Bob Sutton

Corporate Creativity: Wisdom From The Late Gordon MacKenzie

As I have written here before, my favorite book on corporate creativity is Orbiting the Giant Hairball by the late Gordon MacKenzie. For me, nothing nearly as good has been written since.  I was searching for insights on creativity and came across this old -- but still very fresh -- Fast Company interview with him. Check out the whole thing (and read the book).  But here are a few gems:

'In the mid-1980s, MacKenzie founded an oasis for creativity -- called the Humor Workshop -- just outside the walls of Hallmark headquarters. "I wrote a one-page, handwritten description of the department," MacKenzie recalls. "Without telling my boss, I called his boss, the vice president of the creative division, and we had lunch. By the end of the meal, the VP was telling me, 'We've got to do this!'"

Eventually MacKenzie shifted his orbit and returned to company headquarters, this time with a title of his own invention: Creative Paradox. "My job was to be loyally subversive," he explains.'

That phrase "loyally subversive" is so delightful, so much cognitive complexity in this those two little words. Like this old story about Chuck House at HP.  Or how about this one:

I became a liaison between the chaos of creativity and the discipline of business. I had no job description and a title that made no sense, but people started coming to me with their ideas, and I would listen to those ideas and validate them. When you validate a person, what you're really doing is giving them power -- like a battery charger.

A battery charger!  Another great phrase, and consistent with Rob Cross's research on energizers.

Finally check-out his answer to the interviewer's question:

'What is the biggest obstacle to creativity?

Attachment to outcome. As soon as you become attached to a specific outcome, you feel compelled to control and manipulate what you're doing. And in the process you shut yourself off to other possibilities.

I got a call from someone who wanted me to lead a workshop on creativity. He needed to tell his management exactly what tools people would come away with. I told him I didn't know. I couldn't give him a promise, because then I'd become attached to an outcome -- which would defeat the purpose of any creative workshop.'

This last point is remarkably similar to a point that I heard from Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, make just a few months back.

Finally,note that these are arguments about how to spark creativity.  I would be the last person to argue that organizations need to be all about creativity all the time.   Doing routine things well requires an entirely different mindset.

Creativity as a Decision: Wisdom from Robert Sternberg

Robert Sternberg is a psychologist who has studied an astounding range of topics, from wisdom, to intelligence, to creativity, to love, to leadership.  I’ve been doing some reading on creativity this morning, and I ran into this quote from Sternberg in a comment that he wrote in the American Psychologist in 2002,  which he titled “Creativity as a Decision” (This was published in the May issue on page 376):

 

“If psychologists wish to teach creativity, they likely will do better to encourage people to decide for creativity, to impress on them the joys of making this decision, and also to inoculate them for some of the challenges attendant on this decision. Deciding for creativity does not guarantee that creativity will emerge, but without the decision, it certainly will not. As a mentor, nothing makes me happier than watching at least a substantial proportion of the students I have mentored make this decision. They decide that they may pay a price but that it is a price worth paying. By making this decision, they transform both their own lives and the lives of others. What greater reward can life hold?”

 

I like this both because it doesn’t sugar coat or over glorify creativity.  And its simplicity reminds me of Karl Weick’s lovely insight that people move through three stages as they gain knowledge about a subject: From overly simplistic, too overly complex, to – in rare cases – elegantly simple.  Sternberg seems to be getting to the third stage!   Sternberg argues that there are many studies and complex findings about creativity (e.g., does it require high or low self-esteem?), but the common theme he sees is that creative people have made the decision to be creative, regardless of setbacks and frustrations.  And his simple insight that deciding to be creative does not assure creativity, but without that decision, it is sure not to happen is intriguing.

McKinsey Quarterly Readers Love Brad Bird

As I wrote a few months back, Huggy Rao from Stanford, Allen Webb from McKinsey and I interviewed Pixar’s  Academy Award winning director Brad Bird for the McKinsey Quarterly.  Brad was one of the most lively and insightful people I've ever had the privilege of interviewing.  You can read it here  (there is also multi-media with it).  It seems that the Quarterly readers love Brad Bird too, as this article was the most popular among readers last quarter.

The two main things about innovation that Brad reinforced for me are the value of tolerating and celebrating constructive friction and of never being satisfied with good enough -- he made very clear about how the mediocrity of the once great Disney animation studio could be traced directly to the attitude that "we are satisfied with our work, it is good enough."  In contrast, my daughter and I were lucky enough to see a preview of WALL-E earlier in the week at Pixar (an astounding movie, especially the first 30 minutes are pure magic), and although the Pixar people we talked to were clearly very proud of this film, the main thing they seemed worried about was that all their success would make them complacent and less creative.  That kind of paranoia and hungriness is, I think, a hallmark of people and organizations that are creative over the long haul.