Category: creativity

Five Conditions for Large Organisations to Develop Innovation Through Acquisition

Large companies seem to be considerably advantaged when it comes to innovation thanks to their unlimited resources to buy and bond together smaller organisations and startups. However this can often be a mirage.

In the past months I have been involved as a creator of small companies, as Business Angel for startups, and also with very large companies in strategic reviews to develop new businesses. Large companies have the great advantage of unlimited resources (at the scale of startups or small companies) when it comes to put together a new business through multiple acquisitions. However at the same time they are probably not the best soil for new ideas (refer the previous post on ‘How Large Should Creative Organisations Be?‘).

Keeping innovation sprouting in a large companies trying to develop a new business by acquisition requires:

  • First, a relative isolation of the innovative branch from the rest of the business and its bureaucracy. It needs to remain independent and enabled,
  • A certain level of stress to be maintained, otherwise, as I have observed, confort and overhead will grow tremendously without real commercial development.The unlimited resources and cash is a great advantage to develop new businesses; at the same time it can be a bit too confortable,
  • An industrial logic to the shopping spree around a driving idea that makes sense,
  • Keeping competition for the services offered by the innovative branch to the original business to detect new offerings and competitors,
  • Exchanges of personnel between the historical activity and the new activity to produce progressively an understanding; however this must be carefully limited and people from the original organisation carefully vetted for their adequacy.

Developing a new activity by acquisition in a large organisation is no easy fit. It requires a lot of management attention. The ‘ugly duckling’ syndrome is never far. Apply those principles to overcome the issue. Any additional idea?

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How Large Should Creative Organisations Be?

In this excellent blog ‘Bigger to feel safer‘, Seth Godin discusses the arguments for and against size in creative organisations.

Bigger organisations feel safer, get safer because of bureaucracy but that often comes at the expense of less risk-taking, thus less creativity. “In other words, hiring more people makes their useful creative productivity go down“. This is the opposite of productivity of the Industrial Age. Seth Godin’s conclusion is that “the natural scale of the [creative] enterprise is smaller than you think.”

I particularly like this quote by the way: “While the bureaucracy may benefit from more scale, the work doesn’t”

Thus in conclusion, truly creative organisations (or creative organisation subset) should remain small. They need to involve several individuals (creativity increases with exchange) but not too many (refer to Jeff Bezos Pizza rule). This is a great news for really creative organisations that are start ups!

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How the Hard Part is Falling Out of Love with the Old Idea

I love this Seth Godin post ‘Falling Out‘: “The hard part isn’t coming up with a new idea. The hard part is falling out of love with the old idea”

In my life as an entrepreneur I encounter or devise more ideas than I can execute. This is often the case in private life as well. The key issue is when one decides to develop some new idea, how to let older activities fall?

I am quite guilty of adding up new ideas and activities without removing older ones, leading to situations of excess work. I then have to do a pruning exercise to concentrate on what is the most important at the time.

I thus fully agree that the hardest is often to stop doing older ideas and objectives, and dropping former objectives. And I also need to improve on this!

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How the Problem of Success is that the World Conspires to Stop you Doing the Thing that You Do

I encourage you to read the writer Neil Gaiman‘s 2012 graduation keynote address. It offers invaluable advice on dealing with failure, and on being successful, in creative fields. Although it is primarily addressed at artists, I believe it is quite applicable to entrepreneurs, who are another type of creators.

The piece of advice that struck me is related to success, after the usual initial failure phase. (“The problems of failure are hard. The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.”)

“The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.” And that is of course the issue for all successful entrepreneurs; working on the company is taking lots of effort and we are doing less of what we wanted to develop when we created the organisation.

There is a lot of advice about how to deal with failure. Not so much on how to deal with success, be it whole or limited. However it can also make people miserable. Make sure your reflect on what you get drawn in when you start being successful, and decide what you really want to do.

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How Creativity Can be Enhanced by Machines

Of course for centuries, creative endeavors have had a renewal every time a new technique appeared. Now with the advent of Artificial Intelligence and machines, artists have another transforming way to be creative. The excellent article ‘The Coming Creativity Explosion Belongs to the Machines‘ gives a broad overview.

“In a process similar to that followed by a human artist or scientist, a creative machine begins its work by framing a problem. Next, its software specifies the requirements the solution should have before generating “answers” in the form of original designs, patterns, or some other form of output. Although the notion of machine creativity sounds a bit like science fiction, the basic concept is one that has been slowly developing for decades.”

This evolution of course may be found threatening by some. In reality we need to get accustomed to the potential for this support to our work and find ways to deploy machine creativity for our benefit. We need to learn how to harness the power of those machines. I can’t wait to see what will come out of those new creativity techniques!

“I suspect the real world-changing application of machine creativity will be in the realm of everyday problem solving, or Little C. The mainstream emergence of powerful problem-solving tools will help people create abundance where there was once scarcity.“

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How Ego Kills Creativity and Talent

Quoted in the excellent book ‘Ego is the Enemy‘ by Ryan Holiday: “The performance artist Marina Abramovi? puts it directly : “ If you start believing in your greatness , it is the death of your creativity ””

Ego kills creativity and talent. It’s a well known fact however we still witness too many situations that demonstrate the truth of this assertion.

It is difficult to stay cold headed when one finds success. We tend to believe we are special, and this is the beginning of the end.

Maybe it is worth remembering that success is as much the result of luck than the result of talent and creativity. And talent can be improved through sheer work; luck can be improved too in a certain measure, but it takes other skills. Ego will kill luck that is often based on good relationships with people; and it will also kill talent because one will not put any more the work in. So, let’s try to avoid ego even when we are successful!

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How Curiosity is As Important As Intelligence in a Complex World

This assertion came up in an influential HBR paper ‘Curiosity Is as Important as Intelligence‘. Of course, this is already suspected for a long time, like the famous quote by Einstein on the subject.

The interesting side of the HBR paper is that it links directly curiosity with the ability to navigate in complexity. It takes the position that it is a skill that can be learned, and that it is an essential skill in today’s world. ” [Curiosity Quotient] has not been as deeply studied as EQ and IQ, but there’s some evidence to suggest it is just as important when it comes to managing complexity in two major ways. First, individuals with higher CQ are generally more tolerant of ambiguity. This nuanced, sophisticated, subtle thinking style defines the very essence of complexity. Second, CQ leads to higher levels of intellectual investment and knowledge acquisition over time, especially in formal domains of education, such as science and art”

So let’s develop our Curiosity Quotient actively!

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What Makes an Entrepreneur Different

The description of Entrepreneurship given by Seth Godin in his post ‘The four elements of entrepreneurship‘ hit a nerve with me.

Basically Seth states that Entrepreneurship is a choice and that there are only 4 elements of entrepreneurship. According to him the rest can be hired:

  1. “Making decisions.
  2. Investing in activities and assets that aren’t a sure thing.
  3. Persuading others to support a mission with a non-guaranteed outcome.
  4. Embracing (instead of running from) the work of doing things that might not work (this one is the most amorphous, the most difficult to pin down and thus the juiciest)”

The interesting thing is that each element taken individually does not make much of an entrepreneur (for example, element 2 can also characterise a stock trader, who is generally not so much an entrepreneur). It is the (rare) combination of those four characteristics that make up the entrepreneur. An definitely, the fourth element is the hardest to apprehend.

Based on these elements, how much of an entrepreneur are you?

[illustration by Gapingvoid]

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How To Organize Creativity in Cycle and Seasons

I came across a very interesting quote from Robin Sharma: “Creativity comes in seasons. There’s a time to harvest your ideas. And there’s a time to let the field sit fallow.”

From my experience I concur that there are times where I am very creative, and other times where I rather gather material and let my creative spirit rest. It is some kind of rhythm that was until now imposed by my energy level.

It also means that it is all right to have periods of lesser productivity, of resourcing.

There might actually be several rhythms embedded in each other: a daily creativity rhythm, with a specific time of the day more suitable; a weekly/monthly rhythm; and a yearly rhythm. All those interdependent rhythms can merge together into a variable, personal and natural rhythm.

It is one further step to organize this rhythm voluntarily like Robin Sharma suggests. I find the suggestion quite worthwhile and worth trying. And you?

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How Procrastination Can Be an Escape Mechanism

Robin Sharma writes “Procrastination is an escape mechanism for people scared to do their best work“. The concept is quite similar to the concept of ‘Resistance’ developed by Steven Pressfield in the ‘War of Art’.

Still it is an excellent reminder that we should note procrastination as a symptom that Resistance is trying to make us escape from doing our Work, that is to say, our best creative work, the work that takes all our resources to be achieved, the work that can change the world.

Procrastination is not good or bad. It is sometimes quite good to postpone something or to relax. But when it comes while we should be doing our best work, it is a sign that we try to escape from our responsibility and from our capability.

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Let’s Launch a ‘Protect My Cognitive Capacity’ Movement!

As mentioned in our previous post ‘How Cognitive Overload Can Influence Our Lives: the Example of Poverty‘, we need to be extra careful when it comes to the usage of our limited cognitive capacity. And this is of course also quite true for well-off people too, in the particular in view of the increasing number of attention grabbing devices that surround us.

Cognitive capacity management may become the biggest hurdle in the Collaborative Age. We are gifted with marvelous mechanisms that decrease quickly cognitive load when we get used to some activities (such as driving or riding bikes for example), but it seems that modern life conspires to add constantly more devices that waste cognitive capacity.

It is almost an epidemics of sort. As it is understood that value lies in attention, more and more devices and gadgets compete for attention and thus cognitive capacity. Issues like accidents when driving and texting are direct illustrations of the problem. The world becomes more complex requiring also more difficult decisions and adaptation.

We all need to learn to protect our limited cognitive capacity; learn to relax and give it time to regenerate; and most importantly not multitask that often, which is a very perverse way of reaching our limits without realizing it.

Let’s launch a ‘protect my cognitive capacity’ movement!

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How Cognitive Overload Can Influence Our Lives: the Example of Poverty

The excellent post ‘Behavioral economics has a plan to fight poverty—and it’s all about redesigning the “cockpit”‘, presents an interesting analysis of poverty. It brings on the surface the issue of cognitive overload.

The theme of the post is that one reason poor people have difficulties escaping from the poverty trap is that because of their limited means, they need to spend a large amount of cognitive capacity (which is limited for all individuals) solving basic issues such as food and shelter. As a result, they can’t quite spend enough cognitive capability on higher purposes such as, for example, developing a sustainable way to escape poverty.

And it is quite true that being well-off basically allows to avoid thinking about certain constraints such as budget when shopping for groceries and where one will sleep tonight, freeing the mind towards higher fields of thinking.

It would also mean that a way to help people escape poverty is to provide support on a temporary basis (a few weeks/months) to free some cognitive capacity to develop a sustainable way to support oneself and family.

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