by Mick Mahoney
224 pages, softcover, €23.99
Published by Bis Publishers
bispublishers.com

While many books out there teach how to create ads, very few of them teach how to lead a creative team. This oversight inspired Mick Mahoney, coauthor of The Creative Nudge, to condense his more-than-30 years of experience into The Complete Creative Director, a guidebook for ad creatives considering making the leap to team directors. The book’s eleven chapters cover developing management skills, building a team, honing the creative pitch and, yes, handling the daily chaos that happens in the creative industry.

Mahoney intends The Complete Creative Director to act as an I-Ching of the profession, of sorts; readers can learn on the fly by flipping through to the chapter that best answers their questions of the moment. He supplements his ideas with quotes from interviews with notable creatives such as Chris Beresford-Hill, global chief creative officer at BBDO, and Katie Mackay-Sinclair, partner at Mother London, who has a particularly hard-hitting point in Chapter 6 on the creative director’s role in tempering big ideas to fit the clients’ needs.

Interestingly, Mahoney chose to omit direct advice on what makes a great leader from The Complete Creative Director. “Realistically, very few people have all the attributes of a great creative director,” Mahoney writes. “But it is important that you’re as aware of your weaknesses as you are of your strengths, and that you work on them or compensate for them.” In this sense, the book provides a framework for creative directors to practice Mahoney’s advice and do the heavy lifting themselves. —Michael Coyne ca