Issue No. 189 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a phenomenal book about the creative process—using world class creative people as the guinea pigs for this analysis. Delegate your reading. Pass the book around and ask for a Creativity Bio at each future staff meeting. And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Gushing Creativity
Creativity is “the new leadership competency,” writes Gary Foster in his enewsletter, The Foster Letter: Religious Market Update. He quotes the Monday Morning Memo: “According to an IBM Institute for Business Value survey, today’s CEOs identify ‘creativity’ as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future. IBM Sr. VP Frank Kern says, ‘That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude.’”
And Harvey Mackay, envelope baron, business author and newspaper columnist (“Lessons on Leadership”) recently wondered what it would be like “if you could turn on creativity like you start a car.” Of his nine suggestions for revving up creativity, he challenged leaders to “read something totally different than usual.” He added, “Too often, we find ourselves looking at the same newspapers, trade publications, blogs and the like. Pick up a murder mystery, a gardening book, a volume of Shakespeare or anything that will teach you something you didn’t know anything about.”
So can creativity be taught or learned? Read this week’s book and draw your own conclusions. Author Paul Johnson explores the essence of creativity in his remarkable (stunning, actually) book, Creators. In 15 page-turning chapters (17 pages per chapter), he analyzes, slices and dices an extraordinary mix of the world’s most creative (and usually highly productive) people. Buyer beware: the fruits of creativity apparently give license to immorality. But that’s also worth studying. Why is that and how do leaders foster the creative spirit in others?
I read chapter 14 first on Picasso and Walt Disney. “Paris and Hollywood: no two places could be more unlike; yet no two are so similar in the mixture of eagerness and cynicism with which they nurtured creativity, both vulgar and sublime.” Disney died at 65 in 1966. Yikes…what have I done with my life so far? Time is getting short!
Creative people, I learned, are often workaholics. By 1900, Picasso “was turning out a painting every morning, and doing other things in the afternoon.” His total output on stone, canvas, paper, ceramics, metal and more: 30,000 pieces. He died at age 92 in 1973.
Creative people also focus on excellence. “Like Durer and Rubens, Disney put excellence before any other consideration, and the studio barely made a profit despite its huge bookings, since the incoming cash instantly went for investment in new technology and better artists.” At one time Disney employed over 1,000 animators, artists and draftsmen. Yikes again! Imagine writing an HR manual to deal with 1,000 artist-types!
The chapter on fashion designers contrasting Balenciaga and Dior was amazing—maybe because I’d never read 17 pages on fashion. The two fashion giants of the 20th century ran their sizeable shops (office and workrooms) two distinct ways: one like a monastery and the other like a party room (Dior). Absolutely fascinating. I read multiple paragraphs of that chapter to anyone who would listen.
There’s a lot more. Chaucer, Shakespeare, J.S. Bach, Victor Hugo and others. The chapter on Mark Twain is sub-titled, “How to Tell a Joke.” Johnson writes, “He understood the economics of humor, and how, once you have a funny idea—a champion frog that cannot move because it is loaded with shot—you can use it, with suitable variation, again and again.” Johnson himself does not lack in creative commentary: “A storyteller is a licensed liar, though he must never say so.”
On Bach, the author wonderfully describes “the continual warfare between those who play the organ and those who make the organ,” and adds, “operating an organ is, and always has been, a source of great anger.”
Let me tempt you to read the book with this—a typical Johnson sum-up, this one of Bach. “There are probably about 1,200 works all told, out of—perhaps—1,600 or 1,700 composed; a few are short, but only a tiny number are slight. Considering the amount of time Bach had to spend playing, conducting, arguing with officials, teaching and copying, this output is astounding—the man was a copious, gushing, unceasing fountain of creativity.”
And…my special thanks to David Curry for recommending this incredible read. I have another Paul Johnson book, per Curry’s suggestion, in the line-up for later this year.
To order this book from Amazon, click on this title: Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney, by Paul Johnson.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) In his chapter on the German artist Durer (“A Strong Smell of Printer’s Ink”), the author says that Germans knew how to paint, but the Italians also knew why. “They had theory.” Discuss both the how and the why of the creative process.
2) Who’s the most creative person you know? What makes them uniquely different from others? Can you learn anything from them? Is creativity the new competency?
Two-tiered and Too Tired - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Volunteer Bucket, Chapter 12, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to reject the notion of a two-tiered Kingdom workforce. That is, treating your volunteers (your unpaid staff) differently than your paid staff.
While waxing eloquent on this core value in a “Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience,” I noticed that the participants started to chuckle. I didn’t see what was so funny until one kind person pointed out the typo in my PowerPoint. It read, “We reject the notion of a two-tired Kingdom workforce.”
This prompted the suggestion that we needed another ball in the Volunteer Bucket. “We pledge not to work our volunteers incessantly, or inappropriately, so they are constantly too tired to enjoy the journey.”
Whether two-tiered, or too tired—neither volunteer approach honors God or your unpaid staff. For more resources from the Volunteer Bucket, click on my website.
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Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop
July 28 – Charlotte, N.C. (“Best of the Buckets” 1-day Workshop, hosted and sponsored by SIM USA)
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The Rolling 3-Year Strategic Plan Workshop
San Dimas, Calif.
Day 1 of 3: July 13, 2010
Day 2 of 3: Sept. 22, 2010
Day 3 of 3: Nov. 15, 2010
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