CHAPTER 6

UNLEASH CREATIVITY BY INSERTING POETRY INTO THE POWERPOINT

The skeptical among you may question this chapter’s premise. It’s all well and good to advocate straight talk and humanizing change, but poetry and creativity as a path to manage change and transform organizations?

Admittedly, the notion of bringing art into the workplace to counterbalance the data-heavy environment may seem like a stretch on the surface. Is gazing at a Picasso for an hour or reading poetry going to help an employee come up with a way to regain market share lost to low-cost foreign competitors?

Perhaps an hour of Picasso-gazing won’t do it, but nurturing employees’ artistic sensibilities will go a long way toward restoring the story-spreadsheet balance—a balance crucial for organizations that aspire to innovative approaches. Before providing some tips and techniques to foster an artistic sensibility, let’s make the case for why it’s necessary to do so.

Left-Brain Bias

This is nothing new. The spreadsheet-obsessed mentality has its roots in the start of the twenty-first century, and observers have noted the dangers of left-brain logic segregated from right-brain empathy and creativity. Naiman, who has written extensively about art in business, also asserted that “metrics are not enough. . . . The economic future . . . depends on its ability to create wealth by fostering innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.”¹ Naiman suggests that people with MFAs rather than MBAs are more likely to make this happen.

In Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, he made the point that left-brain, linear, analytical, computerlike thinking is being replaced by right-brain empathy, inventiveness, and understanding as the skills most needed by businesses.²

Interestingly, Pink and Naiman made these statements around 2005. Despite their beliefs and the similar ideas about this subject advocated by other thought leaders, the spreadsheet mentality still dominates most organizations. In fact, in uncertain, confusing times like today, decision makers often cling to logic and data for the seeming clarity they provide.

The spreadsheet, however, is not a clear window to view either the present or the future. Inherently, it’s a backward-looking device that jails thinking within its cells. Some organizations recognize the limitations of spreadsheet thinking and hold off-sites, brainstorming, and other creativity-stimulating sessions to generate an alternative view to what data and logic deliver. The problem, though, is that breakthrough ideas emerge suddenly and organically rather than from these structured approaches.

Within many organizations, highly innovative, potentially game-changing ideas are born regularly. Unfortunately, the left-brain environment of these organizations often starves these ideas of oxygen and they don’t survive.

If you doubt this last statement, consider all the times that one company incubated a great idea but the culture, leadership, or policies stopped the idea from seeing the light of day—and how the idea migrated to another company with a better left-brain/right-brain balance who turned the idea into gold.

The idea for new visual computing was built at Xerox but brought to the world by Apple.³

Nokia originated the concept of a great mobile phone, but management could not accept touch screens and the importance of software versus hardware.⁴

Two years ago at a Procter & Gamble Alumni conference, the ex-CEO of Procter & Gamble noted a mistake he had made: even though Gillette saw a market for a lower-priced subscription razor-blade delivery service long before the Dollar Shave Club, they didn’t move quickly because doing so would cannibalize the profits of the existing product line.

Start-ups often use right-brain thinking to disrupt left-brain industries. Even though incumbents often spot the outsiders’ threat, they do little for the following reasons:

        •  The new idea challenges the logic of the industry and the old ways of doing business.

        •  The new idea makes no sense from a financial standpoint.

        •  The new idea requires a significant investment that will impact earnings.

At times, market leaders are able to fend off start-ups and other market challengers, but to do so they need to draw upon their right brain. Steve Jobs put an iPod in every iPhone, killing the iPod even though it was Apple’s leading product. Netflix invested in streaming, which destroyed their DVD-by-mail business. Adobe transitioned from packaged software to a cloud-based system, reducing their revenues and hurting their stock price in exchange for long-term sustainability.⁵

A sure sign that a company is capable of right-brain as well as left-brain thinking is the ability to tell a story. The art of the story is something that great leaders understand and encourage in their people. They know that being able to construct a narrative draws people in and helps them relate to you and your message. Great narrative artists—fiction writers, playwrights, songwriters—know that they need more than great characters and a scintillating style. They need story.

Interestingly, the leader of a company that is known to be intensely data driven also gets the value of story.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, speaking at his alma mater, Princeton, left graduates with five key words: “Build yourself a great story.” Commenting on this, the website 234Finance noted:

Although everyone has a story to share, most people are shy about sharing stories about themselves, especially stories relating to our experiences of the good, bad and ugly. These are crucial stories that form the foundation of how to solve problems, critical reasoning and conducting business.

Storytelling transcends writing, and employing social media as the primary vehicle for sharing experiences is very effective to reach as many people as possible. Also, as humans, we learn best from our experiences and the experiences of other people. As a storyteller, it is your duty to create multiple opportunities to establish emotional connections to the key elements of the story, so the listener can learn and gain insightful information from you.⁶

Recently a colleague of mine—Linda Boff, CMO of GE—attended a session at Amazon with Bezos and noted that he paid particular attention to anecdotes. She told me that his belief in the power of stories is so strong that he often focuses on stories he picks up from customer complaints and letters rather than data, saying, “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”⁷

The ability to respond with right-brain, innovative strategies such as these requires an artistic sensibility. Here’s why this is so.

Out-of-Sight Insights

I define innovation as “fresh, insightful connections.” Let’s break this definition down to its three parts. “Fresh” means new—every innovation has a sense of the new. “Insightful” involves perception—perceiving innovative possibilities that others have missed. In terms of “connections,” Steve Jobs talked about connecting the dots in new ways, combining things in new ways to create something different.⁸

I came to my definition of innovation as fresh, insightful connections in watching our younger daughter, Rohini, who can get to the core of an issue and recognize patterns in frighteningly prescient ways.

She often connects things that shouldn’t go together in various areas of her life: dressing a certain way, directing her sister and mother, figuring out how to get an advanced degree in marketing without doing too much finance or accounting, advising me on how to solve some issue I am lingering over, or becoming a social media expert by linking things that were not linked.

Her process is to identify three elements of a problem or possible solution (she gets this from her dad and has named her blog The Power of Three), then play around with them, stretching or combining or spicing them up, and then—lo and behold—an answer that connects the core elements in new ways.

Artists do all these things. They create something fresh on a blank piece of paper or canvas. They look at something familiar and then render it in a way that inspires or moves us with its ability to perceive the familiar differently. And they connect disparate elements—words, images, sounds, movements—so that the whole seems like nothing that has ever come before.⁹

The artistic sensibility that allows them to innovate is related to the way they question. As Pablo Picasso said, “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”¹⁰

Great art helps us see differently. Walk into an art museum and look at a Picasso cubist painting or a late van Gogh work, and you’ll see colors and angles that will cause you to reframe the way you perceive things. More specifically, here are four ways exposure to art facilitates business innovation.

        1.    Reframing. Art takes us out of our routines and out of ourselves, providing us with ideas that cause us to rethink our assumptions, giving us sounds or images that make us consider alternative ways of hearing and seeing the world. It shifts our viewpoint, and from this shift we can look at everything from business policies to strategies in a new light.

        2.    Inspiring. We read a great book or go to a terrific play and we’re revved up, energized by the experience. Wonderful art motivates us in ways few things can. We return to work ready to grapple with a difficult project or take on a stretch assignment.

        3.    Exploring options. We see art that connects the dots in new ways, and we take the possibility of new connections back to our workplaces. We look at difficult or complex situations and are willing to try an unorthodox approach or test a new concept to meet the challenge.

        4.    Overcoming failure. The story of many artists is the story of one failed attempt after another—how a bestselling book was rejected by every publisher or how a great classical musician was ignored during his lifetime. These artists weren’t deterred by their failures and pushed forward. Being aware of artistic failures helps businesspeople realize that failure isn’t fatal and that trying again is not only a good idea but perhaps the best way to produce results.¹¹

Art can also be a great teaching tool, telling us stories that help us look at issues differently. For instance, coaches and others have admonished command-and-control leaders about this leadership style, suggesting that it’s no longer appropriate for the current work paradigm. These leaders hear what they’re being told, acknowledge the value of the advice, but don’t change their behaviors.

When this traditional leader “hears” the same message through an artistic form, however, he may be more motivated to change his behavior. For instance, one of my favorite films by François Truffaut is The 400 Blows. It is the story of a young boy navigating his way through a hostile world. There are many amazing scenes in the movie, including its classic ending freeze frame. One scene that is particularly relevant to the controlling leader, though, involves a gym teacher taking his students on a run along the streets of Paris. Furiously blowing a whistle, running ahead of all his students and oblivious to them, the teacher does not realize that all of his followers are peeling away from him.¹²

How many times do leaders bark out orders and run ahead to storm the hill without bringing their teams along? Either emotionally by “following but not really following” or physically by leaving and finding other jobs, some of the most talented folks leave the pack. I’m not saying that seeing this film will transform all order-barking leaders instantly and magically. I’m suggesting that this particular scene might have an impact, that the dramatic illustration of a leader’s behavior can get past that defensive reflex and help see behavior in a fresh light.

Richard Thaler, the University of Chicago professor and Nobel Prize winner, notes that “nobody remembers some formula, but they remember stories.”¹³

Round-the-Clock Innovation Capability

The spreadsheet approach to innovation is to designate a specific time and place for innovation to occur: offsites, brainstorming exercises, role-playing. The notion is that creativity can be planned for in a systematic manner; if you schedule X amount of time for innovation, you’ll produce Y amount of creative ideas.

Yes, I’m overstating this position, but only by a bit. The belief that you can plan for and produce innovation on command underlies many of the so-called creativity exercises organizations use.

In truth, creativity is an everyday need in organizations, and innovation can and should happen all the time. Here are some tips and techniques to make it a more available competency for organizational employees:

ESTABLISH REVOLVING ARTIST SHOWCASES. It’s not enough to place art on the office walls (and at a time of tight budgets, many organizations have backed off from this traditional practice). Why not bring a variety of artists to showcase their talent? Musicians, actors, performance artists, sculptors, writers, and dancers who are trying to get heard and seen would welcome the opportunity to display their talent to employees.

From poetry readings to glass-blowing demonstrations to dance recitals, these artistic endeavors could be scheduled for lunch breaks (or other times) and expose people to cutting-edge approaches and blazing creative talent. In addition, these showcases should include interactions with the artists and discussions about the art. None of this will produce instant innovation, but it will help people start thinking in more creative directions. Art inspires, provokes, challenges, and moves (emotionally). It stretches minds, allowing people to broaden their perspectives. With more cognitive and emotional space to roam, they are free to think about things in new ways—thus, innovation. Leo Burnett has brought in artists-in-residence to provoke and inspire creativity.

SET UP ART CLUBS. Within any sizable organization, you’ll find employees who are opera buffs, closet novelists, poetry aficionados, painters, and theater lovers. Whether they’re creating the art themselves or are simply fans, these employees would relish the opportunity to show their work to others or discuss what they’re passionate about. Employee book clubs, movie clubs, and the like would be easy to set up and would help people think and talk about subjects from a creative perspective.

SPONSOR EMPLOYEE ART OUTINGS. Many cultural venues will work with organizations to provide discounts for large groups sales. Companies often subsidize employee health club memberships; why not do the same if employees want to become museum members or go to the symphony? These outings allow employees to experience great art, and by sponsoring them and defraying the costs, they incentivize people to do so in ways they might not otherwise. Again, this is a way to foster a creative consciousness.

CREATE AN $X-PER-EMPLOYEE ART BUDGET. This last suggestion will communicate to employees that an organization is putting its money where its mouth is. Allocating a dollar amount for artistic pursuits motivates employees to take advantage of them. For instance, an annual subscription to Criterion Collection, a selection of great movies accompanied by commentary from directors and actors in these movies, costs $100. It could also fund the books for an employee book club or help people purchase annual museum memberships.

How to Structure Your Artistic and Creative Endeavors

You can’t impose artistic activities on people and expect the creative impulse to take root. Many employees have spent years being indoctrinated into the world of data; they’ve been told to follow the numbers, to take advantage of analytics and algorithms. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this except that it has an unbalanced effect on the way they work. It’s going to take some time and effort to restore the balance.

To that end, here are three ways to structure your “art strategy”:

MAKE IT VOLUNTARY. You can’t force art on people like you can a computer training session. Invariably, some people won’t choose to participate or won’t participate until they’re ready to do so (perhaps after a colleague relates how much she enjoyed going to the company-sponsored movie night). This is an extracurricular activity, and no pressure should be put on anyone to attend any particular event. If you force people to attend a lecture by a guest artist or go to a concert, their reaction will be similar to when they were forced to read Shakespeare in school when they weren’t ready for it—it will go in one ear and out the other.

KEEP IT DIVERSE. By diverse, I’m referring to the range of artistic activities and events. Within any organization, you’ll find people who love going to the symphony and hate poetry and vice versa. If you focus all your energy on one particular art form, you’ll attract only a small percentage of the workforce. Remember, the goal is to expose as many employees as possible to art. Obviously, you don’t want to go too far in the opposite direction and offer zither lessons or other overly esoteric art forms. At the same time, it’s a good idea to supplement the most popular forms—books, movies, museum outings, concerts—with experiences that challenge participants. Slam poetry readings, a concert of twelve-tone music, a provocative art exhibit—these are the types of experiences that prompt people to think outside the box, to push the envelope. Diversity, then, means combining traditional artistic forms with cutting-edge experiences.

COMMIT TO ONGOING EFFORTS. Singular events, no matter how spectacular (e.g., inviting Yo-Yo Ma to play a private concert at your organization), don’t have much of a right-brain effect. It takes repeated exposures over time for people to broaden their thinking so that story is balanced with spreadsheet. Most organizations are limited in what they can do by budget and time, but committing to an art appreciation program doesn’t have to be expensive or consume a lot of work hours. Scheduling four events a month—a book club, a movie showing, a trip to a museum, an in-house concert—may be enough if these events become regular events.

Art Is for Leaders Too

Leaders can benefit as much if not more than other employees from immersive art experiences. Too often, leaders exempt themselves from employee training and development programs. Sometimes this makes sense—they already possess the knowledge and skills being taught—or because they have to prioritize, and a particular type of training isn’t as important as their main responsibilities.

But leaders, especially those who live and die by the data, need to broaden their perspectives, and art can help them achieve this objective. Think of it this way: leaders must develop their own points of view, their own styles of leadership. Today, authenticity is crucial, and people in senior positions must reject a one-size-fits-all definition of leadership and use their strengths and beliefs to develop a genuine personal style.

Art frees people to be creative in their approach to leadership, to adapt in response to changing environments. We constantly create our many selves. We have points of view. We select what we wear and how we appear. Events twist us into new shapes. Creativity is how we manage our own change. In a way, art gives people permission to take chances, to try new things. We see a mind-bending art exhibit and we’re inspired to cross boundaries. We hear a hot new jazz trio and we get jazzed about a project or program—we want to improvise rather than play all the notes as written.

It’s all too easy for leaders to fall into leadership ruts—to play their roles rather than transcend them, to lead by the numbers rather than incorporate their own story into the mix.

Art is liberating. Again, it’s not an instant transformation. It’s an incremental process, freeing your innovation capabilities by degrees. Accumulated exposure to art opens leaders to ideas that are untraditional and even risky. It exposes them to provocative ideas and imaginative leaps. Over time, it can’t help but stimulate reflection and exploration.

Or consider two CEOs. John is a highly competent leader, great with financials. He started in accounting, received his MBA, and became great at operations. Outside of work, his interests are limited to family and exercise. He can’t remember the last book he read, and he hasn’t been to a concert or museum in years. Years ago he dabbled in painting still lifes, but he hasn’t picked up a brush in years, convinced he lacks talent. John is considered a no-nonsense, by-the-book type of leader. He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor and rarely spends much time on conversations that don’t relate directly to the subject at hand.

Riya is also a CEO, and though her background is similar to John’s, her interests and personality are quite different. She is a history-reading fanatic and knows almost as much about the Civil War strategy as she does about business strategy. A former violinist with her high school and college orchestras, she attends ten concerts annually at her local symphony. She also is a potter and has a wheel and kiln at her summer home. In the summer, she loves going to street art fairs and has taken a number of trips to Europe specifically to see works of art housed in museums. Unlike John, Riya is an open, transparent, and spontaneous leader. There’s a steady stream of people coming into her office to talk to her about work and a variety of other subjects.

Which CEO would you want leading your company today? Which one will be better able to handle the major changes coming down the pike? Which one will respond more effectively when a smaller competitor disrupts the industry with a revolutionary product or service introduction?

I know this isn’t a fair comparison—people aren’t as black-and-white as Riya and John—but you get my point. CEOs like Riya can use their artistic sensibilities to respond to change in more agile and creative ways.

The Elements of Art Are the Elements of Change

Years ago, art was a much more integral element in people’s lives than it is today. If you doubt this statement, ask a colleague when was the last time he attended the symphony; or went to a special exhibit at an art museum; or read a book that is considered a classic; or heard a poetry reading; or attended the ballet. Yes, people probably see as many movies as in the past, but many of these films don’t really qualify as art—they’re mass entertainment that are fun to watch but don’t provoke or require much analysis.

Similarly, people lack the time to pursue artistic hobbies. In many cases, time is at a premium because of increasing work demands. In the past, people often had nine-to-five weekday jobs and saw painting or playing in a local symphony as a great escape from work. Now, many professionals work six or seven days a week for longer than normal hours; they also travel a lot for work. Even if they can maintain reasonable hours, the pressure of work is such that they’re mentally exhausted after a hard day and prefer vegging out in front of a screen to practicing a violin sonata.

Consequently, they don’t bring the same strong artistic sense to work as they might have years ago. This is a problem in a spreadsheet-dominant environment, especially given the times in which we live and work. Bear with me as I lay out one final and compelling reason for introducing art into the workplace.

Just about every organization communicates to its employees this truth: We are living in transformational times—times when people are empowered, things move fast, and the biggest opportunities and threats often arise from outside the category and traditional competition. It was not Schick or Gillette that hurt each other but Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s. It wasn’t GM versus Ford versus Mercedes but Tesla and Uber versus all the established automakers.

Given this environment, winning companies re-create themselves. They need to reimagine possibilities. They need to connect things in new ways to remain relevant. All of this requires innovation, and art fosters all the elements of innovation—re-creating, reimagining, connecting in new ways.

Recognize that spreadsheets, for all the value they contribute from a left-brain perspective, don’t foster these qualities. As valuable as they are as tools that identify the need for change, they paradoxically stop change in its tracks by also identifying all the risks and costs associated with it.

Art can help leaven even the most diehard spreadsheet mentality. It’s not going to change an archconservative accountant or a data-centric techie into an innovative leader overnight. It is capable, however, of providing the possibility of being more creative. It gives an option when facing a problem or opportunity—an option to try something different, to connect a different set of dots, to take a chance.

Listening to Beethoven, gazing at a Monet, reading Dickens, and watching an O’Neill play have many benefits, but one of the most surprising is helping organizations think and work in innovative ways.

CARLA MICHELOTTI

The Importance of Connecting Dots in New Ways

As a senior in-house lawyer for Leo Burnett, Carla Michelotti had few reasons to interact with a young account executive like me. For years, we only spoke a few times, when I was working on commercials that required Carla’s senior expertise to address tricky legal issues.

Carla pioneered protections for advertising in multiple environments and especially advertiser rights on what then was referred to as the “information superhighway,” better known today as the internet.

Carla’s legal team and the little internet marketing group I had started for Leo Burnett were neighbors on the same floor. We bonded over our common passion for internet marketing.

Even though I was in a completely different function from Carla, she refused to “stay in her lane.” Too often, spreadsheet-focused bosses define their responsibilities and relationships narrowly. Carla, on the other hand, was willing to cross boundaries to create synergistic connections. Carla had me accompany her to Washington, DC, for many summits on the role of advertising in internet marketing, including the first-ever meeting with the White House, at a time when the government didn’t think there was going to be advertising on the internet. We became fast friends. Carla then introduced me to her boyfriend—now husband—Bob Colvin, who was a senior agent in LA at International Creative Management (ICM) and who was representing internet content companies and talent that wished to explore opportunities on the internet.

Through Bob Colvin and his introductions over the next year, the Leo Burnett Interactive Group, in conjunction with ICM, partnered with a small company with less than a million members, called America Online, to create an online celebrity-interview format using ICM talent. We helped General Motors by creating a promotional mapping CD-ROM—the first of its kind—which was used to induce buyers to drive a new model being introduced, and McDonald’s ended up being the first nontechnology company to advertise on AOL. And we also created a deeply immersive, interactive experience, using a CD-ROM, for Dewar’s Scotch.

These initial efforts in 1995 led to many positive changes in both my career and the work Leo Burnett would do. New frontiers opened because Carla refused to allow a rigid set of specs to define her job. She was willing to mentor me in ways that had nothing to do with the spreadsheet and everything to do with our intersecting stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

        •  People are analog and moved by stories and emotion, not just numbers and facts.

        •  Art allows people to see and feel differently, unleashing their creativity and fueling change; artistic experiences in various forms should be embraced, extended, and enjoyed at work.

        •  Successful organizations and people recognize that artists are entrepreneurs who start with a blank sheet of paper, frame problems in new ways, and see differently, which inspires innovation and creativity.