August 10, 2011
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FedEx Global Brand Management Director Monica Skipper shares a cost-effective way to build a bigger brand for your small business.
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From time to time, I teach an advanced elective course called "Creativity & Innovation in Organizations" to second-year MBA students attending Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Business in Malibu, California. One of the things I require of my students is to start a daily "creativity journal." I give daily exercises and activities, but more importantly I ask them document events that trigger or stifle their creativity, along with their thoughts and feelings about that event. When I read the journals at the end of the course, I'm generally mesmerized. The entries are often true windows to the creative soul. Most of my students write me to tell me that they've continued the journaling beyond the course.
The other thing I have them do is read several articles written by Harvard Business School professor and business creativity expert Teresa Amabile. She is one of a handful of academic researchers that have a true passion for, and have dedicated their lives and careers to, understanding and unwrapping creativity in business. She's examined the issue in a variety of ways, and her research is always rich and rigorous. I always learn something new from her work. Amabile usually writes with a partner, and often that partner is her husband, Steven Kramer.
So when I learned that the duo had teamed to publish The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work—and that the central research methodology was an analysis of work diaries, essentially creativity journals, kept over several months by 238 recruits in 26 project teams representing seven companies in three different industries, resulting in 12,000 individual diary reports—there was no way I could stay away.
It never even dawned on me to consider my students' journals as research material! (Slap to the forehead.) What a terrific way to conduct research into human creativity, research that is of the most enlightening, revealing and compelling kind. No sterile, clinical studies. No arms-length interviews. No management bias. No programmatic consultant advice. Just insight into what the authors call the "inner work life" through real-time thoughts and feelings of people called on to be creative in a business setting. Reading the diary entries is page-turner stuff.
The Progress Principle, for that reason alone, must stand alone.
Big idea:
The secret to unleashing the creative potential of people is to enable them to experience a great inner work life, and the the single most powerful influence on that inner work life is progress in meaningful work. "Great inner work life is about the work," write the authors. "It starts with giving people something meaningful to accomplish...It requires giving clear goals, autonomy, help and resources—what people need to make real progress in their daily work. And it depends on showing respect for ideas and the people who create them."
Key takeaways:
- There are three components, or processes, that influence creative performance: Perceptions, emotions, and motivation. Every event in your work life goes through these filters, and what results is an individual's performance.
- High performance has four dimensions: Creativity, productivity, commitment and collegiality. Creativity is generating new and useful ideas, and "is the most important performance dimension, given the need for pathbreaking work in 21st century organizations."
- Small wins, defined as seemingly minor events, can yield significant inner work life benefits, sometimes as large as much greater leaps forward.
- Conversely, seemingly minor setbacks can detract from inner work life, negatively impacting creative performance. The effect of setbacks on emotions trump the effect of progress.
- Negativity is five times stronger than positivity when it comes to influencing emotions, so positive events must outnumber negative ones by a wide margin to ensure high levels of creativity and performance.
Liked most:
The snippets of participant diary entries were my favorite parts of the book, not just because they supported the authors' assertions and conclusions, but because they give fascinating (albeit short) glimpses into the goings-on in the mind of the person.
I also appreciated how larger ideas were supported with tactical tips for those in business wishing to promote great inner work life in their respective companies, tips that have their root in the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the people do the work.
Best for...
Those who appreciate the work of people like Dan Pink (Drive), Chip Conley (Peak) should seriously consider adding The Progress Principle as the third member of a very compelling trio of books offering just about everything you need to know about tapping the deepest wells of human creative performance.
What people are saying
"This book isn't a bag of breathless hype, it doesn't make grand and shocking claims, and it doesn't promise instant results. But it is fun and easy to read, it is as strongly grounded in evidence as any business book ever written, and it is relentlessly useful because it points to little things that managers, team members, and everyone else can do day after day to spark creativity and well-being. And it shows how those little things add-up to big victories in the end. I believe it is one of the most important business books ever written." —Robert I. Sutton, Stanford professor and author, Good Boss, Bad Boss
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