How to lead your creative people
Here's a copy of my new white paper. It's the precursor to my book series due out in about June this year. To view just click on the animation. Or download a pdf version. Hope you enjoy.
Being creative is sexy. Everybody is talking about it and everybody is doing it. Being creative is the new black.
And in business, being creative is even sexier. Why? Because being creative drives business. It adds real value to a business. Value to its people, value to its customers, and value to its bottom line.
Log onto any business website, such as Business Week or Harvard Business Review, search for ‘creativity’, and you’ll find a plethora of articles. In his book Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida points out that in the US alone, workers in the creative sector make up 30% of the workforce and earn nearly 50% of the money. Being creative is not some whimsical, intangible thing – it’s a major business tool.
Intrinsically, we all understand this.
But there is a problem – because there is a gap. There’s a gap between the value an organization places on being creative and its ability to tap into its creative resources to fully use the talents of its creative people.
How do we know this? Because we asked. Recently, we conducted a survey of both business leaders and creative people[2]. One of the questions we asked was, ‘In business, should creativity have a commercial value?’ Pretty straightforward and, as you would expect, most people answered yes – 90%, in fact. Not surprising, when you think about it. In the commercial world, creativity just isn’t that useful unless it leads to a positive business outcome.
BUT… the surprise was the result from another fairly straightforward question: ‘Do you fully utilize the talents of your creative people?’ Only 17% of people answered yes!
I don’t know about you, but that rings alarm bells for me.
On the one hand, business emphatically understands the need for creativity to be commercially valuable – yet 83% don’t make full use of their creative people’s abilities and wisdom to achieve this. What’s even more amazing is that they know they don’t!
It’s like building a bridge across a canyon to get a heap of stuff to the other side, but only using 17% of that bridge’s capacity. You’d have to limit how much you carry across or do multiple trips. Either way, it’s inefficient: you’re not making full use of a very useful bridge. You wouldn’t utilize only 17% of the bridge's capacity, so why use only 17% of your organization's creative capacity?
The answer lies in the challenge that faces creative organizations. The challenge is not actually to find creative people and it's not to teach your people how to be more creative. The real challenge facing creative organizations is knowing how to lead your creative people and your innovative thinkers. It is knowing how to tap into their talents, harness their genius, and direct it towards viable business outcomes.
Click here to read the full paper




Sunday, January 31, 2010








