Harvard Business Review Creativity y and the Role of the by Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire From the Magazine (October 2008) Summary. Reprint: RO810G In today’s innovation-driven economy, understanding how to generate great ideas has become an urgent managerial priority. Suddenly, the spotlight has turned on the academics who've studied creativity for decades. How relevant is their... more + BLOG: Join the conversation with Teresa Amabile about the challenges of managing creativity. Creativity has always been at the heart of business, but until now it hasn’t been at the top of the management agenda. By definition the ability to create something novel and appropriate, creativity is essential to the entrepreneurship that gets new businesses started and that sustains the best companies after they have reached global scale. But perhaps because creativity was considered unmanageable—too elusive and intangible to pin down—or because concentrating on it produced a less immediate payoff than improving execution, it hasn’t been the focus of most managers’ attention. Creativity has, however, long been a focus of academics in fields ranging from anthropology to neuroscience, and has enticed management scholars as well. Therefore, a substantial body of work on creativity has been available to any businessperson inclined to step back from the fray of daily management and engage in its questions.And that’s suddenly very fortunate, because what used to be an intellectual interest for some thoughtful executives has now become an urgent concern for many. The shift to a more innovation-driven economy has been abrupt. Today, execution capabilities are widely shared and the life cycles of new offerings are short. As competition turns into a game of who can generate the best and greatest number of ideas, creativity scholars are being asked pointed questions about their research. What does it mean? How relevant is it? Does it offer guidance on the decisions that leaders in creativity-dependent businesses have to make? To help make the connections between theory and practice, we recently convened a two-day colloquium at Harvard Business School, inviting business leaders from companies whose success depends on creativity—such as design consultancy IDEO, technology innovator E Ink, internet giant Google, and pharmaceutical leader Novartis. At the gathering, leading scholars presented their newest and most important research. In all, we brought together nearly 100 people who were deeply concerned with the workings of creativity in organizations and let the sparks fly. Over those two days, we saw a new agenda for business leadership begin to take shape. At first, we heard skepticism that creativity should be managed at all. Intuit cofounder Scott Cook, for example, wondered whether management was “a net positive or a net negative” for creativity. “If there is a bottleneck in organizational creativity,” he asked, “might it be at the top of the bottle?” By the colloquium’s end, however, most attendees agreed that there is a role for management in the creative process; it is just different from what the traditional work of management might suggest. The leadership imperatives we discussed, which we share in this article, reflect a viewpoint we came to hold in common: One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity. Drawing on the Right Minds The first priority of leadership is to engage the right people, at the right times, to the right degree in creative work. That engagement starts when the leader recasts the role of employees. Rather than simply roll up their sleeves and execute top-down strategy, employeesmust contribute imagination. As Cook put it, “Traditional management prioritizes projects and assigns people to them. But increasingly, managers are not the source of the idea.” Tap ideas from all ranks. Cook told the story of an eye-opening analysis of innovations at Google: Its founders tracked the progress of ideas that they had backed versus ideas that had been executed in the ranks without support from above, and discovered a higher success rate in the latter category. Similarly, it was noted that Philip Rosedale, the founder and chairman of Linden Lab, the fast-growing company that manages Second Life, claims to give most workers enormous autonomy, and says the greatest successes come from workers’ own initiatives. Research by Israel Drori, a professor at the College of Management in Israel, and Benson Honig, a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, highlights the hazards of not distributing creative responsibilities across the organization. They observed an internet start-up offering a new, sophisticated form of computer graphics from its inception in 1996 until its collapse, seven years later. While the venture enjoyed initial success, it was ultimately unsustainable because it depended too much on the genius of its award-winning artist-founder—and took organizational creativity for granted. Encourage and enable collaboration. As leaders look beyond the top ranks for creative direction, they must combat what Diego Rodriguez, a partner at IDEO and the leader of its Palo Alto, California, office, calls the “lone inventor myth.” Though past breakthroughs sometimes have come from a single genius, the reality today is that most innovations draw on many contributions. “Consider the examples of InnoCentive, of Mozilla, of Wikipedia,” Rodriguez said. “All are contexts that bring in lots of contributors. And the fundamental structure of such networked organizations is not centralized and top-down. People don’t do what they do because someone told them to do it. Contributing to an interdependent network is its own reward.” Rodriguez argued forcefully that, even in today’s highly networked world, organizations fail to take full advantage of internet technologies to tap into the creativity of manysmart people working on the same problem. (For Scott Cook’s thinking about tapping the input of people outside the organization, see “The Contribution Revolution,” Reprint Ro810C.) A study by Victor Seidel of the University of Oxford’s Said Business School identified one practice that leaders would do well to promote: the use of “coordination totems” in the conceptualization of new products. Seidel looked at the problem of how to achieve collaboration on radical innovations; when no obvious antecedent exists, it’s difficult for a vision to be shared. His analysis of six award- winning products (from three quite different industries) showed how product development teams used not only prototypes but also metaphors, analogies, and stories to coordinate their thinking. Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, noted that most companies have hierarchical structures, and differences in status among people impede the exchange of ideas. How to remedy that? Sutton couldn’t resist pointing out the huge inequalities in salaries at today’s firms and suggested that if the field were more level, more people might speak up and be listened to. He urged leaders to define “superstars” in their organizations as those who help others succeed. Wryly, he recalled seeing powerful people hold forth in meetings even though others in the room had much better ideas for solving problems. It should be management’s mission, he suggested, to “figure out how to get people to shut up at the right time” Open the organization to diverse perspectives. Frans Johansson, author of The Medici Effect, described his finding— based on interviews with people doing highly creative work in many fields—that innovation is more likely when people of different disciplines, backgrounds, and areas of expertise share their thinking. Sometimes the complexity of a problem demands diversity; for example, it took a team of mathematicians, medical doctors, neuroscientists, and computer scientists at Brown University’s brain science program to create a system in which a monkey could move a computer cursor with only its thoughts. Other times, the application