Readings 4 December

The Weird Rules of Creativity

• Creativity does not stem from fun, low-stress workplaces, where conflict is held in check and managers keep a close watch on how money is spent and how people spend their time.
• Managing by getting out of the way is often the best approach to gain creativity
• Weird ideas work by increasing the range of the company's knowledge, causing people to see old problems in new ways and helping companies break from the past.
• Traditional practices help gain short-term income, which is often the company focus
• Weird Ideas that work:
• Decide to do something that will probably fail and then convince yourself and everyone else that they are certain to succeed
• Forget pass success
• Use job interviews to get new ideas and not to screen candidates
• Seek out ways to avoid, distract, and bore any stakeholder who wants to discuss money
• Reward success and failures, punish inaction
• Think of some ridiculous or impractical things to do and plan to do them
• Ignore people who have solved the exact problem you are facing
• Find some happy people and get them to fight
• Hire "slow learners" of the organizational code, people who make you uncomfortable and may even dislike, people you don't probably need
• Encourage people to ignore and defy their bosses and peers
• The more people are exposed to something, the more positive they feel about it
• Ignorance can be bliss because you do not know how things are suppose to be.
  
• Managers that provide vague encouragement for employees to work on what they want and don't demand to know the details helps the innovation process
• Provoking happy people to fight does not include provoking personality conflicts or relationship issues. That will kill innovation. Rather, get those who loves their work to defend it.
• Creativity is a function of the quantity of work produced
• Committing to a project wholeheartedly is the best thing one can do to increase the likelihood that a project will succeed
• Random selection is the most unbiased way to determine which risky projects to pursue

It is said in business that one should hire people based upon their potential and yet, so often, companies hire people based upon their past experience. If a company was truly innovative, wouldn't they want to gain the potentially unnecessary skill-sets and unbiased or experienced mindset new hire can bring? If that is the case and an employee truly wanted to work for an innovative company, what would be the point of declaring a major? One of the keys to innovation is happiness and passion. Hiring needs to tap passion and drive without experience. Perhaps more companies should encourage students to major in the arts and tap into their passions, yet ensure them of their ability to remain employed.

Let My People Go Surfing

• Patagonia's Founder, Yvon Chouinard, believes that business can do good things and make a profit without losing its soul
• Work needs to be enjoyable daily. We need to be surrounded by friends who dress as they wish. There needs to be flexible to pursue enjoyment and create better work-life balance
• The company originated from Chouinard's mountain climbing passion and realization that the status quo did not meet his needs. However, from the mid-eighties to 1990, sales skyrocketed from $20M to $100M
• However, they continued to fail to provide proper training for new company leaders and the strain of managing a company with eight autonomous product divisions and three channels of distribution exceeded management skills as they grew at 40% annually.
• After letting 20% of staff go, Jerry Mander created an 'ecology' of values that could mitigate the environmental and social crisis of the time. It expressed thinking as it applied to different parts of the company: design, production, distribution, images, human resources, finance, management, and the environment.
• The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to "have it all" the sooner it will die.
• Employees are so independent, that they would be considered unemployable in a typical company
• Get independent people to align through strong communication and lack of offices
• Despite the challenges involved, Patagonia found that every time it elected to do the right thing, even when it costs twice as much, it's turned out to be more profitable

In honesty, I felt that this article articulated more of the innovative difficulties that "being yourself" presents to companies. I think it is very true that the sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to "have it all," the sooner it will die. This is one of my key take-aways from my brand strategy class. However, I think Patagonia needs more than a few philanthropic trips to help inspire it to innovate environmentally solutions. It considers too much of the restrictions on the product and not enough about the ideas. The company needs more than just a Zen Master to help it sustain its growth. It needed somebody to innovate new managerial techniques (not training) to help sustain business. Hire those people who are unfamiliar with the industry and are from untraditional companies. As long as they are passionate about Patagonia and its beliefs, innovation will then flourish.

Managing for Creativity

• A company's most important asset is its creative capital
• Professionals whose primary responsibilities include innovating, designing, and problem solving, make up a third of the U.S. workforce and take home nearly half of all wages and salaries
• Creative people are intrinsically motivated and respond to similar motivations.
• Corporate creativity depends upon a firm's "absorptive capacity:" the ability of its R&D units to not only create innovations but to absorb them from outside sources
• SAS's success stems from its ability to harness the creative energies of all of its stakeholders, including its customers, software developers, managers, and support staff
• SAS has 3 guiding principles:
• Help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually engaged and by removing distractions.
• Make managers responsible for sparking creativity and eliminating arbitrary distinctions between "suits" and "creatives."
• Engage customers as creative partners so you can deliver superior products
• Long-term relationships between employees and customers adds to the company's bottom line by increasing the likelihood of "productive accidents."
• SAS realized that its developers thrive on intellectual stimulation: as a result, it sends them to industry and technology-specific conferences to learn, stages expos so they can teach, and encourages employees to write articles
• Creative people do not like obstacles. The more distractions a company can remove, the more its employees can maximize its creative potential.
• Creative people can be trusted to manage their own workloads, their inner drive to achieve compels a high level of productivity
• Managers need to work alongside team members in order to for employees to know that the boss actually understands and respects the work that you do.

The SAS environment reminded me very much of my job at Google. Innovation clearly is significant for Google. Employees have all of the perks that this article mentioned. In fact, salary compensation is less than industry average because of them. The article was exact regarding hiring processes. I met a number of people who want to work at Google for the perks and the fact it is the #1 place to work in America. Hiring should screen out those people and hire only those who want the work. That being said, the articles that we read discuss designers and engineers, not necessarily business people. In AdWords, we played by traditional business rules and hours while engineers were playing volleyball after rolling in at 10:00 a.m. and working on their 20% project. How does one inspire business people to be creative? As an account manager, I worked with many advertisers, but felt I could only add my idea to the company Ideas Page. While the ideas were encouraged, I felt that the managers were interested in numbers with an idea ad-on portion. Furthermore, how do you serve clients who work in traditional companies? I think you need to have the right people, which Google does. However, it distinguishes between the innovators and the implementers. Implementers need creative management as well.