Rotman Management Fall 2011

IN ITS 2010 GLOBAL CEO STUDY, IBM asked 1,541 leaders in 60 countries to name the most important leadership competency for modern business, and the trait that ranked first won’t surprise our regular readers: creativity. “Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks,” according to the study, Capitalizing on Complexity (available online). “They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles and committed to upsetting the status quo.” While creativity gets plenty of ink these days, it actually requires a mental process that gets much less attention: imagination. Although imagination is not always creative, when creativity does occur, it necessarily springs from the imagination, and as a result, imagination has moved onto the business agenda. Even the most rational thinker is…

IN 2005, in response to a request from members of the U.S. Congress and Senate, the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine published a seminal report titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” In the report, the academiesmade the case that the United States was facing a global competitive threat and warned that, “without a renewed effort to bolster the foundations of our competitiveness, we can expect to lose our privileged position.” In essence, the report warned of a growing innovation gap, withAmerica on the wrong side of it. Fortunately, the report’s writers had a prescription for renewing America’s competitive edge: not surprisingly, given their backgrounds, they urged a greater emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering…

You have said that “In order to be creative, you have to knowhow to prepare to be creative.” Please explain. Being creative is a full-time job, with its own daily patterns. Think about it this way: we stretch before we jog, we practice the violin before we play – and it’s no different for our minds. Anyone who has been successful in a creative profession has their own routine for preparing for their work, whether it’s a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory. The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration – maybe more. Igor Stravinski always did the same thing each morning when he entered his studio: he sat…

WHEN DESIGNER HUGH DUBBERLY asked Tim Brennan of Apple’s Creative Services group to define design for his book, HowDoYou Design?, Brennan drew the following picture: Design, this drawing asserts, is simply magic – a mysterious no-man’s land where only the brave dare tread. Such a definition mocks the idea that a formal process could possibly exist for navigating its many hairpin turns. Our advice: don’t be put off by Brennan’s view of design. Design has many different meanings, and the approach we will describe here is more akin to Dorothy’s ruby slippers than to a magic wand: you’ve already got the power; you just need to figure out how to use it. Can the average manager be transformed into the next Jonathan Ive? No more than your local golf pro can turn…

When groupswant to generate new ideas, brainstorming is often their first course of action. When this technique is effective, participants draw on each others’ pre-existing knowledge to create new combinations of ideas not previously considered. But brainstorming can fail in at least as many ways as it can succeed. Over the past eight years I have worked closely with designers who take brainstorming very seriously and together, we have added a new technique to the brainstorming mix: improvisation. Like brainstorming, improvisation is a creative collaboration between people with a common goal of developing engaging ideas within a prescribed amount of time. To date, I have taught improvisation techniques to approximately 60 practitioners, 170 undergraduate and graduate students and 80 faculty members at Stanford and Northwestern Universities. Early on, participants are exposed to…

Your work is driven by a conviction that the imagination is an essential skill that must be nurtured. How did you come to this conclusion? Looking back over my 35 years of work in this area, one thing has become clear tome: what we think is what we see.We tend to interpret new information in ways that bend toward our preconceptions and confirm them, and this tendency shapes how we move through the world as individuals. Unfortunately, this tendency is magnified exponentially when we face each other as different cultural groups, which is why cultivating imagination in an organization or community is no simple matter. The general assumption is that you have to decide to do something before you imagine what it is; but in reality, imagination comes first; it must.…