Entries Tagged 'creativity' ↓

In recent months I’ve run across a couple of companies — one of them a good-sized regional bank, the other an unnamed Blue Cross company — who are still referring to and using consumer and customer research done as far back as early 2009. What is worse is that they’re using this consumer and customer research in building their 2011 marketing plans.

Never in the modern history of commerce has the tectonic plate under our business world shifted so suddenly and precipitously as in the past 2 years. And what do you suppose has been the sector most affected?

Why consumer and customer behavior, of all things.

The bank’s answer to my question was, “Well you do have a point but our system-wide mission and focus is to stay close to our customers on a daily basis.”

I responded  that staying close to your customers in these times is pretty hard when you have over 4 million of them.

I wonder if they ever look at the expiration date on the eggs in the refrigerator.

Couple of years ago I was watching a video on YouTube showing footage shot from an attack helicopter. The voiceover explained how the rocket was fired at the same time the target was framed, and the on board computer guided the round to the target.

About the same time I saw a small news item in the Industry Monitor column by Otis Port from a couple of years ago, titled “A Drill That Can Think As It Makes A Hole.” Continue reading →

It’s a sad fact that creative people are often looked upon by many in business as intellectually ungrounded, loose impractical thinkers whose ideas are generally interesting, usually provocative, hardly ever immediately practical, and always to be investigated rigorously to find all the reasons they won’t work. Continue reading →

The amount of energy wasted trying to train fundamentally non-creative people to be creative is incalculable. 

It’ s true that many kids have the innate capability of developing creative skills, but early on this capability is forever crushed under the boot of parenting, educational systems and workforce authoritarian rigidity. They become linear thinkers on the spot, and over a lifetime become as unlikely to develop a passion for creative thinking as a bookie would be to develop an obsession with early English literature.

If creativity isn’t there early it very likely won’t be there late. Trying to put it there is much like trying to teach elephants to create paintings. They’re alert enough to learn eventually to pick up a brush, dip it in the buckets of paint and swish it onto the paper.

But all they’re doing is whatever it takes to earn another serving of peanuts, their art purchased with magnificent self delusion by people who don’t understand art any more than the elephants do.

People are a lot like the elephants. Particularly when they’re clustered together in a “How To Be Creative” employee learning session.

It’s actually easy to convince people they’re being creative simply by encouraging them to blurt a random thought without much regard for its connection to the topic under discussion. Since they would never have otherwise had the nerve to do this, and since they’re applauded now for doing it, they can be forgiven for thinking that something seriously profound has taken place.

Blurting thoughts and receiving approval is a real novelty and a lot of fun, like it must be for a philosopher to yell insults to the referees at a wrestling match.

Finally, since this sharing of impractical, irrelevant thoughts is enthusiastically applauded by everybody else in the room – indeed, peer criticism is strictly forbidden – they forever after think their ideas are all good ones, and confuse random mental outbursts with honest-to goodness creative product.

As I said early on, the damage this can do to an organization can’t be properly measured.

For one thing employees who subsequently step forth with other ideas in the normal course of their work almost always take permanent offense at the fact that their ideas (which are just as dreadful as you might imagine) immediately disappear into thin air.

There are other reasons, too. Stay tuned.

-Howard