Learning to be more creative

I haven’t yet read Jonah Lehrer’s new best-selling book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works, but I have read his extended article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, and I’m not impressed.

He starts from the proposition that “there’s no such thing as a creative type” and that “anyone can be learn to be creative”. It is not an encouraging thesis.

Basically it’s an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours insight. And while it’s true that everyone can improve their connection-making skill (this being at the heart of all creativity), nevertheless it’s quite observable that some amongst us have creative skills of a quite different order.

Think Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, Edison, Turing… To be frank, even with a million hours of skill-building, I’m unlikely to achieve their level of, well, genius. And to deny this strikes me as, well, blind.

I have been training people in creative thinking over several decades now, and I notice consistently that the students who have lost their creativity (or suppressed it or never seemed to have had much anyway) can indeed up their game substantially. However they never catch up with the ones who have real self-confidence in their connection-making capabilities.

The latter make massive progress in a structured training session, because they are enabled to hone skills that already exist, taking them up to a whole new level. Whether the basis for their special talent is nature or nurture seems to me to be of secondary importance.

Steve Jobs. Saint?

Working this week in Manila with a wonderful group of young Filipino leader/managers, I’ve been asked several times why I have not written about Steve Jobs since his death one month ago.

I think the truth is that I have been wrestling internally with a couple of issues.

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that, particularly since his return second time around to the company he founded, Apple’s story has been one of continuous and spectacular success. And he has written and spoken inspiringly.

So what’s the problem?

Well, for one thing it’s clear that the great successes of the company were all built on the innovations of others – from the laptop to the iPad. And all the other blockbusters in between. Picking up other people’s inventions and improving them for the customer is good, but really doesn’t make Jobs comparable with, say, Thomas Edison, who was the founding father of so many of the world-changing innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

And then there’s the man who has been described as “Jobs the Tyrant”. Years ago I was told that it was not a good idea for an Apple staffer to get into an elevator with Steve. Apparently there was a good chance that you might emerge unemployed. I guess that story is more emblematic than literally true.

And yet, since then I have continuously heard and read about the tantrums and tirades, the disrespectful ways that colleagues could be treated.

No doubt the upside to all this was a sense within the organisation of what people call “creative tension” - tension which can drive performance. At least in the short run.

Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, said recently: “In the end, you have to judge him on the outcome.” Right now, the Apple juggernaut rolls on, apparently unstoppable.

Only time will tell what the outcome will be now that he is gone. Will enhancing the innovations of others be sufficient? And how will the climate change in Apple now that he no longer visits the building?

Maybe in future I should include Apple in Brand Renovation masterclasses that I give. For, in my mind, the company is a superb “renovator”, rather than being a real innovator.

By the way, are you coming along on Tuesday in Manila?

Manila Masterclass with Roger Neill, 8 November 2011

Individuals or teams for breakthrough creativity?

For years I believed that the best ideas emerged collaboratively. As international managing partner of Synectics for many years, a leading proponent of team creativity, that’s what you’d expect.

I’m not so sure any more.

It’s gradually become clearer to me that real ground-breaking ideas are more often hatched in the brains of highly creative individuals. Think Galileo, Harrison, Einstein, Edison.

Certainly Edison’s biggest breakthrough ideas were conceived in solitude – but he was also superb in organising his innovation project teams to work systematically towards implementation once he’d made that initial imaginative leap.

In my experience team creativity is generally better for more day-to-day creativity, for problem-solving, for the creation of strategy and for getting the team fully on board.

The miracle of aircon

In the midst of a heatwave in midsummer Sydney, temperature at 45.5 degrees Celsius, my friend and colleague Jacki Fortune writes: “Spare a grateful thought for Willis Carrier, inventor of air conditioning.”

Certainly his creation can make life so much easier in sub-tropical Australia, where the temperature soars for a while, and often with it the humidity. But in real tropical climates, where temperature and humidity are constantly high, aircon is not so much a convenience as a necessity. In Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and a dozen other countries, it creates conditions in which WORK and THINKING can take place. It’s not surprising that, before its arrival, these economies were based only on fishing and farming.

I would even say that the economic miracle of recent decades in South-East Asia simply could not have occurred without air conditioning.

Willis Carrier? He was an American engineer, born in 1876. And his breakthrough drawings were made in 1902. He was granted a patent four years later and continuously improved his “Apparatus” in the following years. Carrier and six colleagues formed a company in New York in 1915. For the first two decades of air conditioning, it was used to cool machines, not people. He died in 1950 with eighty patents to his name.

Not so famous as Thomas Edison. But what a legacy.

The Last Laugh

From Shall We Dance, 1937

Words: Ira Gershwin
Music George Gershwin





The odds were a hundred to one against me
The world thought the heights were too high to climb
But people from Missouri never incensed me
Oh, I wasn't a bit concerned
For from hist’ry I had learned
How many, many times the worm had turned

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly

They told Marconi
Wireless was a phony
It’s the same old cry
They laughed at me wanting you
Said I was reaching for the moon
But oh, you came through
Now they'll have to change their tune

They all said we never could be happy
They laughed at us and how!
But ho, ho, ho!
Who’s got the last laugh now?

They all laughed at Rockefeller center
Now they're fighting to get in
They all laughed at Whitney and his cotton gin
They all laughed at Fulton and his steamboat
Hershey and his chocolate bar

Ford and his Lizzie
Kept the laughers busy
That's how people are
They laughed at me wanting you
Said it would be, "hello, goodbye."
But oh, you came through
Now they're eating humble pie

They all said we’d never get together
Darling, let’s take a bow
For ho, ho, ho!
Who’s got the last laugh?
He, hee, hee!
Let’s at the past laugh
Ha, ha, ha!
Who’s got the last laugh now?

Does any other song have so many important messages for innovators?

Wishful thinking

I don’t know about other cultures, but in Britain “wishful thinking” is what you get accused of when the apparent facts don’t support the claim - imagining against the evidence. Daydreaming.

My mother used to accuse me of it regularly as a child.

Yet wishing is the most powerful start point when you want to innovate. Wishing is the single act that best enables us to get out of the pit of experience, to set off into unknown regions.

Edison wished that he could light the world. The Wright brothers wished they could fly.

“Thy wish, Harry, was father to that thought,” says King Henry IV to his son when Prince Harry lifts the crown from his father’s head, thinking him already dead.

What’s one of your unfulfilled wishes?

Edison: Lighting the World

If you ask people about Thomas Edison, they nearly always come up with the light bulb. But in truth, that’s just the start of it.

In 1878 on a vacation with a group of scientist friends in the Rocky Mountains, he was struck by a thought of one of them, Professor George Barker, that he might look at the possibility of producing light electrically. Gas lighting was the standard at that time.

The existing electrical system, the arc light originally developed by Humphry Davy in 1808, was “too bright and too big”, wrote Edison. “What we wished for was little lights, and a distribution of them in people’s houses in a manner similar to gas.”

It is clear that from the start Edison envisioned the whole thing - from the generation of the electricity, through its distribution, to the lamps and fittings themselves, together with necessary fuse systems. So many parts of this system needed either to be invented from scratch, or to have adaptations made to existing inventions.

In developing the electric lamp, a key problem was that the early filaments tested were both too expensive and burned out far too quickly – in less than ten minutes. Over time they tested more than 7,500 materials. “Finally, I carbonized a strip of bamboo from a Japanese fan, and saw that I was on the right track,” wrote Edison. Now they had to establish which strain of bamboo would be best suited for the purpose. It was in the end in Japan that they found exactly what they were looking for. It gave 900 hours of continuous light.

In parallel, Edison built a glass-blowing plant at his labs at Menlo Park in New Jersey, installing the most advanced vacuum equipment. He calculated the size and cost of using copper mains, worked on an improved dynamo, driven by steam and producing a steady 110 volts, created a system for sending power from the generators, through feeder wires, to distribution points, and from there to individual streets and buildings.

Having got the whole system up and running, Edison first provided the complete lighting system for a newly-built ship, the SS Columbia. Then he had eight miles of underground electric mains laid at Menlo Park, lighting the houses in the village – together with lamp posts across the fields for streets that did not yet exist.

He invited the city council of Manhattan to come and observe this amazing phenomenon, and they were persuaded that this could all work. So Edison turned his attention to Manhattan, moving his headquarters there and laying eighteen miles of underground electrical mains. “I saw every box poured and every connection made on the whole job,” he said. “There was nobody else who could superintend it. I used to sleep nights on piles of pipes at the station.” On September 4th, 1882, the lights were switched on.

Edison was thirty five. The world was never to be the same again.