In terms of group creativity, we've talked
about diversity, so diversity of skills is
conducive to groups being more creative, essentially.
That's the main factor.
In terms of group processes, it's a little
bit of a repetition of what we talked about,
I'm not going to go over that.
There's a lot of organizational factors which
I don't have time to - I don't want to go
in to, because they're too complicated for
this class.
So I'll just skip over that.
So, based on all of this, all of these five
dimensions of creativity, what we know about
creativity, what does that tell us about how
you can lead people so that they are more
creative?
So imagine that one day, you are manager of
a team that needs to be creative.
What can you do to help them be more creative?
Essentially, what research says, based on
what we have seen before, is you want to mother
your creative people.
You want to be a loving mother to them, which
means you want to foster an open and tolerant
culture, you want to have a feminine and motherly
approach to people, and you want to encourage
and coddle them to be their best.
You look at company like Google - that's kind
of like how it's like.
Has anybody ever been to the Googleplex, by
any chance, or seen pictures of it?
Google is a great example of the type of environment
where you mother.
They have amazing food available everywhere,
beautiful offices, no clear timeline about
when you come to work and when you leave.
You're given immense freedom in how you organize
your work, who you can collaborate with.
You're given challenging but exciting projects
to work on.
When Google started, the policy is not fully
in place anymore, but when Google started,
every employee was required to spend 20% of
their time on a pet project of their own choosing.
So imagine you work five days in a week, one
out of the five days that you work, you would
work on a project that you were excited about.
And you could enroll anyone in the company
to help you work on that.
Now the caveat was that the project, if it
worked, belonged to Google.
But that's how Gmail was created, somebody
said, "Let's create an alternative to those
terrible email programs that exist, or those
unsatisfying ones, and create one that will
reflect Google's way."
And Gmail was born that way, with a group
of programmers that spent their time.
But you go to Google, you show a lot of failed
projects.
A lot of them have failed, but Google Maps,
I think, came out of that.
So let people work on quirky projects because
they find it fun, and that's going to foster
creativity.
So Google is a great example of that, you
- there's a company called IDEO, how many
of you have heard of IDEO.
It's a design firm in the Silicon Valley,
and it's also a great example of that kind
of culture.
You have open spaces, where essentially they
are hired by other companies to design new
products.
And they work in teams to do that.
There's a great video that I sometimes show
in my classes, but not this time.
But if you want, I can give it to you - a
great video about IDEO and how they work,
how they brainstorm.
So that's sort of like the main story now.
You look at the leaders of these two companies,
for example, the founders and leaders of Google,
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the leader of
IDEO, Dave Kelley, who's now retired, but
when he founded the company, they're really
like mothering leaders.
Not the type of arrogant person who sort of
imposes their view on others and squashes
other people's opinions.
So that's sort of the established wisdom.
Now what was interesting for me, I looked
at the literature, and I was like, "That's
great, I love that story.
I'm all in favor of the loving mother style,
that's my favorite style.
I feel that I would do better in that circumstance,
but I cannot help notice that there are counterexamples."
A famous one is Steve Jobs - Steve Jobs, if
you know anything about him, if you've read
his book, or seen the movie, or whatever - read
articles about him, not exactly the loving
mother, right?
More like the angry, stern, father type.
And then you have other counterexamples, like
chefs in particular, Ferran Adria, a lot of
research in particular was done on him, he
was dubbed the most creative chef in the world,
one of the most creative people in the world
- he's the guy who started molecular cuisine,
molecular foams and that kind of stuff.
He's from northern Spain, and had a restaurant
called El Bulli, which was named best restaurant
in the world for 10 years, until it closed.
And it was pretty much impossible to get a
reservation there.
But the guy really changed - he's kind of
like the Picasso of modern cuisine.
And he's not exactly a loving mother either.
You see, there's a great documentary on, before
they closed, El Bulli, that shows how he created
new dishes and how he interacted with his
staff.
But there's other chefs, in the US, Marco-Pierre
White is an example of that, in Japan Jiro
Ono - there's a great documentary called Jiro
Dreams of Sushi.
I'm kind of into food, so I like those documentaries.
But you know, other - Howard Hughes, the founder
of Hughes Aircrafts, and the movie director,
and many other things, was kind of not exactly
the loving mother, but very creative - had
a very creative empire.
To some extent, you could say that Mark Zuckerberg
- I'm not sure if he fits in there.
I've studied movie directors in my research,
and lots of movie directors are not exactly
the loving mother style.
Alfred Hitchcock was known to be a control
freak, Oliver Stone - I have a friend who
works with Oliver Stone on some of his movies,
and he was practically strangling people on
set - like he was high, and drunk, and upset
when things didn't go his way, and he would
strangle people.
And my friend was the only one who could somewhat
calm him down.
But Lars Von Triers, you might have read some
stories about Lars Von Triers and how he treats
his actors, and about how essentially he's
almost crazy.
But he's also a recognized genius as a movie
director.
So what do you make of all those counterexamples?
How do they fit the loving mother style?
Oh - orchestra conductors, other examples.
You have Riccardo Muti, one of the former
musical directors of La Scala in Italy, who
was fired from La Scala for being too uptight,
too demanding.
Herbert Von Karajan, who was a very successful
conductor, but also know to be very demanding,
very uptight, but obtaining great results
with that style.
So for me, what this showed was that the mothering
model works at Google and IDEO, but it's not
the only style out there.
So what do we make of these leaders?
The way I thought of it was, in fact now there's
a new article that's out and makes that even
clearer, is you have to think of those two
situations as different ways of going about
creativity.
So in the Google and IDEO model, the leaders
are not the ones who are being creative.
They are hiring people to be creative for
them, and they created an environment in which
those people are going to do their best.
This is best illustrated with Apple - well,
this is true too, let's compare Apple and
Google.
In the Apple case, while you have a bunch
of creative people working for somebody like
Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs saw himself as the
main creative person who other people had
to adapt to to implement his vision.
So you look at chefs like - you can see this
very much with Ferran Adria, those are kind
of geniuses that use a retinue of people working
for them who allow them to put their genius
into motion, to actually implement it.
So Ferran Adria, for example, he's a genius
in the sense that he has photographic memory.
So he read - becoming a chef was an afterthought
for him.
He was an accounting student who had to do
his military service for Spain, and somehow
became the personal chef of an admiral, because
he was good, and after that continued at another
restaurant, and it turned out that he was
just an amazing chef.
While he was doing it, he started reading
books like the big Spanish encyclopedia of
cooking, and the French one, and would remember
every one of those recipes, every one of those
pages, and could tell you, "With photographic
memory, I remember that dish."
He himself has created thousands and thousands
of dishes - with El Bulli, the idea was to
make tapas, so he had a series of 50 different
small dishes, that were all dazzling creations.
But to create the menu, which changes every
year, for every one of those 50 dishes, he
would try like 20, 30, 40.
So every year he would go through thousands
of possibilities.
And doing that for ten years, right?
That's tens of thousands of dishes that he
has experimented with.
And he has a team that helps him create dishes,
try different things, source different ingredients
- they try a lot of stuff.
And Ferran Adria essentially remembers almost
every one of those dishes.
So when he tastes something, he can be like,
"Oh yeah, we tried that in 2005!"
So that's a genius that is out of the ordinary.
Steve Jobs had a certain kind of genius when
it came to understanding where the computer
industry was going.
He had a way of foreseeing what would happen
that nobody else understood.
This creates people that are the opposite
of loving mothers.
They are so smart that they are impatient
with everybody else who is not like them.
Ferran Adria is like, "How can you not remember
this, you stupid bunch of..."
They have such facilities with their crafts,
they have such knowledge that they tend to
be very demanding, very impatient, very driven
- and anybody who's not like them, who's not
out to create a work of genius, of art, that
they want to, they have very little patience
for that.
Which is why it's very hard to work for those
people.
Only the people who are willing to put up
with such crazy, demanding personalities are
the ones who are going to stay.
Steve Jobs has a - I recommend, if you're
interested in that, to read Steve Jobs' biography
by Isaacson.
It really gets very well into all of that.
He has an amazing life story - he has multiple
wives.
He died young, but he had a very fulfilling
life.
But you will see that interpretation of his
style: The people who cannot put up with me,
essentially, I act as a filter.
My abrasiveness acts as a filter to get rid
of the people who are not good enough.
That's his assumption.
And clearly, what's interesting is there's
two models - I'm not saying that this model
is the correct one, but it's an alternative
to the mothering model.
Both work, but it depends on your style, they
depend on what you're after.
Some people really want to work for Apple
with Steve Jobs, and some people prefer to
work for Google or IDEO with their mothering
style.
In the lone genius style, you have to be a
genius.
Not everybody can do that.
