CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE

Truly high-growth innovative businesses, whether they are startups or big ole behemoths, need both a creative and an operations person at the top. Think Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. When the creative leaves and the operations person takes control, the transition is tricky at best–and often problematic. The narrative frame of Apple now is all about taxes and profits and money–not innovative products, not love and emotion, not aura. OK maybe for shareholders and Wall Street. Not good for those of us who us Apple stuff.

A similar thing has happened at another “Design-led” big company in the US–P&G. At P&G, A.G. Lafley redesigned the company from 200 to 2010, opening up its silos, promoting a business culture of creativity, and ultimately generating 30% of annual profits from new products. He brought in Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, to rethink strategy. And Tim Brown from IDEO, to instill Design Thinking. Lafley was replaced by an operations guy who focussed on efficiencies and traditional marketing and the result? Lackluster results. 

In my book, Creative Intelligence, I spend time explaining how Lafley used Knowledge Mining, Framing and Pivoting (Scaling) to change the sources of P&G’s profits and boost them to new highs. Lafley got his managers to “Connect + Develop,” to take their deep domains of knowledge in chemistry and product and connect them to new spaces, new ideas. No brainstorming of a 1000 ideas. No funnels and processes of innovation. Just smart people thinking about extending outside their silos to create the new. Then scaling like crazy.

The next big question is whether or not Lafley brings back Claudia Kotscha, the genius who tried to change P&G’s culture and make it more creative.

http://www.fastcompany.com/53060/interpreter

On Wednesday, I’m giving a talk about Creative Intelligence at Frog Design in NYC. These are tumultuous times in the Design/Innovation consultancy business and it will be exciting to talk with these great people about Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting, the key competencies of my book

http://www.frogdesign.com/

Frog is one of the largest innovation consultancies in the world. I put its founder, the brilliant Harmut Esslinger on the cover of Business Week when I first began covering design for business.  The early Apple design language of clean, white and small was Esslinger’s and Frog’s. Esslinger and Frog have always understood the power of aura and the notion of a calling. In his book, A Fine Line, Esslinger writes that “Every product promotes an identity and a clear idea of the consumer experience it provides as part of the bigger Apple "ecosystem.” When consumers buy a product that has been “Designed in California,” as the Apple label proudly proclaims, they are buying into a way of life. “

Now read that last sentence again and you get the notions of aura, charisma and calling–critical to deeply understanding what is meaningful to people. People join a social movement when they buy into an "ecosystem” that gives them identity and purpose.

 I prefer the idea of social movement to ecosystem and UE–User Engagement–to UX, Use Experience. UE reflects the true dynamic participation of people in their products and services these days.  Hartmut gets it. So does Frog.

Oh, Hartmut is sitting astride a huge motorcycle on the cover. Ha,

I just love this review of the book by the Portland Book Review. It captures the message of Creative Intelligence which is that we are ALL creative and can learn to be MORE creative.

http://www.portlandbookreview.com/tag/creative-intelligence-harnessing-the-power-to-create/

I’ve been speaking at Google, Microsoft and a lot of other companies in the past weeks about the message of Creative Intelligence it is remarkable how many engineers, doctors, scientists and other “analytical” people say they are not creative–only to prove they really are once I ask them what they actually do. 

Anyone who is good at seeing patterns is creative.  People who do that using numbers and , engineers for example, typically don’t see themselves as creative. BUT THEY ARE! 

I will be speaking at Ziba Design, one of the greatest design and innovation consultancies in the world, in PDX on May 9. It’s founder, Sohrab Vossoughi, taught me that Design is not just about process and thinking but about love–that powerful attraction you feel for an object, an experience. It’s about the beckoning, the aura, the culture. Come and have a conversation with us. The book has great stories of Ziba’s research and success in China. 

And it will be on sale there if you don’t want to buy it now on Amazon or B&N.

Framing your engagements with people, especially in social media, is one of the key Creative Competencies of Creative Intelligence. It’s amazing for me to see it happen live on Amazon, where your numbers rise and fall as people decide to engage you via your book. I guess there’s not much more intimate–or transparent–than this ritual of committing to you and your ideas.

This morning, the ebook edition of Creative Intelligence is up to #24 in the Biz & Investing category.

http://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Business-Investing/digital-text/154821011/ref=ntt_dp_kar_B001KIM2P2#3

It’s above Nassim Taleb, #26 who wrote The Black Swan (I show people how to train to spot Black Swans in the book and call it “Donut Thinking”–looking for the hole in the donut). Jim Collins, the Good To Great guru, is #27.

Creative Intelligence is just below the remarkable Clayton Christensen, #22, whose Innovator’s Dilemma, launched the conversation about innovation. 

The 5 Creative Competencies of the book–Knowledge Mining, Framing, Playing, Making and Pivoting take that conversation forward.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

I went back to the June 2006 cover of IN: Inside Innovation, a quarterly supplement I founded at BusinessWeek to look at Marissa Mayer’s 9 Notions of Innovation. The subtitle was "Marissa Mayer, The Talent Scout.“  Mayer has Stanford U degrees in symbolic systems and computer science and patents in Artificial Intelligence.  She was the first female engineer at Google, its #20 hire and took charge of search products and the user experience.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-18/marissa-mayer-the-talent-scout

Here are her "9 Notions of Innovation:

1-Ideas comes from everywhere. Google expects everyone to innovate, even the finance team

2- Share everything you can. Every idea, every project, every deadline–it’s all accessible to everyone on the internet

3- You’re brilliant,  we’re hiring. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience.

4- A license to pursue dreams. Employees get a "free” day a week. Half of new launches come from this “20% time.”

5- Innovation, not instant perfection. Google launches early and often in small beta tests, before releasing new features widely.

6- Don’t politic, use data. Mayer discourages the use of “I like” in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics.

7- Creativity loves restraint. Give people a vision, rules about how to get there, and deadlines.

8- Worry about usage and users, not money. Provide something simple to use and easy to love. The money will follow. 

9- Don’t kill projects–morph them. There’s always a kernel of something good that can be salvaged.“

The controversy surrounding Mayer’s decision to end remote working and have everyone be physically present in the office is reflected in these notions of how you generate innovation. It is a very Silicon Valley, techie model of brilliant engineers coming up with new techie functions that are then tossed out into the world to see if there is an audience for them. It often works. It more often fails.

There is a much better way–understand what is culturally meaningful to people and THEN generate the innovation that satisfies their aspirations. Or do both simultaneously and have engineers and designers work together to design new products and services.

Either way, what Google and Yahoo need right now is to get the cultural meaning  part right. They need to move beyond the engineer-centric reliance on numbers and data to tell them about the world and get into the world itself to understand it. They might find that the employees  staying home and raising their children have important ideas for the products and services that are meaningful to millions of people.

I talk about Knowledge Mining and Framing in Creative Intelligence. It just may be that Mayer and her old bosses at Google need to rely less on the "best” intelligence of their engineers and more on the creative intelligence of people who embody the lives of their customers. Then they could reframe who and how they employ and what they actually offer up in the marketplace.

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

Creativity is a social phenomenon more than an individual event.

Mihaly Csikszmentmihalyi is best know, of course, for his work on individual flow. But he also analyzed Renaissance Italy to explore why Florence, at a certain point in history, was able to produce such an amazing number of brilliant artists.

In my book, Creative Intelligence, I say that he asked, What are the social conditions that lead to creativity? How can we make ourselves part of that social matrix? These are critical questions in our quest in becoming more creative. 

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062088424?ie=UTF8%20&tag=harpercollinsus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062088424

B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/creative-intelligence-bruce-nussbaum/1112757030?ean=9780062088420&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-MdXm68JZJz8-_-10%3a1&r=1&

President Obama will speak about the State of the Union soon and he will talk about many things except, perhaps the most important–the state of innovation in America. In my book, Creative Intelligence, I argue that for the past 30 years, there has been lots of innovation but it has been narrowly focussed in Finance, IT and social media.

In fact, only 9% of all public and private companies in the US do any sort of innovation at all. Think about that. Look at the profits of all US corporations over the past few decades and you can see that where innovation has occurred, profits have done particularly well. Finance, surprisingly to many of us in the Design/Creativity/Innovation space, has seen its profits soar from about 10% of the total of all profits to 40% of the total in the past 20 years because of financial innovation. I would argue that this has been a disaster for the economy as a whole but the fact remains. 

What policies do we need out of Washington to spur innovation and creativity?  How do we generate a million-fold increase in startups? How do we push entrepreneurial capitalism over finance capitalism?  These are the key questions that the President should address in his State of the Union.

Gas leaks, battery fires, faulty wiring, electrical service software errors–Boeing’s new 787 is experiencing a series of problems that is hurting the brand, slowing the roll-out and costing the company many millions of dollars. Any new jet comes with teething problems and one with entirely new composite materials can be expected to have more than its share. But the three-year delay in launch and cascading problems suggest that Boeing’s original strategy of outsourcing most of the design, engineering and manufacture of the Dreamliner is proving seriously costly.

For most of the past decade, globalization of innovation has been in vogue, with consultants promising huge cost savings and speedier results. As manufacturing went global, it appeared to make sense to outsource the creative aspects of making as well. In addition, nationalistic pressures by potential buyers of big-ticket items, especially commercial jet planes, demanded a piece of the action as a quid pro quo in purchasing them. Besides, Apple shifted all production of its high-tech iPhones, iPads and Macs to China and that’s worked, so the business logic went.

For Boeing, the logic hasn’t worked. The 787, like all commercial jets, is really a super-complex, hand-crafted product, composed of new materials, designed in new ways and assembled by new methods. The best innovation strategy for this kind of cutting edge innovation may well be internal, organic teams who have control over most, if not all, of the complex procedures. Agile, resilient teams of skilled people who trust each other to share information and learn quickly by doing are the best organization units for this kind of innovation. They make up “magic circles” of creativity who can craft original designs and then scale their efforts for production. Organic, networked circles of creativity and craft can be better managed and are often more efficient than totally outsourced design and manufacturing. The poor quality control experienced by Boeing over its suppliers in Europe and Asia might have been prevented had the company done more of its creativity and crafting in-house.

Boeing’s decision to outsource 30% to 40% of the 787 was made in the context of a contentious history with it’s engineering unions. In retrospect, the higher cost of keeping a creative, competent and in-house capability happy would probably have been a tiny fraction of what Boeing is paying today in penalties for delays, fixes to errors and brand erosion. Circles of highly creative, innovative teams are expensive but the scaling of their efforts may be more efficient and cost-effective in the long run for companies intent on playing at the edge. Apple never outsourced its design and engineering and demanded total control over the manufacture and assembly of its products. Apple’s handful of “magic circle” of design and engineering teams has worked on nearly all of its products over the decades. Boeing and business consultants should take note.

Why are Republicans anti-city? One of the reasons for their loss that us not getting attention is the anti-urban policy stance of the Republican Party. Anti-mass transit. Anti-high speed train. Anti-support for education & museums. Anti-intellectual. Anti-immigrant. Anti-bike. The GOP is anti-Jane Jacobs. Add it up and the anti-city stance of Republicans is anti-creativity and anti-innovation.