Free your mind

By Allison Shirreffs

More than ever, today’s marketplace is about survival of the fittest. Whether they’re high-tech startups or Fortune 500 companies, businesses are clamoring to find an edge, a competitive advantage to ensure their survival. But in a world of sensory overload, where so many things have already been “done,” the task becomes more difficult. As a result, more companies are assigning greater value to innovation and creativity. Companies are not only seeking employees who generate unique ideas, but also focusing on providing a work environment that is conducive to creative thinking.

Think far beyond the box

Making the workplace more creative is easier said than done, however. Experts say it takes more than a statement labeling it as such and must go beyond asking employees to “think outside the box.”

Michael Sacks, visiting assistant professor of organization and management, says corporations want to be more creative, but they’re faced with a paradox: How do superiors attach value to creativity and find a balance between creative freedom and handling the corporations more practical concerns? “There’s a dichotomy between creativity and getting things done,” he says. Not only that, but “there’s no means with which to measure value [in creativity].”

Despite its abstract nature, creativity is being treated as a concrete and critical company asset. In the business world where the half-lives of products shrink constantly and the Internet breaks down barriers to entry, Joey Reiman asserts that creativity is the “only sustainable competitive advantage a company can have. . . . Ideas are the new economy. Technology is useless when it’s all the same. The only resource is the human mind.”

Reiman, an adjunct faculty member at Goizueta, is CEO and founder of BrightHouse, an “ideation company.” The company receives no less than $500,000 per “ideation,” each of which takes twelve weeks to create and involves fifty to seventy-five experts in collaboration.

Reiman also goes as far as calling creativity in the workplace “an oxymoron.” “You can’t force people to create,” he says. “You have to provide the right nvironment.”

Many Goizueta professors and at least one current BBA student are trying to find the best methods for fostering creativity in the workplace. In partnership with Associate Professor Anil Menon, Associate Professor of Marketing Sundar Bharadwaj completed a study last year that suggested hiring creative people is not enough. Nor is merely implementing management practices that enhance creativity. “They are equally vital,” says Bharadwaj. “Companies with the best innovation performance do both very well.”

Creativity works from the top down

From an organizational standpoint, the most effective way of generating creativity in an organization is from the top down, says Associate Professor Robert Drazin, in teaching notes on creativity prepared by organization and management research assistant Farah Mihoubi. “Leaders have the ability to serve as visionaries, to make connections between ideas that others with less experience would not be able to do,” Drazin says.

Leaders at every level also must familiarize themselves with the work habits and talents of their employees. With this knowledge, leaders will be better able to fit employees with jobs or projects that maximize their talents. Better matches should result in greater employee satisfaction and less turnover. Furthermore, by providing employees with challenges rather than routines—something Reiman sees as a creativity roadblock—employees will feel more inspired by and interested in their jobs. “Any routine must be scrutinized,” Reiman says. “When you get into a routine, the routine becomes a rut, the rut becomes a grave, and then it’s all over.”

Providing an atmosphere in which employees feel encouraged to break free of routines, to take risks, and to think in non-linear ways is important. In this capacity, creativity can be taught and treated like any other skill. “Our model formulates creativity as a property of the thought process that can be acquired and improved through instruction and practice,” says Bharadwaj.

In January, Goizueta’s MBA Lead Week activities centered around “teaching creativity.” Students participated in activities from drawing with crayons and molding clay to improvisational thinking exercises. During one class, students were given two malleable sticks as props for which they had to find “uses.” Once the group had discovered the most obvious—conductors’ batons and drumsticks—they had to continue finding uses for the sticks. Some discoveries? A stethoscope, a game of horseshoes, and an asp and flute of a snake charmer. The purpose was to illustrate that if a similar exercise were applied in a corporate environment, employees would be encouraged to think past the first “right” answer to find other answers.

Failures help lead to success

The search for correct and viable answers inevitably includes failure. And it’s important that employees feel free to fail, according to Drazin and Mihoubi. “Failure is an integral by-product of creativity,” they concur. Very few new ideas will actually make it from the creative stage to implementation; however, learning what doesn’t work is essential and can help in discovering what does. To reinforce this, company leaders must be supportive when new ideas fail, which happens more often than not. In the pharmaceuticals industry, for example, it costs between $500 and $800 million to develop a single drug—and only one out of ten will make its way into the marketplace.

“The trick is not to fail less often, but to fail more quickly,” says Reiman. He explains that when Thomas Edison was asked to describe how he’d invented the light bulb, he said, “It was easy. I’ll give you all 1,300 steps.” What Edison called steps were actually failures along the road. “Churchill said that real success is keeping the same amount of enthusiasm as you move from one failure to another,” Reiman says.

Two heads are better than one

Establishing teams also is important in maximizing workplace creativity, and according to Drazin, diversity is key. “Be sure the team, early on, includes representatives from the functions that will be responsible for implementation later in the project’s history,” he says.

Called “skunkworks,” and “cross-pollination,” it means making sure that the divisions of the corporation affected by the ideas and their implementation are involved in the decision-making process. Being inclusive, the corporation encourages communication, allows for insights and knowledge to pass back and forth, and avoids “groupthink” and other problems that arise when a group is too homogenous. It’s also helpful to bring in outsiders on occasion to challenge assumptions the team has made. To foster and build trust among team members, the team should interact frequently—both in prearranged meetings and “by accident.” Some corporations have gone as far as designing or redesigning the office space to encourage “accidental” meetings between employees—fewer walls, more open space, and places for breaks that are not isolated in corners but are integral to the work environment.

Other ways of encouraging employee interaction include company intranets and inter-office trade shows. Amanda Besemer ’01BBA completed an independent study on creativity and innovation with Professor Bharadwaj last year, and launched her own company, Abinav Innovation, this spring. One idea developed at Abinav is the “Idea Engine.”

“It’s a forum for allowing senior management to encourage and reward creativity,” says Besemer, who also notes that employees hold 76 percent of all corporate intelligence. “Say a beverage company wants to come up with a new milk drink for kids. They can implement our Idea Engine on their company intranet to brainstorm ideas.”

Downtime ups productivity

Field trips are also important, says Drazin. “Exposing employees to sources of information and stimulation other than at work is crucial,” he says. “This information opens up thinking in general and allows the metaphor that has been learned in one place to be moved to the other.” He continues, “Can you imagine convincing a manager that his employees should go to an art show?”

Andrea Hershatter can. As assistant dean and director of the BBA program, Hershatter has taught entrepreneurship classes for a number of years and recently established a research seminar called “Innovation and Intrapreneurship.” Intrapreneurs are employees who take on the role of entrepreneurs inside a company.

While studying which companies were the most innovative and why, Hershatter and her students found that space, mental freedom, and official downtime, both inside and outside of the organization, were key ingredients. Hershatter asks, “Under what scenario do you think most creatively: While you’re putting out fires all day, or while you’re taking a jog?”

The seminar was born after Reiman invited Hershatter to collaborate with him on a book about thinking, pacing, and innovation. According to Reiman, the book will show that when companies slow down enough to really think, it helps them “win.” “Contemplation, thoughtfulness, meditation, and space—these are all going to be the important features of a thinking society,” he says. “It’s the shift from the fast lane to the vast lane.”

What’s the return on investment?

In Hershatter’s innovation and intrapreneurship study, she set out to define what Reiman meant by winning. How could the benefits of fully embracing thoughtfulness and creativity within a company be proven?

Hershatter and her students hypothesized that this value could not be defined by stock price because the market often places a short-term premium on the “buzz” that comes from rapid innovation, whether or not it represents breakthrough thinking. They settled on “a really basic measurement” of return on investment. “The notion of tracking profitability over assets is fundamentally sound,” says Hershatter, “in that it has something to do with the stewardship of a company’s own resources.”

If you take the ratio—profitability over assets—and compare it to other companies in the same industry, Hershatter says you can identify particularly effective corporations. “The inherent assumption would be that these companies are doing more with what they have, not necessarily by making better dollar allocations, but by activating other assets—time and people—that aren’t measurable in that number.”

When Hershatter and her students compared companies using this ratio, they found that companies that were good at facilitating creativity did, in fact, have more favorable ratios. Hershatter’s own research addresses individual creativity inside organizations. “I’m trying to discover what makes an individual willing to activate his or her intellectual capital—the most precious piece of that being his or her creativity—on behalf of a company.”

Hershatter notes that there is a great deal of research about strategic commitments to innovation, organizational structures, and policies and procedures that support the transition from idea generation to implementation, but little on the pre-innovation cycle—the time from ground zero to a breakthrough idea.

In exploring this cycle, Hershatter and Reiman have identified a time/space dimension that they call “corporate thoughtfulness,” defined as “a cultural and ethotic space that enables individuals to be creative.” According to Hershatter, corporate thoughtfulness ranges from corporate philanthropy to sabbaticals to dress code. The most important implication is that thinking is considered a valid activity. “Is it legal to be sitting at your desk staring?” she asks. “In some companies, all time is measured in billable hours.”

Reiman is teaching an ideation class this semester that builds on the same approach to thinking. “You can define yourself or be defined,” says Reiman. He wants to give the students a good idea of how to think, and how to analyze the anatomy of an idea, “which is not just doing research and collecting qualitative data.” Reiman also hopes they’ll come to respect the longest stage of the ideation process—what he calls “the incubation period,” or “simmering process.”

Striving to maximize creativity in the most thoughtful ways provides another service. If it’s true that corporate thoughtfulness can be measured, creative people can better identify where they’re wanted and where they can thrive.

Creativity, by nature, may always remain in the eye of the beholder. Besemer encourages her fellow students not to let competition among classmates motivate them to take jobs. “Take a chance while you’re young,” she says. “Doing what you want to do—maybe that in itself is an innovative idea.”

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