INTRODUCTION:

WHY CREATIVITY MATTERS IN YOUR
CAREER AND LIFE

The chief marketing officer strode into the conference room and sat at the head of a very large conference table—one large enough for me, two of my colleagues, and forty-five of his fellow employees, all directors or vice presidents of product development or marketing. Seven years earlier, the company had been a startup. Their growth had been so meteoric they were now an $8 billion Fortune 500 company with enough executives just in that room to field a basketball league. Nonetheless, they were in trouble.

All eyes turned to the person at the head of the table as he spoke. “As you know, we are under attack from our chief competitor in a very competitive marketplace and we are being engaged in a price war, a place we do not want to be,” he said. “In response to that attack, we have hired the most creative marketing agency in the world, and these three senior partners will review our situation and then provide us with a creative marketing response. But more important, they will advise us on innovating our current product offerings so that we can be more competitive.” All eyes in the room shifted to us. I could only think of three questions. Who outsources their company’s creativity and product innovation to an outside firm? What did all these people actually do? How did they get here?

Today, most people still believe that some of us are born creative and others are not—and that’s just the way it is. However, our creativity is not simply inherited, like brown eyes or blonde hair. Most people also still believe that right-brained people are more creative and left-brained people are more analytical, even though research in the past five years has shown that, in fact, we use both sides of our brain when we are being creative. We use both sides of the brain to fire our creative juices.

Many people associate creativity only with artists, writers, designers, and filmmakers, not programmers, for example, or lawyers, marketers, and accountants. But these are exactly the people who imagined online auction marketplaces, simplified legal services and forms, connected people with cars with those needing to be somewhere else, and found an easier way to do accounting for small businesses, creating eBay, LegalZoom, Uber, and Quick-Books, respectively.

The fact is, everyone is creative, and you can develop your inherent creative skills just like you would any other skill.

For eighteen years, I worked with big brands and startups as a marketing and branding expert and, with three other partners, built a $1 billion integrated marketing agency with more than 10,000 employees. I worked around “creative” people most of my life, but my belief—and our company’s premise—was that everyone in the agency was creative. We never really knew where the brilliant flash of inspiration would come from as we solved customer problems or helped them take advantage of new opportunities. Whether we were introducing new “virtual” automotive technology on the Mazda website or launching Amazon.com into the marketplace, we saw everything as a challenge that, with a certain amount of focused and structured creativity (“brainstorming”), would ultimately lead to innovative solutions or campaigns. Creativity for us was not a choice. It’s what we did every day for our clients and to win new business. Looking back, it seemed chaotically normal. So, if we thought being creative was normal, why doesn’t everyone else? Why can’t the companies we work in or lead also be creative? As all the research I’ve done on the subject of creativity and innovation indicates, they can.

Over the past four years, I have taught a course called Creativity and Innovation as part of the Entrepreneurship Program at San Diego State University. Before I taught this particular course, I researched how others taught or introduced creativity into their company culture. That included professors at some of the top universities in the world who sent me their syllabi and leaders at companies like Pixar and Disney, where creativity was high. (Disney has its own head of creativity training.)

And what I learned is that creativity isn’t something some people have and others don’t. We all have it. But we need a growth mindset, one that believes we can learn and grow our intelligence beyond what we were born with. We need to assemble diverse teams of people who “think different” but all agree on the problem at hand and strive to solve it together. To be truly productive, we need to apply brainstorming tools inside of frameworks that use limited time periods and a mentality that a quantity of ideas is initially better than fewer quality ideas. And if we are working inside of a company, senior management has to provide the right culture, environment, and leadership for creativity to thrive. I now know it can work. My own students have shown me their creative abilities year after year, and they continue to amaze me. And yet you may still ask, why is creativity important to you?

According to IBM’s 2012 Global Survey of 1,500 CEOs and entrepreneurs, 92 percent indicated that creativity and problem solving was the top trait or skill they look for in hiring or promoting an employee. That’s why I ask my students on the first day of class, “Who thinks they are creative?” Unsurprisingly, out of forty-five students, only four to six of them raise their hands. And yet after fifteen weeks of exercises, challenges, hands-on work with new tools, and learning how to spot problems, they’ve developed a growth mindset that fuels their creative potential. This is the mindset you will gain by reading this book. First, though, we have to address why you’re probably reading the book in the first place. Have you, like that tableful of executives from the Fortune 500 company, lost your creativity or never realized you had it?

Consider when you were a young child—let’s say between three and six years old. Without even thinking about it, you were naturally creative. Your instinctive curiosity and imagination fueled your day. You drove your parents crazy with the word “why.” You created “forts” out of pillows and sofa cushions. You ate dirt to see what it tasted like. You threw food at the wall to see if it would stick. You ate glue to see how it would taste. You got your sister to eat glue to see if she’d become a statue. You created amazing art with just your fingers. You were constantly using your imagination to play make-believe games and create imaginary friends. You had conversations with no one. You were insanely curious. And you were creative.

Research has shown that curiosity is highly linked to creativity, and we (parents, teachers, society, etc.) systematically begin to dull your creativity and ask you to conform between the ages of 4 and 12. Color between the lines. There is always just one right answer. You need to dress appropriately. Then, during your teenage years, your curiosity and potential creativity was further undermined by the premium placed on only the “right answers” for standardized testing. Eventually, little remains of your curious, childlike natural inclination to question and challenge the status quo. You covered your inner well of creativity, maybe without even knowing it.

But creativity and problem solving is exactly the skill most critical to personal, professional, and academic success in today’s rapidly changing world. According to education leaders, qualities such as curiosity, creativity, and imagination are for today’s kids “what the ‘three Rs’ were for previous generations.” If that’s the case, then you’d better understand exactly how creativity and innovation works and how you can get back what you had as a child.

The good news is that you can. You see, it never really left you; it’s just hidden. And you need to fire the flames of your “creative” spirit. The only way you will ever achieve your maximum potential is if you become better at solving problems or taking advantage of opportunities. So, let’s unleash your creative talent because that’s what you need to reap the greatest rewards today and keep ahead of the competition tomorrow.

Forty years ago, businesses assumed that they would have to create new products and services or respond to changes in the marketplace to ensure their viability and success—eventually. Speed was not really rewarded; steady and slow was the norm. Companies would get there when they got there, and customers would just have to wait. Innovation was glacial. It could take years, sometimes decades, before change rippled across global markets. Well, change has changed.

The modern world and marketplaces—global, domestic, and local—are amazingly fast and dynamic; they are now in a constant state of disruption largely thanks to the Internet and large marketplace segments like millennials and baby boomers. The new normal is fast, faster, fastest. All of a sudden, being creative and innovative is a requirement for most companies. That means that the people who are building these companies or working in them need to be more creative. That means you need to be more creative or, just like companies that don’t innovate, you will be left behind.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU SPECIFICALLY, IN THIS BOOK?

First, you will learn about all the “myths of innovation and creativity”—those things that everyone believes but are not true. Then I will introduce you to my CreativityWorks Framework, which consists of the following: mindset, environment (leadership and culture), habitat, and powerful brainstorming tools. Yes, brainstorming tools. Most brainstorming, as you may have already experienced, is haphazard, hit and miss, and most times a complete waste of time. Using the brainstorming tools I identify, within my recommended structure and time frame, you will begin to yield amazing ideation and creativity that will hopefully lead to innovative solutions. I will walk through the two types of mindset, fixed and growth, and explain why you need to adopt the latter. Then I will introduce you to the steps you can take to heighten individual and team creativity. After that, you will learn how to really set up and conduct brainstorming sessions using six different tools, all in a structured time frame. I will thoroughly walk you through all six different brainstorming tools so that you can understand which one to use when you try to address a problem or take advantage of an opportunity.

If you are not aware of key trends, marketplaces, and disruptions occurring today and emerging in the near future, I will highlight several you should pay attention to—and show you how you can recognize them yourself. Finally, I will share with you the backstories of several entrepreneurs and how they became curious about a problem they encountered, tried to solve it, and ended up creating amazing companies. If you use the knowledge and tools in this book, and adopt a growth mindset, you will become more creative and perhaps you too will create something amazing. All you need to start is to simply reengage your curiosity.

Curiosity is in fact what got me to where I am now. I was born in Europe, but grew up in New York and Michigan, one of five children. I had a pretty normal childhood, but I questioned everything, which got me into some trouble both at school and with my parents. I can’t really tell you why; I was not trying to be a rebel. I was just curious about how and why things worked. I did not really believe everything that people told me—I had to see, taste, or explore it for myself. Right when I was graduating college in 1983, I had two job offers; one salary was fully twice as much as the other. But I was curious about a marketing agency that said it was using computers to drive marketing. I knew nothing about computers and little about marketing but felt, based on my curiosity and instinct, they were critical to my future. So I chose the lesser paying job. That curiosity paid off very well as I got in at the beginning of database marketing and working at the agency hastened the development of my marketing knowledge and skills. Within one year, the agency asked for volunteers to launch a spinoff business that would focus on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty programs. I joined the team. I’d bet well; the spinoff exploded to $20 million in revenue in two years (about $50 million in 2016 dollars), as did my responsibilities and career. In the next few years, I further developed my marketing expertise and fed my curiosity about the future by learning how to recognize and follow trends. I read voraciously and networked with industry thought leaders and analysts. I wanted to understand the potential future before it got here. If I could do that, my clients would value me immensely. I challenged myself to know more than the next person. I also challenged myself to find other people like me so that we could build an amazing company. I didn’t know where they were exactly, but I knew they were not in Detroit, so I accepted an opportunity to work with clients in New York.

Later, while in New York working on the Mercedes-Benz account, I was flying first class to San Francisco on business and I sat next to a person about seven years younger than me. I was in a dark blue Brooks Brothers suit and he was dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt. I was curious why this person sitting in first class was dressed, well, rather casually. Turned out he was the director of marketing for a company called Apple Computer. We had an amazing four-hour conversation. I marketed cars that came out once a year; he sold new computer products every quarter. I was so curious about the challenge of marketing new products every quarter, and this young executive, with only a couple years of experience, was so fearlessly creative. I instinctively knew the people I was looking for were in California. Within one year, I had moved to Silicon Valley and was working with Apple on several marketing programs.

One day the senior VP of marketing at Apple suggested that I meet the founders of a small graphic design agency. Initially, I was not interested. He suggested it again about two weeks later, telling me that the founders were some of the most creative marketing people he had ever met. Now, I was curious. I met with them for one hour, walked outside, leaned against the wall, and knew that I had just found the most creative people I had ever met, too. One person was a former creative director at Apple; the other two had strategic marketing experience in consumer foods and technology. They were all about thirty-two years old. Within one year, I joined them, and in the next seven years we built the best integrated marketing agency in the world, which we would take through an initial public offering (IPO) and grow to over 10,000 employees, with $1.2 billion in annual revenue and offices in thirty countries. Best creative years of my life.

Later, after eight years as a turnaround executive, I found my way to San Diego State University. I was curious about whether I had what it takes to teach young minds. Shortly after beginning my career at SDSU, I met a man at a university networking event. We ended up sitting next to each other, and after we politely said hello to each other, I noticed that he seemed stressed out. So I asked him how his day was going. He was the executive director of the entrepreneurship center and he lamented that he was losing a key person. I told him about my background and he asked why I was wasting my time just teaching two courses. He suggested I join the center and work with him in running the current programs. I told him his current strategy and programs regarding the center sounded “terminally disinteresting.” He asked for forty-eight hours to put together three strategic objectives that he felt would challenge me in a way that would also greatly benefit the university. When we met again, the three strategic objectives were so large that initially I did not think I could accomplish them in anything less than five years. He had piqued my curiosity. Within thirty days, I was the director of the entrepreneurship center at SDSU, where today I still run the center’s programs and teach in the entrepreneurship program. Today, San Diego State University is ranked in the top twenty entrepreneurship programs in the United States, according to Forbes and U.S. News & World Report.

Curiosity had taken me a long way and still does today. I wrote a book called Fail Fast or Win Big that was published in 2015, all because I agreed to do a TEDx talk. My editor, who was curious about TEDx talks he could turn into books, found my talk through an acquaintance and contacted me. We had several conversations over a five-week time period and I signed a contract to write Fail Fast or Win Big. Simply Brilliant came about because I was curious about teaching a course on creativity and innovation in the entrepreneurship program. The more I researched, the more I wanted to teach this kind of a course. It just so happened that the department chair was looking for someone else to teach the class. I agreed to teach the class if I could have one year to do the research and to design the course. He agreed, and I have taught the class for four years now to what I hope are insanely curious students. When I told my editor about wanting to write a book based on the class, he, being curious himself, said, “Go for it.”

For most of my career, my practical experience has centered on creative people and the innovative solutions we crafted. We had what David and Tom Kelley from IDEO like to call “creative confidence.” We had a growth mindset that overcame any personal mental blocks or misgivings about being creative. We believed we were creative and were supposed to come up with innovative solutions, so we did. You can too. You just need to believe that you are creative. My mission today, at San Diego State University, in the San Diego community, and with this book, is to help as many people like yourself to realize you have the potential to be amazingly creative.

I will invite you to begin your creativity journey with this quote from one of my former students who took my Creativity and Innovation course. It illustrates why I teach this course:

Ever since I can remember, everyone has told me that I am not creative. My parents told me, my teachers told me, and my friends even remarked that I was just not creative. However, after taking this course, I am shocked to learn that I am creative. Our teams came up with great solutions to the problems we faced in our group projects. And I often found myself being the one who suggested ideas that led to a breakthrough in our projects. With the knowledge I have gleaned from this course, the books we read about the myths of innovation, and the creative exercises and tools we learned to use, I am going to live the rest of my life knowing that I am creative and can lead teams to be creative and perhaps even innovative. Thanks for changing my life.

What have people told you your entire life? Do you feel creative? Do you really want to be more creative? If so, read on.