Creativity #8: Creative Organizations Tathagat Varma Knowledgepreneur http://thoughtleadership.in

Forbes’ World’s Most Innovative Companies 2016

1.  Tesla Motors, Innovation Premium 82.4%

2.  Salesforce.com, 75.5%

3.  Regeneron Pharma, 72.9%

4.  Incyte, 70.8%

5.  Alexion Pharma, 70%

6.  Under Armour, 68.9%

7.  Monster Beverage, 68.8%

8.  Unilever Indonesia, 67.93%

9.  Vertex Pharma, 67.9%

10.  BioMarin Pharma, 67.4%

http://www.forbes.com/innovative-companies/list/

Innovation Premium

  Companies are ranked by their innovation premium: the difference between their market capitalization and a net present value of cash flows from existing businesses (based on a proprietary formula from Credit Suisse HOLT). The difference between them is the bonus given by equity investors on the educated hunch that the company will continue to come up with profitable new growth.

  To be included, firms need seven years of public financial data and $10 billion in market cap.

http://learn.theinnovatorsmethod.com/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2015/08/19/how-we-rank-the-worlds-most-innovative-companies-2015/#5199b23d4524

Most creative companies chosen by creative freelancers

https://www.fastcocreate.com/3031248/these-are-the-46-companies-creative-freelancers-would-kill-to-work-for

Most Creative Companies in India, 2015

  Indigo

Perfint Healthcare (medical robotics)

  ISRO’s Mangalyaan Mission

  Domino’s India

  Tata Swach

Novopay

  The Ugly Indian

Micromax

  U2OPIA Mobile

Freshdesk

https://www.fastcompany.com/3041651/most-innovative-companies-2015/the-worlds-top-10-most-innovative-companies-of-2015-in-india

Are they more creative because they have more money?

https://gigaom.com/2012/01/30/how-apple-gets-away-with-lower-rd-spending/

If not money, then what?

  They hire creative talent? More Salaries? Better Incentives?

  Policies? Stretch goals? Performance targets? Get it right first time (and every time)? Failure is not an option? Micro-management? Flexi-timings? Standard processes?

  Offices? Open plan offices? Perks? Free food and foosball? Productivity tools? Unlimited vacations?

  Markets? Products? Technologies? Company location? Government policies? They are, well,…”creative”? They don’t do any maintenance, just do new product development?

  Force people and teams to be creative? Hard deadlines? War-room creativity? Annual innovation events?

  Just let people pursue creative ideas without any goals? Free time? No market pressure? Laissez faire?

  ???

What companies do?

  Give every opportunity for creativity to flourish

  Embrace creativity as a business process

  Create a company culture that actively promotes experimentation

http://www.inc.com/thomas-oppong/creativity-cannot-be-forced-and-what-truly-innovative-companies-do-instead.html

An interesting perspective…

http://www.milesfinchinnovation.com/idea-climate.html

http://adaptivepath.org/ideas/a-blueprint-for-a-creative-workplace/

Culture-based Creativity

  Nurtures and generates innovation (cultural, economic and social),   enables innovation to be more user-centred,

  essentially refers to the work of artists and creative people,

  is a process that is essential to cultural and creative productions, to marketing-driven industries and

  often helps give meaning to the act of consumption,

  provides means to stimulate social cohesion,

  can be stimulated by the environment (society, institution, family, education etc.) .

http://www.keanet.eu/docs/impactculturecreativityfull.pdf

Components of Culture-based Creativity

http://www.keanet.eu/docs/impactculturecreativityfull.pdf

Top Ten Tips for fostering a Culture of Creativity

  Recognise your responsibilities as a cultural leader

  Take the bureaucracy off the people at the sharp end of the creative process

  Cheer the creative process not just the results

  Not punish failure and remember that carrot works better than stick

  Use intrinsic reward for creative people

  Celebrate and foster diversity in all its forms

  Encourage autonomy through setting output expectations for performance whilst allowing creative people to decide the means of delivery

  Encourage free flow of information both within and into the organisation

  Ensure that healthy competitive rivalry is harnessed into collaborative endeavour that delivers better creative solutions quicker

  Remember that your competitors are working away to be more creative than you; thus a culture of creativity is a ‘must do’ not a ‘nice-to-have’.

http://www.normanbroadbent.com/AppContent/Defining%20Creativity%20and%20How%20to%20Develop%20a%20Creative%20Culture.pdf

Case Studies

  Pixar Inc   Creativity Inc – Ed Catmull

  Hallmark   Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide

to Surviving with Grace – Gordon MacKenzie

  IDEO

  Anthem – Ayn Rand

Creativity, Inc

  The animators who work here are free to – no, encouraged to – decorate their work spaces in whatever style they wish…The point is, we value self-expression here.

  We start with the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myraid unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

  My job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for things that undermine it.

Creativity, Inc…

  When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

  …Basically, they welcomed us to the program, gave us workspace and access to computers, and then let us pursue whatever turned us on. The result was a collaborative, supportive community so inspiring that I could later seek to replicate at Pixar.

  Tension between the individual’s creative contribution and the leverage of the group is a dynamic that exists in all creative environments.

Creativity, Inc…

  ARPA’s mandate - to support smart people in a variety of areas – was carried out based on the unwavering presumption that researchers would try to do the right thing and, in ARPA’s view, overmanaging them was counterproductive. ARPA’s administrators did not hover over the shoulders of those of us working on the project they funded, nor did they demand that our work have direct military applications. They simply trusted us to innovate.

  Prof Sutherland used to say that he loved his graduate students at Utah because we didn’t know what was impossible…When one of my colleagues at the U of U invented something, the rest of us would immediately piggyback on it, pushing the new idea forward.

Creativity, Inc…

  I created a flat organizational structure, much like I’d experienced in academia, largely because I naively thought that if I put together a hierarchical structure – assigning a bunch of managers to report to me – I would have to spend too much time managing and not enough time on my own work. This structure – in which I entrusted everybody to drive their own projects forward, at their own pace – had its limits, but the fact is, giving a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated people enabled us ti make some significant technological leaps in a short time.

Creativity, Inc…

  Experimentation was highly valued, but the urgency of for-profit enterprise was definitely in the air.

Alvy and I decided to do the opposite – to share our work with the outside world

  The only problem was, I had no idea what I was doing.

  His (Steve Jobs) method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous, and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come back at him, he often respected it – poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it.

Creativity, Inc

  Deming’s approach – and Toyota’s too – gave ownership of and responsibility for a product’s quality to the people who were most involved in its creation. Instead of merely repeating an action, workers could suggest changes, call out problems – feel the pride that came when they helped fix what was broken.

  Because making a movie involves hundreds of people, a chain of command is essential…we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure.

Creativity, Inc

  The first principle was “Story is King”, by which we meant that we would let nothing – not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities – get in the way of our story.

  The other principle we depended on was “Trust the Process”. We liked this one because it was so reassuring: while there are inevitably difficulties and missteps in any complex creative endeavor, you can trust that “the process” will carry you through.

Managing a Creative Culture

Think of each statement as a starting point, as prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not a conclusion!

  If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get ideas right.

  When hiring people, give more weightage to their potential than the current skill level.

  Hire people smarter than you.

  People across the organization should be free to suggest ideas.

Source: Creativity, Inc

…

  As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.

  Measuring the process without evaluating the process is deceiving.

  The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.

  Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected things occur.

…

  Manager’s job is not to prevent risks, but make it safe to take them.

  Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.

  Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up – it means you trust them when they do screw up.

  The people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval.

…

  The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal – it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.

  Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others.

  Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

  Be wary of making too many rules.

  Imposing limits can encourage a creative response.

  Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.

…

  An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it.

  The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent.

  Our jobs as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past.

…

  New crises test and demonstrate a company’s values.

  Excellence, quality and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.

  Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.

  Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Making the product great is the goal.

The Hairball!

  “There’s a time when there is no hairball. So, where do hairballs come from?”

  Every new policy is another hair for the Hairball. Hairs are never taken away, only added.

  To tap the ability to create, you must spiritually soar into the thin air of the stratosphere – blue sky – where it is possible “to bring into existence” from nothing an original concept.

Orbiting

  …Then there are those few who manage to actively engage the opportunities Hallmark presents without being sucked into the Hairball of Hallmark. This is accomplished by Orbiting.

  Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate mindset, beyond “accepted models, patterns, or standards” – all the while remaining connected to the spirit of the corporate mission

  To find orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a place of balance when you benefit from the physical, intellectual and philosophical resources of the organization without becoming entombed in the bureaucracy of the institution.

  If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be genuine and to take the best course of action to get the job done rather than following the pallid path of corporate appropriateness.

  To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you must invest enough individually to counteract the pull of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape the pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the Hairball.

  Through this measured assertion of your own uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic relationship with the Hairball – to Orbit around the institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of deep space.

Orbiting the Hairball

  Hairball is policy, procedure, conformity, compliance, rigidity and submission to status quo, while Orbiting is originality, rules-breaking, non-conformity, experimentation, and innovation.

  …People who have a deep passion for their ideas don’t need a lot of encouragement. One ‘yes’ in a sea of ‘no’s’ can make the difference

IDEO

Anthem – Ayn Rand

Source: Anthem, A Graphic Novel – Adapted by Charles Santino and Joe Staten

Source: Internet

Recap

  Organizations need to innovative in today’s ever-evolving world. To be innovative, they need to be creative first!

  The most successful creative organizations don’t impose measures of creativity as an outcome, but rather create a culture that fosters individual creativity and harnesses collective creativity of their teams. They tolerate, even celebrate failures, and make it safe for employees to experiment.

  In next class, we shall explore Creativity in Industries.

Further Reading

http://www.legofoundation.com/it-it/research-and-learning/foundation-research/cultures-creativity

http://www.nobelmuseum.se/en/exhibitions/cultures-of-creativity

https://hbr.org/2014/12/how-to-tell-if-your-company-has-a-creative-culture

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/getting-to-eureka-how-companies-can-promote-creativity

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/241260

http://bestthenews.com/article/what-do-creative-companies-do-differently-wed-03022016-0454.html

http://philmckinney.com/leaders-innovation-theyre-creating-cultures-creativity/