It takes something special for an internet video to capture my attention for 40 minutes. This video of Ben Chestnut, co-founder of MailChimp, talking about how he created a company that seems to nurture the creative instincts of its employees, and how this benefits the company in the grand scheme of things.

Among the great insights from this video, there’s one regarding managers. About 20 minutes in, he talks about how managers act to stifle the progress of companies. Not through their errors or incompetence, but by design - they are people who are meant to simply maintain the existing structure of the company, not move it forward. In his words, “Protect and defend [the] business”, which leads to adding layers of bureaucracy, and if I may extend and variate from his train of thought slightly, office politics.

“Before you know it, your whole company is thinking like managers … you’re defending the money machine you created 10 years ago. No one’s making new machine’s, no one’s looking to improve it, you’re just defending…”

So, to maintain the creative edge of the company, Ben recommends a bit of chaos… but managers hate chaos and disorder. However, Ben accepts it as part a unavoidable by-product of a person or company working.

According to Ben, creativity is assembling random bits of other things into new forms. So he encourages small outbursts of chaos to create the matter for creativity and innovation.

He goes on to show several examples of how the by-products of work have gone on to create wonderful personality and new products for MailChimp.

I thought it was just a wonderfully fun and insightful talk about how to create a company that moves forward while others will stand pat and eventually falter.