Image from flickr by GeminiCai@SH
Teresa Amabile and Mukti Khaire at the Harvard Business Review have an engaging piece in the latest issue called “Creativity and The Role of The Leader” (PDF excerpt). In describing the value and role of creativity within a very wide range of businesses, the authors note:
“What used to be an intellectual interest for some thoughtful executives has now become an urgent concern for many.”
As Teresa’s blog points out, “Big companies, unable to cultivate [creativity] within their own walls, end up buying it instead.”
The growing need for more creativity within organizations isn’t a surprise. As the article points out, business has succeeded in honing processes of optimization, distribution and execution to the Nth degree. Our on-demand supply chains hum. But as psychologist and NetFlix Prize contestant Gavin Potter points out in Wired, “The 20th century was about sorting out supply. The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand.”
Creativity = Demand
And thus, figuring out how to manage for creativity (versus simply trying to control or organize it) is the business challenge of the future.
As we’ve experienced over 20+ years working in and running small and large ad agency creative departments, managing for creativity has as much to do with willingness, temperament, attitude, patience, philosophy and optimism as practical considerations, like work flow. Or time sheets.
The currency is ideas. The more you have, the better your chances. The better your abilities to filter, the more likely you will be to succeed.
You have ideas. Everyone does. That’s not the problem.
The problem is in understanding what the idea needs to accomplish, then mercilessly tuning that idea (or killing it, most likely) until it succeeds. You will kill more ideas than you tune or produce. Be quick. Get on with making new ideas. As an old mentor of ours puts it, “The business of creativity is learning to survive rejection.”
What do you think?
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