Leadership: sparking up your personal creativity

Published: 2011-07-08   There are 2 comments ... please add yours below

“Only by forcing our brains to … move beyond our habitual thinking patterns can (leaders) begin to imagine truly novel alternatives.” So say the authors of a recent McKinsey Quarterly article – and it’s hard to argue. They focus mostly on improving team creativity but there are two segments of their article I’ve re-refocused towards personal innovation. Rapid technical, cultural and social changes mean that leaders, who fail to generate new approaches will become victims of change, not its drivers. How would people say you perform on the items in the two checklists below?

List One: LEARNING FROM THE BEST

• Customers: think of two organisations that have really engaged your loyalty? What were their secrets? And, how could thinking like them help you recast your customer management?
Products: which personal products do you enjoy and value? Perhaps your iPad? If Apple’s people came to visit, how would they reshape the function, design and value of what you offer? Costs: what companies do you know that keep prices down but still deliver quality? For example, an airline or restaurant. What’s the trick behind this double win? What can you learn? Logistics: how is it the best distributors achieve both speed and reliability? What do they do that you’re not doing? Is it about process or people? Either way, what’s it mean for you? Information: what’s Google got to teach you? How can you manage your data to make it add value to your products and services – or make life easier for your staff?

List Two: LEARNING FROM NECESSITY

• Segments: what if you only had to service the largest sub-set of your customers. How would you change things to make life great for them and more profitable for you?
Channels: imagine you only had one communication mode with customers – say, online. How would that change what you do? Could it be a positive for your business? Pricing: imagine (like Tata Motors) that you set an upper price limit for your product or service. If it were 20% of the normal level, how would you achieve this? Tata’s goal was even lower! Staffing: if you only had half the staff, how would you organise them to keep the business going? What roles or activities would you dump? Which ones and how? So, why not start today? Outsourcing: some businesses today are virtual – almost everything’s done by contractors. How would they reconfigure your business? Could this be more successful and profitable?

There’s nothing new in emulating the best people. And, as we know, necessity is the mother of invention. What’s new here is applying best-practice and necessity to your mindset not just to an element of what you produce or deliver. It’s about new models and approaches not just incrementalism. Creating new paradigms not oiling old ones.

Dr. Timothy Pascoe AM
PhD (Cambridge), MBA (Harvard), BE & BEc (Adelaide)
Creator, V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership^®