Currency

Over the course of my 20-year career, I have watched creativity go from being a slightly mystical, unattainable, and not-terribly monetizable attribute reserved for flighty artistic types to what it has become today: the sexiest and most desirable cultural currency of our times. To the point that I know finance guys who are at great pains to be seen as creative. Why? I guess it’s because having the power to use innovation and art to impact people for the better is cool—and being rich and powerful just ain’t enough anymore. To have real clout today, you gotta have juice in the marketplace of ideas, too.