Creativity And The Role Of The Leader

us e ity. d ativ oul e nc f cr o se o zati ani r do g e r or t it. igg ab You bou a do t to a wh re’s He
by Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire

REATIVITY has always bee at the heart I h always been has a of business, but until now it hasn’t been at the top of the manage the o management agenda. h n By definition the ability to create somenition the n h t thing novel and approp appropriate,creativity is essential to the entrepreneurship ent that gets new businesses started and busines that sustains the best companies after they have reached global scale. But perglob haps because creativity was considered creativit unmanageable – too elusive and intangible to pin down – or because conceno trating on it produced a less immeditrating t p du produc ate payoff than improving execution, itimpr hasn’t been the focus of most managers’ n focu attention. a n attention.

Creativity has, however, long been a focus of academics in fields ranging from anthropology to neuroscience, and has enticed management scholars as well. Therefore, a substantial body of work on creativity has been available to any businessperson inclined to step back from the fray of daily management and engage in itsquestions. And that’s suddenly very fortunate, because what used to be an intellectual interest for some thoughtful executives has now become an urgent concern for many. The shift to a more innovation-driven economy has been abrupt. Today, execution capabilities

Josh Cochran

hbr.org

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October 2008

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Harvard Business Review 101

Creativity and the Role of the Leader

arewidely shared and the life cycles of new offerings are short. As competition turns into a game of who can generate the best and greatest number of ideas, creativity scholars are being asked pointed questions about their research. What does it mean? How relevant is it? Does it offer guidance on the decisions that leaders in creativity-dependent businesses have to make? To help make the connectionsbetween theory and practice, we recently convened a two-day colloquium at Harvard Business School, inviting business leaders from companies whose success depends on hbr.org creativity – such as design Join the conversation with the consultancy IDEO, technolauthors about the challenges ogy innovator E Ink, internet of managing creativity at leadingcreativity.hbr.org. giant Google, and pharmaceuticalleader Novartis. At the gathering, leading scholars presented their newest and most important research. In all, we brought together nearly 100 people who were deeply concerned with the workings of creativity in organizations and let the sparks fly. Over those two days, we saw a new agenda for business leadership begin to take shape. At first, we heard skepticism that creativity should be managed atall. Intuit cofounder Scott Cook, for example, wondered whether management was “a net positive or a net negative” for creativity. “If there is a bottleneck in organizational creativity,” he asked, “might it be at the top of the bottle?” By the colloquium’s end, however, most attendees agreed that there is a role for management in the creative process; it is just different from what the traditionalwork of management might suggest. The leadership imperatives we discussed, which we share in this article, reflect a viewpoint we came to hold in common: One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.

Drawing on the Right Minds
The first priority of leadership is to engage the right people, at the right times, to the right degree in creative work. That engagement starts when theleader recasts the role of employees. Rather than simply roll up their sleeves and execute top-down strategy, employees must contribute imagination. As Cook put it, “Traditional management prioritizes projects and assigns people to them. But increasingly, managers are not the source of the idea.” Tap ideas from all ranks. Cook told the story of an eyeopening analysis of innovations at Google: Its...