Let's take mashed potatoes, a classic recipe. Then let's look at another part of the world and think about the flavors that its cuisine offers. Let's think about Japan and think, "What about wasabi? What if I added wasabi to mashed potatoes, would it taste good?"
A good example is Wasabi Mash , a dish created by chef Bobby Chinn, who has several East-West fusion restaurants that combine Western ingredients and Asian cooking techniques.
If you want to boost creativity in your company, you can encourage micro-habits so that innovation happens all the time throughout the organization. Let me emphasize – you don’t always have to come up with completely new ideas . It could be a new product, service or a new internal process.
One example is Hsu Fu Chi georgia telephone number data a confectionery company I visited in China near Shenzhen. The company was recently bought by Nestlé, probably because it is very entrepreneurial and always experimenting with new products.
In the factory, they set aside a space where a small machine could easily be adapted to produce new products or packages. It is important to increase the volume to create a new candy and launch it in a huge factory. But if you have a small factory, you can produce small batches to experiment. In this way, you can quickly introduce new prototypes to the market.
So they were constantly introducing new candies. Most of them weren't continued. But because they had so much experimentation and prototyping, they were able to introduce more new products than a large organization like Nestlé.
They were releasing a new bar every week, while it took Nestlé several years to introduce the dark chocolate KitKat. So Nestlé wanted to learn how to adopt a trial-and-error approach.
Creativity is a numbers game. It's rarely a bolt out of the blue that comes as a fully formed idea. More often than not, you have to write down 100 ideas in a notebook, go back to them, pick five, extrapolate, and iterate until you get one strong idea. With a lot of time and iteration, it's easier to get winning ideas than to wait for divine inspiration.
Another idea you explore is “layered leadership.” How can business leaders implement this in a corporate context?
One creative organisation I’ve worked with is London-based immersive experiences producer Layered Reality. They combine – or ‘layer’ – different creative techniques to create entertainment experiences. Instead of watching a play, the experience combines actors, holograms, virtual and augmented reality, original music and games that viewers have to play.
When I interviewed their CEO, Andrew McGuinness, he said that the way they run their business is a metaphor for how he approaches leadership. You have to consider the different ways in which your leadership is required on a daily basis. Sometimes you're dealing with the finance function, sometimes it's the creative function. As a leader, you can't be one-dimensional.
Innovation, adaptability and constant balance with commercial realities require extraordinary agility from a leader. Or, as he says, from layer to layer, with a frequency not often seen in executives in traditional industries.
I encourage readers not to be rigid in their approach to their leadership role and definition of leadership. If you look up the word "manage" in a thesaurus, in almost every language the synonym that comes first is "control." So management is synonymous with control.
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But there are other verbs that are more helpful in today's management. Words like "augment significance" and "inspire" drive people to achieve extraordinary results. Managers who believe their goal is control should not be surprised when they are unable to innovate and inspire others.
Is there a place for human creativity in an era where AI software can create images and text, or even write a novel from scratch?
Most creative results generated by AI are extrapolations of patterns. AI takes information and processes it to create something else.
The wonderful thing about human creativity is that it relies not only on novelty, but also on interpersonal relationships: stimuli that emerge spontaneously, organically, and through interpersonal communication.
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So the creative results generated by AI can be interesting, even wonderful, but they will only increase the need for creativity fueled by human dynamics.
Therefore, leaders have an important role to play in increasing the creativity of the organization. Leadership will be about managing the human ecosystem.
