creativity « John Caddell's blog

Archive for the ‘creativity’ Category

Don’t worry about Lego Star Wars impairing kids’ creativity

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

The New York Times this weekend profiled the business revival at Lego Group (”Turning to Hollywood Tie-Ins, Lego Thinks Beyond the Brick“).

The numbers speak for themselves:

Amid a 5 percent drop in total United States toy sales last year and the industry’s worst holiday season in three decades, according to Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham & Company, Lego’s sales surged 18.7 percent in 2008. And despite a worsening global recession, Lego powered through the first half of 2009, with a 23 percent sales increase over the period a year earlier. It earned $355 million before taxes last year, and $178 million in the first half of 2009.

But the article contained an ominous message:

In the United States, Lego’s biggest market and the biggest toy market in the world, games with themes like “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” were among the reasons Lego sales jumped 32 percent last year, well above the global pace. But experts like Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz, a New York psychologist who also runs a psychological services company, Diagnostics, wonders at what price these sales come.

“What Lego loses is what makes it so special,” he says. “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch. When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.”

Even toy analysts who admire the company and its recent success acknowledge a broad shift. “I would like to see more open-ended play like when we were kids,” says Gerrick Johnson, a toy analyst at BMO Capital Markets in New York. “The vast majority is theme-based, and when you go into Toys “R” Us, you’d really be challenged to find a simple box of bricks.”

Um… these guys have never been to my house. My 8- and 6-year-old sons are big Lego fans. Last winter, when we were at Disney, my 6-year-old chose to spend his birthday at the Lego Imagination Center. They’ve gotten “theme-based” kits for the Hogwarts Castle, various Star Wars fighters and Indiana Jones.

But if you think that has inhibited my kids’ creativity, you are dead wrong. Once these kits are built (sometimes even before they’re built), the pieces are repurposed to fit whatever my kids want to make. The 8-year-old built a little Segway-like device for a Storm Trooper to battle in; the 6-year-old mashed up a character with Storm Trooper legs, Indiana Jones’ whip and Harry Potter’s friend Hagrid’s bushy brown beard. The minifigures, in particular, are ripe for innovation and storytelling. Which makes sense–people like stories with other people in them.

Legos when I was growing up were 2- 4- 6- and 8-dot bricks, the occasional wheel and window. My guys have innumerable pieces from which to create–and they do, without limits and with interesting, unique pop-culture references that weren’t possible in my day.

I think creativity among our young is alive and well, and movie tie-ins won’t bother it.

Must we give away digital creative works?

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, spurred on by the recent Fran Ten podcast, this David Pogue post, and most recently a thoughtful post by Scott Goodson based on this column by economist Paul Krugman.

The upshot of Krugman’s argument, referencing Esther Dyson’s prediction from the early ’90’s, is that digital creative works will become free, and creative artists will have to make their money from “ancillary” projects, such as touring, personal appearances, licensing, etc.

If this turns out to be true (and the music industry is approaching this state right now), then it has a lot of negative ramifications for the future of creativity.

First off is the fairness question. Here is a simplified digital media value chain:

Digital distributors (i.e., ISPs like Comcast) make money through subscriptions
Directories and aggregators (like Google) make money through advertising
Creators make… nothing?

While the structure of technology allows this to happen, it’s hard to look at this picture and see it as fair. I agree that DRM sucks, but is the solution “pay what you want“–a virtual tip jar?

Furthermore, if creating a work of art cannot in itself make money, it will then be difficult to invest much in that creation. While that may allow bloggers to continue (though I wouldn’t turn down a few bucks for my work if that were possible), it doesn’t bode well for musicians or moviemakers, and, soon, book authors.

If I can make money in personal appearances but not by writing, I will have to limit my writing time in order to, you know, pay the mortgage.

If a band can make money touring but not through selling CDs, they will be unlikely to spend much time in the recording studio, or to spend money on studio effects or gear. Perhaps they will instead simply tape their concerts and compile albums from the live sessions.

If a moviemaker cannot make money from her films because they are freely available on the web, she will have difficulty using any approach other than Dogme 95 in order to reduce costs. And do we want to see Dogme 95-style movies all the time?

The irony is that time put into making money takes away from time to create. Therefore, the output from our best artists is less. Is that progress?

Perhaps this is offset somewhat by the “long tail” of creators enabled by new technology. But I would trade 1000 bad “Nude” remixes for one new album by an artist I really like.

(Photo: pro-copying logo from piratbyran.org)

Tags:
creativity, compensation, music, movies, books, content, strategy

Posted in books, compensation, content, creativity, movies, music, strategy | Comments

Everyday stories hold great insight

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

If you’ve visited this space at all before, you’ll know that I believe the stories we tell of our lives hold vast riches of information–and that information can be used to inform decisions on strategy, management & leadership, among other areas.

Today, the invaluable Harvard Business School Working Knowledge website features an article by Julia Hanna discussing creativity in the workplace and its place in innovation. The whole article is wonderful and worth reading in full. But I was fascinated by this passage regarding the research of Harvard professor Theresa Amabile:

As a way to delve deeper into the link between motivation and creativity, Amabile and her husband, psychologist Steven J. Kramer, conducted a three-year study of 238 professionals from seven companies in the high-tech, consumer products, and chemicals industries. Without revealing the focus of their study, they asked the subjects (all of whom were working on projects requiring creative effort) to fill out a daily electronic diary form that required numerical answers to questions about their work that day, as well as their emotions, motivation, and work environment. They were also asked to describe what they’d done that day and to include a brief description of one event at work that stood out in their minds [emphasis mine]. (Participants were asked to refrain from discussing the diary content with colleagues.) By the end of the study, Amabile and Kramer had collected nearly 12,000 entries, what she describes as a “wonderful treasure trove of data.”

“We have a window into how concrete events affected knowledge workers’ thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and motivations,” Amabile says. “We call this ‘inner work life,’ and we found that it directly influences creativity and other aspects of performance.”

The mundane, quotidian stories (the events the subjects documented) were an integral part of the study data. By leveraging these, Amabile and Kramer were able to evaluate a trait–creativity–far more deeply than could have been done by numerical analysis alone. I’m convinced that capturing and sorting through stories can add incalculable wisdom to the business world. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities.

On a side note, I’ve been thinking about how Twitter and like tools will be involved in this arena. What are all those tweets telling us about ourselves?

But that’s a topic for another post.

(Photo: “Old Diary” by Race_Eend via stock.xchng)

Tags:
narrative, storytelling, sensemaking, assessment, evaluation, creativity, HBS Working Knowledge

Posted in HBS Working Knowledge, assessment, creativity, evaluation, narrative, sensemaking, storytelling | Comments

Choreographer Twyla Tharp on the usefulness of failure

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

In this month’s Harvard Business Review, editor Diane Coutu interviews choreographer Twyla Tharp (free link), creator of avant-garde dances as well as the Broadway show “Movin’ Out.” Tharp mentions some important thoughts on failure.

If you do only what you know and do it very, very well, chances are you won’t fail. You’ll just stagnate, and your work will get less and less interesting, and that’s failure by erosion. True failure is a mark of accomplishment in the sense that something new & different was tried. Ideally, the best way to fail is in private…. I have also sometimes failed in public, and that’s very painful. But failing, even in this way, is not useless. It can force you to get yourself together and to produce something new.

From The Mistake Bank

art, creativity, learning, failure, Mistake Bank, Harvard Business Review

Posted in Harvard Business Review, art, creativity, failure, learning, mistake bank | Comments

"Big Think Strategy" is a fun, inspiring read on reinventing business

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Every CEO these days wants to reinvent her business. One problem is thinking big enough. Being part of an industry, a market, a sector tends to limit a company’s peripheral vision. How do companies break out of their comfort zone and find strategies that take advantage of their unique strengths while opening up new markets?

That is the question “Big Think Strategy” by Bernd Schmitt, professor at Columbia Business School, tries to answer. And the book does a good job of showing what is needed to “kill the sacred cows” of a business and imagine and invent a prosperous, growing future. Schmitt’s focus is on nurturing creativity in the executive suite and in among the rank and file. And it’s written in a fun style that complements the subject matter and inspires the readership to give the ideas a try.

The best parts of the book are around generating new ideas–from staff, customers or seemingly unrelated industries–creating a strategy from those ideas. In Chapter Four, Schmitt describes four “big think strategy” types–opposition, integration, essence and transcendence–and what competitive reaction each type is likely to spur.

Like more and more business books these days, Schmitt lets his personal story seep into the pages, whether it’s his love of steak or a nice suit, or the opera. (I have to say my enjoyment of these anecdotes was offset somewhat by twinges of envy–Schmitt’s life seems pretty posh for a consultant… perhaps he is hiring?)

“Big Think Strategy” is a companion piece to a couple of other recent books of importance: “The Opposable Mind” and “The Future of Management” (see posts on these books here and here). And it suffers a bit by comparison to each. Due to its brevity and fewer examples, and to some extent its breezy writing style, it feels less substantial than either book. Nonetheless, it’s a good book on a crucial subject for today’s leaders.

If you can only buy two books on reinventing your business this year, I’m afraid you’ll have to skip “Big Think Strategy.” Otherwise, it’s a worthy addition to your bookshelf.

creativity, strategy, business development, reading list

Posted in business development, creativity, reading list, strategy | Comments

The first great business book of 2008

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

When I was growing up in the northeast US, it became fashionable for weather forecasters to declare, “This is one of the ten best days of the year!” And I always wondered what happened if they used up their ten-best days too early–for example, not being able to duly recognize a spectacular October 17th.

Such is the risk in proclaiming a book on January 14 to be one of the best books of the upcoming year. But if I read five better books than “The Opposable Mind” this year, it will have been a good year indeed.

The book, by Rotman School of Management dean Roger Martin, seeks to demonstrate that great business innovators use a different mode of thinking from that of the run-of-the-mill manager. Such thinking (using the “opposable mind,” in the book’s parlance) allows them to hold several conflicting ideas in their heads and craft breakthrough solutions that resolve the conflicts. While relying on vivid anecdotes and case studies, the book also has a strong academic underpinning, referencing the work of, among others, Stanford’s James March.

Martin introduces us to a new cast of great thinkers. Likely because the author’s home base lies in an important metropolis outside the US–Toronto–he has discovered innovators rarely profiled in business books. While trotting out a few of the usual suspects (Welch, Lafley), Martin also reviews the decisionmaking of Four Seasons Hotels’ Isadore Sharp; citytv’s Moses Znaimer; and Piers Handling of the Toronto Film Festival.

In many ways, the book is a celebration of the entrepreneur. Collaborative decisionmaking is nonexistent in the book. One of Martin’s theses is that only an individual seeing the entire picture can create the creative leap to the new. Even in large corporate settings, like P&G, the hero is the individual who can resolve the paradoxes and see the breakthrough solution that his/her thousands of colleagues have missed.

For Sharp, it was uniting the best of small, high-service hotels and large, impersonal hotels with vast amenities. For Znaimer, it was creating a brand for a television station apart from simply a compendium of others’ programming. And for Lafley, it was seeing that the requirements for low-cost products and increased innovation did not have to be mere tradeoffs, but could point the way to a new way of creating products–Connect & Develop.

“The Opposable Mind” is an utterly optimistic book. Martin believes strongly that anyone can learn these thinking skills. He teaches them to Rotman students and describes their struggles and forward steps in mastering what to folks like Moses Znaimer is natural, but to the rest of us is brand-new thinking indeed.

Posts that discuss related subjects:

creativity, complexity, entrepreneurism, reading list

Posted in complexity, creativity, entrepreneurism, reading list | Comments

Top 5 Best Business Books of the Year

Monday, December 17th, 2007

It’s December, and “best of” lists are appearing everywhere. Here, too. So, if you are still searching for great gifts for the business-book reader in your family, you can’t go wrong with any of these titles:

5. “Reinventing Project Management,” Aaron Shenhar and Dov Dvir. A look at project management that goes way deeper, and is far more useful, than “on time, on budget, to requirements.” Here’s what I wrote about “RPM” earlier this year: 1, 2.

4. “Smart World,” Richard Ogle. Innovative breakthroughs are not created by solitary thinkers toiling in the lab, but by people or groups interacting with their networks and environments. Prior posts on “Smart World”: 1, 2.

3. “X-Teams,” Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman. How great teams orient themselves externally and encourage dissent. Here’s what I wrote about it back in May and June: 1, 2, 3, 4.

2. “Negotiation Genius,” Deepak Malhotra and Max Bazerman. The best one-volume negotiation book you can buy at any price. Read a fuller review here.

1. “The Future of Management,” Gary Hamel. (It’s in stock at Amazon.) How to build a change-adaptable business in the 21st century. I did five posts on this book last year: start here.

negotiation, innovation, creativity, project management, organizational behavior, reading list

Posted in creativity, innovation, negotiation, organizational behavior, project management, reading list | Comments

An important new resource for improving innovation

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Upon first reading this month’s Harvard Business Review, I skated over “Breakthrough Thinking Inside the Box” (free link). I was probably too wrapped up in the storytelling article. Or I was concerned that this was another “strategic secret in 3000 words or less.”

After carefully reviewing the article today, it was a mistake to skip over it the first time. “Breakthrough Thinking” is a practical, useful and surprising look at generating new business ideas. The authors, Kevin Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford and Renée Dye, remind us of how frustrating typical brainstorming sessions are (“invent an idea for a new business in the next 20 minutes”). Then they go further to describe how such meetings can be infinitely more productive by laying out simple constraints to focus the mind and describe what form a useful new idea might take.

The creative usefulness of constraints is no secret, but “Breakthrough Thinking” is novel because it closely connects the right-brain creative flow process to a highly practical (and vital) business problem—improving innovation. I was also impressed by the rigorous approach used to create the method and the extensive in-use testing done before publicizing it (kudos to McKinsey).

My favorite part of the article is the sidebar “21 Great Questions for Developing New Products,” which should be cut out and pasted on the wall of every product manager, R&D vice president, or C-level executive. I can’t count how many meetings I’ve been in where using this list would have greatly increased the results. I’ve thought of four or five instances where I can use the list in my own work, right away.

So, read “Breakthrough Thinking.” Paste “21 Great Questions” on your wall. And let the great ideas flow.

innovation, creativity, Harvard Business Review, product development

Posted in Harvard Business Review, creativity, innovation, product development | Comments

On Gary Hamel’s "The Future of Management" part 5 – Final thoughts

Friday, October 19th, 2007

Hamel talks frequently in the book of enrolling the entire company in innovation. Among all the obstacles to achieving this–the lack of democracy, the weight of inertia–the biggest one in my view is the information gap. Comparing the volume and depth of information I had access to when I was a senior executive to the paucity I had in any other position–the difference was staggering. (Note: you can find excerpts of “The Future of Management” here.)

It’s no wonder that people can’t or won’t contribute meaningful ideas for the future when they don’t know what the strategy of the company is, or what the core competencies are, or what happy customers like and angry customers hate about the company.

And companies simply won’t share enough information for employees to be a valuable part of the innovation process. (If the guy in the printing department is limited to knowledge and context of printing, he’s not going to be able to contribute as much as he could.) Perhaps it’s concern for confidential information leakage, or for PR fallout, or that management simply doesn’t trust in the employees’ ability to add value to innovation. At any rate, there isn’t nearly enough information sharing with the rank and file.

So where does this leave us, at the end of “The Future of Management“? For one, with a feeling that the top-down, hierarchical, command-and-control model of management is in decline. But also that the next model has yet to be even devised, never mind perfected.

It will certainly be technology-driven. It will be more collaborative, and less proprietary (like P&G’s open innovation process). It will be more engaging and rewarding for most employees. There’ll be even less job security, and few places to hide if you want to skate for a while (and get paid for doing so).

But will companies look like Google, which for all its innovation still relies on hordes of internal staff; or like movie studios, which form and reform teams of independent contractors for each project; or like open-source communities, which solicit volunteers and manage via a peer-review process and offer of public recognition?

Will people be paid a salary, a price per innovation, or in equity?

What will managers do? Collect and distribute data, perhaps? Administer the market-making systems? Or vanish entirely?

Over the next twenty or twenty-five years, we shall see. It will be an interesting journey.

On Gary Hamel’s "The Future of Management" part 4 – Learning from highly-adaptable systems

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

After lengthy case histories of some new-management examples (W.L. Gore, Whole Foods Market and Google), Hamel gets down to helping us imagine what the new management model might look like. In Chapter Eight of “The Future of Management,” “Embracing New Principles,” he lays out models for highly-resilient, self-organizing systems, so that by example we could create some rules and practices for new corporate managment. The systems are:

Life – by its limitless diversity, life has adapted to every calamity and catastrophe that has befallen the earth in the last billion years or more. It’s instructive that most life “experiments” are failures–virtually all species become extinct, most mutations don’t survive. Yet the overall results are anything but a failure.

Markets – they rapidly incorporate information from buyers and sellers, and set prices without any ultimate authority. Investment abandons poor investments quickly to seek higher potential or lower risk, and there are numerous sources from which to raise money.

Democracy – gives each citizen a stake in his governance. By giving voices to many, dissent is prevalent. Which leads to slower, but sounder, decision-making. And, transparency of information is the rule–which tends to create a more egalitarian environment and one where citizens feel empowered to protest what they see as injustice or inequity (you should have seen the uproar when this news was published in my local paper).

Faith – gives meaning to people’s everyday lives, and allows them to persevere through tragedy and heartbreak.

Cities – they reinvent themselves continuously by taking on the character of their inhabitants–usually a highly-diverse, creative, enterprising group–and providing variety and space for self-expression. By their layouts, they “increase the odds for serendipity” by allowing people from different viewpoints and areas of expertise to collide, dialogue and perhaps collaborate.

The question Hamel poses in this section is: are any of these traits found in your company? The answer will be, for the vast majority of us, no.

Corporate hierarchies don’t allow for many failures to find the one great success; they don’t move quickly to defund bad ideas, and are terrible at speculation; they aren’t democratic in the least; a higher mission or calling is rare (certainly a deeply-felt mission); they are laid out to reduce costs, not increase the environment to collaborate.

All of this points to the fact that (a) instituting such change will be difficult and (b) those who can do it will achieve outsized rewards, for imitating it will be a challenge.

Ending again with a quote:

Indeed, the more one learns about what it is that makes things adaptable, the more one is tempted to question the very foundations of modern management theory. After all, when compared to large companies, the most adaptable things on the planet are either under-managed or, Mon Dieu, un-managed.

Other posts in this series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 5

Note: you can find excerpts of the book here.

(Photo by echobase via stock.xchng)

innovation leadership creativity reading list democracy adaptability