The chairman of an immensely respected and successful company, when asked to press a magic button and obtain whatever his firm most needed, hesitated not at all. He wanted his managers to be more creative. He was right. Jack Welch of General Electric, today's most quoted business leader, sounds the same note: his businesses will have to win by ideas, not by 'whips and chains.'
Welch's remark establishes the basic conflict: in the left corner, creativity: in the right corner, control. Mostly, the right wins. That's partly because systems and hierarchies collectively obstruct efforts to innovate and be imaginative; but also because individual managers, like chameleons, adapt to their stodgy environment for self-protection. It follows that the chairman really did have a magic button: he could change the ruling management style.
The needed change has been dramatically demonstrated in the astonishing world of information technology. 'Intel's history is to obsolete its old products with its next products', says a senior vice president. Right across the spectrum, for hardware, software and services, the pace is set by creative thinking and the new technology that new thought generates. Customers have been swept up in the maelstrom - competitive advantage can be snatched and kept by the most creative uses of the latest IT tools.
As Percy Barnevik, the chairman of ABB, has said, all companies today are IT companies. 'The big difference is between those that are good at using the technologies and those that aren't.' The quote comes from John Kao's Jamming, which equates the management of creativity with running a jam session. In the face of shortening product life-cycles and proliferating, savage competition, any IT company has long had to jazz up its modus operandi to encourage, expedite and reward the flow of new ideas and their effective implementation.
To put it very gently, that's not the traditional method of managing. Creativity doesn't figure in management appraisals or bonus payments, and a sense of urgency rarely arises save in crisis, when time suddenly becomes of the essence. In more normal circumstances, would-be creators find themselves fighting for dear life (that of their brainchild and their own careers) against the determined resistance of their employer. That can happen even in companies renowned for their creativity, like 3M.
The company is now intensely proud of the world-conquering Post-It notepads. But almost every obstacle was placed in the path of the innovators - including the firmly held, ill-founded belief that the product would never find a market. Probably every great idea comes up against some conservative fellow who automatically finds reasons (often, as with Post-It, based on no real evidence) why the idea will never work. Edward de Bono calls this 'Black Hat' thinking. It has an important, worthy role to play, but only in combination with five other 'Thinking Hats'.
In de Bono's method, all the team don the Black Hat to investigate the idea's drawbacks: then, they all change hats to Yellow, say, to explore the benefits. The method (which is very effective in eliminating politics and personalities and speeding discussions) forces participants away from habitual mental modes, making them look at the issue from all angles. For example, they switch to the Red Hat to tackle the idea or problem emotionally, giving full rein to hunch, intuition and gut feeling.
These are immensely important in creativity, as every innovator and artist knows - which is one reason why orthodox managers find managing creative people so difficult. According to David Benjamin, who has researched innovation in great depth, the orthodox approach has little or no result, anyway. 'Innovations consistently occur despite management efforts, and very often out of their sight.' Managers then do their best to bungle the new beauty. They don't give the creators the credit that is their due, and often follow up with 'a wrong-headed exploitation strategy' (that's how EMI blew the fantastic opportunity created by the accidental invention of the brain-scanner).
'The exception to the follow-up snafu', says Benjamin, 'is the entrepreneurial company born from an innovation' - which applies to the vast majority of IT firms. They have been remarkably successful, however, at avoiding what he sees as a major risk: that management orthodoxy 'infiltrates the creative team, drains their innovative spirit and jettisons many of its members.' This successful resistance to bureaucracy is easily explained. The pressures of competition are too intense, and the creators, if baulked, will simply walk out and create elsewhere.
That was the origin of SAP, whose founders started on the road to enterprise-wide computing software after their employer, IBM, killed their project. No doubt, the nay-sayers had sound Black Hat reasons. No doubt, they also paid lip-service to the importance of creativity and innovation. But the control culture (Welch's 'whips and chains') won hands down. The issue isn't therefore one of creativity itself, but of the gulf between management and managed - the very same gap which arises in participation.
Two researchers, Kate Perkins and Terry Prime, found this yawning canyon in an automotive plant in Australia. The managers sincerely believed that workers should participate in making decisions, setting performance targets, and working out how to meet them. But managers' behaviour stayed sincerely control-driven: 'we will develop the BIg Picture and tell workers about it'...'there will need to be checks and controls'...'they complain about everything we try to do, so we may as well go ahead. They'll come round...'we can't trust them to make important decisions.'
Distrustful command-and-control behaviour is senseless in the factory. In R&D, or in dealing with managers who are ostensibly paid to think and create, the stance is obstructive and dangerous. Trusting far outweighs checks and controls in creating a truly creative organisation. In most management cures, a familiar difficulty arises: somebody must take the risk of action. Not so with creativity. Control freaks need simply and constructively do little - except get out of the way.
