Failures within the Fortune 1,000 world have become critical over the past ten years. To learn how to protect corporations from bad decisions, IBM polled 1,500 CEOs to learn the #1 leadership competency required to survive the future. The answer was “Creativity.”
Two years ago a dozen corporate futurists also stated that creativity was moved to the number one slot of the top ten skills list needed for advancement. Business analysts stated that the only growth companies were those that thrived in creative environments with innovators on staff.
The flurry of activity surrounding creativity in the corporate sector suggested that HR departments needed to set up creative training sessions, adjust hiring scripts and find ways to compensate those who created beneficial solutions. But hundreds of HR departments did nothing.
Over the years HR has become a science, while creativity remains an art form. It’s hard to scientifically measure the value of a creative to determine which one should be hired. It’s also difficult for a director, who was taught that people are supposed to work in the figurative box that the company made, to design a program that trains logical people to play in a box-less environment.
Corporations needed to build the box lifestyle for employees during the days of industry in America. By the time the personal computer was invented, corporations needed people who thought outside of the box. For our future, corporations need to hire people who don’t work, but play, not in or out of a box, but in a box-less environment.
And they don’t get it.
Who doesn’t get it?
Well, let’s start with SEARS or any other relator that is headed toward bankruptcy. The list is getting longer every year. Just think about SEARS having survived for 124 years both inside the box and outside of it, but now that a box no longer exists, the company has no clue how to survive. Some are guessing its doors will close during its 125-year anniversary.
I was once taught that business is always moving. If its not moving forward with growth, then it’s moving backwards with decline. A business is incapable of standing still. I was also taught that innovation (creativity) was the only thing that could grow a company exponentially. Creativity is movement.
The companies throughout history that disrupted their business market with new innovative solutions always captured 40-90% of the market and forced all other competitors to share the leftovers.
The fact that progress is impossible without change stumps numerous leaders. But a creative knows that change is inevitable and chooses to create the change rather than worrying about what may or may not take place by the hand of others.
Creatives are the leaders of our cultural future.
CJ's Corner 