The Three Threats to Creativity - Hurting the Business of Thinking Wildly

Dr. Teresa Amabile, on a Harvard Business Review blog, looks at three killers of creativity -- the creativity that results in new or improved technology, new products, better stuff. She worked at Xerox during the creative development that gained us -- much from other companies inspired by Xerox's vast creative efforts -- icons and GUIs (graphic user interfaces) of the Apple Macintosh and MS Windows, and laser printers, and more.

We're talking engineering creativity, product and process concepts -- the creativity that has led to things such as the airplane, automobile, ergonomic chairs and offices, lasers, lightbulbs, PDAs, the World Wide Web, and -- via Xerox's PARC -- desktop computers, graphical user interfaces, and more. Even those who aren't engineers can appreciate this because these are the activities that led to the tools and toys we use every day.

In tough times, people's minds are on many things, not just their work. Some suffered a layoff. And that includes many of the crafty ones. Call them eccentrics, or just generalists, creative minds are tense, perhaps, about what might happen to their lives, their jobs, tomorrow. Why not allow the staff to think about improving things that they do, rather than sit in some sort of rigid state of dragging through their predictable tasks for 40-plus hours a week? It's a time to free the talents of the needed ones, that of the underemployed ones, not insist on heads down and moments on target. That's a quick dabble into my view of gaining from wandering minds. The accomplished Dr. Amabile's post starts:

Creativity is under threat. It happens whenever and wherever there's a squeeze on the ingredients of creativity, and it's happening in many businesses today. According to the Labor Department's most recent stats, productivity is up. But stretching fewer employees to cover ever more work in our job-starved recovery is no way to run the future. ...

MORE, hit the LINK: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2010/11/the-three-threats-to-creativit.html

- Jon O