Getting Realabout Creativity in Business

The FEMININITY of Productivity & Creativity

Professor of Design, Creativity, & InnovationGrad School of System, Design, & Management

Keio University, JapanMaster of Innovation,

Founder, Dimensions of Difference DesignsDeTao Masters Academy, Shanghai

By Richard Tabor GreeneEMAIL richardtgreene@alum.mit.edu

THE FEMININITY OFPRODUCTIVITY &

CREATIVITY

Your Door to CreativityAre You Creative? 60 ModelsAre You Creative? 128 StepsGetting Real about CreativityYour Door to Creativity

Are You Educated?

Are You Educated, Japan, EU, USA, China--300 CapabilitiesManaging Self--128 DynamicsPower from Brain TrainingKnowledge Epitome--A New Kind of University

64 Capabilities

72 Innovation ModelsCreativity Leadership ToolsCreativity Leader 4 Year Curriculum

Your Door to Culture PowerCulture PowerGlobal Quality

Thinking DesignDesigns that Lead

Are You Effective? 100 Methods54 Excellence Sciences--Redoing PlatoSuperSelling--33 cases & MethodsManaging ComplexityTaking Place--Creative City Theory and Practice

INNOVATIONS IN INNOVATION and in 29 OTHER CREATIVITY

SCIENCES

These are the 24books I wrote be-fore I wrote thisbook you are nowreading. Left toright, top to bot-tom they cover:creativity, edu-catedness, inno-vation, culture,design, manage-ment, and all formsof creativity.

There is a flowfrom 2 bases attop through 3application areasto sheer workimpact, to gene-rating creativeoutcomes of 30different genresof creation asoutcome.

Creativity Educatedness

Innovation Culture Design

Management

Capstone Book

RICHARD’S 24 BOOKSBY CATEGORY

EMAIL: richardtgreene@alum.mit.edu

THERE IS A BOOK OF BOOKS by RTGreene having 50+ page EXCERPTS of ALL 24 BOOKS

1. Your Door to Creativity--42 models summarized 8 in detail--PAGE 4--86

2. Are You Creative? 60 Models--world’s most comprehensive--PAGE 88-142

3. Are You Creative? 128 Steps--to becoming creator & creating--PAGE 143-192

6. 72 Innovation Models--a grammar of changes that change history--PAGE 304-367

7. Creativity Leadership Tools--intructors’ manual & student text--PAGE 368-420

8. Creativity Leader--managing creativity of self & other, everywhere--PAGE 421-468

9. Thinking Design--160 approaches, tools, leading design, designs that lead--PAGE 469-538

10. Designs that Lead, Leaders who Design--an article collection--PAGE 539-594

11. Are You Educated?--an empirical science-based definition as 48 capabilities--PAGE 595-657

12. Are You Educated, Japan, China, EU, USA--300 capabilities from 5 models--PAGE 658-728

13. Managing Self--128 Dynamics--redoing Plato, Freud, Sartre, Kegan,Zen--PAGE 728-805

14. Power from Brain Training--exercises for 225 brain modules--PAGE 806-866

15. Knowledge Epitome--200 new face to face tools from revising ancient media--PAGE 867-933

16. Your Door to Culture Power--the shared practiced routines model--PAGE 934-989

17. Culture Power--what can be done with it, models & articles--PAGE 990-1055

18. Global Quality--24 approaches, 30 shared aims, quality soft-&-hard-ware--PAGE 1056-1129

19. Are You Effective?--100 methods from the world’s top performers--PAGE 1130-1193

20. A Science of Excellence--54 routes to the top of nearly any field--PAGE 1194-1242

21. SuperSelling--tools, methods, cases from 150 best at ALL forms of selling--PAGE 1243-1304

22. Managing Complexity--3 sources, 3 paradoxes of handling them--PAGE 1305-1370

23. Taking Place--creative city theory & practice via 288 city-fications--PAGE 1371-1431

24. Innovations in Innovation--& in 29 other creativity sciences--PAGE 1432-1491

FREE download of this entire book of books via LINK:https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9XSvwJ-xErSSkoyMGU0azN0eFk

4. Getting Real about Creativity in Business--measures tools--PAGE 193-245

5. Your Door to Creativity, Revised--42 general 12 detailed models--PAGE 246-303

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OTHER BOOKS by Richard Tabor Greene

Getting Real about

Creativity in Business

The Femininity of Productivity and Creativityby

Richard Tabor Greene

Professor of Design Creativity & Innovation, Grad School of System Design & Management,

Keio University, Hiyoshi, JapanMaster, De Tao Masters Academy,

Beijing-Shanghaiemail: richardtgreene@alum.mit.edu

CONTENTSPREFACE: THE CULTURE-CREATIVITY CONNEC-

TION p.3The Ballpark This Book Plays In--13 Sizes of Creativity, 42 Models

of Creativity, No Interest at All in Feminism, Humans are NotNecessary for Creation

The Culture of Business PublishingWhy This Book Got WrittenWhy a Book on Creativity in BusinessProfessors, Americans, Right Wingers, Techies, and

Males Patronizing BusinesspersonsThe Culture of Publishings for Business

The Culture of Creativity in BusinessThe Prima Facia Case for Culture as Central to Creativ-

ity in BusinessThe Culture of Creators

creators are people struggling to stay awakein your presence, in your speech, inyour organization

creators are people who are unstoppable--the issue: stopping them long enough tohang around your organization

creators are nasty people and they see theflaws in everything

the despair doorway to insight and creationGetting Crystalizing Experiences--For You, Your Firm,

Your Worldnut farming--a workforce of nutshome runs verus base hits

The Culture of Me, the Author of this BookFamily CulturesPolitical CulturesEthnic CulturesHacker CultureEngineering Design CultureGender CulturesBusiness CulturesNon-Profit and Religious CulturesJapanese CultureMy Career as a Pain in the Ass & Why All Creativity is

Always UncreativeUsing Culture Changes to Create--Exaptation and Reframings

reframing suggestion systems--the final adaptationlayer

reframing slack time systems--the productivity founda-tion of later creating--learning to fight for freetime

reframing failure tolerance systems--second chancecareer systems

reframing “creative thinking” tools--the greater cre-ativity of root thinking systems

reframing silicon valley systems--flows of things seek-ing homes, being a flow, being a home

reframing firms and careers--the concept of social mul-tiplier

reframing knowledge work--code versus action fac-torws

Globality = Creativity: If Your Global Assignments are Phony YourCreativity is Shallow and Wimpy

Culture, Creativity, Educatedness--Their RelationsSome Paradoxes of Creating

making it easy makes it hard -- supporting iteliminates it

creativity is not creative -- so supporting itprevents it

creativity is uncreative -- changes of frameturn the uncreative into the creativeand vice versa and you and I do not con-trol frame changes

the uncreative is sometimes very creative --by definition, is another new technol-ogy from the US creative? no, it merelycontinues a well established trend

the creativity of error--mis-copying (bad copyand copying wrong thing), mis-imple-menting (doing wrong thing, doing itwrong way)

A Model of Culture and Culture’s Role in CreatingTools for Upping Mental Granularity and ProductivityA Useful Model of Culture

PART ONE--CREATING CLARITY ABOUT CRE-ATIVITY p.14

Chapter 1: The Uncreativity of Current Research on Creativity inBusiness p.14

some other flaws in academic research oncreativity in business

a fair representation of the state of value ofwhat academic researchers have foundabout creativity in busiiness

What to Notice in the Above “Findings” About BusinessCreativity

The Lack of Diverse DiversityTuning the Control versus Creativity Trade-

OffMissing DisguiseAvoiding The Power of the Negative and the

Despair DoorwayOmitting Skepticism, Schizo, and Know Thy-

selfWhat are These Well Populated “Spaces” and

“Resources” of Academic Research onCreativity in Business?

Missing Connections--Perseverence via Dis-guise

Curiosity, Interest, Drive, Persistance, Invest-ing in Failing Lines of Action--WhatDoes Instrinsic Motivation Hide?

Creativity Kills BusinessesConclusion--Not Male Enough, Not Female

Enough, Not Anything EnoughChapter 2: Disillusioning Creativity--Stripping Illusions from It

p.21toys for boys, tools for fools, getting real about creativ-

ity in businessinauthentic reasons for interest in creativity--the

career system distorts creativitythe costs of inauthentic interest in creativity--simulta-

neous overshooting and undershooting creativitytampering--statistical, complexity, and creativitythe uncreativity of creating--neurotic creativityreducing creativity by supporting it--(it is not an “it”)educatedness as a primary route to creativitydefining creativity--using the word and concept care-

fully and consistently--clearing away conceptualbrush

a one minute creativity courage testrelational and representational defining of creativitythe creativity implementation paradoxesconnection as a self limiting route to creativitythe recommendations and subcreations models of cre-

ating--what they tells us about business blocks tocreating

managing by events--a primary route to creating inbusiness

managers educated enough to spot creative personsand not get in their way

pulsed systems--enough isolation and enough connec-tion at the right times

gthe impossibility of creativity in modern businessesargument

the inevitability of creativity in modern businessesargument

creativity as cultural work--5 cultures--american,male, technology, capitalist, monkey

create-analysis not toolsthe paybacks from creating

Chapter 3: Errors in Doing and Handling Creativity p.36error 1--Assuming that Environments “Support” or

“Create” Creativityerror 2--The Disaster of Assuming that Creativity is One

Thingerror 3--The Disaster of Missing Trade-Offs Between

More Creativity and More “Other Things” ThatYour Business Needs

error 4--Slighting or Ignoring the Creativity of Survivingas a Business

error 5--Missing When Being Creative is Not Very Cre-ative

error 6--Stifling Creativity Using Creative Environmentserror 7--Excepting, Containing, Bounding Creativityerror 8--Toys for Boys, Tools for Foolserror 9--The Mental Illness Illusion--Same Inputs, Dif-

ferent Outputserror 10--Missing Infrastructure-Based Immense Innova-

tions

error 11--Confusing “Base Hit” Democratic CreativitySystems with “Home Run” Elite Creativity Sys-tems

error 12--Trying to Get Creativity from Non-Creatorserror 13--False, Exaggerated, Biased Attributionerror 14--The Creativity of Hassle Handlingerror 15--Being “In the Flow” “With it”

Chapter 4: The Femininity of Productivity and Creativity--WhyThis is Both Obvious and Inevitable and a Result of the Cul-tural Work that All Creating Amount To p.42

Creativity as Moral and Culture Work: How & Why Gender Work Gets Disguised as Technology and

Technique WorkThe Femininity of ProductivityThe Femininity of Creativity Creating Leadership--The Minimal Unit of Competent

Cognition--The Heterosexual Pair Chapter 5: Measuring Amount and Quality of Creativity p.47

The Relativity of Creativity and the Paradox of TurningIncrements into Leaps

Resolving the Paradox Using 13 Sizes of CreativityEnvironments Supportive of Different Sizes--Assessing

SizesEnvironments Supportive of Different Models of Creat-

ing--Assessing ModelsPART TWO--CREATING CREATORS p.51Chapter 6: Total Quality as Eliminator of Uncreative Creativity

p.51total quality and elimination of uncreative creativitytotal quality, TRIZ, and standard innovation operators

DEMASSIFICATION break a long, big, riskything into a population of fast, small,riskless things

DEGENDERIFICATION take hierarchical, sta-tus concerned, competitive things andturn them into egalitarian, intimacyconcerned, cooperative things

DENEUROTICIZATION identify the costs of alltalents and develop slighted capabili-ties caused by existing talents

Chapter 7: Creativity, Total Quality, and the Culture of Profes-sionalism--Should Creation be Done by Professionals in It orby Everyone? p.53

Bledsoe and the Culture of ProfessionsTotal quality as Un-professionalizing Work, Un-profes-

sionalizing Creativity--that is, Doing CreativityWithout Creators

Towards Total Quality Creators and Total Quality Creat-ing

The Paradox of Creative Ends Obtained by UncreativeMeans

Chapter 8: Can I Personally Become Creative Alone or in an Envi-ronment Hostile to It? p.90

Creating Creators on All Size ScalesHow to Become a Creator and Create in Hostile (that is

Normal) Business EnvironmentsGetting Creators, Once You Create Them to Create on

All Size Scales

Supporting the Models of Creating Appropriate andChosen by Each Size Scale

Synergies--Between Organization Levels, Between Cre-ativity Size Scales, Between Creativity Models

Chapter 9: 45 Models of Innovation p.95Chapter 10: From Psychoanalysis to Create-analysis p.155

create-analysis-- ordinary people never create, subcreations for creating, creative lives do creating, 42 models of creating not one or a few, using the recommendations model, create-analysis, using 42 models

using 42 models of creativity in business--two dia-grams, empty and filled in

the creativity of educatedness--a short cut, believe itor not, for advanced organizations and leaders

Chapter 11: From Total Quality Creativity to Global Quality Cre-ativity p.158

The Social Vehicle of TQ Applied to CreativityEvolving Increments into LeapsDevolving Leaps into IncrementsStatistical Control of Creative Thinking and Creation

DoingStatistical Control of Creating CreatorsFrom Total Quality Creating to Global Quality Creating

PART THREE--CREATING CREATIONS p.159Chapter 12: Know What You are Talking About and What You are

Doing p.159Creativity, a Non-Human Process

lessons from the most creative process knownin this universe

the process that created you and me, naturalselection,

the process that produced “natural selec-tion”

relational defining of creativity--the orthogonal disci-plines research program

representational defining of creativity--a model of 42models of creativity

Chapter 13: The Model of 54 Orthogonal Disciplines p.160Chapter 14: The Model of 42 Models of Creativity p.169(Chapter 15: 3 Out of 42 Models of Creativity

the recommendatioins Model--a model of the 64 stepsof becoming creative and the 64 steps of creat-ing: neutral drift and exaptations (gene reuse in newframes/contexts)

the subcreations modelthe culture mixing model)

Chapter 16: A Model of the Business of Creativity--ManagingInvention, Discovery, Art, and Creators p.228

a model of the creativity of business--thenext profound abstract model of busi-ness after total quality--globalizing alldimensions of business

the art of business, the business of art--emo-tional capitalism--femininizing: selves,systems, the earth and its future

how to ruin creativity in business--1. patronizing publishings to businesspersons-

-dumbing down for wider markets, big-ger sales, greater profits, while gettingless interest, less reading,

2. praising the easy--gradually lowering stan-dards of what gets called “creative” tillnothing is not creative

3. making creating easy--reduces challengeand victory, reduces creativity

4. off site rope climbs and rapid rides--expe-riencing how good life outside the rulesis merely makes people hate the orga-nization more, not less; businesses ascommunities = Japan

the software of creativity and the creativity of soft-ware systems and people--

tongue cramps from speaking mind to mindwith software people

procedural embedding as a core creativitythinking skill

abstracting a minimal grammar of operatorsthat do what is wanted as a small subsetof a new combinatorial world

from programming codes to programmingstrategies, products, persons, careers

PART FOUR--CREATING CULTURES THAT CRE-ATE p.248

Chapter 17: A Model of the 10 Components of Any Culture p.249Chapter 18: Creating a Culture that Creates--How to Use the

Model of Culture to Create a Culture of Creation p.278APPENDIX--ASSESSING ALL OF CREATIVITY

(NEARLY) p.280Chapter 19: 1500 Item Creativity Checklist p.280Chapter 20: 1000 Item Creativity Questionnaire p.313

PREFACE: THE CULTURE-CREATIVITY

CONNECTIONBefore reading this Preface, scan the chapter below titled “The Model of 42 Models of Creativity”.That chapter introduces you to the thoroughness and ambitions of this book.

This book was writtten by someone with a successful career in global corporations, in non-profit thirdworld development, in politics, in university research, in artificial intelligence software developmentand in the arts. His career took place in the US, in Europe, and in East Asia, particularly, Japan andChina. Therefore, this book will be uncomfortable for people used to and liking their own experienceand point of view. This book will be comfortable for people who have mastered living inside points ofview completely different than their own for years. This book argues that trusting your self and yourown experience and point of view is the beginning of the end of creativity of all sorts. Your identityand your comfort are twin enemies of creating. This book will not be a comfortable read for most peo-ple. It will attack, in some cases, relentlessly, things most readers depend on for confidence, pride,and feeling superior to others. This book will in most cases be a humiliating experience--as all truelearning experiences are. In particular, this book counters the culture of all normal business publish-ings, for a reason.

This is a feisty book. It throws usual business commonsense out the window. It throws an entirely dif-ferent, harsher light on business as usual. It looks at office and factory, system and businesspersonsthe way anthropologists see them, the way visiting aliens might see them. I use emotionally loadedphrases, where it is normal to, instead, use sanitary euphemisms in polite society. This book aims tobe impolite. For too long too many in business, in academia studying business, and in the businesspress and publishing, have kissed ass to business--for they all want money from business. I do not seekmoney. I am, in this book, seeking truth. There is power in truth, great power, even power to makemoney, and I am after bigger game than little increments of money and little increments of creativity.For that, I have to break conventions of thought and talk, and use expressions that put usual businessthings in a new context, a context that often reveals the cupidity, stupidity, and torpidity of what busi-nesses are and do. That does not mean that all that they do is cupiditous, stupid, or torpid. Seeingnegatives and flaws more deeply and comprehensively, is an essential step toward creating--it has tobe done, however painful it is--because it shows us where and how to improve. There is a methodbehind my madness of expression in this book, for cultures that you readers are now happily controlledby and embedded in, hinder your attaining great creativity. To see those cultures inside you, afterdecades of denial and self obfuscation, I have to wake readers up, make them cognizant of culturalhints and results, that normally they bleep over or pretend are not there. This book gets real and thatmeans, if you have been exaggerating your own worth or the worth of your business and its systems,this is going to be an extremely painful read for you. Beware! On the other hand, if you find the pab-lum common to most business publishing a bit trite, boring, and hard to keep awake in front of, thisfeisty book may be just what you ordered!

I said above I wanted to deal with the culture of business books and their publishers (and how thataffects creativity), but before doing that, there is one small other thing I want to do. I want to showreaders the scale of creativity this book deals with--because it is quite different than the scale of cre-ativity of most famous university professor-consultants on innovation and creativity, and because it isquite different than the scale of creativity most corporate leaders, and their cultures, aim for andachieve.

The Ballpart This Book Plays InIf the creativity of Procter and Gamble’s Corporate New Ventures program interests you, this is not thebook for you. This book considers that program approximately 5% of what normal companies do whenimplementing programs for creativity (to be fair, the managers I know inside P&G also consider thatprogram only a fraction of their approaches to enhancing creativity). This book considers that P&Gprogram, based as it is on Harvard University consults, one of the lower, simpler levels of creativity

implementation. The size of creations it aims at are small fractions of the size of creations semicon-ductor companies have to achieve every two years, small fractions of the creations systems biologyventures have to propose to get funding, and small fractions of the creations that most large organiza-tions will have to achieve to continue in existence another 20 years. The size of results from the Cor-porate New Ventures program are, in this book’s opinion, dangerous, extremely dangerous. The resultsof the P&G Corporate New Ventures program are far too modest to meet the criteria of this book. Thisis a book for people with a lot more ambition, a lot more capability, and a lot better consultants thanthat P&G program. This is one way to estimate the ballpark this book plays in. A more abstract and accurate rendition of the ballpark this book plays in can be gotten by consideringa very important aspect of creativity, overall. Creativity comes in sizes, just like dresses, pants,drinks, and a lot of other things. There are small sizes of creation followed by middle sizes then largesizes. The Procter & Gamble Corporate New Ventures program is either size 2 or size 5 out of 21 listedbelow, depending on how strict one wishes to be. If you are satisfied with that, I and a lot of otherpeople, will not want to invest in you or your management. This book is about achieving all the below,simultaneously. Indeed, this book demonstrates that you cannot do a good thorough lasting job ofachieving any one of the below without also achieving many others of the below. Creativity in busi-nesses is a natural selection evolution process that evolves suggestions into revolutions and devolvesrevolutions into suggestions. It is top down and bottom up and middle out all at the same time, when-ever and wherever it achieves large sizes of creativity, sizes far beyond P&G’s Corporate New Venturesprogram and far beyond the IBM-P&G retiree network for research “outsourcing”. If those, or similarprograms elsewhere, are your “creativity benchmarks” you are too wimpy for this book--go buy a sim-pler, easier, more conformist book that does not stretch you at all. This book is for the ambitious, thevery ambitious. Actually, it is for the very best. If you want to be the very best in global creativityattainment, this is the book for you.

TWENTY ONE SIZES OF CREATIVITY:The twenty one sizes of creation listed below are in order from small to large.This is not just a dimension of size differences. It is also a dimension ofincreases in abstraction--small size creations are more concrete, local, andfaster than large size creations. Large size creations are very abstract, global,and time-consuming to implement. There are two super-layers: improvementand revolution. Improvements have to be sought out and benchmarked as“best practices”; revolutions do not have to be sought out, they force them-selves on everyone in an industry or economy. There are two ordinary layers--tangibles and frameworks--that apply to both the improvement and the revolu-tion super-layers. That makes for four layers overall, that are increasinglyabstract, general, and time-consuming as you progress through them in theorder found below. The examples beside each item below, come from the his-tory of total quality--since most business readers will be familiar with this glo-bal transformationin business theory and practices as implemented worldwide over the last 30years. Note Six Sigma does not appear in the below examples because it ismerely a rewording compendium of diverse old established quality techniquesplus more stringent variance requirements on process attainments. It repre-sents failure of total quality people to mesh and learn from software people(the old, analog, hardware blue suits versus the young, digital, software T-shirts culture divide within persons, economies, firms, policies).

THE IMPROVEMENT LAYER1. suggestions--lubricating omnipresent adaptation (Example:

any corporate suggestion system having robust imple-mentation)

2. improvements (kaizen) in practices--same outputs forfewer inputs, better outputs for same inputs (Example:process enleanment via waste elimination to exposeprocess determinants)

3. improvements (kaizen) in approaches--changes in abstractaspects of how things are done (Example: getting pro-cesses in statistical control)

4. improvements (kaizen) in systems--changes across bound-aries, vertical or horizontal, physical or physic orsocial (Example: root cause analysis exposure of mana-gerial social class and status boundary causes of poorprocesses and outcomes)

5. improvements (kaizen) in infrastructures--changes in sub-strates all functions work upon, use, or depend on(Example: machine tools with statistical control “con-trols” built in by their manufacturers)

6. improvements (kaizen) in directions--changes in humannature, feelings, goals, aspirations, boldnessesattempted (Example: Ph.D. workgroups--all ordinaryworkgroups doing Phd. level statistical research

projects on process improvements and automations;also, statistical control and improvement of softwaresystems and processes of invention)

THE FRAMEWORK IMPROVEMENT LAYERImprovements (kaizen) in governing framework assumptions--changes

in the following:7. a. elaborating existing paradigms and their

anomalies (Example: Statistical ProcessControl separation of special and commoncauses; root thinking replacing folk attri-bution of causes)

8. b. challenging existing paradigms (Example:Management by Fact--evidence-based pol-icy and strategy)

9. c. proposing alternative paradigms (Example:Policy and Quality Function Deploymentcampaigns)

10. d. establishing new winning paradigms (Exam-ple: process, internet, & social binding ofcompany, suppliers, customers)

11. e. finding and specifying anomalies in newwinning paradigms (Example: diversity (ofidea, human attributes beyond gender/age/ethnicity) management best prac-tices)

THE REVOLUTION LAYER12. revolutionary practice inventions--practices forcing all

others to copy or capitulate (Example: JIT inventory)13. revolutionary approach inventions--approaches forcing all

others to copy or capitulate (Example: Knowledgemanagement: total quality processes along with inter-net-implemented software-intelligent enhanced self-organizing processes)

14. revolutionary systems inventions--systems forcing all oth-ers to copy or capitulate (Example: firm cluster-iza-tions, outsourcing knowledge, research, and creativitywork; firms as plural, diverse, competing-within-the-firm “homes” for ideas/creators)

15. revolutionary infrastructure inventions--infrastructuresforcing all others to copy or capitulate (Example: JITmanaging, the agile economy of automatic net-builtfirms)

16. revolutionary direction inventions-- human nature, feel-ing, goal, aspiration, boldness inventions forcing oth-ers to copy or capitulate (Example: cognitivecompetitiveness, continual statistical improvement ofbenchmarked internal-to-the-individual mental pro-cesses)

THE FRAMEWORK REVOLUTION LAYERRevolutionary “governing framework assumption” inventions--changes

in the below forcing others to copy or capitulate17 a. elaborating existing paradigms and their

anomalies (Example: from quality circlesto high technology circles)

18. b. challenging existing paradigms (Example:managing by events: departments andprocesses replaced by events, social com-munities across internetted networksmaintained via mass workshop eventtypes)

19. c. proposing alternative paradigms (Example:quality globalizations)

20. d. establishing new winning paradigms (Exam-ple: total quality creativity; global qualitycreativity)

21. e. finding and specifying anomalies in newwinning paradigms (Example: sizes of cre-ativity).

Another ballpark this book plays in is this--this book, unlike all the 300+ other books now published oncreativity and innovation in business (I have personally read, recently, 600 of them, only 300 are worthremembering), assumes that creativity is not one thing. In fact, nearly half of this book is taken upwith a model of 42 different models of what creativity is. Creativity is at least 42 different approaches

to creating, not one. Therefore, when consultants sell you “an environment that supports creativity”which model does their environment support and which models does it hinder? The consultants do notknow because they assume that creativity is one thing so one environment that supports it can befound. Those consultants could not be more wrong. I built expert systems for ten years, using artifi-cial intelligence programming I learned in high school before going to MIT. I interviewed personally 8of the world’s greatest designers and managed my employees interviewing over 69 other expert design-ers. Many of these people were best in the world and their corporations were terrified that disease ortraffic accidents would take them suddenly away. We got “mental contents” every 15 seconds, duringdozens of hours of design work we observed these people doing--making huge transcripts of mentaloperands they used and mental operators they applied to those mental operands. This constitutes adeeper, broader, more detailed exposure to “creativity” of the design sort, than any other professor orconsultant now selling creativity classes or consults. This book is founded on things that are both obvi-ous and validated by research, that are omitted by all other books on creativity in business, namely:

1. There are 21 sizes of creativity--all of them have to be implemented at once for any one to last and have impact.2. There are at least 42 different models of how to create--supports that help any one of them hinder many others.

Penultimately, the subtitle of this book, about the femininity of productivity and creativity may mis-lead some readers. I am not a feminist, I do not like feminists, I am disgusted by political correctnessof the American sort. Nevertheless, I am a scientist and my research data, has, again and again,revealed that most of the transformations and solutions applied in business, today, end up feminizingwork systems. This is undeniable, from a statistical standpoint. There is, I have to admit, a certainimportant support in this for feminist positions--but only for some positions by some feminists, and thedata do not support all the additional feminist ideas, rigidities, inflexibilities, nastinesses, self destruc-tive self praising, and intellectual dishonesties found all over feminism and academic departments forgender studies. This book dislikes all of that while affirming scientific research results showing thatmost changes to improve business systems feminize those systems. What this ultimately means for cre-ativity in business is dealt with in detail later in this book. Do not make the mistake of thinking thatthis book has a single sentence in it supporting feminists or feminism. This book in general, in princi-ple, and in specifics does not support feminists or feminism. Not a single sentence in this book, otherthan this paragraph you are now reading, concerns itself with feminists or feminisms. They goentirely unmentioned in this book except this small proviso paragraph. Fear not, your time will not bewasted in rigid ideologies and new founded bigotries!

Though I intensely condemn feminism, feminists, and political correctness of all sorts, I have spentyears, in Wellesley College, as an undergraduate, mastering female culture to correct excess maleattributes of MIT’s culture, and as a manager of artificial intelligence software development in 3 globalUS and 2 Japanese corporations, I have found myself hiring more women than men, because femaleemployees were more reliable than males (though, for some reason not entirely clarified yet byresearch, my best single programmers were always males). This book deals with reality, however itfalls on various ideological dimensions and personal preferences or beliefs--including my own. Ipresent what the data support, whether I like it or not. This is a book about getting creativity out ofreality, not out of namby-pamby idealizations or dishonest whitewashing corporate cultures for thenaive. If you want to feel good all the time, constantly praise your self and your firm, and have a nicelife, stop reading this book and pick up some comics or novels--this book is about reality in all its gloryand nastinesses--how to create in that. This is not a book for fools.

Finally, what is the most creative process known? Well, what, then, is the most creative thing in theuniverse? By most criteria it is human beings. What, then, is the process that created human beings?It is Darwin’s natural selection process (religious nuts who believe otherwise have more basic problemsto work on than creativity and should not be reading this book). What created the natural selectionprocess? It was something in life itself. What created all life? It was auto-catalytic sets among prim-itive RNA precursors, according to the best current knowledge in science (people who believe it wassome magical being in the sky who wants people to have luxurious motor vehicles have more basicproblems and should not be reading this book). What created auto-catalytic sets among primitive RNAprecursor molecules? It was the universe itself. The universe itself is, by far, the most creative pro-cess now known. Recent information physics theories of the “reality of the universe” as informationtake this a step deeper. Anyway, the most creative process known is the universe we are in. Thatmeans that most of the most amazing creation going on is going on outside of what humans think anddo. This book takes place within the modesty that recognizing that produces. Other books tend toforget that most of the most important creativity that humans experience is not produced by humanbeings. This book, on the contrary, is modest about the role of humans in creating and the amount ofcreating they, thus far, have proven capable of. This book is real and it is about getting real about cre-ating in business.

The Culture of Business PublishingWhy This Book Got WrittenI was in Singapore the other day, with an hour to kill, so I went to the terminal bookstore and browsedaround. There was a large, prominent, out front business book section, reflecting the ethos of Sin-gapore itself. As my eyes scanned title after title I got this message--hey stupid! hey stupid! hey stu-pid! The titles were insulting little pieces of tripe. The world’s publishers have decided, from sometime, many years ago, that businessmen are stupid and need to be fed two distinct kinds of junk--over-simplifications: 7 keys to this and 9 ways to that; and books of egotistical self praise: “how I, the greatX, saved GE”, “how great X is” and “wisdom from our hero X”. This always puzzled me. The people I worked in businesses with were quite smart, mentally bright, funto converse with, and filled with ideas and ambitions, trying out wierd new things every few monthsand years. They regularly read research journal articles and Harvard University graduate school bookson patterns in history and the history of individualism. At parties at their homes, they invited Ph.dresearchers, scholars and artists, as well as business men and women. All of them hated the bureau-cratic structures of most businesses and the pompous gangster CEOs who ran off with their money--andall of them had numerous tactics for getting around bureaucratic roadblocks and greedy CEO distor-tions.

Yet the books for business persons seemed to be aimed at a group of people much stupider than theones I met in business. The books seemed to try hard to teach the utterly obvious using simplistic lan-guage, as if business persons were both unaware of bureaucracy around them and unable to understandsentences having more than one clause in them. Somehow an entire publishing industry had decidedthat, to sell to business persons, a book had to be naive and grade school in content level. Wherewere all these dumb business persons? I never worked in any part of any business filled with peoplethat stupid. What were the publishers seeing that I was not seeing? The Harvard Business Review, forexample, puts “executive summaries” at the back--these are advertisements for the limited mentalityof CEOs. If you take them seriously, you have to conclude that CEOs are mental cripples. Everyone Iworked with in business laughed at the unwitting error of the Harvard Business Review’s editors andthe vapidity of those “executive summaries” at the end of each issue. We never met a CEO that men-tally stunted (to become CEO you need a fair bit of mental facility, not of the academic intelligencesort, as recent research found CEOs average in that area, but in social smarts and “people” knowledgefounded on robust self knowing). I never heard a single person not speak of the executive summarieswith contempt. Board members I associate with promise to fire any CEO needing such pablum. Butgetting beyond CEOs, the fastest growing and by some measures “richest” parts of modern business,worldwide, are high technology based--filled with Ph.D.s, researchers, edge of field graduate studentsand their professors. Managers incapable of thought do not do well in such environments. There is adisconnect between the mental capabililty of people in business and the view of them that the businesspublishing industry has. Finally, on a technical basis, executive summaries are not accurate summariesand drop telling details in favor of vapid generalizations--not a valid summarizing strategy given whatresearch has found about discourse and the dynamics of mental recognition and recall (see research byKintsch, van Dijk, and Meyer in the late 1980s and early 1990s). .

Much of this is an America only phenomenon. You find French middle managers reading philosophybooks, literary criticism, anthropology, and the like. You find German middle managers reading up onthe physics and chemistry of tool design. You find American middle managers reading “7 Habits of JoeMillionaire” and “How to Persuade Your Boss of Anything”. It is as if Americans, in order to do busi-ness, have to pretend to be unintelligent, and advertize to everyone around them how mentally inca-pable they are, using the output of New York business book publishers.

One reason that I wrote this book was to create one book that does not patronize business persons--that speaks to the full mental capabilities that they have, that respects the immense churning of tech-nology and system, globality and competition that every business faces, but, that does not pull itspunches about flaws in businesses. It is time for publishers to talk “up” to business persons, and stoptalking down to them. If you are a person who finds existing business publishing just right, a good fitfor your mentality, then you will soon lose your job--your work will be outsourced to an Indian with agraduate degree. This book gets real about creativity in business.

Why a Book on Creativity in Business?Truth is--first world employees and managers are running scared. At first it was boring mundane callcenter work that was outsourced to India, China, South America, and Vietnam. Then it was audit andfinancial analysis, business programming and artificial intelligence software, and more professionaltypes of work. Now it is just about everything except the CEO position. Job security is gone, for thewell educated upper middle class in industrial nations. This is an immense change and dire threat.The reason “creativity” and “innovation” are appearing in more and more businesses and business pub-lishings is people in first world nations are fleeing to creativity as a last bastion against the tides of out-

sourcing. If you want to keep your job, you are going to have to make it so creative, no one in anothernation can compete with you to do it. There is a quite profound and general interest in creativity inbusiness for this reason. Why did I write a book on creativity in business--there are lots of books on that already out there? Duedilligence required me to read up on all that was already published, out there, before decidingwhether another book was needed or not. I bought 600 hundred books on creativity and innovation inbusiness, copied about 150 research articles on the topic produced by the PsychLit database, groupedthem by similar topic, and read them all. I had been researching creativity and other related mattersfor 20 years but had never tilted my work towards business-only creativity. I had researched creativityin science, art, commerce, government, and all domains of life, not emphasizing business at all. Socomparing the many models and results from my own research with what current publishings about cre-ativity in business said, was informative. I found that nearly nothing in my own research was coveredby existing business book publishings on creativity. I found that business publishings on creativity weremissing the boat, missing the big picture, concentrating on a few slight details. Most of creativity wasbeing missed by existing business book publishings on creativity. Indeed, business aims and imagina-tion, for creativity achievement, were so slight, limited, stunted, modest, petty, constricted by con-formities and bias-limited imagination, that books on creativity in business, for the most part, read asjokes--unwitting comedies of gyrations and purturbations needed to achieve the pettiest imaginablelevels of novelty and change.

Worse than that--most of the books on creativity in business were not creative themselves. The booksout there were dominated by certain cultures--the same cultures that prevent creativity in most ofbusiness: academic culture, American culture, right wing culture, techie culture, male culture, mon-key culture. To have a male, competitive, American, right wing techie professor tell us, in business,how to create is like asking Nazis to design Jewish community centers. The cause of low or difficultcreativity is selling us “how to create”.

Professors, Americans, Right Wingers, and Males PatronizingBusinesspersonsOne reason that books for businesspersons patronize them is many such books are written by profes-sors. Many of these professors come from the “publish or perish” generation, who were made to gen-erate a great number of trivial research articles, before getting “tenure” in famous universities. Manyof these professors are made to “generate research funding from outside sources” every year, evenafter getting tenure. The majority of these business professors have spent their entire adult lives incolleges--they have never managed a business, except nominally, on the side, with “business savy part-ners” helping them out. They have an especially abstract, remote, pale, lifeless rendition of life andpeople, work and business. It reminds me of why white people cannot dance and why St. Paul had somuch trouble dealing with women and sexuality. It reminds me of Prof. Sacks, helping Russia ruin itseconomy by privitizing state enterprises to friends of Russia’s president, making Prof. Sacks guiltyenough to tackle world poverty, to make up for ruining Russia, some say. It reminds me of the NobelPrize winner professors whose “investment fund” had to be bailed out by the US Federal Reserve Bank,to prevent harm to the world economy, when the Asian financial crisis happened a few years ago. Itreminds me of Harvard educated, Ford tested, McNamara “measuring” war via body counts, while sup-port in the US population for the Vietnam war evaporated. The vast majority of books for business arewritten by such professors--you heed what they say at your own peril, data or not. If you restrict your-self to what their data statistically support, you end up in trivia land; if you go beyond what their datasupport, you end up being bailed out by reserve banks and entering personal bankruptcy. Professors think business persons are simple-minded and they generate books that talk down to theirbusiness audience.

Another reason that books for businesspersons patronize them is many such books are written by Amer-icans. Paradoxically, America is filled with immigrants and the children of immigrants, while beinglargely ignorant of culture and the world, arrogantly swinging around its economic, cultural, and mili-tary might, making enemies everywhere, president after president. From EuroDisney’s decades of redink to Lincoln Electric’s finding its piecework pay system illegal after setting up European subsidiaries,Americans have mastered the art of ignoring culture around the world. International institutions likethe World Bank, UNDP, and IMF routinely ignore culture, mores, social traditions, and anthropoligy pre-ferring whatever Milton Friedman and Econ 101 say is “good economic theory”. P&G, lauded as a“transnational” corporate culture, keeps nearly 100 American managers in its Kobe, Japan East Asiaheadquarters, apparently finding that “globality” means posting Americans abroad to “keep the cul-ture global”. That is the same kind of globality that made the Iraq war such a shining success forAmerican policy makers.

Books written by Americans, as if Europeans, East Asians, and others “naturally” have the Americanmodel to follow, talk down to their business audience.

A third reason that books for businesspersons patronize them is most such books are writtten by rightwing people. That means that a chip on the shoulder decides many issues throughout the books--mar-kets are good, governments are bad; wealth is good, care is an expense and bad; make elites wealthy,

make the poor suffer (they are poor because they lack effort, not because they lack parents, health,and education). Books that cannot discuss many issues because ideology automates their thinking onsuch issues, tend to be a little bland. They tend towards a self congratulatory mood and feel--look, asusual, we are right and the public sector is wrong, look rich people deserve everything, and poor peo-ple cannot be trusted. You end up with books from the right wing to the right wing telling them howright they are. Not exactly thrilling intellectual material.

Books written by right wingers for right wingers omit discussion of all the fundamentals and concernthemselves with working out the application of fixed ideological commitments to the nooks and cran-nies of a few new cases. At best you end up with books celebrating “how right we all are”. Such writ-ers patronize business persons who buy their books.

A fourth reason that books for businesspersons patronize them is nearly all such books are written bymales. If you are male a lot of things are obvious and good that never get challenged (attack, defense,pride, bragging, territory fights, status systems embedded in hierarchies of rank, the hunt for certainparts of women’s bodies, egotism, ignoring and minimizing emotions among many others). What menthink of as “rational” and “natural” women notice as “hormonal” and “coming from the glands thatswing between men’s legs”. Women notice that these things are not obvious and not good but whocares what they think? Again it is an in-group publishing thing--males publishing to males, after all,only males really count in business. You get self congratulation--how, obviously, good we all are.Males take for granted lots of attitudes, habits, ways of work, and aims of life and work that look andfeel “obvious” to them, though females see these as dangerous flaws and at best, incomplete. Amer-ica, recently, has invented a new type of woman--one who “fits in” to male management structures bybeing more male than males. These renditions of femininity, rather than checking male excesses anddelusions, actually exacerbate them, in their efforts to “get ahead”. That more and more women aredropping out of these roles and competitions for them, attests to, the partiality, the incompleteness ofpresent business cultures and to the wisdom of many women in them.

Books written by males for male business persons, either ignore completely or miss, insights and waysonly females can see and value. Such books end up talking down to business persons, assuming thatmale ways are “all” or “right”, “obviously”.

A fifth reason that books for businesspersons patronize them is the assumption by publishers and writ-ers and professor-consultants that “more technology is more progress”, that “more connection equalsmore creativity”. Men have glands beween their legs that make them all their lives dwell in and lustfor toys (including the biggie toy that dangles beween their legs). Entire industries foist toys, in theform of software “systems” and hardware “devices”, onto, men customers in each business. The menfoisting and the men buying share a love of devices, toys, and all that is inanimate and without emo-tion. It is “obvious” and “natural” to them all that more and better and more sophisticated toysequals more money, more sex, more pride, more status, and more “business success”, all the things“men” like.

Books writtten by techies for techie customers assume benefits rather than measuring, finding, or cre-ating them. These books patronize business persons by virtually being a religion of “belief” in“progress” from “toys”.

The Culture of Publishings for BusinessIn sum, what we have is a business book publishing industry replicating all the cultures in the industrythey publish to--the blind leading the blind. Non-professor views, non-American views, non-right-wingviews, non-techie views, non-male views are “unpopular” and “unpublishable”, so professor, Ameri-can, right wing, techie, male views are published to abstract, American right wing, techie, male read-ers in business. If you wonder why much publishing on creativity in business produces little impact oncreativity in business, you need look no futher than this--the blind are leading the blind. With non-academic, non-American, non-right-wing, non-techie, non-male views in practice and in principle ruledout from the beginning, business book publishers recycle self congratulatory pablum--limited peopletelling each other how great “we” all are. Businesses trying to create and innovate do exactly the same thing--”our firm needs an abstract, Amer-ican, right wing, techie, male way to innovate”. Nobody says this but everybody does this. To fit in,any innovation or creativity-promoting system must fit that nexus of intersecting cultures. Any “way”or “method” or “approach” that does not fit that nexus of cultures, “will not fly” “around here”.Businesses, from the very beginning, rule out the kinds of departure from existing values, views, andpractices, needed to diversify their repertoires and make things in them creative. Businesses seekconformist, comfortable forms of creating. Most business books on creativity promote safe, smallscale incremental forms of innovation--departures from existing norms small enough that nothing failsto fit in, nothing has to change much, nothing requires personal change or growth. Creativity that ismade to fit existing cultures, values, and norms, is still born--dead on arrival.

The Culture of Creativity in BusinessThe Prima Facia Case for Culture as Central to Creativity in BusinessI am going to list, below, some incidents, some telling ones, and let readers draw their own conclusionsfrom them.

I was standing outside the main entrance of a Japanese restaurant in Rochester, New York, with someFuji Xerox friends of mine, when another Fuji Xerox employee came to the door. Igreeted him but my two Fuji Xerox friends refused to acknowledge his existance. Puz-zled by this, I asked them directly, what was going on--”he’s a printer guy not a copymachine guy” they answered. I was amazed, because digital West Coast Xerox employeesdisliked analog East Coast Xerox employees. I thought this was a US phenomenon. To seethe same conflict repeated 10,000 miles away in Japan was amazing to me. TECHNOLOGYCULTURES

Sematech was a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers in the US who had gotten together to leapfrog Japanese competition. The founder of Sematech was a West Coast, digital technol-ogy guy from a semiconductor firm in California. Later a new head replaced him--a guyfrom the headquarters of an East Coast firm. The old leader wore T-shirts, answered hisown email directly, had a cubicle like everyone else, and parked with everyone else. Thenew leader wore blue suits, hired a secretary to insulate him from the rabble and theiremails, knocked down half a dozen cubicles, replacing them with a huge room in which amarble toped desk was installed, and mandated special parking and exclusive diningrooms for executives. Within six months of his arrival, the 21 most capable technicalstaff had left the consortium for other work. COAST CULTURES

I was killing time in Xerox PARC, after installing software for Xerox’s Liveboard product, written by myown software group. I saw a meeting announcement on the wall, and, out of curiosity,went to it--the head of Xerox’s world wide research was presenting an “annual summary”of research directions for the company to PARC researchers. I sat in the back row andwas amazed as dozens of audience members shouted abuse to the vice president ofresearch up front. Not just one dozen but dozens of dozens, over 100 people in all,ended up shouting abuse at him--”you just don’t get it do you” “head in the sand, head inthe sand” “love the suit, hate the mind” and other clever phrases filled the air. I knewthat Xerox was famous for missing entire new industries that emerged from inventions intheir own labs, but I never knew the utter contempt with which East and West coastemployees viewed each other. RESEARCH CULTURE

My boss had just written an order, cancelling all computer orders for Sun computer from Sun computer’slargest customer, General Motors. My boss was head of workstation computing for Gen-eral Motors. Suddenly Bill Joy, the Sun executive, was interested in General Motors andwilling to adopt software standards that, up till then, Sun had arrogantly ignored from cus-tomer requests by General Motors and other firms. Later, when things had been “amica-bly” resolved, I phoned my own Sun salesman, to place an order with him. He insisted oncoming over. When he arrived, I handed him a written, complete order--but he insistedon showing me a slide show on Sun computers and their new capabilities. I sat, watchingthe slides while phoning Sun computer. At my request this particular salesperson was, inthe next minute, re-assigned to a smaller than GM account. I wanted to buy products, notslides. MALE CULTURE

Eight consultants, one after the other, made 20 minute presentations to 3 vice presidents of Johnson andJohnson, in New Jersey. My boss’ boss was sick, my boss was sick, and therefore, thepartner of our consulting practice had asked me to “fill in”, not expecting much. I wasnumber 6 out of 8 presenting. The vice presidents were in deep sleep by the time theygot to me. I held up one slide in my fingers and said, loudly “I will present only 1 slide,but first I need some feedback from our customers”. I then proceeded to ask each vicepresident what he thought about the five prior presentations--all PowerPoint slide shows.It was like extracting teeth, but eventually, slowly, they began to speak, telling us allwhat they liked, disliked, believed, and doubted about the previous 100 minutes of pre-sentations. From that, I got core issues and concerns in their minds, and chose one slidethat centered on those things. That is the one slide I then presented, talking myself onlythe last 5 of the 20 minutes allotted to me. When the day was done and we went to anearby restaurant to hear results, our partner, after consulting with the vice presidents,came back and announced no new business for 7 of the 8 of us, and $6 million in new busi-ness for me. Apparently, being listened to outweighed in customer minds, being pre-sented to. Interestingly, the next Monday, on the elevator going to my office on the 44thfloor of our Avenue of the Americas building in Manhattan, all the old white haired guysgreeted me by name--once a consulting company finds out you can sell, everyone getsinterested in you. MALE CULTURE

I was peeing in the rain in Korea’s poorest village, next to Thomas Jefferson Coolidge the Third, of BackBay Orient Enterprises, grandson of US President Coolidge. This village had no electric-ity, no running water, and no toilets--we were using a corner of the pig stye (a bad idea aspigs fed human waste generate lots of diseases, Mr. Coolidge and I did not eat the porkthere). I had just doubled per capita income in the entire village by ignoring men in thevillage and concentrating on women. Income had been doubled by delivering backpackportable mowers, donated by a firm in Takatsuki, Japan, to village women, turning 7weeks of hands and knees harvesting into four days of standing up harvesting. Thewomen had used their six+ weeks of free time to go to neighboring Jeju city, earning cashincome from part-time work. The men of the village, seeing their women with cash, gotvery upset--cash could buy sex and Korean men are very interested in alcohol and sex.This cash income of the women and the envy it provoked is what got the men, for the firsttime in years of development projects in this area of Korea, serious about development

work. Three prior years of projects involving the village men had produced absolutelynothing except theft and dereliction. Suddenly after the women got cash income,projects that had failed again and again before, now worked well. AMERICAN CULTURE,GENDER CULTURE

My employer, a major American manufacturer of office equipment, had a Japanese subsidiary andanother Japanese firm as our most dangerous international competitor. Our Japanesesubsidiary developed a color copier technology and wanted to release a product based onit. However, American engineers in US headquarters were offended and found excusesto ignore that technology in favor of a much more complex and expensive one beingdeveloped more slowly in the US. During the several years it took them to develop thisUS version, our fiercest international competitor released their color copier technologyand for the first time in history could visit all our customers offering a machine we couldnot match. In other words, a huge portion of our global sales evaporated in the two yearswhile national pride caused us to ignore a technology developed by our Japanese subsid-iary, delaying release of color copier products that could have matched our competitors’products. NATIONAL CULTURE

I was at the headquarters of a US high tech firm, hosting visiting Japanese for a “technology exchange”meeting. They stood up and presented one slide on their aims and goals for their techexchange visits. I stood up and presented one slide on our firm’s aims and goals for itstechnology development programs. I then sat down. After some flustered conversationamong my Japanese guests, one of them, in imperfect English, asked me to “continue”. Isaid, “since this is an exchange meeting, I will present one slide for every slide you firstpresent--let’s see your next slide, please”. They had no next slide so we ate sushi I hadordered up, in silence, and they left. This, to my mind, was an entirely successful tech-nology exchange meeting. The dumb Americans had not given away their crown jewelsfor nothing. A year earlier by eating where one of the Japanese companies leading thisvisit ate, near their headquarters building in Tokyo, I had overheard significant bits ofwhat they were doing in new technology development--I did not need more “exchanging”.They did not expect to meet Americans fluent in Japanese. JAPANESE CULTURE

For 2 years 7000 salesmen from my own employer had succeeded in selling nothing to our biggest cus-tomer, General Motors. Only our chairman had made sales during this 2 year period. Intruth, the culture of my firm was military, male, aggressive, proud and both resisted andresented by better educated managers at General Motors who were used to developingand using more sophisticated technologies for their product, cars, that my own companyneeded for its product, computer networks. I was not a manager, but had four 22 yearold new hires to keeep busy, so we decided after drinking too many beers one night, to“solve the biggest problem our own company now had”, namely, no sales to our biggestcustomer in 2 years. We invented a feminine event, where instead of presenting we lis-tened, instead of bragging we asked for help, instead of promoting how great our companywas we promoted how great our customer General Motors was. Three one day long massworkshop events, at three successive GM divisions, were held, at which GM engineers wehad found proposed new software projects that my company could “help” with, in themorning, matched, one for one, by demos in afternoons of working such systems in othercompanies. We transcribed remarks by made by GM managers viewing each afternoondemos, compiled and analyzed them, into a 500 page book, that we then printed andmailed to the top 2000 managers of each GM division where we held this event. After ourthird such one day event, followed by such publishing, we were called in by GM’s largestdivision, Truck and Bus, and told we had “12 million dollars” for a trial project, and 2weeks to tell GM how that money would be spent this year. In other words, withoutdirectly selling we made the first “sale”, by anyone other than our chairman, by counter-ing the military male culture of our own firm, and installing a female style event thatcharmed the customers into paying us money. GENDER CULTURES

I had just come back from 7 years in Japan, working at Japan’s most profitable single research lab, Mat-sushita Electric’s Wireless Research Lab (now called their Development Research lab). Iwas working at a consulting firm that sold expert system software applications to WallStreet financial firms. My bosses were selling one or two $1 million each projects peryear. These projects took 2 to 3 years to complete, were complex to sell, and complex tocomplete, often late and with expenses that eliminated profits. If I followed my leaders Iwould sell, at most, $2 million in projects a year, with about half of such projects havingno final profit for our firm. This I refused to do. Instead, I decided to sell 30 smallerprojects as a High Technology Circles program to New Jersey drug companies--eachproject 18 months long, simple to sell, simple to complete code for, and 30 such circleprojects scattered all over the firm. At $100,000 per circle per year, I sold $6 million inmy first 8 months of work--with all 60 circles projects coming in on time and under budget18 months later. Joining Japanese quality circles with US high software technologies wasnatural to me--I had worked in Japan’s best quality firm, Matsushita was a Deming Prizewinner--and I had studied artificial intelligence computing years earlier at MIT. Thoughmy work appeared “innovative” or “creative” to outsiders; to me it was just the naturaleffortless combination of two diverse contexts from my background. CREATIVITY CUL-TURES

At Brunswick Corporation a business process, before being re-engineered, was sequential, with unchang-ing pre-planned flow, and performance measures that determined correctives for stepsdone slowly or late. After re-engineering it was many parallel processes, flexibly chang-ing in patterns that emerged from process interactions, with performance measures thatdetermined which steps the entire process workforce analyzed and improved. At visitingconsultant noticed that the movement from sequential to parallel, from pre-planned toemergent form, from punitive measurement to solving measurement corresponded to thetraits that female discourse type had that male discourse lacked. Re-engineering hadfeminized work systems, using technology to reduce male-ness of system. GENDER CUL-TURES

I had just talked with several consultants at Delta Consulting in Manhattan and learned that their top sal-ary was half what I was already being paid. One of them was telling the other about afailed sale in the recent past. According to him, Delta had presented a re-structuringplan for a business unit that involved changing organization structure, incentives, and thelike injecting total quality and socio-tech system concepts from Emery, Thorsrud, Herbst,and the Tavistock Institute. The Delta proposal had been rejected. What irritated thisconsultant was the winner, whose proposal was accepted, had proposed exactly the samechanges, only less well articulated and organized. He was lamenting that Delta with abetter track record and better methodology of client engagement lost this job to a com-petitor who proposed the same thing less excellently done. When asked why they lost hetold his partner--”X corporation proposed a new technology--workflow computing--systemnot a new organization system--this client was willing to ‘change technology’ but not will-ing to pay for ‘changing sociology’”. GENDER CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY CULTURE.

Add to the above EuroDisney losing money year after year, Lincoln Electric setting up piecework paysystems in European nations before finding out such pay systems violated national laws there, andother cross-cultural business “learning experiences” and you can sense that creativity and culture over-lap to a considerable and interesting extent, worldwide. Why?

The Culture of CreatorsCreators are people who struggle to stay awake while you speak, who find your presence boring andyour organization trite. Creators are people who ooze disrespect. Creators are intense and engagedpeople--chances are you will be perceived by them, nearly always, as a pain-in-the-neck distraction, acost, an irritant to be avoided. Creators, like centenarians, are rather nasty, self-interested people,willing to push others away in order to further what they are working on at the moment. Creators arenot nice people to be around. They are team players in the same way that lions are among sheep.You know a business person is insincere about creativity whenever he mentions creating and teamworkin the same sentence. He is either deluded or pretending to care. Creators mock “teams” becausethey automatically without permission establish social networks much stronger than corporately man-dated “teams”. Creators seek out value around them, even in the poor quality workforces and man-agement layers of big organizations, building deep personal bonds with those few who can be found tohave some decent amount of motive and capability. These “invisible colleges” within and across orga-nization boundaries are established by creators automatically and used to buffer them and their cre-ative ideas from the vagaries, budgetting errors, management changes of organizations they happen tobe in. Creators are also people who do not need your help and support. Whenever you hear a consultant ormanager talk about ‘better supporting creativity around here” you know you are in the august presenceof a phony--someone who has never seen creativity and would not recognize it if it were to run overhim or her. Creators are creative precisely because they cannot be stopped. They do not ask permis-sion and they do not give a damn whom they irritate and how irritated they be. They know that if theyare fired from a job today, they will be paid more in a better location by a better organization thisafternoon. Firings propel the careers of creators--they damange the repute and careers of non-cre-ators. Creators are hated by CEOs and vice presidents, in large part, because of their fearlessness--you cannot intimate them into doing anything. Intimidation is daily rain for creators--they send rootsout into it and use it to grow. Creators do not seek “support” for their ideas from their own organiza-tions because to them “who needs some dumb bunny throwing inept unfitting maladroit sneaky ‘sup-ports; at us all the time”. The best support most administrations can furnish to creators is simply this--leave them to hell alone.

Creators are nasty people--they see the negative in everything. Nothing around them pleases them--they see flaw, error, delusion, pettyness, and the like. They certainly never see the pablum “good-ness” and “greatness” and “excellence” that CEOs are always talking about in speeches and missionstatements. Creators are the first to laugh out loud at CEO pablum pronouncements about teamwork(for all except golden parachutes) and organizational excellence (numbers good enough to get stockoptions for a few at the top). Creators are the sullen ones, cutting their fingernails during mandatedcorporate training sessions. While everyone around them builds teamwork while shooting the rapids,they contemplate all the organizational obstacles, like rocks in the rapids in front of them, that shoot-ing these rapids are not removing from real work and real workplaces everyone will soon go back to.Teamwork in nature is easy and fun and has nothing to do with building teamwork in a nasty bureau-cracy where CEOs steal millions from naive employees and stockholders.

There is a good reason creators are always so filled with negativity--because they see the flaw aroundthem, they improve everything they touch. It is precisely because they dislike everything they see sointensely, that they improve everything around them. Research shows that despair is the doorwaythrough which personal change and creativity emerge. Shut despair out of a person or workforce andyou shut the door on all personal improvement and creativity.

Creators live in a different world than the rest of us. The talk, expressions, images, and explanationsoutside all around them in society, that tell us all what things are there and which are important andthe like, are not the talk, expressions, images, and explanations that creators use inside their ownheads to explain the world to themselves. Creators maintain their own views of the world and workdiligently to keep accurate personally-invented expressions for things, rather than borrowing or casu-

ally using expressions that society and persons outside them use. Those outsider expressions are seenby creators as just about totally bogus--lies, exaggerations, deliberate distortions, unwitting stupidi-ties, uneducated guesses, casual biases, and the like. Creators maintain inside themselves a rathernasty negative bitterly accurate vocabulary for all that is in the world around them, never permittingthe images and terminologies around them to become their own images and terminologies. Creatorstalk about the world in unique personal ways that are much nastier, more accurate, and less driven byfad and fashion, crowd enthusiasms and conformities. A person can start out on the road to creativitywhen they maintain an internal, inside-the-mind vocabulary and expression set, that differs drastically,from all the images and expressions for things, used by people and institutions around them.

Consultants and CEOs, together, all too often promote a nice goody two shoes version of creativity,creators who are team players, who speak respectfully of corporate missions and CEO golden para-chutes, who love their work environments and supports there for creativity. Such consultants andCEOs merely advertise, thereby, their own complete ignorance of creators and how creators actuallycreate. Banish despair from a workforce and you thereby banish creativity. You do not unblock pro-cesses for creators; you get out of their way and clean up the messes they leave behind! The problemis uneducted CEOs of limited intellect cannot see and recognize creators around them--they seeinstead disrespectful people who fail to demonstrate adequate loyalty to CEO gold parachutes and pab-lum announcements. Only highly educated CEOs, usually with Ph.D.s are smart enough to distinguishcreators from bad-minded rebels and laggards.

Indeed, creators are invisible people--you can never see them, unless you are highly abstract, that is,highly educated. They are around you, in your firm, but you cannot see them. They are, for consid-erable portions of their existence, in disguise and their best projects and ideas are in disguise also.Van de Ven and others at the University of Minnesota studied innovation and creativity the hard expen-sive way--longitudinally, following particular ideas though changes of management, budget, organiza-tion, priority. They found nearly everything taught about them was false--creative ideas and projectscontinually put on new disguises to hide from new enemies of change. They choose temporary cham-pions then spit them out when they get too proprietary and political--owning ideas too much. At timesthey connect to the organization and its resources but most of the time they withdraw and hide. Likethe football team, the L.A. Raiders of old, they take the discards of others and find value in them.They function as religious orders in a secular company environment, to the extent that they are tre-mendous drive passing through generations of part-time participants in an evolving coalition aroundsome idea passionately held. .

Getting Crystalizing Experiences--Do Little Bits of Creativity Add Upto a Big One?Most managers prefer a motivated person to a talented one. We can all turn motivation into great tal-ent; we cannot turn great talent into motivation. Most creating work is not creative--it is boringand a hard slog. Think of Edison testing light bulb material number 9997, 9998. Long strings of repe-titious failure is what creating consists of for the most part. Environments that support “creating” and“creative things” miss the boat--most of creating needs support for long strings of repetitious failing.Harvard famous names are not given to selling “supports for the tedious long uncertain mundane stringsof work from which insights and inventions come”. They would prefer to sell supports for “creativethinking”--if Edison had gotten creative while testing light bulb material 7774, for instance, we proba-bly would still be burning oil lamps. MIT has researched inventions of all sorts, Prof. Hipple’s work. He found it was not customers of aproduct from which inventions came, nor developers of products, but driven users--users who had greatneeds and drive who tinkered with a product inventing improvements in it that they needed. You donot make such driven users, you find them. To make such an inventor, should you be so bold as to try,you would have to find someone just as they are falling in love with something--a problem, a possibil-ity, an idea, a technology, a device, a need. Crystalizing experiences are like the young Yo-yo Ma,hearing for the first time in his life, the sound of the cello--he fell in love with producing that soundand spent an entire life doing so. Creators are people who love something passionately, and, withridiculous levels of drive and initiative, pursue it to a good conclusion. No business even comes closeto producing this level of dedication and passion, CEO pronouncements notwithstanding (unless youinclude CEO drive for stock options and gold parachutes). You do not foster such love--you recognize itwhere it is, and get out of its way before it crushes you. Instead of this, all too common is tepid cre-ativity for sullen employees subjected to “creativity support environments”. We have ways to improvethe creativity of rutted, tired, cynical, conformist, unenthusiastic, incapable persons--”improvement”is something professor-consultants love to promote, but should businesses be spending money onimproving very very low base levels of performance to merely somewhat low levels? Why transform arock into a partial human when you can find and hire a genius? It is time to get real about creativity inbusiness.

Finding, it turns out, actually does outperform “improving” and “creating” creators--if you examineresearch results broadly, not narrowly. There is an agriculture of creating--finding good soil for partic-ular seeds, finding good seeds for particular soils. Ideas are the seeds, creators are the fertilizer, andcompanies are the soils. You do not modify companies to fit creators--you fiind companies to fit them.

That is much faster. You do not modify ideas to grow in company soils, you switch to new ideas andtry them out in your soil. That is much faster. Creativity is very much a matching process--finding ahome for an idea, finding ideas to home, to take root, in a particular firm. Companies and consultantsthat sell themselves on the idea of making “our firm” a home to all creative ideas or most of them areliving in an illusion. Most creative ideas will not fit any one partiicular spot or home. You have tohave a repertoire of spots and cycle the idea through many of them till suddenly you find one where ittakes root. The method is cycling lots of ideas past lots of potential homes till a match is found. Thatis how you make creativity flourish.

Trying to make one soil grow all creative ideas is a fool’s mission. Unfortunately many creativity con-sultants, professors, and company managers are involved in this illusion. Please note that to theextent that a company is one uniform environment, it is a “one home” target for ideas flowing past,which means few chances for ideas to find something to stick to as their home. This suggests that com-panies serious about getting creative think about how to become many different plural cultures andcommunities under one umbrella. The example of Silicon Valley suggests that companies become such“clusters” tech valleys. The power of Silicion Valley is the flows of person, resource, funds, technolo-gies, and ideas--five flows--woven together at spots called “venture businesses”. By flowing manyideas past many persons, many persons past many jobs, many jobs past many firms, many firms pastmany funders, many funders past many technologies--homes for ideas, persons, jobs, technologies, andfunds are found. It is a matter of matching things--finding fits. For the changes in your one firm’ssoil that you make to adapt it better to idea 1, necessarily adapt it poorer for ideas 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc.Trying to adapt your soil to fit all ideas insures that it fits none well or for long.

From Edison’s first R&D lab in New York to the latest technology venture in Silicon Valley, creativity inbusiness is a matter of nut farming--managing a workforce of nuts. Herding cats is the metaphor usedto describe management of university professors. Herding cats refers to managing the unmanageable.Creators are just about unmanageable. Though there are lots of books about R&D labs and their man-agement, they are pretty much filled with one long boring repetitious fight--executives wanting rele-vance from creators and creators wanting resources from executives. As executives win--creatorsleave or fail to join up and as creators win--funds dry up and people whose ideas require few resourcesare the only ones who prosper. If you review, as I have, seventy five recent such books on managingresearchers and inventors, you find that overwhelming consensus today is incrementalism. This is a“management” strategy, a way to get creators pointed, where you want them pointed, as an execu-tive, towards where immediate funds are to be made. This incrementalism approach looks for faster,less risky, smaller scale, immediate inventions that can be strung together sometimes into things largerand of more import. This makes new ideas small enough that they fit into executive heads--the Har-vard Business Review’s executive summary strategy again--and it makes researchers take next stepsthat happen to add up to something that can be sold. When this is applied and when it works, execu-tives as well as researchers succeed in getting smaller and smaller increments of innovation, till reallyinfinitesimal ones are produced in a long long stream. It is a kind of calculus miracle of getting innova-tion by adding up little bits each of which is not at all novel. Unfortunately, organizations that masteradding together infinitesimal amounts of novelty, end up achieving creations of tiny size, and minimalimpact.

Unfortunately, especially these days, little bits of almost novelty, never add up to enough to allowbusiness survival. Our world is filled with revolutionary new technologies, yearly if not monthly. AsKurzweil says, it all is growing exponentially so that in a few more years, it will be weekly and thendaily that revolutionary technologies appear. When your environment is filled with a stream of revolu-tionary technologies and innovations, answering back with a continual stream of little bitty ones is notenough. It makes you a laughing stock, not a big player or survivor. Home runs--producing a string ofhome runs, not base hits--is the challenge. How does one do this? The incrementalism strategy of pro-fessor consultants and consulting firms, of managers and executives, does not help--it is not relevant.

The Culture of Me, the Author of This BookThe Ground This Book Grew FromBelow I have rewritten my own biography as encountering a series of cultures. I do this, in some detailfor me, because it helps readers, while reading the below, imagine their own “cultures encountered”at similar points in their own lives. Each of us can be understood as the result of a number of shockingand self changing culture encounters. Understood that way, each of us becomes closer to becoming “acreator”. Here goes. Family Culture. I grew up in a family having a dictatorial father, trained in psychology by 14 yearsin military service to his nation. He did not attend college, and my mother attended a small rural col-lege in music, so I heard little about knowledge and university while growing up. He did found threeventure businesses, one after the other, none of them breaking into the big time, all of them eventu-ally failing. A retired executive, hired by my father when his third mini-mill steel company went

nearly bust, correctly diagnosed the problem--Mr. Greene, he told my father, you created your busi-nesses for personal psychology reasons, to have people to boss around; you were never in it for profitand therefore your businesses take a too casual attitude to and method for the pricing work that deter-mines profitability of the business; when you get serious about being a business person rather than justa boss, profits will quickly be found. He was exactly on target. My father created firms in order to“not take orders”, “not salute”. He was correcting for 14 years of subservience sufferred while in themilitary. I watched my father deal with disgruntled investors, beg clients for further business, strug-gle to meet monthly payrolls, and preside over the death of a business as computers automated awaythe work his employees were doing. My father enjoyed business even when it was failing. He loved“playing the game” “having the chance to succeed”. The point was taking a risk and playing it out aswell as you could.

To like men at all I needed examples beyond my own father and my high school girlfriend’s father fitnicely. He had a Ph.d. and I could discuss and disagree with him, unlike my own father, without any-one getting angry or heated. He deftly took two, three, or more approaches to any issue, often com-bining incompatible views. Months later, when the same issue came up between us, I found his viewshad evolved, based on reading or discussions he had had. Where my father got angry when his opinionswere ignored or attacked, my high school girlfriend’s father did not seem to mind being disagreed with.He disagreed with his own opinions, not infrequently declaring that his own ideas bored him and hewished he could update them more regularly but could not fit in enough reading to keep up with all thefields that interested him. I found this liberating and enthralling after years of living with a grown manof adolescent opinions that, decade after decade, did not improve or evolve, and that were defendedwith vehemence out of all proportion to what was at stake in the conversation. A psychology book byKegan at Harvard, later explained this to me--my father “was” his opinions instead of “having” them.He was stuck at an adolescent stage of psychological development, though in an aging body. My highschool girlfriend’s father, on the contrary, “had” opinions that he updated, doubted, and, in general,managed. His worth and confidence were not invested in them. You could dislike them, and attackthem, without disliking or attacking him, as far as he felt. Political Culture. I took junior high school summer jobs at a highway design firm, plotting dots fromsurveyor books onto graph paper (work now done in seconds by computers). My first job had rulesabout when I could eat, when I could go to the restroom, how I had to dress, where I could eat lunch.I found work entirely dictatorial though America, in schools, was explained as a democracy. Appar-ently the democratic part evaporated when you worked for a salary someone else was paying--you soldyour political worth for economic sustenance. I found this less than enthralling as a junior high stu-dent, and, reading Montesque under the guidance of a nice teacher there, found that Frenchmen ofseveral hundred years earlier agreed with me in this impression. Also, the petty tyranny of low levelmanagers whom I reported to, impressed me. When, in college at MIT, I experienced McNamara send-ing Vietnamese and Americans and others to their deaths, under his Harvard-developed “management”skills, and Martin Luther King demonstrating unmistakably how entire sections of the US had used lawsto strip the right to vote from ethnic groups, this issue of democracy being real or not and extending toall of life or just tiny parts of life, became rather weighty as an issue for me. The lack of democracy inmy father, in my state laws, in my nation’s prosecution of wars, in my first jobs in business, in mybosses--all blended together.

The state and city I grew up in were backward, past-looking, based on tobacco and slavery, rooted insuppression of blacks, women, and all minorities. Ultimately they produced stunted people, them-selves, they stunded, ironically, themselves--me and the people I grew up with--low achieving, con-formist, bigots. My high school principal had forbidden me, on our debate team, from debating at ablack college. I went anyway after giving interviews to a local newspaper that spawned a federalinvestigation of my principal and our state’s system of high schools. This made me famous in a nastyway--the principal never recommended me to MIT and Princeton when I applied there. Fortunately hisreputation went before him and his lack of recommendation was taken by both colleges as positive evi-dence of my worth. It impressed me that, to go to college, I had to overcome the resistance of my ownhigh school principal to letting whites debate at black colleges. Democracy was just for some people,where I grew up. Ethnic Culture. My sister and some friends had been pestering me to attend music concerts at Tan-tilla Gardens in the downtown area of my city. I delayed for months and years but finally bought tick-ets to the second concert, from 9 to 11 p.m.. As was my wont I showed up early, catching the lastminutes of the first show. As the first show audience left and the second show audience arrived Inoticed something strange--all the first show audience were white and all the second show audiencewere black. I was one of only half a dozen white people in the audience for the second show. Some-thing even stranger happened. The performers--the Four Tops--who had been demure and boring forthe all white early performance were vivacious and shining with passion in their second performance.An even bigger difference was in the audience. The all white audience had sat still, politely tappingtheir hands together in applause after each number. The black audience, from the start, swayed intheir seats, danced in the aisles, sang along with the choruses, and got into the spirit of the wholething. As I drove home I pondered this--all my life I had grown up among and been influenced and edu-cated by those pale, static, lifeless white people. Look at all the passion in life I had missed as aresult. I was stunned with another way of being in the world right there all along next to me but

unseen until that night. It reminded me of H. G. Wells’s novel about the elohim, flower strewingwimpy lifeless ones above ground, supported by dirty nasty brutish powerful passionate workers belowground in some future world. Software Hacker Culture. I chose MIT and was accepted. In high school I had three summervacations, each spent building software--a Fortran I program that expanded the stress integrals ofbridge design binomially and integrated them, keeping integer coefficients throughout (on an IBM 1401with 8 digit limits on numbers), a Lisp 1.5 program that controlled a crystal growing machine, and anAPL program that plotted star maps taken off photos from a large telescope. By the time I got to MITI found their first programming course--building a Cobol compiler in PL1 (course 6.251)--a waste oftime. However, my roommate, Al Baisley, taught me Lisp, the early artificial intelligence language--itwas amazing. Even a beginner could build programs that learned from whatever it was that they did.Even beginners could create programs that had no definite procedure of execution, no main routine;instead, hosts of little conditions sat around checking a “blackboard” for whatever was true aboutpresent conditions, and when a present condition matched a software condition’s rule, it fired, takingsome action, including, possibly posting a new situation on the “blackboard” for other routines to reactto. In this way you could write programs whose overall behavior neither you not any machine couldpredict--yet the program did powerful and useful work. Lisp was wonderful. We worked in a place,the Project MAC basement in Tech Square, where a bunch of PDP computers were covered with cables.The only rule was--you can plug in new cables, but you can never unplug any old cable, because no onereally knew what the old cables were connecting and they were so twisted together, it would take halfa day to trace any one of them. All sorts of people, not studying computer science, not taking engi-neering, even not related to MIT were in that basement doing early artificial intelligence programming,day and night. Later words for that amorphous community of the intellectually curious appeared--”nerds” “hackers”. I later learned I had been in hacker culture during my college years. Engineering “Design” Culture. The rest of MIT amazed me, outside that Tech Square base-ment. Suddenly all the adults I met were adult, not adolescents defending unchanging opinions. Sud-denly everyone had multiple points of view, not the same point of view. Suddenly people around mechanged views monthly as they read new things. The region around me, at MIT, made money withoutkilling people with tobacco, and did not harken back to the “good ol days” of slavery. I was fully lib-erated there, finding the people around me, like me, interested in ideas and in trying them out tochange bits of the world. For one specific thing--all our homework was designing things. Unlike Har-vard and Wellesley, MIT homework was useful and innovative at the same time. Since designing wasintellectually fun and challenging, we all started inventing our own homework and doing it, beyond anyassigned work from courses. This amazed me--all of us ended up doubling and tripling our homeworkload, voluntarily, because it was fun inventing things that did useful work and innovative functionsnever achieved in human history before. I grew to love and respect the culture of engineering itself. Gender Culture. After two years at MIT I noticed an excess male-ness to things there. Famouslystudents drew circles on sidewalks to be targets for suicides. They thought that was funny but I sensedan excess of male hormones. Though Japanese engineering methods were becoming world famous, atthat time, 1966 to 1971, MIT courses did things the good old American engineering way, with no inclu-sion of interesting alternative ways from Japan. I found that wimpy in a “not invented here” male ter-ritory sort of way. In these and lots of other ways, I got the sense that MIT was too male, hurt by beingonly male in culture. Of course MIT had admitted women decades before other colleges, but they stillwere a token presence on campus and faculty. To correct this I cross-registered for courses at Welles-ley, a famous women’s school, for two years. Courses, I found, at Wellesley, were harder than MITcourses but in a different set of dimensions--instead of hard math and design, they had hard interpre-tation and composition. I liked Wellesley because it was a sexual paradise for me, as a young man, andbecause it was mentally challenging, by being emotionally challenging. Students there were feelingresponsible for all of Western culture and saw themselves as carriers of that culture who transmittedit, for better or worse, to next generations. MIT lacked that sort of cultural centrality and responsibil-ity atmosphere. MIT, on the other hand, had a direct sense of power and “we can do anything” thatWellesley lacked. By living at Wellesley for two years I could be a minority in female culture andobserve what was different there. Business Culture. My father refused to pay tuition for me, after exchanging views on Vietnam, soI desperately needed money--at first to eat, later to pay tuition. A girlfriend of mine at Wellesley sug-gested a weekend “romantic weekend” childcare school, on a creativity theme, for children of Har-vard, MIT, Radcliff, and Wellesley faculty. This would take care of kids from Friday dinner to Sundaydinner, allowing parents a child-free weekend, while exposing the kids to a full creativity curriculum,designed in a “spiral” manner for four age groups--5 to 7, 8 to 10, and 11 to 13, and 14 to 16. I formedsuch a school, averaging 42 kids per weekend the first months and ending up, almost two years lateraveraging 140 kids per weekend. To avoid state liscensing regulations, I changed facility to a differentstate every two weekends, using donated facilities (free tuition was offerred to 8 kids per eachdonated facility) though I took teacher education at Wellesley to qualify me to head such a school,bought lots of insurance, and hired a physician to be on call to help the children. Each weekend had atheme--Beethoven and Einstein, Mozart and Maxwell, Picasso and Darwin--from the arts and sciences,so I recruited kids to each theme--”so you are not interested in having your child engage Picasso andDarwin this week?” To control the kids, the first two hours, Saturday and Sunday morning, were filledentirely with running games, to use up the physical energy of the kids and get them outside before the

heat of the day. After lunch another one hour running games period worked off calories of lunch andprepared them to sit and study later in the afternoon. We comissioned expensive deserts from Bos-ton’s most prestigious and expensive patisserie for dinner and punishment for crimes was missing thesedinner deserts. Parents were astonished at the mood of their kids Sunday at 6 then the weekendended. We had a strategy of having a teenager on staff, as a full time, all day, photographer, for allthree days, Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday. We sold booklets of these photos, to parents whenthey picked up their kids. All proceeds from these sales went to the teenager “managers” of eachgroup of six kids.

Building a business was tremendous fun. I trained teenagers from the same families who gave childrenfor us to care for, as my staff, paying them 4 times more than any part-time work they could usuallyget. If they did not perform well, they got fined, and if that failed to work, they lost their job andother teenagers were hired--eager because of the great pay. The staff and I researched each week’sgeniuses, an arts one and a sciences one, creating exhibits, slide shows, games, and software simula-tions. If I got the teenagers interested in the geniuses of the week, I knew they would pass that inter-est onto the kids in their teams. Non-Profit and Religious Culture. I was so happy at the education I had received at MIT, atWellesley, taking courses at Harvard, that I decided to rebuild Western civilization without pay for afew years, to pay the world back. I asked a professor for the name and address of some organizationdoing that--he gave me a contact. I ended up in an experimental ecumenical religious order of corpo-rate vice presidents and CEOs, queens of Australian aborigines, French landed gentry, and Berlin art-ists. For six years I “helped the world”. Two of those years I spent fund raising, visiting a differentcity in North America every week, asking 20 families for donations. Two of those years I spent design-ing workshop procedures for mass workshop events--2000 people for 30 consecutive days in 400 work-shops per day, for example. Two of those years I set up participatory town meetings and qualitycabarets of many arts, composed by community people, in Korea and Japan, doing village developmentwork as well.

By my fourth year in this group, I realized that underneath all its groovy new values and tactics, peopleand tasks, were the same old political machinations and discrepancies. The old elite who had foundedthe group controlled everything and as the organization grew, their control anxiety caused them tostrengthen controls till near dictatorship level. At my fourth year, therefore, I determined to leave,but it took me two years to arrange for departure--I wanted to get shipped to someplace outside the USand not like the US, and leave there. So I managed to get an assignment to set up participatory townmeetings in Japan and Korea, and two years after arrival there, I left the organization and was on myown for the first time since graduating from college. Japanese Culture. My first problem was making a living as a foreigner in Japan. Direct selling ofmy MIT artificial intelligence skills did not work as Japanese firms were not all that interested in skills.They also were in the midst of worshipping machines and felt sofware was a US delusion (they haverecently changed their minds about this, 30 years too late, (an example of male culture making Japa-nese pride-filled and stubborn)). So I got a job teaching English, knowing the dead end nature of thatprofession. I was smart enough to find a school filled with beautiful young women who wanted tomeet foreign men and to become airline stewardesses. I was smart enough to negotiate teaching all ofmy 8 weekly classes on one day, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That gave me $3400 a month and a six dayweekend every week. I have maintained that tradition, keeping a five day weekend tradition all mylife, from this time on. No corporation ever asked me to do work I could not finish completely in twodays a week work (and often I could finish it in two hours of work Monday mornings). I learned to nego-tiate deliverables to provide at 6 month intervals, (with the corporation, in the contract, losing theright to advise me (manage me) as long as I met my deliverables promisses). This irritated my bossesterribly and I liked that.

I had adequate time and income, now I needed status. I found the most famous brain surgeon in Japan,befriended him, and through him got introduced to the leader of Matsushita Electric’s WirelessResearch Lab, the most profitable lab in Japanese industry at the time. Matsushita hired me to teach“languages”, in this case, artificial intelligence and object oriented ones, nicely bypassing visa restric-tions, two days a week. Again, I thrived on five day weekend lifestyles. Matsushita Electric was aDeming prize winner, for best quality in Japan, and while I was there, I researched their quality meth-ods. A few years later I switched to Sekisui Chemical Company, Japan’s largest plastic manufacturer,as they were just applying for the Deming Prize and wanted desperately to know how Matushita hadwon it.

After Japan, I got two master’s and a Ph.d. degree from the University of Michigan, did consults for adozen defense and other firms in the US and Europe, published homework from University of Michiganclasses as two books by McGraw Hill, set up 9 new business units for 3 global US corporations--EDS, Coo-pers & Lybrand, and Xerox PARC, got my first teaching job as professor at the University of ChicagoGraduate School of Business for five years, then joined Japan’s 8th ranked private university as Profes-sor of Knowledge and Creativity Management, teaching Japanese and hundreds of Chinese studentsyearly, building a network across China and Japan. You have the entire picture now, but most impor-

tantly, you have a series of cultures, seriously encountered. You can rewrite your own background asa series of cultures thusly encountered.

I could write this entire book presenting my own inventions and innovations, my own compositions andcreations, as deft technical accomplishments due to my great skill. That would be utterly distortive.Nearly all my innovations and creations were effortless and not creative to me--others respondedgreatly to them as “creative”. I myself was merely applying normal moves in one or more of the abovecultures I had encountered, within another culture. To me, this was doing things my normal way. Toothers, not familiar with that other culture from my background, it looked amazing. Much innovationand creation is of this sort and this book elaborates that better than any other book currently pub-lished, I believe. When professor-consultants suggest erecting “creativity support environments” bysupporting “better” creative types of thinking (which they all concentrate on) they assume all creativ-ity comes from thinking that is somewhat creative, to the creator and others. However, much creativ-ity, though not all, may instead come from normal cognition by someone having diverse unusual intenseenvironments and backgrounds working within him or her. “Creative” thinking types, if supported andgenerated, might distract from this person’s ordinary cognition with its already creative results. Inother words, this is another way that “creativity support environments” may stamp out more creativitythan they foster--all due to professor-consultants working with illusory, unitary, cosmically inclusivesingle models of what creativity is.

My Career as a Pain in the AssThe paragraphs above about the cultures I encountered, are a whitewash of sorts. My life has neverbeen nice. It has never been smooth. I am older now and compared to the younger me, I am quitesmooth and easy-going, but underneath, the same fires still burn and the same stunning authority-per-plexing stunts usher forth from me, even in institutions I have been working around for years. I wasborn with DNA for impertinance, for going my own way, for tying authorities in knots, for pleasure. Apsychiatrist once told me this was my reaction to an authoritarian uneducated father--perhaps so. ButI have constantly encountered authoritiarian uneducated men in positions of authority and, like myfather, they get in the way. Fortunately, as my career put me in more and more creative positions, thepeople working with me shared my contempt for uneducated dictatorial buffoons in positions ofauthority. Dilbert seems exaggerated only to the deeply naive, we say. Just as my encounters with white people wimpily singing in churches turned me off of their distant,remote, conceptual dis-embodied ways of living, my encounters with black people criticizing their kidsfor “whitey like thinking” when they used metaphors they learned in school, turned me off from theirpassionate, full bodied ways of living. Every culture I met was deluded, partial, incomplete--and arro-gant, because it pretended it was right and enough. It is not one culture I hate or prefer. I dislike allcultures. They all pretend to be complete and healthy while they all are incomplete and dangerous,taken by themselves. You cannot have a decent safe life while participating in any one culture--theonly way to do it is to combine elements from half a dozen cultures, that each compensate for weak-nesses in the others. Great portions of the entire population of various mid-East countries, of the Phil-lipines and other East and South Asian countries, of various South and Middle American countries workabroad and eventually come home having mastered a different culture and language and way of life.The US does not have this and it hurts. I was in Japan’s poorest single neighborhood--Kamagasaki inOsaka--some years ago, to do social welfare work with the poor there. The neighborhood is composedof day laborers for construction companies who have no fixed job. Instead daily they go to a hiring hallwhere construction contractors choose laborers for that particular day’s work. Many of the inhabit-ants of this poor neighborhood in Osaka are old and hence are rarely picked for day labor, therefore,they have little money coming in monthly. They eat at local stand up sake bars, bars that avoid airconditioning in the summer so as to up beer sales to these poor customers. I ate with them nightly,watching Wajima and Kitanomi fight it out in sumo tournaments. I could not speak Japanese and thesepoor workers could not speak English--so we all talked together and sang together in French! Here Iwas, nightly, in Japan’s poorest neighborhood, speaking and singing French with the least educated,poorest workers in all of Japan. Poor people in most of the world work abroad and master foreign lan-guages and cultures--poor people in the US, nearly alone, do not do this. These Japanese day laborershad, when young, gotten construction jobs for Japanese firms doing business in North Africa and theMiddle East, where there are a lot of French speaking nations. They mastered daily life French andFrench songs there. So I could talk with them and sing with them, fluently. Night after night, thisstunned me--poor people, indeed Japan’s poorest people, literate in French novels, great at Frenchchansons, and able to converse about cultural encounters in workplaces in half a dozen nations theyworked in. Such quality to poverty! Later in life when I regularly met CEOs less culturally experiencedand competent than these Japanese workers, I developed not a little doubt of these overpaid buffoonsof cultural laziness (and the business disasters their cultural ignorance generated). Any CEO not as cul-turally adept as the poorest of all workers in Japan is not worth much--and certainly not worthy ofholding my personal investments in his hands.

Every corporation I worked for had a culture and I sensed around year two in the company, that culturepressing itself onto me, wanting my assent and compliance. I resisted that because the cultures werestupid, belittling, designed for sheep, and beneath contempt. They were chirpy little happy songsignoring deceit, theft, sloth, laxity, and all the other failings in danger of killing off the organization.Americans, especially, have fallen for “positive thinking” by which they mean, “let’s forget our fail-

ings”. This sounds like a slight thing but it is not. Entire sets of corporations, entire industries, in theUS, tell stories, that everyone who hears them, mock, instantly. The stories have no reality or believ-ability to them because all negatives are avoided, dropped out, and only “positives” are included,advertising the timidity of leaders in these firms and industries. You sense a failing of the Americanspirit and a new kind of timid wimpy American leadership in these examples of “positive thinking”.Positive thinking of that sort is merely ineffective thinking--stories that no one believes or cares about,stories that motivate no one. The result of such “positive spin” stories by Americans, is shining para-gons of American virtue in action, like the Iraq war. “America may have once been democratic andmay have once been well intentioned, but all that died some time ago and the current generations ofAmericans are some sort of new low point in human history--the world’s fattest asses and egos”--this isthe commonest view I hear on the streets of Paris, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Sidney, Shanghai, Otawa,Amsterdam, Stockholm. Many people born and raised in the United States do not realize that othernations, instead of looking up to the US and worshipping its media and wealth, denigrate the US, abhor-ring the low quality of daily life, food, care, sexuality, sensuality, and human feeling there. An entirenation, hiding from reality in religiousity, most foreigners think. The US is a great economy embeddedin a disgusting way of life, to many in the world, outside the US. Americans, so insulated by their ownmedia and constant self praise, often do not realize how little they are respected and looked up to inthe world as a whole. Indeed, corporate cultures are much like American government pronouncementsabout all the “progress” being made in Iraq. Believable stories, stories that motivate people, aretough, showing awareness of all the failings, challenges, weaknesses that must be overcome in order toprevail against a present challenge. Positive thinking is a wimp’s story--a wimp afraid to look at whatmust be overcome, what must be faced, and what personal growth and change will be required to pre-vail. Most corporate cultures, by this criterion, are as sick as US results in Iraq. A CEO with positivespin is dangerous to invest in.

The corporate cultures I faced were self congratulatory little bombastic boring statements by fat, agedmen whose minds were firmly on retirement. I verified this with our Information Technology vice pres-ident, at each firm, who privately told me keystroke counts of executive information systems showedall executives of the firm only used the system to access their personal investment portfolios, severaltimes a day--no executive ever used the system to access customer satisfaction, product release, orother business data. I never have met a human being dumb enough to “like” or “respect” the cultureof any corporation I worked for. Dilbert has it about right--though everyone in the organization laughsat how stupid the corporate culture is--leaders continue to generate and propagate it--apparentlythese leaders have nothing better to do. It is the Office effect--bosses unable to understand the feed-back they receive, their own egotism or psychotic-ness causing them to mistake contempt for them aspraise of them. Any culture that omits the failings of and dangers to a group of people is suicidal andassumes its members are stupid. Such corporate cultures patronize their own members. They are adaily message from the CEO to each and every employee telling them “I think you are a buffoon”.

I am reminded of some utterly stupid Dodge commercials now running in the Japanese media--toutingDodge as the world’s best car--who is going to believe that? If you have a middling product from a fail-ing company like GM, a company failing for 30 consecutive years now, and you “market” it as “world’sbest”, who do you think you are kidding? It shows how phony and deluded all the managers of Dodgeare--a culture of lack of self awareness is propagated to customers, making customers leery of anythingyou do or produce. Kia and Hyundai, with commercials that acknowledge, cleverly, their existingfaults in the context of their ambition to reach world top ranks, do the job correctly--if only Dodge hadmanagers as hard working and smart as those Korean managers of Kia and Hyundai. In general, in thisbook, any culture that lies about reality is doomed and the people propagating it are either stupid orsneaky--deliberately generating a lie to cover sneaky stuff they are doing. I want readers, right fromthe start, to know I am on Dilbert’s side--the reality of most leaders, managers, and corporations is dis-mal and all their protestations, in their corporate cultures, that they are shining knights saving theworld, are just jokes. If you are foolish enough to believe their cultures, you are too foolish to createanything, and you might as well stop reading all books as well. There are exceptions, mostly on the USWest Coast, in Nordic Europe, and in East Asia--corporations whose corporate cultures are educated,include dangers to the organization, include past failings of the organization, and, in short, deal withreality. But these really are exceptional--your average corporation has a corporate culture fully capa-ble of killing the organization all by itself, it is so deluded and psychologically dishonest. For realhumor, buy any book by a major business school professor on corporate culture. You will find hun-dreds of pages of extenuation, excuses for the very delusions and psychologic dishonesties that kill offcorporations. It is a healthy reminder of the danger of putting your personal investments in the handsof business school professors! I worry about the fate of the children who have these professors as par-ents.

I am so extremely negative about all cultures that some readers may get me wrong. Do not do so. Idislike most of America’s culture, that is true, but I dislike most of Japan’s culture as well, and most ofmale culture, most of female culture, most of French culture, most of absolutely all cultures I haveencountered. A principled reason for this is given in chapters below. Indeed, nothing makes Amer-ica’s culture more appealing than solid encountering of Japan’s culture, and vice versa. Truth is--andonly expatriates of various nations will understand this intuitively--all cultures are partial and danger-ous--the only safe culture is a combination of several of them that compensate for each others’weaknesses. This book will show how any one culture, taken by itself, undermines and hinders

most ways of creating. If you want to be creative you are going to have to do lots of cultural work--that is intimate, feminine, emotional work that men are not comfortable talking about or doing. Mostmen do not have the emotional guts to do the work that makes things creative. If you are a man andreading this book and have the courage to “change yourself” you have hope--this book can make youvastly more creative than any of the men you now compete with. But it is going to take work--inti-mate, emotional, interior--work.

Using Culture Changes to Create: Exaptation and ReframingsWhy do pain medications--CoxII inhibitors--cause heart valve disease? Why do anti-osteoporesus drugscause heart arythmia disease? The answer is exaptation. The most creative process known is naturalselection, the process that created human beings and all living things. It is the most creative processknown because it created the most creative product known--human beings. There is a process that ismore creative, however, than natural selection. It is the process that created natural selection. I willdeal with that latter process late in this book because I have another book covering that topic. Here Iwant to introduce some very basic aspects of how natural selection “creates” because much of busi-ness effort to create has to work the same way. Exaptation is a major part of this story of creation, asnatural selection does it and as businesses do it.

Anyone who is not a professor and who has actually done work in a large organization knows there aretwo forces that make business professor prescriptions about how to create and improve things jokes--the inertia of large organizations, and the continual changes of context in large organizations. Here iswhat all of us who actually do work in large organizations face--our bosses tell us to “be patient” ittakes time for an idea or solution or some other benefit to percolate its way through the layers anddepartmental boundaries that segment large organizations. On the other hand, while we are “beingpatient” as requested by our bosses, the CEO is replaced, strategies change, a new competitor technol-ogy or two appear, government regulations change, outsourcers appear, our budget gets cut, and weare merged with a similar organization in Katmandu. This is similar to the product development para-dox--to design it right takes time but the longer product development processes become the more cus-tomer specs for what to produce change. Professors tend to not understand this and if they mentionit, they do not give it the weight of respect and analysis and attention it deserves (there has neverbeen a single serious academic study of this omnipresent eroder of tactics and plans in any researchjournal!). This paradox, large organization patience causing instability of contexts, is an immenseeroder of all the solutions bandied about by business school professors in their books, and in theirreviews (Harvard Business, Sloan Management, California Management, etc.). Of course consultantswill leave before things are actually completed, so what do they care. Of course professors are moreentertainment than instructive for most companies who hire them--”some fresh ideas” to ignore.

The implications of this large organization patience causing instabililty of contexts for creativity areimmense. What we judge “creative” now and a few weeks from now will differ if contexts changegreatly. That means any creative project that starts out in one context but passes through very differ-ent contexts as it progresses towards completion, will most likely end up not creative. That is becausewhat is creative depends on external viewpoints applied to it. Creativity is a social judgement, madeby some qualified judges about the work of others. When contexts change around the judges, their cri-teria, what they look for and like, change. Therefore, what they judge to be “creative” changes.Large organizations are incapable of large creativity because of this principle of large organizationpatience causing instability of contexts. For most of you reading this book, this sentence is all you willneed to get huge paybacks from your reading experience. If you properly focus on this problem youwill not be wasting your creativity efforts.

What does this have to do with natural selection, the second most creative process in the known uni-verse?

Professionals who research natural selection used to view it as a process of survival struggles betweenorganisms and between them and their environment selecting out a few “adaptive” traits. We nowknow this is rare. Instead, most mutations in organisms generate selectively “neutral” traits--traitsthat do not help survival much and do not hurt it much at the moment. What happens is the genomesof organisms accumulate lots of these neutral traits, that do not do much one way or the other, untillsome drastic environment shift occurs, whereupon, some few of the up-till-now neutral traits becomepowerful aids to survival in the new circumstances the organisms find themselves in, and some few oth-ers may become powerful detriments. For the few organisms having more traits aiding survival thanhindering it, those up-till-now neutral traits will dominate the population of the organism as it survivesinto the new circumstances. It is shifts in environment that turn neutral traits into adaptive ones.

Another mechanism is important in understanding how natural selection “creates”. Exaptation is natu-ral selection using the same mechanism in a different context, usually a different kind of system havingsomewhat similar functioning needed in it. Take reaching motions. The elbow motion of reaching

takes place in the context of the larger scale shoulder reaching motions. The wrist motions of reach-ing take place in the larger scale elbow motions of reaching. In this way, the motion of each joint is“contexted” by motions of larger scale joints. Motions are embedded in larger scale motions. Insteadof some central controller controlling such reaching, each joint, simultaneously informs adjacent jointsof its motions and real time adjustments among them all result in accurate reaches. Next, in the brain,to the part that controls such reaching, is the grammar areas for language. Recent research foundthat great apes have a rich gestural “reaching” language, with the least aggressive and violent monkeyscombining facial expressions, voice noises, with hand gestures. It is the judgement of researchers nowthat language, the part of human language most unlike ape language, used the embedding of motionsinside motions, mechanisms of our brain, in a new “pointing to meaning” “pointing to my state ofaffairs” context where those brain mechanisms became grammar, the embedding of one gesture withinanother gesture, the embedding of one clause within another clause. The embedding mechanismwithin reaching parts of the brain got “exapted”--used in a different context--by the language part ofthe brain, so embedding of motions in reaches became embedding of clauses in sentences. Naturalselection in just this way constantly finds new uses for existing chemical pathways and operations inthe organism. A mechanism developed in one context gets used in entirely different contexts, oneafter another. This is why a drug that slows bone loss hurts heart rhythms--because bones and hearthave somehow been using the same functional mechanism in different contexts, due to past exaptationof a bone mechanism in a heart context or vice versa. (Note, this also explains, in part, why most DNAis “junk” DNA that does not directly encode the generation of specific proteins; such “junk” DNAencodes many of the different contexts in which a non-junk “gene” DNA segments operate).

We have, now, two mechanisms of creativity within natural selection--neutral traits accumulating in akind of passive library till changes of context turn some of them non-neutral--and--constant reuse ofexisting organism mechanisms for new contexts-uses so genomes code a few mechanisms and many dif-ferent contexts for using them for different purposes. A corporation that mimicks natural selectionmechanisms for creativity would therefore:

1. build up huge repertoires of neutral traits that changes of context can turn into winning capsabilities inthe new context

2. seek out changes of context that allow existing already built up capabilities to make powerful results inthose new contexts.

Creation would come from maintaining huge repertoires of capabilities, to become non-neutral whenunforeseen and unforeseeable context changes occur, and from seeking out and exposing oneself tonew contexts, to spawn reuse of existing functional excellences to produce powerful results in some ofthose new contexts. A dual set of huge repertoires is required--repertoires of capabilities, and of con-texts for using them.

Now we can link the large organization patience creating instability of contexts principle with creativ-ity in corporations in general. The constant stream of new contexts that large organizations find them-selves being and in, helps creativity, if it becomes a repertoire of contexts for possibly turning neutralcapabilities into adaptive discoveries, but hurts creativity by changing what the criteria for judgingsomething “creative” are. Streams of context changes work both to help and hurt creativity--this iswhere corporate response to such changes and management of them can make a huge difference.Second, the patience to build nascent capabilities into full grown ones helps creativity by adding capa-bilities to the corporate repertoire, so that future changes in context might turn some of them fromneutral to highly adaptive. However, changes of context increase when patience-exercised becomeslong time periods--so it is virtually impossible to sustain efforts through many changes of corporatecontext--unless lies are told and disguises are developed. Innovations are nearly always hidden anddisguised, the Van de Ven longitudinal studies of innovation demonstrated--because capabilities, pow-erful interesting ones, take time to develop and changes of context make sustaining such efforts in onedirection impossible unless they are hidden. You can see an area here where corporate approach,treatment, and management can make a huge difference. Tolerating the disguising of long efforts forcapability build up and invention fosters later creativity but at a cost of not really responding to somechanges of context around the organization or within it--changes of CEO, strategy, budget, market,technology.

The two points for leverage on creativity just outlined are: one, using streams of context change to dis-cover adaptive strength in existing capabilities while minimizing the way such changes of contextreduce what is judged creative; two, keeping new capability efforts going when contexts change usingdisguise so corporate capability repertoires continually expand making adaptive discoveries morelikely.

Below I illustrate application of these two points for leverage:

1. reframing suggestion systems--these are not innovation or creativity systems at all--they are adapta-tion systems that update them, continually, to accomodate inventions and creationsdeveloped from more powerful processes--they are also ways to continually reduce theoverall inertia of big organizations so that continual adaptation at the bottom layers, themost massive ones, speed up overall organization adaptation to changes of capability andcontext; this allows less “patience” as new ideas and practices can be adapted to faster,allowing changes that would not be creative if inertia stretched out implementation of

time long enough to allow changes of context to declare something no longer needed orcreative, to instead, be installed so quickly they are judged creative in the existing con-texts that first noticed them

DO NOT EXPECT CREATIVITY FROM SUGGESTION SYTEMS, INSTEAD MANAGE THEM SO THEY REDUCE INER-TIA OF ADAPTING THE ORGANIZATION TO CREATIONS, SO CREATIONS CAN BE INSTALLEDFAST ENOUGH THAT CHANGES OF CONTEXT DO NOT MAKE THEM NON-CREATIVE

2. reframing slack time--giving slack time to teams and talented or driven employees eliminates the firstsubcreations of becoming a creative person at work--that is the hard thought of inventingon one’s own how to make slack time for more creative work--creators by struggling toinvent more productive ways of work to make time free for more thoughtful rewardingforms of work, invent personal productivity improvements, and much evidence points togreat personal productivity being a key component in becoming a creative person--if com-panies “give” slack time to employees, they reduce the invention of productivityimprovements by them, and thereby reduce, long term, creativity from them--a paradox!

DO NOT GIVE SLACK TIME TO EMPLOYEES--INSTEAD LET THEM KEEP SLACK TIME THEY GENERATE BYINVENTING MORE PRODUCTIVE PERSONAL WAYS OF WORK (Good creators typically caninvent their way to doing all their assigned work in just 2 hours of effort each week, if youlet them keep the 4.5 days of free time they thereby invent their way to, their creativitysoars)

3. reframing failure tolerance systems--people love being superior to others so a failure gets rememberedand used against you by all who know you--to give people second chance lives andcareers, you have to have systems for putting them into new contexts where no oneknows about their past failure--any company that does this, by transfers to equivalentwork in distant centers or nations, by isolating creators so failures never get widelyknown, create many isolated soils, environments, in which people can start over, allowingmany tries to be tried, fostering greater creativity

DO NOT EXPECT KNOWN FAILURES TO NOT PREVENT FUTURE CREATIVITY, INSTEAD CREATE ISOLATIONPOCKETS, MANY ENVIRONMENTS THAT DO NOT KNOW ABOUT EACH OTEHR, SO FAILURE INONE OF THEM IS NOT KNOWN ABOUT IN THE OTHERS--THIS ALLOWS PEOPLE TO HAVE SEC-OND CHANCE CAREERS IN MANY SPOTS IN YOUR ORGANIZATION--LACK OF ISOLATION KILLSCREATIVITY BY KILLING SECOND CHANCES IN CAREERS

4. reframing creative thinking tools--most of creating work is not creative in feel and content so tools forclever thinking do not foster creativity but foster “looking creative”, the tools for think-ing that foster creativity are root thinking tools--defining root problems, defining rootcauses, defining root solutions, defining root implementations

CREATIVE THINKING IS NOT A BIG PART OF CREATING SO TOOLS FOR DEEPENING THOUGHT AND DISTRIB-UTING THOUGHT MAKE FOR MORE CREATIVITY THAN CREATIVE THINKING TOOLS (Goingbeneath automatic contexts for defining problems, causes, solutions, implementationsand finding entire system contributions to problems, causes, solutions, implementationsmake for more creativity than brainstorming, wierd association, and other conventionaltools for “creative” thinking)

5. reframing silicon valley systems--ideas, people, technologies, funds flowing between possible “homes”(ventures) allowed Silicon Valley to soundly defeat route 128 in Boston--East coast mind-sets of hoarding idea, hoarding people, hoarding technologies, hoarding funds killed cre-ativity because flows slowed, allowing too few ideas, people, technologies, and funds tofind homes where they were loved and lovingly developed into their full potentials--youcreate by fostering generosity and sharing not hoarding--by matching ideas/people/tech-nologies/funds with possible homes for them

IF YOU TRY TO BECOME A GOOD HOME TO ALL THE IDEAS FLOWING TO YOU, YOU FAIL UTTERLY, YOUBECOME CREATIVE BY RECOGNIZING GOOD MATCHES WHEN THEY APPEAR--MATCHES YOURPLACE AND PEOPLE CAN LOVE AND LOVINGLY GROW UP--CREATIVITY IS FINALLY JUST AFORM OF LOVE

6. reframing firms and careers--the industrial world is full of multipliers, industries that take single ideasas inputs and turn them into huge changes and products and distributions and impacts--creating is merely linking people, ideas, and careers to the multipliers in our societiesappropriate for them

A GREAT CREATIVE IDEA, PERSON, OR CAREER IS MERELY ONE THAT FINDS THE MULTIPLIER APPROPRIATEFOR IT--PUBLISHER, VENTURE CAPITAL, MEDIA PROGRAM, ETC.

7. reframing knowledge work--everyone underestimates the power of getting codes right--the world isdivided into code factors and action factors, the latter are big well funded implementationmachineries that impress us all, the former are modest specifications of idea combina-tions--all the big impressive action factors in the world do nothing unless they are basedon good quality codes--American Idol, the TV show, is a good example--it was just a oneparagraph idea that became owner of the entire world music industry and TV industry--code determining action factor fate

INVEST IN CODE FACTORS NOT ACTION FACTORS--THE LATTER WILL COME RUNNING WHEN GOOD CODESHAVE BEEN INVENTED.

The principles above are all rather obvious applications of the two principles from natural selectionpresented earlier in this section. There are many more implications for creating that I present later inthis book. Here I am looking at changes of culture, changes of context, and how these have thepower to create, how managing them determines how creative you are and become.

Globality = Creativity: The Cost of Costless Mental Fluidity and Breadth of AssociationGoing out, Joseph Campbell wrote decades ago, requires going in. That is, to handle the diversity ofways around the world you have to realize your own limited ways, the deep emotional unconsciousunderpinnings put inside you while growing up somewhere. This is intimate, emotional, self analysiswork--not something males excel at, not something that Americans excel at, not something that capi-talists excel at, in sum, not something that all the cultures of business tolerate, foster, or are good at.A business’ ability to go out, to globalize, depends on its ability to do feminine, caring, non-Western,egalitarian non-business-culture types of work. Businesses not able to go global well, are not able toget beyond the common cultures of business well, which greatly reduces their ability to create.

Consider an American business executive assigned to Japan for a few years of work for his corporateaffiliate there. He lives in special housing near other expatriate American executives. His kids go tointernational schools with other executive children. He goes to a local church with other expatriates.After four years in Japan he knows roughly what a repeat tourist knows. He has never lived in Japanamong Japanese doing things Japanese ways. Most of the “global” corporations of the world do this--they pretend to global exposure, while using and generating enclaves of isolation to make sure that for-eign exposure never produces change in culture, mentality, or outlook. To be honest, most Americancorporations are afraid of no longer being “American” enough and their executives share that fear of“foreign contamination”. Culture shock going home from a foreign assignment often is larger andmore dangerous to careers than culture shock going abroad. This is mostly an American and Japaneseproblem. Europeans, having longer histories of global operation, do things differently. The Britishmilitary, for example, unlike the American one, sends it middle rank officers to foreign nations for sev-eral years of learning to master a different culture. They require mastery of the local language ofthese officers. N. V. Philips, with more than 40 nations represented among its offices and subsidiaries,hires people who have worked for seven or more years in nations foreign to them, to make them lead-ers of offices in particular nations--rather than hiring locals to head local offices and rather than foist-ing Dutch nationals on the world. Such companies put the average US “global” corporation to shame.This is an example of mental fluidity and breadth of association attainment by corporations that are so-called “global”. Mental fluidity, that is, deploying ideas in many diverse contexts in short amounts oftime, and breadth of association, each idea calling to mind many diverse ideas from very differentdomains--are two of the most important types of thinking involved in creativity. That is not entirelytrue, but researchers have long believed it (more on this proviso later in this book). Nearly all standardtests of creative thinking ability measure mostly these two types of thought--that is one reason theylack validity and reliability--they do not predict who will create and how creative anyone will be.Why?

Tests have questions you have to respond to, with or without, mental fluidity and breadth of associa-tion. To be mentally fluid in responding to a test question, alone in a room, without consequences, iseasy and totally unlike the mental fluidity that real creators do. Real creators exercise fluidity ofthought by how they work and live, making people around them change or get angry, even become life-long enemies, by changes of context and thought the creators exert. Divorces, fights with bosses, vio-lations of budget constraints, lies about killing off particular projects--all these are forms of real lifemental fluidity as exercised by real creators. Tests measure wimpy dis-embodied forms of mental flu-idity, without consequence. So test results have no ability to measure creativity in situ. Similarly, forbreadth of association, real creators exercise it by changing jobs, changing nations, attending meetingsforbidden to them, snooping around, trying out competitor offerings and praising them. These sorts ofactions have consequences and require a bit of courage to do, in real companies and situations. Testsmeasure wimpy consequence-less forms of associative breadth. They fail to measure creativity, as aresult.

Now let’s tie the first paragraph above, about expatriates abroad, with the second, about mental fluid-ity and breadth of association. Being sort of, safely “mentally fluid” and safely, sort of “broad in asso-ciation” does not cut it. Most “global” corporations, especially American ones, are nominally globaland quite nationalistic, defensive about their “culture” by which they mean doing things the tradi-tional American way. Mental fluidity is not expanded at all by foreign assignment experience in suchfirms--it is only nominal encountering of things foreign that goes on. Breadth of association is notexpanded at all by foreign assignment experience in such firms--it is only nominal encountering ofdiverse contexts that happens there. You cannot expect a pretend “global” firm to be anything but“pretend” creative. P&G is a good bad example--they are “global” everyone says, but have over 100American managers in their Kobe, Japan East Asia headquarters office, and, those 100 are ensconsed ina American-like island, called Rokko Island, with their own American doctors, stores, import-exportsuppliers, schools, church, athletic clubs, social clubs, and the like. It is all designed to minimizelearning, change, exposure, and mental fluidity and associative breadth changes. Pretend globalityleads to and comes from pretend creativity. Companies and mangers too wimpy to change mentalityin foreign assignments are too wimpy to change mentality when back home running headquarters.Their unwillingness to learn and change abroad merely proves and demonstrates their inability to cre-

ate back home. Corporate cultures that turn foreign assignments into pretend foreign encouters fearcreativity and deliberately undermine and prevent it, back home.

Having a corporate culture at all nearly insures no creativity, for most firms. High tech Silicon Valleyfirms, so proud of themselves technologically, repeat this fleeing from learning when abroad, just asfamous old American firms now do. The Culture of Doing What is Hard is foreign to such firms. Theyhave to white wash the world as a place where easy effort produces stupendous results, as a placewhere they have always been excellent and face few or no problems in being excellent in the future.Hollywood story tellers point out that stories about how nominal obstacles were easily overcome bypeople and groups automatically superior to all others in nearly all ways--are terribly boring stories,incapable of motivating anyone, and rightly are mocked by one and all with contempt. Corporate cul-tures are such stories for the most part. “Great elite us did another great thing easily due to our supe-rior greatness”--this is the kind of program TV remotes were designed to help us click past. Mostcorporations, by promoting corporate cultures of the good doing the good (again easily), proudly adver-tise they want to be clicked past in just this way. Why? What drives adult men to advertize their ownboring wimpyness, proudly declaring it to one and all by printing it on all sorts of their publications?This book will later delve into why people act this irrationally, destroying creativity by denying thetough work and failure and obstacles that define it. What makes people unable to see that they areadvertising their own stupidity to one and all? Dodge, the best car in the world!--a great convincingstory if ever there was one. This book helps such companies get real about creativity in business (andabroad).

The Culture-Creativity Link: EducatednessIf culture and creativity are tightly linked, if creating requires doing lots of culture work, then thisbook has to present a world best model of culture and how to do the kind of cultural work that creatingrequires. Below I show the link between culture and creativity with some precision. Then I show asurprising name for what that link actual is and comes from. A vital powerful avenue to majorincreases in creativity comes from this discussion--one missing from nearly all companies and largeorganizations of our day but one that could readily be installed in them with benefits not only for theirlevel of creativity but for many others areas of their work.

Creativity requires doing culture work because culture is all that easy, automatic stuff inside of all ofus--it is routines that, though they may once have required careful thought and deliberation, have longsince, via repetition and practice, become automatic and unconscious, operating quickly inside usbefore we are able to think. Most of these quick, easy, automatic routines inside us were not chosenby us, with consideration. They were put into us as children growing up in some one particular placeand time or when joining one or another group and adapting to fit in with it. We never evaluated andcarefully chose these contents inside of us--most of what we “are” we did not make or choose. That isa vital insight and the beginning of wisdom. It also is the link to creativity--if most of the reactions,preferences, views, expectations, ideas, images, metaphors and the like inside you are happenstanceunchosen contents put into you while growing up somewhere or while joining some group and adaptingto fit into it, then you do not have conscious ability to control your own self and reactions. Most ofyour self and reactions are beyond your conscious control. This poses an immense barrier to creativityfor all ordinary people--most of what they “are” they did not choose and they absorbed, while growingup somewhere. The ability to depart from, diverge from, be distinct from, surprise, be novel, takeanother viewpoint--all of which are core parts of any sort of “being creative”--is small in ordinary peo-ple because they have not chosen, are not fully aware of, and cannot easily change “who” they are,their own mental and emotional contents. Thusly, unconscious contents inside them make their reac-tions, preferences, expectations, and so on just like those of the people around them.

Consider now the five cultures of business--if you share those, most of the contents of which are uncon-scious to you, so much of you is “like” everyone else in business, that you have only 1/100,000 of youwith which to “diverge” “depart” “differ”, that is, with which to create. It is hard to “create” whilebeing identical to everyone around you (especially in unconscious ways not recognized or consciouslyexamined). Similarly, inability to differ from oneself, dooms one to new work “like” one’s past workbecause informed by similar views from a similar “you”. A common form of mental illness is expectingcreatively different outcomes from the same or similar inputs. Inability to “differ from others” and“differ from oneself” dooms creativity attempts in a person or group. Frank Lloyd Wright, the archi-tect for the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, is a good example of a person being creative by differ-ing from himself--he had three distinct careers, each of which failed, resulting in him going back tobasics again, re-inventing his aims and means, and slowly, crawling his way back to clients and fame.Culture, when promoted consciously by companies, foists a “common identity” on people in the com-pany--insuring that they do not “differ” from themselves (or each other). Companies achieve controlvia culture, to avoid achieving control by older more “oppressive” means, command and punishment.Culture is a primary barrier to creating of all sorts and therefore, when people labor and work tobecome creative, what they are doing, in large part, is:

1. uncovering unconscious routines inside them

2. stopping the automatic execution of those routines in key situations3. scouring the best in history and in the contemporary world for better routines4. replacing routines inside them now with these consciously chosen better routines from the world’s

best.

There is a name for the four steps above--leaving home and determining your self. They are notexactly parts of creativity, not parts of being effective, they are parts of becoming an educated per-son. Educatedness, in the form of the above four steps, is thusly, an essential foundation for creating.It allows you to replace automatic routines inside you that make you just like everyone else, with bet-ter routines consciously chosen from the best in history and in the contemporary world. The purposeof college, as an experience, is to expose you to the best in history and in the contemporary world,while you are away from home, so you can make your self a product that you yourself have made,rather than keeping as your self, something that was made by unconsciously copying whatever wasaround in the environments you grew up in.

Childhood trauma has been found to be predictive of who will later be creative. It predicts that a lotof people who have it, will fail in life and be destroyed by relicts of that trauma, but for those who arenot destroyed by the aftereffects of trauma, something quite wonderful occurs--they become creative.Why? Childhood trauma splits kids into having two simultaneous lives--a real life that, during thetrauma period, is rather unhappy and not filled with joy--and a watching themselves and others life ofintense questionning and scrutiny to figure out some happier way of being in the world. At age 20 orso, these people have two lives where the rest of us, with happier childhoods, have one. These trau-matized people, now no longer kids, have watched intensely themselves and others all throughout theirchildhoods and have figured out paths to personal happiness for them. They are driven to make theirown way, because the easy, automatic, culturally sanctioned ways brought trauma to them, that madethem intensely unhappy. So going with the flow, is not something, these people are going to do, trust,or tolerate. You can see how childhood trauma in these ways prepares people for creativity if andwhen it does not destroy them.

College, then, is designed to be a sort of “positive” trauma for the rest of us who did not have trau-matic childhoods. College takes us away from home, mixes us with people from all nations, ethnicgroups, social classes, and outlooks, and makes us, with all those diverse people, find and discuss thebest ideas in history and in the contemporary world. This makes us doubt out backgrounds, examineour backgrounds and the contents those backgrounds put inside us, and eclectically choose new, bettercontents from the best in history and in the contemporary world, to replace contents inside us from ourbackgrounds. Childhood trauma and college end up “educating” people in the same way.

If you like who you now are, your present gender, your nationality, your profession, your social circle,your ideas--you cannot create. Only people who depart from who they now are can create. Picasso,in his later years, remained Picasso, staying his old self, and hence, history has judged the works fromthe last third of his life, derivative, Picasso copying Picasso, uncreative Picasso. He failed to differfrom himself and lost creativity as a result. Only people who are educated---who have examined allthe 90% unconscious contents inside them operating all the time to guide and direct them--andreplaced those happenstance contents unconsciously absorbed while growing up with better con-sciously chosen ones, can create. Your identity--who you think you are--is a primary block to creatingfrom most ordinary people. Most ordinary people rebel--I am American and proud of it--that attitudeprevents all creativity. I am a man and proud of it--that attitude prevents all creativity. I am awoman, a powerful woman, and proud of it--that attitude is enough to prevent all creativity through-out all of your life. People who are their identity cannot create because their identity is mostlyunconscious stuff inside them, culture, and that unconscious stuff makes them similar in many ways topossibly millions of other people who grew up in similar or the same environments. It also, by beingleft in place, unchanged, makes a person similar to himself at later times.

All of us know this--we all have known kids in our own high school who all the other kids gossippedabout--that guy will either win a Nobel Prize or shoot his brains out after college. These were peopleon the edge--usually because of childhood trauma--who lived with us other kids and who lived apartfrom us other kids, all at the same time. We all recognized in high school that living on that kind ofedge prepared one to create or to be destroyed. We all “sensed” that creativity grew from departurefrom one’s self. Therefore, all readers of this book who seek to become much more creative whilekeeping their present self--are liars and hypocrits--you will fail and fail badly! Forget it! If you are notwilling and able to dislike your own gender, your own era, your own nation, your own family, your ownvalues, your own profession--you are too wimpy both to create and to ever reach psychological adult-hood. Your body will age but your mind will be uneducated, stuck, usually, at some teenage stage ofdevelopment--loving your own ideas and view, perhaps, or loving your own social circle of friends, sothat people who have different ideas or friends are threats to your “rightness” and make you uneasy.Research shows, unfortunately, most adults are only biologically adult--psychologically, most adultsare stuck at teenage levels of character development, too attached to personal opinions or circles offriends to ever reach adulthood.

This book is tough on readers because it does not tolerate or pamper such giant babies--if you areafraid to depart from your own identity, you are too wimpy to create anything. Put down this book andcrawl into some hole where, for the rest of your life, you can hide from wonder and growth, impact

and history. Recently in the US, political parties have become good holes for such people, in Europe,certain amiable lifestyles have become such holes. Every culture and tradition has good holes for hid-ing in--enjoy them but at the cost of never creating anything.

A Model of Culture Good Enough for Our Pur-pose--CreatingIn my own career I spent time in Japan teaching artificial intelligence programming at Matsushita Elec-trric, Sekisui Chemical, and some other companies. These were all Deming Prize winners, for best-in-Japan total quality results and programs. I studied total quality in Matsushita and when Sekisui laterwas applying for the Deming prize they wanted to hear about Matsushita systems for total quality andMatsushita’s presentations to examiners for the Deming prize. I was able to do this for them. Later,I came back to the USA and as a manager in Coopers & Lybrand noticed bosses selling large, slow, riskyexpert system project to Wall Street firms, that took a long time to both sell (explain) and finish (ottenrunning over-schedule and over-budget, negating profits). So I combined Japanese quality circles,substituting for quality statistics methods advanced software methods--High Tech Circles I called this.Instead of selling one big, slow, risky project per client, I sold 30 small, fast, riskless projects to thatclient--selling much faster and completing work much faster and, at $100,000 per circle per year, get-ting $3 million per High Tech Circle program sold where my bosses got $1 million for selling, in thesame amount of time, one big, slow, risky project taking 3 years to complete and often with no profit.To me I was merely taking two big parts of my own background--artificial intelligence programmingfrom high school and MIT and quality circles from Matushita and Sekisui--and combining them in a sim-ple and obvious way. To Coopers & Lybrand and it clients, however, I was revolutionizing advancedtechnology delivery--spreading it faster, getting learning of it deeper, lowering risks and costs, andmaking it more visible getting promotions for the client firm managers that I worked with. I was “cre-ative” and “an innovator” from the point of view of everyone else, but I myself, was doing only normal,obvious things given the background experiences I had chosen and collected. Creativity, in thisway, is nearly always not creative. It is doing something in one cutture (in this example, in US cul-ture) from the standpoint of doing things in another culture (in this case Japan’s culture). I did a tech-nology the US was interested in using social tactics Japan had invented. It appeared “creative” toothers merely because they were not intimately familiar both with artificial intelligence programmingand total quality statistics and social methods. The software types in this world denigrated total qual-ity stuff from Japan and felt superior to it; the total quality folks were old and conservative and fearand therefore shunned advanced software technologies. I was that rare software person not denigrat-ing total quality and that rare total quality person not so old and decrepit that I feared new softwaretechnologies. Creativity, in this way, is nearly always doing culture work.

If creating is largely the doing of moral and cultural work, as I assert here but demonstrate in the fol-lowing portion of this book, the we have to understand culture well in order to create well. Culture isa word, like “creativity”, that everyone uses and bandies about, but when you examine what peopleactually are saying with such words you find great slop and distortion, inconsistency and inaccuracy.Words like creativity and culture, for one example, suggest that “creativity” is one thing and “culture”is one thing. Careful thinking and research, by 200 scholars, on creativity demonstrated that it was atleast 42 different things, not one thing. Similar thinking and research, by 200 scholars, on culturedemonstrated that it was one thing, in spite of all the diversity of how to eat, what to worship, when tofight, found around the world and in our galaxy (Star Trek, etc.). We need deep, careful, comprehen-sive models of “creativity” and similar models of “culture”. This book is the first book to furnish both.

Tools for Upping Mental Granularity & Productivity. One chapter, below, in this book, pre-sents a model of 42 models of creativity. This overwhelms some readers. I want to explain why suchreaders have to deal with the personal growth needed to not be overwhelmed by that. First, I am aprofessor, and at my present university in Japan, for 13 years or so, I have been training hundreds ofJapanese to expand their “personal list limit”. This is an unconscious mental trait that we all have. IfI ask someone what activities we might do together this coming weekend, what are good books on eco-nomic growth, what is wrong with US government immigration policy, and just about any questionwhatsoever, that person will respond with answers for each such question. I am focussing here not onwhat those answers are and whether they are good or up-to-date or the like, instead, here, I am focus-sing on how many such answers, unprompted, they generate. How long are their lists, their naturallyproduced lists?

If you do the research, as decades ago I did, you find that Germans average 7.7 items per list, Italiansaverage 5.0 items, Japanese average 6.3 items, and Americans average 3.4 items. These numbers areacross all social classes and educational strata in a national population, and across all age groups andprofessions. Since these are averages you will find that highly educated Germans average an astonish-ing 11 items and highly educated Americans average 12.8 items. Education attenuate national differ-ence effects in many but not all cases.

So what? Who cares! Well there is a “so what” here--people who, dozens of times every day of theirlives, consider more alternatives when making choices, attend to more details when viewing situations,imagine more possibilities when looking into the future, end up discovering better solutions--to everypart of their lives. The excellence of German exports, the products they export, the skills of the peo-ple who make those exports, the people who develop those high skill levels--the excellence of all thatGerman stuff is, in part, based on considering dozens of times every single day, nearly twice the num-ber of things that average Americans consider. A similar argument explains part of Japan’s exportpower versus the US. Differences in cognitive list limit have powerful economic, political, cultural,and social change implications.

Decades ago, I put before myself the following problem, therefore: how can people drasticallyimprove their own cognitive list limit? how much improvement in cognitive list limit can the averageperson make in a reasonable amount of time, say, six months? This is not a book on my structural cog-nition methods (see the references of this book for my books on structural cognition), so I will notdevote space to any details here. Suffice it to say that I developed several tools and exercises forextending personal cognitive list limits. This book uses some of them, in particular, fractal conceptmodels. These are highly regularized polygons of concepts--”categorical models” academics call them.So instead of a book presenting 6 or 8 models of creativity, I have this book presenting 42 such models.If that overwhelms you consider the following:

1. hundreds of Japanese students have been trained by me at applying ordinary mental operators not tofive or 10 ideas at a time, but to 64 or 128 ideas at a time

2. in 3 US corporations, I rose, within a year, from level 12 out of 21 management levels, to level 20, inlarge part based on offering bosses 64 well ordered alternatives where peers/competitorsofferred 6 to 8 alternatives, and my 64 included all of their 6 or 8

3. your creativity in large part, depends on how much detail you can adapt to, how many alternatives youcan imagine and consider, and how many simultaneous tasks you can manage without get-ting lost or confused--all of which expand when using some of my tools, like fractal con-cept models presented in this book.

Therefore, this book has a side benefit for those who read it well--by stretching to master the largenumber of levels of abstraction and large number of details at each level of the fractal models in thisbook, your personal cognitive list limit will expand, to German and Japanese levels and beyond, makingyou capable of creativity levels beyond them. That is a worthy profit from reading one book well, Ibelieve.

A Useful Model of Culture. There are typical kinds of bad books on topics like creativity and cul-ture. One kind of bad book is filled with one cosmic “right” view, and an attempt to argue and per-suade that other views are useless and wrong. Such books are arrogant, rather stubborn, and lessuseful than books that welcome many models and views of any one phenomenon like creativity or cul-ture. Another kind of bad book is filled with lots of alternative explanations and models, but with notenough depth and detail about them to actually apply and benefit from exposure to them. A third kindof bad book about such topics is filled with little tools and tricks, marketted as fast and easy for every-one. You can be sure a book for everyone is filled with worthless “commonsense” and utterly shallowtripe--editors invent such books for gullible ignorant parts of the general public, knowing there is a vastlayer of uneducated buffoons who will buy books on advanced sounding things that present nothinghard or difficult to understand. Vague, general topics like “creativity” and “culture” invite such badbook treatments by publishers. I was determined to never write such junk myself and this book consis-tenly avoids the above faults. The way I treat creativity and culture demonstrates that throughout thisbook.

Therefore, I had to treat culture seriously yet make such a valid, rigorous treatment accessible to alarge audience. I could not write for professors but I had to write with the accuracy and carefulnessthat professor audiences require. The model of culture in this book reflects those opposing needs--tocommunicate to a wide audience carefully defined and used concepts that actually work in reality.You will not find some cosmic one “right” view, some catalog of shallow alternatives, and some com-pendium of little tricks that are fast and easy, for creativity and for culture in this book.

I am going to introduce my model of culture here, and in several other places in this book, so that read-ers can ease into it, rather than be intimidated by it. Keep in mind that you readers are not beingasked to master the entire model, at any one of these places introducing it. Rather, I expect thatrepeated introductions to it will accumulate in your mind so that, by the time you get to full presenta-tion of the culture model, at the end of this book, you will be comfortable with all its main purposes,concepts, and outlines. The repeated visiting of the same topic, at several spots in this book, is therefor a purpose. I had to persuade my editors to keep this repetition in the book.

Culture Aspects Culture Space Culture Results

item

s Defini-tions

Uses Operations Tools Traits Dimensions Processes Types Powers

The above table, from another book I have written, summarizes the most accurate and sophisticatedmodel of culture I have been able to compile. About 50 years ago, professors published books present-ing 50 or 100 different definitions of what culture “is”. The word “culture” is used to refer to all thatpeople are and do, in some places by some persons, and to refer to “rites and rituals” of life in otherplaces by other persons, and at least 98 other definitions are found in publishings on culture. I person-ally assumed that most definitions of culture were sloppy and since never tested by real applications,not worth taking all that seriously. What point of view, I wondered, allowed one to focus on why peo-ple cared about culture and why culture had enough power to deserve respect?

EuroDisney is one example--a major successful corporation that loses billions and billions and billionsacross more than ten years--due in large part to imposing American cultural assumptions in France. Ifsomething has the power, when slighted or ignored or handled badly, to cost a corporation billions formore than ten years, it deserves our respect. Lincoln Electric is another example--subsidiaries set upin Europe before headquarters figured out that the piece-work pay system at the center of them all,was illegal in some of those nations. Ignoring or slighting or handling culture badly costs money, lotsand lots of money. Culture deserves respect for this reason.

I investigated other “powers” of culture to frustrate, cost money, enable victories, invent technolo-gies, make failing systems work, and the like. I eventually found 9 powers of culture that each hadenough “umpf” to get our respect for culture and the power of culture to affect human affairs. Weak,vague, wimpy, intimate, and emotional as culture appears--if you mess with it sloppily, it will ruin you.Therefore, in the above model, the “powers” of culture are important, more important than theyappear as the 9th out of 10 components of culture in my model. The “powers” are why treating cul-ture carefully and practically are important.

My model says that culture has aspects that get realized/implemented in a culture space, to produceculture results. The aspects are definitions that determine uses that determine operations that areenabled by particular tools. The operations, enabled by tools, get applied to culture space--whichconsists of traits of a culture that we wish to modify, and those traits are found in dimensions of cul-ture which are evident in processes that all societies have. By applying an operation to a trait asfound in a dimension and social process, we get changes of a culture from one type to another, whichchanges the power we get from the culture, producing high performance.

A corollary of the above model is this insight--all cultures are merely high performances and all highperformances are merely particular invented cultures. If you think about your own encounters withdifferent cultures this becomes clear. Remember your first dinner, as a teenager, at a girlfriend’shouse with her family. Remember the hidden pitfalls and treacherous conversational territory of thatdinner--what would disappoint the girl’s mom, what would provoke the girl’s dad, what toadying up toparents would alienate the girl? That dinner was your family culture encountering someone else’s fam-ily culture. Your girlfriend’s family had mastered certain assumptions, mental routines, and certainrites and rituals, physical routines, doing them instantly and expertly--you could not keep up or followthese routines. That was a high performance that your girlfriend’s family had created by years of rep-etition of the same attitudes or motions, repetitions that made things instant, effortless, and auto-matic, as well as effortlessly coordinated among her family members. Your remarks and motions, inthat context, looked labored, slow, slightly mis-fitting. You could not join their high performance.Culture, because it is unconscious contents inside us all, unconsciously determining our expectations,reactions, preferences, and the like, from years of practicing the same things together with a group of

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such operations on such traits

tools enable us to perform

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have

the traits that cultures have are found in

specific dimen-sions that dis-

tinguish cultures

the dimensions that distinguish

cultures from each other are found in certain processes

of society

the result of operating on particular traits (as

found in dimensions and processes) is

changing the type of a culture

each type of culture has a distribution of weighting

across the nine powers of cul-ture, so changing types also

changes this pattern of emphasis of the various pow-

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when someone empha-sizes some powers of

culture and de-empha-sizes others, the result is achievement of a dif-ferent type of high per-

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1 particulardistinctionswe make inhow we live;

change how welive;

recognize culturedimensions, traits,etc.

maps of thestages of pene-trating any cul-ture;

coherence of aculture--howwell its bits fittogether;

humans are firstamong species ver-sus humans areequals to other spe-cies of animals;

conserving novelties--defending innovationsfrom old establishedpowers

sex denying cultures--sex isdangerous and to be carefullycontrolled

culture’s vastness--it iseverything humans thinkand do

innovate radically but onlywithin chosen form

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differenttypes ofexcellenceachieved;

change what typeof excellence weachieve

strengthen culturetraits

response stop-ping--stoppingour easy auto-matic responsesto situations;

exception rec-ognition--howmuch a culturetolerates andacknowledgesexceptions toits rules/ways;

my circumstancescause my situationversus I cause mysituation;

polis processes--spacesfor appearing amongpeers to exchange wordand deed and contributeto collective well being

market pricing--the value ofeverything is determined bywhat others are willing to payfor it in some currency

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use others’ rejects as star players;scarf resources others dismiss

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people, is always a high performance of such shared routines. You do things faster, easier, and morespecifically, in a more coordinated way that outsiders do those thngs. All high performances, are,conversely, just particular cultures people built up together. Consider an NBA basketball team dynastysuch as the Chicago Bulls when Michael Jordan was playing with them. Their high performancetogether was unconscious, effortless, execution of routines they all shared---but that high performancecame from hours and weeks and years of repetition in practice together. Routines at first wooden andconsciously labored over, by repetition became instant, unconscious and effortless as well as well coor-dinated. The slightest gesture or wink sufficed to shift players into a different mode, that opponentscould not anticipate. All high performances are just shared cultures and all cultures are just very par-ticular high performances. There is literally no difference between culture and high performance.When companies say “we want to be the high performance players in our industry” they are saying “wewant to establish an intense unique culture of operating in our industry”. Note where that leaves us--desire for high performance drives companies to establish their own cultures, which greatly limit andreduce their creativity. High performance reduces creativity; creativity reduces or blocks high perfor-mance. The rest of this book shows us what can be done about this paradox.

PART ONE:CREATING CLARITY ABOUT CRE-

ATIVITYThe Uncreativity of Current Research On Creativity in

BusinessMoney distorts truth. You have to be pretty naive to not acknowledge that. Creativity research ingeneral is robust and healthy; it is that part of it that deals with creativity in business that is not toohealthy. It is sickly because it is being distorted by money. For just the most obvious example, pro-fessors in leading business schools are not free to tell the truth in lectures. Their deans are hitting upcompanies all year long for donations and companies will not donate where a professor is saying “bad”(though truthful) things about them. Deans tell leading professors, at the world’s top business schools“I am not asking you to lie, I just want a judicious ‘toning down’ of your expressions, so that people arenot ‘unnecessarily’ offended”. A few schools of business, hire new clinical professors, for a couple ofyears, who bad mouth particular corporations, telling inconvenient truths. Then those schools, havingoffended a few particular corporations, thusly, do not renew the contracts of the truth-telling clinicalprofessors. To restore these particular corporate reputations on their campuses, they approach theoffended businesses with proposed donations that would highlight their corporate greatness on campusin the next few years. You get attention by hiring a temporary truth teller, then you go to the corpo-rations, thusly awakened, and hit them for donations to raise their “salience” on campus. It is anextortion racket, in effect. I love it. Another force, is the children of business executives, sitting inclasses and coming home to “daddy” talking about truths their professors let slip about their dads’companies. The dads, irate that truth is found on campus, cancel donations as soon as possible. I loveit. However, these forces mean you cannot find anything like truth in the lectures of the world’s topbusiness schools. Truth and business do not go together. That is because truth and career do not gotogether. Indeed, perspicacious people notice that an entire industry of lying has arisen to servicebusiness--the advertising industry. I remember being asked to describe a dinky distant smog-coveredmountain range, miles away from a hotel as “the magestic Rokko range frames our master suites in nat-ural splendor”--for an advertising assignment I did decades ago. Lying, if paid for, is “business” and“creative” apparently. I, like many other professors, teach my students to simply reverse the mainmessage of any advertisement in order to get its actual truth content--if the message says “our airlines

is friendly to customers and arrives on time” you can be sure the actual situation is this airline is nastyto customers and arrives late. People with standards that low are creative indeed (sarcasm here forunperspicacious readers).

In the above context, research on creativity in business has been made to pretend that businesses arehonest, upright, sincere, goodboys in society trying to help people in many specific ways. Professorsresearching creativity in business publish studies with results showing how tweaking this and that will“improve” creativity--they fail to publish that the improvement is from a terribly low base level andthat the amount of the improvement would not pay for the postage stamps on the research reports sentout. You get studies showing how all sorts of changes, in business “environments” foster or hinder cre-ativity. What is never mentioned is all of these changes are well within comfort zones of existingexecutives and managers throughout the business so nothing substantial ever gets changed and testedfor effects on things like creativity. These studies should be titled one or another version of this--”Theeffects of popular slight easy changes of marginal work environment aspects on producing unimportantamounts of change in terribly low creativity levels of software firms in Silicon Valley California--a lon-gitudinal study by Susan Asskisser and Curt Conformist”. What you do not find, ever, are studies likethe following: “Financial effects of immense morale declines in the most talented employees of com-panies having immensely large CEO retirement payouts--a longitudinal study by Sam Suicide and BettyBurnout”. All the marginal incremental safe stuff gets laboriously studied with immense social sciencemethod thoroughness while all the heavy hitting factors go unmentioned, unresearched, and unpub-lished because companies are offended by truth, especially central big powerful ones. Ah, the humanrace, what an inspiring bunch of creatures!

Some Other Flaws in Academic Research on Creativity in Business. Most of the academ-ics who publish research on creativity in business have spent all their lives in academia studying andresearching, or, if they have worked, it was in a Ph.d role in a lab somewhere, or in a low level jobearly in their career. As a result, these academics, continually, in their published research articles andreviews “discover” effects that all people in business from age 22 to 30 learn as “commonsense” aboutbusiness. As a result, academic articles, on creativity in business, announce saliently as “discoveries”things that are embarrassingly commonsensical to everyone alive in business. In effects, these aca-demics are “discovering” the basics of any business, the same basics that hundreds of millions of peo-ple new to work discover every year. To see such “discoveries” backed by “solid” data under the nameof world famous universities, somehow demonstrates a debasing of our universities themselves. Theyhave so much become narcissistic, determining their own worth by themselves comparing each other toeach other, that the continual “discovery” of the absolutely obvious, does not bother them. I am nottalking, here, about all social science research, in academia, or all natural science research in aca-demia--I restrict these comments to academic research on “creativity in business”. In that area, mostpublished articles “discover” what the academics writing them would have “discovered” by working insome ordinary job for five or six years. It is nice to see academics catch up with 28 years olds in theworld’s businesses--more power to them--but it does not help the rest of us very much.

There is a more general and serious problem, that goes beyond being a weakness just of academicresearch on creativity in business. This is a weakness in all empirical research on society in general. Ifyou read thousands of research journal articles, as I and many others have done, over years, you findall of them examine “how the world now is and how it now operates” getting data by experiment, sur-vey, or simulations based on experiment and survey data. They analyze this data and discover thecauses of effects going on now in the world. Many readers will be puzzled here--what is wrong withthat? What is wrong--and it is a big big wrong--is “what the world now is” and “how it now operates”are extremely tiny slivers of a much larger space--how the world might be and how it might operate.Empirical research is fine--it debunks lots of junk and dangerous opinions that you and I build our livesaround--it tests them. However, it points people, institutions, funders, and eventually everyone inentire societies towards--learning how to do things by studying only how people now do them. This isgreat if the variation and examples in place in the world of how people now do things are doing thingswell and competently enough to handle our challenges and needs. But what if present ways are prettybad and not doing much to help or change humankind and humankind’s destiny? Then getting betterdata about poor practices--though publishable as “great” research--will not help anyone.

Finally, and readers will laugh with me at this, every time a major business journal changes editors,the new editor writes an opinion piece lamenting that no actual business people read the research aca-demics do on business. Indeed, research by some somewhat cynical academics has shown that mostacademics in a field do not “read” articles in the journals covering their own part of the field. Thearticles bore both practitioners and other academics. No one is reading all this academic research.Why? Journal editors explain it in obvious ways, but subtly they imply that practitioners are at fault--they do not realize how bad they are and how bad their practices are. Also, they imply that businessesare reluctant to give access to their businesses and the data in those businesses to academics forresearch. However, both of these can be read in reverse--practitioners of academic research may notbe realizing how bad their research is, and businesses may be justified in being reluctant to share datawith people who publish research of that bad level of quality. I do not want to beat up on academicsor on business practitioners here--rather, my point is this--academic research on business in general isnot a great success story, or even a moderate success story, or even a little success story--it is a “no”

success story. Therefore, in that context, it may not be surprising to find that academic research oncreativity in business is not a stellar resource for us all.

Some Limitations of Academic Research Results on Creativity in Business. The analy-sis above of the cultures of business and the culture of academics studying business leads us to the fol-lowing provisional conclusions--anticipations we could call them:

1) academics researching creativity in business mostly discover whatany beginning employee to a business discovers during their firstthree or four years of work

2) that is largely because they themselves have been in colleges alltheir lives and know not business in practical reality, so they dis-cover its basics in their research

3) academics study only based on data from how things presently aredone so they cannot research changes beyond current practice =boring results that are copies of what people now do

4) academics narrowly educated in one field--lacking philosophy, his-tory, physics, engineering, quality, etc. training-- cannot framethe creativity-in-business question well enough to make theirresearch questions and results uncover valuable stuff.

5) businesses pay lots and lots of money to top ten colleges so none oftheir research and professors reveal strong negatives about busi-ness in general and about particular firms

6) those researching businesses share nearly all the cultures that limitand hinder and constrict businesses (and hence, that generatemost of their problems and failings, particular recrudescent prob-lems that slough off all solving)--the blind researching the blindeffect--white, right wing, American, males researching white,right wing, American, male businesses and business systems

7) a culture of avoiding all negatives infests leaders, CEOs, boards,researchers, and general business cultures so big emotional reac-tions and defenses distort attempted researching of what fails,what causes failure, what obstacles are likely and similar ques-tions

8) an illusion of control dominates businesspersons, and infects thoseresearching them, so research, like businessmen, pretends thatexecutives influence many or most aspects of doing business--when careful empirical work demonstrates quite the opposite--policy changes, on average, have undiscernable effects on out-comes and most “leadership” solidly takes place as taking creditfor luck and avoiding credit for bad luck

9) strong national and gender cultures fostering attibuting all out-comes to heroic male individuals, constantly distort actual busi-ness operations and research findings on business in the directionof gross exaggeration of the influence of individuals and theiractions on outcomes of interest.

In other words, there are profound forces making the problems of academia similar to the problems ofbusiness, the weaknesses of academia like the weaknesses of business, the blind spots of academia thesame as the blind spots of businesses. Europeans and East Asians have long noticed that academics inthe West at the same time and in the same way as businessmen in the West took all of total qualityand:

individualized itmade it analytic and complexturned it into numbers and toolseliminated social and power distribution changes in it.

I wrote a doctoral dissertation, at the University of Michigan, that showed, in parts, how academics inthe US were busily individualizing, analytic-izing, and elite-izing total quality team, simplie, and egali-tarian aspects--assimilating total quality’s culture to the culture of academia and US businesses. Justthose components of total quality that required fundamental change in values and ways were stripped

out and replaced with “comfortable fits” to present practices (and hence, that improved little andmade outcomes similar to past outcomes). MIT, for example, still gets Taguchi technique entirelywrong--missing, in a neurotic male US way, Taguchi’s emphasis on optimizing free energy out ofdesigns (MIT optimizes away traits that bother customers instead), missing Taguchi’s emphasis onexperiments to find “tuning” factors (MIT experiments to find optimal trait values instead), missingTaguchi’s emphasis on optimizing to find linear functions of reliable values (MIT optimizes to find bestpoint performance values instead). In each case, MIT distorts Taguchi to fit past business-academiaculture in the US. Business and Western academics share the same values, cultures, and blind spots--soWestern academic publishing on creativity operates within the same 0.00001% of consciously recog-nized alternatives and opportunities--the rest being ruled out by routines operating inside them bothunconsciously, from the cultures that they share.

In the context of the above, I present, below, two reviews of a typical academic work on creativity inbusiness from an unimpeachable publisher of long renown. The first review identifies main points onlyfrom each article in the work, dropping all secondary points and rewording main points to sharpen theirfocus. The second review examines what portion (of all types of creativity insights) each of the twelvecreativity-in-business approaches, in the work, covers.

If, like me, you have spent more than a decade working with creators and reading hundreds of booksand research journal articles on creativity in general, a cursory glance at the two tables below revealshuge portions of creativity research completely unmentioned. The ideas presented below representan extremely small slice of overall known research results on creativity. Either academics studyingcreativity in business are narrow and unread, or what they study--businesses--are narrow and unread inhow they do creativity and what amounts and qualities of creativity they achieve.

Personal CEO culture &Corporate culture of belief inIndividual influence & control

Business culture in general andIndividual institution culture

Industry and technology culture

Right wing pro-capitalism culture

National culture with or without tinge of Americanisms

Male gender culture 90% of this culture’s contents are unconscious

90% of this culture’s contents are unconscious

90% of this culture’s contents are unconscious

90% of this culture’s contents are unconscious

UnexaminedUncontestedUnconsciousUnmeasured

10% of Content

0.00001% possible for being controlled

or influenced

The Illusion of Individual & Leader Influence & ControlBusiness and itsresearch operatingwithin five commoncultures, shared between them, means most alter-natives, causes,opportunities aremissed, ruled outby unconsciouspreferences & views operatinginside of leaders& followers alike.

The Blind Leading the BlindAcademic Research on Creativity in Business

for each of 5 cultures =

Academics and Businessmen Share the Same Cultures and Blindnesses from Them

90%

ACADEMIC RESEARCHER RESULTS: Increase Creativity Howfrom Harvard Business Review, On Point, The Creative Company,

Paul Barker in What’s Stifling the Creativity at Coolburst?use the past and present to build the futuredo not confine creativity to one or a few departmentstap into every employee’s creativitysafe, step-by-step ideas existing people will be comfortable withask employees to identify areas needing improvementask employees to view the company as competitors see itget employees out of the office for a day or few days to change contexts

Teresa M. Amabile in What’s Stifling the Creativity at Coolburst?apply the fact that all people with normal human capabilities can be creative; believing that only special people can becreative reduces overall levels of creation; expertise, creative-thinking skills, motivationcreate an atmosphere that will allow creativity to bubble up freely; changes in the physical environment do not affectcreativity muchset aside some resources specifically for innovative projects and allot time for themcreate workgroups composed of diverse sets of skills and perspectiveshave managers not display a knee-jerk protection of the status quocelebrate breakthrusachieve the right balance between freedom and creativitywant people to work hard because they are challenged by hard problems they care about not because of arbitrary dead-lines; arbitrary deadlines stop much creativity, in part because pressure stops creativity, time pressures stops it, andsome creating requires much timehave managers take some risks and extract failure value from failures

Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries in What’s Stifling the Creativity at Coolburst?inject fear of a real threatdo away with command and control culturecreate culture having transitional space where people can play because rules are minimal

Gareth Jones and Elspeth McFadzeanidentify and build on existing strengthsgrow creativity out of a sense of accomplishmentpromote mavericks who tried to create but were blockedstart a suggestion systemget out of the company context to refresh viewsteam members anonymously suggest new ideas then teams develop such ideas collaborativelyencourage employees to take more risksuse creative problem solving techniques: wishful thinking, brainwriting, object stimulationencourage employees to challenge any process in place merely because “that is how it has been done”hire a trained facilitatorencourage employees to think positively when presented with new ideassencourage visioning alternative futureshire people unlike people now in the companyallow time for innovation projectsensure senior manager support for innovation projects

Robert McKee Storytelling that Moves Peopletwo ways to persuade/motivate people: cost-benefit story and emotional storygood story explains how and why life changes: life in balance, inciting unbalancing incident, effort to restore balanceforces expectations to dash against uncooperative realitywhat it is like to deal with opposing forces: digging deeper, use scare resources, make diffiicult decisions, take actiondespite risks, discover the truthstory of a person dealing with conflict between subjective expectation and cruel realityhow do you imagine the future--create scenarios in your head of possible future eventsdisplay the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastinessaccumulate antagonists because it creates suspense; do not sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists,and the struggle under the carpet, do not present rosy scenariosthe irony of existence: what makes life worth living does not come from the rosy side, the energy to live comes from thedark side, from all that makes us suffer, struggling against those negative powers forces use to live more deeply and fullyposition the problems in the foreground; positive images work against you--they create distrust

acknowledging the dark side makes you more convincing because you are being more truthful; we all live in dread, fear iswhen you don’t know what’s going to happen; dread is when you know what’s going to happen and you cannot stop it--werepress this dread (inflict it on others via sarcasm, cheating, abuse, indifference); we commit little evils that relieve thepressure and make us feel better, then we rationalize this; groups do the same, deny the existence of the negative whileinflicting their dread on other groupsa great leader is someone who has come to terms with his or her own mortality and as a result has compassion for others,expressed in stories; the golden rule of nature--do unto others what they do unto youskepticism--sees the difference between text and subtext, seeks what is really going on, huns for truth beneath appear-ance and surface, the real thoughs and feelings of people are unconscious and unexpressed, looking behind the maskdiscover a story by asking key questions: what does my protagonist want in order to restore balance in his/her life (desireis the blood of a story, a core need); what is keeping my protagonist from achieving his or her desire? doubt? fear? confu-sion? personal conflicts? social conflicts? physical conflicts? forces of nature? not enough time? antagonists from: people,society, time, space, objects; how would my protagonist decide to act in order to achieve his or her desire in the face ofthese antagonistic forces? finally, do I believe this that I just wrote as a story? childhood trauma makes you see life simultaneously 2 ways: direct real-time experience, but also recording it all as“material” to later ponder and understandself knowledge is the root of all great storytelling: if I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?great leaders are people with enormous self knowledge, self insight, self respect, balance with skepticism

Richard Florida and Jim Goodnight3 principles: keep employees intellectually engaged and remove distractions, make managers responsible for sparkingcreativity and remove arbitrary distinctions between managers and creatives, engage customers as creative partnerscreative capital is not collection of individuals’ ideas but a product of interactiondo not bribe creatives with stock options, instead thank them with even more challenging projectfind right intrinsic motivator for each group--beauty for artists, hunt for salespersonssend developers to conferences, let developers assemble in company eventsencourage employees to collaborate on books and papers publishedupdate tools of employeesoutsource no job functionssurvey research process for choosing which benefits to offerthe leader/ceo leaves the room when meetings become unproductivediscourage people from working long hoursestablish egalitarian work cultures, make managers do hands on workdo not withhold criticism of higher ups, no overconcern with titlesbring groups of people together to facilitate exchange of ideas managers clear away obstacles to creating for employees, procure needed materialshire hard, manage open, fire hardno penalty for honest mistakesact on customer complaints and suggestions, solicit feedback, track suggestion handling with databasecollect feedback at annual users’ conferencesalespersons collaborate with customers to come up with new solutionsprint names of software developers in manuals so they get phone callscreate bug free productsmanagers ask a lot of questions

Amabile Creativity Under the Gun the more time pressure on a day the less creative thinking on that day (BUT what is “creative thinking” and does it resultin “creating”?)people perceive themselves as having been more creative on days with more time pressure but real data contradicts thatmore time pressure on a day reduces creative thinking on that day and following days--called “pressure hangover”creativity need time to create ideas to combine with others and time to combiningtime to include exploratory activities within a task make the doing more creative; thinking through a task before doing itmakes the doing more creativecreative days have a particular set of working conditions: focus from isolation (= less collaboration), real urgency notarbitrary imposed deadlines; little switching of modes, schedules, topics of work; in absence of pressure when people explore and generate rather than identify problems to solve they had more creativethinkingcommunication, process checks, and interdepencency among roles at work all make the focus needed for creative think-ing rare and hard to keepfirst rule--avoid time pressure, it reduces creativitysecond rule--when low time pressure encourage playing with ideasthird rule--avoid time pressure by articulate goals that are realistic and carefully planned (= be German)fourth rule--protect time pressued people from interruptions, distraction, and unrelated demandsfifth rule--avoid arbitrary deadlines

sixth rule--avoid groups and meetings and any collaborations should be one on oneseventh rule--avoid schedule changes and goal changes

Amabile How to Kill Creativity coordination, productivity, and control can be had along with creativity--a win win possibility exists but requires certainconditionsassociation of creativity with artistic creativity causes confusion about where to achieve creativity in businesses--creativ-ity is needed everywhere including accounting (activity based example)creativity has parts--creative thinkiing, expertise, motivationexpertise fosters bigger space of possible idea wanderings, large space =s more creativity possibledisagreement is tolerated or encouraged causes more creativity because departure from norms looks like disagreementand negationcombine knowledge from disparate fieldspersevering through on a difficult problem increases chances for creativityincubation--setting aside difficult problems while working on something else, then returning to them with refreshed per-spective--helps creativityintrinsic motivation makes for more creativity than extrinsic motivation--money often reduces intrinsic motivationmost creativity when people are motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, challenge of the work itself, not byexternal pressures (how benri--boss can keep all the profits himself!)expertise and creative-thinking skills are more difficult and time consuming to influence, motivation is easiest and leasttime consuming to influence (if you are a wimpy social psychologist)managerial practices that affect creativity--challenge, freedom, resources, work-group features, supervisory encourage-ment, organization supportchallenge--match people to right assignemtns--ones that use expertise, creative thinking and ignite intrinsic motivationfreedom--autonomy about means, autonomy about ends not so needed (isn’t that benri--leaders can control what peopledo entirely and still get creativity)freedom--stable goalsresources--fake deadlines reduce time unnecessarily, tight resources redirect creativity into finding resourceswork-group features--mutually supportive groups with diversity of perspective and background makes creativity (homoge-neous teams kill creativity)work-group features--members share excitement over team’s goalwork-group features--will to help teammates through difficult periods and setbackswork-group features--recognize unique knowledge and perspective of other memberssupervisory encouragement--feel their work matters, via general recognition of their work before final financial resultsare in and knownsupervisory encouragement--not layers of delay for evaluations and criticism; not punishing people whose ideas do notwork outsupervisory encouragement--managers as role models of persevering and handling teams wellorganizational support--mandating info sharing and colaboration, and making sure political problems do not festerP&G corporate new venture--team members volunteered, team given enormous latitude about how, when, and wherethey worked (one product a heat pad copied from Japan!!!!!)

Dorothy Leonard and Susaan Straus Putting Your Company’s Whole Brain to Worklogical versus intuitive, collaborate versus by self, study first versus experience first = cognitive preferences--avoid clonesof self/others, seek creative abrasioncreate by knowing own cognitive preference profile firstcreate by establishing whole brain teams combining all cognitive preferences (Nissan hire designers in polar pairs)create by strategies that use teams’ full cognitive preference specturmcreate by managing the creative process--acknowledge differences first, make guideliness for handling conflict/disagree-ment, keep goal salient, time for divergent and convergent, communications tailored to cognitive preferences of receivernot sender, depersonalize conflicts

Thomas Davenport, Laurence Prusak, James Wilson Who’s Bringing You Hot Ideas (and How Are You Responding)?to create management innovation find idea practitioners who introduce new management practices to the organizationnowrecognize four functions in them--scouting for ideas in literature and conferences, packaging ideas in frames executivelike, sell ideas to layers of rank, implement ideas via prototypesrecognize idea practitioner personality traits--optimis, passion for ideas in general, self-confidencecreate roles for idea practitioners, set them loose with precise corporate values, encourage risk; reward them with intel-lectual stimulationget CEO backing for ideas “single greatest factor” (if this is single greatest factor then hierarchy is ALL!!!!!)create idea friendly culture that tolerates failures

Andrew Haragon and Robert Sutton Building an Innovation Factorycreate by knowledge brokering--using old ideas as raw materials for new ideas via different contexts around the old ideascreate by systematizing generation and testing of fresh ideas

experiental exposure to diverse working good ideas--get your hands and self in their contexts of invention and use, learnwhy and how they work, their goods and bad, observe people using themembed ideas in object displayed around for constant reminding/imaginingcreate by seeking analogies between new problems and old ideas displayedquickly turn ideas into real product/service/business model--to test and make improvements

Robert Simons Control in an Age of Empowermenttrade-off between control and creativity--want both, how to get bothfour control levers” diagnostic monitors of performance, belief systems embodied by managers, boundary systems tellingwhat not to do, interactive control systems sharing info collecting responses

Theodore Levitt Creativity is Not Enoughcreativity--generatng ideas is easy, innovation--putting ideas to work is hardinnovation requires--present ideas to executives wellinnovation requires--risk implementation failures, not all ideas workinnovation requires--balance flex with rigidity of organizationinnovation requires--courage, energy, staying power--so many ideas hang around for years because no one took responbil-ity for converting talk into actionpresent ideas plus what implementing it is likely to involve--cost, risk, manpower, time, particular peopleorganization can make innovating less risky--broad financial base and large pool of people = distributing risk across manypeople = lowers financial risk and career risk of involvementrecognize creative people who cannot implement and pair them with implementorsan idea’s dress: rank of proposer, complexity of idea, nature of industry, job and attitude of person receiving idea (load), organization permissive to new ideas often is less organized--conformity is a mission of any form of organization--so com-partmentalize/ specialize innovation some where within it

What Kind of Thing Academic Research Reports on Creativity in Business Are Telling Us The Example of Harvard Business Review’s On Point--The Creative Company

Twelve Creativ-ity Approaches:What Do TheyShare?

Points thatwere mainpoints for eacharticle are putbelow, notmere pointsmentioned onthe side of theargument.

Use All Safe Space Mental Life Un-Dis-Trac-tion

Use/Combine Diversi-ties

Except

allapproach: past/future,everyone,incremen-tal steps

supplyapproach:resources(diver-sity, rec-ognition.realisticdead-lines,extractfailurevalue)

playapproach:injectfear,removecommandand con-trol, setup playspace fortransition-ing

spacesapproach:anony-mous sug-gesting,outsideviewingin, saferiskspaces

storyapproach:expecta-tion ver-sus reality= story ofnegativesenoun-tered that“if” sus-pensateout-comes,acknowl-edgingdark sidemore =greatermorale/buy-in;together-ness fromreality ofthreat

intel-lectuallifeapproach: keepall intel-lectuallyengaged,updatetools,cross bor-ders,enact sug-gestions

focusapproach: dis-tractorsTHEenemy ofcreation =pressure,context/goalchanges,dead-lines,meetings

motive& skillsapproach:domain &createskills hardtoimprove,motiva-tion fastertoimproveby stable,realistic,intrinsicegoals

wholebrainapproach: mapcognitiveprefer-ences ofself andothers,messagefor others’CP notown, mixCP inteams,differ-ence han-dlingprocess

idea practi-tionerapproach: iden-tify IPs,identify &supportfunctions:scout,package,sell,imple-ment; findroles forIPs, CEObacking

combi-nato-ricsapproach: use oldideas innew con-texts by:experi-enceworkingideas,embedideas indisplayedobjects,seek anal-ogies,turn ideasintoimmedi-ate tests/proto-types

embedapproach: struc-ture hurtsand helpsinnova-tion: con-trols--monitors,beliefs,bound-aries,informing--spread riskbut createconfor-mity; findspecialplaceinsidestructurewhere lesscontrol canbe safelytolerated

Paul Barkerin What’sStifling theCreativityat Cool-burst?

Amabile inWhat’s Sti-fling theCreativityat Cool-burst?

Kets deVries inWhat’s Sti-fling theCreativityat Cool-burst?

GarethJones &ElspethMcFadzeanin What’sStifling theCreativityat Cool-burst?

RobertMcKee Sto-rytellingthat MovesPeople

Florida andGoodnightManagingfor Creativ-ity

Amabile,Hadley,KramerCreativityUnder theGun

AmabileHow to KillCreativity

Leonardand StrausPuttingYour Com-pany’sWholeBrain toWork

Davenport,Pursak, andWilsonWho’sBringingYou HotIdeas?

Hargadonand SuttonBuilding anInnovationFactory

SimonsControl inan Age ofEmpower-ment andLevitt Cre-ativity isNot Enough

VIO

LATE

DIVER-SIFY

directexperi-ence ofout ofofficeviews

groups ofdiverseskills andperspec-tives

promote mavericks who tried butgot blocked; encourage envisioningalternatives; ;hire people unlikethose now in company (spacesapproach column only)

experiential exposure to diverse working goodideas, get your hands and self in their contextsof use, learn why and how they work, theirgoods and bads, observe people using them(combinatorics approach column only)

COM-BINE

bringgroupstogetherfor ideaexchange

combineknowl-edge fromdifferentfields

createwholebrainteamshaving allcognitiveprofiletypestogether

DE-BOR-DER

combine knowledge from differentfields; mandate info sharing anddistribution (focus approach col-umn only)

invent by analogiesacross domains:between problems,between solutions(combinatoricsapproach column only)

FO

STER

SE

NSE

DE-POLI-TIFY

do not letpoliticalproblemsfester

DE-MONIFY

work hardcuz hardchallengenotrewards

intrinsic motivationout-creates extrinsic;most motivation fromchallenge and interestin task itself; motiva-tion easier to changethan expertise/cre-ative-thinking skills;(focus approach col-umn only)

rewardidea prac-titionerswith intel-lectualstimula-tion

DIS-ESTAB-LISH

employ-ees chal-lengeroutines inplace cuz“that’show wealways doit”

positionproblemsin thefore-ground,positiveimagesworkagainstyou, cre-ate dis-trust

ISO

LATE

FOCUS creative days = focus from isolation; real urgency not arbitrary deadlines;little switching of modes of work, schedules, goals; communication-col-laboration-process checks-interdependency all hinder focus; avoid timepressure by clear realistic goals; stop interruptions/distraction/s; avoidarbitrary deadlines; collaborate 1 on 1 not groups/meetings (this is focusapproach column only)

PERSE-VERE

make goals/schedules stable; persevering whenstymied encouraged; manager role models whopersevere when big obstacles loom (focusapproach column only)

innovation requirescourage, energy, stay-ing power = doingorganizational work(embed approach col-umn only last at right)

LEAVEALONE

protect from distractions/interruptions/meet-ings/reportings (focus approach column only)

SPREA

D

RIS

K

ENABLERISK/FAILURE

managerswho takerisks;extractvaluefrom fail-ures

encour-ageemploy-ees totake morerisks

no pen-alty forhonestmistakes

createideafriendlyculturethat toler-ates fail-ure

risk imple-menta-tionfailure,not allideas workout

INCRE-MENT

safe, step by step, ideas presentpeople will be comfortable with;employees spot areas needingimprovement (all approach columnonly)

start sug-gestionsystem

act on customer complaints andsuggestions; collect user feedback;sales collaborate with clients(intellectural life approach columnonly)

TESTIDEAS

quicklytest ideaswith pro-totypes--talkaroundprototypenot justaroundidea

PRO

VID

EO

PPO

RTU

NIT

Y

RECOG-NIZE

celebratebreak-thrus

find idea practitioners in your organization; findtheir functions: scouting, packaging, sellling,install via prototypes; (whole brain approachcolumn only)

BACK-ING

ensureseniormanagersupportfor inno-vationprojects

get CEObacking =singlemostimportant“singlegreatestfactor”

USE ALL use pastandpresent tobuildfuture

not fewdepts.;use everyemployee’s creativ-ity

identifyand useexistingstrengths;grow cre-ativityfromsense ofaccom-plishment

use oldideas innew con-texts

OPEN managernot knee-jerk pro-tecting ofstatus quo

eliminatecommandand con-trol

What Kind of Thing Academic Research Reports on Creativity in Business Are Telling Us The Example of Harvard Business Review’s On Point--The Creative Company

SUPPO

RT

CO

NC

RETELY

RESOURCE

set asideresourcesand timefor creat-ing

allow timefor inno-vationprocess

accumu-late ago-nists =createssuspense--can wemake it? =creates“together-ness”

time tocreateideas,time tocombinethem;

createroles foridea prac-titioners

SPACE establishplay space(transi-tionalwith mini-mal rules)

creatementallife ofindividu-als andgroups =send toconfer-ences,publishtogether,updatetools; nooutsourc-ing, sur-vey forbenefits,discour-age longhours, donot pullpuncheswhen cri-tiquinghigherups, egali-tarianwork cul-ture,managersclearawayobstacles

when lowtime pres-sureencourageplaying withideas; moreexpertise indomainmeans largespace ofpossibleimagi-naings; tol-eratedisagree-ments asdeparturesfrom normsappear firstas disagree-ments andlack of con-sensus;managerpracticesfor cre-ation: chal-lenge,freedom,resources,workgroupsolidarity,supervisorencourage-ment, orga-nizationbacking

define dif-ferencehandlingprocessfor allteams--acknowl-edge dif-ferences,guide-lines forconflictresolu-tion, goalskeptsalient,time fordivergentand con-vergentthought,communi-cationstailored tocognitiveprefer-ences ofreceivernotsender,deperson-alize con-flicts

createideafriendlyculturethat toler-ates fail-ure

embedideas inobjectsdisplayedfor simul-taneousviewing/scanning

TOOLS wishful thinking, brainwriting, object stimula-tion; hire facilitator (spaces approach columnonly)

EM

BRA

CE

NEG

AT

ION

DESPAIRDOOR-WAY

display struggle between expectation and real-ity in all its nastiness(story approach column only)

SKEPTI-CISM

see text/subtext, appearance/reality,espoused/enacted beliefs differences; peerbehind masks (story approach column only)

SCHIZO childhood trauma = doing experience + observ-ing you experiencing (recording it) (storyapproach column only)

NEGA-TION

embrace the dark side, elaborate it, from it comes vitalityand truth and self transformation; dread unacknowledgedbecomes inflicted unconsciously on others (story approachcolumn only)

DIS-GUISE

anony-mous sug-gesting;groupapplying

present ideas well to executives; present likelycosts of an idea--cost, risk, manpower, time,particular people; idea dress--rank of proposer,complexity of idea, nature of industry, job andattitude of person receiving idea (embedapproach column only--last column at right)

KNO

W

SELF

SEESELF

see selvesas others/clients seeus

get out ofcompanycontext torefreshviews

what makes life meaningful comesfrom the dark side, facing andstruggling and making it against allodds brings truth; great leaderknows own mortality = compassion= connects to others (storyapproach column only)

know yourown cog-nitive pro-file first

KNOW THY-SELF

self knowledge root of all great storytelling: if Iwere X what would I do? leader = enormous selfknowledge = compassion, insight, respect, skep-ticism (story approach column only)

know yourown cog-nitiveprefernces/style

MA

NA

GE

EMER

GENC

E

EMER-GENT

creative capital comes from inter-actions not persons alone or capa-bilities alone (intellectual lifeapproach column only)

DISTIN-GUISH

tailor intrinsic incentives of typepeople wish--beauty for artists,hunt for sales, etc. (intellectuallife approach column only)

INCUBA-TION

set aside difficult problems, work on somethingelse, then return = unconscious does work whileaway (focus approach collumn only)

TUNECON-TROL/CREATIVE TRADE-OFF

tilt to control or to creativity differently in dif-ferent parts of organization; control via moni-tor, beliefs, boundaries, info sharingd (embedapproach column only, last at right)

What Kind of Thing Academic Research Reports on Creativity in Business Are Telling Us The Example of Harvard Business Review’s On Point--The Creative Company

What To Notice in the Above “Findings” About Business Creativity

For all readers there is the practical question--did I know all this stuff already? Are any of these ideasI am reading new to me? Are the ideas that are new to me new because I missed something of value orare the ideas impractical idealisms from people not familiar with real obstacles and operating condi-tions in my situation?

The Lack of Diverse Diversity. The above work on creativity in business mentions diversity,almost in passing, almost as an “obvious” afterthought. A few articles stated that homogeneity wasbad for creativity, a few others suggested diverse backgrounds and perspectives were good for groupsbeing creative, a few suggest promoting mavericks not now promoted and hiring people not now hired.What is startling is the tiny diversity of possible diversities mentioned and the shallowness of treatmentof diversity in general in all the articles. That is the first problem--a lack of diverse types of diversitycovered.

The problem with “getting diverse people” is obvious and is this--there are billions of dimensions forcomparing people and by each of which they can be diverse--which of these billions of dimensions fos-ters creativity the best, assuming creativity is one thing, and which of them fosters each of 60 differentapproaches to creating, assuming creativity is not one thing. That is the second problem--which ofmany diversity types to use. Then there is the issue of the “amount” of diversity along each of thosedimensions. That is the third problem--how much of a particular type of diversity to use. What sort ofdiversity, how much of it, is needed for creativity? What are the collateral costs of that diversity, whatdoes it hurt while it helps creativity of certain sorts in certain ways? Just getting “some” diversity andhoping it will help you create in “any” particular way--is a fools paradise of illusion. That is the fourthproblem--what happens, other than creativity benefits, when a certain amount of a certain type ofdiversity gets deployed to “up” creativity?

The fifth problem is nothing is said about how to use diversity. Apparently you just get some and itkind of automatically sits there and “spices” up things in a creative direction. You have to be prettynaive to believe this--apparently academics know next to nothing about both kinds of diversity and howto use or do anything creative with them. The five aspects to using diversity to create, mentionedhere, are unexplored in contemporary research on creativity in business, and more unfortunately,unmentioned.

Tuning the Control versus Creativity Trade-off. Interestingly some of the articles directlyaddress the issue that--what “organization” is and does is “organize”-- that is, create certain things(made of people and systems) going in certain depended upon directions at depended upon speeds andcosts. Bad nasty things that destroy playing around, being open and free, dancing among flowers--inother words, that hinder creativity--like deadlines, schedules, budgets, results achieved at certaintimes and costs-- result from “organizing” because, in part, they are essential for getting a job done.Creativity in business is a kind of “un-organizing”--to be creative you un-organize. One article abovementioned this point (in the except approach) but the others ignore it entirely. In practical reality, itcannot be ignored at all if you are serious about creating in business.

Here is the crux of the issue, missed by all the articles above. There is a trade-off--creativity undoessome of the core things that organizing does, and vice versa, organizing undoes some of the core thingsthat creativity does. Trade-offs require tuning to find an appropriate intermediate value. Who issmart enough, broad enough, educated enough to spot when a key crucial norm or boundary is beingviolated for a creative result of too little promise to justify the harms and consequences involved?Getting someone to make this judgement who is great at operating an organization for continued busi-ness survival, is nearly impossible--the two domains require such different skills. Executives good atprofit and business survival are not well-practiced in risk-taking, boundary ignoring, and flower spread-ing. Business consultants and professors are flattering executives by pretending that they can, easily,by an act of will (or by merely purchasing a nice juicy consult by the professor involved) be excellent atrunning a business and managing departures from, undoings of, its more essential boundaries, rules,norms and the like in order to foster creativity from it. There are no such people--the skills of doingthe one are enormously different than, opposite to, the skills of doing the other! That is why we haveHewlets and Packards. It is why we have couples made of men and women. Much more will be madeof this split CEO phenomenon later in this book.

The only CEOs able to make this sort of judgement have Ph.D.s in hard sciences, or histories of beinginventors themselves, and the like. Normal MBA finance or marketting type CEOs simply cannot figure

out when a violation is good and when it is bad, both for creativity and for the business staying orga-nized enough to survive. Hannah Arendt had it right--actions--injections of the truly new into history,are not works, things designed that function as planned, hence actions have unforeseen (becauseunforeseeable) consequences.. CEOs who can see the unforeseeable are not possible; CEOs who knowwhat to do about not seeing the unforeseeable are possible but are Phd.s themselves in research fieldsor inventors for the most part.

Notice the backing function in the table above. Some articles emphasized that the single most impor-tant factor was CEO backing of innovative ideas. This intensifies the issue treated immediately abovein this section--are CEOs smart enough to manage organizing and unorganizings for creation? Can CEOs“back” the un-doing of what is their own primary responsibility and accomplishment? Can CEOs “back”such violations and un-organizings when no one can know their consequences because they are actionsnot works? If normal CEOs cannot handle this, yet some do, what traits are needed in CEOs who canhandle this duality--organizing and un-organizing for creativity?

Missing Disguise. Since the Harvard Business Review is not an academic journal, it does not citefull references, listing a few readings instead. Nevertheless, it is strange to cover innovation in busi-ness without mentioning Van de Ven at the University of Minnesota, who did one of the most seriouslongitudinal research studies ever done on actual innovations flowing over years in and out of variousdepartments, ventures, budgets, schedules, management changes, reorganizations, nominal championsof them, and the like. Van de Ven found disguise was a major determinant of success. Innovationsnearly always had to go through numerous clever disguisings. The above articles mention disguisingsonce and not centrally. The articles surveyed above are idealizations in this sense--they assume inno-vations will be popular, welcomed, and liked, when this is nearly never true.

There is a further external-to-the-company dimension of disguise. New ideas have this trait of beingstollen. People outside the firm like to steal them. They set up budgets and industrial spying to getthem. Several of the articles above suggest lots of information distributing, sharing, crossing ofdepartmental and other boundaries, mixing and combining of persons and functions. That is wonderfulexcept it undoes the isolation that keeps ideas from being stollen. Disguise is needed in two ways, toprotect innovations from hostile conservative and fragile-ego forces in firms, and to protect them fromsnooping competitors inside and outside the firm.

Finally, ideas have to surprise to be judged creative. If leaks and hints seep out all the time, aboutthem, then everyone learns them by small un-impressive increments, and no great surprise ever even-tuates. Better by far, to attract the attention and resources to implement a great bold new idea, toamaze people with the announcement of something robust, that has been developed in secret for quitea while, without hints leaking out.

The Power of the Negative and the Despair Doorway. As I hinted above, professors shareso many cultures with businessmen as well as being “bribed” indirectly to never criticize them, that weexpect the omission of negativity by businessmen to appear fully, undiminished, in academic researchon creativity in business--and it does. The above articles had nearly no comments at all about thepower of negation and the door to all insight requiring despair, absoluate despair over getting to yourgoal with all that you now know. If the power of negation and the essential role of despair areremoved from creativity, of course, all creativity evaporates as well, and you get a namby pamby ide-alist adolescent distortion of creativity, creativity-ish-ness in analogy with truthy-ness. All the abovearticles are about creativity-ish-ness not about creativity, and we know this, absolutely know this,because only one of them deals with the power of negativity and that one leaves out the despair door-way into insight (the story approach).

We can also easily see how the failure to deal with disguise, from the section above, comes from fail-ure here to include the power of the negative and the despair doorway into insight. It is telling thatonly the screen writer from Hollywood, among the writers in the Harvard On Point, admitted theessential core central role of negativity in creation. It is the nasty, negative, biting, disagreeable one,who does not conform, who sees fault everywhere, who rebels, who mocks, who belittles higher ups--who creates. Only the screen writer is prepared for this--the others are afraid of it and omit it--do nothandle it. They are all good little boys and girls and have been all their pampered lives. Yes youmight get creativity out of them but only the conventional wimpy sort that Procter and Gamble getsfrom its Corporate New Ventures program--the result: all of Amabile’s environment supports installedin a special group so they can attain brilliant ideas like taking a hot pad sold everywhere for nearly tenyears in Japan and adapt it to the US market. It takes a giant new venture program apparently to getP&G to have the courage to copy a huge already successful product abroad in the US market. That iswimpy creativity at work for you. Most of the West Coast CEOs that I know would consider such resultsthe proof of a stodgy culture not the evidence of its elimination. The Harvard work on creativity inbusiness above presents systems for achieving that sort of creativity--ten years after massive success inJapan a product gets copied by a giant US firm--after the US firm installs an exciting Harvard designedexception to its usually stodgy culture. Wowie--if that result inspires you, you are too wimpy for thisbook--read elsewhere.

Lastly, consider the CEO role. We think of it as coach, coaxer, persuader, encourager and the like--thepress encourages these images. However, CEOs are often the only embodiment of the negative inentire corporations--they are the only people formally empowered to be negative, to fire, to dis-orga-nize, to drop, to sell. They exercise cutting and shrinking, dropping and selling off, where everyoneelse in the organization has much reduced permission to act negatively. The distribution of negativityamong roles, departments, functions, and layers of any organization is a key measure of how much“leadership” exists in it. Similarly the distribution of positivity--the ability to hire, build, spend, orga-nize, start up--is a key measure of how much authority is in an organization. Fixed organizations canhave remarkably different amounts of total authority exercised in them, depending on how negativityand positivity are distributed throughout. Organizations with more authority, in an absolutely sense,exercised can do more anything, including more creation, than others. See references later in thisbook to just-in-time authority systems.

Skepticism, Schizo, and Know Thyself.

The role of doubt in the history of science is immense and central. The role of doubt, dressed up asrebellion and fantasy, in art is equally immense and central. The role of doubt in the above Harvardwork on creativity is nil, barely mentioned. Apparently creating in business has nearly no overlap withcreating in science and art. I doubt it.

A similar issue is the split person--the person who lived experience in real time, and who, at the sametime, observed and recorded what was in that experience. So many creators are like this, in scienceand the arts. Are creators in business without this? I doubt it.

Finally, knowing thyself, in the sense of choosing to use one’s biases and bents, one’s talents andflaws, is a core part of creativity in science and the arts. Is it not of worth in business creativity? Idoubt it.

These three--skepticism, schizo, and knowing thyself--are both emotives and negatives--both of whichmen, not women, shun and therefore are not good at. The male American techno cultures that domi-nate modern business rule out these sorts of emotional and negative dimensions of work and thought,and thereby rule out creativity in toto.

Only the Hollywood screen writer sees these elements and faces emotion and negation courageouslyinstead of wimpily or gutlessly.

What are These Well Populated “Spaces” and “Resources” Category Above? Quite afew articles above dealt with defining spaces in which creativity can occur. These spaces requireresources: time (no deadlines) and budgets (things and facilities and persons). What are these wellpopulated categories all about? This is the “un-organize in order to create” phenomenon as recog-nized by the authors above. The authors above do not recognize that creating within an organizationinvolves un-organizing things, till enough free time and emotional and goal and means space is therefor changing and toying and combining and violating to occur. They see the free time, emotional, goal,and means freedom needed, and so on but they do not note it as undoing what organizing inherentlydoes. They, after all, sell consulting to businesses and could not do this if they had lots of inherentconflicts between creating and organizing as businessses do it.

Getting resources for creating is not as obvious and easy as it seems. Creating costs time and otherresources--how much--no one knows. People in a business get paid for--at standard employee seniorityand skill rates. If a project takes 2 years instead of one, then lots of money for salaries and benefitsand facilities goes out the window. Businesses tend to care about that. How much to bet on an ideanot now fully clear or born--that is a hard judgement to make. In science and art there are viable mar-ginal lifestyles. We all know this--artists who starve for ten years, generating works no one buys, then,who come to the attention of one well placed buyer, and suddenly they are millionaires and on all themuseum walls and media. Societies handle this investment question by making marginal lifestyles via-ble so it costs little to support lots of starving artists while they make things of possible later value.Companies should seriously consider doing the same--creating viable marginal lifestyles for their owncreators. This goes unmentioned by all the articles above--I find that almost an impossibility. Howcould they have missed such a big element in societal creativity? In reality, we know how they missedit--they are the cultures of business that they study--the blind leading the blind point again.

By minimizing the inherent, ineluctible conflict between organizing--getting things going in pre-decided dependable speeds and directions--and creating--doing things that those directions are notpointed at--the authors above pretend that creating is not deep undoing of what executives and cul-tures and “our ways” do. By minimizing this they pretend that creating is easy in business. This doesnot serve well anyone at all. It sells and that is all--it does not establish creativity but leads to disap-pointed clients in the long term.

Persevere and Disguise. What do you have to persevere over and against? Changes in budget,changes in organization, changes in management, changes in policy, changes in firm, changes inemployees, changes in technology--these flow continually around and through all businesses. They arenot generally very stable and any innovation not do-able in instants is therefore going to have to have away of surviving many of them. Van de Ven’s excellent University of Minnesota work, because it waslongitudinal, discovered common research knowledge on creating was false. Champions were late,after the fact and usually nominal only--innovation coalitions chose them rather than they forming coa-litions to innovate something. Disguises were needed to hide innovations from budget, schedule, orga-nization and other changes. Sometimes years of hiding were needed and the idea re-emerged withentirely new employees, leaders, and sponsors.

The Harvard works, because they chinch on funding by doing cross-sectional research only or diarywriting over weeks not years, miss these dynamics of focus carried on as environments flow and churnaround that focus. They miss the essential elements of long term payoff creativity projects and,unconsciously, without saying so, end up being entirely about short term incremental, gradual, easy,unimpressive creativity projects like P&G’s Corporate New Ventures inventing “taking a hot sellingproduct from Japan, ten years late, and trying it in the US and elsewhere”--wowie, Nobel Prize herewe come!

Curiosity, Interest, Drive, Persistance, Investing in Failing Lines of Action--What Does Intrinsic Motivation Hide? Much of the research on creativity in business is costly and doneby schools like Harvard due to greater funds and entre there. Much of Harvard’s research on creativityis about conditions that foster “intrinsic motivation”. What is that? The results published pertain tohow intrinsic motivation is hurt or helped by particular conditions--but the outcome variable--intrinsicmotivation--is left partial, vague, ill-defined--perhaps so as to get consults for Harvard faculty. I donot really know. But if you examine what the term “intrinsic motivation” hides, it hides a lot, a suspi-ciously lot.

Let us consider someone lacking all curiosity. If I install the conditions that Harvard’s partly publishedresearch suggests, am I going to get someone curious? No, I get someone curios-er, from a low baseimproved, but not yet, probably useful. Consider someone lacking all interest. If I install Harvard’spartly published conditions, do I get someone having great interests? Not not at all--I get someonehaving more interests or greater ones than they had at the start from an abysmal base line. Considersomeone lacking all drive--if I install the Harvard conditions will I get someone of great drive? No.Consider persistance, risk-taking-ness, perspicacity, adaptability, ability to ignore intrusions and dis-tractions, and on and on. In every case, the Harvard partially published conditions will “improvescores on our [proprietary] instrument” as the articles above say, but they do not say that creativityimproves greatly and the examples of great improvement they provide center on P&G’s achievement ofcopying a fully successful Japanese product in the US market--not Nobel Prize stuff exactly. In short,improvements from very low baselines can be done using methods never fully published by a Harvardalways on the lookout for money. Is that enough for you?

Perhaps your business has such abysmal baselines of support and tolerance for creativity that movingfrom cockroach levels to dog levels of creativity is enough to get you promoted? Improvement is all toooften and all too easily substituted for “achieving robust levels” of something, both in research and inmanager bragging about own recent “accomplishments”. If the improvement is from a low base line ofperformance, if it is expensive or hard to maintain, if it soon gets replaced as an emphasis as otherconditions flux and flow around it--then it becomes of zero worth to anyone. “A little teeny weeny bitmore of X” may get you promoted at P&G and at Harvard but it will not get you promoted in my ownfirms!

Creativity Kills Businesses. When you join, as an employee, one of the big global consultingfirms you discover they sell 8 to 10 year old ideas to firms too timid to do anything unless nearly alltheir peer and competitor firms are already doing it. If everyone is already buying IBM then we willtoo--firm after firm affirms courageously and masculinely. You cannot sell contemporary proven tech-nologies--they are scary and too much for most firms. General consultancies know this well. So, youcan generalize this--within firms you cannot sell the present, and the new. Between firms you cannotsell the present and the new. To them all you can sell the recent past, stuff about 8 to 10 years old.

In that context, creativity is neither needed nor profitable. Why all the bother to look like it and do orpretend to do it? Add to this Harvard installing Corporate New Venture programs fully capable of get-ting giant companies to notice and copy giant product successes by other companies in Japan, and youget the idea that businesses aspire to nearly no levels of creativity. They make lots of money, pres-ently, using very low levels of creativity--safe, incremental, creations that do not reduce CEO rip-offsand top monkey excesses. Why upset the applecart and be truly creative instead of safe, incremental,P&G-ish creative? The research on creativity in business pretends, on the professor side, and on thebusiness client payee side, that robust creativity is needed, wanted, and tolerated. Everyone is lying--robust levels of creativity scare people, are intrusions ruining well oiled present processes producinglots of money already, and put careers at risk--who needs them.

Any honest and complete treatment of creativity in business must address this fact face on, honestly,and fully--creativity kills careers and businesses, careers and businesses now with laughably small lev-els of safe little P&G-ish incremental creativity make lots of money. It just may really be that, asJames Marsh said 50 years ago--CEOs and VPs and Harvard professors “need to look creative and looklike they are installing robust levels of creativity” rather than actually do it. It is all appearances thatare needed, not realities! We will investigate this later in this book--but it is perfectly stunninglyclear from the tables above that the Harvard work on creativity in business slights this, omits it, as anissue. They proudly ballyhoo achievement, after installing environmental conditions that meet all theunpublished wonderful criteria of social science survey instruments they sell in consults, of noticingmajor market success products in Japan and copying them in the US. Wowie! Let’s go and learn howwe too can learn the obvious and copy it globally! You have got to be kidding! Dilbert has it right,again: I saw this giant elephantine success hot pad product making lots of money in Japan and I gotthis brilliant idea after Harvard adjusted 78 dimensions of my work environment--let’s sell a similar butimproved version of that product in the US. Genius! Einstein! Wonderful! You have got to be kid-ding. Let’s get real about creativity! The professors and their business clients are well deserving ofmockery--if this is the kind of improved creativity to which you aspire, put down this book and stayaway from me the rest of your life--I do not want to meet your sorry self, I could not withstand theboredom of lunch conversations with you.

Conclusion--Not Male Enough, Not Female Enough, Not Anything Enough. I could goon and on--and write hundreds of pages, literally, about the failings of current research from businessschools at top colleges on creativity in business. However, why beat a dead horse? By now readershave formed some conclusions of their own. Dilbert has it about right--all the negativity banishedfrom ass-kissing academics needing funds from businesses--is found in his cartoons. We need Harvardsable and willing to hire people with Doonebury levels of reality and honesty about them. We are notsoon going to get that, I am afraid, hence my writing of this book. I will, at any rate, give it a try.

I conducted a little off the cuff study last year by asking all the Japanese junior high school girls goinghome from school past my house, what was the most creative project they had observed or partici-pated in, what made it creative, what did it have to overcome, what resisted it, what ended up over-coming that resistance, what sorts of people create, what makes them able to or not able to create,and similar questions. [As a disclaimer I need to inform readers here that Japanese junior high schoolage girls are major drivers of creative product introductions in many product categories in Japan andall of East Asia, leading trends that spread through Korea and China like wildfires.] I got 88% of theabove insights on creativity from a sample of just over 56 of these girls. I am not yet cynical enough toactually publish it as a journal article, but I find the results, not surprising. Most publishing on creativ-ity in business is juvenile and adolescent, however big and impressive the social science statistics in itare. The same CEOs who have a hard time judging when violators and violations are worth the risksthey expose the firm to for the sake of creations they may make, have a hard time judging whetherfancy “instruments” and “validated scales” actually produce something of more worth than conve-nience samples of Japanese junior high school girls. Not surprising, not surprising at all!

Finally, there is a wimpy-ness that infests academics and their research of everything, including busi-ness. There is a wimpy-ness in businessmen that infests all that they do and all the systems they useand sell and build. Men in businesses end up emasculated by the monkey dynamics of being lessermonkeys in a hierarchy dominated by one great big monkey making hundreds of millions even whenruining the stock value and the sales of the firm. Men in academia end up emasculated by theirdependency on funding from businesses--choosing safe topics not too negative about anything in thefirm. In short, wimps researching wimps.

Yet academics lack femininity and businessmen lack femininity as well, inspite of lacking masculinity.Lacking masculinity does not make you powerfully feminine! There is so much more on this later inthis book it would be a shame to partially present it here so I will stop. But academic research on cre-ativity in business lacks masculinity and it lacks femininity as well--it is a wimpy pale washed out rendi-tion of a world without negatives where good little boys and girls do what their bosses say nicely whilemaking lots of nice innovations--like copying huge successful Japanese products ten years later anddoing something like them in the US market. Wowie!! If that is your criterion of creativity--buy somedog food--dog food illustrates that sort of creativity fully--you do not need books.

Dis-Illusioning Creativity: Stripping It of Illusions

Creativity in Business: Toys for Boys, Tools for Fools, and Getting Real about CreatingThis nature of this chapter is “getting real”. This chapter intends to demonstrate what a little “get-ting real” can do for our understanding of how business and creativity do now relate and should relateor could somehow in the future be made to relate. This chapter involves conceptual house cleaning ofhow we think and talk about creativity and more important some moral and emotional house cleaningof that. I have been somewhat creative in NGO 3rd world village development, in fund raising, in grad-uate research, in the arts, in politics, in artificial intelligence software, and in global corporations. Iused several specific models of creativity to do that--the culture mixing, events, subcreations, and rec-ommendations models. These I introduce below in this chapter. It was organizationally easy for me tobe creative in global corporations--I entered them immune to their five principal cultures. However itwas personally hard for me because, in order to create, the “I” that I was at the time was not capableof creation. I had to grow into a new “I” before I could create. Similarly, perhaps, not a few readersof this book will have to change in order to create. The “you” that you now are will have to drop awayin favor of a new “you” that you begin construction of in the chapter below. I will discuss some irritat-ing un-admirable aspects of life and work in big organizations, calling things by their real names, to seta realistic context for creativity in such organizations. As long as we pretend that big business organi-zations are wonderful and without flaw, we get nowhere discussing why such organizations do not haveall that much creativity in them. Throughout the chapter below, I will refer repeatedly to five cul-tures--American culture, male culture, technology culture, capitalist culture, and hierarchy-monkey-games culture (as the US general said “it is asses all the way up” in a chimpanzee troop’s hierarchy,like the military command structure). These are cultures so much a part of us they are like water is tofish. Seeing such waters we swim in, opens up a huge powerful doorway into creativity, that I get spe-cific about at the end of this talk. Among the realities we face when we try to create in business orga-nizations is the courage-surveillance trade-off. Businesses are organized as places of omni-presentsurveillance of everyone by everyone else. This forces everyone to face reactions by partly and il-informed others for all that they do. Ultimately people reduce what they do, so as to not be hassled byall these reactions. Surveillance drives creativity out of all organizations that have it. Below I con-sider what this means, ultimately, for creating in organizations.

Each section of the chapter below is followed by bullets summarizing its key points. It is hoped thatreaders will depend on these summaries to visualize the links in my arguments, making them easier torecall and apply.

Briefly, I will introduce the topics covered in the rest of this chapter. Experience using this chapterwith students and consulting clients found that seeing the entire argument briefly up front, greatlyimproved dealing with its detailed sub-arguments in the rest of the chapter.

toys for boys, tools for fools, getting real about creativity in businessThere is a lot of selling of “things” in this world and hormones drive men towards

“toys” all their lives. Not surprisingly, male hormone dynamics play amajor role in the inventing, producing, and selling of “things”--boxes,devices, “toys for boys”. A lot of the apparently creative is really toyingwith things and making things into toys. It is not serious in large part. Simi-larly, consultants promoting creativity in business tend towards tools of twosorts--clever thinking gimmicks and social science “instrument” gimmicks.Though the evidence is that no creativity at all results from deployment ofeither of these types of tool, promoters still sell them and customers stillbuy them. This apparent creativity is not creative at all. From both ofthese perspectives, to do creation in business, one first has to get a bit morereal about what is “real creativity” and what is merely apparent creativityand creativity “for show”.

inauthentic reasons for interest in creativity--the career system distortscreativity

Most of the interest in creativity in business comes not from needs of any businessbut from needs of people having careers. The career system generates byfar most of the interest in and use of creativity in business. Employees usecreativity to get attention of higher ups--a crucial resource for career build-ing wherever people organize themselves in monkey-like hierarchies of rank.Consultants can sell creativity instruments and services that have minimalimpact on actual creativity of the business because they are being hired fora different impact--getting their clients promoted.

the costs of inauthentic interest in creativity--simultaneous overshootingand undershooting creativity

Inauthentic use of and promotion of creativity is not without costs and heavy con-sequences. It causes overshooting--exaggerations of creativity, of the needfor it, of the amount of it around and achieved. It causes undershooting--apparent creativity becomes so consuming that people forget to do any realcreating. Creating just to the point of promotion gets done then dropped.The career system short circuits creation. So we end up with the paradox--too much creativity while having too little of it. This is a familiar problem--the standard inventory problem of simultaneous overshoot and undershoot.

tampering--statistical, complexity, and creativityWhen managers intervene in a process without solid knowledge of what determines

aspects of the process, their interventions inevitably make unwantedaspects much worse and wanted aspects much weaker. Such interventionsnot based on solid knowledge of how processes work was called “tampering”by Dr. Deming the crusty old quality guru of the late 20th century. Thereare, it turns out, three forms of such tampering--statistical, complexity, andcreativity tampering. Creativity tampering occurs when people, ignorant ofthe number of diverse models of creating that exist (in general and realizedin their own firm) support one or two models that they know about andthereby undermine many more models of creating that they are not awareof that yet operate in their firm. Overall, their support of the few modelsthey know reduces more creativity than it generates. This is creativity tam-pering.

the uncreativity of creating--neurotic creativitySocieties like individual persons are neurotic--they have talents that represent long

past focuses, and that hence, have costs associated with them, all the thingsnot focussed on while developing the talent. Societies hide these costs oftheir talents from themselves. They, when presented with clear conse-quences of their talents, deny any connection between that talent and theimmense costs associated with it. Societies are neurotic about these, theycannot see “the connections” involved. That means societies are willing tocall “a solution” only things guaranteed not to solve their biggest and deep-est problems. What they call “a solution” or “creative” is often, and some-times, always, something unable to solve their most important problems.US society, for one example, tends to prefer “creativity” as a solution toproblems caused by too much creativity. Certain types of solution are sopreferred, biased-for, that societies irrationally try to solve everything witha few favored solution types. Outsiders see this and laugh at it, but partic-ular societies can stay hung up on these illusions for centuries, with muchsuffering and failure along the way.

reducing creativity by supporting it--(it is not an “it”)The assumption is often made, by you the readers of this book, by business execu-

tives, and by professors, that, because we have one word for it, “creativ-ity”, that it is one thing. There is a lot of evidence that creativity is manyplural things not one thing. Suppose creativity is 60 things--that there are60 models of what all of creativity is, each seeing and emphasizing a differ-ent aspect of creating. When we evaluate an environment for how it sup-ports and hinders “creativity” what are we doing? If we have a clear validmodel of the 60 varieties of defining creativity, we are okay. But if we,instead, treat creativity as if it were one thing--when we find environmentconditions that “support” the one model of creativity we take for all of it,those conditions may be helping that one model, but may be hurting a dozenother models. Those conditions, if installed, may reduce far more creativ-ity than they help, because the installers--consultant, professor, and clientalike--assumed creativity was one thing, and did not account for conditioneffects on other models of creativity not recognized by them.

educatedness as a primary route to creativity

Creating requires people who stand outside themselves, who stand outside all thatraised them. Such people perceive and have contexts for all that is withinthem, that used to be unconsciously powerful within them, till theysearched it out, brought it to conscious examination, and asked--what putthis stuff inside me and should I put better stuff than it inside me now, con-sciously, to improve my self? Such people can see and aim for and achieve“surprising” and “amazing” things that, those around them who grew upwith them, cannot see, aim for, and achieve. What creates such people?Not creativity but educatedness--education produces it, higher education.Educated people undo what socialization processes do to them. Educationmakes people aware of contents operating inside them that they did notconsciously choose--contents put there unconsciously while they grew upsomewhere. Education asks people to become aware of these involuntarycontents of their own selves and replace them with better contents from thebest in history and in the contemporary world. This is one principal functionof college. One powerful route to creating creativity is higher education ofpeople, of people who “went” to college without really “being” there.

defining creativity--using the word and concept carefully and consistently--clearing away conceptual brush

When an inventor with a track record of dozens of prior inventions invents a newone--is he being creative or is he merely continuing a “normal for him” worktrend? Can anyone create who does not first differ from their own past self?Is there any kind of creating that does not require personal growth beyondwhat one was when one did past creatings? Can people learn to differ fromthemselves, their recent past ones, all their lives? Does creating a self,which we all do, prepare us all for more historic types of creating? The word“create” means just generating stuff--we create documents and soups fordinner. Is there some way, say by doing a lot of it, that mere generating cansomehow grow into historic levels of creating? Why do we all want to bemore creative than we now are? Why do we want the world and workplacesand families within it to be more creative than they now are? Why ask orga-nizations established for consistent execution of producing something ratheruncreative, that have become rather good at that producing (businesses), tobecome great, instead, at something else--creating? In this section allthese questions are considered and some of them given solid answers.

a one minute creativity courage testPeople in business and professors talk about violating norms and traditions, taking

risks, and all that sort of thing, quite casually, as if, when people areordered by their bosses to do such things, they have no trouble doing them.Going beyond organization boundaries, personal comfort zones, old rulesand procedures, overt present priorities and emphases, traditions and sys-tems, tends to be resisted, punished, and extirpated by organizationsinvolved. People who, nevertheless, continue violation and departure fromnorms and comfort zones, in the name of creativity or anything else, take alot of risk and abuse. It takes courage to create. Most of the people read-ing this book simply lack the courage for creating, and they always will.They may like to pretend that they want to create, but what they want is akind of creating without consequences, costs, risks, and career troubles. Nosuch forms of creativity exist. Professors keep promising it without being atall able to deliver it. Professors write entire books about “normalizing”creativity and creating “creativity-promoting” cultures, by which they meancultures that so “support” creating that it becomes normal and easy for“anyone” to create. Such creating ends up like the drawing that small chil-dren take home from school--”creative” in the sense of it was generated bysomeone, but not “creative” in the sense that people 100 years from nowwill be impressed when presented with it.

relational and representational defining of creativityWords like “creativity”, “effectiveness” and “educatedness” make us think that

creativity is one thing, effectiveness is one thing, and educatedness is onething. This assumption, from terminology, from having one word for some-thing, that the phenomenon that word points to is one thing is unwarrantedand usually false. Words like “creativity” are vague. We all use them as ifwhat they mean is something we all also agree on. However, when we areasked, in valid statistical samples, what such words mean, it turns out theymean different things for different people and different things for the sameperson asked different times. How do we make precise, stable, and usablethe meaning of words like “creativity”? Science handles this by developingrelational definitions--that distinguish a concept like creativity from con-cepts on the same level like effectiveness and educatedness--and by devel-oping representational definitions--that show what an idea is by dealing with

its component ideas, what it contains and implies, both facts and proce-dures of handling. Here we present representational and relational defini-tions of “creativity” so, in the rest of this book, we can talk precisely aboutit and use it with precision.

the creativity implementation paradoxesOrganizations today, and their leaders and professor consultants, are shutting

down more creativity than they generate, by their efforts to become morecreative. The tactics that support the one or two models of creating thatthey know about, unknown to them, as side-effects shut down dozens ofother models of creating in their organization that they cannot see becausethey do not know these models. Organizations today are working hard toimprove the one or two models of creativity that they have, while failing tolearn about and install much more relevant and powerful other models ofcreativity, that they are not aware of. Thinking that creativity is one thingis a major way to achieve little or no creativity from much creativity pro-moting activity.

connection as a self limiting route to creativityLots of companies are selling tools and products to “help your company be more

creative”. All of these products and services connect things and connectpeople more, faster, and better. The assumption is: more connectionequals more creativity. This assumption is partly true but mostly false. Inthe beginning, new connection systems spawn creativity as ideas and per-sons not formerly in close contact, begin to interact. However, this is a selflimiting process. As familiarity rises, quantity and quality of interactionnosedives, so ultimately such systems destroy permanently nearly all formsof creativity among their members.

the recommendations and subcreations models of creating--what they tellus about business blocks to creating

In the Orthogonal Disciplines Research Project 315 people nominated “orthogonal”fields, areas of knowledge that determined who, in old traditional fields likemedicine and physics, rose to the top. 54 such orthogonals were nominated,then the 315 nominated 150 people they knew in each of those 54 areas,that is, 150 highly educated people, 150 highly effective people, 150 highlycreative people, and so on for 51 other orthogonal disciplines. These setsof 150 were then surveyed and interviewed, creating categorical models ofthe skills they shared. In this way 60 models of creating were found, one ofwhich had 64 steps of becoming a creator and 64 steps of creating, andanother model, the subcreations model, presented small preparatory cre-ations that lead to larger scale big historic ones. These two models--therecommendations model of 128 steps, and the subcreations model of 16types of preparatory creations--are enough to tell us quite a lot about howcreativity and business interact. One, the omni-present surveillance inbusinesses, all snooping on and observing all, makes it costly to stand outand be different (so everyone minimizes exposure to il-informed opinions ofviewing others, reducing creativity). Two, conformism and risk avoidancereign in business because positive appearing is well rewarded so actualaccomplishment is not needed and failures are pounced on to destroycareers (by others wanting to move into the opening thusly created bydestroying you). Three, subcreation are forbidden in most businesses--inventions of work style and life style are stifled by corporate norms andtraditions of “how we do things here”. Four, wild gyrations of context, re-organizations, budget changes, changes of management and personnel flowcontinually through all projects in all businesses so “what is creative” is con-stantly changing as the outlook and standpoint continually evolves. The rec-ommendations model of creativity is outlined, at a marcro level of 8 types ofsteps not 128 detailed steps, below.

Create a Creative Life1 Make Interior Room--emotional space, find your self, liberate, create subworlds2 Make Exterior Room--locate the creation process, create creation environments, focus, optimize

activity3 Mental Travel--diversify, broaden, extend horizons, time travel4 Perceive Paradox--mystify, demystify, balance, unbalance

Use That Creative Life to Create Creative Works5 Create Creation Machine--select creation type, invent tools, establish loops, recursively define

problems6 Think--generate, associate, decompose, map analogies7 Conquer--commit to victory, establish work discipline (exceptionlessness), normalize creation,

establish flow8 Manage Emergence--establish population automatons, establish reflexivity, tune performance, prune

away noise.

managing by events--a primary route to creating in businessThere is a lot of phony creativity and a lot of phony products “to enable” “to sup-

port” creativity because people can sell systems that foster creativity(mostly because flashy projects that “look” creative, whether they are ornot, get people noticed by upper management and promoted). The actualpotential for technology to assist creativity differs by which model of cre-ativity you wish assisted. A lot of theories guide the use of technology insupport of things like effectiveness, educatedness, and creativity: compu-tational sociality theory, social automaton theory, space type theory, infoecology theory, network theory, cognitive democracy theory, processware,socialware, pulsed systems theory, social indexing, social virtuality, agileevent-built firms, general empirical computation. In the recommendationsmodel the role of tools is restricted to 1 of 8 big steps, equals a minimal roleof modest if any impact--you cannot get creativity by changing tools. Thatis a lie sold by vendors of tools, wanting to sell to you. They have no evi-dence that any tool ever increased any creativity. A major conflictbetween horizontal flat global network-connected work process systems andhierarchical authoritarian monkey hierarchy systems is underway every-where--creators prefer the horizontal to the vertical system so much theywill not work in monkey hierarchies. One of the primary blocks to creativityin business is CEOs and VPs lack the higher education skills to distinguishmavericks who will create when set free from monkey hierarchies from mav-ericks who will free load and do nothing when thusly liberated. P&G is anexample of pretend creativity, mentioned above, and pretend globality--with over 100 American managers in their East Asian headquarters in Kobe,Japan--apparently globality is best done by promoting Americans abroadrather than hiring the globe at US headquarters. If a monkey hierarchy ver-tical dimension is incompatible with a creative horizontal dimension in busi-nesses, what sort of replacement for monkey hierarchy will work? The mostcreative companies today are replacing management by bureau, a perma-nent set of monkeys in rankings, with events--mass workshop events that, ina short matter of hours or days, do functions formerly done over weeks andmonths by small staffs of managers. All management functions can be deliv-ered by event, greatly reducing the number of managers needed and greatlyincreasing ability of organization units to self manage, by interiorizing worldbest management protocols learned in such events. Social automata, as areplacement for meetings, gets reliably 10 to 15 times as much work doneper person per unit time as the regular monkey hierarchy status struttingmale dominated hormonal pride meetings that dominate most businessestoday. Managing by Events allows achievement of Just-in-Time managing--delivery of just the kind and amount of managing functioning needed whenand where needed without paying for an immense fixed inventory of a fixedsocial class called “managers”. This requires a model of all basic managingfunctions and tests for their quality of execution when done by monkeys inhierarchies and when done by events. Regular questionnaires weekly andmonthly determine when what specific type of managing is needed for deliv-ery by events. Invent Events, mass invention, discovery, and creationevents, are a natural outcome of this new approach to delivery of manage-ment functions. Precise amounts of and radicalnesses of innovation can bedelivered by such events, deployed over time and space, sparingly. Inactual practice there are specific types of Invent Event for each of the 60models of creativity in my model of all models of creativity. The Siemensexample of 1200+ patents from 8 events of 200 persons each doing 40 work-shop in parallel in 2 day long events.

managers educated enough to spot creative persons and not get in theirway

The connectivity illusion--more connection at first increases creativity as formerlyisolated things get joined and combined, but that leads to familiarity andsoon a quantity and quality drop off in participation till long term levels ofcreativity are below initial base line levels before the connectivity systemwas deployed. The solution is pulsed systems--ones that isolate and join ina precisely set rhythm that fits the area of creativity attempted.

Creativity requires the courage to depart from norms--but businesses achievedirection and order by throwing out people who do not conform to theirnorms--a contradiction, give up direction and get creative or get directionby giving up creativity. Norms are a substitute for more draconian controlsso ignoring of norms undermines discipline generally and dangerously--cre-ativity is dangerous, fundamentally, not superficially only. Creators will nottolerate monkey hierarchy dynamics--status fights, strutting self importance

displays of male monkeys in hallways and meetings, I-I-I-ness, plus USA cul-tures of theft/lies/spin/stealing. Slack, leeway, and lack of surveillancefoster creativity among determined “creators”, but not among ordinary peo-ple. CEOs and VPs unable, because of the low level of their personal edu-catedness (MBAs only in most cases) to distinguish creators from anarchists,constantly give leeway to the wrong people and deny it from the right peo-ple. Their firms do not have in place systems to create “creators” via the64 steps of doing so from my recommendations model of creativity. So theygive leeway to people not yet creators, where it is wasted. Unblock cre-ativity by providing graduate education every 10 years to all executives. Anexample is the Ecole Polytechnique guy down from my office who did nowork whatsoever for 18 months, just sitting and sipping coffee daily, thensuddenly a new business he proposed to our CEO made him the highestgrossing, in sales, consulting partner in the entire firm, in weeks from start.Most CEOs and VPs would have judged him “a slacker” and gotten rid of him.Only highly educated bosses could detect underneath his indolence a bril-liant and informed, practical mind at work. Hannah Arend’s model thatcreations are babies that need the protection from public exposure of beingin the dark, being secret, till they are proven enough to withstand hostilescrutiny.

pulsed systems--enough isolation and enough connection at the right timesTechnology companies do not sell a lot of systems to help people stay isolated or to

isolate them more than they already are. That is a shame because creativ-ity requires isolation. Full connectivity wipes out creativity entirely.Familiarity breeds contempt. Creativity is defined as a kind of astonish-ment, a kind of surprise. If you are watching the incremental attempts andtries of someone no one step astonishes--it is all too gradual. What is moreshocking is the development of some huge unexpected result from the accu-mulation of a lot of little steps. If the steps are hidden, not seen, then thehuge result without any apparent huge preparation, astonishes us andstrikes us as “creative”. Magicians and leaders know and practice this--doing their best to hide the means by which they achieve their apparentfeats of greatness. Creativity has the same principal at its core--it is asocial judgement made by one group of expert people on the performancesor achievements of another group of expert people. Studies of productdevelopment teams found that teams better connected produced less inno-vative products than groups less well connected. More detailed studyshowed that isolation was essential in concept development and connectionwas essential in resource acquisition. In other words, more connectionhelps some stages while hurting other stages of creation. Companies thatsell technical systems that further connect people, do not admit that they,thereby, are killing off creativity, overall, for the long term.

Pulsed systems are rhythmic--sometimes fostering more links and deployments andother times pruning and reducing links and deployments. The rhythm is setby users, to match their speed and phase of work. Believe it or not, it takeswork to stay isolated--we all know this at our level as individuals at work inlarge organizations. Surveillance is everywhere and therefore everyoneresponds to what we do, often though they lack goodwill or adequate con-text and information. We end up responding to maladroit responses of oth-ers, wasting our time. We crave isolation and invisibility. What we want todo is hide out then suddenly appear in many well received and well con-nected venues when the time is right. Systems to promote a rhythm of suchwithdrawals and exposures, are desperately needed and will gradually beinvented and appear as people realize that current systems, that merelyconnect people more to others, undermine creativity in general.

the impossibility of creativity in modern businesses argumentBusinesses are organizations that take creations and change the world with them.

Why would you choose an organization good at execution and distribution ofsomething and try to make it, as well, good at the opposite--coming up withnew ideas? On the face of it, the demand to make businesses more creativeappears to mean make businesses less business-y. Make them good at theopposite of what they are good at now. Business and the military excel attaking ordinary inputs, and getting consistent uniform outputs from them.Their genius is systems that input a variety of not so great human and otherresources and yet achieve consistent performance and output from them all.Businesses are structured for consistency of performance--that is why theBuffets of the world invest in them. Creativity, by definition, and in prac-tice, is a major block to consistency of any sort whatsoever. Even enor-mously successful creations upset consistency--so there are so many largebusinesses that, rather than suffer such disruption, failed to follow through

on revolutionary inventions in their midst. Creativity does not thrive inmonkey environments of preening self importance, status fights, dominancedisplays, surveillance, one-up-man-ship and all the other dynamics of what Icall “banana-land” (an image with two meanings--monkeys eat bananas andbananas resemble a part of the male body that when excited becomesbanana-like and that part of the male anatomy fosters so much of the cul-ture and status contents of modern business organizations). Managementoperates at a globally low level of intelligence and thoughtfulness. Manag-ers are both narrowly educated and shallowly educated (at least at top 5MBA programs where I taught). The book publishing industry has special sec-tions of dumbed down content for businessmen to consume--sentences withlots of embedded clauses are too difficult for businessmen to handle, appar-ently. Yet the Jack Welch’s of the business world tend to have chemistryPh.D.s, so they think abstractly enough to treat their conglomerate as abank taxed at half bank rates--Welch’s genius of treating GE as a bank not amanufacturer of everything. He bought and sold companies not products.

the inevitability of creativity in modern businesses argumentThe five cultures of global businesses keep its people narrow--if you can think out-

side of them, you can innovate continually without competition. Just thinkbeyond American, male, techie, capitalist, and monkey values and views.All extra, beyond that, is packaging your innovations with the CEOs stateddirections for the organization so your invention can be seen furthering CEOagenda items. These two--thinking beyond the five cultures of business andwrapping the results of that in CEO agenda items--suffice to make anyone atall creative in a modern business. Positional power--fighting to get pro-moted to VP--nearly always self-contradicts because you have to alienateyour peers to beat them in competition for the position--reducing yoursocial power greatly when positional power appears. Better invent newbusinesses and lines of business that you head without taking positions frompeers. Then you combine positionals with social power--exercising morepower, overall, that old function VPs. Corporate cultures define and moni-tor lowest common denominator levels of performance. These are done forlegal and risk control reasons but they end up becoming salient and normsthat people lower themselves to. But, such low levels of manager educa-tion and low levels of performance expectation make a background excel-lent for shining with just a little creativity in you. The base levels ofmodern businesses are so low in education and performance terms thatnearly anyone can surprise such people and shine relative to them. Remem-ber P&G producing the “great” innovation of copying a well sold Japaneseproduct after achieving all of Harvard’s creative environment criteria andglobalizing by putting 100 American managers in their East Asian headquar-ters. If those minimal self contradictory achievements are “great” we canall readily imagine how easy it is to look like an Einstein in their midst.Such low standards make creativity easy and an everyday accomplishmentfor anyone the least bit not in the thrall of the five cultures of business.

creativity as cultural work--5 cultures--american, male, technology, capi-talist, monkey

Business culture is wrapped within five larger cultures. Each culture is operatingunconsciously within us, each one rules out huge numbers and types of pos-sibilities. If we are conscious only of 10% of each culture’s contents thatoperate inside us, 90% of it we miss. Business worldwide is strongly affectedby a particular national culture--American culture--its actual competitivecontacts and its styles and media and “influence”. Most business alterna-tives and ways are unimaginable from the viewpoints of American culture,so adhering to it stunts thought and action in huge ways that we are only10% or so aware of. Similarly, technology culture is global and gets into allbusinessmen, stunting what alternatives they imagine and what goals theyaim for. We are only 10 or so % aware of how it operates within and limitsus. Third, capitalism, a semi-right-wing version of it, infests businessesworldwide, limiting greatly what they imagine and try for. We are only tenor so per cent aware of how it operates inside us limiting us. Fourth, malegender culture strongly infests businesses worldwide, greatly limiting whatthey imagine and do, ruling out tens of millions of possibilities every day.We are only 10% or so aware of how it operates inside us. Lastly, monkeyculture operates in businesses world wide, enhanced by male gender cul-ture, forcing status conflicts, rank games, vertical consciousness--strippingalways attention from missions, customers, and enduring efforts. Shortsemin-like spurts (quarterly profits?) characterize monkey efforts and maleefforts when businesses often need enduring effort through thick and thin.We are only 10% or so aware of how monkey culture infests business and lim-

its its alternatives, imagination, and accomplishments. Each of these fivecultures of business has several dimensions, each of which strongly limitsbusiness imagination, alternatives, and accomplishments. They multiply soanyone embodying all of them is constantly looking at 1/100,000th of theactual alternatives there to be used. Instead they focus on a monkey hier-archy, male, technocratic, capitalist right wing, American-esque version ofthings--that is the space of alternatives safe and “sensical” to explore, toanyone steeped in these five cultures of business. The beginning of cre-ativity in business is awareness of these, extirpating all their contents oper-ating unconsciously inside one, and replacing them by consciously chosenwider cultures that go beyond each of them. Someone who moves seriouslyin this direction of growing beyond these common cultures of business, auto-matically becomes a business innovative genius, with little effort other thanthe moral and cultural emotional work of becoming a new being, beyond thebeing they were born to be by the identity they had given to them by theirbirth parents and communities.

The American Waypoor implementation, fast chasing of trends, home runs notbase hits, trust systems not people, psychopaths make goodmanagers, people are mere tools, omni-present theft

The Male Wayshow how important I am, protect my turf, talk not listen, challengenot care, fix not empathize, teach not learn, push not pull, emotion isunprofessional, relationships are a cost of sex

The Technology Waytoys for boys, fix everything with technology not people, latest is dan-gerous, product development decaying into technology fixes, promisethe moon delivery is a later manager’s problem

The Capitalist Waylive and work for money, you can never have enough, greed isgood, the MBA religion, numbers don’t lie, externalities areirrelevant

The Monkey Wayat every occasion first establish dominance, promotion viafawning, yes-men and ass-kissers, only praise is heard, prob-lems never exist

create-analysis not toolsFrom psycho-analysis to create-analysis: the recommendations model suggests

companies first have to create creators, then they have to set them to cre-ating. Becoming a creator is a change in one’s identity. It takes very deepintimate emotional work to make this sort of transformation. Male, bom-bastic self important money oriented top dogs, executives and their sorts,are the absolute last people on earth to understand and support this sort ofwork. They are far too male, hierarchical, dominating, self bragging, psy-chopathic to undertake the handling and doing of such intimate emotionalslow growth work. Making creators of a bunch of people not now creators isvery similar to making a psyche whole that is disturbed. It resemblesFreud’s psycho-analysis, talk therapy. Gradual changes of self understand-ing, unblocking basic stages on emotional growth, and similar work has toget done. It takes years. We therefore need a kind of create-analysis inanalogy to psycho-analysis. I run create-analysis sessions for a few compa-nies I like working with. We take 40 people and grow them into becomingcreators in three years of monthly sessions, with measures of all dimensionsof personal, emotional, identity, psychic growth measured and monitoredthroughout. Each group of 40 chooses one or more of the 60 models of cre-ativity in my research work and we grow them into being creators of thatsort. Next, when they are creators we have to grow a commensurate andrelated set of executives they all report to, into recognizing creator needsand efforts and excepting the norms and culture of their organizationenough to permit these creators to create--that is making room for subcre-ations.

the paybacks from creating

As people near middle age, they notice their remaining time on earth is short.Whereas before they worked mightily to improve lifestyle and personalaccomplishment, now they find all that futile. You cannot take it with you.They wonder why have they bothered living at all since, the second theydie, their company will forget them forever and the earth will have no tracethat they ever existed except a few memories in busy people who too willsoon forget them. Death without a trace--is hell. We find Elton John at aripe age, suddenly writing classical music, because he noticed that none ofthis pop music will be played 100 years after he dies. People at 40 turn cre-ative, in concern if not in accomplishment, because only creations may out-live them and tell the world what life was like for them. Only creationshave a chance to capture human interest 400 years from now. We all wantto make the history of humankind before we go. Creations are literally theonly way other than mass killing. CEOs can leave their names on collegebuildings--but who reads them 100 years later. People can leave riches tokids who squander it away, on average, within two generations. No, onlycreations give life multi-generation historic value. The paybacks from cre-ating are absolutely immense, the most immense deeds and feelings peoplecan ever achieve. Compare Shakespeare’s touch to you in history comparedto Alexander the Great’s--there is no comparison, Shakespeare delivered farmore of himself to your mind and heart than some mass male killer.

Inauthentic Reasons for Interest in More Cre-ativityCareer systems, especially in American companies, male dominated organizations, technology compa-nies, capitalist economies, and monkey-like hierarchies (here are the five cultures I mentioned above),want more creativity, not to help customers, not to help their organization, but to enable many indi-vidual managers to attract attention to help their personal career progress. Creativity is a way toobtain one of the rarest and most valuable resources in any large organization--attention of higher ups.By far, most of the talk about creativity, and desire for more of it now in the world, especially Ameri-can, male, technology, capitalist, monkey-like parts of the world, comes from a desire for propellingindividual manager careers. It has nothing to do with helping customers or firms. It gets distorted,from earliest stages, so as to propel individual manager careers.

Companies that sell technologies and technology systems want more creativity, because they can sell“systems that promote” creativity easily to client organizations. Those clients organizations may, inturn, want more creativity either to sell creativity supports to their own customers, or to propel indi-vidual manager careers via the attention that being creative draws one’s way. This is the second prin-cipal reason people want more creativity in business--to use it as an excuse, a cover, a package forpushing machines and products onto customers with money to pay for such things.

The world has creativity consultants. These tend to sell tools for promoting creativity. There is solid,incontrovertible evidence, that no significant creativity ever resulted from using or buying a particulartool. Since looking creative is often enough to get one promoted in modern business organizations,especially American, male, tech, capitalist, monkey-hierarchy ones, these consultants continue to selltools, of no worth or effect, to managers satisfied with promotions based on mere appearances ofbeing creative. Creativity comes from creating a creative way of life and it is that creative way of liv-ing that creates creative works. There are no short cuts.

•individual careers benefit from creativity, they get visibility to higher ups from it, so most creativity is distorted for personal careers

•you can use creativity to sell products (creative selling, selling creations, selling tools for client creating)--so sales forces distort creativity everywhere

•looking creative is enough to get one promoted, so consultants sell “tools” for creativity even though tools are never enough to make one creative, because looking creative is enough for seller and buyer alike

The Costs of Inauthentic Reasons for Interest in More CreativitySimultaneous Overshoot/Undershoot, Caused by Creativity Noise. Because creativityhelps individual manager career building, and because it helps tech companies push products onto cli-ent organizations, there is a huge commercial motive for exaggerating need for creativity, results ofcreativity, and amounts of creativity produced. Individual managers, and organizations, typically,grossly exaggerate how much creativity they need and achieve. The role and importance of creativityoverall is greatly distorted by these forces. A kind of creativity “noise” pervades and disorients corpo-rations. If individual managers and many business organizations are continually grossly exaggeratingthe role, need for, and achievement of creativity, then businesses suffer from, paradoxically, way toomuch creativity present while having way too little creativity present. Readers will recognize this predicament as an ancient long-standing one in all businesses--the famousinventory problem of simultaneous overshoot and undershoot. Pre-total-quality fixed inventory sys-tems constantly suffered from simultaneously having both too much inventory and too little. For fixedinventories of products-in-process, the solution to this was Japanese just-in-time inventory systems.

The managing function itself, in businesses, is based on a fixed inventory of managers, since managingfunctions are delivered to work processes by a specially designated and perked social class of “manag-ers” and “leaders”, with a formal monopoly on delivering management functions. The result is simul-taneously too much managing going on (looking managerial) while too little managing goes on(pretending each manager is competent at all basic managing functions).

Creativity suffers the same fate. Career system dynamics that make looking creative worth as much ormore than actually being creative, result in simultaneous excesses of creativity (looking creative to getpromoted) with deficits of creativity (the vast majority of the workforce stripped of creative potentialand possibility, due, generally, to work conditions outlawing subcreations, creative life and workstyles, and other requisites of creating).

•creativity sells machines and helps careers, so creativity is exaggerated every-where in modern businesses

•because of exaggeration companies have too much creativity (as posturing) and too little creativity (as real change)

•the fixed inventory problem--simultaneous over- and under-shoot; for creativ-ity, for management

Creativity Tampering. Tampering is a business term, made famous by Dr. Deming, the crusty oldquality guru, who liked pointing at the funny colored spots in the bald pates of company CEOs, whiledeclaring that they, ignorant of the statistical nature of work processes, constantly intervened toreduce variations, but, because they did not understand processes statistically, they always made vari-ations much worse. Dr. Deming called this “statistical tampering”.

Similarly, the Santa Fe Institute defined a similar fault--managers ignorant of the non-linear systemdynamics, the system effects of workplace interventions, when intervening to stamp out unwantedvariations, instead, by their interventions made variations much worse. This they called “complexitytampering”.

We can here, in this paper define a third such common business fault. Managers ignorant of the vari-ety of creativity models implemented in the world, intervening to “improve” and “enhance” creativity,thereby making creativity much less. This “creativity tampering” comes from assuming that creativityis basically one phenomenon, that one model can encompass.

•statistical tampering--managers ignorant of the statistical nature of causes of variation, making variation worse when they intervene

•complexity tampering--managers ignorant of non-linear system dynamics causes of variation, making variation worse when they intervene

•creativity tampering--managers ignorant of all the models of creating causing creation, making creativity lower when they intervene to up it.

The Uncreativity of Upping Creativity. A well documented flaw in all social systems is this--each culture and society chooses to call “a solution” only things guaranteed to perpetuate its deepestand most dangerous problems. For example, Japan has a low birth rate, hence, a population declineproblem. All of government, NGOs, experts, and the press there propose various solutions--no one pro-poses elimination of the unpaid overtime tradition at Japanese corporations that sends men home totheir families at 11 p.m. every night, too tired to converse, too late to talk, leaving too early the nextmorning to apologize, for decades at a time. Children are regularly reported in the press, terrifiedwhen, one night, they meet a strange man in the hallway of their home--dad. We all laugh at the fool-ish Japanese, proposing everything except the obvious.

In the US, everyone proposes more initiative, more freedom, and more creativity to solve the problemof one sixth of the American population lacking public schools, health care, and parents. To Europeansand Asians this is a giant joke by the Americans on themselves. For it is obvious to anyone not com-pletely blinded by American culture and traditions, that basing funding of schools on parental incomelevels, via using property taxes to fund schools, guarantees that more initiative, more freedom, andmore creativity will change nothing about this problem. Americans propose any sort of “solution”except one capable of making elites in America take responsibility for leading and caring for all of theirnation’s population. Anything but that is “a solution”.

All societies are blind this way. All societies eventually are killed off by this particular type of blind-ness. Take the US military and Vietnam. Nothing was learned so here we are decades later repeatingexactly the same mistakes in Iraq. Any solution to the Vietnam defeat was accepted as long as it didnot touch the root cause of Americans being so male and boy-like that toys, not people, are always themain solution there. In sum, in America creativity reduces overall societal creativity.

•every society is willing to call “a solution” only things guaranteed to perpetu-ate its biggest deepest problems

•example 1: childless Japanese problem “solved” by everything except ending unpaid overtime at firms that keep dads out of families

•example 2: US fixing lack of schools, parents, healthcare for 1/6 their popula-tion by proposing more creativity = being uncreative.

•Creativity, as the “go to” solution to all in American culture, reduces overall US creativity

Helping Creativity in Ways that Destroys Much More Creativity. Harvard and other pro-fessors commonly do this today in corporations all over the world. The big money in creativity consult-ing is found in assessing client environments for how they help or hinder creativity. Many famousprofessors from famous colleges now do this sort of thing, making a lot of money at it. There is mini-mal evidence that they have any impact on creativity of person or organization, though they are quiteadept at getting sponsoring managers promoted--the real intent both of the customer and of these con-sultants. This is another case of phony “for show” creativity being enough in American, male, technol-ogy, capitalist, monkey-hierarchy organizations.

Why do these famous ones, with elaborate statistical scales and “instruments”, produce so little actualcreativity? Of course, the biggest reason is neither they nor their clients intend to increase creativity--rather both conspire to settle for career effects. Making something creative, in American, male, tech-nology, capitalist, monkey-hierarchy organizations is primarily a moral matter--is it worth it to actuallydo something, when merely looking it, is enough to get me and my friends promoted?

How, exactly, do these famous consultants ruin creativity, even granting that ruining it is fine withthem as long as someone gets promoted for “looking” creative? They assume that creativity is largelyone general overall thing. They measure how many environment aspects “support” or “hinder” it--creativity. What if creativity is not one sort of thing but 60 sorts of thing. My research, using 7000famous, highly accomplished people in 63 professions, half US, half global, found that there are 60 dif-ferent models of how to be creative, how to create. When a particular environment “supports” 3 ofthem well, if you measure, you always find that those exact environment aspects thereby hinder 30 or

40 or more, other models of creating. Businesses that up support for two or three favored models ofcreating, thereby stamp out 30 or more other models of creating--but they are never aware of this,because the famous consultant that they use, has only one very broad general model of what creativityis.

•consultants assess how environments “support” “hinder” creating--without this improving creativity much, why?

•first, they intend only to help clients get promoted for looking creative; •second, they measure supports for creating as if it were one thing; there are

at least 60 models of creating, conditions helping any one or two of them, always hinder many more--say, 10 or 20 others so:

•actions to improve 2 or 3 models of creativity reduce overall creativity of 20 or 30 unexamined models of creating

•actions to increase creativity usually reduce it

Creativity is First of All a Moral and Cultural Task. What does this means for creativity? Cre-ativity along with more freedom and initiative, are the traditional American preferred forms of solu-tion, to everything. Americans will try more creativity to solve problems having absolutely nothing todo with creativity. More ridiculous than that, Americans will try more creativity to solve problemscaused by excesses of creativity. Blind is blind. This means that most of the creativity in American,male, technology, capitalist, monkey-hierarchy organizations is uncreative in its intents and results.Furthermore, love of creativity causes American, male, technology, capitalist, monkey-hierarchy orga-nizations to be uncreative. Ah, here is a paradox worth getting one’s teeth into!

The Creativity to Solve the Above Four Problems that Make Most Creativity Uncre-ative. Educated persons are, by definition, people whose attitudes, actions, and beliefs we cannot atall predict from knowledge of where they were born and raised. Instead of their environments makingthem, they made themselves, more and more as their lives progressed. Most of the limited creativityneeded by American, male, technology, capitalist, monkey-hierarchy organizations comes not fromcreativity but from achieving educatedness--standing outside all that raised you and making a new selfthat you consciously design, using the best exemplars in history and the contemporary world. This isthe traditional function of college--where young minds, filled with propaganda, sales spiels, from momand dad, hometown, rightwing political gurus, schools, affronts to national pride, and the like, undo allthat, getting it out of their minds and habits, and replace it, consciously, with better contents fromwhat the best in history and in the contemporary world, have done. Educated men are capable of: notsimultaneously under and over shooting, not tampering, not making solutions that fail by always pro-posing creativity as a solution, and not supporting one model of creating while hindering more othermodels. Americans, males, techies, capitalists, and monkey-hierarchy people, who are not educated,are incapable of being creative in this immense way. They are condemned to simultaneously over-shooting and undershooting, reducing creativity by creativity tampering, missing creative solutions byproposing uncreative forms of creative solution, and reducing 30 models of creating by what they do toimprove 3 models of creating. This is a paradox worth getting one’s teeth into! The key to immensecreativity is not creativity but educatedness. Uneducated men, however long they have spent in col-leges or grad schools, are incapable of all but the most trivial forms of creating. Educatedness cannotby itself make you creative, but lack of it, can, by itself, prevent any significant creative accomplish-ment from entire lifespans spent trying. Being who you were born, is enough, to rule creativityentirely out of your life. You may nibble the edges and look like something creative from time to time,but you will miss all of the center, where the big paybacks, the history changes, are.

•this means, creativity is first of all a moral task, doing creating not looking creative;

•this means, creativity is second of all a culture task, in US type cultures cre-ative solutions usually are not creative at all

•a way to be creative when the above two are true--get yourself educated, that is, your attitudes, reactions, opinions are not predictable from where you were born and raised and what you were born and raised to be

•the key to immense historic level of creativity is being outside yourself, being educated, differing from your self

•the price of immense historic level creativity is changing your present self, and growing a new bigger bolder self

•why do not more people create? why do not more people change themselves? tobacco, eating, exercise--these are not easy changes

Getting Clear on CreativitySome Conceptual Clarity. There are words like “effectiveness”, “educatedness”, and “creativ-ity” that we all use as if they had perfectly clear meanings that we all shared and understood. When,however, we look at any of them at all carefully, we discover that it is anything but clear what theymean. You find people all the time saying or writing things like: “we all need much more creativitythan we now have.....we all are much more creative than we realize”--which is it? “it is very rare anddifficult to be truly creative....every human born is one of the most creative creatures in all the uni-verse”--which is it? If we are all creative then none of us is, for creativity is someone attaining somerare attribute of one sort of another, that stands out from the ordinary, from the crowd, from what isnormal and usual. When everyone is rare, no one is. It is much like Lake Woebegone, by GarrisonKeilor, where all the children are above average. My point is this--”creativity” and related words, aretraps, abysmally sloppy concepts, the use of which almost always hides more than it reveals. You can-not trust words like creativity and people who use them a lot.

The Relativity of “Creative”. Is it creative for Japanese to install new forms of central controlfrom Tokyo? Is it creative for Americans to invent a new technology? Is it creative for men to come upwith new lines for catching the attention of attractive women? No, of course not--for these three arecontinuations of long term traditions and trends. All of these are perpetuations of well establishedroutines. If these groups merely continue to do what they now do, these results will eventuate. Whenyou find Americans celebrating their creativity by pointing to the latest new technology they devel-oped, they are deluded--the products of well established routines are not creative, by definition.They are the baseline against which creative deeds are measured.

Creativity is rarity--something out of the ordinary. You cannot get it by doing your past more. But canany group or individual differ from their own past enough to be creative? Frank Lloyd Wright is thebest example. Three times he got outmoded, overcome by technical developments and visions else-where. Three times he became a baby in his own field again, going back to school, studying basicsinvented by his competitors, mastering what younger generations loved, slowly rebuilding a new client-base, eventually rising to the absolute top of the new era. He started as an infant in architecture, forhis third time, at age 60, after seven failures in a row. It can be done--it is a tough way to live but itcan be done! Is the US, as a society, tough enough to be creative? The evidence is not clear. Iraq isjust a hint, the rise of religion is just a hint. The US likes being its past more and better. It does notwant to differ from itself. It does not want to create. Do males want to create? to differ from them-selves? The evidence is? Do technology people want to create? want to differ from themselves? Beingyourself equates to being entirely uncreative. It is simply a matter of definition--being creative meansdiffering from your past. Perpetuating your past, your self, your value, means, avoiding creativity.Tradition (was it ever otherwise?) fosters the opposite of creativity.

Let’s Make Everyone Creative! Here we run into exactly the same problem again. If everyoneis creative, then there is nothing rare about it, it attracts no attention, and, in short, it is not creativeto be creative. Yet we all think, in some way, it makes sense to try to make everyone creative, or atleast more creative than they now are. Why?

We all have the image that somehow the essence of what it means to be human is to be creative. Ifwe are to be “more essentially us” we have to become more creative than we now are. What gives usthis idea, that the essence of being human and creativity are highly related? We all create somethingvery very sophisticated--a self. Perhaps the first, and most important thing we generate, we create, isa self. In most cases this is a rather conventional, uncreative type of self. In most cases it even is ananti-creative tradition-bound rather cowardly form of self. Indeed, most of us do not actually createmuch of our own selves at all--we default and let the environments around us fill us up with whateveris in them, and the accumulation of all that becomes “us” down the road. Anyway, regardless of thequality of the self that results and regardless of how much conscious design by us goes into creating it,we all do, one way or another, end up creating a self. That gives us a feeling of being creative even if

the self thusly created is rather timid and conventional--afraid not to wear a business suit when every-one else around wears one (the horror!).

Furthermore, we all do bring things into the world--generate stuff, even if rather conventional in itsform and content. Creating understood as establishing or generating is something all people do all thetime; creating understood as astonishing others with what they could not imagine producing them-selves, is rare and not normal for any of us, by definition. Indeed, rigorous research over all creationsin human history that are documented enough to support research, shows that creators themselveshave no idea which of their works will end up being judged “creative” hence, real creators largelyattain creativity via immense productivity--producing so many things of so many diverse sorts thatsome of them have to strike somebody somewhere sometime as creative. Piccaso was the mostfamous artist of the 20th century and also by far its most productive, averaging 3 paintings a day, everyday, for 70 years. For another example, musicians are more famous and “creative” in direct propor-tion to hours they have practiced--more hours of practice equals more fame and creativity.

We All Want to Be More Creative Than We Now Are; We All Want More Creativity in the World than it Now Has. We all want to be more creative than we now are because beingcreative draws attention, and with attention, investments, resources, limelight, and offers of sex fromthe opposite sex. We all want the world to be more creative than it now is, because our brains arewired for novelty and familiarity soon bores us. We need the new, the unseen, the never imagined tostay awake, keep us interested in life, keep our immensely competent perceptual and mind machiner-ies exercised. Without sabre tooth tigers hunting us down day and night, life seems, and is, by com-parison, rather dull.

Why Ask Organizations Good at Realizing Extant Ideas to Be Good at Inventing Them? On the face of it, it appears ridiculous to ask business organizations, that are born when someonedecides to not just have a creative idea but to go out and change the world and the way people livewith that idea, to, instead of being good at their main purpose--turning potential change into actualchange--to be good at coming up with potential changes. Why would any sane person look to busi-nesses for creativity. Businesspersons and even more so their executives have constantly tested asamong the most conservative, cowardly, herd-following, risk averse, conformist persons in any society(business founders, however, test out as much more risk accepting, and less conformist). A couragetest for any individual business person or business leader is given below:

Defining Creativity. What is the difference between a change, something new, something differ-ent, and a creation? As was said above there is a relativity to creativity because it is a social judge-ment by one group of expert people on the works of another group. A great creator whose last workrepeats patterns he or she created in the past is judged not very creative--the later work of Piccasorepresents, critics agree, Piccaso copying himself. So the works did not surprise others when released--they probably did not surprise Piccaso, as well.

Another relativity to creativity is the change of context and its ability to change what people judgecreative. A committee sets up to judge artworks as their Italian city state falls under deadly attack bya competitor city state. Suddenly the art works that fascinated everyone yesterday, today bore andinstead marginal works that pick up on the bloody and dangerous moods in and around everyone reso-nate and are judged “creative”. Changes of context can and do change what people are surprised byand find useful. This is another relativity to creativity. Businesses that continually churn with newmanagers, new technologies, new re-organizations, new strategies, new competitors by changing con-text continually make nothing creative within them--they rule out creativity in toto.

However, there is another relativity to creativity. People in academia say creativity is useful novelty.Sternberg revamped Kuhn’s scientific revolution stages about challenging a paradigm, deposing a para-digm, suggesting possible replacement paradigms, installing a replacement paradigm, and fleshing outthe worth and anomalies of a new paradigm as measures of how novel something creative is. A cre-ation can challenge a paradigm, depose a paradigm, suggest a possible replacement paradigm, install areplacement paradigm, and flesh out a replacement paradigm’s worth and anomalies. Deposing a par-adigm and installing a new one are very difficult, historic tasks, of the Einstein and Darwin sort. Chal-lenging paradigms and suggesting replacements are of intermediate levels of novelty. Fleshing out anexisting paradigm is of modest novelty compared to the others. However, the single word “paradigm”causes this formulation (and Sternberg’s one derived from this) to dysfunction for measuring novelty indefining what is creative and how creative it is. For the word “paradigm” suggests one context is atstake, the paradigm as that context. That is a bit too simple for reality. Old established fields,reveal their age and its deadening effects, by tolerating single dominant paradigms (that determinewho get hired, what gets published, who gets funding). New lively emerging fields tolerate pluralmutually cooperating and competing paradigms and tend to hire, fund, and recognize people who make

progress in the context of any of those paradigms and who make progress uniting or selecting amongthose competing paradigms. Plural paradigms amount to plural frameworks for interpreting any partic-ular research results--contending incompatible interpretive frameworks. That is another relativity tocreativity--there may be one single dominant framework for spotting it, especially in the most innova-tive creative fields.

This third relativity to creativity is how a creation can reveal, while challenging or replacing, abstractimmense or microscopic contexts. Something creative not only surprises us, but it surprises by bring-ing into view dimensions or scales of existence we normally never considered. Einstein explainedmomentum and gravity by bends in something new called space-time that suggested that space andtime were similar not different dimensions. Wolfram showed how the universe might be digital notanalog and hence space and time emerge from more fundamental strata of existence--automatadimensions of information flows. What makes these theories of genius is they handle problems andanomalies with past explanations and views by bringing into focus and awareness entirely new scalesand dimensions never thought of before or never used before. One creation may bring into awarenessmore than one such dimension. In a way, the number of such dimensions/scales brought into aware-ness and the novelty of each, together, constitute a better measure of how creative something is thanSternberg’s Kuhian categories. One can niggle about words and define “paradigm” so it includes myplurality of dimensions and scale, but to do so is to implicitly agree that the word “paradigm” does notdeliver that particular content as its message when commonly used to define creativity and measure it.

A fourth relativity to judging what is creative, is impact on a field. Piccaso impacted painting--hechanged how it was done and what paintings themselves looked like for a hundred years afterwards.His paintings changed the criteria and direction and sequence of works in his own field. If big creativ-ity is defined this way--as something that changes the direction of an entire field for decades or centu-ries--then creativity is made relative in a tricky non-linear history way. Entire fields do not changemerely because of one creative work that appears in them--they change because of the slow build upof things--grains of sand dropping till the sandpile that they make reaches its “critical” angle, accord-ing to research by Par Bak that won the Nobel prize in 1972. One never knows which grain of sand willsuddenly cause an avalanche event that changes the entire shape of the sand pile. After thousands ofgains of sand dropped, did nothing to change the overall shape, one last grain, that we cannot predict,changes everything. Piccaso’s Desmoiselles D’Avignon was such a grain of sand. No one could predictthat it would be the last grain, the one that would release the avalanche that changed painting for-ever. This unknowability is another relativity to defining what is creative.

A Measure of CreativityHow many new dimensions and scales never imagined before or never used before does it bring into awareness and how novel is each such

dimension and scale--creations bringing into focus more scales and dimen-sions of more novelty each are more creative creations than ones bringing

into focus fewer scales of lesser degrees of novelty.

A Second Measure of CreativityHow much a work changes its field, how many subsequent works copy or are obviously influenced by it, does a work become the last grain of sand on the sandpile, the grain that unleashes entire system-wide change, that

changes the whole field?

•words like effectiveness, educatedness, creativity are sloppily used and dan-gerously imprecise

•Americans, creating a new technology, are NOT being creative--they are con-tinuing a tradition and a routine

•creating requires differing from your self--continuing your past self makes creating an impossibility, by definition

•can people differ from themselves throughout their lives--the Frank Lloyd Wright example, infant again at 60 for the 3rd time, learning basics

•we are all creators--1) we all create a self 2) we generate stuff (not usually creative stuff)--none of us are creators--we refuse to differ from our present selves: as a male can I do feminine alternatives? as an American can I do Japanese ways? as a techie can I socialize? etc. for $? monkey?

•can generating stuff ever turn into creativity? if you become immensely pro-ductive of things, meeting bold unusual requirements, just by generating so many chances to be judged creative, you inevitably will be thus judged--some time for some thing

•we all want to be more creative than we now are--for limelight, attention, loss of crushing anonymity in mass societies of sitting consumers

•we all want the world to be more creative--because our brains turn repeated exposure to anything (creativity?), familiarity itself, into boredom

•why ask business organizations--those who implement ideas--to be good at generating ideas? perhaps fear of loss of 1st world jobs?

•a courage test for creating--change what is work, what is a job, what is a week, what is hierarchy--see the 8 test items below

Creativity is rare, not common, in part, because it demands courage. It is tough on people. It is hardto do. The courage that creating requires can be absolutely amazing. Creators tend to be people whoare willing to go where no one else goes at all. It is easy to forget this when modern books and per-sons, in business, bandy about words like “creating” and “creative” so casually. Below is a simple testfor business persons that measures your nearness to being a creator--someone who creates.

The One Minute Creativity Courage TestAre You Much Too Wimpy to be Talking About Creativity? Find Out in One Minute

1) Come to work, from an hour from now, everyday, without exception for the next three weeks, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, apologizing/explaining nothing about it to anyone.

2) Give your boss a written signed list of embarrassingly narcissistic, power-hungry, employee-humiliating,employee-disempowering deeds he/she has done over the past month.

3) Do all of your weekly work by working fantastically hard Monday of each week, then skip work entirelyTuesday through Friday, without explanation or apology, for two years

4) Assign four to ten desks per employee in your section, one desk for each project not for each employee,buy and equip the desks, and use them for a year or more

5) Do two full time jobs at two different companies at the same time all day each week without apology orexplanation

6) Work 24 hours a day for one year by interviewing and hiring on to three companies working shifts that donot overlap more than a few minutes till 24 hours is covered

7) Work one job at a firm Monday and Tuesday and work an entirely different unrelated job elsewhere in thefirm Wednesday through Friday

8) Get your firm to pay you to work for your firm’s fiercest competitor, with pay from that competitor, for sixmonths, in order to, learn what makes them fierce, good, a threat.

Note: I have personally done every single one of the above, and numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 repeatedly inmore than one global corporation. To exaggerate slightly in order to make a point, I will say the fol-lowing: if any of these give you a pause, are beyond the pale for you, you very well may lack the kindof ballpark courage all creativity requires. That is a slight exaggeration but a useful way to view one-self relative to what creating requires. Large organizations, of all sorts, are systems of huge omnipres-ent surveillance--so everyone gets reactions from everyone else about everything they do. This alone,without any other conditions, suffices to rule creativity out of all large organizations. Surveillance--

standing before the opinions of uncontexted, possibly envious or hostile others, having to react contin-ually to their reactions, however uncontexted or ill-informed, demoralizes all, and makes the size ofgoals one is willing to attempt, shrink every year of employ. Psychopaths rise to top management posi-tions so often, in Western business organizations, because they genetically ignore this audience of sur-veillance--they can focus where others can’t, because they cannot genetically care what others thinkand feel about anything that they do. Isolation is the missing element in large modern business orga-nizations. Lack of isolation turns everyone into cowards. Creativity is not courage but it, at least,requires lots of courage. When you talk about enabling, supporting, improving creativity in your selfor organization, at least that means you are talking about enabling, supporting, improving courage inthem both. When you increase isolation, by somehow reducing surveillance, you lower the amounts ofcourage needed for creativity to occur.

That gives us two routes--to increase creativity--increase courage in peo-ple, or, decrease surveillance of people.

Fix yourself to a stable context, so what is creative is stable, by fixing to a highly abstract context.

In addition, modern businesses are filled with continual context changes--when contexts change what is creative changes too--this reduces creativity possibilities greatly, unless you attach your-self to highly abstract contexts that are not subject to change whenever the next CEO, VP, tech-

nology, competitor appears.

• two routes to creating: increase courage or decrease surveillance of people•Threat to Creativity 1: SURVEILLANCE surveillance is everyone seeing every-

one’s else’s doing/sayings and reacting, so we shrink goals to reduce hassle of mal-informed reactions

•Threat to Creativity 2: GYRATING CONTEXTS a third route to creating: fix a sta-ble context by choosing a highly abstract context to work in

•continual changes of context caused by boss changes and technology/competitor changes redefine what is “creative” making attempted creations no longer creative if their cycle time to produce is at all long

Getting Precise about Creativity. Traditionally in science we nail down concepts in two ways:relationally and representationally. Relational defining distinguishes a concept from similar and com-peting ideas at the same level or scale. That would be distinguishing creativity from effectiveness,educatedness, handling error, handling complexity and like capabilities that make people rise to thetop of traditional fields and occupations. Representational defining elaborates what a conceptincludes and excludes in terms of components of it. That would be mapping the kinds of creativity andof creative processes and their respective components, plus when they work and do not work. We cansubject woozy tricky concepts like “creativity” “effectiveness” and the like to both these treatmentsin order to get definitions of them we can trust in all circumstances. When I first became a professor,not so long ago, I realized I was hired to “educate” but I did not know what that meant. I bought somebooks and realized the authors of those books did not know either. No one had a scientific, valid, prac-tical idea of what it meant. How could such ideas be defined? I had built expert systems for years, asan artificial intelligence programmer, studying minute every-15-second contents of the minds of someof the world’s best designers. In AI we defined terms like “expertise” by asking people who was best atX, then asking those nominated people who was best at X, then asking the people they nominated howthey did X and what X meant to them. This dual nomination with interviews of the final level nomi-nees worked in defining expertise for AI system building purposes. I could apply that to define otherwoozy tricky concepts, I felt.

I built a long term research project to do so. The project took nine years and involved data from over7000 people, half American, half global. This project--the Orthogonal Discipline Research Project--got315 people, 5 in each of 63 diverse strata of society, to nominate the capabilities needed to rise to thetop in their own field. These were orthogonal to all traditional disciplines, in that they cut across allof them, determining who rose to their tops. Thousands of thusly nominated capabilities were orga-nized, analyzed, grouped, and boiled down into 54 orthogonal fields cutting across all traditional fieldslike law, medicine, biology, math, literature, dance. Then the 315 people were asked to nominateone person each, for each of the 54 orthogonal fields, producing 150 effective people 150 creative peo-ple, 150 educated people, and so on for each of the 54 orthogonal fields (we got 150 not 315 because

not everyone could nominate someone for each of the 54 orthogonal fields). We interviewed thesesets of 150 for what their orthogonal discipline consisted of and meant. This achieved relational defi-nition of creativity--distinguishing it from effectiveness, educatedness, handling error, handling systemeffects, handling complexity, and so on for the other orthogonal fields.

Representational definition of creativity was achieved by getting the 150 creators, thusly identified inthe above process, to specify their own models of creating, comparing those models of creating withmodels they observed in peers and competitors, mentors, and other figures in their field and others.Hundreds of such models were analyzed and overlaps found, resulting in an overall model of 42,extended by late data to 60, and more recently by an updated questionnaire to respondents to 102models of creativity. Each model had between 20 and 50 variables in it that interacted to producesomething creative. Each model purported to explain all of creativity though each model was distinctfrom the others, often differing utterly from others. This achieved representational definition of cre-ativity.

Thusly, equipped with comprehensive, scientifically developed models of creativity, I could sensiblytalk about it and work with it. Without these two models--the relational one of orthogonal disciplinesof which creativity is one, and the representational one of the various models of creativity and theirspecific components--talk about and work with creativity is doomed to be just one more form of inef-fective, uncreative, counter-creative tampering.

•defining creativity relationally--how it differs from educatedness, effective-ness, error handling, complexity handling, etc.

•defining creativity representationally--what it includes and excludes via what its components are

•I did via the Orthogonal Disciplines Research Project; from quality and exper-tise across all traditional fields to what else?

•what causes people to rise to the top of all traditional fields and professions: quality, expertise, creativity, educatedness, and what else

•ask 315 to nominate such ortho fields, then ask the same 315 to nominate 150 people great at each of the 54 ortho fields they named

•interview those 150 (in each of 54 ortho fields) for what their ortho field really is and means

•result: large books on several of the 54 orthogonal fields; book on 60 models of creativity; book on recommendations model of those 60

•with creativity defined responsibly and scientifically, I could begin to do something serious about it

Creativity Model Interaction Matrices. In the quality method, Quality Function Deployment,there is a house of quality, with a roof, that is, in reality, an interaction matrix. If we put the 60 mod-els of creativity in columns and erect an interaction matrix roof over the columns, we can specify andmeasure how things that enable creativity models 2 and 6, also enable some other models and alsohinder some other models. When we do this, at several different firms and venues, we find, inevita-bly, environment conditions that help creativity models 2 and 6, generally hinder 20 or 30 or moreother models of creativity. Existing organizations, ignorant of all the models of creativity in theirmidst, are constantly shutting down more creativity than they foster, by their very efforts to becomemore creative! This is the creativity implementation paradox. It is worthy of bold lettering--

The Creativity Implementation Paradox:

Theorem 1: Existing organizations, ignorant of all the models of creativity in their midst, are con-stantly shutting down more creativity than they foster, by their very efforts to become more cre-ative.

Theorem 2: Existing organizations, unaware of all the various models of creativity that exist, workhard to improve a few known models of creativity, getting modest paybacks from this, while ignor-ing much greater paybacks, from learning to recognize and install, the much greater number ofother models of creativity, they lack entirely or have never supported at all.

Example 1: The much vaunted by HBR P&G net among researcher retirees, who bid on problems,they might have something to help with, illustrates the self limiting nature of connectivity (andtools for it)

--at first, being connected increases creativity as ideas combine, --but within months all on the net become familiar with each other, within a year or two, the net

becomes boring and homogenous, everyone knowing what everyone else will say before theysay it

--loss of difference, variation, surprise, ends up wiping creativity off the net entirely.

Connection is a self limiting process--it increases creativity due to initial new com-binations but destroys creativity ultimately by wiping out isolation and hence dif-

ferences.

•organizations reduce creativity by how they increase it--because they do not build interaction matrices among the 60 models of creativity

•organizations work to do 2 or 3 models of creativity well when similar effort invested in doing omitted 57 other models of it would pay more

•increasing creativity by increasing connectedness--is self limiting--1st more creating from combination increase, 2nd loss of all creativity as variety and difference evaporates due to connection--SOLUTION = pulsed connectedness, connecting increases as wave with isolation increases.

Getting Technical about Creativity--What We Learn from 2 of the 60 Models of CreativityMaking Yourself a Creator Using the Recommendations and Subcreations Models of Creativity. There is not enough space in this chapter to discuss many or even a few of my 60 modelsof creativity, or to discuss thoroughly even one of the 7 models found in my 4 Cycle model. What I cando is examine quickly two models, because they represent the bridge to many of the other models.You have to understand these two models in order to qualify to consider seriously many of the others ofthe 60. The recommendations model comes from 150 creators interviewed in the Orthogonal Disci-plines Research Project. Each of them was asked to recommend specifically how to create and becomecreative. Thousands of such recommendations were analyzed to create a final model of 128 steps tobecoming creative and to creating, shared by nearly all the 150 interviewees.

The recommendations model says that creative works are never done by ordinary people, and neverdone by clever tools, but are done by creators. To create you first have to become a creator--that is,a person with a creative type of life. After major personal self change and transformation, adjustingall aspects of your life to support creating, it is not you who create, but that creator life that creates.The subcreations model relates to this for it holds that before a creator makes any one astonishing cre-ative work, he create lots of preparatory tools, workspaces, life arrangements, and so forth, that pre-pare the way for his creative final work. Stop these preparatory little “subcreations” as they arecalled, and you prevent the final creative work emerging. You can see how these two models relate toeach other. Before creators create great works, they invent/create two things: a creative life, then,lots of subcreations--hosts of lifestyle and workplace, workstyle and tool arrangements, that preparethe way for and are absolutely essential for realizing their ultimate final creations. Stop the creativelife arrangements or stop these small preparatory inventions--subcreations I call them--and you shutdown all possibility of that creator creating.

The dire problem of the idea of "being creative in any part of any modern business organization" is this--businessmen, especially executives of business organizations, are some of the most conformist, herd-oriented, people in the world. That is because business persons work in an environment of constantomnipresent overwhelming surveillance--everyone sees and has opinions/reactions to all that everyoneelse does (Bacon's Panopticon captured this reality hundreds of years ago). Businesses outlaw, nearlyeverywhere in every modern business organization, the very subcreations essential for creators realiz-ing their final creative products. They outlaw, are outraged by, creative non-conformist styles, dress,attitudes in their midst. “Be creative--but look like this” they say. “Be creative--but one desk per per-

son is our limit” they say. Creative products and creators themselves are actually hated in nearly allmodern business organizations (Van de Ven, the only thorough, longitudinal study of business innova-tion in the literature, found exactly this to be true, hence, disguise, workarounds, scarfing resources,and skunkworks).

•150 creators recommended how to become creative and create--boiled into a model of 128 steps, 64 to becoming creative, 64 for creating

•recommendations--create creative type of life, use that to create works•subcreations--final creations require many small preparatory inventions of life and

work style, tools, that allow the final overall resulting work•problem one; conformism and risk-aversensss of businesspersons--because of

surveillance, because looking something is safer than being it•surveillance--splits work into two tracks, doing X and looking like one is doing

X--the PR part of every job and career = tendency over time to erode doing X into merely looking like doing X = the PR only firm, the PR only executive, the PR only person, the PR only life = all show

•problem two: businesses forbid nearly all subcreations, hence, scarfing, skunkworks, disguise for innovations hated by organizations

•problem three: wild gyrations of context so what is creative changes as tech-nologies & executives change, hence need abstract context anchors

The Recommendations Model of Creativity suggests you only have to do 8 basic things in order tobecome creative and create:

Create a Creative Life1 Make Interior Room--emotional space, find your self, liberate, create sub-

worlds2 Make Exterior Room--locate the creation process, create creation environments,

focus, optimize activity3 Mental Travel--diversify, broaden, extend horizons, time travel4 Perceive Paradox--mystify, demystify, balance, unbalance

Use That Creative Life to Create Creative Works5 Create Creation Machine--select creation type, invent tools, establish loops,

recursively define problems6 Think--generate, associate, decompose, map analogies7 Conquer--commit to victory, establish work discipline (exceptionlessness), nor-

malize creation, establish flow8 Manage Emergence--establish population automatons, establish reflexivity, tune

performance, prune away noise.NOTE: the full model has 128 recommendations, not just the 32 ones listed

above.A book on the model exists but is only available to my grad students and "create-

analysis" clients now. Every creator in history did every single one of these, according to the creators who made these rec-ommendations. Without any one of these 8, no creativity appears. Tools, part of creating a creationmachine, are not nearly enough. In fact, only tools you invent that have never appeared before, suf-fice to help you create. The tools-selling-industry, of creativity consultants, wants you to believe thatyou can create by skipping steps one to four above, skipping steps 6 through 8 above, and instead ofinventing tools, buying the tools they, the consultants, wish to sell to you. Nice try but no banana! Soif you want something short, clear to understand, fast, and simple that will make the same you, thatyou now are, creative, you are a fool and nothing you learn, buy, or acquire will make you creative,though it may erase some of your foolishness. Did any of us really believe that Faraday, Curie, Edison,Einstein, Piccaso were made in a day? came from buying clever tools? evolved from use of the rightmental technique? No, not a single reader of this chapter believed any such things--we all knew, allthe time, that getting clever tools was nothing like what becoming creative actually requires. There is

no short cut--the life we all have now has to be radically revised, if we are ever to create, in the raresense, of amazing humankind with what we produce.

Applying the Recommendations Model of CreativityMaking Interior Room is the first step--stopping all the emotional drains on us, the things that wasteour time, from the hassles of daily living, kids, spouses, taxes, groceries. Naked men off dirt roads,without phones and cars, write great novels, because they live hassle free, without interruption. Killthe phone! Divorce the kids! Creativity--powerful creation of the rare kind--begins with living withouthassles. Most of us lack the courage to depart from "what others do" enough for this. In history, a lotof people have achieved this--Making Interior Room--via marrying smartly highly supportive spouses, bynot marrying at all, by living far from civilization, or having parents who isolated them from friends andsociety for early decades of life via harsh training regimes (John Stuart Mill and Piccaso among manyothers) and like extreme measures. Other creators Make Interior Room by developing a kind of hardcrust, the scares people away, and intimidates. This reduces interruptions and hassles by reducinghuman encounters in general. Quite a few creators were extremely hard people to live with and workalongside. Their crust--Made Interior Room for them--but at a cost in ordinary accessibility and charm.

Making Exterior Room is the second step. It only comes after you are free from interior hassles andwastes. This is where one invents new living and work arrangements, one's first subcreations, that arethe ladder steps to full creation later on. All of your life--clothes, walls, friendships, talk, moneyarrangements--are optimized to support you creating, not you doing anything else. As Piccaso said, ifanything at all competes for attention with creating, you have no chance of creating at all. Creativityis a jealous god and does not tolerate competitors. Creators pour their entire lives into creating--it isnot a hobby. It does not come from dabbling. It is not a fashion or trend, an item of apparel, a lookor posture. It consumes all that you are and ever will be. If burns up your all.

Another important route to Making Exterior Room is sheer productivity--making yourself so awesomelyproductive that you do an entire week of work on Monday morning, leaving all the rest of your time onyour job free for creativity stuff. One reason so many creators in history are awesomely productive(Piccaso 3 paintings a day for 70 years) is they developed that productivity at some school or workplacein order to free up time--Make Exterior Room--for creating. One of the first fights all creators win isthe fight for free time every week. If you have to work for money most of each week, it is hopeless--you will never be creative.

Mental Travel is the third step. This involves mentally, being everywhere, omnivorous consumption ofall things unknown to you, new to you, beyond you, foreign to you, not natural to you, hard for you,distasteful to you, counter to how you were raised. It involves decades of inconvenience--caused bymentally going where others fear to tread. It involves befriending exactly those all around you fearand avoid. You seek out minorities, dissent, rebels, non-conformists, unpleasant grumpy sorts, socialoutcasts, those shunned by polite and high society. In eras of digital media you read; in eras of read-ing you play video games. Whatever is fallow, forgotten, overlooked, looked down on, missedentirely, or unimagined you visit and explore.

Perceiving Paradox is the fourth step. However, it goes hand in hand with Mental Travel. You cannotdo Mental Traveling unless you are willing to embrace paradox. Perceiving Paradox and liking it arenecessary for Mental Travel to take place at all. For Mental Travel moves you where your upbringingand comfort zones do not apply, do not work, break down, make a fool of you. Legitimating periph-eral participation in communities of practice entirely new to you--snooping--happens because you arewilling to undergo the pain of infancy, being a complete beginner in realms and worlds and areas ofideation wholly unknown to you, where you lack all orientation, commonsense, and skill, where youmake a fool of yourself every few minutes or hours, in big ways. Many of us can do this when we areyoung; creators do this all their lives. Frank Lloyd Wright failed completely three times and rebuilt hiseducation, skills, client base, and technique three time, entirely. At 60 he started all over again,becoming an infant in his own field, learning from upstarts.

The new you, having interior and exterior room, doing mental travel by facing paradoxes that stop oth-ers, is what creates, is what Creates a Creation Machine, the fifth step. Your Creation Machine istools, loops, recursions. You invent tools, insight process loops, and fractal multi-scale problem defi-nitions for the type of creative work you decide to produce. Creators work on many size and timescales simultaneously. Hence, loops (iteration) and recursion (fractality of outcome) are naturalbyproducts of all creative work. Furthermore, tools vary by loop and size scale so the creator's toolsthemselves take on fractality of form. Here are the full panoplies of subcreations that precede andenable final creative works. It takes months and years to accumulate one's Creation Machine. It takestotal mental dedication and full mobilization of your insight and rational thought faculties to achieve aCreation Machine. The Creation Machine you create is your second creation, after creating a creative

life. Creating a Creation Machine generally takes about 8 to 10 years of work at 12 hours a day ormore of effort. Trying to short cut this time period is the norm and always fails. For those interestedin serious creativity, 8 years is not a long time to prepare the way for it. Those who cannot imagine"waiting" 8 years for something, obviously, lack all the courage and guts of any real creator. As HerbertSimon liked to say Piccaso trained for over a decade under his father (though it was done as a child);Einstein studied physics for over a decade, Edison--you know the story--history is populated with highlypersistent, hard working, enormously productive people who became famous for creativity, not withcasual hobbyists who did so.

Thinking the sixth step, is something not done by you, but done by the creative life you have inventedand installed in yourself. For example what makes us intelligent is the surround of tools outside ourbrains that help us think and amplify what we can remember and inter-relate. Take away the mindextensions of any creator--her personal files, her personal professional library, her network of friendswho perform cognitive functions for her, her cognitive architecture, her cognitive apparel, her cogni-tive furniture--and she can no longer create. Thinking is done by a creative life enabled by subcre-ations of lots of mind extension tools. Schools stymie creativity, in many ways, one of which iseducating brains, not the mind extensions, outside brains, that make us smart.

Conquest is the seventh step. This is the step where flexibility and association breadth, fluidity ofthought, take place in real life and work terms, that have risks and costs, requiring much courage toface and pay. This is the step where morale and drive, persistence and finesse, judgement and cour-age prevail. This is the step, all of whose contents are missing in the wimpy creativity tests that mea-sure ability on paper in an exam to flex things that everyone does not get hurt by or care about (hencecreativity tests have no validity, when tested longitudinally). Flexing ideas on a test is quite a bit dif-ferent than flexing lifestyle arrangements, or flexing comments that turn a boss into an enemy, or thatalienate powerful figures in a field capable of preventing anyone exhibiting your works. Gutless cre-ativity test flexing has nothing to do with real creator flexing, with the enemies, backbiting, revenge,subterfuge, and like resistances it produces. Only conquerors create, not nice people easy to getalong with. People who live to 110 and historic creators share one main attribute--grumpy selfishruthless pushing. They do not make nice friends or spouses.

Managing Emergence is the final step. It is tough indeed. Creations do not appear cleanly, with neonlabels shouting their identity, boundaries, and presence. They appear amid messes, jumbled withjunk, contaminated with collaterals. They are slight signals amid much noise. Creating means dis-cerning the pattern among the junk. It means pruning away noise to reveal the pattern, the signal.More than this, before something creative emerges from much work, you have to get huge populationsof ideas, problems to work on, alternative problem formulations, failed solution attempts, partiallyworking solution fragments, to interact. You have to tune these populations interacting--adjustingconnectedness, diversity, distribution of initiative-taking among them. There is an exquisite balanceto doing this that produces Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" dance of working at slightly beyond one's full cur-rent potentials. This is where rapture enters the world and lives are forever transfixed and trans-formed. This is where we go to where we were before we were born and realize that we areguaranteed heaven all along--nothing in living can take it away--it was always all that was final andreal in our lives. This summarizes 8 of the 128 points in the overall recommendations model of cre-ativity. For the other 120 points see my book on the topic, at present available only to my grad stu-dents and clients of my create-analysis consults.

•Create a Creative Life--it is this life that creates not you alone--for example mind extension tools that make you smart

1 Make Interior Room--emotional space, find your self, liberate, create sub-worlds

get freedom from hassles, that squander your mood and emotions daily2 Make Exterior Room--locate the creation process, create creation environments,

focus, optimize activityto create first battle: get control of your time--compress your job into one day a week

of intense work, then use 4 days to create3 Mental Travel--diversify, broaden, extend horizons, time travel

this means going mentally where you never go, associating with people you nevermeet, exploring what is totally new and unknown to you

4 Perceive Paradox--mystify, demystify, balance, unbalancemental travel exposes lots of paradox--only people who love “things not working” and

having-to-adapt can do mental travel

•Use That Creative Life to Create Creative Works--it is that creative life that creates work, not the person alone

5 Create Creation Machine--select creation type, invent tools, establish loops,recursively define problems

takes 8 to 10 years at 12+ hours per day--loops and recursion = multiple size scales ofwork/tooling, subcreations galore

6 Think--generate, associate, decompose, map analogiesmind extensions that make us smart--thinking with our extended minds not just our

brains7 Conquer--commit to victory, establish work discipline (exceptionlessness), nor-

malize creation, establish flowfluidity of thought, breadth of association, not on easy riskless test items but on

changes in life and work with heavy consequences8 Manage Emergence--establish population automatons, establish reflexivity, tune

performance, prune away noise.finding signals among noise, tuning populations interacting till patterns emerge, spot-

ting patterns and pruning away noise

Getting Technical about Creativity--Three QuestionsQuestion 1--Can systems for dynamic, globally distributed, work processes and arrangements establish or improve creativity in them? I am suspicious of questions like this, when posed to me by American, male, technology, capitalist,monkey-hierarchy persons. I suspect that what is really going on with this question is “how can we usecreativity as a cover for selling more of our products to people than they really need?” This is the toolsfor fools approach of telling yourself and other people that certain tools will “enhance” or “enable” or“increase” or “improve” or “foster” some nice sounding thing like creativity. The truth is, absolutelyno tool whatsoever, ever made anyone the least bit creative. The recommendations model specifies 8things that make people creative, 4 under create a creative life and 4 under use that creative life tocreate things. Tools are a part of one of those 8 steps in becoming creative and creating, Create aCreation Machine. The other 7 steps cannot be substantially affected by tools of any sort, though somemarginal impacts there are possible.

An OEM business of 8 employees, 2 each in Taiwan, Tokyo, New York City, and London, and huge sales,lost 4 big contracts in a row. They did not need creativity--they needed shared vision, shared values,rapport with and trust of each other. They had a shared technical system but no shared social life.The people had no relation to each other other than work and did not trust or like each other. Tech-nology not only distributes work more widely but thins it--fewer people doing functions. Add distribu-tion to thinning and you get no social life among a smaller number of people--only technical tools withmessages they share. This is a recipe for disaster, so being creative is not the main concern, usually.Outsourcing research, programming, product development, localizing products, and the like are largelynominal in this world. P&G, much vaunted as a trans-national forward looking firm, has over 100American managers in their Japan headquarters in Kobe--a concrete specific measure of their degreeof trust, localization and global distribution of authority and initiative. The Prussian military underBismarck 150 years ago was about as global in structure and function. Headquarters, all over theworld, in every sector of the economy, shiver with fear over control, not creativity. They have to havecontrol over far flung functions, persons, and offices--creativity would be nice but only if control isassured. The bottom line is the hierarchy. Some high tech firms look more global and trusting--likeCisco and Google--but when they go global it is servers in warehouses, identical to the ones in the US,with little if any tailoring of things for localities. High tech isolates firms from localization issues forthe most part.

My solution for this OEM firm, however, had unexpected rather large creativity side-benefits. Weneeded a cost effective and time effective way to weave social life with technical systems. Weneeded a way to regularly, rapidly, intensely, build social relationships and trust, while keeping peoplelargely dispersed. Not departments where people are co-located; not processes where people sendmessages and calls but seldom meet; the answer was events. Not usual events, but an entirely newkind of event, inspired by computation, that uses individual people as if they were CPU processors in anarray of human processors. It is called Managing by Events.

Managing by EventsMass workshop events using unusual “social automaton” meeting procedures to establish a kind of micro-level of organization within each workshop session, using people as if they were processors in an array, that multiplies greatly how much work can be done and how much people learn from

workshop procedures they do.

Research assemblies, customer contact events, problem finding workouts, problem solving workouts,solution impact finding workouts, participatory town meetings, invent events, quality cabarets of manyemployee-designed arts, competitor virtue surveys--are some of the types of events typically used.This OEM needed Sales Follow Up Events, Annual Budget Creation Events, Supplier Capability TuningEvents, among others, each event combining the 8 employees with anywhere for 12 to 20 outsiders,making a total of between 20 and 30 per event, divided into 6 simultaneously working teams. Eventslasted 2 days in principle, with a few extended an extra day where good work would otherwise havebeen delayed or lost.

Another element in my solution for this OEM firm was a model of managing functions, used by ordinaryemployees in this firm to identify when particular managing functions were needed, then, workshopevents to do these managing functions were held among the 8 employees, using outside advisors orexperts when needed.

Just-in-Time Delivery of Managing Functions, When and Where Needed, by Events

Instead of a fixed inventory of managers, a designated special social class of people, being paid all day to be managerial even when no managing functions were needed, managing functions were

requested by workgroups and delivered by events having specific procedures for doing each of 64 basic management functions.

Three months of the year were designated for these events. Locations rotated among the four cities ofthe OEM firm. Outside consultants were usually hired to assist particular functions the 8 employeeswere not good at. The consultants’ ideas were embedded in event manuals so future events could usetheir wisdom without having to hire them again, at least for those same ideas. Just-in-Time Managingdepends on having a good model of what all the most basic functions of managing are--which I pro-vided, obtained from my Orthogonal Disciplines Research Project. This OEM solution delivered sociallife via events, cost and time effectively across the globe. Instead of vague meetings and long windeddiscussion, everyone followed expertly-led precise procedures, developed by interviewing world bestpractitioners before events. This led to creativity that was not a part of the original contract in thefollowing form.

Invent EventsMass workshop events with procedures from world experts on how to invent, how to design, how to discover, how to create, anything from ads to products, from ventures to business ideas, using invited customers, competitor retirees, consultants, professors, inventors, as workshop leaders or

advisors/result-evaluators.

One Type of Invent Event for Each of the 60 Models of Cre-ativity

Entire Invent Events dedicated to applying just one Model of Creativity as well as myriad Invent Events that weave several Models of Creativity are possible.

These Invent Events came up with working new products, system designs, ventures, so quickly and withso much good specification and documentation, evaluation by experts and expert commentary onresults, that I sold the whole Invent Event program to Siemens, three years later, when one of the 8OEM employees got an executive position there. At Siemens we developed 1231 patents in a sequenceof 8 events, one event held every three months for two years, each event combining 100 Siemensemployees/managers and 100 external consultants, advisors, customers, and the like. Siemens at thattime was in a typical predicament--a hardware culture, managerial class, and structure the primaryvalue of whose products came from software not hardware. The Invent Events turned software from aninconvenient hassle, into a source of competitive pride and advantage, by inventing new product valuefrom clever use of rare forms of software.

Each Invent Event lasted 4 days, with, like GE workouts, executive sign offs for feasibility budgets andtesting of results at a final lunch convocation. Each event was scripted at the every five minute level

of detail with workshops from 7 am breakfast info exchanges among workshop groups, to 7 pm start ofevening designed celebrations by particular representatives of each workshop group. With 200 mem-bers, 40 parallel workshops met during each day, exchanging printed results at night and orally discuss-ing their needs and accomplishments in a breakfast plenary session, each morning.

The Profits of Event Based Doing of Business Functions. When dozens of people areintensely together, not vaguely discussing in tiresome meetings but following precise and expert proto-cols from people world best at some vital function--they learn from each workshop new ways ofthought and work, in an applied context of using ideas in procedural contexts to create tangible prod-ucts they get at the end of each workshop. This is fast, detailed, applied learning of the best sort--thesort people remember for years. It is not “learning by sitting and taking notes in a lecture”. It is not“learning by doing a business simulation” in some middle manager corporate training weekend. It isdoing real work now using real expert procedures to produce a real product you will later have to livewith and use. There are huge organizational learning benefits of doing a function in event form versusprocess or department form.

Furthermore there is the event productivity principle and a coordination-event weave principle:The Event Productivity Principle

Mass workshop events can do a function in hours or days, that otherwise, would take small staffs months or years to complete. Faster cycle time!

The Coordination System-Event Weave PrincipleWork coordination system for global outsourcing and firm binding depend on their info having a

“social life” most economically provided by events of a special social automaton sort--Mass Work-shop Event with micro-organization of all meeting procedures and time.

Software Opportunity--No One Sells Software for Supporting Such Mass Workshop Events!

With So Much Discussion of Events, What About Software Systems and Their Support-ing of Creativity? Deploying technical systems alone is nearly everywhere a mistake. Informationhas, as the book by Brown and Duguid says, a social life and what inevitably gets deployed is both par-ticular social tactics along with particular technical capabilities. Can a technical system alone supportor increase creativity? Strictly speaking, no. Why?

The Recommendations Model of Creativity makes this clear. Try to imagine any purely technical sys-tem that Creates Interior Room, Creates Exterior Room, does Mental Travel, Perceives Paradox, Cre-ates a Creation Machine, Thinks, Conquers, and Manages Emergence. Though we can all identify a fewsmall discrete functions within each of these that technologies might help with, it is hard to imagineanything core, central, heavy hitting that technology can do for most of these. Creativity tends todepend on the most subtle, self-contradictory, complicated features of the human condition and mind.That is why expert systems, a few decades ago, peeled off the dumber parts of expert designer’s pro-cesses of work and helped with them, ignoring the core, the central, the heavy hitting stuff that reallycounted. If we ask the same question about the Subcreations Model of Creativity, or any of the 58other models in my Model of Models of Creativity, though, we get different answers. Subcreations, forsome types of creator, can substantially include software and other contemporary technical means.The overall answer depends on which of the 60 models of creativity you are using.

The potential for technology to assist differs by which model of creativity you apply.

•some relevant theories--computational sociality, social automatons as micro org, social life of info, processware/socialware weaves/pulses, social indexing, social vir-tuality, agile event-built firms, general empirical computation, space type theory, info ecology theory, network theory, cognitive democracy theory

•the role of tools in fostering creativity = (in the recommendations model of creativity) tools appear as part of 1 of 8 steps = little impact

•the costly fight--between flat, software/net supported globally distributed work processes and monkey-hierarchy behaviors demanded = executes are

the primary block, their lack of education, lack of educatedness, command monkey skills when tuning automata skills are needed

•example 1: P&G with 100 American managers in their Japan headquarters = pretend globalization, coordination by command not system

•example 2: my OEM client, weaving electronic connection with just enough face-to-face-ness via Events

•a new kind of event--mass workshop events using parallel workshop of proce-dures from experts, with micro-layer of organization

•the micro-organization layer--from computational sociality, using people as proces-sors, Social Automata = 15+ times as productive as meetings

•Managing by Events--faster than by process or department, with more org learning, and more professional procedures of work

•Just-in-Time Managing--from delivering management functions via fixed inventory of managers = special social class, to, delivery of management functions via events

•Requires model of all basic management functions and regular questionnaires to determine when, where, what amount, of which management function is needed = far more management functioning using far fewer “managers” = vastly more empowered employees = customer sat up

•evolution of JIT Managing events for OEM firm into Invent Events--dozens of software inventions in parallel workshops in days

•one Invent Event type for each of the 60 Models of Creativity•example Siemens = 1200+ patents from 8 events of 200 persons each doing 40

parallel workshops•Software opportunity--no one sells software supporting mass workshop

events, only general discussion type sit and listen type events•the role of tools and technologies in creativity--bit parts in some steps, noth-

ing main, ever•the connectivity illusion--we have lots of technologies for connecting but con-

necting self limits

Question 2--How can individual persons in modern business organizations become more creative?

You can argue this either way--that it is nearly impossible for such a person thusly situated to becomecreative and create, or that is is nearly impossible for such a person thusly situated to not become cre-ative and create. In a section below I compare, proposition by proposition these two arguments.Here I merely want to suggest that anyone with a goodly amount of courage, able to think far beyondwhat everyone else assumes without thinking, can be immensely creative in modern businesses, how-ever, modern businesses do all that is humanly possible to not select, not create, and not tolerate suchpeople.

Anyone courageous enough to depart from norms can cre-ate in modern businesses but modern businesses in every possible way make sure no such people are hired/kept.

The monkey-hierarchy stuff between strutting self important little males makes sure that exactly thekinds of people incompatible with supervision will get too much of it to hang around long--dominancefights among monkeys drive creators away. Creators are not good at kow-towing, making big shots look

un-stupid, and like skills of the socially smooth business organization. This will be dealt with morefully below under the cultural work of creating.

Question 3-- How can teams and whole organizations in businesses and economies become creative and more creative? Slack and scarce supervision, lack of surveillance, isola-tion--these are the keys to getting entire teams and organization units creative in modern businessorganizations. You can see how both total quality systems and work coordination computing systemsdrive out the “wastes” the “slack” the “leeway” in which creativity grows. Bad people, given slack,slack off and become corrupt; good people, given slack, thrive and pay firms back with immense inven-tions. Modern business organizations do not have high enough quality leaders to distinguish the onefrom the other.

The biggest impediment to creativity increase for organizational units is the lack of upper leadershipcapability to know who to trust. Slack is constantly given to ass-kissers when it is needed by rebels andmalcontents instead. If you improve upper management levels of education, you improve their abilityto spot the kind of people not needing any supervision at all--to set them free to create. Perhaps thesingle greatest leverage point for increasing creativity of entire organization units is sending all upperlevel managers every ten years through 2 years, full course programs, of graduate education.

Perhaps the single greatest leverage point for increasing creativ-ity of entire organization units is sending all upper level manag-

ers, every ten years, through 2 years of grad education.

Is Creativity Possible? Comparing the Employee Condition with the Creator Condi-tionWith the above recommendations and subcreations models of creativity under our belt, we can nowcompare creator conditions with employee/manager conditions, to see if creativity is possible in mod-ern business organizations. Remembering that career forces cause gross exaggeration of tolerance forand achievement of creativity, remembering that the immense difficulty getting anything the tiniestbit new through bulky business bureaucracies, causes business persons to apotheisize, to celebrateachievement of very slight novelties, as if major achievements and conquests, we have reason to doubtbusinesses get much that is creative done today in spite of lots of ballyhoo, marketing, brochures, andslogans.

The Creator Condition. Supervision is the enemy of all creation. Creative people, on their own,are hundreds of times more productive than anyone in even the best business organization. Creation,however, is risky, so you make bets, lose most of them, and if smart and lucky, get a true home run,every now and then. Research on managing R&D organizations is full of these contradictions--manag-ing prima donnas. You see firms buying out technology firms and getting hollow shells, as half a dozenabsolutely key people leave, taking not just some knowledge, but only-one-in-the-entire-world type ofknowledge with them. Dumb, dumb, dumb buyouts by upper managers completely out of their classeducationally with whom they are buying.

Creators work no particular way and every particular way, and it changes all the time. I saw this inaction at Coopers & Lybrand. Every morning I passed a “director” sitting at his empty desk, doing noth-ing. He was French, from Ecole Polytechnique, one of the best Grandes Ecoles set up by Napoleon,that train the French elite. For six months I passed, never seeing him on the phone, shuffling papers,or even moving at all. He just sat, elegantly, sipping coffee, doing nothing for months on end. Oneday I hazarded a question to him about what he was doing--”thinking” he answered, sipping his coffeeas a sign for me to leave. Sure enough, a year later, he was not there. Instead he was with our CEOexplaining a new consulting practice, and in two days, getting $24 million in contracts from clients tostart it up with. $24 million a year made him the highest earner in the entire firm, but for 18 months,from hire, he did absolutely nothing, talked to no one, sat and sipped. Only upper level managersintelligent enough, educated enough, to know such people exist, and recognize them, leavingthem to hell alone, can foster creativity in workforces. Your average power-hungry dumb streetsmarts Joe, does not have a chance. Upper manager low levels of education are a primary block tomaking organizations more creative. Give three graduate degrees to your CEO and all his or her VPsand watch creativity bloom! Remember Jack Welch has a Ph..D. in chemistry!

The Employee and Middle Manager Condition. Supervision is everywhere--how to buy pen-cils, when to travel and how to travel, whom to talk to and whom not to talk to, whom to give credit toand whom not to give credit to, what egos to praise and fawn before, how many desks are permitted,what days to show up, and on and on. We define a prison of rules, supervision, norms, social fawningbehaviors, and then ask that creativity come out of this prison.

Surveillance is everywhere. In big organizations the most irritating thing is everyone watches whateveryone else does, and, having only a fragmentary distorted context, they all react to what they see,making the doing of even the most obvious or necessary things, a huge burden, to dis-encumber it fromall the partial, distorted, un-informed reactions to it from everyone and everywhere. Isolation anddarkness are where the new starts out, as a baby idea, needing protection from critique, doubt, poli-tics, competition. With nearly no isolation and a huge audience for everything everywhere all thetime--it is a wonder that anything new at all creeps out of any modern business organization. We neednot more connection but far far far far more isolation. But technology vendors cannot sell isolation--they do not make systems that foster or improve isolation--their technologies only improve connection--so modern technologies are driving difference, surprise, variety out of the entire world. Moderntechnologies are killing creativity world wide. Remember the P&G retiree researcher network exam-ple from above--connect everyone, get a boost from new combinations then a long long deep decline aseveryone knows everyone till no variety and differences remain, killing all creativity on the network.Connection is a self limiting process. Technologies that connect ultimately destroy creativity unlessovercome by more powerful new means of isolation.

What Does this Mean, Practically, for Creativity? It means pulsed connection systems areneeded. Systems that enhance separation for months and years, keeping things unknown and uncon-nected, then, at regular or somewhat surprising, irregular intervals, breaking out strong connectionsthat were never there before--Pulsed Systems are the answer.

Pulsed Systems are the Answer: a rhythm of connection and isolation woven together.

•personal creativity in businesses--the courage to depart from norms, but firms support creating while throwing out people who create

•monkey dynamics at work drive creators away = dominance fights, strutting self importance displays, I-I-I ness, + USA culture of theft/lies/stealing

•slack, leeway, lack of surveillance fosters creativity among determined, but not among lazy, people

•block to creativity at work = top managers and execs not educated enough to spot what people to stop surveillance on

•foster creativity by: forced grad education every ten years for all top manag-ers

•example: the Ecole Polytechnique guy sipping coffee only for 18 months, then getting $24 million in a week--most bosses would have fired him = his sipping was thinking, most bosses cannot detect thinking, cannot understand it, = not educated enough to manage creative people

•creation needs darkness = babies protected from public exposure = lack of surveillance

•the self limiting nature of more connection means we need Pulsed Systems not connectivity systems to foster enough isolation = surprise to create; example--academic publishing of tiny bits fast = nothing attracts attention = lower standards, pluralizing journals = for show only ideas

Is Creativity Possible? The Case for the Impos-sibility of Being Creative in Any Modern Busi-

ness Organization versus the Case for the Easiness of Being Creative in Any Such Orga-nizationThe Impossibility Case. It is not the job of businesses to create. Someone creates in a lab, uni-versity, alone in the woods, then a business person decides to turn that novelty into a real change insituations and lives on a widescale basis. The job of business is taking ideas somewhere, not comingup with the ideas. This argument has a lot behind it and should not be belittled without carefulthought. When businesses get cute and start wanting to be good at doing everything in life, they arebecoming mentally ill, deluded, grandiose, ready for a big fall.

Businesses excel at taking ordinary not-so-great people, aimless-undirected-drifting people, and plug-ging them into systems designed to produce using such poor or mediocre human inputs. The genius oflarge business organizations is quite similar to the genius of armies--anything input into its systems pro-duces. The genius is in these systems that get standard outcomes of production and sales from highlyvariable, poor quality, or average inputs. To ask, now, such organizations based on such genius, to getcreativity from such variable, poor, average inputs, is perhaps going one step too far. Can systems beset up that take as inputs, mediocre human quality and output world and history best discoveries,inventions, and ideas?

Many global businesses are American dominated, male, technical, capitalist, monkey-hierarchies.They are banana-lands where hormones rule all, making control very very important. Strutting, selfimportant, self advertising braggadocio infests every hallway encounter, every meeting opening, everystaff meeting, every social occasion in them. Ego, territory, revenge, demonstrations of dominance--these monkey dynamics are the main show and products, customers, and the like are just a way to getenough money to keep the show going. To expect such systems of organized omnipresent surveillanceand control to create is ludicrous. Looking creative is enough to get one promoted--why would anyrational being go the extra mile to actually do some creating? Where is the payback in that?

The “It is Easy” to Create There Case. Nearly all upper level managers of businesses arepoorly and narrowly educated. The quality of books read by business persons is unbelievably dumbeddown, by publishers, looking for wide markets (more sales, revenues). MBAs, in not a few executives,give the pretense of education without any real study or intellectual content. I taught University ofChicago MBAs for five years and was under-impressed with the quality of mind input and output fromthat program. As a result, the leaders of most businesses are not intellectually capable of spotting cre-ative people, creative ideas, and intellectual paths to corporate greatness. This sounds like a case forwhy businesses cannot create but it is the opposite, as the next step makes clear. Because of all this,this globally low standard of intellectual life in business, a remnant of immigrant labor early days wheninitiative, not mind, was key to business, all made dumber by overt male hormone power games anddisplays, anyone not playing these monkey games of dominance and territory, not reading booksdumbed down by dumb publishers--conquers the entire field. There simply are no competitors for thecourageous man or woman willing to imagine and act outside of the Americanisms, male-isms, tech-nology-isms, capitalism-isms, and monkey-isms that populate modern business organizations. If youare willing to not belong, you can do anything you wish, mobilize resources behind any idea you wish,in the confidence that no one embedded in the organization will be able to understand you well enoughto stop you or even guess where the hell you are going.

My personal experience has been that the levels of performance in modern business organizations arerather low, in discipline, thought, productivity, integrity. That, remember, is part of the genius ofmodern businesses--vast income made from accepting rather ordinary inputs of human resources.Therefore, anyone just a little beyond ordinary in these domains, shines like a Super Novae, brilliantly,immediately attracting CEO attention, promotion, and resources. I have shipped ten years of studentsof my 2 year undergrad research seminars into the world’s leading businesses, with this attitude inthem, that virtually nowhere in any modern business is there a single person, working at one tenth thelevel of daily discipline that I instill in my students, in that 2 year seminar (20 hours of homework perweek for one class; 50 graduate research books in English read per year, one per week, with 200 mainpoints of each book chapter diagrammed for checking by me; weekly one hour presentations by teamsof four presenting 200 main points in one hour in five media--website, video, speech, workshop,videogame). Over 50 of my students have won prizes as the best of 1000, the best of 4000, the best ofAsia, the best of North America, within their chosen firms. 19 of my 28 year old graduates are makingabove US$150,000 a year. It takes 8 to 10 years to create your Creation Machine, so these students are

still a bit too young to create, but soon, in four years or so, they will be ready and able. I await theirresults.

It is nearly impossible not to be creative in any modern business organization. All it requires is thecourage to violate norms and expectations and systems, and a strategic inventiveness sufficient topackage an idea in terms of CEO priorities, well enough, that you get the CEO’s immediate attentionand support, because your initiative looks like an example of where he is working to make the overallorganization go. Fighting for promotions and existing positions of power, like VP slots, is a waste oftime. You have to make enemies, socially, to win competitions for these positions, insuring that onceyou have positional power you have too little social power to do much with it. Instead, you can inventwholly new business units and initiatives, that no one competes for, and freely install them and gatherrevenues from them, growing too large too fast for higher placed people to block you. That you looklike a fool in the early stages of this sort of work, helps you, by making you not worth opposing whileyou become a competitive threat. Potential enemies wake up to your power far too late to stop you.I teach my students this and they, so far, are practicing it very well.

Modern business organizations are so boring, their level of thought within meetings, within daily con-versations, in documented emails and workflows so average and boring, that they virtually drive goodpeople to create, just as a tactic to keep awake. While the boss is pompously intervening in staffmeetings, merely to demonstrate to everyone that he is in control, you scratch out notes on an initia-tive that your biggest customer can help you launch, without your boss knowing, till enough revenuecomes in that your CEO notices instantly, bypassing your boss’ status concerns. People get used tomodern businesses and their cultures. Within three years of joining a firm, the culture gets to you,lowering your standards to the corporate norm. This lowest common denominator level of perfor-mance makes creativity easier while making it rare to find people willing to create. This paradox wasmentioned above.

•business grandiosity = orgs good at realizing ideas as actual changes in the world try to be good at everything = creative = at creating ideas

•businesses and the military excel at = taking ordinary inputs, getting consis-tent outputs from them = not getting creative outputs from them

•businesses are structured to NOT get creative outputs from their human resource inputs; they are structured for consistent production instead

•banana land hormone displays--monkeys preening, looking important, domi-nance fights = surveillance = no creativity, looking is enough

•globally low standard of intellectual life in top management = narrowly edu-cated and shallowly educated = cannot spot creation or handle it

•remember, Jack Welch was a Ph.D. at the start of his business career, is your CEO a Ph.D? Can he understand Ph.Ds at lunch?

•anyone able to imagine and think outside the Five Cultures can be creative without competitors and hindrances: American, male, techie, $, monkey hierarchy

•being creative requires 1) operating beyond Five Culture norms 2) strategic packaging as furtherance of CEO priority directions

•the contradiction of positional power--you have to become enemy of peers to get it = have too little social power to use positional power well

•corporate cultures install lowest common denominator levels of performance = easy to shine against such low backgrounds of perform norms

Being Creative--A Matter of Cultural Work, Educatedness Work, and Moral Work

Being creative in modern business organizations, in my personal experience, is primarily a matter ofdoing cultural work.

The American Waypoor implementation, fast chasing of trends, home runs not base hits, trust systems not people, psy-

chopaths make good managers, people are mere tools, omni-present theft

The Male Wayshow how important I am, protect my turf, talk not listen, challenge not care, fix not empathize, teach not

learn, push not pull, emotion is unprofessional, relationships are a cost of sex

The Technology Waytoys for boys, fix everything with technology not people, latest is dangerous, product development decaying

into technology fixes, promise the moon delivery is a later manager’s problem

The Capitalist Waylive and work for money, you can never have enough, greed is good, the MBA religion, numbers

don’t lie, externalities are irrelevant

The Monkey Wayat every occasion first establish dominance, promotion via fawning, yes-men and ass-kissers, only

praise is heard, problems never exist

These are five common cultures of modern business, attenuated in cultures outside the US, attenuatedmore in non-Western cultures, least respected in Japan and Nordic Europe. If being educated meanswhat you believe and do cannot be predicted from knowing the backgrounds in which you were raised,then few of us are educated. That means, most of what we believe and do comes from unconsciousautomated routines put inside us while growing up somewhere or spending intense time in some group.We are unaware of most of what is inside us and most of the principles determining how we operate.That is what culture is--high performance. All cultures are just high performances--procedures prac-ticed so much they have long become unconscious, operating inside us without need for consciousexecutive attention from us. The problem is, going around all day, unaware of what is determiningwhat and how you do things, means you are only partially, at best, steering you, each hour, each day.Most of what is steering and determining you, you are unaware of, and have been unaware of fordecades. For anyone cultured in any way, this is true. How to be creative?

Being creative--enormously surprising those around with what you invent, produce, suggest, create--isas simple as getting outside all or a few of these cultures and operating from that outside vantagepoint, while all around you are stuck within these cultures.

The Creator Spec:Master the Non-American Ways--example, Japanese solace systems within workteams,

the boss as benevolent carer not source of all ideas for others to obey; example, my artificial intelligence circles

Master the Feminine Way--example, re-engineering feminized work systems in a male-looking way; example, my feminine Taguchi application spec

Master the Social System Way--example, computational socialities, social automata; example, my Management by Events workshops with micro organization layers

Master the Social Capital Way--example, quality cabarets inventing arts that transition firms to needed attitudes/behaviors for the future, example, my market by fash-ions

Master the Educated Person Way--example, working cocktail parties by eating only 1st hour, waiting for people to solve the mystery of you, example, my dual jobs career path--have a better job/salary always on offer so full risking goes on in each job

Each of the above five cultures, and all other cultures in history, is neurotic--what it is very good at,hides, what it is therefore very bad at, the cost of the focus that made it good at the first thing. Amer-icans live, conscious, of their innovative, pragmatic virtues--they do not live amid their shallow imple-

mentations, sloppy applications, gutless inability to persist in pursuit of a goal. Males live, conscious,of their venturesomeness, heroic fighting ability, pride in past feats--they do not live amid their blind-ness to effects on others, they narcissistic sycophancy, their terrible daily insecurity about whetherthey are important or not. Technologists live, conscious, of their revolutionary implications of theworld, their promise of riches, their complicated systems and contents--they do not live amid theirpretense at improving things, their fear of emotions and human relationships, their ignoring of all thatis not abstract, quick, mere thought. Capitalists live, conscious, of their accumulations of wealth, oftheir investment risks, of their constant search for advantages--they do not live amid their suicidalstripping of resources from non-financial areas, the enemies they make with their ruthless focus onreturns, the financial costs of side-effects that take time to develop. Monkey-hierarchy-members live,conscious, of their dominance, their rank in the hierarchy, their competitors for next ranks, their strat-egies for defeating competitors--they do not live amid their wasting half of all meeting time in lookingimportant, their bombastic personal style, the stench of their subservience to other monkeys, the costsof problems they cannot afford to admit.

Instant, powerful creativity results whenever anyone steps outside these common business cultures andthereby becomes unpredictable, un-understandable, un-controllable by those left comfortably uncon-sciously in these cultures.

Getting outside such cultures is the work of becoming an educated person. Unfortunately most peoplego to college not for this purpose. Unfortunately most colleges no longer remember educating personsas a mission. We are drifting into a world lacking educatedness entirely--where people of God one killmasses of people of God two, each side convinced it is right. 35% of the entire population of Germanywas killed in 30 years of religious wars that broke out after Martin Luther left the Catholic church. Anaffirmation of faith. A world without educatedness we have already, as humankind, tried. 500 yearsof women burned alive at the stake, after days or weeks of torture, church endorsed, as God told peo-ple about the devil and the dangers of devils. We have lived by faith alone for 1000 years and escapedit. Selling is more important than educatedness right now, but eventually, selling will be hurt, moreand more, by lack of educatedness. Rich Americans in Texas will wait in line years, for stem cell ther-apies developed in Singapore, Japan, and Britain, because, while they were selling, ignoring educated-ness, the world’s biggest new industry--human replacement parts, immortality--passed their nation by.

Historic level creativity always comes from being highly educated, in this specific sense, of standingoutside the cultures, everyone else around you, are in. Einstein was German working in Switzerland, aPh.D. working as a clerk, married as an active adulterer, trained in math working in physics, a Jew whodistrusted religions--that is five cultures violated, mixed, escaped. Say you escape these cultures, bybecoming an educated man, getting a new graduate degree every ten years of your life. All that is left,as the final step to creating is morality--the integrity to do creativity rather than just look creative, tospend the 8 to 10 years composing your Creation Machine rather than looking for short cuts.

•being creative is primarily culture work--my personal experience in 3 global firms

•Five Cultures to extricate yourself from and extricate from inside your self: American, male, tech, $ (the MBA disease, Mintzberg), monkey hierarchy

•all cultures are neurotic--they are focusses, attained by not focussing, on other stuff = by virtue of being good at X, not good at A, B, C, D

•cultures forget their costs (the costs of the focussing used to attain them) = exaggerate their benefits because forget costs of those benefits

•step outside the Five Cultures = become unpredictable, uncontrollable, unstoppable = creative ALSO regression to mean = solutions outside the culture

•think about it--for 2,000 years men rule, so most solutions feminize systems (the re-engineering example)

•step outside the Five Cultures = call “a solution” things that actually solve instead of perpetuate the blind neurosis spots of your own culture

•stepping outside the Five Cultures = differing from your present self = growth, intimate, emotional, growth = hardest work in your life

•becoming educated = such growth, but educatedness forgotten by colleges

•educatedness method = get grad degree every ten years of your life, no exceptions and do creating not look creating.

“Create-Analysis”--Not Tools for Creating but Coaching the Process of Becoming a Creator and Getting that Creator to CreateI do not sell creativity tools, as you by now have guessed. I think that is a joke and I think all of you,without exception, believe it is a joke, though you may, because your corporation makes money sellingtools to fools, play the game of pretending that tools make people creative. We all know this. Instead of selling tools, I do creativity consulting. This is a kind of creativity psycho-analysis (note, foreach of the 60 models of creativity from my research I have a different kind of consulting in creativityenhancement on offer). I meet my clients once every two to four weeks and review their progressalong all 8 dimensions of the model we agree to use (recommendation in this chapter). They report onwhat hassles they liberated themselves from, this interval, what transformations of work facilities theyachieved, what mental places they traveled to, what paradoxes they encountered in doing so, whatinventions of tool and place they installed in their emerging Creation Machine, what thought theyachieved, what they conquered, and what automaton tuning and emergent pattern pruning theyaccomplished. "Create-analysis", as I call it (a registered trademark), switches life transformation fortools, as consulting content. It works with teams in industries far better than training such teams withtools. Create-analysis coaches bosses and executives surrounding teams into permitting the myriadsubcreations they habitually forbid in businesses. It helps these frightened men to develop the cour-age to do something (the horror!) that is a career risk. It helps these frightened ones grow up. It callsforth the human being from the monkey in the organization suit. " T-shirt courage" this was called onthe West Coast of the US in the early 1980s--the courage to not wear (the horror!) a suit. If a busi-nessperson wants outsiders to respect the conformities, the careers concerns, the monkey hierarchybehaviors of any modern business organization, while "improving" their creativity, then he is simply toogutless to mess with creativity. Such wimps do not have what it takes to create. Remember my oneminute courage test above.

This means you can: 1) hire me to do create-analysis for you 2) hire me to work as a partner withyou doing create-analysis for your clients 3) hire me to help you invent new software tools andservices to support client creativity improvements 4) hire me to help you develop the ability todo create-analysis on your own for your clients.

What is the payback from create-analysis?

First, you become famous, exhibit your works, and women offer themselves sexu-ally to you (also men to women, but that may not please the women).

Second, you populate the world with works that speak to the world for you where you are not and after you die.

Third. you face down and wipe out all those things that squander your time, de-focus your efforts, and belittle your possible originality and impact.

Fourth, you show your children a way of being in the world that impacts genera-tions alive after you die--a historic respect to lives lived.

Fifth, you become detached from trend, fashion, career, selfishness, wealth, and consumer society-izations--you develop personal style and poise.

Sixth, you grow into a historic audience of those yet unborn who will benefit from your work, that eases anxiety about meaning and worth.

Seventh, a gratitude for being alive grows in and around you, put in the world by your works, that, like a beacon tells myriad others this message:

"all is okay" "heaven was here all along, we never lost or left it, we just stopped noticing it".

Further Resources:The book you are reading is ninth book I have written--all on various aspects of what I call the “orthog-onal disciplines” that is, those capabilities that make people rise to the top in traditional fields likemedicine, business, law, physics, math, and the like. In prior research I defined 54 orthogonal disci-plines that cut across all traditional ones and determine who rises to their tops. I arranged interviewsof 150 in each orthogonal field and used those results to build categorical models of the skills shared bysuch people--that is, by highly effective people, by highly educated people, by highly creative people,by people great at handling complexity, by people great at handling error, and so on for the rest of the54 orthogonals. You can contact me for purchase of any of the book below by email at : richardt-greene@alum.mit.edu.

Are You Creative? 64 Steps to Becoming Creative, 64 Steps to Creating

Are You Creative? 60 ModelsAre You Educated? 64 CapabilitiesAre You Effective? 96 Skills of the World’s Most Effective

PeopleA Science of Excellence: 54 Orthogonal DisciplinesManaging Complexity: 30 MethodsTaking Place, Creative Cities Theory and Practice: 288

City-ficationsKnowledge Epitome: 64 New University CapabilitiesSuper Selling: 13 Principles, 26 Methods, 33 Cases

These books, ranging from 1000 to 3000 pages (at 400 words per page) are available for site licensing orfor use during my Create-Analysis consults; they can be ordered from me now, or later from Ama-zon.com.

Create-Analysis is a contract of once or twice per month half or full day consults, on site or via videoconnection, with teams implementing one of more of the 60 models of creativity. Teams plus all theexecs they report to must together participate--the teams to do the creativity models, the execs toclear the way for subcreations needed by each creativity model.

The Errors of Creating Creativity

Error 1: Assuming that Environments “Sup-port” or “Create” CreativityWhat Makes Money Does Not Make CreativityWhy all this interest in environments, measuring how they “support” or “foster” or “enable” or “cre-ate” creativity? The interest in this comes from professor-consultants selling services to businesses.The easiest creativity service to sell is “assessment”--scientific-looking “instruments” that tell a busi-ness how poorly it is supporting creativity with its current environments. Obviously, to the consult-ants, the firm needs major changes in its environments, which the consultant can advise the firm on,for a price. Money is the force causing all this emphasis on environments that do something to creativ-ity. What if environments do little, positive or negative, to affect creativity?Creative people are the least affected by any environments that you already have, research has shownfor generations now. Creators are precisely those obnoxious persons who dislike their environments,are skeptical of all the contents of them, and do their best to ignore their effects. If you have no peo-ple who dislike your work environments you have no creators. If you erect proper “creativity-support-ing” environments, you can be sure it is your most creative people who will dislike them, rebel againstthem, and isolate themselves from the influence of those environments. Who then likes and supportsthe creativity-supporting environments erected by professor-consultants? It is not creators who likethem but your run-of-the-mill ordinary employees who want to think better of themselves and want;therefore, to think of themselves as “creators”. Creativity-supporting environments will encouragethese people to appear creative. Indeed, though not many professor-consultant programs for creativ-ity have had their results evaluated by third parties (companies, particularly sponsoring managers ofthem, do not relish having their “accomplishments” rather than “launches” evaluated for final results,for good reason, usually), those few programs the results of which I have come across, appear to havesignificantly improved “appearing creative”. For many wanting promotions, this is enough; for thoserare ones wanting real creativity, that is disappointing.

Why Creativity-Promoting Environments Fail to Promote CreativityWeakness one is the professor-consultants base their suggestions on studies of how existing businessesproduce their existing low levels of creativity. Instead of studying hotbeds of creativity like major sci-entific labs or artist studios, they base their suggestions on data from the ho-hum creativity levelsachieved by existing businesses. You get a watered-down version of what some of your competitorsalready are doing, from the academic-consultants with “valid” and “reliable” creativity instruments.Weakness two is, by paying attention to such consultants, you bypass paying attention to those in yourworkforce who are creative and need specific supports and to those in your workforce who gave upcreating years ago as male strutting dynamics, right wing market dynamics, monkey hierarchy dynam-ics, American theft and backbiting dynamics--some of the basic cultures of business--undermined theiraims and work. Weakness three is dealt with in passages below--the professor-consultants never failto treat creativity as if it were one thing, so they measure how environments support their one model,never measuring how the environments support dozens of other models of creativity not in the reper-toire of the consultant involved. Weakness four, creativity, even one model of it, has stages and theenvironment that supports well one stage necessarily hinders other stages because those other stagesneed rather opposite things. Real studies of product development teams by Gallegher (LEA, 1990,Intellectual Teamwork) showed the teams needed isolation during concept development but neededconnection during resource scrounging phases later in development. Environments that support con-cept development hinder resource scrounging and vice versa. Weakness five, mental processes, we allhave, and cannot consciously control, like habituation, mean that environments that thrill us today,bore us in six months. No vendor of “environments” or “knowledge work systems” wants to admit youwill have to buy something new six months later just to keep present levels of minimal creative perfor-mance. Weakness six, some powerful models of creativity insist that you have to first create “cre-ators”, that is, people living creative styles of life, then you have them “create”. Environments thatcreate “creators” have to be very very kinky and unusual, nothing like businesses at all. If you erectenvironments “to create in” you are not, by them, going to get any “creators” made. You end up withnon-creative people trying to create using modest environment crutches. If you erect environments tocreate “creators” they are going to be so far from usual business environments that you have to erect

special corporations and legal mechanisms, totally separating these people from employees as usual.Trying to, from one environment, get both the creation of creators and the creation of products andservice inventions is a fool’s game that flouts research showing these two need distinct types of sup-port. Environments that create creators do not create creations, and vice versa.

If You Do Not Erect Special Environments What Do You Do to FosterMore Creativity?Okay, so environments do not make people or groups of people creative. What is the alternative?What can we do? The rest of this book answers this in some great detail. A few salient items can be given here. Forone thing, anyone operating within the five cultures of business, presented above in this book, stopstheir own creativity as well as the creativity of those around them. People operating outside the fivecultures of business can be creative by using those five cultures as tools, rather than “being” those cul-tures as their personal or corporate “identity”. It is a matter of learning to “have” that is manage,what you used to “be”, as all psychic growth involves (Kegan’s book on self development). For anotherthing, you can clean up the social, political, economic messes left behind by creators already in yourmidst who are being drummed out of your organization by people angry at them defying the “culture”of your group and its gender and nation. For another thing, you can design specific supports for eachphase of creativity and learn the hard art of delivering those supports not by omni-present environ-ments (an expensive inventory that violate just-in-time principles) but by just-in-time event deliverysystems that deliver the type, amount, and version of a needed support exactly when and whereneeded to whom it is needed. Call this Just-in-Time creativity support delivery, replacing expensiveenvironment inventories with faster, leaner, more targeted spot delivery systems. In this way a totalquality way of delivering creativity supports outperforms fat static inventory “environment” ways ofdelivering similar services. There are many more items of this sort dealt with in the rest of this book,below.

Error 2: The Disaster of Assuming that Cre-ativity is One ThingNearly All Consultants from Major Universities and Think Tanks MakeThis MistakeI do not know why. Perhaps it is for as simple a reason as assuming one model of what creativity is, isenough to publish articles in journals, enough to get tenure, and enough to set up lucrative consults--why bother with truths not needed for major wealth and lifestyle improvements? Another possible rea-son for this mistake is companies that purchase creativity consults from creativity consultants resistcomplexity--keep it simple--is their theme. Why mess with plural diverse things when you can get pro-moted for single homogeneous things? So from the supplier side and from the client side there arepowerful motives for treating creativity as if it were one thing. There is, after all, one word for it.

A Demonstration--Using the Dumbest Simplest Model of Creativity andShowing How Optimizing “Work Environments and Systems” forSupporting It is Frustrated by Trade-OffsIf we take the most creative process known--the one that created the most creative thing we know ofin the universe--us--that is, the process called “natural selection” by Charles Darwin, and simplify italmost to comical levels by treating it as four primary functions of creating--generating variants, com-bining variants, selecting variants, reproducing variants that survive throughout entire populations--wecan examine how “creativity” modelled in this simple way interacts with “environments that ‘support’it”. Below is a table that presents four particular environment supports, one for each of the four Darwinianfunctions of creating in my model. As you go across the rows, for each such support, you find how thatsupport of one function, harms attainment of the other three, except for the last row, the support forreproducing variants--that support does not affect achieving the other functions one way or another.In other words, each of the first three supports makes it easier to do one creativity function but harderto do three others, while the last support makes it easier to do one creativity function and does notaffect the doing of the other three functions.

Even using this extremely simplified model of creating, and equally simple and obvious environmentsupports for key creativity functions, we get a situation where most environment supports for creativ-ity, help one function but by hindering three other functions. A manager or leader who implementedthese supports, a consultant who suggested these supports, would be hurting creativity overall. Thehelping of one function within creativity, if that was all they looked at, would blind them to the overallharm their “helps” and “supports” were creating. Only when the effects of an environment support on“all creativity functions in the model” are assessed, do we know whether it “supports” creativity.

This is the small, micro-version, of a much bigger argument. Consider something else--supports thatpositively affect, not one creativity function but all of them--supposing such supports are possible.Now these supports support all creativity functions of one model of creativity. Suppose there areother models having different functions that, in the end, achieve creativity. What is the chance thatthose same supports support the majority of all those new functions? What is the chance that thosesame supports support even a few of those new functions? What is the likelihood that those supportswill actually positively hinder achieving several or many of those functions from the other models ofcreativity?

A Summary of the ProblemHere is the summary in listed points:

1) environment changes that support any one function of one creativity model seldom support other func-tions and usually hinder more functions than they support in that model

2) environment changes that support a majority of functions in one model of creativity seldom supportmany functions in other models of creativity and usually hinder more functions in themthan they support:--other models of creativity that are present in a workplace but not recognized by

consultants and managers there--other models of creativity more powerful for this firm than the models recognized

and promoted there but not now implemented there.

To devise environment changes that, overall, support creativity more than hinder it, requires nearly anact of genius. There are vanishingly few executives and consultants up to this task. Since looking cre-ative long enough to get promoted is enough for most managers in existing business subcultures--male,monkey, capitalist, etc.--failing to achieve any actual creativity is perhaps not a central problem. It isonly a problem for those few in business who must have creativity in order to survive or prosper.

What is the Likelihood that Creativity is One ThingWe all get the idea that creating is one basic process because we all use the same one word for it,namely, “creativity”. Let’s consider creative bagels, creative ladies handbags, creative biotechviruses, creative experimental designs for detecting particles to confirm or disconfirm string theory inphysics. Is there one creative process used for these? Are there several distinct creative processesused for these? How could ordinary people like us figure out the answer to these questions? Well, arethe people in the processes of creating these distinct things similar? Are the tools they use similar?Are the lengths of time of their processes similar? Are the kinds of thinking involved similar? Theissue is, as we all guess, to find “similarities” such as these, we will have to become very very abstract,so abstract that though we find something “similar” among their processes, it is so denuded of concre-tion and specificity as to be practically useless for actually achieving creativity in any real circum-stance. It is far more likely that the extreme diversity of what people create indicates there are some greatdifferences in how they think and work to achieve them. Indeed, tens of thousands of expert systems,built in the 1980s and 1990s worldwide in every type of business, that put into software form some, butnot all, of the rules of design and decision of many of the world’s most creative designers, showed adomain-dependent set of rules of design and a domain-independent set of rules. That is evidence thatsome environment changes can end up supporting multiple models of creating but not necessarily with-out doing more harm to creating with them than help, because changes that help the domain-indepen-dent parts may be outweighed by the harms those very changes cause in the domain-dependent parts.We can achieve changes that help plural models of creating but not without, quite probably, harmingthem more than they help them (the domain dependent parts of creating tend to be larger than thedomain independent parts, as the above expert system building movement showed).

Four Environment Changes that Support Creating in One Way, Each, But Hinder it in Three Other Ways, Each Plus One Change that Supports One Function of Creating without Affecting Three Other Functions

CreativityFunctions

Environment Item to Support the Cre-ativity Function in

the First Column at Left

generate variants combine variants select variants reproduce variants

generatevariants

hire argumentativeloners who never gowith the flow andfollow crowds ortrends

XXXX this sort of person makes enemiesfor lunch daily = little or no com-bining of ideas with others

managers and leaders will bebiased against contributions/ideasfrom this source as he or she isobnoxious and uncooperative withothers

the kind of careful explaining andselling of ideas to others that pro-motion of an accepted idea requiresis anathema to this sort of person

Doing Something About The Above--Quality Function Deployment andIts House of Quality’s RoofBusiness people are very familiar with quality function deployment and policy deployment--two majorquality methods. One is vertical, in two months each year, deploying nominated policies down a hier-archy and collecting up required changes to achieve those nominated policies; the other is horizontal,in two months each year, deploying across adjacent business functions/departments particular cus-tomer requirements and putting in place systems to insure that local views and trade-offs do not dis-tort into irrelevance particular requirements that customers have as schedule, budget, politics andother realities and pressures handle requirements passed from prior functions to them. They both usethe same data format--a so-called House of Quality, which has a roof where interactions between col-umns are marked and measured for strength. The columns, of things that interact, can be customerrequirements--achieving one can make it harder to achieve some others, achieving one can make iteasier to achieve some others. This same data format--this roof, called “an interaction matrix” sug-gests itself for implementations of any one quality model and for implementations of several differentquality models. In the former case, the roof’s columns are functions within one quality model; in thelatter, the roof’s columns are different quality models themselves. The roof in the former case, showshow achieving one quality function in the model helps or hinders achieving other functions in themodel; the roof in the latter case, shows how achieving one quality model helps or hinders achievingothers. I am suggesting using this interaction matrix “roof” in quality and policy deployment for cre-ativity--showing how achieving one function, within a particular model of creativity, helps and hindersachieving other functions within that same model, and how achieving one model of creativity helps orhinders achieving other models of creativity.

Who to ChastiseEliminate any consultant presenting one creativity model who does not build an interaction matrix ofhow functions in that model interact when changes “to support” any of them are made (that is, howachieving one function helps or hinders achieving others). Eliminate any consultant presenting onecreativity model who does not build an interaction matrix of how achieving that models’ functionshelps and hinders achieving functions in the other creativity models extant at the workplace though notassessed or recognized by the consultant. Eliminate any consultant presenting one creativity modelwho does not build interaction matrices of how achieving that models’ functions helps and hinders

combinevariants

common facilities--coffee stations,meeting rooms,lunch facilities,events, conferences,net forums--sharedby diverse profes-sions, projects, andpersons

exposure to others constantlyerodes uniqueness of value andviewpoint and constant interactionwith others de-focusses effort andreduces intensity of realization ofnascent ideas

XXXX commonality among diverse partsand professions at work speeds upand makes easy later consensus onwhich variants are interesting toall--however, ideas that “all” cele-brate, are often influenced byhigher ups and the career aspira-tions causing people to “please”them, as well as crowd and trendphenomena

commonality among diverse partsand professions makes reproducingselected variants much easier andfaster and lower in costs; howeverthe cost of it doing that is pressureto select popular variants, or easy-to-understand ones, or ones that donot require much discussion ordebate = long term reduced unique-ness of ideas reproduced

selectvariants

a committee of themost brilliant and farsighted people, inand outside the firmwe can get plus acommittee of themost practical andmarket savvy peoplein and outside thefirm--let them com-pete to nominatevariants and justifyones they nominate

selection via rigorous debatesbetween committees havingentirely different viewpoints/crite-ria, overtime causes the whole pro-cess of generating and combiningvariants to split into factions corre-sponding to and appealing to one orthe other of the debating selectioncommittees = not blends of criteria(far sighted ideas versus realizablein markets) but alternations amongthem as political forces and histo-ries of past success sway resourcebehind one or the other selectorcommittee

combining a variant great in termsof far sighted unique value (revolu-tionary potential) with a variantgreat in terms of appeal to existingmarkets and those who must imple-ment ideas, is very hard mental,emotional, and social work--themost likely result is watering downtraits supporting one virtue in orderto get in some traits that foster theother virtue; in sum, combining isundermined by having contendingevaluation criteria and commit-tees, because the tendency is todelay and let the hard work, com-bining, be done by the two selectorcommittees, so those responsiblefor combining do not have to do thehard part themselves

XXXX doing selection via contendingcommittees representing differentviews and values means the selec-tor committee that is most valuingwhat makes an idea easy and fast toimplement is popular with theentire machinery that reproducesthe idea throughout a firm andindustry--the other selector com-mittee becomes the “kiss of death”and its hard to implement ideas arelobbied against by every meansavailable, and avoided, by the pow-erful means, of letting “hard imple-mentations” kill a few of them off,proving that the selector committeeshould never have selected them

repro-ducevariants

a cascade of events,announcing newselected ideas/prod-ucts, to all levels ofthe implementationmachinery, compar-ing the idea to near-est matching pastones and to mostrecently imple-mented ones

this method of reproducing a vari-ant idea does not affect generatingvariants strongly one way oranother

this method of reproducing a vari-ant idea does not affect generatingvariants strongly one way oranother

this method of reproducing a vari-ant idea does not affect generatingvariants strongly one way oranother

XXXX

Four Environment Changes that Support Creating in One Way, Each, But Hinder it in Three Other Ways, Each Plus One Change that Supports One Function of Creating without Affecting Three Other Functions

achieving functions in other creativity models not extant at the firm but of more power than the onesextant there (and hence more important for achieving that the model the consultant is using and apply-ing). Re-educate as well managers who omit these interaction matrices.

Error 3: The Disaster of Missing Trade-Offs Between More Creativity and More “Other Things” That Your Business NeedsYou can obtain more creativity in your business. You can do this by changing some things while notchanging others. However, if you get more creativity, in most real cases, it comes at a cost, of gettingless of some other important things that you may need more than you need more creativity--effective-ness, efficiency, quality of general implementation, quality of implementation of particular goals andsystems, excellence of executing goals in general. Yes, you can get much more creativity than younow have, but, can you afford the costs?

The Career System And the Creativity Noise It GeneratesEveryone in your organization who is ambitious wants the attention of higher ups. By doing theirassigned role well they will not get such attention. Most higher ups have a policy of not rewarding ornoticing “too much” people doing their jobs well, because if too much reward and attention is given tosuch people, it will make it, over time, too expensive to just get needed levels of performance. Ifpeople think doing their job well is “normal” “for all” in the organization then special pay and perksand other rewards will not be needed to get excellent performance. Because of belief in this principle,most higher ups, do not notice and reward people who do their job excellently. As a result, everyonewho wants special attention, special promotion, special resources from higher ups, has to turn, awayfrom doing their own jobs excellently, and towards “being creative”. Creativity gets the attention ofhigher ups. It is something they can wheel around and show to their own “higher ups”, the CEO, or theboard of directors, or customers, or the media to enhance their repute and future career. This is thesituation that causes creativity noise, generated by and inside the career system of firms, that dis-tracts everyone in the firm from doing their own jobs excellently. The more creativity a corporationhas, the less excellence of doing of ordinary jobs it has. More creativity is usually bought and paid forby less excellence of execution of ordinary job tasks. Creativity is not free.Bruce Willis, in an interview at the Actor’s Studio, in Manhattan, when asked, said the thing he mostwanted in life but was not getting was--”competence”. That is a cry for excellent doing of one’s ownjob, that we all have, as slop and bad attitude infest all the ordinary people and jobs around us that wedepend on in daily life. Anglo cultures worship celebrity and wealth, eroding morale for lives lackingcelebrity and wealth, and the media greatly intensify this by “covering” celebrity and wealth not thehappinesses of people lacking celebrity and wealth. Such societies are split--with everyone stuck insome non-celebrity non-wealth-producing job and longing for fame and riches, while thusly stuck. Theresult is a surly, bitter, nasty attitude and style with which all ordinary jobs in the society are done.

Tourists to Japan are most shocked, not by the temples and Buddha statues, the 1200 year old tablets,and 1500 year old statues, the tiny winding streets filled with kimono clad maiko and geishas. Whatmost draws their attention during their tours of Japan is the buoyancy, joie de vivre, happy elan of allordinary part-time workers in restaurants and ice cream parlors, in hotels and small shops, in streetvendors and fast food outlets. The staff seem to lack all management, conversing among each otherto decide things, smiling and laughing while they work, each helping out the others when they getoverloaded. Jobs that one person, surly and bitter, does with open resentment and nastiness in theWest, are done by two or three people, laughing together in Japan. Japan is a society that worshipshappiness in ordinary daily life, not happiness from fame and riches. As a result, most Japanese donot aspire to fame or wealth--half as many in cross-national surveys as in Western, particularly, anglocultures. This means people are not hating their dumb job while doing it and not hating their anony-mous life while living it, unlike ordinary people in the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and otheranglo cultures. The creativity noise from career systems is muted or missing in Asian societies likeJapan and in European societies like Germany, Italy and France.

Lust for Creativity, Love of Creativity, and Quotidian CreativityIf the drive for creativity in your self and business comes from disliking your life now and its lack offame and wealth, then you are most likely to end up with the noise of creativity from your career sys-tems--with everyone all the time degrading their current job in a lust for more creativity as a route tofame and fortune. If, to the contrary, you want more creativity because your present work is alreadyrather creative and worth doing, then you may end up with some serious useful creativity that does notbecome distracting noise everywhere in the career systems of your firm. New venture businesses are founded for all sorts of reasons. Research has found that almost half ofthem are founded to allow their founders to achieve something psychological that they want--freedom

20 aspects of your environment are listed below, as well as the contents of one particular stage in creative production. In the lefthand column put a circle to indicate whether a particular environment aspect helps or hinders that creativity step’s work. In the righthand column put a circle to indicate whether a particular environment aspect controls your work in this creativity

stage or is controlled by you in this stage of work. helps or hinders Creativity Stage One: Curiosity I control it or it

controls me

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1. physical environment: room, furniture, weather, city, etc2. social environment: relations to colleagues and peers3. social environment: relations to bosses and leaders4. social environment: relations to subordinates or followers5. social environment: relations to evaluators and critics and customers6. social environment: the structure of the organization I work in7. psychological environment: rewards offerred8. psychological environment: stress or tension level9. psychological environment: amount and variety of hassles10. intellectual environment: access to new ideas11. intellectual environment: receptivity to radical attempts12. intellectual environment: tolerance for risk and failure13. complexity environment: how well connected I am to people and resources I need14. complexity environment: how many diverse types of things I have access to15. complexity environment: how many types of initiative I can easily take on my own16. culture: the dominant values where I work17. polity: the way things get decided in my work18. economy: the way scarce resources get focussed on my needs19. change: the ability of me to change my work environment when and as I need20. change: the ability of my work environment to change me when and as needed

When You Finish:

Please tell us, now that you have finished this questionnaire:

1. What did you learn about yourself while filling out the above questionnaire:

2. What do you wish to do as a result of having filled out this questionnaire:

20 aspects of your environment are listed below, as well as the contents of one particular stage in creative production. In the lefthand column put a circle to indicate whether a particular environment aspect helps or hinders that creativity step’s work. In the righthand column put a circle to indicate whether a particular environment aspect controls your work in this creativity

stage or is controlled by you in this stage of work. helps or hinders Creativity Stage Four: Breakthrough I control it or it

controls me

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When I break out into success after much frustrating

effort and failed attempts; completely revise my approach and find new exciting possibili-

ties in the situation; and make a major breakthrough or get the single key insight I

need to complete my work I mos

tly c

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1. physical environment: room, furniture, weather, city, etc2. social environment: relations to colleagues and peers3. social environment: relations to bosses and leaders4. social environment: relations to subordinates or followers5. social environment: relations to evaluators and critics and customers6. social environment: the structure of the organization I work in7. psychological environment: rewards offerred8. psychological environment: stress or tension level9. psychological environment: amount and variety of hassles10. intellectual environment: access to new ideas11. intellectual environment: receptivity to radical attempts12. intellectual environment: tolerance for risk and failure13.complexity environment: how well connected I am to people and resources I need14.complexity environment: how many diverse types of things I have access to15.complexity environment: how many types of initiative I can easily take on my own16.culture: the dominant values where I work17.polity: the way things get decided in my work18.economy: the way scarce resources get focussed on my needs19.change: the ability of me to change my work environment when and as I need20.change: the ability of my work environment to change me when and as needed

Your Door to CreativityAre You Creative? 60 ModelsAre You Creative? 128 StepsGetting Real about CreativityYour Door to Creativity

Are You Educated?

Are You Educated, Japan, EU, USA, China--300 CapabilitiesManaging Self--128 DynamicsPower from Brain TrainingKnowledge Epitome--A New Kind of University

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Your Door to Culture PowerCulture PowerGlobal Quality

Thinking DesignDesigns that Lead

Are You Effective? 100 Methods54 Excellence Sciences--Redoing PlatoSuperSelling--33 cases & MethodsManaging ComplexityTaking Place--Creative City Theory and Practice

INNOVATIONS IN INNOVATION and in 29 OTHER CREATIVITY

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These are the 24books I wrote be-fore I wrote thisbook you are nowreading. Left toright, top to bot-tom they cover:creativity, edu-catedness, inno-vation, culture,design, manage-ment, and all formsof creativity.

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Getting Realabout Creativity in Business

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By Richard Tabor GreeneEMAIL richardtgreene@alum.mit.edu

THE FEMININITY OFPRODUCTIVITY &

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