Principle 1: Everyone has creative potential

I worked for a time as advisor to an international cultural organization, which also has a major art museum. I was having lunch one day with the head of security. He was irritated and I asked him why. He asked if I had heard about the study that the senior management had commissioned on how to improve the “visitor experience” to the museum. I did know about the study and that a New York firm of consultants had been brought in to conduct it. I asked him what the problem was. He said, “Why doesn’t the senior management ask us?”

“For innovation to flourish, it has to be seen as an integral purpose of the whole organization rather than as a separate function.”

He led a large team of security staff who spent much of their time in the galleries and corridors, in the car parks and public spaces, interacting with the visitors and answering their questions. They helped visitors to find the restaurants and rest-rooms, directed them to the exhibits and often to particular works of art. He said, “My staff probably know more about the nature of the visitor experience than any other group in this organization, yet the management is spending a small fortune on a firm of outside consultants who’ve never been here before; and we’re not even being consulted. Apparently, the leadership thinks the sole role of security is to slap people’s hands if they try to touch the exhibits.”

Organizations often associate creativity with specific functions; for example, with marketing, design and advertising. While these can be highly creative fields, creativity and innovation are possible in everything an organization does. For innovation to flourish, it has to be seen as integral to the whole organization rather than as a separate function of part of it. Everyone in an organization has different experiences of how it works and insights on how it might be improved.

In 2001, Gallup published a study that estimated that “actively disengaged employees” were costing the US economy alone between $292 and $355 billion a year.³ Later studies show that engaged employees, in contrast, are more productive, profitable and create stronger customer relationships. Workplace engagement is a powerful factor in facilitating creative thinking on how to improve business processes and customer service. According to Gallup, 59% of “engaged employees” strongly agreed that their job brought out their most creative ideas, while only 3% of “actively disengaged employees” said the same.

I meet many people who don’t enjoy the work they do. They endure it. It’s not their life’s mission: it’s just what they do to make a living. I also meet people who love what they do and who couldn’t imagine doing anything else. They are in their element. To say that somebody is in their element means firstly that they are doing something for which they have a natural aptitude. It can be for any sort of work: administration, design, teaching, cooking, working alone or with other people. The essence of diversity is that people are good at very different things: what deters one person may have an irresistible attraction for another. Being good at something is not enough. Plenty of people do things they are good at but don’t really care for. Being in your element is not only about aptitude, it’s about passion: it is about loving what you do. When you’re doing something you love, time changes and an hour can feel like five minutes. If you’re not in your element, five minutes can feel like an hour. The clock seems to have stopped. Being in your element is about tapping into your natural energy and your most authentic self. When that happens, as Confucius once said, you never work again.

Being a creative leader means ensuring that everyone is playing to their creative strengths and feels valued for their contribution to the overall performance of the organization. In every organization there are all sorts of untapped talents and abilities. People join companies from many different backgrounds and with many different profiles, but they’re often perceived only on the basis of their past education and current job descriptions.

Identifying individual talents is not simply a matter of conducting a formal audit. There are some general tests for creative thinking and a growing battery of instruments for assessing personal strengths.⁴ Most of these tests give only a rough indication of potential. A better strategy is to put people in situations and give them challenges that reveal their abilities; some of which they may have been unaware of themselves. An advertising company I know in New York has established its own university with classes by members of the company’s own staff. The designers run courses on graphics; the copywriters on creative writing; and the accountants on financial management. The program encourages a greater understanding between departments of each other’s work and creates a strong sense of common culture. It also develops the skill base of the company and has stirred up the internal talent pool. Several people have moved to other departments because they found that they were good at something other than the job they were hired to do.

“Being in your element is not only about aptitude, it’s about passion: it is about loving what you do.”

Principle 2: Innovation is the child of imagination

In the early stages of a project, a good deal of creative work is about playing with ideas, riffing, doodling, improvising and exploring new possibilities. The quality of what is done often depends on making fresh connections, breaking with convention and seeing from different perspectives. A creative organization, as Peter Richards puts it, “is first and foremost a place that gives people freedom to take risks; second it is a place that allows people to discover and develop their own natural intelligence; third, it is a place where there are no ‘stupid’ questions and no ‘right’ answers; and fourth, it is a place that values irreverence, the lively, the dynamic, the surprising, the playful.”⁵

Pixar is one of the most innovative and acclaimed film studios in the history of the movies. Since launching Toy Story, its first animated feature, in 1995, Pixar has produced 17 feature films, a variety of short films and a host of industry-changing technological innovations. The company has won over 210 awards, including 27 Academy Awards, a fistful of Golden Globes, and Grammys and has earned more than $10 billion worldwide. Pixar knows something about corporate creativity.

Pixar has a fascinating culture. It includes the Pixar University, a program of workshops, events, lectures and seminars that takes place on the Pixar campus every day. The university offers the equivalent of an undergraduate education in fine arts and the art of filmmaking and over a hundred courses including filmmaking, painting, drawing, sculpting and creative writing. Every member of the Pixar payroll, including the animators, accountants, catering staff, technicians, production assistants, marketers and security guards, is entitled and encouraged to spend up to four hours of every working week in the Pixar University.

Randy Nelson was Dean of the University for 12 years. Formerly a juggler and co-founder of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, he says that the university is part of everyone’s work because everyone on the payroll is a filmmaker. Everyone has access to the same curriculum and people from every level within the company will sit alongside one another in class. At one class on “Lighting and Motion Picture Capture,” the students included a post-production software engineer, a set dresser, a marketer and a company chef, Luigi Passalacqua. “I speak the language of food,” he said. “Now I’m learning to speak the language of film.”

The university has many benefits for Pixar. Since anybody can go to any course, there is a constant flow of new ideas running through the organization. People from different areas of the organization work with each other and are reminded that they are all part of a single effort. The skills that are developed in the university are used everywhere within the organization. A drawing class doesn’t just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant, no matter what their usual role. Nelson says, “There’s no company on earth that wouldn’t benefit from having people become more observant.”

“Being creative is not only a matter of inspiration. It requires skill, craft in the control of materials and a reciprocating process of critical evaluation.”

The Pixar University crest features the Latin motto, Alienus Non Diutius, “Alone No Longer.” Nelson says, “It’s the heart of our model; giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together.” Above all, the Pixar University is a practical way of energizing the imaginations of everyone in the company, of uncovering often-unknown personal talents, and of cross-pollinating the culture of the whole organization.⁶

Principle 3: We can all learn to be more creative

Brainstorming is one of a number of ways to facilitate the first mode of creative thinking: the generation of ideas. Simply being asked to go off and have some new ideas is rarely enough. I was once sent with 40 or so other academics on a training program called “Managing a University Department.” In the first session I sat with seven other heads of department including professors of sociology, engineering, physics and social sciences. Just before coffee we were asked to have a brainstorming session on the future of education. We were given large sheets of paper and thick marker pens and five minutes. (If you ever lose consciousness and wake up wondering where you are, check whether you have a thick marker pen in your hand and a large sheet of paper in front of you. If so, there is a good chance you’re on a management course.) What followed wasn’t quite the monsoon of ideas we’d been led to expect. This wasn’t so much a storm, more a light drizzle – a faint condensation on the walls. We ventured a few self-conscious thoughts and then fell into general conversation until the croissants turned up.

Being creative is not only a matter of inspiration. It requires skill and craft. Professional development in the general skills of creative thinking (including how to work in creative teams) is an important feature of creative organizations but, as I noted in Chapter 3, organizations are often reluctant to invest in it.⁷ Many take a short-term view of training needs, which can ultimately be counter-productive because it eats away at organizational loyalties and the sense of common purpose on which creative cultures depend.

For McKinsey the moral is straightforward: “You can win the war for talent but first you must elevate talent management to a burning corporate priority. Then, to attract and retain the people you need, you must create and perpetually refine an employee value proposition, senior management’s answer to why a smart, energetic, ambitious individual would want to come and work with you rather than with the team next door. That done, you must turn your attention to how you’re going to recruit great talent and finally develop, develop, develop!” One solution is “to form smaller, more autonomous units, create the maximum number of P&L jobs each business will bear and use special project teams to provide new challenges and ways of working together.”⁸ Another, as Pixar and others have shown, is in-house universities that award their own qualifications.

In 1981, Motorola was the first company in the United States to develop a corporate university (CU). Today there are hundreds throughout the world.⁹ A corporate university is “an internal structure designed to improve individual and business performance by ensuring that the learning and knowledge of a corporation is directly connected to its business strategy.” A corporate university’s students are drawn from its employees and it normally accredits the programs it provides.The principal purpose is to offer learning opportunities that advance the organization’s goals: by developing a sense of corporate citizenship; enabling staff to understand the context and priorities of the organization’s work; and developing the specific skills and aptitudes that give the organization its competitive edge. The benefits are also personal.

I once spoke at the national conference of an international hotel chain, which included awarding degrees to graduates of the company’s corporate university. One told me this was her first experience of educational success. She had done well in the company even though she had failed at school. This was the first time she had been on a program that uncovered her real strengths and raised her confidence as a learner. Providing such opportunities is a core role of a creative leader and one of the rewards of a creative culture.

Principle 4: Creativity thrives on diversity

“Diversity is a powerful resource for creative teams and in the workforce as a whole.”

IDEO is a leading design and innovation consultancy. Based in Palo Alto, California, it has offices in Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, London, Munich and Shanghai. IDEO has worked with dozens of organizations to develop hundreds of products in industries as diverse as toys, office equipment, furnishings, computers, medical applications and automotives. It has been ranked among the Business Week top 25 innovative companies, and has offered consulting advice to the other 24. IDEO’s expertise is not in any of the industries it advises: it is in innovation itself. Its work is based on “design thinking.” For each project, a team of specialists is brought together from different disciplines, including: engineering, product and industrial, ergonomics, behavioral sciences, marketing and market research. They explore the task from different angles and develop a range of possible solutions. Each idea is prototyped, critiqued and tested until the final version emerges. As Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, explains, “a competent designer could always improve upon last year’s widget, but an interdisciplinary team of skilled design thinkers is in a position to tackle more complex problems.”

From research organizations to commercial companies, the best creative teams bring together people who think differently, who may be of different ages and genders, or with different cultural backgrounds and professional experiences. Diversity is a powerful resource for creative teams and in the workforce as a whole. Not all companies have woken up to this. Leaders and managers tend to hire people who look and seem like themselves. I’ve worked with a number of organizations on the need for a diversity strategy. One was an international investment bank with offices in Europe, America and Asia. The bank was proud of its diversity strategy though it evidently had some way to go, as I realized when I was briefed by one of the all-male, white, middle-aged senior management team. I asked him how the diversity strategy was coming along. He thought the company was doing pretty well. “In fact,” he said, “I’m interviewing a diverse candidate tomorrow.” I asked him what he meant by a diverse candidate. He said, “You know, a woman.” That evening, I told my wife she was diverse. She had no idea.

Diversity, naturally, takes many forms. One dimension is innate characteristics, including gender, age and sexual orientation. A second is cultural background, including ethnicity and nationality. A third is professional background, including work experience, education and expertise. In a rapidly changing world, there are ethical reasons for promoting diversity in the workplace. There are also strategic reasons. A more diverse workforce helps the organization to be in tune with the changing cultural environment in which it is operating. It also provides a deep resource of different perspectives to sustain a culture of innovation.

Principle 5: Creativity loves collaboration

Bringing people together from different disciplines is no guarantee of creative work. They have to be able to collaborate so that their differences become assets not obstacles. Collaboration, as Randy Nelson observes, is not the same as cooperation. Cooperation only requires that the efforts of different people be synchronized in some way. They may be doing separate tasks at different times yet still be cooperating, as long as one supports the completion of another one. This is the typical modus operandi of industrial assembly lines and the linear processing of many administrative tasks.

“The creative impulses of most people can be suffocated by negative criticism, cynical putdowns or dismissive remarks.”

Collaboration means working together in ways that affect the nature of the work and its outcomes. According to Randy Nelson, collaboration has to be based on two key principles. First, everyone has to accept every contribution that’s made. The aim is to build on each other’s contributions not undermine them. At Pixar, they call this “plussing.” Second, always make your work partners look good. The aim is not to judge what they offer but to make something of it and raise everybody’s game.¹⁰ The creative ideas of most people can be doused by negative comments, cynical putdowns or dismissive remarks. Effective collaborators “amplify” each other’s contributions. Tim Brown from IDEO makes the same point. Design thinking is collaborative, “but in a way that amplifies rather than subdues the creative processes of individuals; focused but at the same time flexible and responsive to unexpected opportunities: focused not just on optimizing the social, the technical and business components of a project but on bringing them a need and a design response.”¹¹ The IDEO slogan is “None of us is smarter than all of us.”

Vis Viva is a teaching and research group of artists and engineers in the United States. A leading member of the group points out a common misconception about interdisciplinary groups: “The notion that we are trying to bring aesthetics to engineers or conversely bring a rigorous empiricism to artists is not the point at all. The point is both of these groups do both of these things in different ways. Our group attempts to foster creativity by creating space for interaction between disciplines and viewpoints.”¹²

Creative teams are diverse and dynamic. They are also distinct. They come together for particular tasks and when the job is done they break up. I once worked on a number of creativity events with John Cleese from Monty Python. The six members of Monty Python were very different but they had ways of working which made their differences energizing, highly productive – and very funny. They created many things together that they would almost certainly never have thought of had they not met. A great leader knows who to put in a team, what roles to give each person on the team, and when it’s time to move onto something else.

Principle 6: Creativity takes time

Original ideas can take time to evolve. Creative organizations understand that time is an essential resource for innovation. Some offer staff time to work on their own ideas. At Google, engineers are allowed to use 20% of their time for discretionary projects. If they come up with an idea that might interest the company, they can pitch it to the senior management team. Five percent of all products that have been launched by Google were developed in the discretionary time. The 20% allocation is valuable in itself but also because it tells the workforce that the company values their creativity enough to give them the freedom to do what they are most passionate about.

“The processes of creativity can also be stifled by a sense that ideas are unlikely to be taken seriously if they come from the wrong places.”

Principle 7: Creative cultures are supple

There is no single strategy for developing a culture of innovation. Some companies set up innovation programs or labs, which can focus on developing new projects without disturbing the rest of the organization. The disadvantage is that they may become detached from the general culture of the organization and rejected by it when they try to reintegrate. Like tissue rejection when organs from one body are transplanted into another, cultural antibodies from the host can attack the alien ideas and neutralize or destroy them. Anyone who has been on an off-site training course might know this feeling when they go back to work on Monday and try to “cascade” what they’ve learnt over the weekend.

Creativity can be stifled by a sense that ideas are unlikely to travel up the organization or not be taken seriously if they come from the wrong places; or by pressure to deliver results too soon; or by the wrong criteria of accountability. The IBM study, Capitalizing on complexity, found that CEOs who are capitalizing on complexity have focused on three areas:

• Embodying creative leadership: Creative leaders consider previously unheard-of ways to engage more actively with customers and partners and employees.
• Reinventing customer relationships: With the Internet, new channels and globalizing customers, organizations need to rethink approaches to better understand, interact with and serve their clients.
• Building operating dexterity: Successful CEOs refashion their organizations, making them faster, more flexible and capable of using complexity to their advantage.

The report concluded that “creative leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.”

When John Chambers took over at CISCO Systems in 1995, he thought of his leadership role in three main ways: developing a vision and strategy of the company; building the team to implement that strategy; and communicating the strategy within and beyond the company. After he’d been in the role for four or five years, he began to think differently about his role. He began to focus on the company culture. Great companies, he says, have great cultures. “A huge part of a leadership role is to drive the culture of the company and to reinforce it.” He changed his style of leadership from command and control to collaboration and teamwork. “It sounds easy to do, but it is hard, because you are trained that way in MBA school, in law school. Around 80 to 90 percent of the job is how we work together toward common goals, which requires a different skill set.”

Engineers, says Chambers, “are part business leaders, part artists, and you’ve got to know which hat they have on.” He now sees the need for a fundamental change in ways of working “that may be really important to the future of business in this country and the world.” At Cisco, the emphasis is increasingly on collaborative teams, on cross-sector groups drawn from sales, engineering, finance, legal and other departments. “We’re training leaders to think across silos. We now do that with 70 different teams in the company. So we’ll have a sales leader go run engineering. A lawyer go and run business development; a business development leader go run our consumer operations. We’re going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaborative teamwork. I think that’s the future of leadership.”¹³

Sir John Harvey Jones, the former leader of ICI, the international chemicals company, made the same point: “Every single person in business,” he said “needs to acquire the ability to change, the self-confidence to learn new things and the capacity for helicopter vision. The idea that we can win with brilliant scientists and technologists alone is absolute nonsense. It’s breadth of vision, the ability to understand all the influences at work, to flex between them and not be frightened of different experiences and viewpoints that hold the key. We need every single pressure from business at the moment to make clear that the specialist who cannot take the holistic view of the whole scene is no use at all.”¹⁴

“In all cases, innovation involves calculating risks.”

Principle 8: Creative cultures are inquiring

Innovation involves trial and error, being wrong at times and sometimes having to back up and start again. There is a tendency throughout the corporate world towards short-termism. Ironically, these pressures arise in response to the very challenges that call for a long-term view. As organizations compete in increasingly aggressive markets, budgets for experimental research, blue-sky thinking and long-range development are being cut back in the interests of immediate returns and instant results. The effect can be to stifle the very sources of creativity on which long-term success ultimately depends.

Being creative isn’t all about chaos and risk. Creativity in any domain is a balance of freedom and control. Innovation involves calculating risks and the organization’s tolerance for them. I talked about risk taking and creative leadership with one of the most successful unit trust managers in Europe. Like all financial institutions, his was being borne along on a turbulent current of change. He described how his own style of leadership has changed to meet these new circumstances:

“I have discovered, upon achieving a ‘top’ position in management, that there is nowhere to hide. One has to make a comprehensive attempt to get things right. This for me at first involved trying to decide everything – I had to know the answers myself, I thought. This led to a series of mistakes and then inertia; indeed I fell flat on my face in the metaphorical mud. I then found that I had to admit my mistakes rather publicly and ask for help from my colleagues to get myself back on two feet. This seems to have been the beginning of some sort of improved understanding of the manager’s role.

I began to delegate, realizing that others were more competent than me. I began to listen, rather than compete with others to produce the cleverest answer. I began to do what I knew I could do, which was to offer support and encouragement to my colleagues rather than seek to score points. I found myself gradually beginning to question, and in many instances unlearn, the very lessons I had spent most of my life learning, as I realized that being dogmatic is the fast road to disaster in a changing environment. Yet at the same time I found that I needed a sense of direction; otherwise it seemed that I would be abrogating responsibility rather than delegating it.

I endeavored to balance directness and openness as closely as possible with a willingness to listen and consider positively the viewpoint of other parties. It seems in practice that it is precisely at the point of convergence of these two ‘vectors’ that the natural way forward always lies. It is hard to find and I’m sure that I never find it precisely as I’m certain that I’m never fully open nor do I fully listen and consider. But it seems to work a whole lot better than my previous approach.

We are now trying to achieve the same balance in the firm as a whole. Admitting what we are not good at has led, for example, to outsourcing of certain functions. Willingness to listen has led to more harmonious senior management discussions, enhanced trust, and speedy decision-taking as colleagues have ceased second guessing each other, particularly in areas where the second guesser has little knowledge. It’s also leading to more delegation and to more empowerment of younger members of staff, who often have clearer minds.

This thinking has, in turn, engendered a greater sense of partnership – both within the firm, reflected in the Board’s willingness to create stock ownership plans for all staff worldwide who have been with the firm for more than a year – and also with our clients, suppliers and shareholders through better communication. Interestingly, it is also coinciding with a greater consciousness that we can contribute to our local community. None of this seems to be at the expense of competitiveness. I believe that our competitiveness is enhanced and I think we are learning once again as an organization and new opportunities are arising continuously.

“The traditional design of office buildings and spaces is rooted in the nineteenth century.”

It has required us to increase training significantly, particularly at senior management levels, including the use of management psychologists, and has led us to introduce 360-degree appraisals for senior managers. In graduate recruitment we are relying much more upon internships. Most of all, it is fun, certainly for me and I hope for my colleagues. Interestingly, being a multinational company with employees from a whole range of cultural backgrounds has been both a spur to re-examine our approaches and a rich source of different perspectives.”¹⁵

Principle 9: Creative cultures need creative spaces

The physical environment is an embodiment of organizational culture. The size and shape of workspaces, the configuration of furnishings and equipment, the quality of lighting, fabrics and colors all create ambiences that may encourage or discourage creativity. Until the 1980s, there was little research into the effects of workspaces on the work done. Since then a number of studies have been published in what is now known as “environmental psychology” and the obscurely named field of “cognitive ergonomics.” The traditional design of office buildings and spaces is rooted in the nineteenth-century model of industrial work. When the emphasis is on efficiency, the main considerations in the workspace may be productivity, maximum occupancy and uniformity. These are hardly the right environments for stimulating imagination, creativity and innovation.

More flexible patterns of working mean that there is a blurring of boundaries between the home and office, work, play and personal time. It’s often important to allow staff to personalize their workspace in ways that they find most conducive to creative work. Where collaboration matters, there is a need for shared spaces for meetings and workshops.