Sort of a spin off discussion triggered by Tim. In my opinion there are definitely unique qualities between artistic people and technical people. And in my experience you need both. For example, when I was working I led incident investigation and root cause analysis classes for both marketing groups and refinery / engineering groups. And I could see the difference. Marketing people were much harder to keep on track - they constantly brought up tangential topics and when someone did it often caused others to grab onto that topic which then created more tangential topics. The technical groups wanted black and white answers to everything. When I was working at the Ortho home & garden products plant, the marketing folks just couldn't understand why the packaging plant couldn't react quickly enough to sudden changes in their marketing strategy. For example, they'd decide to run a 2 for 1 coupon in the paper in a selected area of the country. But they didn't tell us in the packaging plant. So suddenly, sales jumped up, they'd order twice as much product as the original plan called for, and we'd have to work week ends and pay over time to meet the demand. That of course resulted in those cases of product costing much more to produce which reduced the profit from selling more product. We had meetings with marketing staff at the packaging facility to show them how much effort and time it took to react to a sudden change in the production plan. On the other hand, the marketing group was really good at creating unique ways to advertise and sell product. So as a company we needed both skills. Watch one of those baking shows, like Halloween BakeOff and see how the artistic people and the technical person need to interact to successfully produce the final vision.
