So, how do you take a picture? With my phone. I usually just use my camera phone. On my phone. Your phone, yeah. How would you do it? Yeah, my phone of course. Have you ever used a camera? I have. Film camera? Not a film camera. Not a film camera? No Never. Never. I have one, but I haven't used it for three years. No. Okay. If you wanted to watch a movie at home, how would you do it? On Netflix. On Netflix, all right. I usually just use the Internet. So, no blockbuster for you? No way. Is blockbuster even around? I don't even know. Everything is moving to online streaming. If you haven't gotten that yet then you're probably out of luck. Thank you so much. So many, many years ago, probably some of us can't even remember a time when people used Kodak cameras to take pictures, and they relied on actual film rolls to take photographs, and this was the core strategy of Kodak. They dominated this industry for decades. The problem is that the world changed and new technologies emerged, and competitors emerged that started to actually be more effective at the very technology that Kodak had dominated for years. The problem is that rather than think of a creative way to shift their strategy and adapt to their new circumstances, they kept doing the same thing over and over again. So this highlights one of the important reasons we need creativity, is that the people at the top need to think creatively to solve problems and make decisions. A decade ago, minor league baseball teams had a big problem. They were attempting to recruit the best players to their teams but they are being outgunned by the wealthier and more famous teams that had more resources to recruit the very best. So, they had to come up with a way to solve this problem in a creative way. They ended up doing that by relying on a broader range of statistical indicators of which players given their records were likely to perform better than their prior record would suggest. So, they were able to creatively use the data that was available to them to make much more precise and targeted decisions about who they would attempt to recruit. In doing that, actually made them able to compete on the same level as these wealthier teams who were making sloppier decisions, not using the data that was available to them. So by using that data effectively, they were able to come up with a creative solution to their recruiting problem. Leaders also need to be creative to make good decisions. So, for example, there was a company called Infosys that was founded in India. The CEO of the company went through this really arduous certification process to get something called the Highest Level of Capability Maturity Model from Carnegie Mellon University. He was actually the first CEO of this company to pull this off in India. So, he was in this position of having this unique certification that would allow him to be much more competitive than any of the other companies in India working at that time. The uncreative thing to do would have been just to be competitive, to hoard that information and not share it with his other Indian competitors. But he did something very creative that ended up making more money for him in the end. What he did was he shared his knowledge of that certification process with all of the other Indian companies in the fields, and doing so elevated the entire industry so that the industry as a whole could become more competitive with countries like the US, and that ended up making everyone more profitable including Infosys. So, his really clever, creative use of his certification really paid dividends in the end. Look, here's another example. It's not just simple mistakes that might cost a little bit of money, but real ethical lapses that we want to worry about. We'd like to behave ethically. You don't want to miss an ethical issue that's staring you right in the face. The term of art among company executives was one that Putnam, a former executive at Coca-Cola had never heard before. It was called share of stomach. To him, it was sort of a mind bending paradigm shift. They weren't trying to get share of market at Coke, they weren't trying to be Pepsi or Mountain Dew, they were trying to beat every other beverage. Putman recalled giving a presentation in which he showed a chart illustrating how consumption of milk had dropped over time, while consumption of soda had risen. When he pointed to the place where the two lines crossed, the moment where soda surpassed milk, Putman remember swelling with pride, "I don't have any reaction beyond we're winning." "It's shocking to me now." is what he later said. But it was not shocking to Putnam at the time in any way shape or form. They were totally uninformed about the health issues. Sometimes leaders need to be creative just to understand others, and this is particularly true when you're working with people across cultures. We get those stories all the time. I guess the story that comes to my mind is this one from Jeanne Brett. I think she'd seen her book, Negotiating Globally actually about a pharmaceutical team, and a group of Americans, maybe a group of French actually working together and they had this huge blow up, it took them half a day to work through. They had this colossal misunderstanding and when eventually they came back to it, they realized that one of the Frenchmen on the team was saying, "I demande for you to do this." What they realized was that demande in French means ask, but to the Americans, what does demande mean? It means demand. So, the Americans were completely insulted and it just blew up on them. Right. So you need creative thinking to overcome those barriers because we're all locked into our particular cultural perspectives, and we need to see problems from different perspectives but also people from different perspectives, and adopt other people's perspectives so we can see ourselves more accurately. Yeah. Those French, they have a different word for everything. Little Steve Martin for you, yeah. But, yeah, I mean that getting to where other people are can require you to change your perspective, otherwise they're crazy. They're not crazy, they just have a different perspective. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here Jeff, everything from Kodak to baseball, from India to the US. Are there any broad themes we can begin to think about as we move forward? Well, that word actually was the one that was on my mind was broad. It's everywhere, broadly applicable. I mean, where can't creativity be relevant? I mean it seems like it should show up everywhere. Yeah. So variety of different kinds of jobs also, anywhere in the world we can expect creative solutions to emerge from, and really from top to bottom, right? Yeah, everywhere in the organization. Yeah. So, great ideas don't just come from the top. Or from the bottom. Right. You're right. All over, yeah. So, I guess one of the concerns since given that creativity is so broad, why is it that people tend to think of it so narrowly that only artists are creative? Right. Or the geek in the lab, right? Right. That it's not something all of us should do. It's not just people, it's also tasks. This is a task where I can be creative or that isn't a task, or this is a space with the bean bags and the cool colors on the walls that that's a place where I could be creative but not in my office, right? Right. So people tend to think very narrowly. So I guess that sets up, you know maybe there are a lot of myths about creativity that we should really get out of the way. We better do some myth busting. Right. So we're going to turn to that in the next segment, busting myths that you may have about creativity. About creativity. Cheers.
