{CHAPTER 10}
PERNILLE
AALUND’S
AVERSION TO
PRETTY GLASS
PARTITIONS:
THE ORGASMIC
BREAKTHROUGH
AND DISCOVERING
CREATIVE
WORKSPACE
There have thus far been too few female voices in our book. With the exception of a number of female researchers who we have cited regularly, our contributors have all been men. Maybe this is because men sometimes shout the loudest. We will remedy this imbalance now. We shall meet Pernille Aalund – lecturer, author, and TV host. Creator of the chat show Men No Access; the web portal Oestrogen.dk, which was later purchased by the Aller Corporation; and Q Magazine in Denmark. After four years as CEO of Aller’s magazines, Pernille was promoted to Director of Business Development at the media corporation. In other words, we are speaking with a very cool woman, who has achieved an impressive career in the media branch without any formal journalistic education. In this sense, she resembles a number of our other contributors, many of whom halted their educations or took circuitous educational paths to their success.
Pernille is fantastic in an interview. She speaks rapidly and precisely about her own creative processes. What stands out most strongly is her ability to seek spaces where she can work creatively and her ability to be places no one has been before. According to Pernille, these creative spaces are not necessarily hidden behind the great glass surfaces at the Aller Corporation’s head office. The head office is perfectly fine for meetings and for day-to-day editorial work, she says, but not for working creatively in particular. For this, Pernille prefers large spaces, where she can stick up Post-It notes and posters and roll out metres’ worth of paper onto the floor. She prefers spaces that need not be cleaned up and where one can live chaotically right up until the eventual solution arrives: the idea!
The interview with Pernille takes place at the Dag H café facing Dag Hammerskjölds Allé in Copenhagen. The sun is shining, and the noise from buses, ambulances, and the other guests at the café mix with Pernille’s voice on the sound file that represents our own external memory now, during the writing phase. Characteristically for Pernille, she cannot let the opportunity pass to use the interview to philosophize over what café design will be like in the future. Maybe people will no longer want to sit in a noisy environment. Maybe cafés will turn in toward courtyards. Maybe we will want to eat other kinds of food entirely. Maybe people need peace and fresh air. This is a jarring thought – we are sitting amid the grime and the noise of the street traffic. Creative people cannot help turning things around. What is the opposite of a café smothered in steam and smoke?
For the past four years, Pernille has worked as CEO of the Aller Corporation’s magazines, in which capacity she has striven to make the magazine operations a better business by ensuring that work, production, and layout are done in new ways. She says that the accounts for October 2010 were excellent. Now she is tasked with sniffing out new business areas. And she does this by using her creativity:
“I always think of myself as the creative one. I’m preoccupied with the zeitgeist. What kind of wave are we surfing right now? Within art and women, how many partners do we need? Swingers’ clubs have been booming outside of the capital. Maybe we’re again on the road toward practising serial monogamy and permanent lovers. We get confirmed, engaged, and married – watch out for ourselves, perhaps because we’re passing over into a more spiritual state. We haven’t yet seen the peak of sexification and thus haven’t yet 100% experienced the reaction against it. We have a need to be together in groups: ego is out. I transform these trends into all sorts of things. It’s what I do. My next epoch won’t be about finding new forms of production but about returning to the ideas and shepherding them into reality – everything we can imagine through media.”
The anthropologist Tim Ingold has described how the ability to be creative does not, despite the common phrasing, concern constructing new worlds. The point is, rather, being capable of registering, of moving within, and of seeing one’s surroundings in new ways. It is this process that Pernille describes earlier. She sniffs out tendencies in her environment and translates them in countless ways in the course of completing her own tasks.
Pernille feels that rationalization, which formed a large part of her work as magazine CEO, is a creative process as well. Why, she asks, should layout be based in Copenhagen if it could be done in Riga instead? We need to work radically differently, break through all the boundaries surrounding us. There are no rules that set out where good ideas originate. It is not difficult to imagine that Pernille might have the effect of a tornado on her immediate surroundings. If something new is going to happen, there is no need to set limits for the desire for innovation.
THE DIFFERENT AND THE UNDISCOVERED
It is often said of creative individuals that they are capable of finding places where others have not yet been. They sow on uncultivated land. They process the materials they come across and the ideas they receive and are able to sell them dear once others discover the trick. The more experience one has cultivating the uncultivated, the better one’s chances when acting creatively. Pernille explains that she loves being places where no one has been before:
“I love discovering quirky places no one knows, towns no one’s visited, films and books no one’s seen or read – generally speaking, places that are unexplored. The worst thing you can say to me is that there are lots of people who like something. Of course, it can be fun to realize that other people like what I’ve found. That puts it in perspective, but I’d rather be where no one’s really been before.”
Pernille buys cheap but has nothing against selling dear. Although this might seem like a lonely process and although she is partial to retreating into her own space when she seriously needs to think creative thoughts, she is far from alone. Pernille says that she is inspired by everything – by her graphic designers and illustrators, by shops and restaurants. By a way of folding a napkin and by conversations with people she does not know. Having conversations with people she does not know is something she greatly appreciates because it means she need not give away too much of herself. She provides a good example of this during the interview:
“A few weeks ago, I was sitting at a sidewalk restaurant in Venice. A Chinese girl was sitting at the next table, and I turned to her to ask what she was drinking. Most people like talking if they’re asked. I asked her why Venice was such a prioritized travel destination, and what it was about Copenhagen and Denmark that attracted people from China. The funny thing was that I went almost directly from that conversation to a seminar on business development a few days later here in Copenhagen, by the Round Tower in the town centre. It was a seminar for business leaders, where we were meant to discuss how we could expand a little brewery in North Jutland. I just said, ‘We have to go to China!’ I could just envision a little piece of Danish cultural history as a successful beer in China. That’s how the conversation with the girl in Venice ended up being connected to the brewery in Northern Jutland.”
A significant characteristic of the ability to be creative is that the process itself often consists of the formation of syntheses between two very different and hitherto unconnected areas. It is presumably beneficial for this process if one actually moves between various areas and occurrences. In Pernille’s example, she is just such a boundary crosser. She thinks that the feeling that arises when she succeeds at associating and combining insights, as in the previous example, resembles that of sex and falling in love:
“All of these pieces come in and land at different tempos. Getting a piece into place – it’s almost orgasmic. The meeting of Venice and the Round Tower. That’s how most things come to me. I’m hugely fascinated by the power of circumstance.”
Pernille loves bumping into coincidences. And occasionally, she becomes the lonely wanderer along the edge of everything, on the hunt for new insight. Pernille says with unabashed honesty that sometimes, when she is seeking the new, she can be a terror to be around. Hot-headed, aggressive, touchy. Nevertheless, she truly needs to be surrounded by people and encompassed by a framework that can get things started. The story of Oestrogen.dk is just such a story.
SOMETHING THAT DOES NOT ALREADY EXIST
Pernille was one of the first to see the opportunities that the Internet offered to the women’s magazine genre. In 2000, she was the main figure in the launching of Oestrogen.dk, a website primarily for and about women. It started when Pernille had a vision of an oak tree on the Internet.
“I did a sketch and told them about it at the Politiken headquarters, and the project became reality even though I knew nothing about the Internet. But there were two people with whom I’d had peripheral contact who helped me. One person was a woman from the Bestseller clothing company in Jutland, Jannie, who’d set up a lecture with me. There were really a lot of people, so she arranged another lecture for the next evening. She was juggling 20 things at once, everything was happening around her, and so her name went into my notebook. Another was a guy who my friend had met on the train. This guy had hooked up the cables in one of the first intranets in Copenhagen. He was so fascinated by the Internet that he’d acquired all of the knowledge necessary to do it. His name was Jan. So I took Jan and Jannie, who both had their own skills. They became some of the leading forces. It’s fantastic. Things happen if you grab the chances that crop up. Maybe because you can see yourself in others. The ability to delve deeply into something, the passion and the fire were, at any rate, part of what I saw in Jan and Jannie, and I recognized it from myself.”
The ability to be creative is also the ability to find people around you who can do what you cannot do yourself.
THE WAR ROOM
Pernille is no fan of glass, prettiness, and big buildings that are designed primarily to impress others. At least, she does not care about these things during the creative work phase. The framework for the creative process obviously needs to be established with the help of a certain amount of knowledge regarding temporal resources, costs, and a good deal of research. For example, if Pernille were to make a new magazine for dog owners, she would have to seek out knowledge of what dog owners would like to read, how many dog owners there are, and whether they are at all capable of making purchases. Frameworks exist, she says, which is why it can be helpful to have budgets. The framework could be that a product needed to be released onto the market and that you needed to operate within some reasonable limits: “I’m forced to set some goals. Otherwise, I go off track.”
Pernille also recognizes our metaphor of moving along the edge of the box, sampling and absorbing knowledge of that which already exists. When this phase is complete, she enters what she calls a “war room” – an actual room with white walls. It is best if it is an ugly place, where anything goes. “Liberate me from design,” she says. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand prettiness. It needs to be raw. Everything needs to be allowed.”
Pernille explains that she is currently working on a new magazine project. She knows how it will look. It is, actually, an existing concept that she is engaged in disassembling then building up again. So she sticks her financial calculations on one wall and the visual look on the other in the war room. At some point during the process, she says, beauty will emerge. Everything needs to be dragged out of the computer and onto the wall.
Before she enters the room, she makes sure she knows a lot about her concept. Before she started making talk shows on television, for instance, she watched a massive amount of chat shows with figures such as the American talk show host Oprah Winfrey. But nothing about Oprah was allowed inside the war room precisely because Pernille did not want to make a copy. Experiences might be vital in the preparatory phase, but they can act as obstructions when you are trying to discover something novel.
The process in the war room is a lonesome campaign. Only a very few of the best employees are invited inside. But once the initial thoughts are prepared, Pernille makes sure to let her employees advance the idea.
A SPECIAL WOMAN
Pernille says she is going to a summerhouse in Jutland after the interview. Alone. Because, as she says, “It can be hard to be the partner of a woman who basically likes her own company.” In fact, she feels that she suffers from a light variety of Asperger syndrome. Her ability to dedicate herself to something and follow through with an agenda and a focus allows her to be very direct with other people. When people come to her to present an idea, they get their feedback raw and unsweetened. “It can take me a few minutes to say that nothing will ever come of it.”
She is also alone inside the war room, and she enjoys frequenting cinemas and restaurants in her own company. That said, she can quickly catch the atmosphere in a gathering and adjust her mood or jargon. She has a keen sensitivity and ability to register her surroundings.
As with most of our interview subjects, Pernille veritably thrives on resistance. She has, at any rate, learned from experience that resistance can be constructive. “Encounters with resistance may in reality be a sign that I’ve got something right.” Once she learned from her employees that there had been betting in the canteen as to whether she would succeed with a project. Out of pure frustration, Pernille went to the bathroom and vomited. But she soon leapt back into the fray.
“Strangely enough, over the course of a day like that, I can go from being unhappy and a bit philosophical about things to being extremely dynamic. I storm toward my goal. If someone tells me that no one’s done it before, that it can’t be done, and that I’m inexperienced – well, there’s no better way of starting me up.”
When we ask Pernille where she acquired this characteristic, she replies that she always received a great deal of support from her parents and that she is strongest when the fire is licking at her heels. “I get sick every time, but it’s a kind of rebirth.” She is, however, also skilled at assembling the right team of people around her. “I call up the best,” she says. “And I write everything down in my book.”
Pernille also explains that she is good at reading up on things. Once she learned that she needed a business strategy, she just sat down and read four books on it. “Then I found out that, in a way, I’d already done a SWOT analysis.”
Pernille is quick to learn but never did well in school. She has trouble sitting still and personally feels that she should have just been given a box of LEGO or a miniature sandbox and been allowed to sit in the corner. “Then I would’ve taken more of it in,” she says. She is always wandering between parallel worlds, and it was difficult at school. “While the others were discussing insects in North Jutland, I was in Iceland looking at volcanoes.”
SUMMARY
The interview with Pernille leaves no doubt that creative processes can come at a cost. Luckily for Pernille, she thrives on resistance. Yet she also tells us that she seeks to avoid the kind of massive conflicts that she often encountered when she was younger. When attempting to learn from Pernille’s story, the following becomes evident:
1. You need to be able to withstand a headwind. If there is a lot of resistance to a project, you have presumably got something right.
2. Creative processes require great sensitivity and ability to register. Learn to see your surroundings and combine insights into new ideas.
3. Creativity is not an individual affair even if space to be alone may help the process along. Creative individuals are good at surrounding themselves with people who are good at other things.
4. A certain degree of devil-may-care attitude is necessary. Pernille is our interview subject who speaks most energetically about her own processes. This may be because women need to contribute twice as much to achieve the same amount as men – or perhaps she is just brashly truthful.
In the next chapter, we will take a trip around the Danmarks Radio studio, where we will meet Ingolf Gabold, head of drama at DR, for a chat about putting Danish drama on the world map and not focusing on too many blue elephants.