Creativity Inc.: Building an Inventive Organization [Hardcover]

Jeff Mauzy (Author), Richard A. Harriman (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1578512077 | ISBN-13: 978-1578512072 | Publication Date: April 16, 2003

To survive and prosper in the long term, people in companies need to create and innovate. And they need to do so as regularly and reliably as they breathe. We begin our discussion of the need for creativity with a look at a successful company that recognized and met a serious new challenge by installing effective creative practices. In the late 1980s, Steelcase Inc., one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of office furniture, like its competitors was investing heavily in research and development in the hot area of its business, modular furniture units. "We had all evolved to the same perspective," says Mark Greiner, senior vice president of R&D at Steelcase. "There was an accepted framework in the industry, defined by three points on a triangle: high design, low cost, and customer relationship."Furniture companies had been differentiating themselves along the points of that triangle for some time. Steelcase was proudest of its customer relationships and placed most of its emphasis on maintaining that edge. "But in fact," Greiner says, "all the manufacturers, by watching each other, had gravitated over time toward safer and safer ground in the middle of the triangle defined by those three points." Thus, the differences between Steelcase and its rivals had grown almost nonexistent. "We were supposedly the most advanced office furniture company in the world, but in fact we were looking pretty much like our competition," he says. Worse, the customer was in motion. The exciting technological liberties of computing and communications made office design and furniture seem less urgent, even less relevant to some businesses. This realization didn't come suddenly, says Greiner."But it started creeping more often into our conversations. Where's the difference? What's our value?" While the industry focused on a familiar, well-understood, highly defined world, the real world was changing. Steelcase needed to break free of many long-held beliefs about customer needs, beliefs that had become invalid. To reconnect with office furniture buyers, the company needed new ideas.Steelcase in the late 1980s qualified as a candidate for creativity and innovation, and through the course of the book, we'll follow the Steelcase story. But the Steelcase story is not unique. Corporate leaders in almost any business today need to know the fundamental elements for initiating and sustaining creativity and innovation. And they must understand the ways in which those elements work together. The speed of change in the economy has long since penalized companies and industries that try to coast with scattershot innovation or a single moment of creative serendipity. It now punishes even strategically astute companies that make serious but only sporadic, isolated, or conventional efforts at creativity and innovation. In the 1870s, Aaron Ward targeted quality-and-value-starved rural shoppers with a single-page, cash-only price list mailed to National Grange members. There was enough creativity and innovation in that business plan to start Montgomery Ward on a 125-year run.The only further innovation of any scope, however, was to build out stores across the country, a strategy that within a few decades caused the company to fall so far behind the pace of change in contemporary imagination and desires that customers stayed away. Still, 125 years is a good ride. Increasingly, the time period that an innovation can last is far shorter. Look at the home audio music business. The music box controlled that market for 100 years. The phonograph controlled the market for 70 years. Cassette tapes dominated for 25 years until the arrival of CDs. Now, after 10 years, CDs compete with mini-disks, DVDs, MP3, and the Internet. And, as if the inexorable compounding in the rate of technological change weren't sufficiently uncomfortable, consider Digital Equipment Corporation and Wang.In 1985, the two pioneering computer companies were at the top of their business and successfully defending their competitive advantages by locking in corporate customers with exclusive networks of proprietary machinery and software. Within a decade both companies were as good as gone, victims of a home computing and open architecture evolution that bypassed their proprietary protections. Not only, then, does competitive advantage have a time limit, a limit shrinking before the accelerating pace of technological change, but resources given to protecting today's competitive advantage can distract companies from keeping an eye on the creative work of developing and deploying the innovations that could drive tomorrow's business.Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter draws an analogy between doing business now and playing croquet beside Alice in Wonderland, with the mallets, balls, wickets, and stakes all alive and all whimsically free to decide when and how they want to move. And Dartmouth business professor Richard D'Aveni says that relying too long on a competitive advantage is like "shoveling sand against the tide." The message in all this, as Steelcase found out, is that tomorrow, with all its surprises, comes more relentlessly and more quickly than ever before. To respond to and take advantage of the surprises, individuals and companies will want to be as ready as possible. And readiness requires creativity. We contend that the successful companies will have established constant, systemic creativity. They'll do so to fuel the moment-to-moment innovative responses a high-speed marketplace demands.They'll do so to maintain imaginative resources that can project operations into a future that will change even faster than the present. They'll do so to develop, in our here-and-gone business environment, the reliably pliable foundations from which breakthrough innovations can be launched. Companies will strive to become systemically creative because creativity pays. It pays financially and it provides a rich array of other rewards: employee and customer satisfaction, incremental growth, the flexibility to match relentless change, the ability to attract good talent, elevated market interest, and strengthened competitive readiness. The rewards of some of the creativity programs that we explore in the book are illustrative. Early into a creativity change program, APL/NOL, a major ocean shipping company, has measured an impact of $46.6 million from cost reduction and avoidance, revenue increase, and improved asset management. Tufts Health Care, now the second-largest HMO in New England, reached its goal of one million members two years ahead of schedule, tripling its membership in five years. Since then it has launched eleven significant new products or services and won four innovation awards. In 1999 Newsweek ranked THCP second among U.S. managed care plans across all categories surveyed. And CareData, the health-care division of J.D. Power, has rated THCP the best overall HMO in metropolitan Boston every year since 1996. Snack-food giant Frito-Lay attributed more than $100 million in cost reductions to creativity training sessions for employees. Medical equipment maker Guidant leaped onto Fortune's list of the top 100 companies to work for, coming in thirty-first in its first try. The diversified technology company 3M, aggressively pursuing innovation, estimates that it has generated more than $4 billion from new product introductions for each of the last four years.People under the leadership and creativity support of Peter McGhee, vice president of national programming at WGBH, a public broadcasting company in Boston, have earned it more than fifty Emmy awards, thirty-seven Peabody awards for broadcast excellence, and twenty-five duPont-Columbia journalism awards. Sysco Corporation, a $23 billion food distributor, reports that employees who participated in creativity training increased their sales an average 25 percent to 30 percent. With the addition of Islands of Adventure, attendance at Universal Studios' two Florida theme parks climbed 11 percent between 2000 and 2001, while crowds at Disney's four Florida parks dropped 6 percent. In its first year, Steelcase's Leap chair, born from the company's new direction and magnified focus on the user, became one of the top-selling chairs in the world.In "Creativity, Inc.", our goal is to enhance a company's ability to create and innovate-reliably, systemically, without stop. We start with six essential understandings that weave through the book and the creative process. There is no recipe for systemic creativity. There is no fixed recipe for all or even most companies.The field of systemic creativity and innovation is still so immature that there are none of the requisite benchmarks needed for universal recipes. In fact, our experience suggests that while more specific guidelines will evolve, a more complete and replicable formula for creative success will be elusive for quite some time. So, instead of a recipe, "Creativity, Inc." provides the foundational principles and practices a company needs to build the framework that's right for itself. Creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts. Although people often use the terms interchangeably, creativity and innovation differ from one another.Each demands different treatment, and each has a different science. To paraphrase Harvard Business School's Teresa Amabile, a leading researcher in the field, creativity is the generation of novel and appropriate ideas. 5 Innovation, as we define it, implements those ideas and thereby changes the order of things in the world. Creativity is about breaking down prior assumptions and making new connections for new ideas. Innovation means taking new ideas and turning them into corporate and marketplace reality. True innovation, as opposed to low-level refinement, takes extended creative effort, yet much of the innovation effort lends itself to direction and organizing. It's much harder to organize, direct, and command the creation of first ideas; you have to encourage and tease out creativity individual by individual.Both creativity and innovation need to be nurtured at every level and function for a corporation to become systemically creative. Creativity happens with individuals...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Many business authorities have touted creativity and habitual renewal as integral to corporate longevity and viability, but few have the practical experience and insight of Mauzy and Harriman, who have spent 25 years consulting, with a focus on corporate creativity. Although creativity often cuts across the grain of old-fashioned corporate values, it is essential to success, even survival, particularly in a time when "tomorrow, with all its surprises, comes more relentlessly and more quickly than ever before." And the authors aren't just talking about targeted, sporadic creativity (e.g., breakthrough products and Super Bowl ads). They contend that organizations need to "nurture and apply creativity throughout their operations" and "be creative at all times, in all areas, in all activities" in order achieve "systematic creativity," a state in which creativity becomes everyone's responsibility. Not surprisingly, Mauzy and Harriman proclaim there's no one set formula for maximizing creativity, but they do identify (and explore) "four critical dynamics" that contribute to personal and organizational creativity. With real-life examples, specific suggestions and well-reasoned advice, this book should help any forward-thinking organization that wants to get ahead.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

"As a thirty-seven-year veteran of corporate America, I strongly recommend Creativity, Inc. to executives of all ages and disciplines who want to take their individual, departmental, and corporate performances to levels they never imagined possible. This book will open your eyes and mind to possibilities that will truly make a difference for you and your team."
—Jeffrey P. Neubert, President and CEO, The Clearing House

"Many promising new ideas are derailed by inbuilt—and unintended—corporate resistance to change. Mauzy and Harriman explain the extensive changes a corporation must make to foster internal creativity. This is a very helpful book for both managers and innovators."
—Eric von Hippel, Professor, Management of Innovation, MIT

"In today’s uncertain world, CEOs are naturally risk averse. But companies won’t prosper without taking risks on innovative products, services, and business models. Mauzy and Harriman give executives practical insights on how to build an organization that embeds creativity and innovation in its core activities. CEOs need to stop hunkering down, and reading Creativity, Inc. is a good place to start!"
—Bob Peebler, President and CEO, Energy Virtual Partners

"Creativity, Inc. will jar loose your fixed patterns of thinking and help you to create new, more profitable connections. This pragmatic book explains how and why innovation works and shows exactly what you and your team can do to enable the force of creativity to re-energize your business."
—Adrian J. Slywotzky, Vice President, Mercer Management Consulting, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (April 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578512077
• ISBN-13: 978-1578512072
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #455,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A welcome paradox, March 29, 2003

By 

T SANTOSO (Surabaya, Jatim Indonesia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Creativity Inc.: Building an Inventive Organization (Hardcover)

I have been doing seminar and study on the subject of creativity and innovation as i run my webdesign company, and i found this book interesting.

Published by HBS and written in the more "formal" language, it seemed like the paradox of creativity itself, funky fancy fun theory in the heavy corporate type of text book.

Most of creativity books are fun, delicious, crunchy, and toward the right brained style of writing with pictures and funs and games etc. But this book try to formalize into a textbook format. Hench my thought of the paradox.

The writers devide the book into 3 parts: CREATIVITY THINKING, which basically tell you wht creativity is, CLIMATE, which is more like culture with some differences, and ACTION, how individual or corporation can implement the creativity.

The authors also describe 7 steps of PURPOSEFUL CREATIVITY, which i found quiet interesting, and formalize creativity into intended innovation.

All in all this is a good book which formalize creativity and make it more corporate-like. However i think it will still be a fuzzy thing if you only read this book alone and expect that you can drive your organization to become a creative organisation. This book has a good way of telling you the direction and what it is all about, with a lot of samples (mostly taken from big famous brand name company).

I surely hope there are more serious creativity book in the future.....

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 40 years of creativity research delivered in a fun package, November 27, 2003

By 

Max More "Max More" (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creativity Inc.: Building an Inventive Organization (Hardcover)

Creativity cannot be reserved for the R&D team or the marketing department. Every enterprise needs to be creative at all times, in all areas, and in all activities. This is what Jeff Mauzy and Richard Harriman call "systematic creativity". Their call for universal and constant creativity might be a slight stretch but it stretches in the right direction. The universal nature of their opening message does not carry over into some unique formula for fostering systemic creativity. Instead of one "right" way, they draw on four decades of research in the field of creativity to set out basic principles and practical techniques that have endured.

The emphasis on tested principles and practices in place of a fixed recipe is the first of six underlying central assumptions for the book. The second assumption is that creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts. The authors follow clear practice in distinguishing creativity - "the generation of novel and appropriate ideas" - from innovation - which "implements those ideas". A third central assumption is that creativity occurs in three areas: individuals, coalitions and teams, and organizations.
The remaining pillars that hold up the perspective of Creativity, Inc.: Underlying creativity are four interconnected dynamics that form the "heartbeat" of systemic creativity: motivation, curiosity and fear, the breaking and making of connections, and evaluation; Creativity depends on climate; Systematic creativity asks everyone to be a leader.

This stimulating, informative, and cleanly written book is organized in three parts. Part I, Creative Thinking, Part II, Climate, and Part III, Action. The first two parts examine a range of aspects involved in building individual and organizational creative capability, while the final part shows how to connect creativity to purposeful work. Happily, the authors understand that organizations find it easier to boost creativity temporarily; making it stick as an integral part of the organization is much tougher. They devote the final chapter to "Sustaining the Change".

If you're the kind of reader who likes to go beyond the main text and dig into the authors' sources and references, you'll be delighted to find that the compact (185 pages) of the main text is followed by copious chapter notes and references. Creativity, Inc. provides a rich set of principles and tools for steeping every aspect of your organization in creativity. Mauzy and Harriman's book on systemic creativity complements work on systematic innovation processes. Businesses that manage to get the twin engines of creativity and innovation running at full power will have the only enduring competitive advantage left.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars From The Innovation Road Map Magazine, May 12, 2005

By 

Paul A. Schumann Jr. (Austin, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Creativity Inc.: Building an Inventive Organization (Hardcover)

Because I've studied and read so much about creativity I must admit that I approached this book with a certain amount of trepidation. I wasn't sure that I wanted to read it. I told myself, just read the intro and the first chapter and then stop if you don't like it. Well, I didn't stop. It was an enjoyable read throughout with many insights along the way. What the authors bring forward in this book is a methodological approach to creativity in organizations, more particularly corporations. They describe a system that seems to touch all the right points in order to increase creativity in an organization. In addition, they provide some helpful information for individuals who want to improve their own creativity.

The book is broken into three parts and eight chapters:

Part 1 - Creative thinking

 The Dynamics That Underlie Creative Thinking
 Becoming Creatively Fit as an Individual
 Breaking and Making Connections for an Enterprise

Part2 - Climate

 The Climate for Creativity in an Enterprise
 Personal Creative Climate: The Bubble

Part 3 - Action

 Leadership: Fostering Systemic Creativity
 Purposeful Creativity
 Sustaining the Change

When an organization has systemic creativity, the authors write "systemic creativity becomes an integral part of everyday operations and spawns new thought, from small changes to breakthroughs, that organizations now need in every activity that makes a competitive difference.

For this to happen, creativity must become the responsibility of everyone - every leader and senior manager as well as every employee. Systemic creativity is only systemic when everyone in an organization learns how to practice it and then promotes it constantly."

This is not an easy task in today's short-term, bottom-line, stockholder-value driven organization. The authors point out "The behaviors required for successful creativity are out of tune with the behaviors that make a company operationally efficient, well-organized and clear-sighted on its mission and goals."

The authors also correctly point out that there is no "right way" to foster creativity in an organization. The approach depends upon a number of factors. "There are, however, basic principles and practical techniques that have stood the test of time." This book is a great contribution that goal.

The book is informed by six basic understandings:

1. There is no recipe for systemic creativity.
2. Creativity and innovation are two distinct concepts.
3. Creativity happens with individuals, coalitions and teams, and organizations.
4. There are four critical dynamics.
5. Creativity depends on climate.
6. Systemic creativity asks everyone to be a leader.

According to the authors, the four inter-linking dynamics of creativity are motivation, curiosity and fear, making and breaking connections, and evaluation.

In the authors' model, making and breaking connections within an enterprise is the pivotal dynamic of the creative process. To foster this, they encourage conflict of ideas, encourage risk taking, the promotion of diversity, organizing for intrinsic motivation, the development of information flows that support creativity, and the utilization of more and less information.

The "conflict of ideas" concept is one of the few areas in the book that I find myself disagreeing. I have found that the metaphor of battle in creativity to be de-motivating for many people. There may be certain personality types that enjoy competition over new ideas, but there are even more people who find this stressful and a turnoff. I think what needs to be fostered in organizations to promote creativity is the development and facilitation of conversations about ideas. Non judgmental conversations about ideas usually generates new ideas that quite often are better than the originals. To converse is to turn around together.

The authors make a distinction between climate and culture. The difference according to their definition is understandable. Many models of culture include a hierarchy of philosophies, beliefs, values and behaviors. Values set expectations and therefore the author's definition of climate encompasses values and behaviors.

The concept of a personal creative climate, a "bubble" is an extremely powerful one. There are many distractions, conflicting priorities, and decentives to creativity in organizations. I have always found for myself, as well as observing the behavior of others, that those who can create this "bubble" are the most productive and the most creative.

The authors end the book with some wise advice to would be promoters of creativity in organizations. They write "As the change to systemic creativity goes forward, everything covered in the introduction and the first seven chapters - from the dynamics of the creative process and their relationship to individuals and companies, through personal; and corporate climate, through leadership and innovation - requires continued attention, reinforcement, exercise, follow-through, and reinvention." They explain that the forces against creativity are so strong, that without continued reinforcement and reinvention, any approach to systemic creativity will fail. Their advice:

 Plan ahead
 Record results
 Expect resistance
 Encourage the flow of information

"More than forty years ago, in The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas MacGregor challenged the command-and-control assumptions about the business establishment: `The distinctive potential contribution of the human being...at every level of the organization stems form his capacity to think, to plan, to exercise judgement, to be creative, to direct and control his own behavior.'

MacGregor was arguing on behalf of the creative climate. Today, while there has been much progress, too few leaders ask and expect creativity of their employees; too few leaders provide the climate in which creativity can flourish."

How true!

Jeff Mauzy is a Consulting Manager and Richard Harriman is Managing Partner at Synectics, a pioneering consulting firm specializing in business creativity and innovation.