Capitalising on Complexity: Creative Leadership is The Way To Go - 2010 IBM's Global CEO's Study

At last, creativity gets the recognition it should. This report is not more about innovation which I have argued is dead as a concept. Instead it points out very clearly CEOs now realise that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation. To connect with and inspire a new generation, they lead and interact in entirely new ways.

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Empowered Individuals and Empowering Institutions - Gary Hamel WSJ

In my last post I talked about the widening fault lines that run between individuals and institutions. Crack open the head of the average manager, and you’ll find a way of thinking that puts the institution in front of, or on top of, the individual. Represented graphically, the thinking looks like this . . . Model I: INSTITUTION –> INDIVIDUAL –> PROFITS The company hires employees to produce goods and services that yield profits for shareholders. In this model, the individual is to the institution what human beings were to the Matrix—raw material; factors of production hired to serve the institution’s goals. In real life, human beings aren’t plugged into machines, but they’re often plugged into roles that don’t suit them and jobs that don’t fulfill them. Usually, it is the individual who must conform to the institution rather than the other way around. If you doubt this, ask yourself what would you wear to work every day if there really were no constraints? What computer would you use on the job if you could pick any one you wanted? And what task or project would you tackle if you were free to choose?

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Do Tight Deadlines Make You Less Creative? « Creativity & Innovation - Keith Sawyer

In fact there’s been a lot of research on this topic. For the most part, I’ve cited a study by Teresa Amabile of Harvard showing that when people feel more time pressure, they are less creative. Now I’ve read a new study* by Marcus Baer and Greg Oldham, that extends this finding. One difference is that they examine a special kind of time pressure: “creative time pressure” which is, specifically, how much time pressure you feel when engaging in the more creative tasks at work–in contrast to deadline pressure for a more ordinary, non-creative task. A second difference is that they separate employees into two personality groups: one that is high in openness to experience (which suggests they will have a broader repertoire of ideas and concepts) and one that is low; and, they separate employee context into “high support for creativity” and “low support for creativity.”

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Collaboration: Building and Managing Trust - Allcollaboration.com

The issue of trust is at the core of effective collaboration. The most basic definition of collaboration (co-labor) is working jointly with others for shared goals and outcomes. The need for trust thus arises due to the interdependence between parties. A trust relationship inherently has risk for the parties involved. Individual personal behaviors are different that manage this trust and associated risk. Since trust it at the core of collaboration, how does one build trust? What is trust anyway? What are individual behaviors and expectations in a trust relationship? What can be done to rebuild trust when trust is violated? These are some of the question we address in this post. We can recall what President Reagan often said: Trust but verify. That is, I am willing to trust you only to the extent I can verify what you say. Trust is based on evidence, not words. Evidence is the key to minimizing risk in this instance. This is not a trust relationship in fact; it is a relationship of distrust. But, the circumstances of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) created the interdependence for shared goals and outcomes.

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Question the Wisdom of Experts: Unlearning 101: - Jack Uldrich

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage Question: Write the letter “E” on your forehead. (Go ahead, I’ll wait. You may also just trace the letter on your forehead if that’s more comfortable for you). Did you write the letter in a self-oriented fashion such that it would appear backwards to those viewing it or did you write it backwards so that it would appear legible to others? In a fascinating study conducted by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Galinsky and his colleagues found that the more power an individual possessed, the more likely the person was to draw the letter from their perspective -- making it appear backwards to others. In fact, individuals assigned to a high power group were three times more likely to draw a self-oriented “E.” The study concluded that power caused individuals to assign too much weight to their own viewpoint and made them less able to adjust to, or even consider, another person’s perspective.

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