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Cult of Creativity
CEOs
need to feed their own creative side well to foster innovation
As a manager, how do you get the
absolutely best, most creative performance out of your people? It starts
with getting the best out of yourself. Reflection, combined with talking it
out, is one of the best ways to stimulate new ideas. Take a lesson from
Carlos Brito, the CEO of the beer company AbInBev. He religiously carves
out time each week when he's not bothered with the day-to-day matters of
the company. Fridays are sacrosanct: they are his time for reflection. He
lets his mind go, and sometimes brings in thought leaders to discuss bigger
picture issues.
If you want to be innovative, you've got to come
out of your silo.
Another thing I've found in my work with managers
is that it's important to be in regular dialogue with people who are not in
your industry and to read in areas that are unrelated to your work. Picking
up books on history, science, and other large and small topics can get
different areas of your brain going. This kind of information building
allows you to develop what I call "knowledge nodes"--synergistic
conglomerations of data that can be unexpectedly combined to create great
solutions. This is how Steve Jobs operated--his wide-ranging interests
allowed for a creative lifetime of connecting the dots.
Leading by example is a great way to inspire others
in your organization. Sachit Jain is an exemplar of this. A year behind me
in our MBA program at IIM Ahmedabad in India, he graduated to marry into
the family that owned Vardhaman Industries in India, a conglomerate that is
one of the largest suppliers of high-quality fabric in the world. Like most
men who marry into such families, he became a senior manager in his
mid-20s.
Jain was suddenly plunged into dealing with a
textile manufacturing enterprise that had experienced so much strife that a
lockdown had occurred at the factory and the chairman had almost been
killed. Yet, amazingly, he turned the situation around. And not just that
situation, but host of them since then.
How? He started talking to his employees. In India,
for a boss to sit at a table with his workers is unheard of. But Jain has
persisted in regularly getting down to the shop floor level to find out
what's going on. His method for instilling an innovative spirit in an
organization is to ask his employees, "What can you do in the
workplace to make tomorrow better than today?" He doesn't ask them to
think about making things better for the organization. He asks them to
think about making things better for themselves.
On a study trip to India with Stanford MBAs in
2011, I saw a few examples of the remarkable results of this kind of
managerial approach. One was the case of a worker who had the equivalent of
a third-grade education in the West. He had noticed a problem: changing the
thread spindles when they ran out was a physically stressful job. It
required a team of two--one pushing a cart with the fresh spindles, and the
other constantly having to move the stool, climb up and replace the
spindle, and climb down. The guy on the stool was often taking sick leave
because of the physical demands, which sometimes led to falls and other
injuries.
In his own time after work, the factory worker
began experimenting with how to propel the stool so that the worker didn't
have to keep getting up and down. Eventually he had the idea to put wheels
on the stool, and then he rigged up an electric motor to propel it. In a
final ingenious flash, he adapted a sewing machine pedal to the mechanism
so that the worker could stop and start it at will. The results? Less sick
time, less injury, and greater efficiency and productivity.
To support the process, Jain drew on one of the
most powerful motivators for innovation: social recognition. The factory
worker earned tremendous social prestige by our visit, which included a
private meeting with him to hear about how he came up with his idea. Other
people in the company began realizing: If he can do it, so can I.
Democratizing where innovation can come from,
encouraging grassroots ideas, and utilizing social recognition are all
powerful methods for encouraging innovation. But the most inspiring method
is, as Gandhi affirmed, to "be the change." A manager who takes
time to feed her own creative side well is the one who
knows how to elicit the creativity of others best.
Baba Shiv is the Sanwa Bank,
Limited, Professor of Management Science, Stanford Graduate School of
Business
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