800-CEO-READ Excerpts

The Source of Success - Part V

The Creative Cauldron

But before getting to that, it may help to show what science has established about the origins of creativity. Creative acts happen in a particular, well-defined state of mind. This has been simply demonstrated by hooking the brain to an electroencephalograph and monitoring electrical impulses during a subject’s creative activity. As it turns out, the human brain’s electromagnetic frequency can be broken into four kinds of wave patterns: beta, alpha, theta, and delta. The beta state, the brain’s highest brain frequency, is where we spend the vast majority of our conscious time: the average waking state. It involves the cacophony of multiple stimuli and is least conducive to creativity. Alpha, by contrast, is the twilight between full consciousness and sleep, the golden hour, the most fertile state for the brain. Interestingly, it is the state of mind where children exist up to the ages of seven or eight. This, in part, explains why children are so prone to fantasy and play, free-association and intuition. Theta and delta are the lowest frequency levels, where some extraordinarilycreative people and some religious luminaries, including the Dalai Lama, have been found to exist in a conscious level. Theta and delta for most people are the brain frequencies emitted during the most healthful sleep time of their lives—and aren’t of interest to us here. It’s the alpha state an organization wants to cultivate if it hopes to encourage widespread creativity.

People whose consciousness is in an alpha state are, almost inevitably, more creative, more imaginative. It isn’t something reserved for the lucky few. A vast amount of literature describes how people find their own instinctive ways to get into an alpha state other than sleep. It takes practice. The most common and healthful way to achieve an alpha state is some form of meditation—focused, purposeful relaxation. There are many forms—yoga, Zen, simple breathing exercises—meditation is no more exotic than creativity itself. It’s a natural, simple way to achieve an alpha state while conscious, on an individual level.
Having worked with thousands of creative people, I’ve seen some unusual, idiosyncratic ways of getting into this state of mental flow. One fellow I worked with would drink a glass of warm water: that’s all it took to ignite his creative firepower, as he put it. Another visualized lowering himself into a well where, deep down, toward the bottom of the well, he found the source of his inspiration. There were other practical solutions: rocking in an easy chair, a rhythmic motion that stimulated new ideas, and obviously brought back memories of that continuous alpha state of childhood. Still others looked deep into space with their eyes aimed upward at a 45-degree angle.

These are all individual efforts. I have experienced such moments myself and have observed them many times in business. Organizations magnify individual creativity through collaboration, partnerships, brainstorming sessions, late-night teamwork, all of which produce an exponential enhancement of each individual’s productivity. As an example, in the advertising industry, “creative teams”—those people who produce the actual commercials—are always paired up, a writer working with an art director. Early in my career, I considered this unproductive. It seemed, well, expensive. My thinking was simple. Most writers I knew could draw and art directors could write—and this, it seemed, offered room to cut costs and improve productivity. What I came to realize was that some-thing else was at work here, the interaction between two creative minds, which seemed to work in practical reality better than a single mind. Literature about fifth-generation computers, yet to arrive, describes a parallel processing model that adds exponentially to what a single processor can do, regardless of its size. There may well be a useful analogy here: the outcome of collaborative efforts is far greater than the sum of the individual minds involved. The writer–art director pairing was in fact an investment in a greater, more rewarding creative output. Every business should seek and find opportunities to create collaborative environments that produce more creative results. The effort and investment is likely to be rewarded exponentially.

The Source of Success - Part IV

Knocking on the Door

Before you even attempt to walk through the door into this new world of creativity, you have to find your way toit. This requires a few conditions:

• A rational, comprehensive understanding of the core business problem, need, or opportunity. This is crucial: it’s where, having understood these elements of your situation, you can apply creativity to achieve productive differentiation.
• An intense, deep engagement with the task at hand. You have to immerse yourself in the issues before the spark of the new appears. You have to wallow in the facts, gain an understanding of conditions now. Understand nowin order to see the new.
• Practice and refine the skill of finding patterns of unconnected events in the world of human experience. This can be learned. Pattern recognition is one of the consistent elements of successfully creative business problem solvers. Insights can come from any direction if you hone this ability. Once, while reading an article in the Washington Poston the Aztec irrigation system that brought water to dry, barren fields in Mexico, I had a sudden recognition about how to help restructure my agency’s direct marketing organization. Stories abound in business about how enormously successful products, from Post-it notes to Viagra, were discovered by seeing a popular application of something originally developed for a completely different purpose.
• Let creativity lead you in unexpected directions when it’s strong. Discoveries in mathematics and in other fields offer many examples of the same kind of unexpected quality. If the discoverers hadn’t been prepared to see the originality and use for the creative discovery, these products wouldn’t exist— again, it depends on the ability to connect disparate patterns, see the application, and then be willing to shift direction toward anew purpose and goal.
• Learn to love the process of arriving at unusual, extraordinary solutions. Be willing to accept risk. A creative solution is almost always simple, but because it is different, it will always seem a bit risky to those around you. Learn to live with that.

It has become a truism that creative insight originates most often in the right hemisphere of the brain, while the left hemisphere governs rational thought. Both are essential in solving dramatically different kinds of problems. Researchers Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers, authors of Creativity in Business, who offer a course of the same name at Stanford School of Business, claim the entire brain comes into play during moments of intense creativity- including the limbic brain and brain stem, structures that reach back through eons of evolution. These findings show that creativity is an innate, biologically governed human activity. The question is how to encourage and integrate this individual biological process into larger organizational patterns.

It’s a tough but critical question. Few of us have been educated to be creative. Sadly, in America and other developed countries today, across most of our educational curriculum, the emphasis is almost exclusively on the logical and rational—skills as consistently repeatable as the sum of two plus two, necessary but hardly sufficient. What we teach our children, what we learn ourselves, is rarely anchored in an understanding of art, music, higher mathematics, or any of the other intuitive, nonlinear, and creative human achievements. This has to change. We must consciously decide to develop the brain’s whole capability and allow it to come into play. Secondary school leadership and higher education must help our next generations be better prepared to use their whole brains, not only for artistic development but also for everyday business. It is tragic to see in our times the first thing to be cut from public schools across the country is almost any form of art, music, and the other studies that nurture the creative process.

Up against the sort of thinking our schools turn out year after year, it’s no wonder business rarely operates to cultivate creativity, but instead reproduces environments inadvertently designed to stifle it. Once you understand how the brain becomes creative and what surroundings nourish that skill, you’ll begin to see why organizations need to operate in new and different ways.

The Source of Success - Part III

Creativity Is More Than a Gift

In business, creativity isn’t a gift reserved for the guy in marketing communications with the earring, though he may have a head start on a certain kind of creativity. The sort I’m talking about here is a learned skill essential for everyone and every successful organization. I emphasize, it can be learned—even though creative insights aren’t automatically predictable, repeatable, or rational. What’s troubling, at first, is that these spontaneous insights are precisely what organizations need to survive now. You can learn to tap into your creativity again and again, but the creative act won’t let itself be analyzed into submission. Rational thought, alone, will let you knock on the door of what’s new, but it won’t open that door.

Still, there’s nothing occult or mystical about creativity. It’s an innate human capacity, available to all healthy human beings. It is a neurological process, which, though it is yet to be fully understood or explained in scientific, technical terms, can be harnessed and nurtured. As elusive as it may seem, it’s a skill available to all fully engaged, normal people.

The Source of Success - Part II

Creativity

The workhorse of the twenty-first century will be creativity, and management has to create an environment where people can be ready for—and working toward—the breakthrough idea. The question is how to foster the productive creativity needed to differentiate a brand in a surplus economy. America and the rest of the developed world must take note: creativity is the force without which our children won’t enjoy a standard of living even remotely resembling ours. In the world of excess supply, natural resources, capital, and knowledge may let you make the cut into a global economic game—they won’t enable you to win it. As I argued earlier, all these strengths will become commonplace, and where creativity doesn’t drive a company’s strategic vision, most often the lowest price will be the winning formula. Success, abundance, a rising standard of living—for individuals, companies, communities, nations—will depend on a capacity to create, invent, and innovate.

It comes down to an ability to differentiate your product or service in a relevant way. This leads inevitably to increased margins and profits. Without differentiation, we lapse back into a world of commodities. Outsourcing is a symptom of the new economic reality, a way of cutting costs in the face of brutal competition— inevitable if you are producing undifferentiated products and services and struggling against tighter margins. Your job, if it exists at all during the next decade, could be headed for India. Then it may move to Ghana. Start now. Differentiate yourself and your products. Get excited about what you’re doing and add so much creativity and passion to what you do that nothing else compares with it. If you don’t, nobody will care. Your job will evaporate.

I’m not talking about playtime. I’m talking about a work environment managed specifically to become a breeding ground for the prepared mind: a mind that seeks and finds creative solutions. Creativity doesn’t mean entertainment, nor art. Unfettered creativity isn’t the silver bullet. Applied, productive creativity with strategic value is the key—and that arises from immersion in the realities of challenges in the market. Before you can even think of doing something new, you need a comprehensive understanding of your busi- nesses, products, and services as they exist today, a thorough understanding of how your organization is wired. Only with that as a foundation can a focused, productive creative energy lift an organization to the next level of practical, functional, and useful differentiation. You have not only to be good at the standard now, you have to understand the principles that have enabled you to succeed up to the present. Only then can you build on that foundation. Applied creativity needs to be fueled by knowledge of what is in order to get to what might be.

All this, again, only gets you onto the playing field. Once we qualify as competitors, we have to awaken and harness the creative power of everyone who contributes to an organized purpose. We need creativity aimed at a clearly defined target: the customer’s heart. Learn creativity, teach it, and adapt it to every aspect of your waking life, because it isn’t a “soft” subject anymore. It’s the hardest core competency a business needs to develop.

The good news is, creativity is an inexhaustible, universal resource. It’s as necessary as the air we breathe—and, luckily, it’s almost as plentiful.

The Source of Success - Part I

The Source of Success: Five Enduring Principles at the Heart of Real Leadership
by Peter Georgescu, David Dorsey, Ram Charan (Foreword)
Jossey-Bass – August 2005
244 Pages – 0787980374

Even with the beatings that ad agencies are taking, I don't think you can argue with their ability to harness creativity. And harness may be the wrong word. I immediately jumped the chapter on creativity (the other four principles are enlightened leadership, competency, alignment, and values). Here is an excerpt from the chapter called "Creativity: Tomorrow's Factory Today".