Creativity and Leadership: Unit 1

CREATIVITY AND
UNIT 1 LEADERSHIP
Those who have changed the universe have never
done it by changing officials, but always by inspiring
the people.
Napoleon Bonaparte
ROLE OF LEADERSHIP
• If there is one single factor that is critical to innovation success, it
is committed and supportive leadership
• Literature offers far-reaching consensus about the importance of
top management support in enabling successful new product
development and innovation.
• Without clear senior management approval and encouragement,
innovation activities will lack a sense of importance and urgency
– and as a consequence, attention and commitment by
participating individuals and functions.
“Clear signals from the top are key”
• Leadership can take place at any level within the organization,
and whereas ‘management’ is about directing people, about
efficiency, structuring and organizing, leadership is about
motivating people and about inspiring them to go the extra
mile – something that is often required in innovative projects.
• SO, WHAT IS LEADERSHIP??
• According to Professor Rob Goffee, London Business School,
‘Leadership is about inspiring individuals to higher levels of
performance’.
The BBC Case Discussion
What makes good leadership?
Research commissioned by the DTI and CBI in 1995 identified the
following six traits as characteristics of good leaders:
• Enthusiasm
• Championing change
• Communicating
• Leading by example
• Tolerating risk
• Being open (approachable, willing to listen)
• For leaders to inspire people to innovate, they themselves have to be
open towards change and experimentation.
• A person who likes to drive change has a different profile from a person
who is good at optimizing things and making sure they run smoothly.
• While most senior managers nowadays seem to buy into the argument
that innovation is important to their organization’s long-term success,
their personal preference may be one for incremental changes.
• In that case they will not be the most appropriate person to lead an
organization’s change initiative or to improve innovation performance.
CHECKLIST ON HOW TO IMPROVE THE CLIMATE
FOR INNOVATION WITHIN AN ORGANIZATION
• Thomas Kuczmarski’s (1998) 20 questions for leaders

who want to find out whether they are actually
creating the right conditions for innovation to
flourish.
Questions for Innovation Leaders (reproduced
from (Kuczmarski 1998))
1. Do I currently incorporate innovation into our business plan as a
strategic lever for increasing satisfaction with shareholders,
employees, and customers?
2. Have I consciously used innovation and launched new products
to help accelerate my company’s stock price or increase my
company’s value?
3. Have I purposely developed a balanced portfolio of new product
types with varying degrees of risk ranging from radically new-
to-the-world to line extensions and repositionings?
4. Do I teach my management team to view innovation as an
investment opportunity rather than as a cost center that
negatively impacts quarterly earnings?
5. Do I have a commonly agreed-upon innovation strategy in place
that links the role of innovation and new products to our
business strategy?
6. Have I made innovation an attractive career path for employees
to pursue?
7. Do I regularly celebrate, with all team members, new product
failures with as much fervor as new-product successes?
8. Do I uniformly communicate and act in ways that clearly
convey trust in the cross-functional teams that are
activating innovation?
9. Do I stimulate an entrepreneurial environment by having
a performance-based compensation system in place for
new product participants?
10. Do I measure and communicate throughout the
organization the return on innovation for our company
11. Do I really know how much innovation costs, and do I set realistic
return expectations for innovation?
12. Do I provide ‘ceilingless’ and motivating compensation rewards to
new-product participants and allow them to invest in the new
products they are developing?
13. Do I select the best people within the company (for example,
those I feel I can’t afford to remove from the existing business) to
activate the new-product process?
14. Do I make sure we conduct consumer research prior to idea
generation to identify problems and needs?
15. Do I ensure that idea generation is a problem-solving endeavor
aimed at generating potential solutions to address consumer
needs?
16. Do I maintain funding and resource allocation for innovation at a
consistent level rather than pulling the plug after a ‘down’ quarter?
17. Do I truly accept that 40 to 50% of our future new-product launches
will fail?
18. Do all R&D people get at least 15% ‘free time’ (unassigned to any
specific project) to give them room to breathe and freedom to
explore their own ideas?
19. Do I have a well-articulated technology strategy that defines
technology platforms and areas of needed technical expertise to
help support the innovation initiatives?
20. Do I hear others throughout the organization talk about my
positive, enthusiastic, supportive, and ‘can-do’ attitude toward
innovation?
THE ROLE OF COMPANY CULTURE
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit of and for
behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting
the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their
embodiment in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists
of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and
especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the
one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other, as
conditioning elements of future action.
Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952)
REMEMBER
• Firstly, Creating the right culture is key to innovation, and that the
most influential person in establishing culture is a company’s leader.
• Secondly, it is important to note that when trying to change a culture
towards increased innovativeness many companies encounter
resistance as a part of human nature, as well as some specific reasons
to object changes such as a loss of power or autonomy.
• Thirdly, there may also be aspects of a company’s heritage that go
against the grain of what innovation is about.
• Finally, there are certain characteristics that are typically found in an
innovation culture
1. EXPERIMENTATION AND TERMINATION
• First, an essential part of the experimentation culture is the acceptance
of failure.
• Secondly, if you start with many different options, exploring a number of
different avenues, you must have the ability and willingness to
terminate projects.
• The art lies in starting as broad as possible and narrowing down as
quickly as is feasible.
• Finally, innovative companies are not only good at killing projects at an
early stage, they are also good at analyzing projects, particularly ones
that have failed or been discontinued at a late stage, to see what can be
learnt from why and how they went wrong
• A further characteristic of an innovation culture related to the habit of
experimentation is the ‘can-do’ approach.
• It is best encapsulated in the typical 3M line of ‘it is better to ask for
forgiveness than permission’.
• People in innovative organizations feel at liberty to try things out and
experiment, often without asking explicit permission from anyone
before doing so.
• The following example is from product design and innovation firm
IDEO. An employee, usually travelling to the office on his bicycle, never
quite knew where to put it upon arrival. He started hoisting it up into
the beams of the roof construction. No one complained, no one
needed to be asked for permission, and soon others copied the idea.
• This displays a degree of ownership and feeling at home that
many organizations lack.
• If people feel comfortable to experiment and explore, they
are more likely to bring forward some ‘ridiculous’ idea they
have – and of course there is the saying that if an idea does
not seem ridiculous at first it is probably not worth pursuing.
2. COLLABORATION AND COMPETITION
• Innovative companies engage in collaboration, be it internally
through cross-functional teams, or externally through joint
ventures, alliances, or less structured forms of networking.
• But many innovative organizations also believe in the value of
internal and external competition by setting up competing project
teams that spur each other to higher performance where the
‘losers’ are happy to support the ‘winners’ on their way forward.
• In a company with a positive competitive culture, to lose is not
equal to losing face or missing out on the next potential
promotion.
3. FUN AND FOCUS
• A third trait is a combination of fun and focus. Fun, exploration and play are
all aspects that prepare a fertile ground for innovation.
• A humour-filled atmosphere encourages ideas and suggestions, makes
‘failure’ more bearable, and allows the exploration of seemingly silly ideas.
• But at the same time, successful innovation cultures are result oriented. Max
de Pree writes, ‘Creative persons, like the rest of us, need constraints.’
• Providing no framework at all for innovation can lead to the development of
concepts and ideas that do not have anything whatsoever to do with the
company, resulting in wastage of valuable company resources.
4. ALIGNMENT OF SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES
• All systems and processes, particularly concerning those related to
human resource management, are set out to support an innovation
culture.
• If a culture of teamwork and cooperation is desired, but rewards
and remuneration of employees are based on their individual
achievements, people will be reluctant to cooperate and share.
• If people are recruited based on their technical qualification alone,
rather than being also assessing on their ‘cultural’ fit with the
organization
Recruitment Text from a Website:
• **** provides solutions to problems that in many cases the industry is not yet
aware exist. We identify situations where new technology is able to satisfy a
market need. We then develop the product.
• Smart, fresh thinking is critical to our growth and ongoing success. We recruit
outstanding minds. We want to hear from enthusiastic, energetic people who can
identify market opportunities and come up with fresh, effective, ingenious
solutions to problems ahead of deadlines.
• The facilities, core technologies and training are of a jaw-dropping quality at ****.
And not only is the work environment first class, but everybody has a voice in the
way we conduct our business too.
• We’re here to have fun and make money. It’s our mission statement. What’s
yours?
5. CULTURE AND DESIGN
• Management, leadership and the human resource function can
establish the values and facilitate and encourage the right
behaviours.
• Design and design management can facilitate the accurate visual
representation of the beliefs and values and ensure consistency
in the physical appearance and representation of the
organization, including products, any form of company literature,
and the physical work Environment.
• In companies such as BMW, that have placed design at the
core of their strategy, it is the role of design management at
the strategic level to ensure visual consistency and the
alignment of the company’s interfaces (products, services,
other forms of communication such as promotional literature,
advertising, etc.) with company strategy and company
culture.
6. COMMITMENT TO INNOVATION
• Finally, innovative companies are committed to the course of
innovation; they do not change policies, dissolve innovation teams or
cancel projects because economic times are getting a bit more difficult.
• Those organizations that were successful in the past indicated that in
future they are planning
(a) innovation in additional areas (e.g. strategic, operational and/or
organizational), and
(b)more radical innovation than in the past.
Success seems to increase companies’ willingness to take risks, creating
a positive momentum for innovation.
THANK YOU

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CREATIVITY AND

• Thomas Kuczmarski’s (1998) 20 questions for leaders

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