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Creativity simply is not ingrained in American business culture. This perception is illustrated in a commercial for the legendary but ever-struggling IBM. In this spot, a manager enters a sparse room, switches on a light, and discovers a roomful of employees lying on their backs in the dark. When asked what they are doing, they respond that they are "ideating" to "rethink the way we are doing things—structure, process. We need to innovate." Asked how, the team informs, "We haven't ideated that yet." The spot, which ends with "Stop Talking, Start Doing" is funny—and is meant to be funny—because this room full of people claiming to be reshaping the business appears to be doing nothing.

The IBM ad characterizes the current status of creativity in the business world; misunderstood at best and often relegated to a status of minimal value. Can we really afford to be blind to what is potentially our greatest single resource at a time when we need to rethink how we will be more competitive in a global economy? We will argue that creativity is a business fundamental that is underutilized, and, when properly understood and employed, provides great results that are the hallmark of businesses that will be successful in the future economy.

At the root of this under-utilization are two main culprits: lack of understanding of how creativity is valuable to business and under skilled managers and employees who rely on a known, but ultimately limited, set of skills and techniques.

To activate the Creativity Culture, businesses need to develop a clear understanding of how creativity is used in all aspects of managing, developing, and growing their businesses, and appreciate what is working well and where there are Creativity Gaps. Given the current economic situation, creativity is one of the most cost effective tools managers have available to reposition their businesses for recovery and to insulate themselves from likely economic volatility in the future. Therefore, we suggest five things managers can do right now to stimulate their Creativity Culture to show improvement with little or no financial investment:

Creativity is a Business Fundamental, Not a "Nice-to-Have"

The imperative for creativity in business has been the subject of much academic as well as business research over the last five years. Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile, who has written extensively on the subject of creativity in business, along with her colleague Mukti Khaire, convened a colloquium in 2008 that "brought together nearly 100 people who were deeply concerned with the workings of creativity in organizations, and let the sparks fly." As the sparks flew, Amabile and Khaire write, they "saw a new agenda for business leadership begin to take shape…The leadership imperatives we discussed…reflect a viewpoint we came to hold in common: One doesn't manage creativity. One manages for creativity."

Indeed, this viewpoint—that creativity is imperative for successful leadership—is held in common not only among the attendees of the Harvard colloquium, but by virtually all who have made significant contributions to the study of creativity in business. In their article, "Managing for Creativity," Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight succinctly inventory the convergent schools of thought on the subject, cogently leveraging the conclusions of previous writers, including Amabile, to assert the business necessity of managing for creativity. Business leaders across industries have taken steps to become more innovative, hiring consultants, instituting initiatives, and employing myriad approaches to generate great new ideas. Yet despite these time and resource investments, these same business leaders are disappointed with their results. A 2007 survey on innovation by the Boston Consulting Group reports that for the 2,500 executives surveyed, "innovation remains a highly valued and sought-after capability. The majority of responding companies consider it important—even critical—to their business, and they're spending larger and larger sums on it. Yet many remain frustrated with the return on that investment…This state of affairs isn't new; it's been a constant refrain since [Boston Consulting Group] launched [its] first survey on innovation back in 2004."

Florida and Goodnight reach a similar conclusion, closing their research review by noting that, "despite such insights and advances, most businesses have been unable to pull these notions of creativity together into a coherent management framework."

It should not be surprising that so many companies have experienced this frustration. Typically the business world is more comfortable embracing innovation rather than creativity. Creativity which is an engine that drives results is challenging to measure, and therefore, to manage, whereas innovation, an outcome of creativity, is more tangible. Yet this mindset limits the true and unrealized potential of seriously embracing a Creativity Culture that has much more potential to yield lasting business improvements. Business leaders crave innovation and often are at a loss as to how to have their organizations be more innovative, so they end up resorting to a narrow spectrum of approaches that are temporary and limited in scope. To avoid repeating these pitfalls, success in establishing Creativity Culture in businesses will require a more comprehensive and integrated approach that looks at the entire organization and its performance in creativity.

To think about creativity as a business fundamental requires treating it with the same discipline applied to other business fundamentals. It must be planned for, measured, and utilized in all phases of business execution—embedded in the fabric of the organization. Similar to the common practice of asking questions about cost and value when making decisions, managers also need to ask additional questions with a creative orientation before embarking on initiatives. Consider the implications of supplementing the questions "Is this the right work?" or "Is this work valuable?" with "Are we getting all the ideas we need?" or "What are options for how we can approach this work?" Once businesses get serious about asking questions about creativity, they will begin to see returns on their investment in building a creativity culture.

The Creativity Gap Defined
In the IBM ad, the joke is double edged, because the (unintentional) message is just the point we are illustrating about the business that fails to look at ways to tap into employee creativity; the manager, with his perplexed look, just doesn't get it. In fact, he seems fearful of what his employees are doing, causing him to walk away and wish them luck, rather than explore how their ideas might benefit the company. His fear explicitly causes him to slam the door on a creative way of looking at the business.

In this example, "Just doing it," to hijack a phrase from another mega-corporation, isn't going to reshape the business either, because this manager, literally left in the dark at the commercial's end, simply will return to "doing" the same thing his company always has done. And as IBM has learned over and over in its storied history, that kind of thinking prevents a company from changing at the pace of its market and meeting the aggressive growth demanded of a corporation in the modern economy. This pervasive and ingrained challenge to creativity has not gone unnoticed; "when asked what they thought was preventing their companies from achieving higher returns, executives most commonly cited a risk-averse corporate culture, as well as overly lengthy development times, a lack of coordination within the company, and difficulty choosing the right ideas to commercialize." For many managers, it therefore is much easier to "close the door" than try to overcome these obstacles to success.

The second component of the Creativity Gap is that companies tend to designate creativity departments (such as marketing or research and development) rather than extend the culture of creativity throughout the business. These departments frequently are hogtied by process and protocol, limiting their ability to bring innovation at the speed of modern business. Consider, for example, that the Big Three automakers, while investing billions in research and development, are years behind in the development of hybrid vehicles and other solutions to our dependence on non-renewable energy, and it is easy to see that developing a culture of creativity is not the same thing as having a "Creativity Department."

What we see here is evidence of a need to move away from "process as usual" business to a people-based approach to business management that considers employees the best and most renewable source of production. To do that, these companies and others facing the challenges of our changing economy must begin to close the Creativity Gap. If successful in this effort, companies can develop a Creativity Culture in which they engender diversity in perspective essential to generating fresh ideas that keep pace with the speed of change. As an added bonus, such a transformation could result in more engagement of staff, thereby encouraging greater retention of talent.

Once we accept creativity as a business fundamental on par with good financial management, and having the right products and services, we know we have to hire and develop people with the capabilities and mindset to execute business plans with creativity as a core element. In "A Whole New Mind," widely accepted as the primer for doing business in the 21st century, Daniel Pink makes the case that those with the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, detect patterns and opportunities, craft satisfying narrative, and combine seemingly unrelated ideas into novel invention, will add more value in the future. Yet leaders, managers, and employees may not know what skills they need to achieve Pink's ideal, and companies may have no initiatives in place to help employees acquire these skills and put them to use. Creativity takes many forms, and proper application in business requires intellectual curiosity and an ability to integrate skills and knowledge across disciplines. Closing this Creativity Gap is not dependent on finding innately "creative types" who can fill this gap for their employers, but would put companies at the mercy of a fickle talent market. Instead, there are actions organizations can take on a practical level to tap into the innate creativity of their existing staff.

Getting to the Creativity Culture
As we have seen, there are compelling reasons for companies to use creativity as a business management option, and some organizations are more effective than others in utilizing creativity. The answer to improving an organization's creative culture starts with acknowledging that most business managers currently rely on highly reactive traditional processes that bring with them organizational impediments to bridging the Creativity Gap.

Specifically, business leaders often are confronted with difficult choices in their efforts to achieve performance benchmarks, make shareholders happy, and grow market share. While virtually all managers acknowledge talent is the key asset for business growth, few understand how to create and execute strategies that include talent as a fully-integrated aspect of their plans. Instead, they typically are risk-averse in considering and implementing people-based solutions, relying primarily on traditional management approaches such as cost cutting measures with diminishing returns.

We recommend organizational leaders begin by understanding the value of talent at a strategic level, enabling them to move from fear-based management styles, where a failed idea results in high cost to the company, into promoting and nurturing a culture of creativity where employees generate ideas all the time, lowering the risk of failure of any single idea. To achieve this desired outcome, organizational leaders need to assess the Creativity Culture by evaluating the business in order to appreciate the extent to which creativity is operationalized. This understanding then can be used to navigate a pathway to a more vibrant Creativity Culture.

Assess Creativity Culture…Develop Leaders
…Release Fear
…Define and Embrace Change
…Develop Employees

True leadership in an organization with a Creativity Culture promotes creativity, values it, understands how to turn it into gold for the business, and has the ability to shift business models in its particular industry accordingly. Action steps for leadership development might include:

• Build creativity competencies and apply them to business management activities. Leaders need to stretch and break the mold of many of their long held beliefs and methods about what constitutes good management practice. Skill building in this area will develop more agile and flexible leaders with a deeper appreciation of what the benefits of creativity are for the C-Suite as well as the rest of the organization and how to use these skills to competitive advantage.

• Equip leaders with a toolbox of actions to increase creativity and generate innovation. It can be a daunting task to put in place a significant culture shift, but there are many things leaders can do with minimal effort and lower cost to get the ball rolling while bigger plans are developed and rolled out: e.g., build awareness and give recognition.

• Institute measurement and reporting that captures the value of creativity. Ultimately, there must be results and value for making investments in creativity. Benchmarking several key aspects of a business and thoughtfully putting in place mechanisms for measuring the investments at the beginning will allow for a more sustainable culture.

• Business management practices provide the framework for executing day-to-day organizational functions and a window into the "soul" of the organization. These practices strongly indicate the depth and breadth of a creative culture and play a significant role reinforcing behavior through everyday work activities. This outcome can be best achieved by:

• Learn to release your fear. Some ideas will succeed. Others will fail. Businesses that hinge their entire futures on the success or failure of a handful of ideas are doomed. Adopting a business model that allows for more fluid and frequent idea generation reduces the dependency on a handful of ideas, distributing risk among a larger, more sustainable pipeline. For the Mr. Clean Magic Reach, Proctor & Gamble re-engineered its product development process, breaking down the walls between departments, building prototypes to test with consumers, and following the strong intuition of its designers who felt the product was a winner even when it did not initially test well.

• Provide the link between creativity and business results and expand the definition and scope of business acumen. Managers need to understand their organization's and competitor's Creativity Profiles and develop strategic plans to address gaps. All employees would benefit from a broader view of the role creativity plays in the company, and managers should share the insights gained through these types of exercises and/or include employee groups in these activities.

To be successful, leadership must accurately define and embrace the change. Leaders cannot pay lip service and hope others will enforce the creativity initiative. Instead, they must commit themselves to role model, communicate, and be involved in these initiatives over a sustained period of time. As we have seen with GE's Jack Welch, Apple's Steve Jobs, or the media empires of icons such as Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey, the personality and journey of a company tends to reflect the personalities and journeys of its leaders—with all their ups and downs. To ensure they are living the creative culture and leading the change by example, leaders will need to:

• Evaluate the company's "internal brand" and adjust policies and communications (formal and informal) to get better alignment to support intended shifts in Creativity Culture. This might take the form of using the output of assessing the Creativity Culture, employee and customer surveys, and industry experts to arrive at a truer, more nuanced view that can be used to inform strategy, planning, and tactics. There may emerge a big gap between what leaders perceive to be the brand, and how much it reflects creativity, and the desired perception that uncovers great opportunities to bridge the gap.

• Change formal and informal rewards to better support "creativity contributions." These rewards could take the form of everything from innovation contests with prizes to solve the most pressing problems of the company, to incentive compensation for specific results and demonstrated skill development, to visible recognition for those modeling behaviors and making significant contributions. It is most important to be clear about the connection to creativity as part of the company's strategy, and to be consistent in providing rewards over time.

Developing new products and services typically is an inherently creative endeavor. But who participates, and how creative the process is, tells an important story about how "open" or "closed" the culture is and how successful a company is at identifying and leveraging potentially great ideas.

Focus on the strengths and develop initiatives to engage the people who work there. If, for example, one of your company's strengths is your research and development department does a good job bringing market trends into the business, identify ways to expand the reach of this department to incorporate thoughts on market trends from a broader group of employees. Recognizing this approach will mean you will get many more ideas that may work for your business, just as you also will increase the number of ideas that cannot succeed. This is O.K.—in fact, it is ideal. The goal is to increase idea generation, not to hit a home run with every idea.

Because talent is at the heart of making lasting and meaningful change, and enhancing creativity competencies is central to building a Creativity Culture, we have several areas for leaders to consider. First, understand the gaps and align talent development with business needs. Then, prioritize the gaps, and begin to implement plans for addressing them. For example, your company may consider "idea generation" an event, open to a small group of staff on a scheduled basis. You may not wish to replace your regularly scheduled planning sessions, but you will want to introduce steps for enhancing those meetings with ideas from a broader base of staff, perhaps by examining work activities by department, project, market, around a theme, through a process, and by looking for opportunities to infuse creativity.

You'll also want to provide a vigorous environment with great tools. Depending on your business and culture, these could be simple steps such as introducing electronic bulletin boards and chat rooms to explore ideas. Use social networking to encourage teamwork and idea sharing, and provide daily activities that re-energize people and take them out of their routine, creating a more social and fun work environment. Assess and adjust your recruiting and training efforts to facilitate intellectual curiosity, mind expansion, and risk taking. In the past, these efforts may have focused almost exclusively on technical skills and a standard menu of professional skills programs, leaving little room for creativity. You may wish to redesign your talent management approach to encourage and develop a broader range of skill-sets among current staff and future recruits.

Often overlooked, there is great potential in thinking creatively about how products and projects are managed. Creativity is not just about dreaming up the next iPod. There is great potential in examining work processes and putting in place a culture that empowers individuals and teams to continuously rethink how best to get the work done and to use lessons learned to innovate.

Rethink your processes and ask your employees for their input on process improvement. If your business processes are hindering creativity, what can you do to change them? Look for ways to introduce models that are efficient and creative. Often employees have great ideas about how to re-engineer their day-to-day work activities. Find ways to empower divisions, departments, teams, and individuals to do so and then leverage the intellectual capital. Remember, you hired them for their expertise and skill. So use it!

Consider the potential of having finance, human resources, marketing, legal, and other internal functions held to the same level of accountability for cultivating and supporting a Creativity Culture. These are typically areas of a business that are asked to cut costs first when times are tough, but are rarely asked to reinvent themselves. How much cost savings or improved business management could be had if there was the same level of creativity and innovation as is expected of the rest of the organization?

As businesses evaluate their options for improving performance and rethinking how they will compete in the future, the value of developing a Creativity Culture is emerging as a new and powerful option for managers. By developing a thorough understanding of the business acumen of creativity and employing creativity skills to better manage organizations, managers will move their organizations to a far more competitive position for the long term. We have tried to present a comprehensive set of approaches for improving the Creativity Culture that can be done by addressing any and all aspects of a business. While many of our suggestions require significant effort, here are five things you can do right now that will be low cost and high impact:

• Build awareness of Creativity Culture by encouraging dialogue and examination of the role of creativity in your business.

• Provide recognition of projects and people who are making significant contributions by using creativity.

• Implement internal "think-tanking" that give employees big business problems to solve.

• Use existing projects as opportunities to inject creativity where it may not have been utilized in the past.

• Have leadership encourage and recommend creativity as a desirable business tool in planning and managing work.


Virtually every company believes its employees are its best resources, and they're right. Now is the time to put this belief into action, engaging employees in a culture of creativity that will build the companies of the future.



Eric is the Managing Director of The Creativity Group, and Paula Jayne is a Talent Development Consultant for Towers Perrin.

Source: ManageSmarter.com

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