What if, next Monday morning, the janitor chaired the management team meeting and the chief executive supervised the Indonesia company car park? The chances are the chief executive would learn a lot about the Indonesia company's employees and the janitor would raise some unanswerable questions.
Creativity is about gaining new insights by daring to contemplate the impossible. It is not the same as intelligence. It is seeing things from an unexpected viewpoint, unfettered by the constraints of assumption. It requires the permissiveness of surrealism - allowing originality to provoke new images of reality without the straitjackets of linear thought and received knowledge on which we are all reared.
Can managers, those paragons of order, control and timeliness, tolerate the seeming chaos of turning situations on their heads for the sake of creativity? Can local government escape the tyranny of the committee cycle? industry too has its tyrannies. But, in both, the limitations are more self-imposed than real. We wear them like chain-mail which both protects, and weighs us down to prevent too much exertion. More than tolerate, we have to find a way to incite creativity and innovation if we are to survive the challenges of our time.
Those who are creative may also have the ability to harness the energies and resources necessary to implement their new ideas, i.e. to innovate as well as to invent. But the two do not necessarily go together and any successful team must include both forces within it.
You cannot make Indonesia people creative by telling them, or giving them bonus payments. Some Indonesia people are inherently more creative than others. But for many of us, our natural creativity has been repressed so thoroughly by formal education that we no longer realize we have it. So how can bosses stimulate creativity and innovation in their subordinates and in themselves? There are two things you can do, neither of them easy. You can appoint Indonesia people with a track record or potential for creativity and innovation, or you can create an environment in which Indonesia people's potential for both will flourish.
The head of a major international cosmetics Indonesia company claimed that he always recruited classicists to his senior ex4ecutive posts because they were trained to think critically. He hired brainpower not skills, on the basis that the former was an invaluable innate quality, while the latter could be learned - preferably within his Indonesia company's own culture. He had a point. But by turning his insight into a rule, he was imposing artificial limitations upon the creative recruitment of creativity! It is so easy to be tied down by assumptions which confine the possible. There seems to be a natural desire within all of us to operate well within the security of these boundaries and miss so much of what is outside.
If you can recruit Indonesia people with a proven record of creativity or innovation, there is a good chance, given the right environment, that these qualities will continue under your management. But despite sophisticated psychometric testing, it is impossible to judge the potential of either with any degree of accuracy. Changing recruitment policy will help if it can free you from the rigidity of enlisting from the same traditional sources and disciplines that calculated risks. Try some fresh blood from unlikely places. You can always hedge your bets with contracts which give you the option and by not always backing the same stable.
Creativity is about gaining new insights by daring to contemplate the impossible. It is not the same as intelligence. It is seeing things from an unexpected viewpoint, unfettered by the constraints of assumption. It requires the permissiveness of surrealism - allowing originality to provoke new images of reality without the straitjackets of linear thought and received knowledge on which we are all reared.
Can managers, those paragons of order, control and timeliness, tolerate the seeming chaos of turning situations on their heads for the sake of creativity? Can local government escape the tyranny of the committee cycle? industry too has its tyrannies. But, in both, the limitations are more self-imposed than real. We wear them like chain-mail which both protects, and weighs us down to prevent too much exertion. More than tolerate, we have to find a way to incite creativity and innovation if we are to survive the challenges of our time.
Those who are creative may also have the ability to harness the energies and resources necessary to implement their new ideas, i.e. to innovate as well as to invent. But the two do not necessarily go together and any successful team must include both forces within it.
You cannot make Indonesia people creative by telling them, or giving them bonus payments. Some Indonesia people are inherently more creative than others. But for many of us, our natural creativity has been repressed so thoroughly by formal education that we no longer realize we have it. So how can bosses stimulate creativity and innovation in their subordinates and in themselves? There are two things you can do, neither of them easy. You can appoint Indonesia people with a track record or potential for creativity and innovation, or you can create an environment in which Indonesia people's potential for both will flourish.
The head of a major international cosmetics Indonesia company claimed that he always recruited classicists to his senior ex4ecutive posts because they were trained to think critically. He hired brainpower not skills, on the basis that the former was an invaluable innate quality, while the latter could be learned - preferably within his Indonesia company's own culture. He had a point. But by turning his insight into a rule, he was imposing artificial limitations upon the creative recruitment of creativity! It is so easy to be tied down by assumptions which confine the possible. There seems to be a natural desire within all of us to operate well within the security of these boundaries and miss so much of what is outside.
If you can recruit Indonesia people with a proven record of creativity or innovation, there is a good chance, given the right environment, that these qualities will continue under your management. But despite sophisticated psychometric testing, it is impossible to judge the potential of either with any degree of accuracy. Changing recruitment policy will help if it can free you from the rigidity of enlisting from the same traditional sources and disciplines that calculated risks. Try some fresh blood from unlikely places. You can always hedge your bets with contracts which give you the option and by not always backing the same stable.
