kills the corner video store, but then also served as a midwife to HBO Go.)
This has happened before, so it is illuminating to look back at another transformative time when literacy and access to books went through an exponential increase, the Renaissance, and then to dig into the environment that gave us one of history's most famous creative geniuses who is unknown as a business genius: William Shakespeare.
Most people think that Shakespeare’s business success was built on his skills as a dramatist, but what if it’s the other way around? What if Shakespeare was a playwriting genius, at least in part, because he was a business genius first? The Shakespeare brand is still going strong four centuries later, and there are surprising lessons to be learned from how Shakespeare built his business and brand-- and these lessons, in turn, can help business people in 2015 (and beyond) grapple with transformative new technologies.
In today's workshop, watch yesterday's Renaissance history smash into tomorrow's digital future as Dr. Brad Berens combines the Shakespeare Strategy with sharpest-edge technologies to show you where digital marketing is going, and how to get there.
