CREATIVITY SEMINAR - reflection on the Module literature

I would like to discuss the article by Sutton, R. entitled The Weird Rules of Creativity (Harvard Business Review, September 2001)

Introduction

The writer’s approach seemed non-conventional and irrational in some cases. His entire article is founded on denying the idea that “creativity would flourish in a fun, low-stress work place, where conflict is held in check and managers keep a close watch on how money is spent and people use their time” (Sutton, R., 96).
Sutton’s futuristic concepts redefine the basis of hiring employees and they radically rearrange the internal processes of any firm. I find it hard to believe that well established companies or companies that find themselves in not so competitive markets would reorganize their internal structure and follow his steps. Reasons may be the high costs of change, fear of losing ground in case the ideas don’t work, reluctance towards abandoning their logistical system that proved to work and of course the suppliers and customers that may prefer certain values within the institution that would be lost within the transformation. If a company decides to take such a path it must be aware that the risk will go up, a good enough reason to make the stakeholders reluctant towards adopting such a tactic, the banks to renegotiate the loan interests (if any), the insurance companies to raise the firm’s insurance rate, employees to ask for raises due to the uncertainty of the work environment, and so on.
In my opinion, this article is directed mainly towards startups or businesses that are in very aggressive markets and lag a competitive advantage. These establishments have nothing to loose, an important factor that would determine them to be risk takers. The author tells of some success stories, which transformed small businesses into huge enterprises or boosted sales of the big companies, but neglects to talk about the failures many encountered while trying to adopt such strategies. Sutton’s ideas may earn a company high profits but at very high risks that many are unwilling to take, since his concepts of “placing bets on ideas without much heed to their projected ROI”, “ignoring what has worked before”, “taking perfectly happy people and goading them into fights among themselves” (Sutton, R., 96) seems far fetched.

AGREE/DISAGREE

I will go now a bit deeper into the text and focus on some Sutton’s “weird ideas”

-I liked his belief of rewarding both successes and failures. It is important not to discourage people and boost their confidence whenever a mishap has happened. And after all, a lot of ideas may be good, but badly marketed or directed towards the inappropriate market segment. The best way to come up with new ideas is to keep on trying, brainstorm as much as possible and rely on the quantity of ideas produced.

-I partially agreed with the idea of not screening the candidates you hire. Sutton offers some examples of companies like Xerox, HP or Dyson Appliances that made a huge success upon inexperienced people, the ones that had nothing to do with the field they worked in. The author seems to neglect though some background info about these people, their interests and education. Indeed, working in a field for a time and gaining a lot of knowledge in that area tends to make you "narrow minded" in time. Fresh workforce may be the answer, but they must posses some knowledge in that field and some work dedication. If there is no dedication and love for the job, there will be no willingness to come with new ideas. Finding this precious “devotion” within a person during the hiring interview may be hard, because the individual may be a good faker and willing to lie in order to get the job, security and money. You cannot rely on work related questions either, because you are looking for “fresh” characters, so you need to gamble.
Once hired, performance monitoring cannot start, unless that person is accommodated, integrated and familiar with the place. If, after all this time, you observe that the performance is mediocre, you inevitably find yourself in a lose-lose situation: you may fire that person and take the same risks with somebody new, wasting more time and money, not to mention insider information about the structure of your company that person gained during that time, or just stick with the same, unproductive, not experienced, not knowledgeable person till you have a better idea to where to relocate him/her.

-I disliked the writer’s idea of hiring people who make you uncomfortable or dislike. In the right environment, with the right team, this idea may work, since you may create an environment in which everybody is independent to think of his/her own and not be influenced by the rules, ideas and thinking patterns of the people that they wanted to abide by.
But in many cases this happy scenario may lead to breaking the team spirit, isolating the employees or just splitting the workforce into small, unproductive groups that spend more time fighting than building something innovative. The working place is usually not tension free, people have to deal with deadlines all the time, while stress and frustration often appears throughout the day. The last think you would need is to work with somebody you find it hard to connect, or is simply dislike because of its character, the aggressive remarks he makes or simply his ego. This may probably result in segregation from that individual and even aversion towards the working space, company and job.

-I dislike the idea of ignoring the people who have solved the exact problem as you face. Peaking at the solution may give you a fast answer, but it will indeed stop any new idea of flourish. I suggest first to try to solve the problem on your own and then see if the already existing solution is better. Adopt the best one. But always look at others for inspiration, because life is not long enough to allow you to figure everything out.

-I dislike the encouragement of the author to “ignore and defy superior peers”. Certain order need to be kept within a firm. R&D is a very expensive department in every firm and the budget and planning is well thought. If some higher official tells you to move to the next project, then you move on. Of course those people have less information about the progress of the work you were conducting than you, but it would be unwisely to spend more paid time and company’s resources on continuing the project on your own. Your chances of finishing it alone, without having a team and always hiding from supervisors (in the case you are dependent on the company’s equipment) will probably be small, plus you will lag behind on the assigned project thus raising suspicion. Or you could do double the work and try to realize them both. In case you succeed and the company has no proof that can correlate your work as its property, you have two alternatives (we’ll take as an example a technological breakthrough): since you worked behind the company’s back, nobody knows about this, so you are free to either sell it to the higher bidder on the market or announce the company about your invention (which would be the ethical thing to do, since you used their equipment and time) and receive a decent bonus. You will be amazed how many prefer to be guilty millionaires rather than ethical middle-class workers.

CONCLUSION

Since I am a risk taker, I would not disapprove of applying many of his ideas if I had a huge company, but I would try this “experiment” only on a remote segment of my R&D Department since I am very skeptic about this high risk – possible high return tests I read about.