TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061190/0611209.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.7 KB | 198 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 40

Let's Get Crazy!


Creativity is the buzz word as companies try to spark daring new
ideas

By JAY COCKS -- Reported by Tom Curry/Atlanta, John E.
Gallagher/ New York and William McWhirter/Chicago


    Charlie Parker is in business. That's right. Bird's Billie's
Bounce, once a touchstone of bebop, has lately found a second,
alternate life. Played on videotape at seminars organized by
the Center for Creative Leadership, the Bounce rebounds off the
consciousness of assembled managers and executives, freeing
them to pursue the goals of increased productivity and higher
profits in a very timely fashion.

    Bop on the bottom line is just one way of solving what
Deborah Dougherty, assistant professor of management at the
Wharton School, sees as the crucial problem of the new decade:
"connecting innovation with existing business." In an era of
global competition, fresh ideas have become the most precious
raw materials. That means companies suddenly want their
employees to think on their own, which calls for enormous
change at firms where imagination was once considered a
subversive trait. "In the past four years, creativity has been
mainstreamed," says Roger von Oech, who runs Creative Think,
a Menlo Park, Calif., outfit specializing in shaking out new
ideas.

    "The hot topic right now is creative problem solving,"
agrees Betty Edwards, director of the Center for the
Educational Application of Brain Hemisphere Research at
California State University, Long Beach. Edwards, the author
of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (copies sold: 1.4
million), has limbered the lobes of executives at companies as
varied as IBM and Patagonia by helping them learn the basic
perceptual skills required for drawing. Says Robert Kelley,
adjunct professor of business administration at Carnegie-Mellon
University: "The vital question American businesses face is to
determine if they are going to require creativity on a regular
basis. If so, they need talent in place, and no one knows how
to do this very well."

    But the folks at the Center for Creative Leadership, with
headquarters in Greensboro, N.C., are giving it a fair shot.
At a seminar organized by Stanley Gryskiewicz, a director at
the center, trumpeter Bobby Bradford plays Billie's Bounce,
then comments on his ensemble: "Everybody knows how many
measures there are in this piece. Everybody knows the harmonic
sequence. Nobody here is the leader. Everybody's free to make
any responsible decision, but we must also deal with surprise.
Part of our training is to come out and dance on a slippery
floor."

    Not everyone in the audience may be familiar with measures
and harmonics, but in discussion groups that follow the
presentation, almost every executive in the place knows what
it's like to go stepping on a slippery floor. "When you talk
to business people about creativity in a corporate framework,
there are normal barriers to understanding," says Gryskiewicz.

say, `My mind's looser. I can suddenly make connections.'"

    Some of the connections may not be so appealing to everyone.
Creativity resists even the most creative definitions. "Trying
to pin down creativity," as a speaker noted recently at one of
the Hallmark card company's regular seminars, "is like trying
to nail Jell-O to the wall." When the corporate back is to the
wall, however, a wild swing can be the best move. "Desperation
is a good motive," says David Luther, senior vice president and
corporate director of quality at Corning. "Customers came to
us and said if we didn't change, they'd go somewhere else."

    Corning gave its employees unusual freedom to think of
solutions, backing off from hands-on management and organizing
the staff into some 3,000 teams of up to 15 members each. One
result: profits have risen 250% since 1982. "By the mid-1990s,"
says Luther, "we'll define good management as the ability to
get out of the way." Managers at Eastman Kodak decided to let
the folks on the factory floor run the professional-film
manufacturing unit. In 1989 the unit, which had run $1 million
over budget, came in $1.5 million under. Such feats should be
ballyhooed as an example to other workers, says Paul Schumann,
a creativity consultant for Austin-based Technology Futures.
His advice to managers: "Make heroes out of employees who
personify what you want to see in the organization."

    Yet there is a fair amount of workplace skepticism about the
whole subject. "Creativity is a negative word in business,"
James Higgins, a professor of business at Florida's Rollins
College, says with regret. "It's touchy-feely." Experimentation
in fluid management style is pretty much confined to less than
10% of all U.S. firms. "What makes anyone think that
managements want more creativity?" asks Audrey Freedman,
management counselor for the Conference Board, a business
research group. "It's uncontrollable. It's rather unsettling to
foster creativity and might even be self-defeating for a
manager. The job of management is to control." The adjustment
isn't easy. "A lot of managers are in role shock. They're still
fearful, apprehensive and unwilling to give up power," says
Jack Grayson, chairman of the American Productivity and Quality
Center.

    It was the absence of direct control and deliberate
structure, however, that moved W.L. Gore & Associates, the
32-year-old outfit that introduced Teflon products, from a
glorified mom-and-pop operation to a company with 37 plants
worldwide. Gore's 5,000 workers ("associates" in company
parlance) turn out everything from electronics to a new dental
product for gum regeneration. Associates are urged to take long
chances. "At Gore," says Jeanne Ambruster-Sherry, a biologist
who works in the company's sales-and-marketing division, "if
you're not making mistakes, you're doing something wrong."
Vieve Gore, 77, who co-founded the company with her late
husband Bill in 1958, puts it even more emphatically: "Our
objective was to make money while having fun. If you're told
to do something, it's not as much fun as doing what you want
to do."

    In Minneapolis 3M encourages employees to devote about 15%
of their work schedule to non-job related tasks, or doing
"skunkworks" duty, as it's known around the office. One
skunkworking engineer came up with the idea for those neat
adhesive Post-it notes while letting his imagination roam. This
and other employee-generated brainstorms, from
three-dimensional magnetic recording tape to disposable masks,
have encouraged 3M to set a goal of 25% in total revenues from
new products developed in the past five years. Currently those
revenues are running closer to 30%, and 3M figures that nearly
70% of its annual $12 billion in sales comes from ideas that
originated from the work force.

    Hewlett-Packard is spending nearly two years and $40 million
designing a "factory of the future," scheduled to open in
Puerto Rico next year, where computer-systems employees will
be hired on the basis of their creative potential. Judging that
kind of potential is the business of Ned Herrmann, whose North
Carolina-based Applied Creative Services runs workshops on
"whole-brain theory." Herrmann, who spent 35 years at General
Electric, a dozen of them as head of management education, has
cooked up a test called the Herrmann Brain Dominance
Instrument, which includes such queries as "Have you ever
experienced motion sickness . . . in response to vehicular
motion?" Herrmann maintains that people who are right-quadrant
dominant, or more "artistic," "emotional" and "spiritual," are
also more motion-sensitive.

    Is this why Woody Allen might avoid roller coasters? Does
Yo Yo Ma get carsick in a limo en route to the concert? That's
not the point, according to Herrmann. With H.B.D.I. results in
hand, a manager can select people with different ways of
learning, who together will form "a composite whole brain,"
thus working more efficiently, and creatively.

    At the University of Houston, Jack Matson runs a course the
students have nicknamed Failure 101. They are encouraged to
build the tallest structure possible out of ice-cream-bar
sticks, then to look for "the insight in every failure. Those
who end up with the highest projects went through the most
failures. Whoever followed a fixed idea from the outset never
finished first."

    Business baptism by pop stick may not be quite as cool as
listening to Charlie Parker, but it still might be good
preparation for the future. Already executives from companies
like Chevron and Amoco have found themselves in two-day
creativity seminars, working on problems like how to raise two
candles to eye level in a dark room using only string and paper
clips. Only Deliverance might be adequate preparation for one
problem-solving ploy practiced at the Gannett-owned News-Press
in Fort Myers, Fla. Employees find themselves out at sea in a
25-ft. boat, often with only one experienced sailor on board.
Says Madelyn Jennings, a Gannett senior vice president: "Some
need to lead. Some need to follow. But they all need to get
back to shore."

    "You can't just order up a good idea or spend money to find
one," points out Hallmark's Jon Henderson, director of the
company's Creative Resources Center. "You have to build a
climate and give people the freedom to create things." Better
make that freedom and -- remember -- two candles, a string and
paper clips.

    Oh, by the way. Are you stumped? Think about the elusively
obvious (like using the box the candles came in). Or maybe
you'd better not go into the oil business. Or maybe you should
just start listening to a little more Charlie Parker.